Cosmopolitanisms (Universals and
Utopias besides)
Professor
Jairo Moreno
Department
of Music, NYU
Spring 2008
Incipient
macro-political project; critique of politics, its institutions, and
parochialisms; democratization of world affairs; template for an ethical and
social embedding of individuals; cultural attitude, disposition, aspiration and
practice; humanistic principle; network of concepts for extra-national
solidarity; bourgeois personalistic conviction;
unearned Western European universalism; imperial apologetics; utopian non-sense;
modes of world-making: Cosmopolitanisms trace a long and winding spatio-temporal trajectory embodying these things, among
many others. In a fundamental sense,
cosmopolitanisms constitute a network of questions. And yet today across East and West, North and
South, they constitute an open and contested conceptualization and putting into
practice of an ancient notion of being “at home in the world,” properly
belonging “everywhere” and/or “nowhere in particular,” or, more recently, being
of, in, and for a world. Contemporary appeals to cosmopolitanisms are
marked by their emphasis on the specificity of their location, pace advocates of celebratory transnationalism or banal interculturalism. Indeed, in a simultaneously fragmented and
macro-dependent world, cosmopolitanisms, themselves constitutive of and
constituted by a certain conflictive mutuality among peoples, offer actually
existing prospects both to carry out and understand the relation between micro-
and macro-politics, their locations, and their spheres of influence,
interference, and interest.
The seminar
will study cosmopolitanisms and cosmopolitanization
in their historical and geo-political trajectory; their economic, political,
and social dimensions today; and their theoretical representations and cultural
self-representations. We will focus on: a) cosmopolitanization as a modality of
contemporary re-articulations of the political b) the dialectics of
localization of engagement with the worldly, the global, and the planetary c)
the effects of these dialectics on the consecution, maintenance, and struggle
against, for, and despite knowledge-systems.
Genealogical
analysis of early formations will give way to study of multiple modalities they
adopt today, ethically, socially, and politically, as debated by late C. 20 and
early C. 21 social science scholars (political philosophy and science,
sociology, anthropology). We conclude
with a series of in-depth analyses of the musical: regional cosmopolitanisms;
an ethnography of cosmopolitan nationalism; cosmopolitanization
of sonic production and performance. Throughout,
the seminar will attend to the limitations both of cosmopolitanisms to
understand contemporary sonic economies and of music’s (its producers’ and makers’,
distributors’, and consumers’) much-vaunted agencies across various cosmopolitical scales.
Much of this will mean applying critical pressure on culture as the dominant
analytics of ‘the musical’.
Schedule
PART 1: Early and Vernacular
Formations
Week 1
Lecture:
Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitans, and Cosmopolitanization
Week 2
Late
Stoics, Early Christianity, and Two Contemporary Reconstructions:
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations (excerpts)
Seneca,
Letters (excerpts)
Patterson,
“Ecumenical
Appiah,
“The Case for Contamination”
Week 3
Cosmopolitanisms
Otherwise and Vernacular:
Pollock,
“Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History”
Mignolo,
“The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”
PART 2: Modern Political Aspirations
Week 4
Western
European Middle Modernity:
Kant,
Immanuel, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”; “Toward
Perpetual Peace”
Bohman
and Lutz-Bachman, introduction
Nussbaum,
“Kant and Cosmopolitanism”
Week 5
Neo- and
Post-Patriotisms:
Nussbaum,
“Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”
Responses
to Nussbaum:
Appiah,
“Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”
Scarry,
“The Difficulty of Imagining Other People”
Walzer,
“Spheres of Affection”
INTERLUDE 1
Week 6
Theoretical
Reflection – Scale, Space, and Flow:
Smith, “Contours
of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the
Production of Geographical
Scale”
Hannerz,
“Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology”
Featherstone
and Lash, “Globalization, Modernity, and the Spatialization
of Social Theory”
PART 3: Cosmopolitics
Week 7
Debating Cosmopolitics:
Archibugi,
“Cosmopolitical Democracy”
Breenan,
“Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism”
Archibugi,
“Demos and Cosmopolis”
Week 8
Doing
Things with Modernities (Second and Reflexive):
Beck, “The
Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity”
Beck,
“Democracy beyond the Nation-State: A Cosmopolitical
Manifesto”
Beck, “The
Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies”
PART 4: Localities
Week 9
Cities,
Locality, and/in Their Spaces:
Abbas,
“Cosmopolitan De-scriptions:
Robertson,
“Glocalization: Time-Space and
Homogeneity-Heterogeneity
Calhoun,
“The Class-Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Towards a Critique of Actually
Existing
Cosmopolitanisms”
Week 10
The Cosmopolitical, the Cultural, so-called, and the Imperial:
Cheah,
“The Cosmopolitical – Today”
Robbins,
“Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism”
Brennan,
“Claims to Global Culture:
INTERLUDE 2
Week 11
Knowledge Production and (Cultural?) Translation:
Breenan,
“Cosmo-Theory”
Clifford,
“Traveling Cultures”
Said,
“Traveling Theory”
PART 5: Musical and Sonic Cosmopolitanisms, Cosmopolitans,
and Cosmopolitanization
Week 12
Regional
Narratives:
Breenan,
“The World Cuban: Alejo Carpentier
and Cuban Popular Music”
Regev,
“Ethno-National Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Made from
Within”
Turino,
“Nationalism and Latin American Music: Selected Case Studies and Theoretical
Considerations”
Stokes, “On
Musical Cosmopolitanism”
Week 13
Nationalism,
an Ethnography:
Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular
Music in