Looking for bowerbirds
When I visited Wollongong University in December 2016, I’d no idea what I was getting into, and as it happened, the kind folk who received me had no idea what I was doing there either. So they looked for clues and found this blog, and suddenly I found myself talking with people who had read what I had written. That’s not uncommon for an academic, but I’m used to the engagement being around the relatively rare and rather compressed academic pieces I produce, not this more heartfelt material. Their kind words helped me return to writing here.
Wollongong is not far off paradise, or at least it seemed that way to a tired traveller in December. It felt like Santa Cruz in the 1980s. Maybe there are hundreds of small coastal communities in Australia like that, but I somehow doubt it. Kate Bowles kindly received me to the University, introduced me to a series of wonderful people, and then spent an afternoon wandering me around the campus hunting for bower birds. I found myself ear-deep in thoughtful conversations about dingos, the Escarpment, watercourses, indigenous cultural heritage…the sort of conversations that constitute the intellectual, open, playful, creative organism of a university. It’s a spirit I have both missed, and been trying to rekindle, of late, and we talked about that too.
After I returned to Scotland, Kate sent along an article from the Harvard Business Review by Gianpiero Petriglieri called ‘In Defence of Cosmopolitanism’. Petriglieri grounds the possibility of twentieth and twenty-first century cosmopolitanism in various mobilities, including (as one might expect in the HBS) the rise of multinational corporations as a site of employment. I’m not wholly comfortable with that premise, but the stubborn openness and refusal to retreat into comfortable factions that he advocates is entirely right. It’s also an excellent loom on which to string the supports for a really challenging discussion about discourse and responsibility in the post-humanities university, a discussion that embraces the cross-species playfulness of dogs, octopi and crows, that acknowledges the ethical imperatives of this Great Extinction, that spends lots of time listening and being mindfully silent, and that welcomes the dog on the sofa, the tree outside, and the child tagging along (it’s a holiday) as members of the conversation.
What struck me was the term ‘cosmopolitan’. Here in Scotland, among anthropologists, that term refers to a position advocated by Nigel Rapport and others. In ‘Apprehending Anyone: the non-indexical, post-cultural and cosmopolitan human actor’ (2010, in JRAI 16:84-101), Rapport lays it out: the Enlightenment was progress and it revealed the universal human as the potential subject for what has become globalised, mobile cosmopolitanism. It is, pointedly, a term that revalidates the anti-relativist moral human individual as the subject and object of anthropology. Rapport recognises its Protestant roots and sketches his position in gentle contravention to collective, culturally determined models of the contingent individual, a position he assigns to Geertz.
I suspect that Petriglieri and Rapport would have much to agree on, though the spirit of the endeavours is almost opposite. This same Kantian human individual is, I have argued, a particularly pernicious and oft-imposed feature of one very powerful culture in desperate need of relativisation in order to free us up to properly grapple with the epistemological and moral challenges of the post-humanities. If I am right, neither of them would acknowledge dogs, trees and so on as equal participants in the creation of knowledge.
The question then emerges: what are the bases and limits of the cosmopolitan if we can so successfully disagree? Perhaps only polite folk who exclude the pig, the octopus, the child from the conversation will ever achieve cosmopolitan satisfaction. I doubt it; rather than individuals, the only viable basis for the cosmopolitan is relation. There is a deep-seated playful relational urge that generates evanescent conversation partners in spite of their perpetual postulation of universal subjectivity. We can’t know the limits: it crosses species and assemblages; it is the vitality of complex symbionts such as ourselves. Irreducibly plural and related as a precondition of awareness, we cannot help but interact constantly and constructively, drawing provisional boundaries around con/versations (turnings-with): cell walls; a nine-holed leaky bag of a human adorned with clothes and a phone; a loch intercepted by a salmon run; a household with its dust mites, yoghurt, transient infections, fleas and mould; a group of polite individuals; a whole university with classrooms and gardens and bowerbirds all gabbin’ away.