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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Cosmopolitanism is commonly associated today with the idea that the forces of globalization could be tempered by new forms of cosmopolitan governance, an idea that was popular among some political theorists in the late twentieth century but seems increasingly unrealistic today. Rather than discarding the idea of cosmopolitanism, Nikos Papastergiadis seeks to reinvigorate it by examining the ways in which visual artists have explored themes associated with the cosmos. Kant regarded cosmopolitanism as the goal for humanity, but he turned his attention away from the connection to the cosmos and directed it toward the practical rules for peaceful co-existence. However, these two concerns are not in conflict. Today a new vision of the cosmos is being developed by artists, among others - one that brings together the cosmos and the polis. Scholars from the South are decolonizing the mindset which divided the world and split us from our common connections, while others are using art to highlight the existential threats we now face as a species. By developing a distinctive form of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, this book shows that the idea of the cosmos is more important than ever today, and vital for our attempts to rethink our place as one species among others in a universe that extends far beyond our world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prolegomenon: Putting the Cosmos Back into Cosmopolitanism
1 Introduction: A Constellation for Cosmopolitanism in Seven Points
Defining the Cosmos
Scope of the Cosmos
Normative Cosmopolitanism
Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism and Pluriversalism
New Physics and Old Cosmos
Cosmopolitanism as Impulse
Part 1 Cosmos in Antiquity
2 Cosmopolitanism in Antiquity
Multiple Origins of the Cosmopolitan Imaginary
Two Provisos on Revisiting the Greek Sources
In Myth Begins the Cosmos: Hesiod and Homer
The Cosmos in Theatre and History
Cosmos and the Origins of Greek Philosophy
Cosmos in Classical Greek Philosophy
Cynics and Stoics
3 Stoic Lives and the Places of Cosmopolitanism
Strangers in the Polis
The Stoa as Liminal Site
4 Cosmopolis and the Physics of Cosmic Fire
City as Cosmos and Cosmos as City
Physics of the Spheres
Aesthesis and Cosmos
Value in the Bizarre Theory of the Cosmos
From the Liquid Polis to Imperious Rome
Cosmos and Spherical Thinking
Part 2 Closing Apertures: Fading Cosmos and Rising Anthropos
5 From Saint Paul to the Enlightenment
Cosmopolitanism in Early Christian Theology
Medieval Cosmos
Humanism in the Early Renaissance
The Enlightenment and the Cosmos Contracted
6 Kant: Cosmopolitanism or the Graveyard
Kant in His Time and Place
Kant’s Philosophical Framework
Fixed Points: Geography and Human Nature
Surrounding Frame: Ethics
Delivery Mechanism: Politics
Lead Role: History
Nature’s Plan
Rival Claims and Kant’s Legacy
Part 3 From the Moral Imperative to the Creative Constitutive
7 After Kant: Political Philosophy for Cosmopolitanism – Habermas and Derrida
Constitutional Patriotism: Jürgen Habermas
Between Unconditional Hospitality and Open Hostility: Jacques Derrida
Conclusion
8 After Kant: Political Philosophy against Cosmopolitanism – Sloterdijk and Mouffe
Antagonisim and Neo-Nationalism: Peter Sloterdijk
Agonism and Liberal Democracy: Chantal Moufffe
The Paradox of Belonging: Through Freedom and with Attachment
9 Cosmos Perduring in Art
Cosmism and Modernism: Against Gravity
Other Places and the Hideouts of Time
Back to the Polis and Out Again
Art Can Shake Hands with Philosophy
10 Cosmos from the Global South: From Subaltern to Decolonial Perspectives
Subaltern Culture and the Southern Question
A Partial View from the South-South-South
The Decolonial
Decolonizing Kantian Cosmopolitanism
11 Cosmos for the World
The Impulse for Cosmopolitanism
Chaos and Cosmos
Signs of Life
12 Epilogue: Cosmic Fire and Liquid Polis
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prolegomenon: Putting the Cosmos Back into Cosmopolitanism
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Paul Carter
The Cosmos in Cosmopolitanism
Nikos Papastergiadis
polity
Copyright © Nikos Papastergiadis 2023
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 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, 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: 978-1-5095-5933-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931479
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 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:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
It might have been my very first supervision. Tony Giddens asked me to describe my aims. I went on a long ramble. Tony interrupted: “That sounds like your life’s project, but what is your PhD?” It took me a long while to notice the difference. However, that question has helped me, on more than one occasion, to put things in perspective. This book is, I hope, the realization of yet another little part of that rambling conversation. It has been written amidst the phases of lockdowns. During this period, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy the companionship of Scott McQuire, Robert Nelson, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, Martin Flannagan, Cheryl Conway, Paul Carter, Victoria Lynn, Callum Morton, David Pledger, Jim Bossinakis, Leonidas Vlahakis, Kit Wise, Hoda Afshar, Paula Muraca, Sean Cubitt, Bill Papastergiadis, and Maya Papastergiadis. I have also benefited from the feedback by friends further away: Marina Fokidis, Didier Coste, Danae Stratou, Yanis Varoufakis, Samir Samid, Pier Luigi Musaro, Ugo Dessi, Anne Ring Petersen, Lois McNay, Sean Gorvy, George E. Marcus, Patricia Seed, John Hutnyk, Gerald Raunig, Christian Moraru, Celia Lury, Jeffrey Di Leo, Uta Meta Bauer, Soh Yeong Roh, and Marsha Meskimmon. Finally, I would also like to thank John Thompson.
Prolegomenon: Putting the Cosmos Back into Cosmopolitanism
The story of cosmopolitanism is about companionship. It usually begins in the polis – extending solidarity from the local demos to everyone in the world. The modern account has sought to explore the political links to democracy and extend its moral footings on reason. However, it is seldom noticed that the ancient versions of cosmopolitanism also reach out to the cosmos, which is everything else. Human fellowship may be a difficult principle to uphold but it is comprehensible. Widening the spheres of companionship to include the cosmos is much harder. It takes us beyond our faculties for reasoning and exposes us to an enchanting but immeasurable sense of awe. The paradox of cosmopolitanism appears in its two composite words: cosmos and polis. The cosmos is an intrinsic part of human nature – but it is also a horizon that forever recedes and therefore eludes our grasp. The cosmos and the polis are intertwined. Without the polis the cosmos risks being an abstraction. A polis without a cosmos risks becoming a marketplace. The polis is where human desire is bound by rules – but it also needs the opening of boundless ideals. The ancient Greeks believed that the terrestrial polis was designed to reflect the celestial order of the cosmos. The early modern philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that history was leading humanity toward a rendezvous between the cosmos and the polis. In our contemporary viewfinders the search for the cosmos continues in other ways. From my perspective traces of the cosmos in the polis are most evident when the lens zooms in on the micro forms of human creation and when scientists zoom out to ponder the big-bang macro question of universal creation. In the words of astrophysicist and artist Dr Annette Lee, a First Nations Lakota woman, the cosmos is intricately connected to the knowledge of culture: “It is not like we’re just outside observers watching this. We’re part of it” (Hamacher 2022: 17). Such perspectives, which are only now starting to emerge in scholarly form, have the potential to widen our understanding. In the next few decades, the story of cosmopolitanism will find new sources and new narratives to embrace the knowledge of Indigenous science and culture. Thus, the story of cosmopolitanism is, for me, both about companionship and creation. In fact, I will go on to argue that the sociality of companionship is interwoven with the aesthetics and physics of creation stories.
The conventional narrative on cosmopolitanism is somewhat different. Discussions on cosmopolitanism have tended to focus on the development of social norms and political institutions. Any quick survey of the idea will note that its dominant orientation is normative. It has focused on the moral duty of hospitality, the benefit of cross-cultural exchange, and the expansion of justice through the invention of wider legal structures and global political institutions. My approach is to connect these discourses with artistic claims and everyday experiences. This involves a cross-examination of the ideas developed under normative cosmopolitanism with the artistic claims and social practices that I call aesthetic cosmopolitanism. While I see continuities between these headings, it is the contention of this book that aspects of everyday sociality and artistic impulses are not fully captured in the normative paradigms of cosmopolitanism. I will also use the terms moral imperative and creative constitutive to distinguish the driving forces in aesthetic cosmopolitanism from the prevailing paradigm of normative cosmopolitanism. Let me offer an anecdote that crosses these paradigms.
In 2014 the Karrabing Film Collective screened a short film called When the Dogs Talked at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. It blended documentary and fictional modes of representing the experience of exhaustion in the lives of members from this Indigenous Collective, and through the dust clouds of recurring road trains trundling along the desert roads it also evoked the intimate ghost presence of the departed. I was invited, alongside the Indigenous artist Richard Bell and poet Rachel Riley, to be part of a plenum called Weak Signals / Low Batteries, which addressed the work of this Collective.
Prior to the public gathering we all gathered for lunch at the gallery. Among the more than thirty members of the Collective were Linda Yarrowin, Trevor Buanumu, and the US-based anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli. They were sitting in a circle with quiet anticipation. Everyone was a little nervous. Some of the staff were busy checking on the arrival of the food. The other guests were keeping to themselves. I noticed that one of the younger members was wearing a Richmond Football Club jumper. A long line of successful players from their region had played for that club. Football in Australia is played with an oval-shaped ball and is derived from a code developed by Indigenous communities.
“Don’t tell me you are all Richmond fans!” I blurted out.
One of the senior women turned to me. Both relieved to break the silence and ready to challenge me.
“No. My family are all Carlton.”
“Thank God. I am Carlton, but my father was Richmond,” I replied.
Then a riot of banter broke free.
The following day we met for a BBQ at Stradbroke Island. After we were sated, someone threw a log on the fire. I was lying on my back. The voice of a singer with a high-pitched voice and the low rumble of a deep bass drum was coming from the CD player inside the house. As the log landed in the fire red embers rivalled the night stars.
What prompted my cheeky reflex on the previous day? I was curious to chat. However, I was not the host, and it was not my moral duty to initiate hospitality. In Australia, inquiring about allegiance to a football club is one of the primal markers of belonging. It is almost equivalent to the ancient Greek ritual of asking a stranger about their place of origin. In Homer’s time this question was normally asked after the guest was offered food.
The impulse for sociality can be easily passed over but when connected with my theoretical reflection on the cosmos it is the basis from which this book will offer an understanding cosmopolitanism. Throughout this book I refer to this combined approach of grounded sociality and celestial connection as spherical thinking. I will draw on examples of spherical thinking that are found in Stoic philosophy, humanist scholars and artists. My aim is to reboot the conversation on cosmopolitanism by first identifying a process of celestial speculation in these three fields and, in turn, suggesting that this overlooked aspect of cosmopolitanism can offer a useful resource for connecting with the contemporary efforts to decolonize the Western mindset. The geometric apertures of spherical thinking can be both vertical and horizontal – aiming to deepen by spiralling in and extend understanding by fanning out. However, more important is that spherical thinking is a relational process. It promotes a dialogue between cosmologies and creation stories. It does not seek to provide a codified framework in which the moral integrity of all human life and the value of global solidarity are fixed, but rather seeks to explore the interplay between social norms and aesthetic impulses.
This book was written during the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic. The privilege of travelling to contemporary art exhibitions and participating in symposia was suspended. Zoom was some compensation. Information came and went, but inspiration I did not find on the screen. I turned my attention inward to re-examine a variety of under-appreciated sources that exist between the twin peaks of cosmopolitan thought – the Stoics and Immanuel Kant. This bumpy journey finally led me to a review of Kant’s most influential successors such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, as well as his detractors such as Peter Sloterdijk, who dismissed cosmopolitanism as an impossible utopia, and scholars from the South who have set out to decolonize epistemology. Throughout the arc of this research, I have noted that the grounding of the ethical precepts of hospitality, legal principles of equality, and codes for cross-cultural exchange have both expanded and contracted. For instance, the contemporary concept of human rights did not exist in the ancient world. This is an important innovation. By contrast, the ancient rituals for welcoming strangers can seem like a quaint anachronism in comparison to the brutal militarization of contemporary “customs” officers and border control officials. This oscillating status of cosmopolitanism can be observed in its divergent rhetorical appeal. On the one hand, it is frequently rolled out to portray the approach toward consumer care adopted by transnational corporations. On the other, neo-nationalist politicians relish describing cosmopolitans as the people who belong nowhere. Opportunism is not a new political feature. Plato and Kant dedicated much of their thinking to putting moral checks on the abuses of power. Kant went so far as to claim that the advance in cosmopolitical norms would promote peace and prosperity. The effort to promote normative cosmopolitanism is a noble effort but it is also an increasingly sad endeavour.
In my previous books I have tried to understand the normative ideas of cosmopolitanism both from a theoretical perspective and through a dialogue with artists. I tried to get as close as possible to an artist’s point of view and track the development of projects that explored ideas of belonging and refuge/friendship and creativity. The spheres of artistic practice not only addressed specific social circumstances and political issues but were often intertwined with ideas on the link between the cosmos and creation. From Francis Alys, who invited fishermen to link their boats together to form a bridge across the waters that separate Cuba and Florida, to Takis, who described the force of his art in terms of “cosmic propulsions,” we can witness the wide horizons of artistic sensibility.
This double orientation, zooming in to engage with the aesthetics of everyday events and zooming out to notice artistic claims that reach for the boundless cosmos, was absent in the normative discourses on cosmopolitanism. Hence, I have often felt that there was a lingering tension between normative and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. I can’t recall working with an artist who did not embrace the normative principles of cosmopolitanism. However, they often suggested that this paradigm did not cover the full spectrum of their motivations and aspirations. Something was left out. The aesthetic impulse and normative duty did not neatly overlap with each other. To this purpose I have returned to aesthetics – the classical term for sensing and perceiving. Plato and the canon of Western epistemology deemed aesthetics as a faulty means for discerning immutable truth. However, the pre-Socratic and Stoic theories of aesthetics recognized that sensory perception was not confined to physical transactions on a one-to-one basis. They claimed that it was coextensive with the cosmic space of communication. Modern philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Giles Deleuze have reclaimed the role of the body as it is immersed in the spectrum of transmitters and receptors. More recently, Walter Mignolo has flung open the space of aesthetics into what he calls the decolonial sublime.
The Danish artist Olafur Eliason defined the “horizon” as the “divide between the known and the unknown.” Can we reinvigorate cosmopolitanism by adopting a similar kind of openness to the horizons of aesthetic impulses and normative principles? The creative constitutive in cosmopolitanism, while never disappearing, became obscured by a greater philosophical focus on the moral imperative. However, among artists the impulse that connects creative thought to both the infinite stretch of the cosmos and the effervescent desire for sociality is forever being replenished. This cosmic impulse is experienced as both internal – it comes from within the imagination of the individual – and as an externality – as a response to the call from others and elsewhere. Artists recognize the double bind of cosmopolitanism – the polis regulates impulses, and the cosmos defies boundaries. Creation never seems to find definitive satisfaction. It oscillates between the dissatisfaction with the polis and the ineffable connection with the cosmos.
My father was never an overtly political man. But I love the story of how he said “fuck off” to the fascist who tried to push in ahead of him in a Greek bank. He was always a kind, forgiving, and courteous man. A shepherd in Greece and taxi driver in Australia. Forever stopping to assist others and greeting people with a warm smile. Only once did my father and I meet in his village. It was during the panegyri – the summer festival. Late one afternoon we walked out into the fields to find his favourite spring. The mountains had reforested since the peasant numbers had dwindled. Wolves and bears had returned. We each took a solid walking stick. While we were picking mushrooms a large shepherd dog came bounding toward us. My father turned and said: “Put down your stick and be calm.” The shepherd’s dog circled us, remained vigilant but did not attack us. When the shepherd arrived, the dog sat at our feet. The shepherd and my father recognized each other from their days in primary school. He looked at the large mushroom in my father’s hand. Pulled the knife from his waistband and sliced it in half. It bled blue.
“There is enough poison there to wipe out the whole village,” he said.
As Odysseus approached the hut of his old shepherd Eumaeus the dogs also barked with ferocity. Homer tells us that Odysseus also sat calmly and released the hold of his staff. I have no doubt that my father embodied the ancient rituals of hospitality and maintained the radiant value of parrhesia: speaking truth to power. But how does this peasant’s worldview connect to aesthetic cosmopolitanism? Was my cheeky provocation with the Karrabing Film Collective expressive of my father’s cosmopolitan sensibility?
I have tried to answer these questions in the first part of this book by returning to the ancient sources on cosmopolitanism. I begin with Socrates, who was the first to describe himself as a citizen of the cosmos. Cosmopolitanism was subsequently developed by the Stoics – a group of strangers who gathered in the arcades of Athens. While cosmopolitan sentiments appear to be universal, it was Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school in Athens, who first proposed a theory of cosmopolitanism that combined celestial speculation with a political vision of a republic based on radical equality. He admired the way that Diogenes the Cynic challenged the norms of the polis. Zeno also reworked the pre-Socratic ideas about the connections between the cosmos and human creativity. Subsequent Stoics, such as the Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, were embarrassed by these radical claims and trimmed down the spheres of Stoic thought to conform to the civic and imperial ambitions of Rome.
In the second part of the book, I track the developments from the Christian era to the Enlightenment. During this period, we see a recurring struggle to accommodate the universal orientation of cosmopolitanism with the political exigencies of their times. Theologians were determined to articulate a link between our terrestrial lives and the cosmos; however, they tended to insert a vertical hierarchy and a stigmatic distinction between body and spirit, which had the paradoxical effect of expanding the spiritual image of the cosmos and contracting the creative relationship to the cosmos. Tucked in the recesses of the Western tradition of the arts and humanities are figures such as Michel de Montaigne, who not only refuted the dogma of his era but also demonstrated the perdurance of what I call spherical thinking. Kant is the looming figure in this section. He laid the foundations for aligning cosmopolitanism with ethical precepts and legal structures. He admired the cosmos but also recoiled from its sublime beauty and infinite scale. He cut out the cosmos because it was simply too vast to comprehend and turned to gearing the work of philosophy toward the regulations of the polis and the emergence of peaceful federations. Kant’s influence on liberal democratic developments is enormous, but, as his harsh rival Friedrich Nietzsche also observed, he tended to suck the life out of philosophy.
The recent scholarly debates on cosmopolitanism have trended towards a defensive position. There is now a myriad qualifiers on cosmopolitanism that either emphasize its general role in everyday life or direct us toward specialized functions. I am drawn to offering a holistic approach by dwelling on the shared aspects, rather than the differences between Zeno, Montaigne, the members of the Karrabing Film Collective, and Antonio Gramsci. If we are to decolonize the link between rationality and modernity, then we must also rethink the cosmological archive that also lurks in the margins of Western consciousness. Gramsci was the first Western Marxist thinker to grasp that peasant consciousness contained both ancient wisdom and relevant resources for cultural survival. As the Nobel prize-winning poet George Seferis noted, the value of peasant culture was more than folkloric decoration, it was embroidered with cosmic underpinnings. In the third part of this book, I examine both the advocates and detractors of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan advocates such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have wrestled with Kant’s legacy, while critics ranging from Peter Sloterdijk to Chantal Mouffe have rejected the viability of cosmopolitanism. In my view, neither of these two positions is sufficient, and so I have set out to both provide a catalogue of artistic witness claims to the cosmos and also inject the concept of cosmopolitanism into the decolonial debates that seek to revitalize Indigenous cosmologies and valorize the agency of subaltern subjects. This connection has been facilitated by the mobilization of a counter-tradition in philosophy, one that starts from Nietzsche and connects Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze. From these diverse sources – peasant consciousness, Indigenous cosmologies, the modernist-cosmicist proclamations, celestial speculations in Zeno, the recesses of humanist aesthetics, and the contemporary advances in physics – I believe that a new spherical vision of cosmopolitanism can be forged.
One thing is clear about the idea of cosmopolitanism. It is never static or fixed. Over the last two millennia it has been refined and transformed. The dominant contribution to this idea came from theologians, moral philosophers, and political theorists. For centuries the idea waxed and waned as it was drawn into various religious and imperial schemata. Toward the end of the twentieth century there was a spike in the philosophical and political debates on globalization and cosmopolitanism. It was argued that the transformation in society and the economy that was ushered in by the forces of globalization could be tempered by new forms of cosmopolitan governance. In a few notable instances, multicultural policies were introduced to address the needs of cultural minorities. However, this exploration of new horizons proved short-lived. Despite the pressing need to expand the hospitable modes of coexistence there is widespread evidence of hostility towards strangers.
To get a flavour of the current crisis of cosmopolitanism, let us consider the political rhetoric that was unleashed on the related concept of multiculturalism. In 2010 the German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that the “multicultural approach of ‘let’s coexist and enjoy each other’, has failed, absolutely failed.”1 This was in step with the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement that: “State multiculturalism is a wrong-headed doctrine that has had disastrous results.”2 Prior to this the French President Nicolas Sarkozy also revealed that the real threat to the Republic was women wearing the hijab in public institutions.3 “Absolute failure,” “disastrous results,” “the end of the Republic,” this hysterical and vitriolic chorus of complaints was rather excessive given that the experimentation with multiculturalism in Europe had been mostly at the symbolic level. Rhetorical claims about the death of multiculturalism bore little correlation to its institutional applications and ignored the fact that Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are all, in demographic terms, increasingly multicultural societies.
Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are often kept apart. The former confined to a state-bound policy for managing minority communities, the latter elevated as a philosophical ideal for global citizenship and cross-cultural exchange. For me this distinction is reductive. The separation of the two denies the ways in which the concepts are mutually constitutive. Multiculturalism would be hollow without cosmopolitan idealism, and cosmopolitanism would be mere pious abstractions without multicultural accommodations.
As politicians poured scorn on multiculturalism and political theorists were moving away from the concept of cosmopolitanism, I noticed a different kind of engagement in the context of the production and art historical interpretation of contemporary visual art. In art theory there has been a serious effort to explain the “place” of art in post-national categories and to explore the creative process of art as a form of world making. The older concept of aesthesis – a sensory awareness of the world – has also had a revival in contemporary art discourse. However, what is most striking is the diverse range of referencing to the cosmos in recent artistic and curatorial projects. Let me provide a brief glimpse into parts of this artworld.
In 2009 Daniel Birnbaum, the curator who completed his doctorate on Husserl, directed the 53rd Venice Biennale under the heading: “Making Worlds.” At the same time the pathbreaking artist Trevor Paglen displayed a series of photographs called Celestial Objects (2009), which were shot on long exposures from military satellites that were positioned over Istanbul. Chuz Martinez participated in a curatorial team meeting at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA) on the role of a potential museum journal. With youthful zest she said that in 2010 it was time to say goodbye to the “intellectual cosmos” that confined thought along a “Hegel–Marx–Adorno axis.” Martinez would later declare: “to speak of the avant-garde today it is necessary to adopt the ecological metaphors of the ocean,” and she fully embraced Yin-Ju Chen’s proposition that the structures of the mind were formed though a symbiotic relationship with the structures of the cosmos. Toward the end of his life, the Romantic Marxist critic and author John Berger concluded a review on Paul Cézanne by quoting the artist’s conviction: “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” Berger propelled himself into the phrase: “Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”
In 2015 Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artworld’s most celebrated curator, published his semi-biographical monograph Ways of Curating. The title echoed both John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). Obrist confessed to beginning each day by reading Édouard Glissant. He also stated his life ambition was to offer a visual contribution to Glissant’s concept of mondialité – the global dialogue that starts from local differences. In the same year Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial heading for the Venice Biennale was All the World’s Future’s (2015). The influential publishing platform e-flux collaborated with Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2017 to stage an international conference on resurrecting the ecstatic and revolutionary vision of Russian cosmism. The following year e-flux published a special issue of their journal that mapped out the universe-scale ambition of these early thinkers and their pioneering role in treating art as a microcosm of world making. In 2019 e-flux also launched a collective research project called Institute of the Cosmos. They proposed to pursue activities that ranged from exploring plant consciousness to reuniting with past and future ancestors, extrapolating internationalism to accommodate inter-planetarism, applying cosmism to overcome the territorial limits of the cultural commons, and engaging creative investigations into the materiality of the cosmos. At the beginning of the same year, Lucia Pietroiusti, the curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London, founded the General Ecology project as a means of combining environmental campaigns and artistic interventions that could extend James Lovelock’s concept of the Gaia. When the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, many museums around the world turned toward updating their websites, commissioning artists to make virtual artworks, producing Zoom forums, and expanding their online digital archives. Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev, the director of Castello di Rivoli in Turin, situated these activities as part of a project that she titled Digital Cosmos. Her motivation was not only to maintain public engagement but also push the frontiers of the museum from being a repository of past knowledge to a space where culture not only meets the world at large, but also becomes both an agent for change and a site for the evolution of “non-human culture.” During this period nomadic artistic and curatorial agencies such as Vessel began to develop socially engaged art projects that expanded the frontiers of ecological imagination.
Parallel to these artistic experiments in the North, new scholars from the Global South such as Eduardo Mendieta combined decolonial critiques and the precarious ecology of the Anthropocene to advance a perspective on “interspecies cosmopolitanism.” For the 59th Venice Biennale Indigenous artists took charge of the Nordic Pavilion, and the Indigenous artist Brook Andrews was appointed curator of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney in 2020. This wide range of interest and orientations have swung open the field for cosmopolitan thinking and cultural practice. There are also profound connections between decolonial critique and cosmic aesthesis. These emerging fields are promising, and one of the contentions of this book is that a return to the overlooked and recessed version of spherical thinking can provide grips and pivots to lever future cosmopolitan dialogues.
Making sense of this elevation of the creative use of cosmos is urgent at a time when the norms of the polis are in peril and the planet is at the precipice of self-destruction. My desire to turn to the archive of cosmopolitan thought, or what Martha Nussbaum called the “cosmopolitan tradition,” is not a historical effort at tracing the signs of continuity and progress. Such vectors are better plotted by historians. Philosophers also have superior skills in conceptual evaluation. These approaches have opened new understandings of ethical duty, sparked the evolution of human rights, extended the spheres of governance. My aim is neither to correct historians nor to convert philosophers. However, my intent is also different to my previous efforts to interpret the cosmopolitan imaginary that is expressed in contemporary visual culture. I am seeking neither to extract meaning from the visual arts nor to illuminate visual meanings by staging a dialogue with the philosophical concepts of cosmopolitanism. In my view the bridge between art and the philosophy of cosmopolitanism seems to be either incomplete or always under construction.
For this reason, I have spent a great deal of time looking for clues on where the link was lost and how this bridge may be extended. Part of my frustration is caused by a tendency for cultural and art critics to assume that there is a logic of equivalence between philosophical and artistic thought processes. Critics who notice a cosmopolitan impulse in art are all too quick to wheel in the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks that have been developed in philosophy. For instance, Jacques Derrida’s texts are routinely cited by both artists and critics as the discursive markers of the cosmopolitan imaginary. Derrida’s work provides great insight into the ethical questions that are prompted by many contemporary artists. However, in his reflections on hospitality and cosmopolitanism he has little to say about the aesthetics, and he fails to mention artists as agents of cosmopolitanism. The “cosmic impulse”’ in contemporary art is often passed over in silence or buried under a sequence of moral imperatives.
It is important to recognize that where philosophy begins and art ends is not always the same place. Gregory Bateson, by means of acknowledging that the aesthetic domain possessed a distinctive realm of significance, enjoyed retelling the encounter between a dancer and a journalist. In response to the request to explain the meaning of her performance, Isadora Duncan sighed: “If I could tell you what it meant, then I would not have to dance it.” The aesthetic experience is, as Heidegger would often stress, a potent force, but as he also pointed out, it should not be conflated with a primordial form of theory. The complicities between these domains does not mean either that the two are equivalent or that one has all the answers to the questions posed by the other.
It is easy to fall into this trap. For instance, it is tempting to turn to artistic examples such as Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant International Movement. This interdisciplinary project is bursting with ethical and political connections to cosmopolitanism. However, there is also a risk of reducing the aesthetic function to a contestation of norms. I do not follow such leads in this book. Instead, there is an extensive catalogue of artistic claims on their connections with the cosmos and a gazette of instances in which cosmopolitan relations have materialized, albeit in ephemeral situations and marginal contexts. I would also claim that there is a new politics that transpires as the aesthetics of the cosmos and the ethics of the polis cross over. It is a politics of resistance against the vicissitudes of globalization and the articulation of a creative agency amidst the apocalypse of the Anthropocene. Until his final breath, the scientist James Lovelock maintained an optimistic view on the co-existence of nature, humanity, and cyborgs. The evolutionary process, in his view, enveloped organic and inorganic transformations. In his final passage he speculated: “the final objective of intelligent life is the transformation of the cosmos into information” (Lovelock 2019: 123). Art has the capacity to translate this concept of “information” into a new material reality that extends the realm of the senses. I hope that the following chapters are seen as a modest contribution to clarifying the dual desire for connections in cosmopolitanism – to both the cosmos and the polis. Ultimately, I believe that the resilience of cosmopolitanism oscillates between the normative structures of coexistence and the aesthetic capacities for belonging.
1.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/17/angela-merkel-german-multiculturalism-failed
, accessed 10 October 2015.
2.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/26/conservatives.race
, accessed 10 October 2015.
3.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/22/islamic-veils-sarkozy-speech-france
, accessed 10 October 2015.
1Introduction: A Constellation for Cosmopolitanism in Seven Points
Is cosmopolitanism a real and implicit part of everyday life? Alternately, is it, at best, an ideal against which we measure our human shortcomings, and at worst a delusional fantasy? What are the ways in which cosmopolitanism has been represented throughout the history of philosophy? How has the idea been tied to other artistic and political practices? In what ways is it linked to the social changes brought on by new patterns of mobility, global networks for commercial interdependence and ascendent technologies of digital communication? Is there only one form of cosmopolitanism, or does each culture imagine a different version? How does cosmological thinking shape our understanding of cosmopolitanism? Is the impulse of eros and creation linked to hospitality and cosmopolitanism?
These are the core questions that will drive this book. It is my contention, that cosmopolitanism is not just an empty abstraction but a living phenomenon. Sociologists such as Ulrich Beck (2006) argued that evidence of demographic and cultural changes was already indicating that cosmopolitanism was a social reality. Beck went so far as to describe the process of contemporary changes through the new verb – cosmopolitanization. In the past few decades there has been a plethora of new modifiers of cosmopolitanism – discrepant cosmopolitanism (Clifford 1992), subaltern cosmopolitanism (Mignolo 2000), vernacular cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006), visceral cosmopolitanism (Nava 2007), indigenous cosmopolitanism (Mendieta 2009), diasporic cosmopolitanism (Glick-Schiller 2012). This is not only testament to the effort to wrestle the contemporary valency away from the traditional, elitist, patrician, and imperialistic versions of cosmopolitanism, but also part of an empirical project to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is a productive prism for understanding ethics (Appiah 2006), citizenship (Held 1995) and belonging (Hall 2002) in the contemporary world. Consequently, the editors of a new collection of scholarly essays have claimed that there is an urgent need to develop a new transdisciplinary approach that can address cosmopolitanism “based on reciprocal comparison and the negotiation of performable values founded upon the potential improvement of human well-being and the sustainability of human life in accordance with its natural milieu” (Coste, Kkona, & Pireddu 2022: 6). This stretches cosmopolitanism across a vast terrain. The editors of an earlier collection had noted the conceptual incompleteness of cosmopolitanism. However, they proclaimed that any frustration over the indeterminacy of the term was to be taken forthwith as a spur to galvanize future possibilities, and therefore the fullness of its meaning was to be left open; the term could remain in a productive state that was always “yet to come” (Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha & Chakrabarty 2002: 4).
Although I lean in favor of these affirmative arguments my aim is not to prove the dependence of cosmopolitanism on ascendant communication technologies, the intensification of migration patterns, or even the widening of institutional frameworks. I believe that it is also reliant on something more fundamental – the sensory experience of companionship with the cosmos. This idea does not fit neatly into the existing moral, political, and sociological perspectives that are used for framing cosmopolitanism (Luek 2014). In this book I have added a fourth category: aesthetic cosmopolitanism. My wider aim is to address the cosmopolitan impulse for care, curiosity, and connection that extends from human fellowship and reaches all the way to the cosmos.
In antiquity the cosmos was the crown in an all-pervasive view of life and creation. Humanity and the cosmos were not aliens to each other, but part of an integrated whole. By being attuned to the cosmos humans could fulfill their nature – physis. The laws – nomos – of the polis were deemed just when they were in harmony with the cosmos. Christian theologians splintered this cosmic unity. Instead of a vibrant companionship with the cosmos there was a subdued position. Instead of the harmonics of continuum that was expressed by ancient philosophers the Christians inserted a duality between the celestial and the terrestrial, the body and soul, the visible materiality and invisible ideality. The cosmos was no longer a fragment that was in us, but a deferred state, one which we may gain access to if we submit to a life of privations. As pilgrims on the earth Christians were obliged to conform to the tangible laws of the polis – world – but also withdraw into an intangible journey that would lead to salvation in the next world – cosmos. Real life was in the future cosmos. The world of the now was mere illusion. The modern philosophers of the Enlightenment moved away from this dogma. A different vision of human agency was delivered, and a new faith was placed in the regulative function of legal, social, and political institutions. As cosmopolitan ideals were incorporated into specialist debates on human rights and global culture, it seemed that it was coming closer to the ground of here and now. Just before the turn of the millennium Ulrich Beck was convinced that not only was society increasingly undergoing a process of cosmopolitanization, but that a new global liberal-cosmopolitan democracy was becoming a realistic ideal (Beck 2006).
David Held also advocated for the expansion of liberal democratic values and procedures into a cosmopolitan framework. He argued that a new form of cosmopolitan democracy was possible if it involved both the formal recognition of every human being as a world citizen and the creation of a world parliament (Held 1995). In short, cosmopolitanism is good for democracy. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida shared this view. Habermas was committed to reforming transnational institutions, and while Derrida also remained optimistic, he adopted a more ambivalent position as he stressed that cosmopolitanism was caught in a double bind. There are also political philosophers who take a more dismissive view. They blame cosmopolitanism as being complicit with the alienating sense of placelessness and providing a justification for corporate expansion. From both positions, the outlook is rather bleak. At best, the modern trajectory in the philosophy on cosmopolitanism has sought to define the ground for universal rights and institutional safety nets and legitimate a wider frame for cross-cultural exchange. However, in the process of grounding philosophical ideals into the normative practice of governance, philosophy has diverted its gaze from the wider spheres of cosmological thinking. All too often we are left with either a melancholic hope for the renewal of ideals or a depressing account of the regressive tendencies. If we stress the idealism of cosmopolitanism, then its grip on reality is lost, and if it is interwoven with institutional life, then the beautiful dream is ruined.
In my view, artists have often insisted that the process of artistic creation is an expression of the connection with the cosmos. By hanging on to a belief in the companionship between creation and cosmos they also offer a different view on the double bind between cosmopolitan norms and ideals. Following from this assertion, we can identify a clearer distinction between the aesthetic and normative viewpoints on cosmopolitanism. Aesthetic approaches privilege the link between cosmos and creation in cosmopolitanism, while normative approaches focus on the moral rules for cosmopolitan governance. I sum up this distinction by defining aesthetic cosmopolitanism through the creative constitutive and argue that normative cosmopolitanism was directed toward the moral imperative.
This book takes inspiration from the bold aesthetic claims about the possibilities that another cosmos exists in art. It accepts that art can extend our thought and imagination beyond the spaces in which politics and philosophy tend to dwell. The challenge that follows from these claims is to then see how we can bridge these worlds. The radical idea of the Stoics rested on the presumption that democracy could be extended beyond the polis to the cosmos. In Kant and Habermas, we see how this cosmic idea was translated “down” toward the norms for the Earth. Let me therefore begin by laying out my definition of its meaning and scope, as well as introducing the difference between normative and aesthetic frameworks, and indicate parallels to the decolonial critique and scientific ideas in new physics.
Defining the Cosmos
When Socrates said that he was not just a citizen of Athens but also a citizen of the cosmos, he was also stating that his ultimate home was in his fellowship with the wise. At that time, it was accepted that the wise, or the sages, resided not on this terrestrial planet, but in a sphere that was known as the cosmos.
The earliest recorded expressions of universal belonging and human fellowship were found in texts from ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and India. These surviving references are confined to tiny fragments. Yet they seem to have been part of a wider exploration. As philosophers and poets wondered about the origins of creation they looked to the skies and speculated on a link between the sublime cosmos that was out there and the creative imagination in here. Priests and emperors then hijacked this imaginary continuum between the cosmos and humanity. By elevating themselves as mediators for the rest of their people they also pronounced themselves as gatekeepers to the cosmos. Being the exclusive bearers of celestial wisdom, they also initiated the most stultifying act in the history of knowledge.
In every culture there is a cosmology – a creation story of how the world began, and a range of narratives of how we belong in it. The fascination and explanation are usually spherical. A usual starting point is the sexual union of the earth and sky. The historian and geographer Patricia Seed noted that the primacy of this imaginary construction is evident in the fact that the celestial maps preceded the terrestrial variety by a thousand years: “The earliest maps sought to locate humans in the universe” (2014: xix). There is a seventh-century BCE cuneiform tablet from Nineveh in the British Museum that accurately records the position of Venus. This knowledge had been held for millennia. The motivation for stargazing was aesthetic, spiritual, and practical. Astronomy was essential for calculating the solstices and equinoxes, measuring the rhythmic rotation of seasons, determining the climatic conditions for agriculture, the movement of fish stocks, and provision of water supplies. It was only when the appearance of the stars could be “discovered” as a navigational tool that long-range seafaring began. The anthropologist Debbora Battaglia took this fascination with the celestial patterns even further. She reflected on the shamans’ stories about the flickering patterns in the sky as an expression of making the cosmos common and concluded that the shamans were conducting a form of cosmic diplomacy by performing a translation of the experience of the celestial spheres into stories that could be shared by all (Battaglia 2014).
While cosmologies are evident in all civilizations, the Greeks were distinctive in the way they asserted an anthropocentric relationship between the divine and the human. For them, not only was the cosmos out there, but the living connection to the cosmos also transpired through the breath that passed in and out of us. The Greeks believed that a fragment of the cosmos was deemed to be part of human nature. Hence, they did not always insist that priests should be the intermediaries to cosmic truth. Rather, they saw a continuum and a form of companionship between being human and being part of the cosmos.
The oldest surviving Greek text to distinguish between chaos and cosmos is by Hesiod. There were earlier references to Orphic poets who claimed to have found a union with the cosmos but there is no direct record of this. Anaximander and Pythagoras were the first philosophers to use the term cosmos to elaborate on the order of the universe and its consequences for social life and moral conduct. Homer used the concept of cosmos with dazzling diversity to describe both the divine plan and the human effort to create order. Euripides placed profound emphasis on empathy for others in his dramas. Herodotus’ account of his journeys was a brilliant exposition of both wondrous curiosity and an intricate interest in others.1 In Plato’s Timaeus the story of the creation of the world is unequivocal. First there is chaos and then the Demiurge introduces order, makes a cosmos. The Greek word for breath – pneuma – was also the word for the world soul. Thus, throughout Greek philosophy and literature the concept of the cosmos was integral to the stories that explained the human capacity for reason and creativity. They speculated that the source of this “divine” capacity in humans must originate from the cosmos and they also thought that breath was the means for transmission. The cosmos was both verb for the aesthetic activity of making order and a noun for the physical sphere that surrounded Earth and separated it from the infinite void. Hence, in ancient Greek the word cosmos has two levels of meaning, and a third has been added in modern Greek:
1. Cosmos – as aesthetics: an embellishment or assemblage that pleases, an alluring use of language, a construction of space that is hospitable to others.
2. Cosmos – as physics: either Earth itself or as a sphere that surrounds Earth and separates it from the boundless universe.
3. Cosmos – as politics/ethics: the widest possible circle of people to which all humanity belongs.
In its broadest meaning cosmos referred to the effort to give form to the formless. It was therefore not only a border zone that separated Earth and the boundless universe, but also a term for the human effort by which we make our space, bodies, and expressions attractive for others. The meaning of cosmopolitanism was derived from this primal effort of making sense of our belonging to, and the efforts for creating, an ordered world. These general cosmological viewpoints circulated in the Greek world for centuries. However, a major leap forward occurred in the middle of the second century BCE. It was led by a group of strangers from the edges of the Hellenistic Empire. They gathered under the stoa in Athens, and henceforth were referred to as the Stoics. They were the first to give a more robust and wider theory of cosmopolitanism by combining cosmological thinking with a cosmopolitical vision of radical equality. For the first time in history, the Stoics claimed that anyone and everyone – irrespective of race, class, and sex – could be a member of the cosmopolis.
The Stoics drew on the earlier philosophical tradition in which it was believed that the human capacity to create was derived from the connection to the cosmos. They imagined that the cosmos existed as a fiery ether that spun around Earth in a constant thrusting motion. They also repeated the view that it was by virtue of the existence of a fragment of the cosmos and the vital transmission of the cosmic soul through breath that humans also possessed the God-like capacity to reason and create. It is notable that the Stoics deployed elegant musical metaphors to both explain the sublime interweaving of the moral with the beautiful and account for the mysterious energy of creativity. They also claimed that wisdom was not measured by material success but rather found in a capacity to live in accord with the cosmos. Hence, the Stoics made an explicit link between cosmopolitanism as an expression of the coexistence between divine creation, human agency, and collective life. Access to the cosmos was not a matter of abstract speculation. There was a direct link with aesthesis – the classical term for sensing and perceiving. The body was not seen as a weak and faulty instrument for registering the sensation of phenomena. It was immersed in, and part of, the cosmos. Thus, from its first conception cosmopolitanism was not confined to moral reasoning. It also began in the philosophical explorations that the Stoics organized under the headings of physics and aesthetics. It is for this reason that I will argue that it is now important to see the story of cosmopolitanism as an expression of the creative constitutive and not just as an outcome of the moral imperative.
Scope of the Cosmos
A common misconception about cosmopolitanism is that its expression in its purest philosophical form is either just another hollow form of utopianism, or an idealized extrapolation of the polis from which it was imagined. This equation between the cosmopolis and utopia ignores a fundamental difference. A utopia is a non-place, and it is projected as an ideal in which perfection has been attained. Once you are in utopia nothing will change, and once you check in no one will leave. It is club paradise! Yet, the cosmos for the Stoics was a fiery and dynamic entity. It was burning and flowing, exploding and renewing. The creative fire of the Stoic cosmos had no resemblance to utopia. Similarly, their vision of the cosmopolis, with its foundation on radical equality, was antithetical to the hierarchies and petty snobberies that defined the Athenian polis. The cosmopolis was neither as vain and vile as the polis nor an empty abstraction that was detached from any place like utopia. Hence, it would be an error to assume that the early Stoics merely extrapolated the existing forms of the polis. Their image of the cosmopolis was expressive of a spherical connection between the human body, the polis, and the cosmos.
The spherical way of seeing the cosmos did not remain intact. The subsequent generations of Stoic philosophers spent less time on cosmic speculations and aesthetic reflections. Instead, they dedicated themselves to the refinement of ethical precepts. The later Roman adaptation of Stoic thought headed even more back to earth. It increasingly veered toward a blend of affective detachment and moral austerity that could be used as both a practical guide for personal wellbeing and a tool to justify political quietism in an era of imperialism. As the poet Ovid rather sarcastically put it, the Roman Stoics transformed the cosmos into the known form of their polity: the orbis was reduced to the urbs. Stoic ideas also found their way into Christian theology. Hence, from Saint Paul to the Renaissance scholars, we see a contraction in the scope of cosmos and a more regulated conception of cosmopolitanism as an ideal to limit the abuses of colonial expansion.
The Enlightenment also found much disappointment with the diffuse forms of spherical thinking in early Greek philosophy. The gaze of philosophy moved away from the cosmos and focused more on the material conditions and institutional needs of the polis. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was writing at a cusp that marked the end of empires and the beginning of nation states. He also recognized that the increased mobility of peoples demanded greater clarity in the rules of hospitality and citizenship. For Kant, cosmopolitanism was both the “greatest problem for the human species” and the “final question” that humanity must answer (1991: 41).
Kant was a complex thinker. While gazing at the cosmos he admitted that the feeling was sublime. It was too big to fit in with the categories of philosophical reasoning. As he turned his gaze away from the skies, he declined from accepting that cosmopolitanism could be imposed by divine fiat. As he read brutish accounts of people from all around the world, he also decided that it could not be derived from within the heart of a common human nature. The former was unreal and the latter contradictory. While Kant was inspired by Rousseau’s optimism, he was more convinced by Hobbes’s account of the propensity for violence in human nature. He also had the strong belief that philosophy needed to be separated from divinity studies. In his polite and meek way, he probably thought that religious types, like the savages in the colonies, were idiots. He was convinced that traditional and Indigenous cultures were irrelevant to progress and could be relegated to the waste bin of history. Having rejected the bad options of divine connection and guidance from the heart, he concluded that the only realistic rendezvous with cosmopolitanism could be found through the work of moral reasoning. Kant’s aim was to develop a theory of cosmopolitanism that could function in a modern world. Ideas of metaphysical love and cosmic order bore no influence on his account of cosmopolitanism. The emphasis turned to deliberative processes and moral obligations. On one level, this narrowed the scope of philosophy and lowered the gaze to what could be empirically verified. Kant gave priority to the guiding hand of moral reasoning, he sought to align institutional rules and political structures to accord with these principles, and this provided the foundation of what I will be referring to as “normative cosmopolitianism.”
After Kant the application of normative cosmopolitanism has, on the one hand, narrowed even further as it became increasingly specialized, and, on the other, widened as it was spread across a variety of fields. Cosmopolitanism was entangled with the articulation of the principles of human rights, the formation of transnational political institutions, the invention of international legal instruments, and the dissemination of the globalized production of culture. In its heyday of the 1990s philosophers and social scientists turned their attention to reconciling cosmopolitanism with the conflicting demands between democracy and globalization, as well as sovereignty and hospitality. There was also a growing recognition that global communication networks and migration patterns had already stimulated the cosmopolitanization of society. In one of the most optimistic voices of this emergent perspective, Ulrich Beck called for cosmopolitans to unite not just as citizens of the world, but also as citizens for the world (cited in Archibugi 2002: 131). In this shift we note the slant that pushes cosmopolitanism from being an individual possession to an ethical form of stewardship for the planet. This was most evident in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida: the two most influential contemporary thinkers on cosmopolitanism.
