Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship: the Rhetoric of Moral Agency

1. Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship: the Rhetoric of Moral Agency Peter Dahlgren Lund University Rhetoric in Society 4 University of Copenhagen Jan. 15-18, 2013

2. Overview • Global civil society and alternative politics: setting the scene • Cosmopolitanism: ways of seeing and being • The mediapolis: a new kind of public sphere • Towards civic cosmopolitanism • Contingencies of the web habitus

3. Global civil society and alternative politics A new era • Democracies experiencing long-term trends of declining participation • Yet also opposite trend: impressive rise in alternative, extra- parliamentarian political activities • Very heterogeneous; tend to address broader range of issues, more opportunity for participation, less hierarchical, more inclusive • Many involved in transnational issues • Global civil society – new phases in history of democracy

4. The cosmopolitan context • Globalization – a familiar and contested phenomenon • Almost in its wake, the notion of cosmopolitanism has become a new buzzword in the last decade • Growing academic literature; a ‘discourse’ emerging • Surprisingly, says little about media • Also, tends to be oddly removed from ideas of political practice

5. Global issues and activism • Transnational civic actors: many goals and strategies • Many forms of organization: INGOs, social movements, activist networks, etc. • Some mainly ‘civic’ - humanitarian, others cultural, religious (eg, diasporias) • Others more explicitly political; alter-globalization movements (eg, WSF) • Most display democratic instincts; some anti-democratic (and thus ‘uncivic’)

6. The perspective of political agency • Issue of participation: needs a ‘civic identity’, political sense of self (declines and re-emergences of participation…) • Civic cultures nourish such identity – knowledge, values/ideals, practices/skills • Thusoffering socio-cultural foundations of empowered political agency • Political practice: must feel meaningful; social, collective contexts • Today, use of digital media technologies essential for civic agency

7. Agency as discursive practice • At bottom politics enacted via communicative practices • Ex: arguing, promoting, recruiting, lobbying, mobilizing, running a meeting, etc, • All are manifestations of rhetoric, involve performative skills ( Arendt; Mouffe). • A constructionist view; impact of contingencies (enabling and constraining) • The subject, and identity, emerge in part via discourses • (Themes for another occasion: Why deliberative democracy is over-rated…)

8. Uh oh: excursus on rhetorical vs. discursive horizons (a few signposts…) • Conceptually a good deal of overlap; constructionist premises • Critical discourse analysis/theory: the inexorability of power relations • Discourses are constitutive; builds on theories of subjectivity, identity, social relations • Meaning is inherently unstable, contingent, contested • Subjects inherently de-centered (the Unconscious, etc.) • Subject positions/identities can be ‘overdetermined’ – contradictory – via incompatible discourses

9. Good grief, still more excursus… • Discourses embody systems of knowledge, modes of cognitive and normative perceptions • They are manifestations of (collective) social practice • Analysis: dynamics between text, discursive practice, and social practice/structures. • (Fairclough; T.van Dijk; Wodak; Laclau & Mouffe; • even Foucault, etc.)

10. Back on track: the basic enigma at hand • Cosmopolitanism: strongly moral discourse • Yet global activism tends to fall outside; not relevant? • Cosmopolitanism needs to connect with agency, with media, with the political • Thus: how might we conceive of ‘civic cosmopolitanism’?

11. Cosmopolitanism: moral ways of seeing and beingOld concept, new package • Socrates, Kant (who seldom left Köningsberg)… • Globalization: brings the Other closer • Offers varying analytic frame for issues about social perceptions and relations with distant others in the world • Helps us to illuminate the normative grounds for such practices

12. Multiple voices: a rhetoric of moral agency • One version offers vision of a more just and democratic world order • Cosmop. as the only way forward for global issues (eg, D. Held, Archibugi) • Others focus on citizenship, rights, inclusion; EU (Habermas, Benhabib) • Still others: moral and political philosophy (Nussbaum) • Also: socio-cultural conditions for its realisation (Beck; Appiah) • Many variations, but lots of moral admonishment

13. High demands on how to be cosmopolitan • Required: self-reflexion on own cultural context, origins, and values • Scepticism towards the ‘grand narratives’ of modern ideologies • Critical distance about the ultimate authority of one’s own culture • Predicated on routine encounters with those significantly different from oneself • Involves a considerable degree of cultural capital • Yet, quest for some mythic ‘new cosmopolitan subject’ is a dead end

14. Troublesome empirical investigations • Notions of ‘everyday cosmop.’ have been studied • Sobering results - often not too encouraging… • Popular discourse about attractive affordances of globalisation, such as travel and culinary diversity • Also discourses about ‘cultural loss’ and ‘dilution of national culture’ circulate…

15. A practical link: human rights • B. Turner: Cosmop = pacifist values that preclude violence, promote agency and dignity • Opposition to human suffering transcends and unites different cultures and epochs • Vulnerability of the human body a starting point for commonality and compassion • UN Declaration of Human Rights obviously a very cosmopolitan document • Yet: this is ‘uncomplicated’. What about minority cultures, etc.?

16. Some critical voices • A lot of lofty idealism; charged with political naïveté • Utopian tendency - a new world of tolerant and responsible citizens • Yet offering little analytic insight on major global divides • Few authors see a confrontation with neoliberalism (exceptions: Delanty, Harvey) • Delanty claims that conflicts around ‘difference’ are less about culture and more about social and economic questions with political implications

17. Intersections: post-colonialism • History of colonialism raises questions of power,privilege • Post-colonialism sensitive to how culture and production of meaning always bound up with relations of power • Ex: patterns of cultural influences, images of the other, identity processes,integration/assimilation, language use, institution-building, etc. • Cosmopolitanism can’t be reduced to power, yet power can’t be ignored

18. An essential tension • Universalism (one size fits all?) vs. the local/national • One or many cosmopolitanisms? • Cosmopolitanism as expression of multiple empirical realities in the world • OR:, as a unitary global ideal, with universalist virtues • Yet universalist claims vulnerable to critiques of ethnocentrism: an expression of a camouflaged manoeuvre for cultural power

19. The mediapolis: a new kind of public sphere Some media connections • The theme of news media and ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski, Chouliaraki) • Touches lightly on cosmopolitanism • Does TV news make viewers more cosmopolitan? • Pivotal text: Sliverstone’sMedia and Morality: • On the Rise of the Medialpolis (2006) • Media central to late modernity and cosmopolitanism

20. The core concept: mediapolis • ‘Mediapolis’: the chaotic, cacophonic space of global media • Resides beyond logic, rationality; efficacy always uncertain • Multiple voices, inflections images, and rhetoric • ‘Post-Habermasian’, ‘post-deliberative’ (even post-structural) • Media as ‘environnments’, dense symbolic ecologies • Power relations/imbalances shape media industries and media cultures

21. The moral argument • Silverstone in line with other cosmop. Theorists; more detailed • Media put us in contact with global others; this evokes moral responsibilities • Between producers, journalists audiences/receivers • Moral demand for reflexivity, recognition of cultural difference • Moral response via thinking, speaking, listening; and acting (but how…?) • Useful rhetorical/moral idea: ‘proper distance’ within mediapolis

22. From morality to the political • Despite its messiness, the mediapoliscan still provide resources for judgement: cognitive, aesthetic, and moral • He underscores inequities of representation, mechanisms of exclusion • Ideological and prejudicial frames of reporting; us and them • Says action and meaning contingent on people’s circumstances • Silverstone’s is a big step forward, but problems remain • Does not really connect with political agency

23. Towards civic cosmopolitanismThe impasse • Silverstone admits we face difficult questions • The public as such does not have a strong meaningful status • Empirically it is not politically very efficacious • Thought, speech, and action are disconnected and compromised by absence of context, memory, and analytic rigour • Increasingly, also by the absence of trust

24. From morality to the political • And yet: sees mediapolis as a site for not only moral response • But also: potential for practice, enacting agency • Yet, the connections remain fuzzy • Moral engagement is a pre-requisite – but we must avoid sidelining politics by incantations of universal morality (Dallmayr)

25. Civic cosmopolitanism: a first sketch • So how do we envision ‘civic cosmopolitanism’? • Global civil society: thin structures for democratic procedures • For most citizens, any hope of political agency involves the web in some way • (Though not need not be limited to online contexts) • The web can enable communicative – and political - practices • The affordances offer historically unprecedented tools

26. Contingencies of the web habitus The web and democracy: pro • Many factors shape the use, non-use, and consequences of the web • Huge literature on why or why not the web serves democracy well • Easy access, interactive, ‘produsers’ – creative practices • Network logic: horizontal civic communication • Natural interface with everyday life • Can give political engagement a good social anchoring

27. …and con… • Political economy, net architecture: centralized corporate control • Issues of surveillance, privacy, etc. – Google, Facebook • Politics far down on the list of uses; instead: consumption, fun, sociality.. • Problems of ‘cocoons’ and ‘echo chambers’, ‘babel’, lack of civility… • Many issues compounded when we go global…

28. The online habitus • ZiziPapacharissi uses Bourdieu’s notion of habitus • Links social structures with agency; people’s daily micro-milieu • Taken for granted template for values, norms, tastes • Durable social dispositions and practices, ‘common-sense’ • Connects the individuals in specific ways to the broader • ‘fields’ that comprise their worlds

29. Online habitus as a discursive – or rhetorical – ‘nudge/wink’ • Affordances + constraints + patterns of practices solidify expectations/norms • The web as experiential daily environment: cultural ‘pull’ • Attributes: for ex: searchability, shareability, permanent novelty, reflexivity, connectivity, self presentation, expression, revelation…. • Markers of identity, (self-)sort people into recognisable categories • Facebook: eg, the ‘like button’ – but no ‘dislike button’

30. Seductions of the solo sphere • Patterns of personalised visibility, self-promotion and self-revelation • A new habitus of political engagement: cozy private digital setting • A retreat into an environment many people have more control over • Intertwined with consumption, entertainment, sociality • The initial civic impulse morphs into an ironic mode of narcissism

31. Pitfalls – but also potentials • The privatized, consumerist online individual congruent with the neo-liberal order… • ‘Mundane cosmopolitanising acts’ (Chouliaraki) – click and make a donation • When compassion fatigue, etc., sets in: just click to ebay… • Nonetheless: the web habitus permits countless forms of political agency - • Discursive political acts – that can participate in global civil society

32. Two regimes of journalism within the mediapolis • -Modernist, mass mediated: claims to objective reporting/accuracy (despite shortcomings) • Distinction between facts and emotionality; allows for judgment and moral response • Yet, the subject position of spectator is largely cemented • -Late modernist, interactive media: claims to experiential witnessing, etc. • Allows for networking, potential practice, participation ‘Objectivity’ gives way to a stream of many voices – often emotional • Who can we trust on the web…? Manipulation very easy

33. Conclusion: the online mediapolis and civic cosmoploitanism • Civic cosmopolitanism can be understood as the potential for political agency, • Anchored in the global environment, informed by democratically oriented moral horizons • This potential can be actualised via the affordances of the web – and limited by its constraints • This is the online sector of the mediapolis. • The web must be understood (and analysed) in relation to its shifting contingencies, • Not least the attributes of habitus that it promotes.