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PERPETUAL WAR
COSMOPOLITANISM from the VIEWPOINT of VIOLENCE
By BRUCE ROBBINS
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5198-6
Chapter One
COSMOPOLITANISM, NEW AND NEWER Anthony Appiah
Anthony Appiah has been saying for some time that cosmopolitanism, properly conceived, does not contradict patriotism. He said it with his characteristic eloquence and verve in a piece called "Cosmopolitan Patriots" in the Boston Review in 1994, protesting gently against Nussbaum's call for a primary allegiance to humanity as a whole. He made the same argument in the final chapter of The Ethics of Identity (2005), entitled "Rooted Cosmopolitanism." And he makes it again in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). It seems reasonable to ask what might lie behind this apparent compulsion to repeat. It's not because Appiah's vision of cosmopolitanism is still struggling to overcome stout, well-entrenched resistance. On the contrary. In the circles where Appiah is a familiar and trusted figure, the older, singular cosmopolitanism in the mode of Nussbaum is now regularly dismissed as otherworldly, elitist, Eurocentric universalism in disguise. It has not been refuted, but it does seem to have been overwhelmed by the pluralizing tide of smaller, subuniversal cosmopolitanisms. Each of these is qualified by a boldly paradoxical adjective like rooted or indigenous. Each freely concedes, to use Appiah's preferred word, its partiality. Rather than making trouble for patriots, these vernacular, discrepant, local, and actually existing cosmopolitanisms are often seen, as I've said, as versions of patriotism. In many, if not quite all, instances the sharp knife of antinationalist critique has been sheathed. The hypothesis presents itself, therefore, that cosmopolitanism in this newer, humbler rewording is so repetitiously invoked, by Appiah and by others, because it has become a comfortable piety: an ideal whose periodic reiteration helps us evade the actual, pressing complexities of the case, a credo that can be easily affirmed because it makes no unpleasant weekday demands. Readers who discovered a portion of Appiah's Cosmopolitanism excerpted in the New York Times Magazine on New Year's Day 2006 may have felt that the term, which always seemed to teeter on the brink of a fatal complacency, had finally gone over the edge.
The danger that cosmopolitanism may have become a piety or is on its way to becoming one seems real enough to warrant further investigation. Still, it would be irresponsible not to leave open the possibility that what will be uncovered is not conventional piety but, after all, some sort of genuine virtue. Virtue on a global scale may sound like a conceptual nonstarter likely to produce only embarrassment, but it is the theoretical possibility of which cosmopolitanism is in effect offered as a provisional instance. A concept that would stand for the proper ethical attitude toward global connectedness and would do so no matter what particular cultural vantage point one viewed the global connectedness from—such a concept is conceivable but is not an obvious match with any presently flourishing position, at least one that can withstand critical scrutiny. The phrase world citizenship, for example, invites dismissal as an oxymoron or worse, a free pass offered to the mighty on the condition (a not very onerous one) that they reframe their militaristic adventures as humanitarian interventions and nation building. Yet we can't help but go on asking what it would take to build an international sense of right and wrong powerful enough to put some perceptible restraint on such militarism, or for that matter what it would take to get something done about the economic disparities that militarism feeds on. While such questions remain insistent, so will inquiries into cosmopolitanism. This is a site where important thinking has to be done. And enough is at stake in it to justify an impulse to return to the scene of the original argument, repeating and perhaps repenting.
In the past two decades, as noted above, the updated, amended, conciliatory version of cosmopolitanism has emerged as a wildly popular term of approval. This is partly because of the term's classical pedigree and partly because in its new versions it is felt, rightly or wrongly, to resolve some of the more troublesome antitheses that currently plague cultural interpretation at a planetary scale: local/global, tradition/modernity, ordinary culture/ high culture. At the same time, it is also attractive because it takes attention away from other, still more unwieldy contradictions, like that between cultural inequality and economic inequality. Cosmopolitanism posits the option that fidelity to a particular place and tradition can be understood, like Aymara-speaking Bolivian rappers, as simultaneously and successfully participating in the global, the modern, and the innovative. However limited the rappers' caloric intake may be, therefore, however modest their living conditions and life chances (surely improved with the political ascension of Evo Morales), their indigenously inflected rapping is taken as grounds for rejoicing, or for what Appiah has called "celebration of cultural variety" ("Cosmopolitan Patriots," 29). Today it is hard to find a place where the celebration is not at full blast. I offer a couple of book-length examples: Jacqueline Loss's Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place (2005) undertakes to show that what has often been taken as local is "frequently more cosmopolitan—interactive, porous, and translational" (3); New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US announces the discovery of a new subject, not adequately covered by "traditional diasporas": "We define new cosmopolitans as people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations.... It is these new forms of shifting choices and complex relationships that emerge from what were earlier 'knowable' as diasporas that we call new cosmopolitanism" (2–3).
Note the accumulation here of value-positive terms: "new," of course, but also "choice," an indicator of freedom, as well as "complex." Unlike ordinary diasporas, these are enriched by a spicy hint of unknowability. "Selectively" suggests the not otherwise obvious assumption that the cosmopolitan status of most South Asians in the United States should be understood as primarily intentional, a form of self-fashioning. The result is that "occupying in-between spaces of identity, culture, and communication" (3) becomes a familiar badge of privilege: a claim to fly free of the labels assigned to others by nature or tradition, or at least to have achieved mastery over them.? James Clifford proposed years ago that cosmopolitanism might be a welcome replacement for the overtasked term culture. Now cosmopolitanism is praised because it is perceived, however subliminally, to resolve the contradiction within culture between the anthropological sense (ordinary culture) and the high or aesthetically valued sense. Cosmopolitanism is lived, like diasporic identity, at the level of the everyday, yet it allows everyday culture to display the signs (freedom, selectivity, imaginative blurring of accepted categories) that are usually associated with a higher, more rarified, more praiseworthy artistic creativity.
Is all this praise for the new cosmopolitanism a good thing? By definition, the new version seems more accessible than the old, closer to a hybridity we already possess and merely need to acknowledge than to an ideal we might have to step outside and fight for. One review of Appiah wondered, "Aren't most of us already the 'partial cosmopolitans' Appiah wants us to be?" In order to make cosmopolitanism seem rare, strenuous, and praiseworthy, the new cosmopolitans sometimes seem obliged to confuse the new with the old, the descriptive with the normative sense of the term. However fleeting and fragmentary, the new sense (cosmopolitanism as a description of the actually existing, ineluctably mixed-up state of modern identity) is perceived as reflecting the moral glory of the old, normative sense (cosmopolitanism as an unfulfilled task or ideal of planetary justice), even as the latter seems less and less visibly active. I myself am on record as having wagered on the new: on cosmopolitanism reconceived as something more weighty, positive, and socially grounded than detachment from one's nation, as a mode of attachment which cannot therefore claim to stand for a universal ethical ideal but also, as multiple or distanced attachment, seems unlikely merely to reconfirm the givenness or singleness of nationalism. The results are not yet in on this wager. I still have hopes. But since I have raised the question of self-revision and even repentance, let me admit that, having praised or at least withheld judgment in the hope that the actual would turn out to be a vehicle for the normative, I have come to feel that, in many cases at least, the actual has stalled out en route. Perhaps it needs a jump-start. To switch metaphors: celebrations of cosmopolitan diversity have largely been uninterrupted by issues of militarism, economic equality, and geopolitical justice, issues which are more readily taken up by the cleaner or older cosmopolitanism. Hence the impulse to check up on the now-aging category of the new and ask what work is and isn't getting done.
Given how much agency the nation-state still enjoys and the active militarism in which it has so often expressed itself, especially though not exclusively in the United States, my own curiosity fixes first of all on the problem of cosmopolitanism's relation to patriotism. Appiah, who is cited as an inspiration by Hollinger, is confident that the two do not contradict each other. Can we accept his confidence? Many critics seem to have no trouble with it. Jessica Berman, whose Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community finds an Appiah-style cosmopolitanism in the experimental modernism of Henry James and Gertrude Stein, is particularly taken with the idea of noncontradiction between nomadic cosmopolitanism and Americanness. Berman credits Appiah with the phrase "rooted cosmopolitanism" (27), which seems to have begun the contemporary habit of waving off the contradiction as illusory. It may be of trivial importance, but the phrase seems to have been used slightly earlier and perhaps indeed coined by Mitchell Cohen in the pages of Dissent. In Dissent, as elsewhere, the paradoxical alliance of patriotism and cosmopolitanism (once a slur directed at the Jews, among others) often seems intended to reconcile a self-image of modernist detachment with practical loyalty to one form of patriotism in particular: Zionism. I would hope that Israeli patriotism will appear controversial enough, in light of the bloody invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and of Gaza in 2008, among other long-standing and everyday outrages, to suggest that if and when cosmopolitanism declares itself constitutionally unable or unwilling to oppose patriotism, a warning signal should sound. American nationalism should set off the same alarm. Here, then, is one plausible criterion for the evaluation of new or adjectivally modified cosmopolitanism: to what extent does it prepare us to bow down before patriotisms like these?
The patriotism Appiah seems to have in mind when he talks about cosmopolitanism is not his own but his father's. The first line of the essay "Cosmopolitan Patriots" reads, "My father was a Ghanaian patriot." The first line of "Rooted Cosmopolitanism" is also about his father, this time about his father's dying injunction to his children to be "citizens of the world" (213). (When I began this book with a reference to my son, it seems likely that some part of my mind was remembering these father–son scenes.) His father, Appiah says, "never saw a conflict between his cosmopolitan credo and his patriotism" (223). Meaning no disrespect, I note that this statement falls somewhat short of demonstrating either that there was no such conflict in his father's case or that, as Appiah allows it to imply, there need never be such a conflict in anyone else's. Appiah's father is also quoted as saying, "No one in Ghana is silly enough not to believe in God" (270). I hope we are not supposed to infer that the tricky old existence-of-God problem has been disposed of by the same means. Filial loyalty is an admirable sentiment, but there is something a bit suspicious about professing it publicly as if it could settle philosophical issues and as if we readers had the same motives as a son for reining in our skeptical, intellectually disobedient impulses.
The usual argument against Nussbaum's, Chomsky's, or Peter Singer's versions of cosmopolitanism is that we cannot possibly be expected to care about those far away as intensely as we care about our families. In his response to Nussbaum, the political theorist Benjamin Barber writes, "We live in this particular neighborhood of the world, that block, this valley, that seashore, this family" (34). "Above all," the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb declares in her response, "what cosmopolitanism obscures, even denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community—and nationality" (77). The dash at the end of this list acknowledges the decisive leap by which, starting out with a natural and inevitable love for one's parents, one finds oneself suddenly and just as naturally committed to one's nation and perhaps therefore also committed to the aggressions undertaken by one's government. Appiah himself writes that what a rootless cosmopolitanism, "taken as a sort of rigorous abjuration of partiality, the discarding of all local loyalties" (221), doesn't have, a family does: a "grip upon our hearts" (221). To insert Joseph Appiah into this argument as statesman and cosmopolitan as well as father is to suggest that there is no general conflict of interest or moral claim between the levels of family, nation, and world. This lays upon Joseph Appiah a heavy burden of exemplarity. If Appiah's father is going to represent a programmatically asserted compatibility between the interests of humanity and the interests of a particular state, readers have to be told something about what he actually did on behalf of the state he served, how he managed the feat of avoiding any collision between national and transnational interests. A footnote (329n11) presents him as a figure of the permanent opposition. We are told about his honorable jail time, but not about actions devoted to defending any particular government. In his foreword to Joseph Appiah's autobiography, Henry Louis Gates Jr. speaks of a "phase of diplomacy on behalf of his country" that involved Appiah in explaining, in Gates's words, the rationale for the "bloody coup" by which the military deposed Kwame Nkrumah (xvii–xviii). This is not the place to enter into the rights and wrongs of Nkrumah (about whom Anthony Appiah writes very lucidly in In My Father's House) or of the coup that sent him into exile. It ought to be enough, for the purposes of the present argument, to remind ourselves that any political career put forward in this rhetorically forceful way can and must be examined objectively and nonreverentially.
Rereading the essay "Rooted Cosmopolitanism," which begins with the words, "When my father died," I recalled the experience of being in a large audience some years ago when Anthony Appiah asked us all whether we recognized another first sentence: "I was not sorry when my brother died." (I did—it's from Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions—and I was duly congratulated on it.) Improper familial feelings of the sort that Dangarembga's female narrator expresses are not represented in Appiah's writing, at least thus far. (The piece from 2007 in the New York Times Magazine about the fact that his Ghanaian family possessed slaves may mark a change in that.) He is magnanimous to his family, and he typically extends this magnanimity to others who may be less deserving of it. He is silent about the support of British imperialism shown by John Stuart Mill, an intellectual hero of his. When presented with an opportunity to vent postcolonial anger, he generally passes. Indeed, he uses the word empire in a seemingly nonjudgmental sense, often modifying it with the casual adjective great. In "Rooted Cosmopolitanism" Marcus Aurelius is referred to as "one of the last of the great emperors of the greatest empire of the classical West" (218). The phrase has every reason to catch the eye, as Marcus Aurelius combined, via stoicism, cosmopolitanism with active empire building. A few pages earlier, on the same page where he notes that "cosmopolitan values" are often seen as "really imperial ones" (214), Appiah refers to the "great Asante empire that had dominated our region before its conquest by the British" (214). It looks as though conquests both by the British and by the Asante have abruptly fallen under the protection of that distanced, resentment-free historical forgiveness in which, many centuries later, we are now accustomed to drape the supposed greatness of classical antiquity's conquerors, whether philosophers or not. Perhaps at this point the British empire builders have to be forgiven so that the Asante aristocracy too can be forgiven. Those who have less greatness in their family backgrounds may want to go slowly here. I am willing to grant that certain grudges of the past, even the quite recent past, may have outlived their sell-by date. Recalibration of targets and priorities is essential to politics, and the ability to forget is as crucial to political recalibration as the ability to remember. But the obvious risk of this particular magnanimity—a sort of temporal cosmopolitanism, not always easy to detect when it follows in the wake of the more ostentatious spatial variety—is depoliticization.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PERPETUAL WAR by BRUCE ROBBINS Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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