After Cosmopolitanism

Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, Bolette Blaagaard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136238598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

At a time when social and political reality seems to move away from the practice of cosmopolitanism, whilst being in serious need of a new international framework to regulate global interaction, what are the new definitions and practices of cosmopolitanism? Including contributions from leading figures across the humanities and social sciences, After Cosmopolitanism takes up this question as its central challenge. Its core argument is the idea that our globalised condition forms the heart of contemporary cosmopolitan claims, which do not refer to a transcendental ideal, but are rather immanent to the material conditions of global interdependence. But to what extent do emerging definitions of cosmopolitanism contribute to new representative democratic models of governance? The present volume argues that a radical transformation of cosmopolitanism is already ongoing and that more effort is needed to take stock of transformations which are both necessary and possible. To this end, After Cosmopolitanism calls for an understanding of cosmopolitanism that is more attentive to the material reality of our social and political situation and less focused on linguistic analyses of its metaphorical implications. It is the call for a cosmopolitanism that is also a cosmopolitics.

Chapter 1
‘Becoming-world’

Rosi Braidotti

Cosmopolitanism as an economic and social phenomenon is the affirmative response to the processes of planetary interrelation which I want to examine in this chapter through the lenses of ‘becoming-world’. My argument is that, given the multiple, complex and contradictory notions and practices of planetary interrelation today, cosmopolitanism can only remain relevant by undergoing a radical mutation. I will suggest that this shift of perspective starts by relinquishing the historical and conceptual attachment of cosmopolitanism to the idea of liberal individualism as a unitary vision of the subject, which entails self-correcting rationality and a propensity for moral and cognitive universalism. Cosmopolitanism needs to ‘become-world’, i.e. embrace diversity and the immanence of structural relationality so as to account also for the atrocities and structural injustices, as well as for the many benefits, of pan-human perspectives today.

I will explore this notion further with reference to the nomadic eco-philosophy of environmental and social interdependence that I have developed elsewhere (Braidotti, 2006). More specifically, I want to emphasize the relevance for contemporary cosmopolitanism of the ethics of accountability that takes ‘Life’ as its main referent while avoiding the twin pitfalls of biological essentialism on the one hand and unreflexive anthropocentrism on the other. In order to implement this meta-methodological shift of perspective, classical cosmopolitanism needs to become-world, in the sense of developing a radical relational model of interaction. This is based on the awareness and the acknowledgment of a structural interconnection among subjects that are complex and material singularities in process. The notion of cosmopolitanism, in other words, needs to acquire increased respect for complexity, so as to evolve in the direction of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘chaosmosis’, that is to say being-one-with the vital processes of transformation alongside and with a multiplicity of human and non-human others. In this chapter I will play out the complexity by offering several, potentially contradictory, ways in which ‘we’ today, could be said to be in this, together.

Perverse planetary effects

The starting point for my analysis is the spurious and rather perverse form of pan-human interconnection that is engendered by the globalized economy of what is still called – for lack of a better term – advanced capitalism. This takes two major forms: one is market-driven homogenization and the other is shared vulnerability.

As for the former, the globalized world defined as a transnational space of mobility, borders, transitions and flows produces cross-border connections, world-wide travel and an enforced hybridization of culture, media and lifestyles. In this same system, however, humans cross borders far less easily. The commercialized forms of planetary transfer of data and capital in turn rest in fact on concrete global migration networks and flows of labour force, the displacement of uprooted people and other forms of mobility. These flows of human labour are racialized, although their itineraries do not run only from the South to the North of the world – as European scare-mongering populists like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Lega Nord in Italy and the national fronts across the European Union would have us believe. In her seminal work on the cartographies of diasporic social spaces, Avtar Brah (1996) argues that the global diaspora is truly planetary and that it affects as much the roots of indigenous people as the routes of the itinerant subjects in the post-colonial world order. The real-life conditions of itinerant subjects point to the exploitative and cruel aspects of the new planetary mobility. Their becoming-world therefore is of the inhumane kind, which is an aspect of global interconnection that is too often left unexamined. I shall return to it later on in this chapter.

One other crucial effect of the deep and constant interconnection bred by the globalized economy and technological mediation is the global spread of fear, insecurity and shared mortality. The accumulation and proliferation of threats to our well-being and stability engenders a political economy of fear as a central feature of the globalized world. Governance by terror is one of the features of our historical condition and this regime engenders a negative vision of pan-humanity (Franklin et al., 2000) as linking us all in shared vulnerability to viruses, environmental disasters and terrorist attacks by suicide and other kinds of bombers.

Closer to home, a global world economy linked by a thick web of transnational flows of capital and labour and marked by internal processes of migration and planetary mobility, also implies the flexibility or precariousness of work conditions, and the ubiquity of settlement camps and impermanent settlements. This proliferation of coercive uprooting movements intersects with layers of increasing social controls in a political economy of ‘scattered hegemonies’ (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). This is a social system of centreless but constant surveillance, which Paul Gilroy aptly calls ‘securocracy’, that is a form of governance which pitches the multi-located centres against the many global peripheries in a complex logic of control and confinement that operates not only between the geopolitical blocks, but also within them.

Translated in the language of nomadic theory, global migration is a molar line of segmentation or reterritorialization that controls access to different forms of mobility and immobility for the sake of profit. Global flows get arrested and solidified – or ‘de-territorialized’ – in nodal points that function as structures of capital and data accumulation within the global economy. One of these is the global cities – megalopolises the world over that act as check-points for the global growth and, increasingly, the global crisis. The global city and the refugee camps are not dialectical or moral opposites: they are two sides of the same global coin, as Saskia Sassen has convincingly argued (1994). They express the schizoid political economy of our times (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). In the globalized world, massive concentrations of infrastructures exist alongside complex, worldwide dissemination of goods. The technologically driven advanced culture that prides itself in being called the ‘information society’ is in reality a concrete, material infrastructure that is concentrated on the sedentary global city. We have all become the subjects of bio-power, but we differ considerably in the degrees and modes of actualization of that very power. To argue simply along facile cosmopolitan lines that ‘we’ may all be in this together, therefore, amounts to taking a shortcut through the complexity of the global condition.

From bio-power to an affirmative politics of life

The bio-political economy of global flows therefore goes hand-in-hand with lethal political regimes of control and management of both survival and extinction. This is due to the fact that the notion of ‘life itself’ lies at the heart of bio-genetic capitalism (Parisi, 2004) as a site of financial investments and potential profit. The essential capital today is the life-codes of all species, starting from animals, seeds and plants, all the way to the Human Genome Project and stem-cell research (Rose, 2001). This emphasis on ‘life’ tends to flatten out the traditional axes of difference which, in earlier historical phases of capitalist production, were predicated along processes of sexualization (women, homosexuals and transsexuals); racialization (natives, colonized, non-Europeans) and naturalization (Earth others). The bio-genetic over-coding of these differences neither suspends nor does it automatically improve the social relations of exclusion and inclusion that historically had been predicated along the axes of difference, defined as negative ‘otherness’. On the contrary, the focus of bio-genetical capital introduces subtler and more pervasive forms of control, exploitation and exclusion. Also denounced as ‘bio-piracy’ (Shiva, 1997), the ongoing technological revolution often intensifies patterns of traditional discrimination and exploitation.

Bio-power and systematic destruction are therefore two sides of the same cosmopolitical coin. ‘Life’ can be a threatening force, as evidenced by new epidemics and environmental catastrophes that blur the distinction between the natural and the cultural dimensions. The spread of viruses beyond the human crosses into the post-human, travelling from computers to humans, animals and back. Illness is clearly not only a privilege of organic entities, but a widespread practice of mutual contamination. The concomitance of a bio-political management of the health and well-being of some sections of the world population with social practices of utter indifference for that of many others – foreigners, migrants, asylum-seekers, people in occupied territories and war-zones – is one of the paradoxes of the so-called ‘advanced’ capitalist system. In other words, the new bio-political practices of the management of ‘life’ mobilize not only generative forces, but also new and subtler degrees of extinction. Thus, contemporary power has to be ‘vital’, yet its paradoxical vitality encompasses distinctions between living and dying. In my own nomadic theory, I have referred to the notion of ‘zoe’ as a non-human yet affirmative life-force to define a vitalist materialism that has nothing in common with post-modern moral relativism, resting solidly on a neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence (Braidotti, 2006).

This notion is relevant to the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism because it redefines the common ground on which a pan-human condition may be posited. In the post-humanist era of the displacement of the centrality of ‘Man’, what could possibly bind us together? The negative bonding of shared vulnerability is not enough to create alternative values. As I will argue later on, a shared post-anthropocentric idea of ‘Life’ as radical interdependence – which I call ‘zoe’ – may be part of a new response to this challenge.

The contiguity of bio-power and new practices of death and destruction, as well as the displacement of ‘Man’ as the alleged measure of all things, worries both the neo-liberal (Fukuyama, 2002) and the neo-Kantian thinkers struck by high levels of anxiety about the sustainability of human futures (Habermas, 2003). Their concern is compounded by the ‘new’ wars and the state of permanent global warfare we are caught in, with ‘intelligent’ weapons on the one hand and the rawness of the bodies of suicide bombers on the other. The highly mediated social space we inhabit is literally ‘Killing you Microsoftly’, as an article in the UK daily Guardian recently put it.¹ The post-Cold War world has seen not only a dramatic increase in warfare, but also a profound transformation of the war instance as such. Achille Mbembe expands Foucault’s insight in the direction of a more grounded analysis of the bio-political management of survival. Aptly re-naming it ‘necro-politics’, he defines this power essentially as the administration of death: ‘the material destruction of human bodies and population’ (Mbembe, 2003: 19).

The implications of this approach to bio/necro-power for discussions of cosmopolitanism are radical: contrary to the Enlightenment ideal, it is not up to the rationality of the Law – as the master code in our society – and the universalism of moral values to structure the exercise of power. Rather, the Law sanctifies the unleashing of the unrestricted sovereign right to kill, maim, rape and destroy the life of others. This same power, following Agamben (1998), structures the attribution of different degrees of ‘humanity’ according to hierarchies that are disengaged from the old dialectics and unhinged from any political rationality. They fulfil instead a more instrumental, narrow logic of opportunistic exploitation of the life in you, which is generic and not only individual.

It is crucial for my argument to set the racialized nature of the process by which ‘humanity’ is attributed to different kinds of human beings. What exactly constitutes the basic unit of reference for the ‘human’ within ‘humanity’ is the crucial question which, as I argued so far, splits open the classical idea of cosmopolitanism. Hannah Arendt, in her fundamental analysis of the roots of European fascism (1951), raised a similar query in relation to the alleged universality of human rights. She argued that the experience of the Second World War and the Holocaust requires – by ethical as well as logical obligation – an answer to the preliminary question: what is the status of people who do not even have the right to have rights? The political ontology of the human is foregrounded by Arendt’s question, which she answers by re-universalizing this fundamental right to be considered as human. Agamben, on the other hand, develops this idea negatively as an indictment of modernity. The concentration camp or the colonial plantation as the prototype of this political economy turns the slave into the prototype of ‘homo sacer’ – vulnerable ‘bare’ life – and stresses the intrinsic links between modernization and violence, modernity and terror.

In my nomadic theory perspective, on the other hand, the same query about the ontological status of the human is re-worked with post-colonial and feminist theories to produce a more affirmative answer. A new pan-humanity needs to be formulated – a new cosmos-polis – that rests on critical distance from the universalism of the past and on the acknowledgment of the atrocities as well as the contradictions of colonialism, fascism and European genocides, without giving in to despair. A nomadic form of reflexive cosmopolitanism needs to start from a more sober account of the world-historical events that show how the concept of ‘difference’ functioned as a term to index discrimination and exclusion. More specifically, ‘difference’ defined as a hierarchical notion – ‘to be different from an often implicit norm’ – distributed degrees of ‘humanity’ to categories of sub and infra-humans, in a scale of negative dialectics of otherness that often made mockery of European claims to the respect of universal human rights. Awareness of this historical deficit and of the silence that often surrounds the colonial and fascist past of Europe is a crucial prerequisite for a non-hierarchical model of cosmopolitanism to emerge.

Furthermore, this enlarged cosmopolitan subjectivity needs to take into account on the one hand the radical redefinition of the humans currently propelled by bio-genetic capitalism and on the other the ubiquity of necro-political instances of death and extinction. Contemporary necro-politics has taken the form of the politics of death on a globalized yet regional scale. The new forms of industrial-scale warfare rest upon the commercial privatization of the army and the global reach of conflicts, which de-territorialize the use of and the rationale for armed service. Reduced to ‘infrastructural warfare’ (Mbembe, 2003), and to a large-scale logistical operation (Virilio, 2002), war aims at the destruction of all the services that allow civil society to function: roads, electricity lines, airports, hospitals and other necessities. It also aims at protecting mineral extraction and other essential geo-physical resources needed by the global economy. In this respect, the ‘new’ wars look more like guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks than the traditional confrontation of enlisted and nationally indexed armies. As a result, as a political category, the ‘population’ has also become disaggregated into ‘rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors”, after a horrific exodus, are con-fined to camps and zones of exception’ (Mbembe, 2003: 34). Equally significant are the changes that have come over processes of mourning both as a private and as a collective practice, in response to the diversification of lethal weapons. The political practice of bearing witness to the dead has mutated into a form of activism, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to humanitarian aid.

Arjun Appadurai (1998) has also provided incisive analyses of the new ‘ethnocidal violence’ of the new forms of warfare which involve friends, kinsmen and neighbours and involve mutilation, cannibalism, rape, sexual abuse and violence against civilian spaces and populations. The social reality of refugees and asylum seekers also becomes an emblem of the contemporary necro-politics. Diken (2004) argues that refugees are the perfect instantiation of the disposable humanity of ‘homo sacer’ and thus constitutes the ultimate necro-political subject. Duffield (2008) pushes this analysis further and makes a distinction between developed or insured humans – citizens of a functional polity – and under-developed or uninsured humans – subjects of dysfunctional states. The d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Becoming-world’
• 2 Cosmopolitanism in a multipolar world
• 3 A cosmopolitics of singularities: rights and the thinking of other worlds
• 4 The metaphysics of cosmopolitanism
• 5 Cosmopolitanism as irony: a critique of post-humanitarianism
• 6 The fantasies of cosmopolitanism
• 7 Postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism: towards a worldly understanding of fascism and Europe’s colonial crimes
• 8 Estrangement as pedagogy: the cosmopolitan vernacular
• 9 Global cosmopolitanism and nomad citizenship
• 10 Destroying cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos
• Index