Social cosmopolitanism

The decentring mode becomes even more distinct in Paul Gilroy’s theories on the subject. Social theorist and scholar in black history Paul Gilroy (2004) places emphasis on activism in his version of cosmopolitanism, which may be argued to turn the concept upside-down. As I discussed in chapter 1, critical race and whiteness theories have developed substantial critique of universal morality functioning as ‘the white man’s burden’ during the heights of colonial expansion. The tradition, to which Gilroy’s work on the black slave trade and forced population displacement across the Atlantic has been pivotal, is carried by a critique of the European-centred point of view of researchers, scholars and lay-people alike. As reviewed in the section on normative cosmopolitanism, this viewpoint, which posits a certain value hierarchy among different civilisations, is also active in the concept of cosmopolitanism. This is why, for a scholar like Gilroy, it is crucial to flip the concept upside-down in order to keep the critique of universal, Eurocentric paradigms. Rather than top-down cosmopolitanism, Gilroy’s is a ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ (Gilroy 2004).

Thus, Gilroy (2004) aims at developing, what he sees as an alternative to cosmopolitanism based on grass-roots solidarity and activism. Gilroy’s concept of

cosmopolitanism from below is constituted of two main ideas, a rejection of the temporality imposed on people of different cultures, which understands some cultures as more mature than others and thus posits them in a teleological relationship also theorised in Goldberg’s (2002) concept of historicism and very evident in the Danish political and cultural discourse – as referred to in chapters 1, 2 and to come. Gilroy argues for a synchronising of cultures ‘in order to fus[e]…horizons so that the possibility of a common future becomes conceivable’ (Gilroy 2004: 74). A way of fusing, Gilroy suggests, is through the second and in this context more important concept constituting his cosmopolitanism from below, ‘estrangement’. Estrangement begs disloyalty to one’s own culture and local civilisation through actual movement.

One needs to leave the comfort zone of one’s home and engage in activism that uses the privilege and entitlement, which one carries by virtue of being white and/or

‘western’ and make use of this privilege to help those who do not possess these privileges. It is not to be confused with the idea of treason to whiteness, as argued by Noel Ignatiev and the people behind Race Traitor magazine (Ignatiev 1997). Rather than an obstruction and giving up of privileges, Gilroy’s estrangement is an affirmative sharing of privileges – it is a physical and mental placement of oneself in the place of the other, for instance, as human shields in the Gaza strip. That is, it is a shift of consciousness as well as of location.

However, replacement of one (self) for the other is not a solution, Elaine Scarry argues. Scarry (1996) believes the difficulty of imagining other people to be impossible. This is because the human capacity to hurt each other is always greater than the capacity to imagine the other, Scarry argues: ‘the human capacity to injure other people is very great because our capacity to imagine other people is very small’

(Scarry 1996: 103, italics in original). That is, it is difficult to share pain experienced by another. Because of this poor human capacity for imagining the other and transferring experiences Scarry suggests that we instead attempt to imagine ourselves less. That is, instead of trying to see the other in a way that is comparable to the way we see ourselves, we should instead adopt a strategy by which we ‘unimagine’

ourselves. This rather negative proposal, moreover, assumes that one can step outside one’s social imaginary and understand oneself and others from an ‘uncontaminated’

position, and the suggestion cannot stand alone. Despite their differences, it could be said that Bauman’s (1991) notion of distancing oneself from one’s culture poses a

similar conundrum – that is, the conundrum of detaching oneself from one’s culture or indeed from oneself. Additionally, Scarry follows Bertrand Russell and John Rawls and suggests that we should learn to imagine the other by attaching certain signifiers to the other which we automatically attach to ourselves in order to apply ‘generous imaginings’ (Scarry 1996: 106). This is an act of imagining the other which we have already established as a hard act to follow. Still, Scarry asserts, this is ‘a cosmopolitan practice of the imagination’ (Scarry 1996: 108) and as such it must be constitutionally safeguarded and Scarry underlines that a structure of sentiments is not enough.

I would say that what Scarry calls cosmopolitan is imagining the other as oneself or putting the other in one’s own shoes. Either way it is a reduction of the other in an attempt to fully comprehend the other. I argue that giving up this idea of consuming the other by reducing him or her to something graspable would allow space for a poetic of relation (Glissant 1997) or ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy 2004). Scarry’s approach does not change much in the power relation and the value placed on the self and the other respectively, that is, the self is still the ideal to which the other may progress through the imagination of the self. What Gilroy calls cosmopolitan, on the other hand – and what I would like to follow and develop – is imagining oneself as the other or indeed placing oneself in the shoes of the other. This is not meant as a metaphor, but to Gilroy it is a very real act, as well as an ethical and epistemic change of mind. It is a question of experiencing the other rather than merely knowing or understanding the other fully. However, in this constellation the other is valued more highly and possesses a privileged position. The notion exchanges the value attached to the two components, but does it break apart the binary – dichotomous – power relation or simply reverse it? It could easily be argued that Gilroy’s estrangement simply re-establishes a new centre of enunciation and fails to stay in a decentring mode.

Moreover, although Gilroy’s idea of cosmopolitanism from below seems immediately applicable to a journalistic war correspondent’s work in the Gaza strip or in Darfur, it does not take into account the dangers it poses or the realities of journalistic media- mogul power structures. It may be a version of cosmopolitanism, which can be practised by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, but to most journalists it remains an unreachable ideal. The western political and economic interests involved in global conflicts will always pose the journalistic risk of providing ‘the normative gloss of globalized capitalism and its imperial stage’ (Douzinas 2007: 176). Political theorist

Costas Douzinas therefore also opts for an explicit emphasis on political resistance. It should moreover be noted, as I did in chapter 2, that journalism’s cultural and political power is not only operational in journalism based on catastrophic events, but it also functions in ‘soft’ news as strong identity affirmations. As in the case of Gilroy’s cosmopolitanism from below, I believe the embodied solidarity which is proposed above must be coupled with a less physical and more multiple ethics in order to take place. I will return to this shortly.