Cosmopolitanism

I'd like add "cosmopolitanism" to our discussion. It came up in the Morley and Lury readings but not as the main focus. These are some of the thoughts that my experience at the "Cosmopolitan Cinemas" workshop in Montreal over the weekend may contribute to our engagement with global media theories:

Cosmopolitanism is both indispensable and ambivalent as a theoretical and political tool. It's indispensable as a possible way to oppose the rhetoric of consumerist, cheery multiculturalism that has taken over and fused together state and corporate approaches to the politics of difference. Cosmopolitanism has been recently resurrected across the humanities-social sciences spectrum, particularly in localized manifestations that usually yield hyphenated cosmopolitanisms. The discourse of cosmopolitanism assumes the possibility of exchange, understanding, hospitality that crosses national borders and is can lead to a global solidarity that contests the neoliberal capitalist framework of globalization. However, this also implies a core of universal humanism, which can never be entirely extracted from the terms roots in European Enlightenment philosophies. This universalism has been proven over and over again to be suspect as a license for intellectual exceptionalism, elitism and racist imperialism in its extreme forms. (Heidegger and Kant come to mind.)

I noticed during the workshop that, in its cinematic dimension, cosmopolitan theory tends to converge on certain "proper" objects, which are mostly self-reflective transnational festival films or humanitarian documentaries. Much of Akin's, Innaritu's or Haneke's work, or a film like Road to Guantanamo would be prime candidates. There was a paper entirely focused on the latter. My nagging unease about cinematic cosmopolitanism has to do with how it separates "good" objects from "bad" ones, such as Nollywood films or reality TV -- e.g. something like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Art films, too me, cannot help but reinforce a cosmopolitanism for the few, and undermine the idea of critical cosmopolitics that many hope to achieve by reinventing cosmopolitanism in hyphenated, localized, particularized forms.

The discussion kept returning to the relations between aesthetic and political effect, especially when it comes to documentaries. How come documentaries that are openly activist, that tell you what to do to confront a problem, usually lead to complacency and non-action; whereas ambivalent ones that simply indicate the problem and observe its various aspects are more likely to be triggers for action? (Someone cited recent studies that have been done about this.) This is a pretty old dilemma, which recurs in familiar debates (avantgarde modernism or realism? move or alienate?). But it seems to take on renewed emphasis as it is posed in relation to the global, in the circulation of global media products among hybridized audiences.