76   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
communitarian lobbies: by nationalism, religious fundamentalist and all manner of strategic essentialism (in aid of ethnic, gendered' local and class identities)? Kealpolitik would seem to call for a compromise: a third way between the free-floating individual and the ghetto, between rationalism and religion. One would secure individual rights to belong to all manner of communities and relations - including the illiberal and intolerant - so long as the individual always retains the right to exit and belong differently or not all. And one would regulate the expression of cultural communities so that the wider society can remain a neutral space, guaranteeing personal freedoms. I elaborate on these considerations in the section, 'Cosmopolitan Planning'.
What should be the cosmopolitan stance with regard to a view of culture that emphasizes fixity of identities, relations and proprieties? An 'Epilogue' returns to this key question and offers £ kind of summary of cosmopolitanism as a global version of politicaf liberalism.
5
The Space of Cosmopolitanism and the Cosmopolitan Subject
What defines the human condition is that everyone is both identical and different ... While every human being belongs to the same species, everyone is irreducibly himself or herself... Our humanity is both shared and singular. (Michaeljackson, Excursions)
SPACE
The human condition, according to Georg Simmel (1971), could be truly apprehended only by taking account of a certain 'dialectical circuitry' which underlay experience and gave human life a sense of passage and progress. The characteristic human experience concerned 'co-present dualisms': public and private, rule and practice, antagonism and solidarity, freedom and constraint, rebelliousness and compliance, creativeness and structure. Here were paired phenomena one element of which presupposed the second element which yet, in turn, presupposed the first; one element influenced the second element which yet, in turn, influenced the first. Human experience oscillated and flowed between one and the other in an unending transition, of variable speed, scope and scale. The oscillation involved the subjective domain of personal consciousness and the objective one of conventional social exchange; it included both momentary changes in mood and perception, and evolutions and revolutions in social and natural environments. In outlining in this introductory chapter the nature of cosmopolitanism - the space which it occupies in human experience -1 shall also have recourse to a series of binary pairs. Cosmopolitanism is an emancipatory project, I argue. Freedom is afforded by the human capacity and proclivity to move between classificatory elements without stopping, without finally arriving, without definitive association.
The very concept of the 'cosmopolitan' compasses a dialectical pairing: cosmos and polls. In his modern denoting of the term, Immanuel Kant held that cosmos - humanity seen as a single, specific whole - and polls - human life as a particular, individualized, local set of experiences and relations - had to be seen as two sides of
77
78   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
a coin. Each contextualized the other. Each elucidated the other/ The human condition was a cosmopolitan one, Kant felt, insofar us each of us lived a unique individual life and at the same time each of us instantiated*a common human life. There was no alternative to us all leading lives at particular times and places and nor was there an alternative to the human generality of that life. 'Cosmopolitanism' was the illumination of that dualism, the exploration and celebration of its tension.
For Kant, this entailed both a scientific project and a political-curn-moral one. What was it to be human? One employed a scientific methodology to uncover facts of the human condition: one did so by a zigzagging or dialectical focus on the individual life and the species-wide life at once. What were the rights of human life; its just desserts? Knowledge of the capabilities and the liabilities of the human translated into a programme whereby human potentialities might fulfil themselves in every individual version. In the cosmopolitan vision, each individual life was to be lived under the moral aegis of what any human being could potentially attain and to be freed from particular constraints.
It is to Immanue! Kant, too, that a denotation of 'anthropology7 as a modern intellectual discipline is owed. The 'writing (describing and analysing) of the human' was the necessary precursor to a cosmopolitan vision being achieved. One inscribed humanity as a phenomenon in order to effect a peaceful resolution between local differences and in order to effect an equable distribution of global resources, resources that included knowledge and justice as well as material things: local life was to benefit from an appreciation of capabilities and liabilities recognized for the human whole.
Kant's vision for a science and ethics of humanity was set against a heritage and an ongoing political reality of communitarian closure: a world organized according to classificatory notions of members and aliens, customary proprieties and infidel practices. Here was: human being structured according to clear-cut and exclusionary conceptions of identity, sanctioned by the authority of the past: of tradition, of revelation, of the habitual. Against an ancicn regime of. patrician versus plebeian, German versus French, Christian versus pagan, masculine versus feminine, free-born versus slave, Kant's vision allowed for a space in which classification, the symbolic structures in whose terms social life was organized, would be brought under the sway of reason. Was it reasonable and was it ethical to differentiate between patrician and plebeian, German and French, Christian and pagan, and so on? In what circumstances and to what
COSMOPOLITANISM ANDTHE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 79
extent was classificatory or categorial structuration of human social life practical or necessary? How did local classes and categories accord with the deliverances of anthropological science concerning human, species-wide capabilities and liabilities? Did 'male' and 'female', 'Muslim' and 'apostate', 'pure' and 'impure', 'good' and 'evil' reflect anything but the biases and blindnesses, the ignorance and narrowness of particular local-traditional constructions of convenient order? At its most radical, Kant's vision ushered in the possibility of overcoming category-thinking as such. 'We are all human', as Ernest Gellner (1993a: 3-4) paraphrased the Kantian mission: 'Don't take more specific classifications seriously;... don't freeze people in their social categories.' If category-thinking was a necessary deployment in human social life-as Simmel (1971) would seem to suggest - then it ought to be as an individual achievement, voluntarily undertaken on an ongoing basis. What the classificatory structures of public social organization had to accommodate was not past, traditional or revelatory notions concerning essential aspects of identity and boundary. Rather, classificatory structures ought to be based on notions of futurity: of the human potential, individual and collaborative, to be in process, always construing identity anew. Being is always 'potential being', as Karl jaspers phrased it (cited in Jackson, 2008: 43), and a cosmopolitan vision would open up the organization of locally lived individual lives to the potentiality known for the human whole. As anthropology apprehended more of human experience and capacity (cosmos), so all local lives [polis) could be judged according to what was understood to be the facts of human nature: universal human needs, the human individual's universal ability to construe his or her identity in terms of his or her own worldview and life-projects.
Mobility, equality and a free choice of identity have better prospects in the modern world than in the past, Gellner considered (1993: 3a). This essay is also a forward-looking one. Cosmopolitanism is envisaged as a space beyond the communitarian yet to be properly fulfilled. Kant's vision for anthropology and for the morality of politics alike still finds itself facing classificatory structures which would close off identities and individuals from one another according to systemic discourses of othering: 'male' versus 'female', 'Muslim' lands versus 'Christian' ones, 'nationals' versus 'foreigners', 'exiles' and 'refugees', 'First Nations' versus 'colonizers', 'religious courts' versus "secular courts', 'honour killing' versus 'murder'. While turning to Kant's conceptions as its starting
80   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
point, this part of the book aims to take forward a cosmopolitan version of anthropology.
To begin, I elaborate upon the space of cosmopolitanism, and the co-present dualisms it might traverse. I take as my guide in this introductory chapter the work of Michael Jackson, for the existential insights he has drawn from his anthropological excursions. 'Come to terms with what all human beings have in common, for better or for worse', he urges, 'and see, beneath the surface of cultural? differences, comparable imperatives, logics, and dispositions' (2004: 153). And again:
World is never something static, something merely given which the person then 'accepts' or 'adjusts to' or 'fights'. It is rather a dynamic pattern which, so long as I possess self-consciousness, I am in the process of forming and designing. (Rollo May, cited in Jackson, 1989: 194, note 1)
Specifically, I find cosmopolitanism between Tradition and Becoming, between Community and Humanity, and between the Unique and the Universal.
Between Tradition and Becoming
There is an 'ambiguity at the heart of all social existence', Michael Jackson writes (1989: 33), which involves 'the indeterminate relationship between the eventfulness and flux of one's own life and the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition': between an individual's personal experience and the cultural forms in which that experience comes to be externalized. On the one hand a confusion of longings, imaginings and desires, on the other a fixity of finite -symbolizations. On the one hand the fleeting, idiosyncratic and-; exceptional, on the other the typical and customary. The interplay and tension between the two, between persons and categories, is the condition of human reality: a dialectical irreducibility between formal cultural concepts, laws and classes on one side and lived experience on the other.
What, then, is the status of culture? Culture is a fund of conventional forms: the sum total of the public words, images : and behaviours onto which individual expression fastens itself. But the human-existential imperative to do this fastening is never i entirely captured or delimited or governed by the cultural patterns and artefacts of its expression, Jackson explains: the imperative ■
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 81
remains mercurial, dissatisfied and unbound, attaching itself only contingently. 'There is always a "more" and an "otherwise" to consciousness than is suggested by the particular names, objects, and persons on which it happens to fasten' (1989: 133). Culture, and also community, nation, religion, class, gender, ethnicity are particular contexts in which people live their humanity - but they do not amount to the human essence. Concepts like those above, and also institution, structure, history, habitus and discourse afford senses of order and control, and even mastery and authorship, in relation to a world in flux but they nevertheless represent the illusions of language. These conceptual orders do not represent inherent orderliness in the world: they are forms of wishful thinking erected against the exigencies of life. Here are instrumentalities rather than finalities. It is thus that we construct enduring notions in the face of finitude, and we posit stability in the face of flux.
But these conceptual models, classificatory systems and discursive idioms should not be taken at face value: 'culture tmayj be seen as an idiom or vehicle of intersubjective life, but not its foundation or final cause' (Jackson, 2002: 125}. Human existence does not reduce to concepts or category terms, nor individual experience to the conventional language which articulates it. The discursive cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. The terms 'culture' and 'history', 'gender', 'ethnicity', 'race', 'class', 'religiosity', nation' and so on are rhetorical devices: here are some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience, and sought solutions to the issue of its expression and exchange. But none do justice to 'the plenitude of what is actually lived, feit, imagined, and thought' (Jackson, 2002: 23).
The task of anthropology, Jackson concludes, is to illuminate the experience which lies behind the masks and facades of symbolic classifications and category terms. The duality calls for a dialectical analysis, one characterized by movement and zigzag: between discursive order and actual experience, objective cultural forms and subjective interpretations, and between particular socioculttiral milieux and the generalities of human dispositions. The result should itself be a dynamic account concerning how 'conditions are shaped by the ways in which we respond to them' (2005: xi).
The space of cosmopolitanism, I would say, is a testament to the way in which human experience surpasses rather than merely conserves the givenness out of which it arises. To be human is to go beyond cultural forms and statuses, social structures and situations
82   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 83
(Rapport, 2010). Cosmopolitanism would anticipate and sanction an individual becoming or going beyond.
Between Community and Humanity
'The transformation of the personal into the social is never completely consummated, experientially or practically', Michael Jackson continues (2002: 63). No symbolic expression does more than create an illusion of fusion and balance between personal and; the transpersonal life-worlds of community, society or state. Every individual's story remains their own, only imperfectly incorporated into the collective realm. Moreover, the oscillation between how the individual knows him or herself and how he or she is known and-approached by others is felt in every encounter and social life might be described as involving an ongoing struggle to reconcile or at least balance the two. One might say that human relations proceed as the playing out of a dialectic: between a desire for personal autonomy; and a wariness of anonymity, between being with and for oneself and with and for others, between furnishing the wherewithal of life: through one's own capacities and furnishing them through one's memberships, and between a search for pure, authentic selfhood and a search for belonging with and to others. "While individuals may find an ontological security in social relations and encounters, a sheltering from chaos and uncertainty, they also aspire to a freedom from constraint, to openness, change and growth.
The otherness of the transpersonal - the dichotomy between individual identity and community, society or state - also means that individual consciousness remains a critical force against established wisdoms. Conscience is part of an individual's existential power, which may be levelled against structural or institutional power (see Rapport, 2002). It was for this reason that Hannah Arendt: argued that humane values were best preserved by individuals: who maintained their apartness from the crowd and practised: an ironic detachment. It is when we become part of a mass, and give ourselves over to others' authority, that we risk becoming callous, passive, indifferent: a categorial 'We' sets up a 'Them' whose individual constituents and personal consciousnesses are discursively obscured.
It is important to remain cognizant of the fact that all social activity continues to owe its intentionality to individual action, and in that sense always originates in personal experience. The social order is not a thing-in-itself, with its own life-force and momentum; the collectivities of community, society and state remain virtual
things, and without their own agency. Rather, they depend on the continual activity of individual members; they are products of individual praxis. Culture may be defined as that dialectical field wherein the symbolic forms of the past are taken up as means to make personal futures: wherein givenness is surpassed, and transformed into design, as Jean-Paul Sartre (196S: 91) put it. It is not a sufficient anthropology simply to study outward and given form: symbols, conventions and habits of the inherited past. There must also be an appreciation of the individual acts whereby givenness is 'produced' through its being lived in consciousness. Individual consciousness is not passive to the world, then, but 'conditioned by the constantly changing projects, intentions and actions that define [that] person's relationship ivith the world' (Jackson, 2002: 71).
Anthropology borrowed the notion of culture from nineteenth-century German romanticism, Jackson elaborates. Against a Kantian notion of the human as an ontological whole, Kant's erstwhile pupil Johann Herder had counterposed the notion of das Volk or the ethnic: Germans and French, and so on, as a communion of blood, language and soil; there were no humans as such only human beings inexorably immersed in landed cultural communities. Only in the late twentieth century did anthropology begin to 'purge [its] discourse of the idealist connotation of the culture concept', Jackson explains (2002: 109), and seek to annul the 'romantic' language of cultural essence and ethnic-cum-national identifications which it had inherited from the likes of Dürkheim and Weber (see Turner, 1990).
Ironically, however, as anthropology has pursued a pragmatist critique of culture and sought to deconstruct the concept, so, popularly, 'culture' has been embraced and employed 'in an essentialistic, exclusionary sense, for counter-hegemonic ends' (Jackson, 2002: 110). Notions of culture that emphasize bounded belonging and collective subjectivities have become commonplace, a politicization of cultural identity which bespeaks the widespread anxieties among marginalized peoples concerning their ability to grasp and influence global forces that would seem to overwhelm their life-worlds. As Jackson writes:
cultural and ethnic identity have become the catchwords for many of those disadvantaged by colonial and postcolonial inequalities in the distribution of power ... Powerless, dispersed, disparaged peoples imagine they can recapture something of the integrity and authenticity they feel they have personally lost. (2002:107)
84   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 85
Fusing the personal and social, the biographical and historical in this way empowers alienated individuals through solidarity with others, embedding individual being in a transcendent field of Being, Anthropologically speaking, one recognizes that community, society and state remain virtual realities only, and that notions of culture, race, tribe, ethnic, nation, religious congregation, economic class: as denoting collective subjectivities exist as imagined entities and are inextricably connected to the experiences of individual subjects. Notwithstanding, one recognizes the power of category terms in human socio-political arenas. The 'We' is satisfying because it allows the T to lay claim to experience and qualities it does not have, 'We are an educated, rich, sophisticated people', says the illiterate, poor Arab peasant. 'Our traditional ways are superior to modern ways: our concern with the rights of the group provides the context within which the rights of the individual are meaningful', says the First Nations activist.
Such 'romantic authochthonization' (Malkki, 1995:52-63) has the effect of merely reversing existing inequalities, however, spawning an iconic othering and cultural fundamentalism. Deploying the concept of culture essentialistically inevitably entails demarcation, denial, division, exclusion, and the dangers of inhumanity and intolerance, Jackson explains: 'any kind of identity thinking is insidious, because, like all reification, it elides the line that separates words and worlds, language and life' (2002: 115). All collective nouns and identity terms convert 'subjects of experience' into 'objects of knowledge', reducing and transmuting the open-endedness and ambiguity of lived experiences into something determinate and known, as instances, examples and expressions of reified categories. When 'culture' is used as a discursive means to draw boundaries, vast areas of human-individual experience are thereby suppressed.
Moreover, reducing the world to simplistic, generalized, category oppositions admits neither synthesis nor resolution and is self-perpetuating. A cultural fundamentalism divides collectivities from one another on the basis of different purported origins, essences and aspirations, and claims to differential group rights. Cultural differentiation then spreads, through nation-building, into purifying and cleansing operations: a purified tradition, a cleansed community. The divided world of true belongers and believers, and outsiders who are rightfully disposed of in the interests of maintaining cultural integrity, institutes an increasing amount of violence in the world. 'Community', 'religious congregation' and 'nationality', imagined as collective subjectivities, may serve as consoling illusions, but such
categorization as means to distinguish whole populations remains not merely a fiction but also an invitation to violence. Individuals become instances of a general case, and tyranny is intimately linked to abstraction of this sort, Jackson advises. Fundamentalism and genocide alike are constructed on the basis of an essentialistic othering (see Berger, 1985: 266-267).
Even social policy and social science imbued with humanitarian and liberal impulses, but undertaken in terms of an enumeration, objectification and technicism which massifies and collectivizes, bear the impress of the totalitarian. 'The refugee', 'the indigene', 'the subaltern' become discursive figures, modalities of consciousness and not individual subjects, 'recognised as who they are for themselves' (Jackson, 2002: 84). On what grounds can we claim that 'refugeeness', 'indigeneity' and 'subalternity' are sni generis phenomena that compass classes of persons, discrete clusters of traits or specific fields of human experience? Definition of this kind will always betray and traduce the irreducible complexity of individually lived experience.
The space of cosmopolitanism is to work out the possibilities of life lived between community and humanity. People have felt the need to belong to bounded cultural milieux but these should not be regarded as reifications. The nature of belonging has been that cultural boundaries are in the process of being drawn and redrawn, transgressed and blurred, on an ongoing basis. Moreover, differences of consciousness and experience 'within' have been as great as those 'between' (see Rapport, 1993). No human society has been isolated, Jackson (2008: 223) elaborates: open minds and trade networks have characterized the human condition long before globalization. It is fortunate, Jackson feels, that life confounds and exceeds the definitions and categories we use to order it. This excess redeems us from the immorality and danger and untruths of category thinking. A Kantian anthropology of the human whole beckons:
One would have hoped that by now we would have broken the habit of magnifying those traits which seem to make us ostensibly unlike others - the color of our skin, the language we speak, the food we eat, the beliefs we espouse - and come to terms with what all human beings have in common, for better or for worse, and seeing, beneath the surface of cultural differences, comparable imperatives, logics, and dispositions. (Jackson, 2004: 153)
86   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
The space of cosmopolitanism is to occasion an 'ironing out of difference in the name of some notion of common humanity' (Jackson, 2002:114), while at the same time allowing for practical expression of human identity-work - for belonging - both individual: and collaborative.
Between the Unique and the Universal
It is a paradox and a double-bind, Jackson observes (2008: xxi), that 'while every human being belongs to the same species, everyone is irreducibly himself or herself. Our humanity is both shared and singular: at once identical and individually different from everyone else who ever lived, lives or will live; every individual is unique, yet shares most of his or her phylogeny with every other member of the species, Hannah Arendt (1958: S) referred to this as 'humanity's plurality', while George Devereux (1978: 178) considered as an 'ergodic hypothesis' the notion that the experience of every individual human being exists as a potentiality within every other human being, given our commensurate species-wide capacities.
The space between the unique and the universal is both methodological and moral. How do we respect that space, the space of individual human expression, and protect it from abuse, without at the same time overwriting that space? How do we recognize that space, know it, while accepting that it is always a potentiality from which unique identities can be expected to emerge?
We can, Michael Jackson suggests (2008: 217), imagine ourselves as 'someone and everyone at the same time'. This relationship imagined between the unique and the universal, the self and other, is not necessarily founded on knowledge in the intellectual sense of the word, but instead on what Jackson can only describe as a sense of natural affinity or fellow-feeling. The common ground of human existence, he elaborates, is bodily. There is a common embodiedness to our being-in-the-world. Words and concepts, classificatory systems and symbolic structures may differentiate and divide, but bodiliness unites: common human needs and desires, dispositions and imperatives. And we come to recognize the truth of this through friendship and common doings. We immerse the body in mutual practice. We achieve a mutuality, a camaraderie, even love, not on the basis of classificatory, conventional or structural allegiances but of an emergence of trust and respect.
The grounds of our common humanity lie beyond the doxa of convention, language and concept, beyond tradition and norm,
COSMOPOLITANISM ANDTHE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 87
Jackson concludes (2008:190). Likewise they entail no overwriting of the distance between the unique and the universal in suppositions of shared understanding: a common humanity does not suppose common consciousness. Rather, the grounds of commonality reside in our potential for mutual friendship and love, and for mutual practising. This is how we know our human fellows. And this is how we can preserve and secure that mutuality too: by the ongoing practice of bodily exchange, the reciprocity of gestural, affective and dialogical intersubjectivity (Jackson, 1998: 32).
Mutuality is possible every moment, Jackson is convinced. A past of traditional boundedness and separation is not determinate of present or future. At the same time, however, one must recognize, as Arendt (1958: 242) phrases it, that love is not a state that can be legislated for, not a province of state policy. 'Love, the Beloved Republic', E.M. Forster advised (1972: 78}, may be the great force of private life - may, indeed be the greatest of all things - but love in public affairs does not easily work. Here, something much less dramatic and emotional, more impersonal, is ordinarily needed, namely, tolerance. Forster famously concluded that he would accord democracy only 'two cheers' - one for its admitting variety, and two for its permitting criticism - but three cheers he would reserve for that ideal state of mutuality that went beyond tolerance to love.
The space of cosmopolitanism lies between self and other, envisioning a mutuality that is grounded in a human-physical reciprocality: it begins with toleration and aspires to love. One accommodates the other without presuming to know the other - to determine his or her consciousness. One would achieve a mutuality with the other without limiting the other to conventional expressions of selfhood. Mutuality entails securing the grounds of one another's continued being and flourishing on the basis of a common embodiment, while also recognizing that one does not delimit what individuals will or should achieve next.
The chapters that follow this introductory one go more deeply into the dialectical relations sketched above. 'Cosmopolitan Living' illuminates further the tensions between the unique and the universal, and explores the possibilities of human mutuality between individuals whose identities manifest themselves in movement and in multiplicity. Mutuality derives from eschewing notions of essentialist and exclusivist identities fixed to territories. 'Cosmopolitan Learning' illuminates further the tensions between tradition and becoming, examining the ways in which individual identity might be nurtured by democratic institutions. One traverses
88   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 89
a fine line between respecting social traditions and practising a healthy irony. 'Cosmopolitan Planning' illuminates further the tensions between community and humanity, exploring how liberalism should-accommodate the 'romance1 of autochthony aiul other versions of closed community. One must consider a social mstitutionalism that regulates cultural expression and guarantees individual movement.
THE SUBJECT
If the above adumbrates a space for cosmopolitanism, then what of its subject? Again, Michael Jackson provides a very suitable point of departure. Against an 'identity politics' that would demarcate the world by way of fixed communitarian categories of belonging and difference, Jackson (2008: 222) suggests an anthropological endeavour that would overcome difference and establish the common ground of a universal humanity: providing the human individual with a 'home everywhere'. His own fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the Walpiri of central Australia and the Kuku-Yalanji of southeast Cape York, also in Australia, deliver-to him a sense of universal, 'existential truth' (1998: 195): people everywhere would have the space to make their own judgements, control their lives, choose their lives, exercise rights to dwell, be free to make a difference, to be loved and be affirmed. To retrieve and represent this truth is the work of what he calls an 'existential anthropology', whose favoured form might be the life-story, as means to integrate the unique and the universal in a single narrative. An existential anthropology would eschew the idea that abstract:1 terms such as 'culture', lbabitus\ 'social structure' or 'history' might encompass and order, or even author, the fluxional world of particular lives.
The existential truth of particular lives traversing a dialectical space between the unique and universal conjures up a figure to; which I would give the name ''Anyone', Anyone is the universal; human actor, and it is he or she whom I would also deem to be the cosmopolitan subject. Anyone might be inserted into each of the-dialectical spaces that has been introduced above. In endeavouring to deliver a science and an ethics between community and humanity and between tradition and becoming, as well as between the unique? and the universal, it is on Anyone's behalf that cosmopolitanism acts. Anyone is that individual instantiation of the human, recognizable irrespective of the social, cultural or historical milieu
in which he or she happens to be living. Anyone possesses certain human capabilities and liabilities independent of his or her gender, class position, status, ethnicity, religiosity or nationality. Anyone instantiates a human condition — the truth of certain existential imperatives - over and against differences of behavioural form. One cannot be clearer than Martha Nussbaum:
The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. [Therefore,] recognise humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect. (1996: 7)
Cosmopolitanism uncovers the human actor beneath the surface vestments of social, cultural and historical specificity, and cosmopolitanism would secure for this actor - for Anyone - universal recognition and apportionment.
Anthropological fieldwork has taken me to the village of 'Wanet' in the Cumbrian dales of north-west England, to the city of St. John's, provincial capital of Newfoundland on the western edge of Canada, to the new-town of Mitzpe Ramon in Israel's Negev desert and, most recently, to the post-industrial, Scottish port-city of'Easterneuk'. My work in Easterneuk, my fieldwork identity, was as a porter in the city's large and modern teaching hospital, now a central site of local employment.
A significant theme of the Easterneuk research project was national identity, and how this was merged with or distinguished from the other identities which workers and patients at 'Constance Hospital' might assume for themselves, and merged with or distinguished from the identity given to Constance Hospital as a place of medical endeavour. Was there a universality to 'human health' which jarred with the particularity of Scottish or British nationality? Did nationality figure as a prominent aspect of the ways in which individuals at Constance presented themselves in the context of their workaday worlds or their experience of medical institutionalism? To what extent did individuals express or espouse a universal mutuality towards one another as workers and patients at Constance; to what extent did my research evidence the manifestations of Anyone!
National identities was a theme of some broad currency at the time of this fieldwork (2000-2001) since 1999 had seen the inauguration of a new Parliament for Scotland, located in Edinburgh, for the first
90   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
time since the early eighteenth century. The Scottish Parliament v/ai being heralded in the media as the most significant change in the constitutional arrangements within the United Kingdom of England^ Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for 300 years. Did it presage a further break-up of the state, with an independent Scotland one day possibly taking its place as its own sovereign entity within the European Union? How did people in Constance Hospital place their loyalties, their allegiances, their senses of belonging and citizenship?
One day at work I arrange to have lunch with Tarn McMurdo, a salaries clerk. Tarn's office was in the Administration Block, while the centre of my portering activities was some floors below: as a rule, the hospital administration and the porters did not meet for lunch or social chit-chat (see Rapport, 2008). However, Tarn used the'; changing-room allocated to male ancillary staff, to be found deep;; in the bowels of the hospital plant, when he arrived each morning on his bicycle and left each evening. He would leave his bicycle helmet and pump in a locker in the changing room and sometimes shower, and he had said friendly 'Helios' to me there on the occasion of our meeting by our lockers. We were about the same age, in ouri forties, and he had a serious demeanour, quiet. I liked the way he kept to himself, not needing to enter into the swaggering banter-of the locker-room; he also seemed to keep himself fit. He had; heard that I was a porter who had an interest in Scottish identity; (and was involved in doing a 'college project' at the hospital): he would be interested to talk to me at some time, he informed me, since Scottish history was a hobby of his. 1 was impressed by his openness. To many among the male ancillary staff, I had discovered, having an intellectual project, a question to answer, was a luxury; or a waste of time.
Eventually 1 set up a lunch-meeting with Tarn, and he suggested; we go to the Staff Refectory near his office. It was a bright sunny: day, and the windows looked out over Easterneuk from high up in"! the hospital complex to a splendid distance. Tarn and I carried our: trays of food to an empty table a little apart from the lunchtime. throng where we would not be disturbed.
I began by explaining in more detail to Tarn my interest in the topic of identity. Tarn seemed very comfortable with the theme. When he responded, he spoke fluently, with no need for hints from; me ~ besides my continued attention to what he had to say - rather as if he were in an interview. I had not intended our conversation to take this form but was quite happy if Tarn wanted to present himself in this way. It was as if he relished the opportunity to;
COSMOPOLITANISM ANDTHE COSMOPOLITAN 5UBJECT 91
rehearse something about which he felt strongly, but which he had grown used to having to tell largely to himself.
In introducing the notion of identity - personal, occupational, national — 1 asked Tarn if he thought Constance Hospital possessed a 'Scottish' identity? Was Constance in some sense a 'Scottish'' institution? Would it have been very different had it been situated in another city, such as Newcastle, on the other side of the English border?
TAM: No, Constance is not a uniquely Scottish place, but it is in Easterneuk, which is in Scotland. So you could say Constance is a Scottish institution 'by association'. But then Constance is also part of the NHS [National Health Service of the United Kingdom) - which is bigger than Scotland. But also, Constance treats the sick of Easterneuk, Angus and Fife — so it deals with Scottish health problems; and with the staff of Scottish companies who are hurt. And with local farmers. So, Constance deals with those who contribute to a Scottish economy and a Scottish way of life. The combination of local conditions, you could say, is unique to here ... Like, just outside Easterneuk is Kilrymont: rural, and a completely different way of life to Easterneuk. In answer to your question, then (finally!), I think the local identity around Constance means that it would be a very different hospital if it was situated in Newcastle ... Also, of course, the evolution of conditions has been different here in Easterneuk: the history of medical institutions. Like, how 'ERF [Easterneuk Royal Infirmary] became 'Constance'. Constance represents a link to the past: a link to how the NHS has evolved here from the past. Like, hospitals in Glasgow will have a different evolution - not just different patient numbers ... So, see what I'm saying, Nigel? Scratch the surface and you see local identities, and great differences between locations.
NIGEL: Do you see yourself continuing a local tradition of health care, then?
TAM: Aye. And continuing that local tradition, or history, of care is far more important than the particular buildings and institutions it's located in - Constance or ERI. I feel a loyalty to this tradition, and I know other staff do too. NIGEL: How long have you been here?
TAM: I came here after a career change. I was an insurance agent for 20 years. But I came to feel insecure there. The insurance industry was going through a number of crises, and it was also
92   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
rationalizing. I felt I had skills I could use in different jobs. So I re-trained. I went to night-school for four years, acquired professional qualifications in accounting. And I've been here two and a half yearsniow, almost three. NIGEL: Was it a good move?
TAM: I like it. It's a new job. Diverse. With lots of opportunities. I also feel secure in the NHS - though it can be stressful too. I feel there's a safety net beneath me.
NIGEL: I think that's what the porters feei, too. The NHS is a safe employer.
TAM: I think the porters are hard done by in the institution. Management talks down to them; and the pay is bad. It's 'cos the management talks down to the line-managers who carry the attitude on down to the shop-floor. And then you get tensions. I know harmonization of pay between ancillary staff is a big porter grouse, and that's what I'm working on right now, actually: almost got it ironed out... But I do wonder what motivates many of my management colleagues to come to work. Really I wonder why they come! With their attitudes. I know I get camaraderie-out of it; and also a sense that I'm helping the public. And the porters seem to like their work too - despite the pay and that. Around the minimum rate per hour! And patients remember porters - the last person they see before they get into the car and go. Patients need signs: 'Where are you wheeling me to?', 'Will I get out safely?' So they remember porters. NIGEL: Do you find national identity is an issue among the workforce?
TAM: On the surface, national identity does not figure here; it: doesn't interfere with working practices. But scratch beneath the surface ... Like, when someone says something that's silly, then it would be drawn attention to by way of national identity - just like it would if someone had a big nose, say, or big ears. So you say: 'You English so-and-so.' And that's okay as long as it does not get pushed over the top; as long as it's not taken too seriously. If it were, then it would not be acceptable. NIGEL: I find that kind of thing being associated most often with football; that seems to arouse nationalist emotions more than anything else, and then it calms down again, when the football match is past. It makes me wonder: what comes first, the nationalist feeling or the football?
TAM: Aye. You're right. People seem to need to compete. And people also seem to need to be known as this identity or that. So
COSMOPOLITANISM ANDTHE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 93
if it didn't happen with football I guess it would appear elsewhere ... But it can spill over. National identity can leave the business of simply being part of the pack, if you like, and assume a life of its own. Like, 1 had to deaf with a case in the kitchens where there was an incident reported of a group of Scots 'calling' an English person. She was called 'an English bitch'... No: I remember now. It was during a football game, actually, that was being televised, and the Scots bloke watching said, 'Fucking England', and looked at her as he said it. So it was obvious he meant her. So she came to Personnel and said she didn't want us to interfere, but she wanted to report it; she wanted us to know about it. So there was a kind of investigation conducted in that case, by a manager who was actually Scottish but who had spent 30 years in the Navy, and had lived in England and Germany; and he felt it was definitely not acceptable and he wanted to interfere. But she said 'No': she would deal with it herself. He said 'Okay', but to come to him again if she needed to. NIGEL: And has she?
TAM: No, she never has. It calmed down after the football match
- just like you said! ... Now they just call her, 'Fat bitch'! [he grins]. But she gives as good as she gets that one, you know! [we laugh]
NIGEL: You told me when we first met in the locker-room that you liked to research Scottish history, and explore Scottish music, in your spare time.
TAM: Aye, that's right! It's a kind of hobby. My parents are from the West Coast [of Scotland], They're Celts... History seems to involve a cycle, eh? It's a story that always comes around again
- and that's true for any country. Identity anywhere is to do with where you come from. So: each year I go back to the West Coast for my holidays. I love it!... One year I met a Dane there who was also into history. Morten was his name. We had a conversation: I'll tell you a story ... it'll probably bore you?
NIGEL: Try me.
TAM: 1 told Morten that this part of the country was where the McMurdo family originated, and Morten said did I know that Marshal McDonald was originally a McMurdo!... Anyway, next year we happened to meet again and Morten told me the story ... After Culloden, when Bonnie Prince Charlie was on the run - being hidden by Flora McDonald etc., you know? - it was an 'Alastair McMurdo' who escorted him round the Isles, and also to France. In France, McMurdo had two sons, who went
94   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
to university and then into the French army, where one fought; valiantly for Bonaparte who rewarded hirn by giving him the"; title of 'Marshal' - which means something like 'General' bub-is a higher rank, and is awarded in recognition of a piece of exceptional behaviour, like bravery in battle, and it's accompanied; by a baton. And this man wrote his memoirs: Memoirs oj Marshal McDonald. It seems he adopted the name 'McDonald' instead of 'McMurdo' 'cos it was more regal, more royal, and so it opened doors for him in France (and the McMurdos were part of the5: McDonald clan anyway}. So he became 'Marshal McDonald' 'cos he had done something exceptional in battle for Bonaparte, in the Russian wars! He also became Governor of Rome for 11 months. And he was part of the negotiating team with the Allies" - Britain, Holland, etc. - after Napoleon's defeat and exile tn Elba. And I've researched this, you know, on the internet; and in reference libraries. But I've not yet managed to get a copy of the: Memoirs ... Anyway, the point of it is that McDonald wanted to return to Scotland to see his father's home - on South Uisf. So he did, and it was after that that he wrote his memoirs ... See" my point? Everyone likes to come full circle, eh? "Whether you're': from Scotland, or England or Germany, or wherever. NIGEL: Does it make you proud, then, to know the history? '■:' TAM:... I feel proud of being Scottish, yeah, but I'm more proud of my family. And the clan thing: connections that bind you; together with people. Every year I go back to the West Coast and; it feels like 'home'. We go to Fort William and then to Mallaig:. it's known as 'The Road to the Isles'. The boats leave from Mallaig, eh?
NIGEL: Do you think that now Scotland is its own country, again, with the Parliament, that divisions within it will become:; more significant?
TAM: Aye. They'll grow. As the saying goes: 'Scotland is united' by the flag and divided by the tartan.* Have you heard that? [Ii: shake my head] The clans always used to fight each other, and: only briefly were they united, to fight the English ... Do you know!; the story of the Lords of the Isles? NIGEL: No ...
TAM: The first Lord was Sornerled: S-O-M-E-R-L-E-D. He was: crowned on Iona. No, on Isla. Something else happened on Iona ... Well, the Lord of the Isles was busy negotiating with the English king to make war against the Scottish king in Edinburgh!;: See, the Highlanders are Celts. And they're Catholic; as opposed
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 95
to the rest of the country. Well: sometimes as opposed to the rest of the country. But they were unique: 'savages' as the rest called them; speaking a different language, Gaelic, etc. This was frowned on by the East-coasters, who couldn't see the point of it. And they wore tartan, the Highlanders. They had all these Celtic traditions, and I think these made them more 'cultured'. NIGEL: I heard there was something of a musical renaissance on the West Coast going on now.
TAM: That's right. New music. Pipes. Runrig [a folk rock band] -heard of them? (Though they're also internationalists, with a big European following.} But, like, East Coast people object to road signs on the West Coast being in Gaelic. They call it 'confusing'. But I tell people it's 'cos of their tradition. Or their heritage or culture. And they just say to me: 'Rubbish!' They just don't see the value of it! ... I like reading graveyard inscriptions round the West Coast, you know. My wife thinks I'm barmy! [we laugh] I have a 16-foot Canadian canoe, and I take it out on the water. There are some islands in the Mallaig Bay and I go out there and explore the headstones. I take my two youngest boys too ... It was funny; when we were coming back to shore one day, I could see my son was confused about something and I asked what, and he said: 'Dad. You said we were going to see the "McDonalds of Mallaig". But that was nothing like "McDonald's" at home!' The burger place, eh? He thought we were going out for a burger! [we laugh]
NIGEL: Have you still got family out West? On the Isles? TAM: No. Not any more. My family moved east. And the rest moved to Fort William and Oban. My dad actually died when I was seven and then my mum lost touch with the family. NIGEL: Did she have a big family?
TAM: My mum was actually an orphan, who didn't know her family. She was from Glasgow. And after the woman who brought her up there died, she didn't go back there either ... But these roots influence you still. You know? ... I hope you don't think this is all barmy? NIGEL: Not at all! Fascinating.
TAM: But Scottish identity is not about hating the English. Never! The people who say that, or feel that, are idiots! ... I've recently come back from Australia, eh?
NIGEL: Yeah? Great! Where? I went there once. Adelaide. Had a good time.
96   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
TAM: This was just north of Brisbane. And I met an Austrian woodcarver there. I do some woodcarving. Celtic carving, you know? So, I chatted to this Austrian who'd been making a 'monument', he called it, for the town of Gladstone - which is actually the world's biggest town for smelting. And the folks there came from the Gladstone family. Scottish, eh? But the Austrian said these Australians have absolutely no culture. They know" nothing of their identity at all; their identity has no depth beyond two or three generations. But the Austrians have real deep culture, and history. Like, in woodcarving. Just like Scotland. But these Australians, they know they come from Britain etc., but they have no real knowledge. Their knowledge of Scotland is - what would you say? - a 'biscuit-tin view' ... The only old identity there is Aborigine identity. When they want something old in Australia they have to go to that! There are no Australian traditions ... But: these idiots who profess to be Scottish and so hate the English haven't the measure of Scottishness at all... The Lords of the Isles-had a real Scottish culture. It was based on a respect for others, respect for skills, for academics - bards who could tell the story of the past from memory or had legal knowledge, or artistic talent, or stonemasons, or musicians or woodcarvers, or they knew how things worked - and they also respected leaders, and warriors: not just 'cos they killed people but 'cos of their bravery and their chivalry; and they respected chivalry in enemies too. They had; their honour. But you know when people lose their history they-lose their identities. They lose their respect for themselves ... Well, I can't go waffling on ...
Tarn excused himself at this point, saying that he had to get back; to work. I did too: lunch-break was over: we carried our trays to a trolley. Before we parted to our different sections of the hospital I thanked him for an enjoyable conversation.
Part of what had made me warm to Tarn was a generosity I gleaned from him: a liberality towards others and a sensitivity regarding other perspectives, which he combined with his own enthusiasms1 in a self-deprecating way. Looking back on Tarn's narration what is also appealing was the kind of balance he achieved. He espoused what appears initially to be a fixed and essential identity: grounded in history, place and tradition. Every year he went 'home' to the; West Coast of Scotland, the place where his family roots lay. He explored the Hebridean islands and read gravestones, taking his sons as company. The heritage influenced him: he felt pride, and
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 97
loyalty to a cultured tradition. At the same time, however, he knew that his wife thought him barmy and that his children were bored - and that having to listen to him witter on I would likely feel the same.
Moreover, all his natal family had now moved away from the West Coast, and his mother was actually an orphan. And history was just his pastime and hobby. Then again, he also took great pride in, and felt a loyalty to, the tradition of health care in which he now worked; and this was bigger than just being part of Constance Hospital. The institution as such was of minor importance compared to the tradition of improving the quality of life of the Scottish public.
While Tarn employed the trope of core identities, then, and also of'scratching beneath the surface', there was an intrinsic ambiguity regarding the way in which the notion was deployed; so that beneath a Scottish way of life, history and economy was to be found an Easterneuk one, and also an institutional one; and beneath the institutional was the national; and beneath the national was the clannish and the familial and the religious and the linguistic. In the way that he used them, while bespeaking surface and depth, the different perspectives became horizontal alternatives rather than vertical or concentric layers.
All the time, too, there is self-deprecation and irony in Tarn's expressive style. He advocated a respect for identity based on knowledge of where you had come from: it was necessary to know who you were to see where you might be going. But he also recognized that his preoccupations might not be others' - might be a source of others' mirth-making, and maybe rightly so. And again, there is the insistence that one's own identity-making need not and should not spill over into a deprecation of others or discrimination against others. Being Scottish, or whatever, was nothing to do with not being, or hating or casting aspersions on, anyone else, such as the English.
We spoke together for a short time but there was a togetherness at the table which led me to believe the story Tam told me: his presentation of self was not merely for my benefit. I felt privileged by his openness and honesty; I did not feel there were barriers between us that I was wary of broaching. I also found an integrity or authenticity in Tarn's claims. His identity was his own individual matter, as was his chosen life-course - from insurance agent to NHS accountant - and his entertainments. His identity pertained to him but not necessarily to anyone else, not even his wife or children. And that was fine by him: he could and would enjoy maintaining
«111
98   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
and expressing his identity in parallel to others' opinions and whj|e living alongside them.
Tarn was his own man, it seemed to me, and this enabled him to extend a human hand to others. I appreciated the balance he appeared to have achieved in his life: between strong will and opinions, self-effacement and toleration.
I also find Tarn occupying spaces I identified above as 'cosmopolitan'
- such as between history and becoming. Tarn situated himself historically, felt that the patterns of history (coming full circle) and rootedness were an indelible part of an individual's life, but he also recognized the individual effort, the interpretation and the personal growth that went into the fulfilment of this relationship. One constructed one's own givens. History was a personal narrative
- that of Marshal McDonald, that of his orphaned mother, that of himself canoeing Mallaig Bay - which might be of no interest to others. Meanwhile, Tam charts his own course from the West Coast of Scotland to the east, from insurance to accountancy, now party to the emergence of a modern Easterneuk health service.
Tarn's identifications are carefully situated, too, between community and humanity. At different moments he places himself as part of a family, a clan, a West Coast civil tradition, an east coast hospital, a Scottish tradition of health care, and also a global conversation that leads him to interact with Danish history-buffs and Austrian wood-carver (in Australia). Such identification, he insists, is positively defined rather than negatively: being Scottish, for instance, has absolutely nothing to do with being anti-English. Community identity is not about negating the outsider as other. The 'essential' aspects of it are in any case likely to be fictional - such as his mother finding herself on the West Coast of Scotland only after being orphaned in Glasgow. Identifications are comforting and satisfying - asserting a loyalty to the British National Health Service - but this does not stop Tam being able to put himself in others' shoes and see the equivalence between his identifications and others' elsewhere.
Finally, I also find Tam between the unique and the universal. As he did, himself. He saw himself - his individuality, his community
- in others. This was what enabled him to appreciate Morten, and Marshal McDonald, and the Austrian woodcarver, also the hospital porters and the patients. In their stories and their practices he could see his own. He recognized a set of existential imperatives that pertained to a human condition: a need for belonging, for finding a home, for equal treatment, for competitiveness, for friendliness,
COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 99
for signs portending to one's future. Tam was his own man, and knew it, but recognized himself in other embodiments. In our brief meeting I felt a mutuality with him myself.
ENVOI
According to Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray (1953: 54-56), 'every man is, in certain respects, (a) like all other men (b) like some other men, (c) like no other man'. Beneath its seeming banality here is a provocative image, of human commonality assuming a certain shape and distribution between individuality and humankind. In die chapters that follow, I shall elaborate upon the notion.
The space between being like 'no other men' and 'all other men' is also the space I have called 'cosmopolitan'. The subject who belongs there I would name the 'cosmopolitan subject', or Anyone. My intention is to examine that space as a place of movement or passage and of rights. In his or her life-course Anyone moves one way and the other between the poles of uniqueness and universality. Anyone's life is spent in the practice of projects that mark Anyone out as wholly themselves and as universally human and as somewhere in between. Anyone is a migrant of identity. He or she contracts relations with particular others but he or she will also have relations with none other than himself or herself - alone with his or her consciousness - and he or she will embody relations with the human whole, as living embodiment of the species. The cosmopolitan emphasis is on the diversity of these relations and on the passage between them. No one kind of relationality need predominate in the human life. Anyone is at once like all others, like some others and like no others. He or she cannot help but be himself or herself, and Anyone cannot help but be human. In between - the space of cosmopolitanism - Anyone moves in and out of particular relationships. The cosmopolitan emphasis is also on voluntarism: the free contracting and maintaining of social relations. Movement within or passage through this intermediary space between his or her universality and his or her uniqueness should be Anyone's right. Engagement with the communitarian should continue to be a voluntarily undertaken process. Being with particular others covers an array of kinds of social relations: purpose-specific, time-limited, fleeting and ephemeral as well as long-term, many-stranded and all-embracing. This diversity should remain Anyone's option. 1 explore, below, those institutional arrangements that might guarantee social relations between the universal and the
TOO   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
COSMOPOLITANISM ANDTHE COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECT 101
unique, including communitarian memberships, to be a right'but not a duty, and a matter of personal interpretation and individual achievement not collective allocation or ascription.
The three sections that follow, 'Cosmopolitan Limuj.' 'Cosmopolitan Learning' and 'Cosmopolitan Planning', eaeli represents a particular case study in cosmopolitanism, to which their subtitles advert. Together they elucidate the cosmopolitan condition of Anyone.
'Cosmopolitan Living' begins by recalling a slur favoured by the Nazis. Litftmenschen - 'people of the air', 'people of smoke' - were those to be deprecated for having no roots: they would not or could not take root; they remained mere 'guests' among others. The ideal types of Litftmenschen were the jews and Gypsies, and in this the Nazis can be said to have followed Hegel, who saw in such people an awful pathology. In leaving the Garden of Eden, the pastures of Abraham, the Land of Israel, said Hegel, the Jews had entered into exile from their natural, human place in the world. They embodied an alienation from self and from humanity, from love, trust, family and natural community. In choosing to house themselves in their Safer Tarab, their Book of Law, Hegel (and the Nazis) concluded that such people had perpetrated a suicidal renunciation of the family of nations by eschewing an unconscious, organic and singular totality with a place.
Notwithstanding, I would offer a kind of paean to Luftmenscbli-chkeit. Anyone is intrinsically a person of the air. The 'Cosmopolitan Living' chapter argues for an ethos of global guesthood, and it explores social arrangements whereby an embodiment of global guesthood might be secured and enshrined. Human identity is born in and of movement, I contend, and manifested in multiplicity: Anyone lives between community and humanity. The chapter looks to movement and multiplicity as ideal ways to measure just procedures of state, therefore, and just relations between human beings. Justice entails ensuring the free movement between communities, societies and states that is fundamental to human being and becoming, and to the fulfilment of a potential for multiplicity. By conceiving of themselves universally as mutual guests on a small planet, human beings might achieve a mutuality and avert the tyranny and destruction that derive from singular, exciusivist identities fixed to territories.
'Cosmopolitan Learning' concerns itself with the pedagogic institutions of civil-democratic society and ponders how Anyone can be at once a historical personage and yet accede to identities
^at are individual and transcend social, cultural and historical givens. Anyone is socialized by way of institutional procedures - in family and school, among elders and peers - and yet one does not want to produce individual members who are merely formed in society's image. Identity emerges from history and yet need not be overwritten by it. Is it a chimera that individuality and a free passage between relations and identities can be nurtured, taught and learnt? Perhaps irony holds the key here. '■■ The chapter begins by rehearsing arguments surrounding diffusionism in social science. In its nineteenth-century appearance, the concept of diffusion was written into a role which opposed the psychic unity of humankind. Creativity, social change and development - 'progress' in the teleological framing of the time - was either regarded as a matter of independent invention and evolution in many different places, thus evincing a universal human capacity for an equivalent creativeness; or else social change was the result of exogenous influences diffusing to different parts of the world from one or more cultural centres. The complexities and confusions of globaiism can now be seen to make the distinction moot: the psychic unity of humankind, one might say, enables cultural traits and social practices to be exported, taken up, interpreted and transformed in any place, every place. In this chapter I return to diffusion as signalling a kind of openness: it identifies a human, intellectual and emotional capacity to engage with radical otherness - that which is alien in origin or provenance - and at the same time a social, institutional and political willingness to do so.
But I alter the context. 'Diffusion' is a means to characterize a socializing and pedagogical relationship that is open-ended: predicated on the emergence of a transcendent individual identity from historical, sociocultural givens. A teacher 'diffuses' information to a pupil in such a way that the pupil takes up the information in the process of coming into his or her own. Teacher and pupil both retain their individuality. The institution of diffusion does not aim or claim to govern consciousness or lead to a reproduction of meaning. Anyone occupies a position between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. He or she comes to find a personal space. Ideally one sacrifices neither institutional efficiency nor newness and individuality. The civil-democratic society aims for ('diffuses' itself to) a space beyond existing structures of knowledge in which Anyone might become him or herself.
'Cosmopolitan Planning' begins from the observation that every place is now situated between the local and the global: every place
102   COMMUNITY, COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN COMMONALITY
is 'glocal'. Social exchange may be habitually conducted by way of specific, historicized and localized norms and conventions yet these are inextricably contextualized by broader networks of relations that span the entire glcSbe. The political issue for cosmopolitanism is to find a just balance between bounded social entities and what Roland Robertson (1990: 20) has called the 'global ecumene'. How is one to accommodate both movement and belonging, both communiiv sovereignty and justice? Too dense or too regimented a social environment and Anyone is threatened by the designs of others, and may not have the space to lead an individually determined life. Too rarefied or too anomic a social environment and Anyone may not find the support or nurture necessary to lead an individual life and so succumb to the schemes of others by default.
Drawing on the distinctions deployed by Ernest Gellner in particular, the chapter considers relations between 'science' and 'culture'. While the former represents a universal, transcultural knowledge of humankind and world to which the species has acceded by way of rational methods of observation, experimentation and critique, 'culture' represents those funds of historical symbols and behavioural forms to which people still like to offer allegiance and from which they draw sentimental nourishment. The chapter explores the ways in which it might be arranged that the universal verities of a scientific worldview are brought into successful relation: with the symbolic domain of culture and community, so that a scientific knowledge of the human progresses in step with (voluntary); affiliation: with all manner of social-relational attachments.
Cosmopolitanism would plan a politico-legal institutionalism that can accommodate local desires for belonging alongside global possibilities for affluence and disenchantment: for freedom from the tyrannies of custom and error which a scientific awareness promises; for Anyone's freedom to fulfil their own capacities for the development of individual identities.
6
Cosmopolitan Living:
People of the Air and Global Guests
City air inspires freedom. (Medieval proverb)
Luftmenschen - 'People of the Air', 'People of Smoke' - was a slur favoured by the Nazis. Luftmenschen were those who were without roots, and who would not or could not take root, rootless (see Berg, 2006). Luftmenschen renounced the blood and honour (Bint und Ehre) of a genealogical attachment to the earth. The ideal types of Luftmenschen were the Gypsies and the Jews. In this the Nazis could be said to have followed Hegel, who deemed these people's situation to be pathological. In leaving the Land of Israel - the 'Garden of Eden', the 'pastures of Abraham' - the jews had entered into exile from their natural, human place in the world and ceased to embody an unconscious, organic and singular totality with place. Here was an alienation from both self and from humanity, Hegel felt: from love, trust, family and community, the spontaneous, the active and the potent. In electing to house themselves in their Safer Torab, their Book of Law, the Jews had perpetrated a suicidal renunciation of the family of nations.
This chapter can be read, none the less, as a paean to Luftmen-schlicbkeit, to being, as George Steiner more positively phrases it, 'guests of life' or 'guests-in-life': guests on a planet among other guests (1997: 60, 62). I argue for an appreciation of and an education in 'global guesthood', also for the 'global city' understood as a site where an embodiment of global guesthood might - not 'take root', but - live, be secured and enshrined. The chapter wishes, too, to illuminate a particular conception of human identity: as that which is born in and of movement, and as that which manifests itself in multiplicity. I would look to movement and multiplicity as ideal ways to measure just procedures of state: to formulate ideas of justice and equitable relations between human beings. Justice entails ensuring the free movement that is fundamental to human being and becoming, to its potential for multiplicity. 'Cosmopolitan Living' envisages Anyone practising the movement of identity.
103