What follows is a set of primary proposals, a step along the way, an emergent process of reflection that has been left open and pluralistic. It is not intended to be anything more than a provisory instrument, tentative and "hazy", available for circulation.

Ambivalent modernities: for a "rooted cosmopolitanism"

Multifacetted, hesitant, a subject of interminable debates about its nature and developmental profile – modernity provides a productive prism for thinking about what might be a new institution of knowledge and creativity. In what follows, I will be focussing on two particular aspects of the question, the first of which might be expressed in the following way: modernity is an historical, long-term process that has led to the differentiation of societies.

Since the foundation of contemporary sociology and anthropology at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, the social sciences have been endlessly reflecting on the division of labour, the institutionalisation of professional universes, the segmentation of social worlds and the fissiparity that accompanied the process of separation from "old" societies. The achievements of the humanist or the encyclopaedist who could single-handedly assimilate the entire range of disciplines, from medicine to philosophy, via mathematics and the arts, have been rendered impossible by the dizzying advances that are to be observed on every side, and the resulting burgeoning of specialisations. This transformation has had its positive side: it has led, for example, to the emancipation of the various fields of knowledge. The different domains of art have cast off political and religious authority, and have become their own frames of reference, defining for themselves, and by themselves, the criteria of artistic value. But with this emancipation, social worlds have tended to close in upon themselves, to multiply institutional inertias and corporatisms, and to turn the legitimate yardstick of competence, which should be facilitating co-operation, exchange and circulation, into an impediment to transversal practices. This has hampered the mobility of knowledge, if not halted it altogether; which is all the more paradoxical in that modernity has also brought about a proliferation of techniques for facilitating circulation. Art schools themselves tend to define their departments in terms of particularisms: painting, photography, architecture, etc. And in general, institutions have a penchant for slicing up, freezing, and establishing hierarchies.

The difficulty about exchanging knowledge and practices across institutional and social boundaries is not unrelated to a more general sense in which modernity places obstacles in the way of cross-border practices. And this is the second aspect of modernity that I would like to discuss. Modernity has gone hand in hand with the emergence of the nation state and its administrative apparatus, in other words a new crystallisation of the old problematic of borders and sovereignty. In this respect, we are living in an "age of Discipline" (Michel Foucault) – an age of control over flows, bodies, even ideas. It is also an age that has been marked by a "closure of the map of the world" (Hakim Bey), with the impossibility that any territory should henceforth stand outside the purview of state sovereignty. Through the construction of national, linguistic and cultural fences, modernity has brutally thematised the question of the foreigner and the stateless person – with sinister and devastating effects, particularly in the 20th century. But the process is two-sided: while nationalism has flourished, ever-closer connections between different places and societies, and improvements in the means of communication (both material and non-material), have given rise to an unparalleled global structure of interdependence. The tendency of mentalities and languages to retreat into themselves has meant that the system of cross-border exchanges is now seen as a competition involving winners and losers, rather than an opportunity for co-operation and reciprocal discovery. This has resulted in highly aggressive types of nationalism, and cynical colonialism.

The "radicalised modernity" (Ulrich Beck) in which we find ourselves today has developed two kinds of discourse about transcending national and institutional borders. The neo-liberal discourse on contemporary globalisation proposes to regard such borders as archaic. Its validity is, admittedly, limited to commercial exchanges, but in fact it has a tendency to transmute every other kind of transaction, even cultural, into exchanges of a commercial nature. It is unswerving in its adherence to the logics of competition, domination and standardisation, while at the same time taking liberties with its own professed principles, from protectionism to a preoccupation with security. Globalisation, thus understood, does not completely break with "state strategies"; in fact statist logics and the machinery of globalisation, far from being mutually opposed, have accompanied and reinforced each other over the course of history (Jean-François Bayart). The other, more heterodox, discourse is that of "cosmopolitanisation" (Ulrich Beck), which goes beyond the ethical stance of 18th- and 19th-century philosophical cosmopolitanism, being a realist form of discourse in the sense that it is based on a genuine cosmopolitanisation of the world. It is also an alternative to the discourse of globalisation, domination and sovereignty. It does not conceive of global interdependence as an adjunct to the logics of predation, but as an extrapolation of the logics of exchange and co-operation. What circulates (or at any rate what is supposed to circulate) is not so much the resources of economics, finance and repression, but rather knowledge, cross-border practices and de-territorialised ways of thinking (with the accompanying technological, environmental and terrorist threats). Cosmopolitanisation does not abolish national spaces, but articulates, in heterodox fashion, the global and the local (rooted cosmopolitanism), thus supplying a channel for speculation about a kind of circulation that is not necessarily exclusive to dominant discourses and the elites that disseminate them, but is open to sub-dominant discourses, resistance movements, and heterodox forms of imagination.

We are heirs to the ambivalences of modernity. And many people around the world continue to think in a particular language, or attempt to communicate in a broken English that makes them forget the subtleties of their own language. We belong to national entities, cultural groups, professional universes and social worlds. Our reflexes are those that were inculcated into us by our socialisation and institutional background. We are uneasy about exile and errancy. We are tree-people, root-people. And yet ours is a world in which the nearby and the distant should, by rights, be contiguous. We are swept up in a groundswell of rootlessness and encounters. We are invited to reject the fossilised logics of territories, institutions, professional specialisation and hermeticised knowledge. We are potential pirogue-people.

We have to do something with, and about, this double inheritance. But can we really, like the Melanesians (Joël Bonnemaison), be both tree-people and pirogue-people, converting the wood of trees and the comfort of roots into material for the construction of pirogues, and energy for the voyage? What kind of circulation do we have to invent if we want to promote modernity in one of its forms, namely that of cosmopolitanisation, while inhibiting it in another, namely that of predatory globalisation and border controls? How are we to bring into being a rooted cosmopolitanism (Sidney Tarrow), and place it in the service of cross-border, heterodox practices?

Crisis regimes, and receptiveness to events

It seems to me that rooted cosmopolitanism is no foregone conclusion, but denotes a "crisis of global interdependence" (Ulrich Beck) in which the local and the global are inseparable and interpenetrative. Cosmopolitanism can be a vehicle for heterodoxies if it is embodied in a mode of cross-border circulation and mobility that reflects local specificities, with mutual reinforcement rather than opposition. Any new faculty of knowledge and creativity that purported to respond to this issue would itself have to be "glocal" (i.e. a combination of the global and the local).

I should add that in thinking about what such a faculty might resemble, the problem also has to be looked at from a standpoint that is epistemologically alien to art. In the first instance, this means providing for cross-border exchanges of concepts, and, in practice, borrowing from the crisis model some ways of re-problematising the question of the art institution. It should be noted that the term "crisis" is not to be understood, in this context, in a histrionic or pathological sense, but as designating a break with the ordinary mode of operation of institutions and social worlds. "Crisis" is the essential mode of heterodox circulation.

A crisis is a regime of uncertainty, a movement of de-specialisation and divergence from the division of labour. It circulates problematics, ways of thinking, practices, issues and risks among social sectors that for most purposes do not overlap (Michel Dobry). Universes that are generally distinct and self-referential, operating according to particular schemas of thinking, implicitness, obviousness, doxa and institutional inertia are brusquely shaken up and invited to reflect on themselves in new ways. Sectorised definitions of issues give way to a regime of strangeness that can produce a "breakdown of intelligibility" (Eric Fassin, Alban Bensa), in the sense that, all of a sudden, one is no longer thinking in old, familiar ways. This is why a crisis is a juncture at which everything seems possible. The imagination is unlocked, and social relations become fluid and labile. Networks and resonances are created between universes, between the close and the distant. Dissonances occur, and the resulting merging of heterogeneous practices and perceptions gives rise to heterodoxy.

In the end, a crisis is quite simply an abrupt, decompartmentalised rearrangement of pre-existing possibilities. It is a reconfiguration of "short" time and "long" time, roots and travel. Yet it is also eventogenic – it disturbs and perturbs. To be fully contemporaneous with a crisis thus presupposes a real receptiveness to the event, a faculty of impermanence, or, to put it another way, an ability to break free of identifications, roles, routines and obligations, and accept the unheard-of, the encounter, the new. In a crisis, there is an entire politics of the occasion; and the knowledge involved in receptiveness to an event is knowledge of the right moment. But as in rooted cosmopolitanism, this permanent revolt against pre-established ways of thinking and living – this receptiveness to the event – comes more easily to those who have material resources available to them, along with the requisite skills and knowledge, always provided that these are not reified, and that they can be set aside where necessary. One does not travel naked, of course, but neither does one travel fully armed. And if cosmopolitanism is not to benefit only those with power and influence, but also fragile, minority communities, there has to be a way of ensuring that it is something other than an impersonal process given over to unconstrained power struggles. There has to be a way of domesticating it, and propagating it.

The pivotal role of education

Any new institution for knowledge and creativity must, to my mind, take up the challenge of cosmopolitanism that has been issued by radicalised modernity; and this would imply a need to draw on the crisis model. But why should it be so urgent to turn institutions for art education into places devoted to confronting this challenge? The reason is that, as Pierre Bourdieu wrote, "Education is one of those locations where, in differentiated societies, systems of thinking are produced and reproduced, as an equivalent (though more refined in appearance) to the 'primitive forms of classification' […] that are to be found in societies without writing systems or educational institutions." Our frameworks of thought, and the barriers they present to the heterodoxy that is inherent in rooted cosmopolitanism, thus find their roots (partly, yet strongly) in the socialising influence of the school and the university. It is at this nodal level that action is required, and in particular within the institutions of art education. The type of knowledge that travels best is flexible, or even fuzzy. And art, since it deploys a type of knowledge that is, precisely, polysemic, facilitates rooted cosmopolitanism as a way to grasp the best aspects of modernity. But it must not bow to the modern logic of borders, whether national or institutional. It must oppose the rigidities inherent in specialisation, and the institutional inertias that are inseparable from social differentiation. In other words, while preserving its relative autonomy from heteronomous logics (political, social, religious, etc.), it needs to be opened up to a form of de-specialisation. While continuing to be founded on transmissible expertise and skills, it has to expand its dialogue with other spaces and knowledge platforms, and to vectorise a nomadism of ideas, forms, concepts and practices.

The task is a considerable one. Institutions tend to live in a sort of schizophrenic state that consists of thinking in a heterodox way while acting in an orthodox way – thinking globally while acting locally – whereas the two levels actually need to be hybridised. It is also the case that institutions have an abiding propensity to present themselves in a prophetic light – with appeals for the unshackling of the imagination, an opening-up of possibilities, a crisis regime – and to function like bureaucracies stuck in routines, or priesthoods steeped in tradition. I think we have to understand the modernity in which we are immersed, if we are to construct a set of coherent institutional responses that use what we are familiar with to develop a real politics of strangeness. And if we want to introduce fragility and mobility into the institutional fragmentation of knowledge and creativity, we have to be aware that resistance to the free movement of heterodox knowledge does not come only from the dominant orthodoxies, and their institutions, but also (and above all) from our inexhaustible persistence in surrounding ourselves with obstacles, and our acceptance of institutional inertia.

We thus find ourselves in a position where it would be in our interest to create a new kind of institution, both amorphous and orderly – one that could organise its own subversion. It should be able to internalise the paradoxical requirement to function "normally" in crisis mode, and in a permanent state of impermanence, through repeated re-locations and re-problematisations, abandoning nothing of what is actually known, but elaborating open, emergent structures that make room for cross-border practices and ever-renewed heterodoxies.

It is not my intention to dwell on the way institutions of knowledge and creativity currently operate, or to make judgements about their degree of heterodoxy. Neither is it my purpose to put forward prescriptions, or to suggest what an alternative critical institution might look like, in concrete terms. All I would hope to do is to propose a questioning process that might indicate the urgency of the problem, help to identify the issues and outline the problematic, knowing that the practical implementation of such a programme could not possibly have just one single determinant, but would necessarily be a product of heterodox interactions and multiple circulations.