Mixed Feelings

Diaspora 8:1 1999 Mixed Feelings Ken Hirschkop University of Manchester Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. Bruce Robbins. New York: New York University Press, 1999. At the very beginning of Feeling Global, Bruce Robbins remarks that "it is not a surprise or scandal that any given version of internationalism turns out to be local and conjunctural rather than universal" (7). Not a surprise, because it's axiomatic for recent thinking about culture that every attempt to transcend the limits of a "local" standpoint is doomed from the outset. Not a scandal, because Robbins thinks he can fashion a version of left-wing internationalism that has moral force in spite ofthis. It's a difficult task, and Robbins not only refuses to cut corners, he insists on describing each corner in detail before carefully navigating his way around it. Had he been a sailor on Odysseus's ship, he would have thrown the Sirens megaphones before attempting to sail past their island. From the very beginning, then, Robbins wants us to understand that the internationalism he will argue for is, as he would put it, "worldly": not "an infinitely deferred ideal ofjustice for all" (3), but a kind of feeling and sympathy—really a mix of feelings and sympathies —tied to a particular "conjuncture." And when I say from the very beginning, I mean not from the very first page, but from the cover of the book, which announces, so to speak, the first and most difficult element of this conjuncture. The striking aerial photograph of Florence that dominates it, and the similar photographs of Naples, Athens, and Rome that front the separate chapters, all taken from a bomber piloted by Robbins's father in World War II, are visible metaphors for American post-war hegemony. The ability to project military force, to push capitalist relations and commodities across borders, and to restructure the cultures of other nations through the virus of the mass media are all neatly summed up by "the confident mobility and the implicit threat that go with the aerial perspective" (3). The violence of bombing has always signaled a peculiar combination of detachment and force in the popular imagination, and here this nexus is the point. For in the world of cultural and literary theory it's commonly 81 Diaspora 8:1 1999 assumed that detachment is itself a kind of violence or force, that to pretend to move beyond the confines of a culture, to intervene or even to think about cultures from above, depending on some kind of rational calculus, is to do violence to them. Having absorbed Foucault, "today's critical standpoint," Robbins points out with characteristic understatement, "tends to look at heights and distances with mistrust" (3). Robbins' choice of cover therefore announces not one, but two ambiguities. The first is the problem that will beset any project for a distinctively American internationalism. Won't any American internationalism mean simply the projection of American national interests, however conceived, around the globe? If American internationalism , no matter how well intentioned, always entails the deployment of resources of power and money concentrated in the world's only superpower, then internationalism in the moral sense, as sympathy for people beyond one's borders, would seem to entail a kind of conscious self-limitation. As Robbins points out, this is the conclusion drawn by many cultural critics: You want to be sympathetic to others? Leave them alone! You want to show international solidarity with those who are exploited and oppressed? Focus on getting America and Americans to do as little as possible!1 The second ambiguity is a kind of philosophical version of the first, with the general and universal taking the place of America. If detachment as such is violent, then any attempt, no matter from what locale it is launched, to know cultures from above rather than from within can only lead to their obliteration. According to this line of thought, the only solution to this problem is to avoid pretensions to detachment altogether, placing one's faith in the power of local movements and cultures to resist every universalizing hegemony. Robbins will refuse the celebration of the local for reasons we'll meet below...