Abstract
I am reading this book in the latter half of July 2014, while Israel is launching a massive offensive in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. As the month ends, over 1500 Palestinians are dead and over 7000 are wounded, and 60 Israeli solders are dead and 400 wounded. My Facebook feeds are full of people expressing disbelief, anger, and horror at what is happening and feelings of helplessness at their inability to stop this killing. Some accuse others of anti-Semitism for their criticism of Israel’s actions. In posts where celebrities and public intellectuals call for peace and for the United States and Britain to intervene, a war of words and hate speech breaks out in the comments on those posts. I sit in the distant safety of New Zealand, staring out at my garden lawn on a mild midwinter’s day. The contrast between the mundanity of what is happening in my life on this small patch of earth and what is happening 10,000 miles away in Gaza is absurd; it’s obscene. This is a most confounding of contexts, but perhaps a horribly appropriate one, in which to reflect on the potential of cosmopolitan writing.
Unquestionably, the vast majority of professional public and promotional writing, and, I would argue, much personal public writing, if I can use some of the Facebook posts I mention above as examples, promote particular interests – be they nationalist, governmental, political, corporate, organisational, economic, and/or those of the self. Professional writing uses rhetorical and discursive strategies to persuade readers of the objectivity of its perspective, the truthfulness and merit of its values, and the virtue of its authors. In doing so, it frequently dehumanises and discredits others, alternative value systems, ideologies, ecologies, and other possibilities for being, doing, and knowing. Indeed, professional writing is generally caught in a dualistic narrative of us not them; this not that; this is better, more pleasurable, more desirable, more right; if you want this, then you sacrifice that; we are this, not that. It is a tiresome global narrative form which paralyses the potential of individuals, communities, organisations, nations and their peoples. It will ultimately destroy the physical world on which we depend as virtually all such writing obfuscates the environmental cost of competitive market-driven globalisation. So how do we change this narrative? How can marketing, public relations, advertising, political and government campaigns, consultancy reports, fundraising appeals, for example, be written in more inclusive, ethical, responsible, caring, compassionate, empathetic and transformative ways? – ways which engage us as readers to appreciate how we are always in relationships of consequence with both human and nonhuman others who have rights and ways of being different to ours, and whose agency, right to self-determination, and, indeed, right to life, must be respected and valued?
These are the matters that Surma addresses in her call for a cosmopolitan revision and recasting of the practices and objectives of professional public writing. She argues that
a cosmopolitan turn encourages writers to consider their responsibilities in communicating in a networked world, and to reconsider the crucial part they play by addressing issues of relationship in their texts – political, civic, national and global, for example – in order to relate to, imagine, situate, address and answer the readers to whom they write. (p. 10)
Surma explains,
cosmopolitanism as a philosophical and ethical commitment encourages us to reflect more deeply on what is important and valuable, exciting and potentially transformative and compelling about writing, as a critical, careful and self-reflexive process […] and as a vital practice in a global context. (p. 17)
Her analysis of professional writing and advocating for the cosmopolitan ideal draws on Arendt, Bauman, Beck, Calhoun, and Fairclough, and includes a feminist ethics of care which insists on our interdependence with, and responsibilities to others in all forms of relationship. Her argument takes into account matters of space and time, technology, power, the global and the local, and is satisfyingly complex and grounded.
Surma provides a useful range of examples to demonstrate how professional public writing is used for instrumental self-interested strategic purposes. She deconstructs the Australian Government’s ‘No to people smugglers’ YouTube campaign which sought to dissuade ‘boat people’ from believing in the possibility of a safe sea passage to asylum in Australia. This campaign, as well as the Australian, British and North American citizenship tests which Surma also discusses, operates as a parochial national narrative demarcating a safe and secure ‘us’ from ‘alien others’ who fail to share our language, cultural values and, therefore, our territories. British Petroleum’s sustainability reporting following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophic oil spill is shown to be, unsurprisingly, nothing more than a vacuous text of smoke and mirrors made up of hollow grandiose claims. Surma even sets to task on communication advocating for organisational change at an Australian university. Any academic will be familiar with the managerialist rhetoric espousing the need for efficiencies and streamlining accompanied by overly simplistic diagrams presenting new organisational structures which Surma finds there.
Surma also provides examples of professional public communication which illustrate the possibilities of cosmopolitan representation. One such example is the joint Médecins Sans Frontières and VII Photo Agency ‘Starved for Attention’ campaign which radically disrupts highly simplistic objectifying stereotypes of starving children commonly used in fundraising aid initiatives. Surma identifies the ways in which this multimedia campaign tasks its audience to consider the commonalities of human experience, rather than the differences of ‘others’, and creatively implicates them in the responsibility to take action to prevent malnutrition in children. Surma also considers Nike’s rather more problematic attempts to engage our individual and collective responsibility to attend to the needs of women and young girls in the developing world through its ‘Girl Effect’ campaign. While acknowledging the grave labour transgressions committed by this multinational corporation as well as the structural injustices that its commercial priorities support, Surma outlines how ‘Girl Effect’ marks an – albeit simplistic – attempt to have audiences recognise how we can contribute to social change by supporting the needs of women in the developing world. All of Surma’s examples of cosmopolitan writing and representation demonstrate the attempt on the part of the writer to have the reader gain a sense of, and insight into, the experience and complexities of those being represented. These people are not simply some distant, foreign ‘other’; they are people trying to do their best under very often appalling circumstances, circumstances that anyone would find incredibly challenging. Through these examples, Surma shows how cosmopolitan writing aims to draw us in as readers to feel part of what is being represented, and able to reflect on our own role in contributing to the lives and circumstances of people and communities geographically, culturally, and temporally close to, and distant from, ourselves.
Perhaps perfectly primed for reading this book, I live in despair at the cruelty and lack of compassion and ethics of care that we humans are capable of, and how we are senselessly destroying our own habitat as well as the astonishing species we co-habit this world with. I am darkly pessimistic about the possibility of our evolving the necessary ethics of care for each other, other beings, and the environment that is urgently needed. But if there are lights that offer a route out of this tragedy, Surma’s book is one of them. To be sure, there is idealism in her arguments and the task of re-orientating the trajectories of professional writing appears overwhelming. However, this book is a very good starting point for thinking about new narratives of public and professional writing, for teaching alternative forms and approaches to writing, and, indeed, for discussing new ways of being in this world.