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Comparative CosmopolitanismAuthor(s): Bruce RobbinsSource: Social Text, No. 31/32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992), pp. 169-186Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466224

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ComparativeCosmopolitanismBRUCEROBBINS

In therecent,much-publicizedbacklashagainstthe left's influencein theacademy, which is hardto disengage fromjournalistic cheerleadingforthe Gulf War, there has been a strangecoincidence. On the one hand,literaturedepartmentsare accused by the rightof abandoning"Culture"capital C in favor of multiculturalism, defined by The New York TimesMagazineas "the drive to includenon-Westernmaterials n every possi-ble course."'On the otherhand,in variantsof a ubiquitousmaster-narra-tive of academicization-as-decline, literature departments are alsoaccused of falling from the commonnessof "Culture" nto the privacyofprofessionalism - self-enclosed, jargon-ridden, hyper-theoretical, ignor-ing the common reader and lacking any general human concern. Aca-demics as a professional "conspiracy against the laity"; minorityconstituencies who insist on having their numbersand culturaldiffer-ences recognizedin thecurriculum,withoutconcernfor the value of theircultural exhibits as judged by some more general standard in bothcases the target s the same: theparticularas opposedto the universal,the"special interest"pressing for its own advantageat the expense of thecommongood.There is some reasonto be skepticalaboutany version of the commongood that can ally against it two such unlike terms as "non-Westerncultures" and "Americanprofessionals."But this is just the alliance Iwant to examine. My premisehere will be that the Right is right:not inits oppositionof the universal and the particular, bout which morelater,but in the (perhaps unconscious) implication that the unprecedentedglobal reach of the Anglo-Americanhumanities,our2recentreachingoutto diverse world written and oral traditions and to colonial, post-colonial,and minoritydiscourse, is somehow related to the local self-interest, thesocial or institutionalbeingof critics, scholars,and otherculturalworkersas a group. To this premise must be added, however, the question ofwhetherrelating local self-interest and global vision necessarily consti-tutes, as bothrightand left oftenassume,an accusation.I will answer thatit is not. Culturalcriticism in the United States has often claimed to beoppositional by virtue of its unworldliness its joint appeal to a re-stricted,elevated canon and to Arnoldianor Weberiandisinterestedness.Both appeals have been largely discredited in recent years. (Perhapsbecause it became increasinglydifficult to believe, with the increasing

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academicization of intellectual life, that institutions servicing so manythousands of people a year could be entirely staffed by, and engaged inproducing, mavericks and outsiders.) But the brouhaha in the press overmulticulturalism and the continuing vulnerability of "tenured radicals" toattack, not least from themselves, suggest that no alternative descriptionof where intellectuals think they stand (especially when they are not beingEurocentrists) or what intellectual activities they engage in (especiallywhen they are speaking about other cultures) has successfully taken theplace of the former ideal. This essay is an attempt to sketch out such analternative description. Now, perhaps, it is time to consider the new brandof intellectual oppositionality that might be emerging from what I call ournew worldliness- worldliness in the two senses of 1) planetary expan-siveness of subject-matter, on the one hand, and 2) unembarrassed accep-tance of professional self-interest, on the other.

The right is clearly wrong - indeed, it is contradicting itself- when itsuggests that multiculturalism and professionalism are related as parallelversions of particularism. Applied to these two objects, the charge ofparticularism indicates not a parallel but an intersection. For if profes-sional critics were hermetically sealed in an ivory tower, then why wouldthey respond to "pressure" from "minorities"? If academics were asself-enclosed as we are told (and as some of us appear on occasion tobelieve), then why would they support multiculturalism? Between thesetwo cases of supposed particularism, there would in fact seem to be somesort of communication, some common language, common interest, com-mon ground. But what ground could that be?When we speak today of "world literature" or "global culture," we arenot naming an optional extension of the canon; we are speaking of a newframing of the whole which revalues both unfamiliar and long-acceptedgenres, produces new concepts and criteria of judgment, and affects eventhose critics who never "do" world literature or colonial discourse at all-affects all critics, that is, by shifting criticism's whole sense of intel-lectual enterprise. In an unprecedented and somewhat mysterious way,what it means to be an intellectual or a critic seems to have becomeworldly or transnational or - to use a wilfully provocative word - cos-mopolitan. But this worldliness or cosmopolitanism does not yet seem tohave moved forward to the stage of conscious self-definition, self-legiti-mation, or self-defense. If the neo-conservatives have been quick toattack the emergent or perhaps already dominant sensibility which sup-ports multicultural inclusiveness, they have kept the term cosmopolitan-ism for themselves. Contrasting it to particularism or "culturalegocentricity," Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, for example, citesit with full approval.3 The left meanwhile, groping for a line of defensestronger than "diversity for diversity's sake," has almost completely

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BruceRobbinsshunned the term. And this is in large part, I think, because it connectsinternational or global subject-matter with the embarrassingly localplacement of intellectuals in relatively privileged institutions.Beyond the adjectival sense of "belonging to all parts of the world; notrestricted to any one country or its inhabitants," the word cosmopolitanimmediately evokes the image of a privileged person: someone who canclaim to be a "citizen of the world" by virtue of independent means,high-tech tastes, and globe-trotting mobility. The association of cosmo-politan globality with privilege is so deeply unattractive to us, I think,because deep down we tend to agree with the right that, especially whenemployed as academics, intellectuals are a "special interest" group repre-senting nothing but themselves. Why else, I wonder, would we put our-selves through such extraordinarily ostentatious and unproductiveself-torment over the issue of "representation," that is, the metropolitanright or privilege of "representing" non-metropolitan others? We have notthereby done anything to remedy the great historical injustices of colo-nialism and neo-colonialism. What we have done is helped to produce thegreat public relations disaster called "political correctness." And, as Ed-ward Said recently suggested, we have not done even the little we coulddo to correct the simple, brutal "ignorance" of Middle Eastern culturewhich permitted the personification of Iraq as Saddam Hussein and thedestruction from the air whose casualties are still being counted. Ratherthan accepting the inescapability of "representation" and making the bestuse we can of its powers, we have preferred to take it as an unwarrantedor questionable privilege, an occasion for repetitive self-questioning.This is not to say that the privileges associated with cosmopolitanismcan be, as the saying goes, "left unexamined." The first entry under"cosmopolitan" in the Oxford English Dictionary, from John Stuart Mill'sPolitical Economy, suggests one reason why left-wing critics have re-coiled from it: "Capital," Mill writes in 1848, "is becoming more andmore cosmopolitan." Cosmopolitanism would seem to mimic capital inseizing for itself the privilege (to paraphraseWall Street) of "knowing noboundaries." Which is also the gendered privilege of knowing no bodies:of being, in Donna Haraway's words, "a conquering gaze from nowhere,"a gaze that claims "the power to see and not be seen, to represent whileescaping representation."4 We may also remember that the gendered andclassed privilege of mobile observation in a world of tight borders andlimited visibility corresponds to a traditional self-image of criticism itself- criticism as disinterestedness, neutrality, objectivity - that the Leftrightfully shies away from. The very act of comparison, as in "compara-tive literature," can seem to signal a liberation from insularity and na-tional prejudice into the one true judgment. And when the internationalrange of comparison suddenly and dramatically expands to include theworld outside Europe, there is the danger that, under cover of the most

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Comparativeosmopolitanismdemocratic intentions, what will be re-invented is the old "free-floatingintellectual" and/or an even older version of privileged impartiality. Themost visibly ineligible example is perhaps V. S. Naipaul, who has recentlybeen singing the praises of what he calls "our universal civilization."5Naipaul presents himself (in Rob Nixon's words) as "the ultimate literaryapatride, the most comprehensively uprooted of twentieth-century writ-ers and most bereft of national traditions" (1). And he does so in order tolay claim to Arnoldian objectivity, to a "secure, reputable tradition ofextratraditionalism" (11)- that is, to "detachment" in the geographical,empirical, and political senses of the word (3).6

As an image of criticism, "detachment" is deservedly obsolete. It is anarticle of our contemporary faith that, like Naipaul, intellectuals andacademics are not "detached" but situated -situated, for instance, asmetropolitans and/or as professionals. To say this, however, is already tofeel some impious stirrings of doubt. What precisely do we mean by the"situatedness" we devoutly claim to believe in? What excess baggagedoes it carry? How tightly does it restrict access to the other places wemay come from, the other places we communicate with? How far can thismetaphor of locality be reconciled with the expansive awareness orworldliness that we also aspire to?In an effort to begin thinking through this piece of piety, let us con-sider, for example, Tim Brennan's application of the term "cosmopolitan"to Salman Rushdie. Brennan speaks of the "almost boastful cosmopolitan-ism" (134) of "third world metropolitan celebrities," including Rushdie,who are celebrated at the expense of "the domestic or indigenous artist inthe process of an actual anticolonial struggle" (135).7 In another article,he places Rushdie in a group of "cosmopolitan commentators on the ThirdWorld, who offer an inside view of formerly submerged peoples for targetreading publics in Europe and North America in novels that comply withmetropolitan tastes" (63). The message of such cosmopolitans - a cri-tique of Third World nationalism and Third World elites - "is very famil-iar to us," Brennan concludes, "because it has been easier to embrace inour metropolitan circles than the explicit challenges of, say, theSalvadoran protest-author Manlio Argueta...." Thus the metropolis under-stands the Third World in terms of a "disengagement" and a "rootless-ness" that are "not at all characteristic of the 'counter-hegemonicaesthetics' of much Third World writing" (64).8This argument can be classified as strongly reader- or reception-deter-mined. According to Brennan, the decisive, definitive reality behindRushdie's writing, a social reality pinpointed with the authority of alexicon borrowed from market research, is the "target reading publics" ofEurope and North America: the "tastes" of the metropolitan consumer.Now the category of the "metropolitan" is clearly necessary here, as it isnecessary to Rob Nixon's project of dispelling "the myth of Naipaul's

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BruceRobbinshomelessness" (27). But simply to catch an author in the act of belongingto the metropolis, even one who claims to belong nowhere, is a two-fingerexercise, given that we believe in advance that everyone belongs some-where, that there is no alternative to belonging. The exercise becomescomplicated, unpredictable, and worth doing only when we ask what itmeans to belong, or how many different ways of belonging there may be.Absolute homelessness is indeed a myth, and so is cosmopolitanism in itsstrictly negative sense of "free[dom] from national limitations or attach-ments" - as in the doctrine, in George Boas's words, "that nationality isinsignificant from every point of view."9 But this negative sense of "cos-mopolitan" coexists from the outset in tension with more positive ones:with the scientific sense of "world-wide distribution," and with the moregeneral sense of "belonging" to parts of the world other than one's nation.In any given case, it seems reasonable to try to sustain this tension,valuing the negative relation to nationality (which has its attractions thesedays, especially since the United Nations voted its support to U.S. war inthe Gulf) without giving up an insistence on belonging - an insistencethat includes the possibility of presence in other places, dispersed but realforms of membership, a density of overlapping allegiances rather than theabstract emptiness of non-allegiance.After all, we know in other contexts that "grounding," "placement,"and "location" are tricky metaphors. Whether mediated by the Marxistglobal division of labor or the psychoanalytic model of selfhood, thenotion that we are where we are not is an equal and opposite constituentof the new common sense. If our supposed distances are really localities,as we piously repeat, it is also true that there are distances within what wethought were merely localities. No localization can be assumed to deter-mine absolutely. If it could, then the charge of "metropolitanism" thatfalls on "celebrities" like Naipaul and Rushdie would also have to fallcrushingly on the metropolitan critic who makes that charge, whatever hisor her own political intentions and degree of celebrity.?1 Situatednesswould indeed be our "faith," in the most dogmatic sense, if we allowed itto suggest the surrogate divinity of a single, absolutely determining causeand if we did so, moreover, largely as a masochistic means of punishingand paralyzing ourselves.Not enough imagination has gone into the different modalities ofsituatedness-in-displacement. And one of the places where we must learnto see a more complex function or "office" of placement is the university.It says something about the humanities as institutionalized in the univer-sity, for example, that they can both over-appreciate the rootlessness ofthe world's Naipauls and, for reasons that are no less institutional, feedoff what Brennan calls "protest-authors" as well. It says - and this is thebeginning of an answer to the Right's charge that professional scholarsesoterically ignore the general welfare - it says that critics have to

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Comparativeosmopolitanismlegitimate themselves to the public, that they do so as transmitters ofcultural artifacts whose value to the public is a site of interpretive contest,as the size and limits of that public are also sites of contest, and that thosewho criticize Naipaul as a metropolitan are simply engaging in thatcontest, which is to say behaving in no less "professional" a manner,obeying no less "professional" a logic, than those who delight to see theirprejudices confirmed by Naipaul's trashing of the postcolonial nations.The political differences that count are not differences about profession-alism as such."

Professional self-legitimation can of course proceed by universalizingthose values ("Western culture") of which the critic is custodian andtransmitter. But professional self-legitimation can also base itself on thepremise that all universals are merely particulars in disguise. The anti-cosmopolitan jargon of the authentically particular and the authenticallylocal provides no escape from or political alternative to the realm of theprofessional. It simply conceals the exemplification, representation, andgeneralization in which any intellectual work, professional or not, isinescapably involved, its own included.Consider, for example, how the piety of the particular functions withinthe most basic and apparently neutral of scholarly concepts: that ofspecificity. In her seminal essay "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholar-ship and Colonial Discourses," Chandra Talpade Mohanty objected thatfirst-world feminist scholarship has often used the category "woman" ina universalizing way "with little regard for historical specificities"(340).12 Her objection to "ethnocentric universalism" (336) in the nameof specific situations was extremely useful then, and it remains indispens-able now.13Nevertheless, it entitles one to inquire into the specific situa-tion in which it itself is formulated and received. What about the(presumably "western"?) logic which values and rewards this insistenceon ("eastern"?) specificity? Why should the professional discourse ofmetropolitan critics greet the call for specificity with such suspiciouslyunanimous enthusiasm?

One answer to these questions appears in Mohanty's counter-exampleof scholarship that is not "ethnocentric universalism," the example of a"careful, politically focussed local analysis" of lacemakers in Narsapur,India. This analysis leads to the conclusion, Mohanty says, that "There isno easy generalization in the direction of 'women' in India, or 'women inthe third world'; nor is there a reduction of... the exploitation of thelacemakers to cultural explanations about the passivity or obedience thatmight characterize these women and their situation .... These Narsapurwomen are not mere victims of the production process ...." I am in fullsympathy with what I take to be Mohanty's intent here, but I am troubledby the possible consequences of her phrasing. If we agree that there is "noeasy generalization," don't we want to retain the right to difficult gener-

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BruceRobbinsalization? Critics other than Mohanty might easily conclude, otherwise,that generalization as such was politically undesirable. Whereas general-izing is precisely what Mohanty is doing. What she uncovers among theNarsapur women is not so much a set of particulars as an instance of arather general rule: the rule that exploitation will always be met withresistance. As Mohanty herself notes, the finding of active agency amongthe Narsapur women registers nothing but that specific generalizationwhich symmetrically opposes Orientalist generalizations about women's"passivity" and "obedience." "Specificity," in other words, functions hereas an innocuous mask which hides not only a claim to epistemologicalauthority, but also, more significantly, the unnecessarily camouflagedtransmission of counter-universals, alternative generalizations.14I am trying to suggest three things. First, that the act of finding"agency" in text after text corresponds to a logic which is as much a partof our "professional" or "metropolitan" situatedness as the act of neglect-ing or denying it would be. Second, that a critic's transmission of thecultural value called "agency" should not disguise itself as a defense ofthe particular, the local, and the specific, since it involves generalizationsthat are no less dramatically synthetic - the people united will never bedefeated, or the unconquerable human spirit - than the Orientalist ste-reotypes they are marshalled against. And third, that if we do not need"easy generalizations," we do need difficult ones - for example, themore difficult though less pious procedure of not assuming agency to beeverywhere present, but trying to explain why it is where it is and why itisn't where it isn't.

It is arguable that, as a critical procedure or paradigm, the formulaicrecovery of inspirational agency may foster political quiescence, while amore politicized criticism might in fact result from a focus on vaster, lessanthropomorphic, less hortatory structures. After all, why do we all value"agency" so highly? As an abstraction that lends itself equally well to theMarxism of Lukacs and the humanism of Matthew Arnold, agency legiti-mates the specific politics of neither one. What it does legitimate is thepublic representativeness of criticism as such, its responsiveness to theactive voice or will of the people. When the academic humanist pulls thisparticular rabbit from his or her text, the point is both that the peoplemake their own history and also, however implicitly, that the academicwho is representing them as so doing, by transmitting this tidbit of thecultural heritage, is himself or herself acting in the interests of the peoplethereby, including the people who make that academic's own immediatehistory - the public legislators and private funders who pass judgment onacademic legitimacy.However desirable agency may be, there is at any rate no inherentconnection between it and the particular, the specific, the local.'5 Here anedifyingly unliterary parallel presents itself: the so-called "localities"

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debate which has raged over the past few years among radical geogra-phers. The move in geography to study the smaller, sub-regional unitsknown as localities came at a time when the worldwide restructuring ofthe capitalist economy seemed at once to be increasing the scale of globalinterconnectedness and, in direct proportion, to be decreasing the powerof the human agents concerned to grasp or resist its operations. In scalingdown the size of the units studied, geographers were hoping to draw onthe empirical authority of the particular, or rather were hoping throughthat authority to sustain a waning illusion of agency. Hidden away in theminiaturizing precision of "locality," with its associations of presence anduniqueness, empirical concreteness, complete experience, accessible sub-jectivity, has been the nostalgia for a collective subject-in-action that isno longer so easy to localize. As one essay in the debate concluded, "Wedo not have some privileged access to understanding patterns of humanagency simply by studying localities" (187).16 Thinking small is notenough; agency is not to be had so predictably. The unit of coherencewhere transformative energies have the best chance of seizing hold is notpredictable in advance; it might well be larger, not smaller. As Neil Smithwrites: "it is not clear in the current restructuring that, in economic termsat least, coherent regions continue to exist as subdivisions of the nationalrather than international economy."'7This suggests the case for a certain cosmopolitanism - not one ob-sessed with embodying a preconceived totality, but one which does notjudge in advance the macro-political scale of its units, which sees "world-ing" as a process, to quote Gayatri Spivak, and a process in which morethan one "world" may be realized, where "worlds" may be contested.'8"Cosmos" (world) in "cosmopolitan" originally meant simply "order" or"adornment" - as in cosmetics - and was only later extended metaphor-ically to refer to "the world." Cosmetics preceeded totality. Worlding,then, might be seen as "making up" the face of the planet -somethingthat can be done in diverse ways. At the same time, the case for this moremodest cosmopolitanism is also a case for a certain professionalism - aprofessionalism which, without presumption of ultimate totalizing cer-tainty, believes in its own intellectual powers of generalization, abstrac-tion, synthesis, and representation at a distance, and in the process ofputting them to use. Which believes, one might say, in its own work.

* * *

Here, then, is a task: to drop the conversation-stopping, always-reversiblecharge of "privilege" and instead to discriminate degrees of complacency,degrees of service to the general welfare, within an overarching acknowl-edgement that the professional producers and transmitters of knowledgeare of course not motivated solely (if at all) by pure disinterested altruism.This effort can begin where the cosmopolitan's privileges are mostgrossly accepted. In the new volume Global Culture, there is an essay

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BruceRobbinscalled "Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture," written by UlfHannerz, which defines the figure of the cosmopolitan by a series ofexclusions. "Anybody who moves about in the world" (238), the authorwrites, is not a cosmopolitan.'9 Nor is it sufficient to have "a willingnessto engage with the Other" (239). Cosmopolitans are not tourists, for whomthey are likely to be mistaken, since "tourists are not participants" (242).They are not exiles, since the exile's involvement with another culture hasbeen "forced" (242). "Most ordinary labour migrants are not cosmopoli-tans either. For them going away may be, ideally, home plus higherincome; often the involvement with another culture is not a fringe benefitbut a necessary cost, to be kept as low as possible" (243). "The perspec-tive of the cosmopolitan must entail relationships to a plurality of culturesunderstood as distinct entities" (239).At this point, if not before, one becomes aware of how self-serving theprocess of definition is. Imagining cultures as "distinct entities" makesthem into objects of artistic appreciation for the passing connoisseur; it isa way of imagining that all privileges of mobility and comparison inherein the cosmopolitan observer. As the definition narrows further, it accu-mulates still more privileges. Cosmopolitans, like expatriates and ex-ex-patriates, "are people who have chosen to live abroad" (my italics). Theyknow "that they can go home when it suits them." Today, this knowledgeis less often guaranteed by independent means than by their occupa-tions. "Transnational cultures today tend to be more or less clearcutoccupational cultures" (243). What occupations? The climactic exampleof transnational occupational culture is - to no one's surprise - theintellectuals.

This more or less shameless use of the new "global culture" to re-in-vent or re-legitimate Mannheim's "free-floating" intellectuals seems tocorroborate, once again, the fear that cosmopolitanism is only a tool ofprivilege and self-aggrandizement. But this is not the precise moral I drawfrom it. The essay's criteria for true cosmopolitanism share a good dealwith traditional aesthetics: in its view, cosmopolitanism becomes an au-tonomous, unforced appreciation of coherence and novelty among distinctcultural entities. The editor of the volume in which this essay appears,Mike Featherstone, stresses the same point when he describes "transna-tional intellectuals" as those who "seek out and adopt a reflexive,metacultural or aesthetic stance to divergent cultural experiences" (9-my italics). In my own view, it is this aestheticism, with its presumptionof inequality and its spectatorial absence of commitment to change thatinequality, which disqualifies the essay from representing the new trans-nationality of intellectual work. What we have to object to, in otherwords, is the particular position that the essay tries to legitimate, and notthe effort of self-legitimation itself.

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By producing a new, international pedigree for the old idea of theintellectual as autonomous critic, this essay joins the genre of the allegoryof vocation. Allegories of vocation are critical works which, while doingwhatever other interpretive tasks they set themselves, also perform asecond, most often implicit function: they invent and arrange their con-cepts and characters so as to narrativize and argue for the general valueand significance of the intellectual vocation they exemplify. Examplesinclude Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, which tells the story ofhow leftist critics like Williams himself arose from Romanticism to writeworks like Culture and Society, or Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman inthe Attic, which turns Jane Eyre into a paradigm for the rise of thetwentieth-century feminist critic. (Or, for that matter, Gayatri Spivak's"Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," which revises theJane Eyre paradigm into an allegory of post-colonial criticism.) My pointhere is that I have not criticized any of these works by identifying thegenre they belong to. If we accept the premise that we want to dosignificant work - that we want the privilege, if you like, of doing workthat is more significant than merely earning a living - then we mustdesire and value texts which help explain, to ourselves and to others, whya particular sort of work is meaningful and valuable.We can criticize theaestheticism of this cosmopolitan, in other words, but not the fact that theessay makes a case for intellectuals. What should be set against it isanother case for intellectuals that mobilizes cosmopolitanism differently.As an alternative within the same genre, then, I will take up in conclu-sion the rich and influential work of historian of anthropology JamesClifford, work which has been so inspiring to students seeking a sense ofintellectual vocation in the confusingly transnational space of contempo-rary knowledge, I think, in part because it has struggled with our ambiv-alence both about cosmopolitanism and about professionalism. Clifford'sposition on cosmopolitanism seems to be expressed unequivocally in hisinfluential review of Edward Said's Orientalism. There the term "cosmo-politan" is unmistakably derogatory. "Said's basic values," Clifford says,"are cosmopolitan." This statement concludes Clifford's case that "hu-manist common denominators...are meaningless, since they bypass thelocal cultural codes that make personal experience articulate." "The priv-ilege of standing above cultural particularism, of aspiring to the univer-salist power that speaks for humanity...is a privilege invented by atotalizing Western liberalism" (263). What must always be avoided, Clif-ford declares, even if the concept of culture itself is eventually aban-doned, is "the positing of cosmopolitan essences" (274-75).In this context, "totalizing Western liberalism" seems to name what iswrong both with cosmopolitanism and with professionalism. Clifford'sessay "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski," firstpublished in 1985, has thus been taken as an undermining of the scientific

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BruceRobbinsmodel of ethnographic authority that Malinowski did so much to make theprofessional standard, an undermining carried out in large part by invidi-ous juxtaposition with the messily literary, unsystematic, unprofessionalfigure of Conrad.20 "By professionalizing fieldwork," Clifford writes,"anthropology transformed a widespread predicament into a scientificmethod" (95). Conrad, who acknowledges the same (cosmopolitan) pre-dicament without escaping into scientific method, thus seems to embodythe literary as an alternative to the professional.If this were all, it would be manifestly insufficient. For, as PaulRabinow pointed out in his contribution to WritingCulture, it would leaveClifford no way of acknowledging the fact that, however "literary" hisstyle, in relation to the anthropologists who are his subjects, he too isplaying a professional role. "There is only one 'professional,' so to speak,in the crowd," Rabinow comments. "For, whereas all the others men-tioned are practicing anthropologists, James Clifford has created andoccupied the role of ex officio scribe to our scribblings .... Clifford takesus as his natives" (242). A "new specialty is currently in the process ofself-definition," Rabinow says (242). But Clifford's "own writing andsituation," which define this specialty, "are left unexamined" (244).21This sort of tit-for-tat, in which injurious epithets like "specialist,""professional," and "metropolitan" are asked to stand in for substantivepolitical judgment, must always be the result as long as it is assumed thatto go ahead and examine one's professional "writing and situation," toopen one's eyes finally and painfully to the "situatedness" of a metropol-itan or a cosmopolitan, is ipso facto to judge oneself intolerably contam-inated and self-contradictory. One of the extraordinary strengths ofClifford's work is that this is an assumption he has come increasingly toquestion. If one looks more closely at the Conrad/Malinowski essay, onesees that in fact neither "professional" nor "cosmopolitan" functions thereas a term of opprobrium. A struggle with "cosmopolitanism" (95), we aretold, is something Conrad and Malinowski have in common. And theessay is about a "difficult accession to innovative professional expres-sion" (96 - my italics) that they also have in common.And that Clifford himself has in common with them as well. The lastline of this extremely moving essay is an ambiguous quotation fromConrad's Marlow: "You see me, whom you know." The point of theambiguity seems clear: the essay can itself be read as an allegory ofvocation describing a "difficult accession to innovative professional ex-pression" shared not only by Conrad and Malinowski, but by Clifford too,along with many of his readers. One might think of the essay, then, as justthat act of professional self-examination that Rabinow found lacking inWriting Culture. Much of its power comes from the extra work it does toredescribe and legitimate the work of the historian of anthropology along

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with that of the anthropologist, the professional, second-order work ofcriticism as well as the "primary,""unprofessional" work of the novelist.In Clifford's allegorical reading of Conrad, "Heart of Darkness" be-comes an alternative model of writing that is no less professional thanMalinowski's professional ethnography. The decisive difference betweenthem is that Conrad includes the experience of fashioning and self-fash-ioning, the activity of selecting and discarding, that goes into any ethno-graphic writing. His fiction includes the exclusions - the Lie to theIntended, the tearing off of Kurtz's "Exterminate the brutes " from theofficial report - exclusions that are inevitable in all professional dis-course. Professional discourse, the moral would seem to go, cannot bepurified; it can only be saved by its ironic self-consciousness of itsimpurity.We may or may not feel that this solution "works"- that it risesabove, say, irony as a mode or style of living with exclusion too comfort-ably. But in fact this is only one of two resolutions to the dilemma ofprofessional exclusiveness that the essay explores. After all, why is ex-clusion inevitable? On the one hand, Clifford suggests that, like fiction,even the most scientific discourse selects and fashions and invents. Hereonly self-consciousness will help. On the other hand, however, he alsosuggests that the Lie to the Intended and the tearing off of "Exterminatethe brutes " are exclusions produced not by representation in general, butmore precisely by the writer's or professional's deliberate act of loyaltyto the arbitrarylimits of his chosen culture. Marlow, Clifford says, "learnsto lie - that is, to communicate within the collective partial fictions ofcultural life" (99). Clifford tries to restrict the damage this will do as aparadigm of professional ethnography: the "ethnographic standpoint" isbetter represented, he adds, not by Marlow but by the second narrator,silently listening to him, who "salvages, compares, and (ironically) be-lieves these staged truths." But this distinguishing of narrators does notseriously affect the result: professional writing seen as "local, partialknowledge," or more strongly (but relegated to a footnote), as "a positivechoice for the 'lie of culture"' (99). "[L]ike Marlow's account aboard theNellie, the truths of cultural descriptions are meaningful to specific inter-pretive communities in limiting historical circumstances" (112). The ar-bitrary, exclusive cultural wholeness that Malinowski imposes upon theTrobriands results from an arbitrary, even absurd act of self-definingallegiance to the professional community of English anthropologists. Theethnographer lies about his cultural objects, presenting them as more"local" than they are, in order to make himself a member of the "local"culture of his fellow professionals.This is a dead end of professional self-definition from which ironicself-consciousness offers no hope of rescue. But Clifford does find a wayout of it. The logic of self-rescue goes from "culture" to the "post-cul-

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tural" and finally back to the "cosmopolitan." If it is no longer feasible tothink of the cultures studied by ethnography as distinct entities, as Clif-ford repeatedly suggests, then why assume that the professional culture ofethnographers is a distinct entity? If we must learn to see other culturesnot as distinct, different wholes, but as mobile, fluid, hybrid, and inclu-sive, then why insist on a necessary and absolute exclusiveness in study-ing the culture that studies those cultures? In writing himself out of"culture" as an absurd but necessary (and necessarily exclusive) order,Clifford also writes himself out of "the profession" as a similarly neces-sary (and exclusive) absurdity. Instead of a dichotomy of professionaldescribers of culture, on the one hand, and their non-professional objectsof description, on the other, Clifford now assumes a "post-cultural" spacewhere the subjects and objects of description are at least potentiallyreversible, where the mobility required for observation and comparison isnot monopolized by one side, where the word "local" has lost much of itscontrastive force. His name for this space -a space that is not exclu-sively professional - is "cosmopolitanism."In the work that has followed The Predicament of Culture, Clifford hasradically revised his opinion of cosmopolitanism.22 Rather than speakingin the name of the local, as in the review of Orientalism, he has beenpointing out the manifold abuses of "thinking local," the distortionsinvolved in taking "the field" and "the village" as localizations of culture.He has been calling on anthropologists to bring back into theirethnographies the "cosmopolitan intermediaries" who intervene in andhelp constitute them, and "to focus on hybrid, cosmopolitan experiencesas much as on rooted, native ones." Clifford can approve of cosmopoli-tanism because he has been seeing it, and teaching others to see it, asneither the consequence nor the prerogative of "totalizing Western liber-alism"; he has been seeing it as something he himself shares with hissubjects. It is not only gentlemen travellers, but the people of color whowere the servants of those travellers, who have "specific cosmopolitanviewpoints." Even the organized coercion of migrant labor produces"cosmopolitan workers." "The notion that certain classes of people arecosmopolitan (travellers) while the rest are local (natives)" is only "theideology of one (very powerful) travelling culture." Questions of poweraside, "they" and "we" can no longer be divided as "local" and "cosmo-politan."Thus the latter term becomes available again for general use. Insteadof renouncing cosmopolitanism as a false universal, one can embrace it asan impulse to knowledge that is shared with others, a striving to transcendpartiality that is itself partial, but no more so than the similar cognitivestrivings of many diverse peoples. The world's particulars can now berecoded, in part at least, as the world's "discrepant cosmopolitanisms."

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Comparativeosmopolitanism

A final few words about how comparative attention to "discrepant cosmo-politanisms" can and cannot help us respond to the current backlash. In aarticle in The New Yorker which does its bit for this backlash, CynthiaOzick comes to her conclusion on multiculturalism: "I would not wish todrop Homer or Jane Austen or Kafka to make room for an AleutianIslander of lesser gifts, unrepresented though her group may be on thecollege reading list."23I take Clifford's reversal on cosmopolitanism as ahint that one of the various moves we might make against this use of theAleutian Islander as an empty figure for pure particularity, and against thelabel of cultural particularism in general, is to fill the figure in, not justas a particular (worthy of the same respect as every other particular), butalso, perhaps, as the carrier and embodiment of a certain cosmopolitan-ism. One might for example bring forward an essay by Claude Levi-Strauss on the "cosmopolitanism" of native Americans along the PacificNorthwest coast. Apropos of the putative Westernness of the Great Ideas,one might emphasize the word "Egypt" on the first page - unfortunately,only on the first page - of an article called "The Greek Origins of theIdea of Cosmopolitanism," which reads as follows: "The earliest recordedformulation of this idea is supplied by modern archaeological discoveryat Tell el-Amarna, in Egypt. Inscriptions have been found there, writtenby Akhnaton (pharoah of Egypt from 1375 to 1358 BC)...."24 Or onemight counter ethnocentrisms both right and left with cosmopolitanismlike that of the last page of I, Rigoberta Menchu: "[M]y commitment toour struggle knows no boundaries nor limits. That's why I've travelled tomany places ...25The scholarly project of accumulating instances of cosmopolitanismfrom around the globe could help us make the point that the concept isneither a Western invention nor a Western privilege. When the Rightsuggests that after all, there is ethnocentrism everywhere, that is, in theThird World too, the inevitable prelude to the suggestion that, after all,only in "the West" has there been any move away from it, we can then saynot just that unequal power has made Eurocentrism qualitatively differentin its effects from other ethnocentrisms. We can also say that we value themove away from ethnocentrism - in all the many places, Western andnon-Western, where it has occurred. To take an empirical route out of theover-simple binary of universal and particular, rather than performing amerely logical or deconstructive exercise on it, would put the matteracross to a broader audience, and it would also have the advantage ofdistinguishing cosmopolitanism from an abstract, ahistorical universal-ism. For it would bring out many diverse and overlapping syncretisms andsecularisms26 for which the term is an umbrella. (The opposition betweenreligion and secularism itself might be one casualty of such a project.)

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BruceRobbinsThe limits of the term "cosmopolitanism" are also its conjuncturalvirtues. No one actually is or ever can be a cosmopolitan in the full senseof belonging everywhere. If such a thing were conceivable, it would notbe desirable, for as Donna Haraway has pointed out, it could only exist inthe form of complete cultural relativism.27 The interest of the term cosmo-

politanism is located, then, not in its full theoretical extension, where itbecomes a paranoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience, but rather (par-adoxically) in its local applications, where the unrealizable ideal pro-duces normative pressure against such alternatives as, say, thefashionable "hybridization." Its provocative association with privilege isperhaps better understood, in this context, as the normative edge thatcosmopolitanism tries to add to the inclusiveness and diversity of multi-culturalism - as an attempt to name a necessary but difficult normative-ness.The term is not as philosophically ambitious as the word"universalism," though it does some of the same work. (It makes room formoments of generalizing, one might say, without offering license foruninhibited universalizing.) Nor is it as politically ambitious as the word"internationalism." But it does start us asking what form such an interna-tionalism might best take. The academy-bashing journalists have beensuggesting that multiculturalism is nothing but an attempt to revive thenaive Third Worldism of the 1960s, with its automatic division betweenImperialist Bad Guys and Newly Independent Good Guys. It seems to methat the term cosmopolitanism better describes the sensibility of ourmoment. Now, as opposed perhaps to two or three decades ago, anti-im-perialism has been and must be newly careful, skeptical, measured in itssupport of any nation. Recently and paradigmatically, it has had to learnto oppose Bush's war without defending Saddam Hussein. More gener-ally, it has been to school with movements in the name of gender, class,and sexual orientation which, in Jean Franco's words, "have sprung up onthe margins of the nation state" and "no longer couch cultural or politicalprojects in national terms" (205).28 Our moment, one might say, is that ofthe globalizing of such movements -a moment to which there wouldcorrespond, ideally, some new, de-nationalized internationalism.If cosmopolitanism cannot deliver an explicitly and directly politicalprogram, it is at least a step toward this sort of internationalist politicaleducation. By suggesting that there is no uniquely correct place to stand,it can take some of the moralism out of our politics. Better still, by doingso it can liberate us to pursue a long-term process of trans-local connect-ing that is both political and educational at once. And in the midst of theshort-term politico-educational crisis where we now find ourselves, it candesignate a teaching of culture capable of mobilizing the energy andenthusiasm of a broad front of people who are not all or even predomi-nantly leftists, whatever the right may think. As a practice of comparison,a range of tolerances and secularisms, an international competence or

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mode of citizenship that is the monopoly of no one class or civilization,it answers the charges of "particularism" and "loss of standards," insist-ing confidently that multiculturalism is a common program, a criticalprogram, a positive ideal of interconnected knowledge and pedagogy, thatelevates rather than lowers existing educational standards.29If you doubtits power, listen to Sylvia Wynter's critique of California's new, insuffi-ciently multicultural history texts. Wynter calls for a new frameworkwhich "seeks to go beyond the model of a nation-state coterminus onlywith Euro-immigrant America, to one coterminus as a 'world' civiliza-tion, with all its peoples; and therefore, for the first time in recordedhistory, coterminus (as a land that's not been yet but must be) withhumankind."30

The word "cosmopolitan" comes from the Greek for "citizen of theworld." In an international context, the model of citizenship is extremelyproblematic. In the absence of a world state - which at present seemsunimaginable, or imaginable only as nightmare- the cosmopolitan can-not be to the globe as the citizen is to the nation, and to suggest thecontrary is to create dangerous illusions of global equality, responsibility,and voter-like control. To associate a citizen's rights and obligations witha cosmopolitan's knowledge is also to risk a new slide toward elitism. I'mmoved to put it forward anyway, or at least to use it in pointing toward asite that some other term may fill better, largely because of the Gulf War,because of the failure of internationalism that the Gulf War illustrated,and because of my sense that the central task for intellectuals in thisparticular corner of North America is to do something about the desperatepretensions of this failing, flailing nation to act as world policeman. Itseems to me that the knowledge that might have helped stop this war, andthat might help stop American citizens from making or approving otherwars like it, has a strong claim to be considered, in our own day, "the bestthat is known and thought." At any rate, to preserve and transmit suchknowledge, trying to educate future citizens of the world rather thanfuture world policemen, seems to me a task worthy of any humanist'sintellectual curiosity and sympathetic imagination.Notes

1. AnneMatthews, Decipheringictorian nderwearndOtherSeminars,"heNewYorkTimesMagazine,February10, 1991, p. 57. I am gratefulto JeanFranco,DominickLaCapra, atyaMohanty,araSuleriandJenniferWicke orkind nvitationso talk hispaperhrough;othefriendsmentioned erein or their orbearancendresistance;nd oGeraldGraff,KenHirschkop,MichaelSprinker,ndthe members f the Social Textcollective ortheirhelpful ommentsndcriticisms.2. As theword"our"uggests, amprimarilynterestedere naddressingeoplewho,likemyself,earnanuneasy iving romculturalwork nprofessionsnd nstitutionshatsometimeseemaimed gainsthepolitical nd thical rinciples hich ivethatwork uchmeaning s it has.Thosewhowork lsewhere,r whoescape uchcontradictionsetweenworkandpoliticsby sustainingheirradicalism ithouthehelpof tenure,will I hopepardonwhatmay look like the self-indulgentarcissism f this exercise.Otherswillhopefullyxcusewhat heymaysee asmyevasion f personal etail.

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3. Dinesh d'Souza,"IlliberalEducation,"TheAtlanticMonthly(March1991), pp. 51-79.On p. 54, D'Souza is quoting (with approval)an article by Michael O'Brien in TheChronicleof HigherEducation.4. Donna Haraway,"SituatedKnowledge:The Science Question in Feminism and thePrivilegeof PartialPerspective,"Simians,Cyborgs,andWomen London:Free AssociationBooks, 1990), p. 188.Haraway'sremarks eave the questionof whatpreciselyhappenshow far the undesirableconsequences of panopticismare undone- when bodies arereturned o visibility - a questionfor the so-called"experimental thnography."Would a"panopticism"n which the viewerwould be visible remainunacceptable?Wouldacosmo-politanismwhich wouldbe forcedto know boundariesand bodies still be one?5. V. S. Naipaul,"OurUniversalCivilization,"New YorkReviewof Books (January31,1991), pp. 22-25.6. Rob Nixon, "LondonCalling:V.S. Naipauland the License of Exile,"SouthAtlanticQuarterly, 87:1 (Winter 1988), pp. 1-37. Note the beautiful phrase "comprehensivelyuprooted,"whichrecognizesdiversityof uprootingsandencouragesdiscrimination f moreor fewer,greaterorlesseruprooting, ather hananover-simpledichotomyof rooted-or-not.7. Tim Brennan,"India,Nationalism,andOtherFailures,"SouthAtlanticQuarterly87:1(Winter1988), pp. 131-146. Brennanusefully arguesfor a discrimination f nationalisms:"The cosmopolitan writers very often cannot accept the virtues of nationalismin thispostcolonial setting, are unable to see it as a defensive bulwark,and thereforefail todistinguishbetweenmonstrosities ike Pakistanor Kenya... andCubaand Vietnam" 144).This arguments elaboratedmorefully inSalmanRushdieandthe ThirdWorld New York:St. Martin's,1989).8. Tim Brennan,"The NationalLonging for Form,"Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation andNarration (London:Routledge, 1990), pp. 44-70. For furtherclarification,see Brennan'sresponseto his criticsin thepresent ssue.9. GeorgeBoas, "Typesof Internationalismn EarlyNineteenth-Century rance," nter-nationalJournalof Ethics38:1 (1927), p. 152.10. It seems possible that the vocabularyof "celebrity" unctions in cases like this totarnisha given writerobliquely,that s, to do so withoutinvokingthe vocabularyof class,which is moreseriouslycontaminating, n the one hand,but also too visibly contaminatingfor one's allies as well as one's enemies,hence often unusable.11. This pointhas been forcefullyarticulatedby StanleyFish in "Anti-Professionalism,"Doing WhatComesNaturally:Change,Rhetoricandthe Practiceof Theory nLiteraryandLegal Studies(Durham:Duke UniversityPress, 1989), pp. 215-246.12. ChandraMohanty,"UnderWesternEyes: Feminist Scholarshipand Colonial Dis-courses,"boundary2 (12:3/ 13:1, Spring/Fall1984), pp. 333-358. Reprinted n ChandraMohanty,Ann Russo, and LourdesTorres,eds., ThirdWorldWomenand the Politics ofFeminism(Bloomington:IndianaUP, 1991).13. One thinksof the extraordinary niversalizingof Lyotard'suse of the CashinahuaIndiansas figuresforall of non-Western umanity n ThePostmodernCondition.14. Agency occupies muchthesameplacein another quallyclassic polemicon behalfofThirdWorldspecificity, KumkumSangari's"ThePolitics of the Possible,"CulturalCri-tique,6 (Fall 1987), pp. 157-186.15. For those of us who are involved in literary heory,this pointwill be familiaras theburdenof "intertextuality" the arbitrarinessf any text's limits, andthe way the negoti-atingof those limits is also the negotiatingof the text'smeaningandvalue.16. Simon Duncan and Mike Savage, "Space, Scale, and Locality," Antipode 21:3(December 1989), pp. 179-206.

17. Neil Smith,"Dangersof the EmpiricalTurn:Some Commentson the CURS Initia-tive,"Antipode,19 (1987), pp. 59-68.18. Spivak,"ThreeWomen'sTexts and a Critiqueof Imperialism,"Critical Inquiry,12(Autumn1985), pp. 243-262.19. Ulf Hannerz,"Cosmopolitansand Locals in WorldCulture,"MikeFeatherstone, d.,Global Culture,Theory,CultureandSociety,7 (London:Sage, 1990), pp. 237-251.20. Reprinted in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1988), pp.255-276.21. Paul Rabinow, "Representationsare Social Facts," WritingCulture, eds. JamesClifford and George E. Marcus(Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1986), p. 258.

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ComparativeCosmopolitanismRabinow offers "criticalcosmopolitanism"as a desirableposition:"Letus define cosmo-politanism as an ethos of macro-interdependencies,with an acute consciousness (oftenforcedupon people)of theinescapabilitiesandparticularitiesf places,characters, istoricaltrajectories,and fates.""We are all cosmopolitans."22. James Clifford,"TravellingCultures," n LawrenceGrossberg,Cary Nelson, PaulaTreichler, ds., CulturalStudies(NY:Routledge, forthcoming).23. CynthiaOzick,"A CriticAtLarge:T. S.Eliot at 101,"TheNew Yorker,Nov.20, 1989,p. 125. I discuss thispassageat greater engthin "Othering he Academy:ProfessionalismandMulticulturalism,"ocial Research(June1991).24. HughHarris,"TheGreekOriginsof the Idea of Cosmopolitanism,"The InternationalJournalof Ethics38:1 (1927), p. 1.25. ElisabethBurgos-Debray, d., I, RigobertaMenchu:An Indian Woman n Guatemala.Trans.Ann Wright. London:Verso,1984), p. 247.26. This term wouldprobablybe a matterof dispute.27. Haraway,"SituatedKnowledges,"p. 191.28. JeanFranco,"The Nation as ImaginedCommunity,"H. AramVeeser,ed., TheNewHistoricism(NY:Routledge,1989), pp. 204-212.29. For a forcefulexpositionof "criticalmulticulturalism,"ee the article of this title byMichael Warnerand LaurenBerlant n CriticalInquiry(forthcoming).30. Sylvia Wynter,quoted in RobertReinhold,"Class Struggle,"The New YorkTimesMagazine,Sept 29, 1991, p. 47.

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