Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Ossman is author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City (1994) and Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Cairo, Paris (2002). She has held academic positions in Morocco, France, the UK, and the US, and she currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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MOVING MATTERS

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................ixIntroduction.....................................11 Cosmopolitan Content...........................192 Nomadic Action.................................363 Moving Through Immigration.....................584 Pulling Oneself Together.......................785 Present Continuities...........................1026 A Poetics of Attachment........................125Conclusion.......................................141Notes............................................149References.......................................169Index............................................181

Chapter One

Efforts to define the cosmopolitan have been at the center of recent debates about world politics, new forms of culture, and human rights. Is he a product of the global market or a reflection of the growth of transnational political connections? Is she a member of an emerging elite or a product of a new world culture? An ever-growing literature seeks to define this elusive figure. But whether we picture the cosmopolitan as a concerned world citizen in a Greenpeace t-shirt asking for donations or a businessman in an Armani suit engaged in a conference call in an airport lounge, whether we seek to include the exile or the world-music performer in this global portrait gallery, all we can know for sure about the cosmopolitan is that disengagement is her defining feature.

The cosmopolitan moves from settled ideas or societies or cultures toward a freedom born of a widening of political perspectives and cultural imaginations. Her gravity-defying performance might be understood as a critique of prevalent assumptions about our being the product of the social worlds we are born into. Through him we seek to recognize that societies have grown beyond the nation, to form outlooks that are not mired in received opinion, to account for global connections made possible by the intensification of exchange and travel associated with globalization. The movement toward a cosmopolitan consciousness leads to a distanced way of looking at what holds people together at their most universal. A movement toward anywhere creates the cosmopolitan's allure.

Cosmopolitans are defined by a mental disposition, bringing to mind Georg Simmel's account of "individualistic persons" who

with their qualitative determinacy and the unmistakability of their life contents, therefore resist incorporation into an order that is valid for everyone, in which they would have a calculable position according to a consistent principle. Conversely, where the organization of the whole regulates the achievement of the individual according to an end not located within him or herself, then their position must be fixed according to an external system. It is not an inner or ideal norm but rather the relationship to the totality that secures this position, which is therefore most suitably determined by a numerical arrangement.

If cosmopolitanism can be understood as a movement to reassess the "inner and ideal norms" that organize the world system and inform an inchoate global culture, we might follow this figure in his many forms to conceive a politics of the future. But by what means of transportation might we embark on this journey? the relationship of physical displacement to the cosmopolitan's critical disengagement is a point of contention. Many assume that some experience of international travel is what makes the cosmopolitan worldly. But others claim that being swept up in flows of images and information about distant lands suffices to lift someone out of a context she has inherited, setting her on the road to the disengaged appreciation and deliberation typical of the cosmopolitan individual. In either case, we should be suspicious of the very idea that one might leap in a single bound from what is given to everyone, to what we should hope for. What place does the cosmopolitan move away from? What generates the momentum of her motion? A flight toward the cosmos is taken to signal the individual's freedom from the gravity of tradition and to step beyond the narrow confines of nationalism. But how might the cosmopolitan know when he has reached a resting point from which to observe his own progress? At which moment might he decide to ponder his position? Some suggest that "cosmopolitan virtue" involves a distancing related to modes of Socratic irony. But are there not various kinds of distance and manners of achieving it?

The cosmopolitan's remoteness from the grounds of social experience has led to accusations that those who seek the politics of the future in the development of the cosmopolitan subject have imagined her as a reflection of their own intellectualism. Vernacular, ordinary, not to mention "abject" cosmopolitans have been devised or recognized in response to these criticisms; these qualifications seem to render the link between forms of life and forms of consciousness more precise. Yet hyphenation simply underscores the value attributed to the term of reference. While recognizing the good intentions of those who seek to expand the cosmopolitan to those whose image rarely comes to mind when we conjure up this worldly figure, we must consider the fundamental deference that amending the cosmopolitan implies. The cosmopolitan's conceit is born less of ethnocentrism or class position than a failure to see that his claim to novelty is a rendition on a well-known song, an old standard composed during the Enlightenment. A two-step contrast of settlement to airy flight sets the tempo for the distinctive melodies of modern nations and societies. It is in contrast to the unmoving grounds of unconscious, bodily practices associated with the past, the countryside, tradition, and exotic peoples that it develops its progressions. To recognize the continuing power of its cadence is essential, but to understand how it persists in drawing the entire world into its compositional logic might require paying attention to the way its instruments are made and its orchestras assembled.

The cosmopolitan takes the nations of the modern age as her point of departure for taking wing toward a politics of the cosmos. She does not depart from any place, but from a space made of earlier flights. She follows previous generations who have progressively left behind some ground of warm social bonds and inherited culture to join a more abstract, individualized modern society. She mimes the moves of the peasant to the city, the sense of belonging as it moves from the village to the nation, now taking those as her starting point. Following the compelling direction of this displacement from an image of the social world as warm, all embracing, perhaps maternal, she moves yet again, this time distancing herself from the national imaginations that are already the sign of an earlier upheaval. She pulls away from habit to seek some ethereal space from which one might gain a perspective on the world at large. But how does she find the content of her character in this way of moving away from the ground toward the cosmos? Does her face lose its color in the course of this skyward motion? Or, as some writers theorize, does she have the opportunity to collect colors from the world at large to paint her face in hybrid forms of consciously remixed and reassembled patterns? In either case, one must wonder what distinguishes her from those...