Aesthetic cosmopolitanism: The force of the fold in diasporic intimacy

Introduction

‘To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?’ Judith Butler (2006: 21) poses these questions in order to make her case that bodies matter; more specifically, that bodies come to matter through the performativity of normative discourse that is at once constraining and compelling. Diasporic art allows us to consider how the creation of culture is a process of both containment and boundlessness, where place matters – or comes to matter – not only in a localised or globalised way, but as an ongoing relationship between both local and global concepts of space. Diasporic artists are tied to normative frameworks of place and culture, but they are also seized to invert these by the constant interruptions of different cultural signs, exacerbated in an increasingly transnational environment.

The contemporary migration experience is highly mobile, fragmented and mediated, bringing forth a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art. Transnationalism is thus integrated into many recent studies of these three threads. The new media and cultural studies approach to the transnational have also examined how global migration transforms the common practice of the creation of home. For instance, Nikos Papastergiadis in Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998) and David Morley’s Home Territories (2002) examined the ways in which the ‘home’ in both its intimate, domestic conceptualisation, and its broader, political formation as the nation-state, has been destabilised by the emergence of communication technologies. More recently, Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller (2012) have examined new forms of familial relationships as a result of migration and new media, demonstrating that homeliness is now multifaceted, constantly re-mediated by an evolving polymedia context. Anthropologists have also begun reassessing the theoretical frameworks for studying culture in this new diasporic interface. Robin Cohen and Gunvor Jónsson’s Migration and Culture (2012) brought together a range of essays seeking to better capture culture in a globalised context; similarly, George E. Marcus (2015) has argued for new ethnographic methodologies to map the transnational mobility of cultural forms. This essay draws from the academic approaches, not simply to illustrate the ways media, culture and art intersect, but to explore how they enable new forms of cultural meaning that can attend to both the need for people to express locality and a need for this expression to exist alongside different, even conflicting perspectives, in an increasingly inter-connected world.

In particular, this essay uses the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to consider the folding of place as a creative process, not simply representative or dialogic, and neither ever fully of the state nor entirely stateless. Folding is an action of bringing together different surfaces. In the fold, different lines cross (Deleuze, 2001). The folds of time and space are what occur in concepts such as diasporic intimacies and cultural hybridities. However, these articulations of time and space are often presented without any mediating forces. The 2013 exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists, held at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) helps to elucidate this point. Examining Léuli Māzyār Lunái Eshrāghi's 2014 exhibition, Tagiauē, held at neospace outside Melbourne, this essay then moves to propose that diasporic art also calls for new conceptualisations of time. Eshrāghi’s art practice illustrates how time is a creatively mediated and vacillatory process, involving the folding of past, present and future into new forms of cultural intimacies. Conceptualising cultural exchanges in this manner helps to problematise the restrictive binary modalities that continue to haunt contemporary theorisations of diasporas.

Our article adds to the existing debates on mediated culture in transnational contexts as it explores the force of the fold. How do ideas that are forged in contexts that are distant from each other find new points of intersection? Why do memories from remote parts of our lives assume a new form or presence in different contexts? In short, how do things that are incommensurable with each other find ways to join together? Concepts such as hybridity and intimacy have taken us closer to the tension points, as different cultural worlds jostle together to form new worldings. These concepts have generated a productive and affirmative vision of the process of cultural difference as well as the benefits of mobility in cultural transformation. However, there is an unresolved problematic in the concept of cultural hybridity. Even in its most generous and creative articulations, there is always the risk that hybridity is seen as a mechanism for novelty production. As more hybrids come into the world, multiples and variations and differentiations proliferate. This is threatening to those who also see in this a disruptive dynamic, and in equal measure, thrilling to those who extol disruption. Hybridity becomes captured by the fears associated with fragmentation and dispersal. What is missed is how hybridity is also a process of reconnection, reinvention and regrounding.

Using notions of diasporic intimacy and imagination, this essay argues that the artistic practice of creating ‘home’ involves splicing a range of temporal and spatial cultural experiences together. This practice enables not merely a representation of a cultural moment, but a kinetic channel through which to consider how other cultural representations and, importantly, other cultural moments, might co-exist. This argument follows the critical work petitioned by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and, more recently, Peng Cheah (2016) and Sneja Gunew (2017), who seek to disrupt the persistent normative frameworks that cultural hybridity and cosmopolitan philosophy draw on.

What we need to consider in more depth now is a visualisation of the way in which different elements are positioned together. This positioning primarily occurs in the sphere of the imagination. It is an affective, speculative and creative process of assembling, stitching and reconfiguring different elements together. However, in the imagination, there is also a process of folding together, so what appears to be on the outside interfaces with the inside. Whether this process in the imagination is represented through the form of a crease, a fan or a helix, it invariably seeks to demonstrate the bending and splicing of time and space. The bending and splicing of time and space are therefore the means by which distant elements and different signs are meshed together to produce hybrid subjectivities. The consequences of this imaginative folding are new perspectives, subjectivities, and symbolic and material entities. Pathways that are removed from each other in their trajectories criss-cross together and thereby touch. It is through the fold that both differences can coexist and new life sparks.

We thus commence our understanding of the creative forces that arise from cultural hybridity and diasporic intimacy through the processes of imagination. It is our contention that such imaginaries yield a worldview that is best evoked through the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Our task in this article is to go beyond the binaries and to trace the interconnections between inside and outside, near and far. The fold will position the imagination at the centre of cosmopolitan conceptions. This places us at a new starting point for advancing a post-normative conception of cosmopolitanism.

Enduring binaries in diaspora studies

Diasporas have traditionally been understood as the forced removal of religious or ethnic groups from their homelands, and often on the premise that these groups hope to return to these homelands in the future (Cohen, 1997). Today, diasporic migration is not as straightforward (Nail, 2015). Some groups of people move with no intention of returning; some plan to return but then become settled in their new home, and others become further dispersed (Papastergiadis, 2000). Many places are thus experiencing what Ien Ang et al. (2002) and Greg Noble (2009: 47) describe as an ‘evolving hyper-diversity’, whereby diversity itself is diversifying.

The two notions of transnationalism and cultural hybridity are key lenses through which studies of contemporary diasporas occur. Scholars use these concepts to map the complex translations that take place as a result of new diasporic flows. However, transnationalism and cultural hybridity studies are persistently plagued by one or the other modality (Ganguly-Scrase and Lahiri-Dutt, 2013: 3; Ong, 1999, 2012; Papastergiadis, 2012). Aihwa Ong (1999) illustrates a tendency within transnationalism studies to position diasporic cultures as either negatively bound to the state or positively stateless. Her work divides these studies into three main approaches: (1) United States–centred migration studies, (2) cultural globalisation and (3) diaspora studies. Ong argues that the first highly US-centric category has recently shifted its focus from cultural assimilation to the globality of mobility and border crossings. Of utmost importance to this work are the ways in which global flows affect the nation-state, particularly in terms of economic theories of labour. As such, the work relies on a world-systems theory of a central power and periphery cultures, and is comparable to the macro-structuralist model of migration discussed by Papastergiadis (2000, 2012) and binary migration models discussed by others (Nail, 2015). The second category, cultural globalisation, is less interested in economic and political systems as it is with the new forms of cultural exchanges and imaginaries created by transnationalism. This largely anthropological work illustrates that the effects of globalisation have not been as detrimental or homogenising as often claimed, mostly because new cultural characteristics are always adopted in ways that are place-specific (Ong, 1999: 10). Ong’s third category, diaspora studies, is influenced by the work carried out by British cultural studies scholars Paul Gilroy (1987, 1990, 2000) and Stuart Hall (2000) on African diasporic cultures. Gilroy’s and Hall’s work enables heterogeneous forms of ethnic culture and identity; however, Ong notes that this approach is less commonly adopted by Western scholarship, particularly American cultural studies (1999: 12). Instead, this work in diaspora studies often utilises the ‘innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, “cultural” border crossing, and the production of difference’ (Ong, 1999: 13). The cultural focus of this work thus overlooks the embeddedness of the diasporic subject in power relations and the interpellation of many migrants as abject.

Former studies have also illustrated the tendency for cultural hybridity studies to collapse into a similar polarity – with state power and restrictive essentialist claims at one end and cultural fluidity and transgression at the other. While cultural exchange involves three levels – effects, processes and critical consciousness – theorisations tend to start and stop at the first level (Papastergiadis, 2012). This first level involves the ‘visible effects of difference within identity as a consequence of the incorporation of foreign elements’ (2012: 117). Those carrying out studies of cultural difference at this level tend either to celebrate the positive effects that the new cultural signs have had on a dominant culture, or criticise the way that the dominant culture has contaminated or subsumed the new cultural signs (2012: 117).

Perhaps by way of tempering the persistent centre/periphery ‘trap’ created by thinking diaspora through the nation-state, and in order to better address the issues created by globalisation, cosmopolitanism has emerged as an important theoretical framework. Cosmopolitanism is now commonly understood as an idea and an ideal for embracing the whole of the human community (Delanty, 2009: 20). Everyone who is committed to it recalls the phrase first used by Socrates and then adopted as a motif by the Stoics: ‘I am a citizen of the world’. Indeed, the etymology of the word – as it derived from cosmos and polites – is expressive of the tension between the part and the whole, aesthetics and politics. In both the Presocratic and the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, this tension was related to cosmological explanations of the origin and structure of the universe. In these early creation stories, the individual comes from the abyss of the void, looks up into the infinite cosmos and seeks to give form to his or her place in the world (Papastergiadis, 2013). Yet cosmopolitanism is also, in more prosaic terms, a concept for expressing the desire to be able to live with all the other people in this world. However, the idea has always remained as an ideal, because there is no unified state of the cosmos that can distribute citizenship to all. Nevertheless, for many, the ideal does not diminish just because such a cosmos never materialised as a political institution. They still insist on the necessity and validity of the idea. As a methodology, cosmopolitanism is usually seen as a state of being that is a product of moral cultivation (Kant, 1795), a political order that is facilitated by transnational institutions (Held, 1995), or a condition that can be extrapolated from cross-cultural interactions (Werbner, 2006). These perspectives have highlighted that the process of cosmopolitanisation is not just a utopian fantasy, but is grounded in social experience (Beck, 2006).

The problems with transnationalism and cultural hybridity studies inevitably carry over into the field of cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy (2006) argues that cosmopolitan discussions tend to offer one of two options: ethnic absolutism (that is, a reaffirmation of particular identity and roots) or a radical individualism that makes collective identity ‘politically irrelevant’ (2006: 71). The diasporic subject is thus offered an option of ‘roots or routes’ (Hall, 2002). The argument for the former often enters cosmopolitanism via the identity politics work of theorist Charles Taylor (1992), who asserts that identities need to be formally delineated in order for legitimate recognition to occur. This maintains the limitations of the residentialist model of culture, which maps culture and its particular practices onto a specific place. This place becomes the ontological site of ‘home’ and identity, respectively (Papastergiadis, 2012: 125). Contrastingly, the radical universalism model, or what Hall (2002: 26) terms ‘hard cosmopolitanism’ is a post-identity politics position in which one actively pursues a thorough detachment from his or her cultural roots. Such a position is taken up by Appiah (2006: 8), who appears to want not only to shatter the mirror of identity, but smooth over the jagged edges of the shards (Trimboli, 2015: 483). This desire leads to concerns of an elitist and often highly Eurocentric view of cosmopolitanism. As Ong (1999: 13) argues, the interest in exploring how diasporic cultures have shaped the world frequently stems from scholars who have the social and economic capital required to live a well-travelled, culturally fluid lifestyle. These studies can therefore ignore or, at the least, underestimate the nuanced aspects of power and the real and often violent forces that immobilise so-called ‘mobile’ subjects.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism in Safar/Voyage

There clearly remains a difficulty in capturing the fragmentary and fluctuating translations involved in diasporic encounters, despite the many and varied theoretical attempts to do so. Artistic interventions can help us to overcome this difficulty by providing us pathways to horizontal rather than vertical articulations of knowledge. Culturally hybrid artistic interventions have arguably accelerated since the onset of globalisation. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) claims that contemporary artworks are invariably translating local and global forms, while artists are, according to Marsha Meskimmon (2011), seen as exemplars of new global selves. Biennials and festivals are viewed as platforms for bringing ideas from all over the world into a new critical and interactive framework (Papastergiadis and Martin, 2011). It must be stressed that exploring the force of the fold in aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not the same as the now-common surveys of the global art world. The ambitious surveys of artistic developments across the world – whether they are conducted by teams that are distributed across different regions (Belting and Buddensieg, 2009) or directed by a solitary figure who has sought to integrate emergent trajectories and classify diverse practices into a new hierarchy (Smith, 2011) – have stumbled before a fundamental problem: the role of place and tradition in shaping context (Papastergiadis, 2012). To avoid the risk that hybrids are simply stigmatised by neo-nationalism or co-opted as a novelty producer in neo-liberal capitalism, it is necessary to frame this approach within an alternative world view. In this world view, imagination is the starting point for making new worlds. Cultural hybridity is not a consequence of the moral imperative to love thy neighbour; rather, cultural hybridity is where our imagination begins.

To have a total world view of contemporary art is now impossible. Works are produced at such a rate and in so many different places that no one can ever see them as a whole. The events and horizons of contemporary art have also become resistant to any totalising schema. However, by bringing into closer focus the elemental terms of ‘globe’ and ‘cosmos’, we can begin an alternative exercise in imagining the forms of connection and being in the world. A simple distinction may help. In the most banal uses of globalisation, very little significance is given to the key term ‘globe’. The world is treated as a flat, square surface upon which everything is brought closer together and governed by a common set of rules. Globalisation has an integrative dynamic, but a globe without a complex ‘ecology of practices’ (Stengers, 2011) would not have a world. A world is more than a surface upon which human action occurs. Therefore, the process of globalisation is not simply the ‘closing in’ of distant forces and ‘coordination between’ disparate elements that are dispersed across the territory of the world. As early as the 1950s, Kostas Axelos made a distinction between ‘mondialisation’ and globalisation. He defined mondialisation as an open process of thought through which one becomes worldly (Elden, 2006). He thereby distinguished between the empirical or material ways in which the world is integrated by technology and the conceptual and subjective process of understanding that these ways are inextricably connected to the formation of a world view. The etymology of cosmos also implies a world-making activity. In Homer, the term cosmos is used to refer to an aesthetic act of creating order, as well as referring to the generative sphere of creation that exists between the Earth and the boundless universe. There is a need to expand our understanding of art by reconfiguring the debates on the geopolitics of aesthetics and to consider the extent to which the local and the global are constantly interpenetrating. ‘Cosmos’ refers to the realm of imaginary possibilities and the systems by which we make sense of our place in the world. What sorts of worlds are made in the artistic imaginary?

Let us consider first of all what the imagination is capable of producing. We know that imagination is the faculty that produces images. It does not merely retrieve images. This may sound tautological but as Gaston Bachelard reminds us, this definition of the nature of imagination has the benefit of distinguishing it from memory (Bachelard, 1969: xxx). While the function of imagination is to produce new images and not simply recall the images from the past, nevertheless both the relationship to time and the status of creativity is complicated. Bachelard’s useful distinction points to the way that our relationship to images can make us lean forward and backward in time and can move us across spaces. Yet, the effect of this imaginary relationship to time and space the status of the image is also spread across a wide spectrum: a mirror to the world, a critique of reality and a producer of a cosmos (Papastergiadis, 2016). These three discrete functions refer to contrasting ideas on what occurs in and through creativity. The mirror function of creation gives emphasis to the role of mimesis in the representation and transference of culture. The role of critique highlights the acts of selection, translation and transformation, so that the artist’s attention begins as an identification of something and through the work of the imagination, there is not just reinstatement but also a reconfiguration of its order. Critique is not just a negative dissecting activity, or positive correction, but also a metaphoric process of exchange and transformation. Finally, there is the idea of creation as invention ex nihilo. According to the early work of Cornelius Castoriadis and, again in the more recent writing of Jean-Luc Nancy, the concept of ex nihilo is distinguished from it theological derivation. Nancy writes: ‘In creation, a growth grows from nothing and this nothing takes care of itself, cultivates its growth’ (2007: 51). The link between art as a world making activity, and the cosmos of creation is further entwined in this absorbing passage in which Nancy evokes the function of art (2007: 42) as the most explicit form of world making activity:

Worldhood … is the form of forms that itself demands to be created, that is not only produced in the absence of any given, but held infinitely beyond any possible given: in a sense, then, it is never inscribed in a representation, and nonetheless always at work and in circulation in the forms that are being invented. (2007: 52)

Consider the 2013 exhibition Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian and Turkish Artists held at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) in Vancouver. MOA houses one of the biggest collections of First Nations art and cultural artefacts, including those of the Musqueam people, the traditional owners of the land upon which the museum is situated. A site of knowledge construction, MOA is an archiving institution that represents certain histories ultimately tied to the Canadian nation-state. Unlike many other museums, however, MOA includes a contemporary art gallery designed to actively interrogate its own archival practices. As such, the institution engages with the public about how particular Canadian histories and identities are shaped in local and global contexts. Safar/Voyage culled contemporary works from Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists; its aim is to rearticulate ‘the Middle East’. The exhibition provided a space for critical reflection on this geographical terrain often neglected by European art history and institutions. While art from this region is becoming more globally visible, this visibility still tends to happen in a generalised manner, a visibility en masse, even though the diaspora from the Middle East comprises many countries, histories, ethnicities and cultural practices (Daftari, 2013).

In response to questions on the relevance of this exhibition to MOA – is the show about voyeurism or voyage Jill Baird and Anthony Shelton (2013: 2) wrote:

The west coast of Canada may seem worlds apart from the issues, cultures, and artistic practices of Arab, Iranian, and Turkish artists. Not so. […] The resonances are many, including the legacy of colonialism, displacement by the state, neo-colonial incursions, categorization by others, community and conflict, beauty and philosophy. For these reasons Safar/Voyage fits well at the Museum of Anthropology – a unique museum with an interest in engaging in conversations that complicate fixed notions of culture, art, and diversity while also challenging standard exhibition practices.

Certainly, these bridging qualities were present in Safar/Voyage, but there was more to the story. The culture of art and the possibilities in thought are both bigger and more mercurial. The exhibition unzipped the conventional hierarchy between local and global in order to better account for the way place matters in cultural exchanges and types of belonging. MOA took the public on a voyage through and beyond the Arab diaspora, selecting works that illustrated both the locality of the diaspora and its displacement and dispersal globally. In the words of the curator, Fereshteh Daftari (2013: 29), the artists are:

neither fixed inside its territories nor permanently diasporic…Safar/Voyage wraps around the globe, scans a map, touches down on cities as varied as Baghdad (Iraq), Konya (Turkey), and Persepolis (Iran), and moves beyond into private, imaginary spheres. It creates stages or discursive spaces for questioning identity, reflecting on modernity, and observing the impact of foreign intrusions and internal turmoil. It offers glimpses into socio-political issues such as immigration, escape, and diaspora, and reveals the journey as an ideal for some, an impossibility for others, or as transient as the idea of life itself when viewed as passage.

Works featured in Safar/Voyage presented aspects of contradiction and unease, reflecting the affective complexities of transnational mobility. Displacement rests quietly beside homeliness in Ayman Baalbaki’s Destination X (2010; re-created for MOA, 2013). His mixed-media installation centres on an old, run-down car, its roof piled high with belongings found in and around the home: blankets, chairs, a pedestal fan, a bike – ‘everything but the kitchen sink’. In Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s untitled self-portrait series (2002–2003), longing for escape resides within the same frame as an overwhelming dread of the unknown. A man wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress, is photographed walking in front of expansive backdrops, all of which feature a symbol of mobility: a plane, a cargo ship, a shipping container, a house in ruins, Jordan’s vast Dead Sea. This precarious relationship with movement is also harnessed in Taysir Batniji’s Hannoun (1972–2009), which uses red pencil shavings to play poetically with the tension between inside and outside. From a distance, the shavings – scattered across the floor of a makeshift room – resemble a field of poppies, a symbol of Palestinian freedom fighters. However, this room is raised above the gallery space, preventing people from going inside. Up close, the shavings come into focus, and the viewer’s eye is drawn to the back of the installation, where a photograph of an abandoned room hangs on the wall. The show notes explained that the photograph depicts Batniji’s studio in Gaza, the artist’s former home, from which he had been exiled. The field of poppies represents a zone he could no longer enter. Viewing the work creates a visceral conflict. As the artist describes – on the one hand, viewers are delighted by the delicacy of these shavings being still and in place; on the other, they are frustrated by ‘being kept outside, owing to the fragility of the shavings and the psychological barrier imposed by the platform’ (Batniji, 2009, cited in Daftari, 2013: 26).

The spaces created in Safar/Voyage were simultaneously accessible and inaccessible, reflecting the way diasporic cultures simultaneously experience inclusion and exclusion within nation-states. Countries such as Canada ‘welcome’ Arab migrants, but this welcome is closely watched and highly precarious – any misperformance will undermine the inclusion. This misperformance need only be carried out by one or some members of the diaspora for it to affect the entire diasporic population (Ahmed, 2000; Hage, 1998; Jupp, 2007; Poynting et al., 2004). As such, ‘home’ is always both within reach and out of bounds.

The exhibition prompted consideration of the histories and memories contained within this institutionalised gallery as well as the nation more broadly, but also of those that could not be contained there. Viewers were constantly moved beyond the exhibition, not only because of its mobile subject, but also because the artists who created these pieces carried them beyond their conventional frameworks. At one level, Batniji’s Hannoun represents the artist’s Gaza-based art practice; but in this space, it invokes new modalities of cultural translation. His former art practice was now only accessible through the portal of this new artwork, receding ‘as a space within a space’ (Daftari, 2013: 26), becoming ‘the source of a double bind that will not bind’ (Spivak, 2012: 335). He reflects: ‘Hannoun was thought of […] as an ideal space, a space of meditation, of dream, an intimate sphere, light, fragile yet imposing at the same time…an impenetrable space’ (cited in Daftari, 2013: 26).

The artists featured in Safar/Voyage clearly transgressed and reconceptualised national borders out of both desire and necessity. The problem with top-down models of transnationalism flagged by Ong (1999) thus becomes apparent. In such models, local and global are polarised by universalising capitalist forces. The globe forms the political economy and the local the site of cultural production, failing to ‘capture the horizontal and relational nature of the contemporary economic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces…[and] their embeddedness in differently configured regimes of power’ (Ong, 1999: 4, original emphasis). Ong offers a definition of transnationality as an alternative model, defining it as ‘the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space – which has been intensified under late capitalism’ (1999: 4). This definition emphasises the importance of the prefix ‘trans’ – that which moves through space and across lines and changes their normative nature. Essentially, this is a viewpoint that stresses the interrelation of state power (or the nation-state) and the cultural fragmentation and adaptation of diasporic groups.

The trans was beautifully captured by Susan Hefuna’s Woman Cairo 2011 (2011). When examining this piece in the first instance, it appeared to be an exemplary piece of traditional woodwork. Standing at 2 m × 2 m, the work involves intricately carved patterns and motifs, inspired by the mashrabiya screens of Cairo. Later, when glancing back at it from the other side of the gallery, the artwork manifested into something else. From this distance, one could clearly make out the words: ‘WOMAN 2011 CAIRO’. The work cleverly manipulated the audience’s viewpoint, so that people could see a different formation of the work depending on where they were standing at the time. Only from particular angles – at a distance, in fact – did a linguistic and gendered subject emerge. How might we think of a local space or subject emerging at a distance, from a global perspective? What does this spatial repositioning do to our understanding of roots, context and connection? Following Alex Kostogriz and Georgina Tsolidis, these questions allow us to reformulate diaspora

as a socio-spatial formation or a network that binds the local and the global, the particular and the abstract, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and, in doing so, transcends these binarisms through cultural-semiotic innovations that cannot be simply captured within a bounded space of nation-states and their cultural politics. (2008: 126)

Creating new temporal intimacies: Léuli Eshrāghi’s Tagiauē

An aesthetic cosmopolitanism allows us to renavigate place in a horizontal way, but it also enables us to rearticulate time in a spatial way, too. This temporal renegotiation is experienced in Léuli Māzyār Lunái Eshrāghi's Tagiauē (Eshrāghi, 2014a), an exhibition held in 2014 in artist-run gallery neospace, located in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. Eshrāghi is an emerging Australian contemporary artist, with both Samoan and Persian cultural ancestry. He writes: ‘My work as a contemporary artist means exploring and depicting transnational cultural memories, family histories, spirituality and connection to place in Oceania and the Middle East. I’m Islander and Persian, but not a Pacific or exotic artist’ (Eshrāghi, 2013: 96). Tagiauē was Eshrāghi’s tribute to his Persian grandfather and aunt, who were persecuted for their religious beliefs in 1983. Recently, their graves were desecrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, prompting Eshrāghi to create a ‘temporary resting place, a liminal space, bearing witness to hidden histories, concealed traumas, and a practice of inhabiting and honouring silence’ (Eshrāghi, 2014b). The artist blended motifs of Iranian gabbeh with aspects of Samoan aesthetic forms to create a deeply personal and hybrid set of works in which past and present Samoan practices were folded into present-day Melbourne and historical Iran. By drawing on other cultural codes available to him, Eshrāghi was able to enact a transnational form of mourning and (re)memorialisation, a ritual previously inaccessible to him.

This folding practice resonated with the actual experience of viewing the exhibition, beginning with the act of locating the neospace venue. Like many of Melbourne’s artist-run galleries, the space is hidden halfway down a tight, ordinary laneway, one of many Victorian buildings that resemble the frontage of somebody’s home. The only distinguishing factor from the surrounding residential buildings is the small black-and-white sign reading ‘neospace’ beside its front door. Next to the sign is a bell with a note to ring it in order to enter. Behind a heavy door lies a narrow, nondescript space run by a friendly curator (and her canine companion); a bright, airy room beckons from the other side.

The colour of Eshrāghi’s works, exaggerated by the white walls, was immediately striking. Moving closer, the pieces had an intricate texture to them, considered line and brushwork. It was difficult to shake the feeling of witnessing something underground, on the margins, perhaps even sacred or forbidden. The location and physical dimensions of neospace instigated this feeling of secrecy, but it was further drawn out by Eshrāghi’s artworks within the space. The works seemed relatively small in relation to the gallery – although incredibly vibrant, they seemed to be almost engulfed by the stark-white walls and concrete floors. An interesting tension arose: the bold colours and brushstrokes pushed the viewer towards a strong response, but the comparatively small size of the works stopped this response from being fully realised. If the works had been bigger, it would have felt as if one had nowhere to go. Perhaps Eshrāghi wanted to make sure we all felt we had somewhere to go?

What sorts of worlds are forged in the imagination? Can cosmopolitanism start in the world of affects? The affective impact is set in motion regardless of Eshrāghi’s intentions, and it is here, in motion, that time becomes something else, moving us towards what Gayatri Spivak (2012) might view as ‘cultural alterity’. The particular assemblage of cultural signs encountered in Tagiauē created what Svetlana Boym (1998) defines as diasporic intimacies. Diasporic intimacies are those affects that sneak into everyday situations and restructure the moment of experience for migrants and those around them. Boym (1998: 501) describes:

Diasporic intimacy does not promise a comforting recovery of identity through shared nostalgia for the lost home and homeland. In fact, it’s the opposite. It might be seen as the mutual enchantment of two immigrants from different parts of the world or as the sense of the fragile coziness of a foreign home. Just as one learns to live with alienation and reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the world around and to the strangeness of the human touch, there comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks in through the back door, punctuating the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad.

When viewing Eshrāghi’s artworks, one quickly realises that cultural difference continues to evolve, that diasporas themselves are becoming diasporic, and that while the regulative force of the state persists, so, too, does the inclination to resist its force, to invert its borders, to create new spaces for cultural inclusion. This inclination begins with the faculty of sensory perception and the process of imagination. The act of the imagination is a means of creating images that express an interest in the world and others. Imagination is the means by which the act of facing the cosmos is given form. Imagination – irrespective of the dimensions of the resulting form – is a world-picture-making process. It creates intimacies that push the boundaries of the normative, of what it means to be this person in this place at this time.

Conclusion: A fold in the cosmos

The folding motion of the imagination takes us to the matter of the joint – the combinatory and creative capacities of articulation. As the imagination folds together past and present, near and far, it also creates new conduits for knowledge formation. Safar/Voyage and Tagiauē spurs the need to move beyond the either/or modalities that frame diasporic studies, while also offering us ways to navigate such a shift. Diasporic cultures are both institutionalised and deregulated, global and local, embedded in state power and also, at times, stateless. The two exhibitions differ greatly in size, scope and strategy. If neospace hosts the most intimate, underground exhibition, MOA hosts the most public and nationally symbolic. Yet, it is impossible to say that any of the featured works are removed from the nationalistic frameworks that regulate movement and intercultural exchange in Canada and Australia. Each of the exhibitions illuminates some aspect of macro mobility management – surveillance, control and expulsion. At the same time, we get a sense of the precariousness and transparency of borders. Large diasporas, such as the Arab diaspora, quickly fragment and complicate what ‘the West’ demarcates as ‘the Middle East’. In Safar/Voyage, we glimpse the large scale of the region’s internal movements and its ability to thwart bounded spaces reserved for the Other. Tagiauē is ultimately linked to this Arab diaspora, and also makes space for connections with other diasporas, such as the Samoan community in Australia. The diasporic cultures encountered in Vancouver and Melbourne are creatively articulated in such a way that transience beyond the local is not only acceptable, but an everyday process of localisation. We thus see how both place and time come to matter in ways dependent on the angles at which we approach them, and dependent on normative qualities that both bind and seize them.

Toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault defined his approach toward ‘the history of thought’ by highlighting and exploring the joint articulation of three elements: ‘forms of possible knowledge, normative frameworks of behaviour, and potential modes of existence for possible subjects’ (Foucault, 2011: 3). This provides a useful way of seeing the interplay between the emergence of particular ways of seeing the world and the forms of subjectivity that are enabled. It combines both a wide lens of the world and a close-up on specific modalities. The aim need not be to substitute aesthetic cosmopolitanism for normative frameworks, but to consider how it also arises from the joint articulation of multiple elements. It is now commonplace to juxtapose the enlightened cosmopolitan subject against the provincial subject that is mired in self-enclosed traditions. Such a binary can only further polarise debate and avoid the more demanding task of seeing how each kind of subjectivity or mode of knowledge is formed through its own matrix of practices and possibilities. Hence, to grasp aesthetic cosmopolitanism, it is necessary to go beyond both an institutional critique that exposes the role played by elites to restrict the access to power. Similarly, this argument will not proceed by developing a substitutive agenda whereby models and modes that lurk in the margins are proposed as the new ideal types. With the example of Foucault before us, we can shift the emphasis from the formal structures of ‘power, institutional composition and dominations, to the techniques and procedures by which one sets about conducting the conduct of others’ (Foucault, 2011: 4). In this manner, we may also glimpse the coexistence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism amidst and against the normative frameworks of behaviour.

Artists develop patterns – spatial systems through which each work is constituted and in each work the order constitutes an emergent worldview. The order in each work and the system that transpires across the working process can be described as a cosmos. The term cosmos has multiple meanings that include a counter-point to the condition of chaos, and an intermediary zone between the material earth and the boundless space of the universe, a reference to humanity as a whole, but also as the aesthetic activity of making a space attractive for others. The act of making a cosmos is welcoming and alluring. It is the kind of strife that heightens pleasure. In this article, we claim that a cosmos starts in the primal desire to make a world out of the torsion that comes from facing both the abyss of the void and the awe that fills our gaze into the eternity of the universe. Second, it should be obvious that this act of facing is a big bang aesthetic moment, filled with the horror and delight. It begins in the act of the imagination, which in turn is the primary means of creating images that express an interest in the world and others.

If we accept that the imagination – irrespective of the dimensions of the resulting form – is a world picture-making process, then we must also turn back to the other question that we posed at the beginning of this essay: What is the scope of the cosmos? The cosmos in the Stoic philosophy of cosmopolitanism did not confine itself to the terrestrial conception of the globe. Thus the idea of the cosmos in Greek philosophy was not to be confused with the world as earth/geia. It referred to a celestial circumambient sphere that was between the world and the unbounded. It was this sphere that was considered to be the source of logos or creative reason, and it is equally important to note that while the Greeks, in particular, the Stoics believed that creativity and wisdom came from being attuned to the cosmos, this source was also represented as a capricious and unpredictable force. Hence, the dynamic force that sustains the sphere of the cosmos was also referred to as ‘artistic fire’. The cosmos was a fabulation to not only link the sensory awareness of the infinite to the creative exploration of the intimate, but it was also the most ambitious attempt to deprovincialise human knowledge and globalise solidarity.

Such an extension and qualification of the idea of the environment can sound fanciful, but it is also central to the thinking of many contemporary philosophers. Jacques Rancière informs us that sensory awareness is always disciplined – the gaze towards the infinite may be universal but the way sensation is organised into meaning depends upon the available systems of interpretation. The belief that the meaning and beauty of the cosmos can be found in ordinary objects is, he argues, a product of the modern period that produced what he calls an ‘aesthetic regime’ (Rancière, 2004). Art, as it is now commonly understood, while resembling the practices that have existed since the dawn of time, only makes its appearance in the late 19th century. The ‘aesthetic regime’ is not just a successive phase, one that follows from the earlier ‘representative’ and ‘ethical regimes’ that placed emphasis on the function of mimesis and conformity, but it is also a form that both articulates and finds its own occurrence in the vacillation of the structure and order by which beauty and truth are constituted. Today art has no prescribed form or style. Its material existence and institutional context can also be found in dematerialised and off-site practices. The boundary between production, reception, interpretation and evaluation are in no way determined along a one-way street. The beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane are not just placed up and against each other in a competition for the supreme value and most authentic belief, but rather the squeezing of the space between the two together announces that the sensorium is no longer directed by fixed rules that defined this hierarchy. Hence, for Ranciere aisthesis is a term that must be stretched and split as it oscillates between the ideal forms that shape the event of sensory experience, and the material conditions in which art is encountered.

It is important to stress that this relationship between aisthesis and social context, especially in the folds of diasporic intimacies, is not defined in terms of linear causality. The relationship between the ‘aesthetic regime’ and ideality of the imagination has a complex modality. Artists produce images that come out of their material conditions, but they are not bound by or the sum of specific historical forces. It does more than either reflect or correct the order of things. Imagination has a double perspective towards the images in its own historical context, it simultaneously reassembles the existent elements and also beckons the new. In Ranciere’s words: ‘thinking is always firstly thinking the thinkable – a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable’ (2013: xi). This production of novelty through an act of hospitality towards that which was absent or foreign is the point at which the chain of causality is broken and it is the gap through which surprise, wonder and freedom enters. This extends the function of imagination beyond an evaluation of political objectives, an expression of ethical obligations and the veridical realm of normative truth claims. It opens us to the idea that art creates an order for the world or an alternative mode of being in the world.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism not only directs our attention to the diasporic contributions, but also develops the understanding of the fold in mediated transnational cultures. This approach heightens the redistribution of agency in the production of meaning and event, and traces the participant’s capacity to imagine his or her place in the world as a whole. It combines a critique of the ‘rootlessness’ of the cosmopolitan figure, while grounding the jagged forms of cosmopolitanism that are produced by the displaced and disenfranchised. It allows us to simultaneously map the clustering of roots and routes and, while following these connections, shape-shift between past, present and future, broadening ‘time’ into a spatial alterity, full of possibility.