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Course of Study: (PRO285) Public Relations in Society

Title of work: Imagining the cosmopolitan in public and professional writing (2013)

Section: Conceptualising the cosmopolitan approach to writing pp. 12--35

Author/editor of work: Surma, Anne

Author of section: Anne Surma

Name of Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

2 Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing

I used to find myself saying, I can't imagine. But, I've since found out, you can - it's just a case of wanting to.

(Lloyd ]ones 2010, Hand Me Down World, 312)

Introduction

That we live today as part of a 'global tribe' (Appiah 2006, xiii) can seem difficult to dispute and yet, at the same time, tempting to ignore. Global networks of trade mean that wherever we work, we ar� somehow affected by the surges and dives of the world's markets. The global reach of intense and competitive industrial expansion, popu­ lation growth and movement means that wherever we live, climate change and its various environmental impacts are felt by us. Hostility arising from social and economic inequity, political, ideological and religious conflict, or clashes over scarce resources means that wher­ ever we care for families and loved ones, we experience a sense of insecurity and, to often radically different degrees, a haunting fear of becoming victim to terrorist acts. And as a result of the revolu­ tion in information and communication technologies of the last few decades we have immediate access - through the vision, sound and text of conventional and Internet-based social media - to (various mundane, appealing and horrifying) aspects of the lives, knowledge and experiences of near and distant others.

For professional writers in this environment, there is no ques­ tion that the proliferation of writing technologies (in tandem with other aspects of cultural change) has shifted not only the ways we

12

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 13

can communicate with others - particularly in terms of the diverse modes, relative speeds and the level of attention we might give to our writing activities - but also the ways we might imagine, relate to, understand or misunderstand both one another and the worlds we inhabit, through the texts we write and read.

Therefore, a key challenge today, in our evaluating and in our doing of writing in professional and public contexts, is not merely to affirm or reaffirm the "I" or the "we" (in the face of the other) - which is increasingly the impulse and the prerogative of voices com­ peting for attention in a consumerist and aggressively promotional Western culture. It is rather to recognise, through writing approaches and practices, how we are constituted or can reimagine ourselves as involved simultaneously in a complex of global and local networks, with obligations to others situated far as well as near, then as well as now. In this spirit, writing has the potential to constitute a resis­ tance to the dehumanising and decontextualising effects of a market economy-driven globalisation.

Paradoxically, given the fragility and indeterminacy (environmen­ tal, economic, political and social) of the period in which we live, the ever-growing pressure facing writers, whether we are engaged in political, corporate or community writing, in fact most non-fiction

writing, is the expectation that we will be unequivocal (or univo­ cal); that we will eschew ambivalence and contingency, in favour of bold, singular statements that declare "truths", and assert "how things really are". Of course this also means that we may therefore often feel compelled to write in abstractions and euphemisms, par­ ticularly if how things really are might cast us in a less than positive light or provoke reflection on the tensions and conflicts inherent in our claims. Situated, as this compulsion is, in a historical moment of accelerated speed, of present-ness, of the intensification and power of the image (and the word as image), it is timely - and crucial - to interrogate the conceptions of, approaches to and practices of writing that support, enable and reinforce those impulses.

In this chapter I outline the conceptual and theoretical frame­ work that guides the ruminations on writing in the book as a whole. An ethically driven, critical cosmopolitan orientation directs the focus as I adapt and apply the work of a number of theorists of cos­ mopolitanism to the field of public and professional writing. I also draw attention to the role of imagination, particularly as it alerts us

14 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

as writers to the centrality of care in complex relations of interde­ pendence and responsibility in our forging of contact with others within and across local and global boundaries. And finally, through a cosmopolitan lens, I suggest the constitutive and powerful roles of discourse and rhetoric in all writing practices, and how they may be deployed in diverse contexts to shape and support as well as modify and destabilise competing perspectives on globalisation.

Cosmopolitanism

As a way of defining our situated global complexions, and as refracted through an explicit ethical, imaginative and discursive-rhetorical approach to communicating, cosmopolitanism provides a rich and challenging means of expanding our awareness of the purposes and the possibilities of writing now and into the future. To write is to change. When we write we are involved, somehow, in changing something or someone: ourselves, the subject of which we write, the person, the group or the community to whom or for whom we write, whether directly or indirectly. That change may affect our and others' apprehension of the past, relationship to the present and potential connections to the future. That change and its impacts may or may not be immediately felt, or be immediately visible or comprehensi­ ble. Conversely, the writing may also help to coordinate or prompt changes that are already in the making, such as we saw with the pivotal role played by social media, particularly Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, during the revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, collectively known as the Arab Spring, in 201 P Craig Calhoun illustrates the point by describing how 'through trade and foreign aid and wars and diplomacy and the tourist industry and the global organization of religion, people on every continent are joined to others through indirect relationships. These are mediated by infor­ mation technology, business corporations, governments and NGOs. But they remain human relationships and therefore demand ethical evaluation' (2008a, 430).

The impulses of cosmopolitanism, and particularly of critical cos­ mopolitanism, which I explore below, serve as a robust infrastructure for the discussions comprising the following chapters, allowing me to situate approaches to and practices of professional writing in the temporal and material contexts in which texts are produced and

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 15

circulated. Moreover, cosmopolitanism gives a surer shape to the sig­ nificant ethical challenges confronting writing practices and their impacts in the contemporary environment. It facilitates reflexivity about the reach and potentially positive value (or even the dubi­ ous value) of writing and of writers (and, by extension, readers) as agents, actively responsible for and engaged in contact with (often unknown) others. It also allows a demonstration of the ways in which the potential for social change inheres in and is represented by vari­ ous discursive and rhetorical approaches to diverse writing activities in a range of contexts. Further, cosmopolitanism's preoccupations also serve to provoke means of imagining approaches to and prac­ tices of professional writing carried out in contexts in which local and global circumstances, events and identities are imbricated. This facili­ tates a focus on the ways in which various discourses, rhetoric and the narratives that animate them are mobilised in textual representations to serve particular interests and to marginalise others.

In this way too, then, cosmopolitanism is a lived experience, a process, an ethical, social and political disposition or outlook inter­ twined with and debating about processes of change. Beck further describes this outlook as:

Global sense, a sense of boundarylessness. An everyday, histor­ ically alert, reflexive awareness of ambivalences in a milieu of blurring differentiations and cultural contradictions. It reveals not just the "anguish" but also the possibility of shaping one's life and social relations under conditions of cultural mixture. It is simultaneously a sceptical, disillusioned, self-critical outlook.

(Beck 2006, 3)2

This disposition - collapsing traditional notions of identity and the (potentially aggressive) distinctions they mark between self and other, us and them - awakens in us, according to Beck, our sense of 'sameness in principle of others' (Beck 2006, 8). Beck uses the exam­ ple of the global protests staged in response to US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (brought up close through the mass media, and thereby stim­ ulating the scope of our 'emotional imagination'), to illustrate the capacity for empathy that a cosmopolitan outlook has enabled and, I would argue, that our present circumstances demand (2006, 6). 3

A more recent example would be the Occupy movement, comprising

16 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

a series of sit-ins in cities around the world, in an ongoing campaign against what its supporters declare as 'the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process' (Occupy Wall Street 2012). However, it is also important to remem­ ber that cosmopolitanism need 'not be any more physically mobile than the local, as processes of cosmopolitanization stand as ethical negotiations of selfhood in a fluid world of blurring boundaries and unforeseen configurations of social life' (Hier 2008, 41).

Alert to the ethical demands of cosmopolitanism, Kwame Appiah helps us understand that being a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan, means being aware that we thereby have ties with and obligations to others beyond our own families, eo-workers, compatriots. It also means appreciating the value of the specific lives and lifestyles of others (Appiah 2006, xv). This is by no means to suggest that cos­ mopolitanism attempts to reduce everything to the singular or the unified. On the contrary, and as Seyla Benhabib points out, it is 'a philosophical project of mediations, not of reductions or of total­ izations' (Benhabib 2006, 20). By extension, Calhoun remarks that cosmopolitanism 'is belonging to a social class able to identify itself with the universal' (2008a, 440).4

Language in general and writing in particular are means by which the individual and social relationships that constitute a cosmopolitan world can be enacted, imagined, realised, critiqued and transformed. As much as anything, an exploration of cosmopolitanism as a philo­ sophical and ethical commitment encourages us to reflect more deeply on what is important and valuable, exciting and poten­ tially transformative and compelling about writing, as a critical, careful and self-reflexive process (rather than merely an efficient skill or slick technique), and as a vital social practice in a global context. Most significantly, it highlights writing today, in a net­ worked society, as a situated, dynamic, complex activity, involving the ongoing potential for mundane or vigorous, restricted or inclu­ sive interactions - extrapolations, discussions, claims, refutations, responses, arguments, edits, rewrites, paraphrases, agreements, dis­ agreements, affirmations - between writers and readers across various times and spaces. It necessarily involves interlocutors in obligations and responsibilities that they may not have actively sought and that they may wish or choose to ignore, but that are nonetheless real. The focus or concerns of writing may well be immediate, local, clear and

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 17

specific, but its impacts may well also be long-term or retrospective, global, uncertain and wide-ranging.

Cosmopolitanism underscores the idea that writers do writing in ethically ambivalent contexts, that they must confront and work within the constraints (whether economic, political, professional, institutional, legal, cultural, ethnic or social) and conventions of their subjective or representative positions. It also highlights the way in which writing that merely rehearses and reiterates the same preju­ dices, or that entrenches the l/we while obscuring or objectifying the other/you, or that refuses to acknowledge the repercussions it may generate, is lifeless, worthless writing. Writing that doesn't engage (with) others, whose lives and wellbeing it affects, that doesn't expect and enable the responses of others, is likely to be merely promotional,

abstract or both. We live in a time when the ideas and understandings that invoke

cosmopolitanism continue to engender important political and social debate. Nonetheless, and as Chapter 1 outlined, cosmopolitanism is a concept and a philosophy with ancient roots. Beck suggests that cosmopolitanism defines the contemporary human condition and is not merely a 'controversial rational idea'; rather, it has become 'the defining feature of a new era, the era of reflexive modernity, in which national borders and differences are dissolving' (Beck 2006, 2). The extent to which the cosmopolitan characterises the present era is still up for debate, particularly as far as the claim that borders and differences are dissolving is concerned. This is why writing the cosmopolitan is such a challenge, and so fraught with tensions. Undoubtedly, the forces of globalisation have ensured that the mar­ ket economy, trade, transport and communication technologies have opened up the world for some as an apparently deterritorialised space. However, it is important not to conflate or confuse glob­ alisation with cosmopolitanism. The former is essentially both a 'macroeconomic thesis' (Appiah 2006, xiii) and the effect of the dom­ ination of the neo-liberal market economy and its control of both local and transnational trade and commercial activity. This deperson­ alising phenomenon makes its at once homogenising and fracturing impacts deeply felt at individual, political, social and environmental levels in cultures, communities and societies around the world.

Thus, cosmopolitanism, as I develop and apply the concept in this book, can be broadly defined as a form of resistance to, or

18 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

as 'a normative critique' of, the destructive aspects of globalisa­ tion; it constitutes a communicative, dialectical response to those aspects, as 'embedded ... in current societal developments' (Delanty 2009, 250). It involves individuals, groups and societies interacting with each other within and across borders, territories, networks and temporalities and, in the process of doing so, undergoing, as Delanty suggests, 'transformation in light of the encounter with the Other' (2009, 252).

Delanty uses the term critical cosmopolitanism to conceptualise the social world 'as an open horizon in which new cultural mod­ els take shape' (2006, 27). And Marianna Papastephanou claims that 'critical cosmopolitanism requires us to be at home with, and respond

to, the hiss of history' (2011, 604; italics in original). Further, the reflective, critical and dialogic disposition of this process is reinforced in reference to that dimension of cosmopolitanism involving 'the cre­ ation and articulation of communicative models of world openness in which societies undergo transformation' (Delanty 2006, 35; see also 2009, 251-52). The centrality of communicating to the process of inhabiting a critical cosmopolitan stance suggests the significance of understanding and evaluating writing in relation to this ongoing project, particularly since the modes, purposes and practices of writ­ ing, as means of forging contact and interacting with or representing or eliding one's own and the lives and worlds of others, have a poten­ tial reach and impact unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.

Whether through blogs, Facebook or other social media, some of us have the opportunity to join in discussions about what it means to live in a world alongside or in conflict with others, or to live in fear of or enthusiasm for change brought about by social, polit­ ical, environmental or commercial activities. However, theorist ]odi Dean's concern that social media feed what she calls 'communicative capitalism ... that economic-ideological form wherein reflexivity cap­ tures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many' (Dean 2010, 4) tempers any nai:ve optimism about social media's positive possibilities. (This idea is discussed fur­ ther in Chapter 3.) For me, Dean's thesis also further supports the importance of a critical cosmopolitan approach to writing, pushing us as writers not to separate the communicative from the meaning­ ful, the discursive from the material, the singular and unique from the relational and relative.

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 19

What precisely does this mean for writing? How does the situated writer, alert to the challenges of a cosmopolitan outlook, reconfigure

her relationship with others and reimagine or represent the social world through writing that admits or recognises the tensions struc­ turing communicative exchange? I will try to answer these questions in the sections below by building on Delanty's notion of critical cos­ mopolitanism pertinent to a consideration of writing in a context of globalisation: its development, dissemination, interpretation and impacts as a potentially transformative social practice. The first step in doing so is to argue for the importance of time and temporality

intrinsic to such an approach.

Writing, cosmopolitanism and temporality

Some theorists draw our attention to the centrality of time or of temporality in reflecting on matters of cosmopolitan ethics and responsibility. This has significant implications for our thinking about the process, purpose, aims and impacts of writing, given the pervasive influence in the developed world of what Robert Hassan calls 'network time', and also - and importantly - the way that cos­ mopolitanism encourages us to take account of the complexity of temporality and the different temporal zones, levels and experiences by means of which individuals and communities are connected, or disconnected. Hassan defines network time as 'digitally com­ pressed clock-time' to describe one of the significant effects of the information communication technologies (ICT) revolution increas­ ingly evident in the developed world's economy, culture and society (2003, 233). He argues that this form of time displaces clock time, as asynchronous interconnectivity: 'increasingly, then, the growing number of ICT devices and applications that comprise the network ecology begins to shape our relationship to a new, emptied and de-temporalized successor to the clock - the network' (2003, 235).

We struggle to resist and are therefore being overwhelmed by the dominating logic of the network, that of commerce and instrumen­ tality. This means that the space for 'reflection, organization and resistance' allowed by clock time (even if such shared experiences through a common temporality were also potentially oppressive), has been elided in network time. As well, 'the more we become con­ nected and dependent upon interconnectivity in our jobs and in

20 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

other aspects of our lives, the more we will live in an accelerated mode' (Hassan 2003, 236-37). With such acceleration there is simply less time, and less perceived need, for reflexive knowledge and eval­ uation. In submitting to the imperative of market forces - working fast, efficiently and now, w� not only have less time to reflect on the future, but the consequences of our actions in the here and now disappear from view (Hassan 2003, 238).

However, and this is an important qualification, network time is not the only experience of time. While many individuals, com­ munities and cultures around the world are certainly influenced

by network time, on a day-to-day basis we may also live our lives according to other temporalities, such as clock time (which, notwith­ standing Hassan's assertions, is still a powerful means of regulating private and public lives), the time of the seasons, of caring and fam­ ily labour, of reproduction, and so on (see Adam 2002). As writers, we need to appreciate these different and often disparate or dichoto­ mous experiences of time, not only because one or more of them will inform how, in which contexts and for whom we write, but also how we manage to succeed or fail to relate to others given their own investments in particular temporal modes.

Saulo B. Cwerner points out the bias inherent in treatments of cos­

mopolitanism, drawing attention to 'an invariable emphasis on the spatial extension of the cosmos as the fundamental feature of cos­ mopolitanism. All the questions about citizenship in the extended polis are framed in terms of the extension of loyalties, identities, responsibilities, and rights across space' (2000, 334-35; italics in orig­ inal). Arguing that this dilutes the radical edge of cosmopolitanism, Cwerner posits what he calls the 'chronopolitan ideal' as a coun­ terbalancing perspective. This situates cosmopolitanism in temporal terms, and is thereby alert to the present's relationship with both the future and the past. Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) have offered detailed and nuanced insights into the ways that our actions in a globalised, technologised culture will have (often unknown) environmental and social impacts on future generations. While we cannot know now what those impacts will be, this does not absolve us from responsibility to our descendants. In turn, a temporally sen­ sitive approach to cosmopolitanism is committed to acknowledging its responsibility for wrongs committed in the past and, through a process of redemption, necessarily 'involves not restoration of the

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 21

past but reparation for the wrongs committed in the past which still haunt the present' (Cwerner 2000, 338). In relation to the present, a sensitivity to the concurrency of different tempos, as well as dif­ ferent temporalities - of the diverse 'rhythms of social life' (Cwerner 2000, 339) - is integral to the cosmopolitan outlook. Thus, as Carmen Leccardi argues, 'the "return of time" is also inevitably a return of responsibility to the centre of the social stage' (Leccardi in Hassan

and Purser 2007, 34). Writing too is a temporally contingent activity. As I have suggested,

written text necessarily signifies (even if it explicitly denies) a rela­ tionship to the other, to an intertext (to a history, a present and a potential future of other texts) representing other lives, other experi­ ences, other truths. This is what makes writing dynamic and variously meaningful. An approach to writing (and, by implication, reading) that appreciates its inextricability from temporality can be grasped by the term "making sense". The term as I use it here intends a play on the multi-faceted notion of sense, one that is relevant to all modes of writing: business, literary, political, community and news media, as well as other forms of public writing. In addition, the use of " sense" here is mindful of the diverse ethical demands of making sense (ratio­ nal, emotional, aesthetic, social, political and so on) when we write (and read) in situated contexts. Thus we have making sense used both constitutively (e.g. as in choices and judgments about how to develop and create or transform, modify and edit texts) and interpretively (e.g. as in the ways we construct meaning from or understand or evaluate texts). The term "making", used as present participle, sug­ gests sense-making as always in-process and provisional, drawing on

a pre-existing knowledge and understanding. A notion of making sense thus both complicates and situates writing as practices and pro­ cesses engaged in, in specific material and temporal contexts, rather than as already-established entities, or as givens. Further, positioning ourselves as writers in relation and responsible to another or others, as well as ourselves, also directs us to a notion of writing as a past­ sensitive and as a future-oriented endeavour, rather than as a static, reactive or even regressive account. Such positioning enables us to question what writing should do, ought to do in this situation or that, to question its purposes and aims and the specific relationship between writer and reader(s) that obtains. It further enables us to ask questions about what or how a text might become: how it might

22 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

be interpreted and transformed, how it might give rise to particular responses, actions - to change.

On this note, and to show how we might apply this notion of making sense to specific writing and reading practices, it is worth referring briefly to a tweet posted by Jim Wallace, managing direc­ tor of the Australia Christian Lobby, on ANZAC Day in 2011.5 The text reads, 'Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for - wasn't gay mar­ riage and Islamic!' (Benson 2011). The tweet may make sense, or it may make some or no sense, depending on who is reading and where they are temporally as well as geographically, politically and reli­ giously situated. It will probably mean something to anyone familiar with Australia or with some of its ongoing debates around national identity, fears about so-called Islamisation, and the legalising of gay marriage. At the moment of its posting, the tweet was regarded as timely by somej by others its timing was regarded as being in very poor taste. Wallace himself issued a swift apology following the media attention drawn to his words, regretting the tweet as 'ill-timed', in that 'ANZACs mean to (sic) much to me to demean this day, not intended' (Benson 2011). There is no question that the tweet had significant impact. It was emotive, political and provocative. It har­ nessed a powerful national story about past and present involvement in international conflicts, and related that story to current struggles over who or what constitutes the distinction and the overlap between Australia and the other. As well, attention focused on Wallace as a figure of authority and as a Christian on the one hand, and as a pri­ vate individual using his right to free speech, on the other. From either perspective, however, the relationship between Wallace and his interlocutors, known and (mostly) unknown was somehow mod­ ified, even as a result of a couple of (apparently) throwaway lines via social media. The context and the question of difference raised by this communicative exchange also highlight issues specifically relating to ethics and imagination that are integral to a cosmopolitan approach to writingi I demonstrate how in the following section.

Cosmopolitan writing: Ethical and imaginative challenges

Calhoun worries about cosmopolitan ethics substituting for trans­ national politics (2008a, 445) and the institutional and structural

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 23

changes imperative for cosmopolitan ambitions for change to be effected (2008a, 433). However, it seems to me that this worry obtains only as long as we conceive of ethics abstractly rather than materially embedded in both personal and political experiences, practices and (inter)actions. An ethical commitment to writing in a cosmopolitan world is bound to see writing as dynamically involved in developing and sustaining relationships across and between bodies, territories and times (I develop this idea further below, in terms of a feminist ethics of care). Hannah Arendt, commenting on the 'boundlessness of human interrelatedness', observes that 'the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundless­ ness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation' (1998, 190). Here she foregrounds both the ten­ sion (of interrelatedness and interdependence) between local and global, individual and public, self and other inherent in cosmopoli­ tanism, and the responsibility attendant on human subjects living and writing in a cosmopolitan world.

Arendt's words remind us of our obligations and our responsibil­ ities as writers; she helps us understand that selves, and identities, are not independent of others. Nor are they appositional to them:

even when we are writing on behalf of a corporation, an institution, community or government, we are not just writing on behalf of their interests; when we are writing as individuals or as citizens, our writing emerges from our sense of our particular personal, social or political affiliations. We are often painfully aware, as writers in the public and professional domains, of the forces of globalisation - of a competitive market economy - that discourage any impulse to write in ways that are not intent on self-promotion, on collapsing into self-referentiality. A cosmopolitan outlook, by contrast, directs our gaze towards the other and at the world "out there" (but at the same time requires us to re-view ourselves, see ourselves otherwise or displaced).6

Arendt's notion of boundlessness is also useful, moreover, for help­ ing to return our attentiveness as writers to our responsibility for a text's potential impacts, a responsibility that lies beyond the range of our own motivation, purpose and intention - in other words, beyond our individual or collective agency as material beings. Her words also imply a responsibility that goes beyond territorial or spatial limits. It is here as well that the cosmopolitan turn is par­ ticularly provocative with important implications for writing. Today, written text is too often conceived in exclusively spatial terms,

24 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

perhaps most obviously in terms of its visibility. To write means having "a presence", via a website, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin and so on. It is the sine qua non for existence: to be seen is to be significant. By extension, writing is too often treated as an instrumental strategy, whose value is objectively measurable according to its capacity to demonstrate achievement of predefined objectives. Writing is therefore conceived of (materially or virtu­ ally) in ahistorical terms. Instead, and in an effort to reimagine

writing as a pivotal communicative dimension of cosmopolitanism, I argue for writing as figuring the ethical connections and rela­ tionships that obtain between self and other, even when these are conventionally represented as depersonalised, objectified or idealised relations.

Linked inextricably with the ethically driven approach outlined above - and extending our writing-related responsibilities to oth­ ers across temporal and spatial limits - is the activity of imagining, pivotal to the process of developing texts. Writing responsibly in a cosmopolitan context demands the use of imagination: the capac­ ity to think and feel and respond virtually, beyond one's own time and place and into another's. It involves reading between the lines, transgressing borders: inscribing and reading a world and set of rela­ tionships that may capture but must also exceed our immediate context and concerns, the taken for granted ways of our particular culture, the familiarity and predictability of our face-to-face encoun­ ters. Seen in this way, the act of imagining, one could argue, is thus inherently cosmopolitan.

Using our capacity - and the time - to imagine has now become more pressing than ever, perhaps particularly for those of us whose lives are dominated by network time. Paradoxically, however, although we can use communication technologies to bring us up close to the worlds of others, we can also use those same technologies to reinforce our solipsism, our disconnectedness from embodied oth­ ers and their lives (see Zuckerman 2010). That is to say, we can use those technologies to exploit, for example, the instantaneity poten­ tial of communicating via YouTube or email, without allowing time to imagine what the texts we write and send might mean elsewhere and otherwise. Even when we are not writing under pressure of speed and time, we may refuse our capacity to imagine by resorting to the generally abstract and typically dehumanised language of cliche or

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 25

jargon (as represented in the pervasive discourses of managerialism)­ about which more below.

Roger Silverstone (2007) and Alexa Robertson (2010) have each written powerfully of the ways in which media representations of the other might reinvigorate the potential for us to imagine and relate to the lives of (particularly distant) others. Written texts might be considered as offering the same kind of possibilities. However, the barriers of language and the disproportionate usage of the Internet by the USA (78.6 per cent), Europe (61.3 per cent) and Oceania/Australia

(67.5 per cent) populations, compared with the populations of Africa (13.5 per cent), Asia (26.2 per cent), Middle East (35.6 per cent) and

Latin America/Caribbean (39.5 per cent) (Internet World Stats 2012i figures are for 31 December 2011), can be an inhibitor of opportuni­ ties for more equitable communicative interaction between peoples across the world. This means that those writers who do have access and reach have added responsibilities and obligations since, as Fiona Robinson points out, 'moral relations ... are rarely conducted among agents with equal levels of power and autonomyi rather, there is a recognition that moral relations are thick with unequal levels of power, voice, influence and independence' (2011, 7).

A cosmopolitan perspective enables a deepening and extending of the crucial role to be played by imagination in approaches to and

practices of writing, as subsequent chapters will explore. Scholars of cosmopolitanism, including Beck (2002), Delanty (2009) and Appiah (2006), have also recognised the vital contribution it makes. Beck identifies the defining feature of the cosmopolitan perspective as the 'dialogic imagination'. He explains this as

the clash of cultures and rationalities within one's own life, the "internalized other". The dialogic imagination corresponds to the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual experience, which makes it a matter of fate to compare, reflect, criticize, understand, combine contradictory certainties.

(2002, 18)

Not dissimilarly, Delanty uses the term 'cosmopolitan imagination' to describe 'a view of society as an ongoing process of self­ constitution through the continuous opening up of new perspec­ tives in light of the encounter with the Other' (2009, 13). What is

26 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

compelling about this idea is the way in which imagining (alterna­ tive) relations between self and other, local and global provokes the potential for mutual transformation. By extension, 'it is out of the interaction of societies, communities, individuals from different cul­ tures that the cosmopolitan imagination is generated' (2009, 77-79). This necessarily involves a tension, 'a dynamic relation between the local and the global' (2009, 68). Where Delanty uses "translation" as a metaphor for describing the changes that might be effected though forging (imaginative) connections with others (2009, 13), Appiah uses the term 'conversation'. He intends it both literally, as 'talk', and metaphorically, 'for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others' (2006, 85). He refers to the role of the imagina­ tion in the process of conversation and, though he doesn't elaborate, we might infer that he suggests the way in which we need to go beyond ourselves, beyond the conventions of our social and tem­ poral positions to be responsive to the other. He also remarks that our connections made in the imagination 'are among the real est connections that we have' (2006, 135). In these accounts, the sig­ nificance of the communicative dimension is clear and, for writers, highlights the ways in which imagination and language may be combined to enrich (or, of course, possibly impoverish) understand­ ings of, particularly unknown, others. Opening up to the other, the cosmopolitan imagination has the potential to navigate the social, geographical and cultural differences between ourselves and oth­ ers, through feelings of empathy, and to heighten our awareness of our obligations within as well as beyond familiar territories and temporalities.

It is not accidental, then, that literary-based citations comprise the epigraphs for this and other chapters in this book. The literary imagi­ nary, in its endeavour to appreciate the perspectives of others, enables writers of fiction to understand, differently and otherwise, our rela­ tionships with the circumstances, stories and inner lives of particular and distant others. Perhaps more importantly, as readers of fiction we have the opportunity to share or actively relate to the agency of others and come to an imaginative - evaluative - understanding of our differences from and our similarities to them. Although in my earlier work I have suggested both the distinction and the com­ patibility between professional and creative writing (Surma 2005), I now believe that it is more urgent than ever for writers in the

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 27

non-fiction domain to draw on some of the insights and approaches of their fiction-writing colleagues, in order to develop as cosmopoli­ tan citizens. The novelist and essayist Zadie Smith laments that 'those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensi­ bility' (Smith 2009). While Smith's essay is explicitly concerned with the way in which we are each composites of different voices and complex identities, it seems to me also to gesture strongly towards an imaginative capacity, making sense, literally and figuratively, of alternative perspectives, different ways of human experiencing, feel­ ing and responding. Thus, imagining enables us to understand others as different from as well as similar to ourselves.

But imagination is not simply a question of whimsy (either in the realm of fiction or non-fiction writing). In writing in the public domain, when we imagine, our emotional, empathetic and evalua­ tive envisioning will be situated by, and often find itself in dialectical tension with, specific instrumentally driven economic, political, cul­ tural, technological and communicative considerations.7 Given the bias of globalisation towards such rationalist approaches, care is therefore needed to redress the balance and ensure that the human, the social and the environmental are not displaced. A critical cos­ mopolitanism which incorporates the practice and value of a feminist ethics of care (and the latter's insistence on the ties of interdepen­ dence and responsibility that underpin our relations with others) is crucial in grounding cosmopolitanism in the human, social realm.

Delanty refers briefly to the importance of care to the cosmopoli­ tan imagination (see, for example 2009, 7).8 However, it is scholars such as Virginia Held and Fiona Robinson whose extension of a feminist ethics of care into the global arena represents what I read as a specifically imaginative expression of a grounded and contex­ tualised cosmopolitanism.9 A feminist ethics of care, which I see as pivotal to writing approaches and practices themselves, as well as to writing about issues related to responsibilities to care, and which treats human beings 'not as autonomous subjects, but as being embedded in networks and relationships of care' (Robinson 2009) determinedly situates discussions about relations between self and other at the centre of what we might imagine as valuable and impor­ tant in both private and public life. Virginia Held puts it succinctly when she remarks that people are always and everywhere 'relational

28 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

and ... interdependent' (Held 2006, 156). The foundation for these relationships is grounded in an awareness of the fact that

all persons need care for at least their early years. Prospects for human progress and flourishing hinge fundamentally on the care that those needing it receive, and the ethics of care stresses the moral force of the responsibility to respond to the needs of the dependent.

(2006, 10)

She also argues that an ethics of care helps highlight the connec­ tions between people as emotionally rich and mutually sustaining relations of interdependence, not as exclusively rationally based or as centred on the lone individual (or self-contained person or private organisation or single society). It is the emotions, Held argues, such as empathy, sensitivity and responsiveness, that are better guides to what we should or shouldn't do, in moral terms (2006, 157). As practice and as a value, an ethics of care 'advocates attention to particulars, appreciation of context, narrative understanding, and communication and dialogue in moral deliberation, suspecting that the more general and abstract the recommendation, the less adequate for actual guidance' (2006, 157-58). Held's discussion of an ethics of care in a global context as well reminds us how some of our respon­ sibilities to care are not chosen but are nonetheless real and emerge from our social positioning and historical embeddedness (2006, 156). This means too that caring relations 'are not limited to the personal contexts of family and friends. They can extend to fellow members of groups of various kinds, to fellow citizens, and beyond. We can, for instance, develop caring relations for persons who are suffering deprivation in distant parts of the globe' (2006, 15 7).

Just as Held draws a distinction as well as shows the overlap between caring as an attitude or disposition and caring as an activ­ ity (2006, 30-31), I do the same in my focus on care as integral to both writing approaches on the one hand, and writing practices on the other. Caring about something enough can motivate us to write about it, or to exchange ideas about it with others, or to circulate a text publicly, via a blog or a letter to the editor, or an issues paper. To take care with our writing can mean many things: to care, as a writer, about the text we produce as a quasi-aesthetic object - one that

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 29

is well structured, clearly articulated and appealing to a reader. Taking care over our writing may, further, imply that the process of writing is considered and deliberate (and that therefore it takes time), and that writers are aware of our (sometimes conflicting) responsibilities to readers, to employers, to affected communities and to contexts near and far. Foucault makes a productive link between curiosity and care that is both pertinent to this discussion, and that loops us back into the activity of imagining. Curiosity, he says,

evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw of familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disap­ pearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

(1984, 325)

And, in the context of writing, what might be deliberated over in this process? The background to the writing moment? Our own interests? The topic being articulated? The context, the needs of the readers, our relationships, real or desired, with them? The impacts of the text?

In turn, how do we go about expressing the subject of care in our writing, making public the pervasiveness of its invisible (because con­ ventionally perceived as necessarily private) relations and practices? For example, what might it look like to read an organisational docu­ ment on change management or a government policy document that explicitly addresses the responsibilities and dynamics of care between those involved or implicated in the change or policy in question? How might we reimagine our writing practices, so as to communicate in a language that admits writing itself as one means of acknowledg­ ing our interdependence (however conflicted or difficult) with and responsibility to others?

As both sets of questions illustrate, I fold in both uses of care, as disposition and as practice: firstly, as an approach to writing and secondly, as representing care in our writing, in order to evoke the integral relation between care's at once ethical and substantive

30 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

dimensions. Such focus, interested as it is in normative and material concerns, requires that we now turn our attention to the constitutive roles of discourse and rhetoric in all writing activities.

Cosmopolitan writing: Discourse and rhetoric

As professional writers our imaginings of the other are at least partly constructed and then publicly articulated through the discursive and rhetorical choices we make. These discourses may work to expand or restrict the imaginative, cosmopolitan horizons we envision. As Norman Fairclough observes: 'discourses include representa­ tions of how things are and have been, as well as imaginaries - representations of how things might or could or should be' (Fairclough 2003, 207).

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges writers face today in com­ municating to others in public, political, commercial or community forums is to keep our language fresh, thoughtful, careful, not let­ ting it be trammelled by the potentially deadening discourses of managerialism or bureaucratese. I mentioned above the insights to be drawn from the literary imaginary; literature also, however, offers writers salutary reminders about using language other than that to

which we may feel condemned as professionals, representatives or advocates. Thus, we need to beware becoming inured to language such as that contained in the following statement by Apple, released

in response to an NGO report finding that workers in its suppliers' factories were forced to work excessive overtime, live in overcrowded dormitories and suffer other mistreatment:

Apple is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility throughout our supply base. Apple requires suppli­ ers to commit to our comprehensive supplier code of conduct as a condition of their contracts with us. We drive compliance with the code through a rigorous monitoring programme, including factory audits, corrective action plans and verification measures.

(The Guardian 2011)10

Rather, it is important to reflect critically on the ways such language risks further distancing us from (caring about and responding to) the lives of distant others.

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 3 1

Sharon Livesey (2002) explains that rhetorical and discourse

approaches have different emphases: the former on the micro,

on purposive function of language itself (and its figures), on the aims of the rhetor and on the impacts and effects of language techniques. Discourse analysis focuses, in turn, on the macro, on

the broader socio-political implications of ideological and material

struggle between competing interests. Discourse comprises the ideas and practices (including writing)

through which knowledge is produced, and the 'regime of produc­ tion of truth' (Foucault 1980, 133) established and maintained. Issues of power and responsibility are thus central to any discussion of the use of rhetoric and discourse and the (intended or unintended) impacts of their use on others in particular social and temporal con­ texts. Certain discourses dominate in particular cultural domains at

a given time, and garner an authority and a status that privileges their truth value in relation to associated but subordinate discourses. Thus Foucault directs our attention to the constitution of subjects (as effects of discourse) in and through discourse and discursively constituted relations of power (and resistance), as those are played out within specific cultural and socio-political structures, rather than at a textual or linguistic level. By contrast, Fairclough's interest is in concrete analyses of specific discursive practices (i.e. language as a form of social practice), rather than the macro-level approach of Foucault.11 Moreover, Fairclough is emphatic in pointing out the dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures, avoiding the pitfall of claiming that the social is only constituted by discourse or that discourse is purely socially determined. Instead, he suggests that 'the relationship between discourse and other elements of social practices is a dialectical relationship - discourse internalises and is internalised by other elements without the different elements being reducible to each other. They are different, but not discrete' (2001, 3).

If Fairclough's approach to discourse brings us closer to the notion of language (and thus writing) as a form of social practice, then rhetoric brings us to the constituent persuasive elements of the text (produced by the writer and interpreted by the reader), and to a focus on the inscribed and interpretable impacts and effects (semiotic, practical, subjective, cultural and global) of texts (con­ stituted by discourses) produced, circulated and read in specific

32 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

contexts.12 As writers, as rhetors, we are obliged to consider and reflect on the positions of power we occupy in relation to our readers, and the ways in which our writing purpose and aims, our choices and uses of language structures and techniques might affect, influence or otherwise have an effect on others. We are also obliged to consider the risks and the responsibilities attendant on universalising, natu­ ralising or standardising our claims to truth, as well as the relations we articulate between self and other, local and global, and between past, present and future.

Discourses, and the rhetorical devices that structure and organise them, remain abstract and ahistorical concepts until they are narra­ tivised. If we consider narrative, at its simplest, as a situated account or story of the relationships and interactions between people, places and events in time, then we can see the ways in which discourses become meaningful as they are integrated into and help to structure narrative. Thus, discourses are never neutral in their effects. They construct the world in particular ways. The manner and extent to which a given discourse or set of discourses are harnessed to repre­ sent the stories of particular individuals, places and times will help determine what that narrative account might mean, how it may rep­ resent a persuasive version of reality. Depending on whose voice is telling the story, certain discourses are thereby likely to be privileged over others. In professional and public writing, our narratives help to frame and organise the relationships we have or wish to have with our interlocutors - they include or preclude the forging of contact across difference. The Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, in a now classic satirical piece published by Granta in 2005, entitled 'How to write about Africa', offers advice to the would-be author of a story about that continent:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 33

concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too

specific. Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the

African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate some­ thing about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life - but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Here, Wainaina shows how the repeated use of specific discourses, including those mobilised to perpetuate and reify stereotypes about poverty, helplessness and relations of power are reductive and dehu­ manising. His satirical tone highlights how certain discursive rep­ resentations contribute to the disabling of African peoples from asserting their agency and their capacity to build good lives beyond simply being (barely) able to keep themselves alive. The good cop/bad cop scenario further illustrates the perils of using discourses that paralyse subjects into appositional rather than relational stances.13 From a critical cosmopolitan perspective, writers and readers in the developed world can thus reflect on how conventional depictions of the "reality" of others' lives generally serve merely to illuminate and confirm our understanding of "our world" and ourselves but do little to nudge towards realising an encounter with the other that might be mutually transformative.

Thus, the global reach, influence and compelling hold of certain popular (and populist) contemporary discourses such as, for example, marketisation and economics, consumerism, individualism, envi­ ronmentalism, globalism, growth, progress, celebrity, terrorism and managerialism, must also be explored in any study of the relationship

34 Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

between writing and cosmopolitanism. The grand-narrative impe­ tus of certain discourses can be interrogated, as we pay attention to the ways in which dominant discourses privilege certain ("common sense") ways of understanding the world and the ways they rearticu­ late or re-present areas of social life differently, and the ways in which they simultaneously privilege and subordinate the different inter­ ests, values and temporalities of individuals and groups. And we can explore the ways in which the subdued alternative or competing dis­ courses harnessed by some individuals, groups and communities will disrupt and reinterpret, complicate or differently inflect the mean­ ings generated by those of the discourses preferred by their imagined or real interlocutors.

By extension, a cosmopolitan apprehension of rhetoric involves writers reflecting on the ways language can variously position or organise individual, social and organisational relationships across dif­ ferent cultural and temporal contexts.14 We notice how and in what ways narrative and argument, genre and mode, metaphor and image, for example, as means of directing the reader's attention to specific local and/or global understandings or interpretations or possibilities (and the tensions between them), are deployed. We also look at the degree to which a text is rhetorically open: how far readers close to or distant from the position of the writing, the situation or the sub­ ject of the writing are nonetheless encouraged to engage with and respond (imaginatively or practically) to the text.

Conclusion

How, then, do our connections and interdependence with others in a cosmopolitan world either directly or indirectly influence the kind of texts we write now - and in the future? And how do they affect how we make sense of, use and respond to texts developed by others, in other times and places? How do we go about making sense of a changing global landscape and timescape in order that we may write with, to, for and about others with due care?15 How do we honour our attachments to immediate and local writing needs and interests while simultaneously acknowledging our differently experienced but nonetheless still vital attachments to more distant and perhaps less visible (and therefore apparently less significant) ones? These are the kinds of questions I explore in the following chapters.

Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing 35

As I hope this chapter has shown, the challenges involved in a cos­ mopolitan approach are not to be underestimated. For a start, there is no objective model for such writing. Cosmopolitan-oriented writing is necessarily incomplete and inviting of others' responses, objections and revisions. And as cosmopolitan writers we learn that each writ­ ing situation and activity is fraught, as soon as we take into account matters other than our own objectives, our preferred discourses, our rhetorical motivations and intentions, and as soon as we imagine how those are disrupted or modulated by consideration of our con­ nections with and responsibility for others not "like us", or beyond our immediate circles. A cosmopolitan outlook demands that as writ­ ers we take up the task to reconsider the ambivalences constituting our writing and reading contexts, to question anew our assumptions and prejudices, and to explore the ways in which writing might refuse the dehumanising aspects of globalisation.

Globalisation/SRIRAMESH.pdf