Cosmo-Theory
Timothy Brennan
...Antonio Gramsci -- to take another obvious predecessor, and one who enjoys a central position in cultural theory today -- explored cosmopolitanism in great detail, and with a critical eye. Nonetheless, his conclusions on this matter play no role whatsoever in current debates over cosmopolitanism, a situation that implies how narrow our framing of the discussion has been. He distinguished the concept from internationalism while considering it an idealist detour associated with specific national formations. In one of his examples, he argues that it found expression in the abstract quest for the "universal language" of Esperanto in the early decades of the century.
As I am presenting it here, Gramsci's approach to cosmopolitanism may seem provocative, but it is very well documented. His views were neither fleeting nor ambiguous. More than a decade ago, in an essay that traced his use of the concept over his complete works, I argued that Gramsci held an attitude toward cosmopolitanism that, given contemporary understandings, was surprisingly hostile. 9 His attitude, moreover, was consonant with that of the left intellectuals of his generation. 10 This line of argument has since been convincingly taken up by Aijaz Ahmad in the context of discussing an emergent Hindu nationalism in India. 11 At any rate, despite many current readings of Gramsci (which hardly prepare one for this conclusion), the Prison Notebooks tirelessly record his views on the lifelessness and conservatism of Italian intellectuals. He traces their shortcomings to domestic traditions that derived, ultimately, from the role intellectuals played in Renaissance Italy, the center (in his words) of "imperial and medieval cosmopolitanism." While understanding the more familiar barriers to national harmony that come from racial and ethnic differences, Gramsci also explored the rather different process of intellectual stasis and indirection that came from a history of relative centrality:
It is necessary to go back to the times of the Roman Empire when Italy, through the territory of Rome, became the melting pot of the cultured classes from throughout the Empire. Its ruling personnel became ever more imperial and ever less Latin: they became cosmopolitan. . . . From the 1500s on . . . Italian Catholicism was experienced as a surrogate for the spirit of nationalism and statehood, and not only that, but as a worldwide hegemonic function, that is, an imperialistic spirit. 12
...Gramsci wrote the above words after serving as the Italian Communist Party's delegate to the Third International's Fourth World Congress. He was deeply involved in strategies of international solidarity and in internationalism as an ideology. 13 For that very reason he reminds us that left intellectuals of his generation thought internationalism and cosmopolitanism incompatible, 14 since internationalism acknowledges that differences of culture and polity cannot be juridically erased before the conditions exist for doing so equitably, and because internationalism insists on the principle of national sovereignty. There is no other way under a global nation-state system for respect to be expressed. This sort of point puzzles critics today, and the very existence of so fundamental a confusion implies that an important range of inquiries has been lost. That range might be located in the variety of complicated questions suggested by the term market insofar as the term is understood as a diagnostic category for understanding the material functions and interests of intellectuals working at the crossroads of policy, social studies, and cultural studies....
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_atlantic_quarterly/v100/100.3brennan.html> -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>