Eyes on the Skies: A Brief Note on Eric Lott and Cosmopolitanism

Bruce Robbins Eyes on the Skies: A Brief Note on Eric Lott and Cosmopolitanism What Eric Lott means by cosmopolitanism is nearly the opposite of the word's usual meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cosmopolitan means "not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants." According to Lott, in "The New Cosmopolitanism ," the term refers to American nationalism. As one would expect from someone of Lott's high intelligence, he has a good excuse for this reversal. The writers he has been commenting on in a powerful series ofarticles in thejournal Transition are indeed, as he says, dedicated toseeing "polyethnic identities" gathered up and transcended by "some national form of cultural cohesion." David Hollinger and Ross Posnock use the term cosmopolitan in a metaphorical sense, suggesting that racial and ethnic identities, like rural and regional ones, are provincialisms whose higher destiny is to coalesce into metropolitan nationhood. Walter Benn Michaels' argument is entitled "Our America." Leftists like Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky, whom Lott does not discuss, also invoke a cosmopolitanism that stands for a more inclusive common good and can thus, they argue, help American progressives break out of their largely self-imposed marginality. "Cosmopolitanism is scarcely a word that should be used as a rallying cry," Tomasky observes in Leftfor Dead, "given its historic anti-Semitic connotation and its certain lack of appeal to ordinary working people. But whatever it should be called, it's a healthy urge." Like Lott, I have to pose the predictable question: healthy for whom? One can't help but notice that Tomasky's "ordinary working people" no longer have much in common with what used to be called the international working class. Their hearts beat for one particular nation—our own. In their name, leftists and liberals are asked to back down on identity, welfare, affirmative action, and immigration (four of Tomasky's chapters). Put these together, and you get an inkling of whose interests are to be served and whose are to be sacrificed. Tomasky prophesies that the left can be reborn, vital and powerful, if only it will learn to see itself as a national left—in other words, if it will agTee both to downplay divisions within the United States and (no less scandalously) to deepen divisions between Americans and non-Americans. To say this is to agTee with much of Lott's case, but also to stake out some grounds of disagreement. In "Boomer Liberalism," the latest in a series of compelling contributions on the same theme, Lott adds Richard Rorty to his list of one-time progressives who 286 the minnesota review have now succumbed to the gravitational pull of the liberal center. Rorty may well belong in this company; the problem is that he is no "new cosmopolitan." Like Gitlin and Tomasky, Rorty in Achieving Our Country accuses the left of being far too comfortable in its powerlessness ; he too pushes us to come in from the cold, to accept the center's bargain of moral compromise in return for practical political results. Arguing against the principled purity of race, gender, and sexual separatisms, he too makes a plea for national pride. But Rorty's example ofcosmopolitanism is a negative one: "the point of view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator," characteristic of the academic left, from which "our country may seem to have little to be proud of." In other words, Rorty usescosmopolitanism in its more usual extra-domestic sense, and he therefore opposes it. And Lott? In opposing Rorty, what attitude is he adopting toward this cosmopolitanism ? It's hard to say. "Left consensus," Lott declares, "has usually been a disaster for blacks, women, and many others." Who are these "many others"? Do they include people beyond the borders of the United States? Or is it only the American victims of American nationalism who matter? This is a time for such questions. Slinking toward the center means de-racializing American politics, Lott argues, in the 1995 "Public Image Limited," whether for "new cosmopolitans" or for black public intellectuals like Michael Eric Dyson. "Playing to the center," Lott writes, "Dyson too easily takes his eyes off the prize." But what about today (writing in...