There are at least two ways of talking about contemporary cosmopolitan cultures. The first is to suggest that cosmopolitan cultures are the depthless commercial pleasures of the increasingly placeless capitalist elite. In this view, cosmopolitan culture is aligned with a postmodern culture that involves the visual and sensual pleasures of global cities. Hollywood cinema, Madonna CDs and Australian wine. This builds upon a prejudice of certain aspects of left thinking that presumes that if one moves outside the boundaries of the nation it is to ‘wallow in a privileged and irresponsible detachment’. Such a notion of cosmopolitanism would tie a fast-moving placeless culture into the rise of a new middle and upper class of cappuccino drinkers. Here cosmopolitanism can be contrasted with the more local and national cultural definitions that are available to poor and working people. Such a view sets up a simple contrast between cosmopolitans and locals. Cosmopolitanism, on such a view, becomes the everyday currency of global capitalism, whose most obvious effect is the reinforcement of symbolic boundaries between social classes.However, the second version of cosmopolitanism has a more overtly ethical vision than one motivated by the reproduction of class prejudice. Such a notion of cosmopolitanism would not presume that the globe-trotting journalists are any more cosmopolitan in their orientations than someone who has never left the city of their birth. This is because to conceive of cosmopolitanism ethically detaches it from my ability to access exotic forms of consumption, while connecting it from my ability to live with different. While cosmopolitanism can indeed be connected to forms of cultural openness, it is more closely connected to what Jonathan Rutherford has called “the art of life” than to manic mobility or hedonism.The version of cosmopolitanism I wish to defend has more to do with ethics and selfhood than explicit concerns with ideology. However, it does retain a sociological point of reference through the many new claims and agendas that are being opened by questions connected to the mobility of cultures, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality. Yet there are a number of skeptics in this regard. For example, Friedman has argued that intellectuals and elites who wish to talk of hybridity and cosmopolitanism are largely writing from the ‘particular’ viewpoint of ‘de-territorialized’ identities. The hybridity and cultural sophistication of elite groups is in sharp distinction to the processes of Balkanization and trivialization experienced at the bottom of the system. Friedman makes these points against cultural theorists like Bhabha, whose work seeks to emphasize how all forms of cultural and symbolic production lack the primordial unity or fixity claimed by cultural nationalists. Friedman’s view is that this insight is likely to be of little help when faced with nationalist forms of cultural closure and violence. However, Bhabha does point to a connection between questions of identity and ethics missed by Friedman. What Bhabha describes as the uncovering of the ‘contestation and flux’ of identity has contributed to the cosmopolitan project. Many post-colonial writers in this respect point to the partial blindness of national habits and traditions, which see only what they want to see. The discursive sin of arguments made in respect of hybridity is to point to the way common identities (not just elites) are forged through the unpredictable flows of peoples and symbols.
