Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
The long history of cosmopolitanism is a history of disputes–sometimes academic, sometimes bloody and catastrophic--over competing imperatives and seemingly irreconcilable values. What else could come of a normative project that depends upon universalist conceptions (however modified or self-aware) of human mutuality? The cosmopolitan imperatives of the Stoics and the early Christians (to recognize human attachment over local attachment; to help other humans in the best way possible) undoubtedly stemmed from ethical fellow-feeling, and yet it is difficult to disagree with the spirit (at least) of Scott Malcomson’s judgement that they “took their universal citizenship as a license either to withdraw from the world or to master it.” No matter that this constitutive feeling of universal belonging was cultivated over and against the intellectual restrictions of the polis, or, later, the violence of class, or religion, or the fealty demanded by the absolutist state, or, still later, the many incoherent claims on subjectivity emanating from the modern nation state. The world-historical record is such that everything said about cosmopolitanism–good, bad, ugly, banal, or inscrutable--turns out to have been true. Thus the “view from nowhere” claimed by anti-parochial cosmopolites is in fact, in Peter Van der Veer’s words, “a view from somewhere and from sometime, namely from the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century”; indeed, for Christopher Lasch, cosmopolitanism is itself merely “a higher form of parochialism.” But the same charges of cultural elitism and political inefficacy routinely leveled against cosmopolitans are themselves instances of Eurocentric parochialism, if you ask, say, Latin American queer modernists desperate to write their way out of the trifecta of U.S. imperialism, Spanish colonialism, and heteronormative nativism (according to Camilla Fojas). Cosmopolitanism is an elaborate ruse for U.S. cultural domination; it is the leading edge of imperialism; it is nationalism in sheep’s clothing. Cosmopolitanism defends against wolfish nationalism; it justifies cities of refuge in a world of refugees; it is a disciplined, self-reflexive praxis of mutual recognition in a world increasingly populated by homo sacer; it is a zone of salutary contact; it is an avant-garde unto itself. It is consumption that changes you from the inside; it is consumption that reinforces your limited world view. It is aesthetics; it is the museum. It is ethics; it is bullshit.
We can’t seem to live with or without the concept (and “we” of the western academy have only lately begun to ask what it means and has meant for not-“we”). Recent modifications of the term have effected a sea change in the latest round of pitched discussions about cosmopolitanism-- which, by my estimation, occur approximately twice per century and last for 17.3 years. As has been the case with so many other conceptual universalisms (including universalism itself), these recent lexical qualifications are aimed chiefly at toning down the universal and foregrounding the local, or at undoing hierarchies of center and periphery. Thus “cosmopolitanism” has been modified by such terms as: rooted, situated, discrepant, vernacular, critical, postcolonial, planetary, limited, actually existing. Some of these involve complicated schematic revisions. Walter Mignolo, for instance, distinguishes between cosmopolitanism and “global designs,” and then between “cosmopolitan projects” and “critical cosmopolitanism” – the latter of which he champions for the fact that it “comprises projects located in the exteriority [of modernity] and issuing forth from the colonial difference.” With provisos like these, some critics worry about an incipient death-by-prefix (e.g., David Harvey), but it may in fact be the case that the sheer energy spent on finding ways to reframe cosmopolitanism references a widespread attempt to “add more theory” (in Kant’s words) to a putatively workable theory that hasn’t yet worked out in practice. Kant discusses his commitment to the “duty” of theory, and to theory’s primacy over evidence-based practice, in “On the Old Saw, ‘That may be right in theory but it won’t work in practice’,” an occasional essay in which he revisits the territory of cosmopolitanism (as he does in other more famous short pieces, including “Perpetual Peace” and “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”). The view expressed in “Old Saw” that human nature nowhere appears “less lovable than in the relations of whole nations to each other” is crucial to the urgency with which Kant links principles of justice to world citizenship; indeed, the third and final article of “Perpetual Peace” holds that “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality,” where “limited” both intensifies and elevates the function of hospitality to a responsibility of nations. Derrida, characteristically enough, fastens onto the indeterminacy of hospitality in his meditation on contemporary Europe-as-nation(s), but what I sense in much of the new scholarship on cosmopolitanism is an attempt to work through the principle of hospitality – and the theory of cosmopolitanism – from angles that correct for Kant’s futural faith in a particular model of nations (and leagues thereof) that has never been tenable. On the whole, the focus of today’s scholarship on the difficulties and possibilities of cosmopolitan practice suggest that the theory survives in spite of its long history of failed practices (though we may always need to “add more theory”), and also that some of “we” have been looking for models of practice in all the wrong places.
While the new scholarship speaks to and from many fields, both inside and outside of the academy, it should come as no surprise that a lot of it has been produced by scholars of literary and cultural study. Who better to find in the micro-breaths of textuality the evidence or absence of the world spirit? Modernist literary study, in particular, which for the past decade or two has been reconfiguring itself as a global (rather than international) field, has demonstrated the need for a substantive way of accounting for the coextensive concerns of modernism and cosmopolitanism. As usual, literary thematics are of limited use here: in modernism’s barely-rendered world of early twentieth-century globalization and imperial crisis, some characters are bad instrumental cosmopolitans, a few are (sort of) good; a few attempts at intercultural contact prove to be laudably self-reflective (if short-lived), while most founder on the rocks of irony. But the fact is that modernism is almost always about cosmopolitanism, even if it rarely conveys a picture of cosmopolitanism. So what has been wanting, and what is now appearing, are cosmo-driven studies of modernism’s most salient and most political feature: style. To that end, Jessica Berman’s 2001 monograph deals primarily with modernist cosmopolitan community as a narrative process; Tom Lutz argues that American regionalist/modernist fiction deliberately presents characters whose very incompleteness problematizes identification and so works to anti-parochial ends; Kobena Mercer’s edited collection of art/lit/culture essays offers political discussions of the cosmo aesthetics of decadence, surrealism, negritude, and Indian modernism; Camilla Fojas’s wonderful monograph tracks the sex/gender tactics of modernist cosmopolitans and modernistas through Caracas, Buenos Aires, Paris and Chicago; and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation aligns works by three canonical European modernist novelists (Woolf, Conrad, Joyce) with three late-twentieth-century immigrant novelists in England (Ishiguro, Rushdie, Sewald), in order to demonstrate modernism’s abiding capacity for and constitutive role in cosmopolitan critique.
Cosmopolitan Style is an ambitious, thoughtful book, one that is especially welcome for its direct engagement with modernism’s aesthetic practices. For this engagement Walkowitz has fashioned her own version of “critical cosmopolitanism,” which she works in two ways: as a method for reading modernist texts and as a categorical term for textual practices used by the writers under study. Accordingly, as readers of modernism we are encouraged to assume the perspective of critical cosmopolitanism in order that we may discern modernist critical cosmopolitan practices. The “critical” of Walkowitz’s critical cosmopolitanism is, not surprisingly, the “critical” of critical theory, which (sic passim, Adorno) finds in “autonomous” art an indigestible kernel of subversion that tacitly misrepresents or challenges dominant modes of reading and scales of meaning. Walkowitz draws on Adorno’s critical reading practices at several points in her introductory chapter, adducing his exchange with Sartre about “committed” writing (which, contra Sartre, should be “strange or upsetting,” containing “ideas that cannot be admitted at any cost” if it is to generate “experiences that are not ‘officially approved’” [24]) as a model for reading deeply into the indirection and displacements of modernist style. Later, in her chapter on Woolf, Walkowitz quotes to great effect Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” observing that both Adorno and Woolf “share the conviction that social norms are embedded in traditions of literary style and that literary style is embedded in the politics of national culture” (84). To write against the homogenizing conventions of transparency is on some level to trouble national culture.
But the second component of Walkowitz’s critical cosmopolitanism moves beyond the Frankfurt School blueprint (which relies ultimately on the goal of better rationality for social transformation), to focus on the affective components of “style” – that is, on the critical attitudes, or “postures” of texts. This isn’t quite the same thing as tone, which tends to privilege the authority of voice; rather, the textual dispositions under study here are best exemplified by what Walkowitz calls the “evasive” style of Woolf’s prose, a method of writing that disturbs attentiveness (of the kind associated with “national triumphalism”) and insistently disperses focus away from the sanctioned, the euphemistic, and into the corners of thought where, as Adorno would have it, orthodoxy’s most urgently-kept secrets are hidden. Other qualities of prose style are similarly coined and assigned to the remaining writers– to Joyce, “triviality”; to Conrad “naturalness”; to Ishiguro “treason”; to Sewald “vertigo”; and to Rushdie “mix-up”; but as the awkwardness of the last term suggests, the style of stylistic criticism on display here is sometimes cumbersome or strained.
Not so the readings and probing analyses of the novels, which Walkowitz delivers with precision and grace. What she identifies in Conrad’s The Secret Agent as “naturalness” may also be understood as a faintly legible performance of passing (and perhaps even vogue-ing) through which the Polish Conrad, writing flawlessly in English about foreign spies in England, registers both his own foreignness and his mastery of the codes by which foreignness is signified in England/English. Conrad’s carefully cultivated naturalness “makes history visible,” Walkowitz argues, by “represent[ing] English culture as a social process” (53). Joyce, by contrast, is at pains to expose rather than to overcode decorum, which, as Walkowitz convincingly shows, is always and everywhere suspect in his work: decorum is “a scam of British imperialism”(61) which “participates in a system of exploitation by substituting moral problems for economic ones” (72). Joyce accomplishes this critique, Walkowitz demonstrates, by (for example) staging scenes in which variant forms of decorum become mutually disabling: the decorum of cultural nationalism (embodied by the Patriot of Ulysses) cuts maeutically against the abstractions of Bloom’s cosmopolitan decorum, and both are displaced by an “indelicate, anticolonial, and unheroic image of Ireland” (76).
The late twentieth-century novelists taken up in the second half of Cosmopolitan Style bear the weight of the book’s insight that modernist aesthetic practices persist in certain strains of postcolonial immigrant writing, and that those practices are essential to the task of challenging both the parochial claims of national culture and the synthetic forces of globalization. W. G. Sebald, a German residing in England until his recent death, used a modernist mix of “panoramic and microscopic views [to produce] a relentless vertigo” (155); Salman Rushdie develops cultural and interpersonal melange that flattens out “authenticity” and implicitly attaches value to the formal properties (and sardonic effects) of heterogeneity; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters deploy modernist double consciousness as a way out of single-minded cultural allegiance. As in the discussions of the earlier modernists, these short chapters are crammed with critical intelligence and exegetical vigor. Nothing gets by Walkowitz in her superb readings of the affective penumbra thrown up by syntax, diction, cadence. What’s more, her readings convince.
Nevertheless, a few questions persist about the book’s broader framing of the relationship between modernism and cosmopolitanism, especially in the earlier chapters. Obviously, the “disabling of social categories” effected by modernist practices doesn’t necessarily derive from or lead to global thinking, or even thinking “beyond the nation.” And while I certainly don’t think that Walkowitz is suggesting that it does, the sheer volume of her liberatory claims on behalf of a handful of books by a few writers has the effect of calling up counterexamples. (E.g., all the destabilizing modernist narrators who wistfully lead us back to Ye Olde England, or the radical fragmentation that can only be shorn against our ruins, or even the terrible beauty of decolonization.) We may try not to think about the forms of intercultural contact in, say, Heart of Darkness (upon which, in Chinua Achebe’s memorable words, imperialism “sharpened its iron tooth”), but the question of what counts as cosmopolitanism seems inevitable – and probably unavoidable -- in a project like this. Will any and all Adornian modes of critique suffice? Any and all affective critiques of critique? For all of Woolf’s brilliant snubbing of nationalist orthodoxies, it’s hard to forget her fictional treatment of Gypsies in Orlando, whose illiteracy and instrumental relation to nature remind Orlando that she is (and is thrilled to be) English to her core. I don’t mean to turn the discussion to crude plot or authorial consistency – for it is Cosmopolitan Style’s important contribution to focus on modernist style, locating in some of it a kind of writing that breaks up the hard ground of Englishness and prepares the soil for brilliant political critique. But is it all cosmopolitanism, in the indispensible theoretical sense that insists on the difficulty of contact? Conversely, is all “ethical discomfort or embarrassment . . . generated by incommensurate or unconventional associations” (20) a sign of cosmopolitanism? These very questions of scale and calibration are in some sense a measure of the book’s success; it will be the work of cultural critics to both follow the leads and test the limits of Walkowitz’s scholarship.
Books Referenced
Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001.
Fojas, Camilla. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005.
Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Political Writings. Ed. H. S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Texts in the History of Thought, 1991.
---. On the Old Saw “That may be right in theory but it won’t work in practice.” Trans. E. B. Ashton. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Malcomson, Scott. “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Mercer, Kobena, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Cambridge, MA: Institute of International Visual Arts; MIT Press, 2005.
Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism. Eds. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Van der Veer, Peter.“Colonial Cosmopolitanism.” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Janet Lyon is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University.
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