Cosmo-Theory

What cosmopolitanism popularly evokes—among other things, the thirst for another knowledge, unprejudiced striving, world travel, supple open-mindedness, broad international norms of civic equality, a politics of treaty and understanding rather than conquest—can hardly be devalued, especially today. As various urban "suss" laws are upheld by the higher courts, and as an entire people abroad is bombarded by U.S. planes for the collective sin of belonging to a race of "serial ethnic cleansers," one is tempted to stick to the basic decency of cosmopolitanism (á la Martha Nussbaum) rather than try to be too subtle. ¹

On the other hand, cosmopolitanism has prompted some of these very symptoms. It is a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon. An ethical argument for cosmopolitanism or for its nominal opposite (patriotism) cannot be based on a formal adherence to a list of positive qualities. One's judgment of cosmopolitanism's value or desirability, in other words, is affected by whose cosmopolitanism or patriotism one is talking about—whose definitions of prejudice, knowledge, or open-mindedness one is referring to. Cosmopolitanism is local while denying its local character. This denial is an intrinsic feature of cosmopolitanism and inherent to its appeal.

Our confusion over these preliminary observations derives from a fact about cosmopolitanism that seems, at first, to be quite extraneous to it. In general, the term has been disorienting within cultural theory because of the theorist's unwillingness to analyze the marketplace in a sustained or careful way. My apparently unjustified leap into new territory might be defended by recalling the opening question of the chapter "The Fair, the Pig, and Authorship" from Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's widely read book, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. They ask, "How does one ‘think' a marketplace?" Their provisional answer, which I take to be the type of point I make in this essay, is that "the commonplace is what is most radically unthinkable":

At once a bounded enclosure and site of open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection with the network of goods. . . . A marketplace is the epitome of local identity (often indeed it is what defined a place as more significant than surrounding communities) and the unsettling of that identity by the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere. . . . In the marketplace pure and simple categories of thought find themselves perplexed and one-sided. ²

Their image of opening up the center's one-sided logic to the clashing values of the outer boroughs is reminiscent of the hybridity so widely extolled in theories of cosmopolitanism. But they take us into more troubling territory with their image of a local reality translated into global terms by way of market flow—a reality, as the authors describe it, that transforms hybridity itself into a coercive lesson imposed on outlying populations. Pursuing this logic, which is uniquely accessible in a cultural analysis that attempts to "think a marketplace," Stallybrass and White find themselves questioning Mikhail Bakhtin's famous observations on the carnivalesque. They observe that "the fair, far from being the privileged site of popular symbolic opposition to hierarchies, was in fact a kind of educative spectacle, a relay for the diffusion of the cosmopolitan values of the ‘centre' (particularly the capital and the new urban centres of production) throughout the provinces and the lower orders." ³

If they treat the concept only in passing and superficially, nevertheless the authors are right about cosmopolitanism functioning as a relay for the center's values, sublimating differences on grounds of understanding by way of a motive to export ideological products made to the measure of the world of saleable things. But I would add a point they leave only implicit: namely, that cosmopolitanism makes sense only in the context of a specific national-cultural mood. As Stallybrass and White imply, centers tend to be where the concept has historically found its greatest acclaim. But what they do not quite express is the process by which...