Recently came across an interesting text on cosmopolitanisms that I think you would appreciate; it goes a lot of directions spinning off from your text in Wear, including some other frameworks for thinking about the cosmopolitan that i had not regarded before. The first part is really a very broad survey of varying positions on cosmopolitanism, from political implications to socio-geographic, institutional or philosophical. One of the misconceptions that we tend to think of, as pointed out, is an opposition of the cosmopolitan and the local, as the case on a political/institutional/corporate level, but Vertovec’s piece brings to light other possibilities, like Mary Kaldor’s concept of “cosmopolitanism from below through the activities of new transnational social movements”. This brings in  grass-roots organisations and social networking sites, to name a few, but not merely to point it out as a form of cosmopolitanism, but as a different juxtaposition of how individuals participate, with or without loyalties, guanxi and a sense of “following the rules” in the public sphere.

Did you read the recent notes on Deludology from Julian Kücklich? His last point is crucial to a lot of points in my research:

“…private and public consumption needs to be replaced by new forms of publicly private and privately public experience. This also signals a radical shift from content to context, in which the “form” of the experience becomes more important than its actual “content” (similar to the way that cheating highlights the form of the play experience rather than its content).”

The contrasts sound a bit like the idea of “cosmopolitan communitarianism” (Bellamy & Castiglione 1998), which becomes important when you think about China’s consumption of the world through piracy (absorbing western popular culture, learning English by watching “Friends” and “Sex & the City”, etc.). These collective experiences on the part of local Chinese are overhauls of content in a completely different context. New meanings are created by the Chinese translations of Western media, and while such hybridity may be regarded as one of the biggest criticisms of cultural dilution, it also points to the specificity required of our handling of culture and the Other. In other words, context.

This is just the beginning of a lot of research that i need to get into for my thesis, but my initial hypotheses want to look to China and this cruciality of context as a philosophy for negotiation between the public and the private, one that is not exemplary but perhaps, or only, a maneuvering…

[download “Fostering Cosmopolitanisms: A Conceptual Survey and Media Experiment in Berlin”, by Steven Vertovec]