Cosmopolitanism and Culture E-Book

Nikos Papastergiadis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 480

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Today, more than at any other point in history, we are aware of the cultural impact of global processes. This has created new possibilities for the development of a cosmopolitan culture but, at the same time, it has created new risks and anxieties linked to immigration and the accommodation of strangers.

This book examines how the images of the terrorist and the refugee, by being dispersed across almost all aspects of social life, have resulted in the production of ‘ambient fears’, and it explores the role of artists in reclaiming the conditions of hospitality. Since 9/11 contemporary artists have confronted the issues of globalization by creating situations in which strangers can enter into dialogue with each other, collaborating with diverse networks to forms new platforms for global knowledge. Such knowledge does not depend upon the old model of establishing a supposedly objective and therefore universal framework, but on the capacity to recognize, and mutually negotiate, situated differences. From artworks that incorporate new media techniques to collective activism Papastergiadis claims that there is a new cosmopolitan imaginary that challenges the conventional divide between art and politics. Through the analysis of artistic practices across the globe this book extends the debates on culture and cosmopolitanism from the ethics of living with strangers to the aesthetics of imagining alternative visions of the world.

Timely and wide-ranging, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars in sociology and cultural studies and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the changing forms of art and culture in our contemporary global age.

Leseprobe

Cosmopolitanism and Culture

For John Berger

Cosmopolitanism and Culture

Nikos Papastergiadis

Copyright © Nikos Papastergiadis 2012

The right of Nikos Papastergiadis to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6060-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Times New Roman MT

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Waiting for the Barbarians

Part I The Aestheticization of Politics

1  Ambient Fears

2  Kinetophobia, Motion Fearfulness

3  Hospitality and the Zombification of the Other

Part II The Politics of Art

4  Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

5  Aesthetics through a Cosmopolitan Frame

6  The Global Orientation of Contemporary Art

7  Hybridity and Ambivalence

8  Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void

9  Collaboration in Art and Society

10  Mobile Methods

Epilogue: The Coming Cosmopolitans

Notes

References and Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book started with an examination of the artistic reactions and experiments against the politics of fear, and it would not have been possible to keep going if it were not for the prompts, invitations and comments issued by a wide circle of friends and colleagues. At various stages it has been ‘held up’ – for scrutiny – and vastly improved by the feedback from Carlos Capelan, Maaretta Jaukkuri, Sneja Gunew, Sean Cubitt, Hou Hanru, Okwui Enwezor, Nick Tsoutas, Manray Hsu, David Elliott, Soh Yeong Roh, Kim Hong-Hee, Harald Kleinschmidt, Gerald Raunig, Virginia Perez-Ratton, Björn Frykman, Maja Pojarnowski, Berndt Clavier, Bo Reimer, Jonathan Friedman, Warren Crichlow, Florian Schneider, Nina Montmann, Jean Fisher, Charles Esche, Mike Featherstone, Francis McKee, Pavel Büchler, Paul Carter, Michael Ann Holly, John Frow, Barbara Creed, Ien Ang, Seva Kammer, Vasif Kortum, Anna Kafetsi, Maria Margaroni, Robert Nelson, Mark Cheetham, Scott Lash, John Hutnyk, Gerard Delanty, Jan Verwoert, Jennifer Tee, Lorenzo Romitto, Yanis Varoufakis, Danae Stratou, Alan Cruickshank, Alison Young, Peter Rush, John Cash, Zoe Castoriadis, Suzi Adams, Cesare Pietroiusti, Leon Van Schaik, Daphne Vitali, Louli Michaelidou, Kate Sturge, Keith Jacobs, Martin Flannagan and Marina Fokidis.

I am particularly grateful to Malmö University for offering me the Willy Brandt Guest Professorship at the Institute of Migration and Ethnic Relations in 2005, the Australian Research Council for providing teaching relief and the University of Melbourne for awarding me a sabbatical in 2009. I would also like to express my appreciation for the support of Anthony Giddens and John Thompson.

Without the ongoing care and camaraderie of my dearest friend Scott McQuire and my family John, Helen, Bill Papastergiadis and Betty Alexopoulos, I would have found it difficult to make ends meet. Research assistance provided by Meredith Martin, Victoria Mason, Meg Mundell and Isabelle de Solier has been an invaluable benefit. Of course, the deepest tribute must go to my wife, Victoria Lynn, for all her critical insight, companionship and loving support. And finally, to my darling daughter Maya, thank you for your patience.

Introduction: Waiting for the Barbarians

Just over a hundred years ago Constantin Cavafy wrote the poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (Cavafy 1984). Cavafy spent most of his life in the cosmopolitan merchant quarters of the Egyptian port city Alexandria. At various stages his family, like many other foreigners, had been expelled from the city. He kept returning. In this poem we can infer the irony with which Cavafy experienced being a stranger in the city of his birth. It begins with a description of the foreboding that precedes an invasion. There is the suggestion that insecurity originates in the absence of a common language. The Greek city is preparing itself for a siege by foreigners who mutter incomprehensible ‘bar-barbar’ sounds. How will the Greeks know what the barbarians really want? Cavafy then turns to the fears that are spread by rumour. There is a dread and hint of panic that the barbarians’ real aim is the devastation of civilization. In readiness for the final battle, the city braces itself for the worst. However, Cavafy does not end his poem with either victory or disaster.

Night is here but the barbarians

Have not come

And some people arrived from the borders,

And said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

After all the waiting, nothing happens: neither conquest nor defeat. Cavafy does not follow this realization with the exhalation of relief: he intimates that something else has occurred. The city had become dependent on the barbarians. Addicted to the fear they inspire. And its identity could only be affirmed by the desperate stance of defensive hostility. Three times Cavafy underlined the disappearance of the barbarians: ‘And some … And said … And now …’ The barbarians had served a purpose. They helped bring a focus into the city. By closing up the city, needs could be simplified, loyalties resolved and identities separated. ‘Those people’ were indeed ‘a kind of solution’. The barbarians could be seen as a mirror of the internal fears. We need them to see ourselves. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were repeated calls that the barbarians were closing in and, as Arundati Roy observed, ‘ordinary people in the US had been manipulated into imagining that they are a people under siege’, and in this state of anxiety they were ‘bonded to the state by fear’ (Roy 2004, p. 7).

This book commenced as a commentary on two events that occurred in 2001 at opposite ends of the world: the arrival in Australia of the Norwegian container ship Tampa, carrying 433 refugees, and the terrorist strikes in the USA. The sight of the Pentagon in flames and the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York exposed the vulnerability of even the most powerful military centre and cancelled any illusion of exemption from global terror. Thousands died, many more were injured and the financial damage was astronomical. When refugees arrive unexpectedly there is also a rupture. Adjustments and special provisions have to be made to determine their right to asylum. The state needs to accommodate new needs. However, the horror of death caused by vicious acts of violence cannot be compared to the inconvenience of interrupting normal administrative procedures in order to facilitate the settlement of a few strangers. Surely the disruption caused by refugees is trivial in comparison to the harm of terrorism. And, yet, these two events were routinely conflated.

One of the first responses of the Bush administration to September 11 was the closure of the airports and the suspension of refugee reset-tlement programmes. The following month his attorney general, John Ashcroft, went a step further. He warned terrorists that, if they over-stayed ‘even by one day, we will arrest you’ (Meeropol 2005, p. 162). The US government threw out the widest anti-immigration net in the hope of catching terrorists. Although thousands were detained and interrogated, not a single person was charged with terrorist offences. By linking terrorism to breaches in border security, Ashcroft was drawing on a deeper fear that the sources of threat are always from the outside. As Judith Butler argued, rather than taking the moment to reflect on the trauma, the political imaginary of America was dominated by a thrusting hunger for revenge. There was a quick succession of steps that justified ‘heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship’ (Butler 2004, p. xi). Even Hollywood was quick to fall in with self-censorship and happy to be part of the defensive. The shooting of catastrophe movies was not only suspended but, between October and November 2001, Hollywood directors were ‘recalled’ to the Pentagon for advice on future ‘unimaginable’ scenarios and to help co-ordinate the messages on the ‘war on terrorism’ (Caterson 2007). Amidst panic, fear spreads, and its sources become more obscure. The Australian and the UK governments took note of the new Patriot Act and responded by passing similar legislation that linked anti-terrorism laws with migration policies. The former Howard government in Australia even went so far as to initiate a series of media campaigns urging all members in the community to ‘dob in’ invaders. This inspired an obliging citizen to issue a car bumper sticker: ‘Help the government. Honk if you are a terrorist!’