gilroy, p. planetarity and cosmopolitics. (the british journal of sociology)

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Planetarity and cosmopoliticsbjos_1329 620..626

Paul Gilroy

Abstract

This comment responds to the articles assembled by Beck and Grande (BJS 2010).It argues that their important approach has been extended in novel directions by

these contributions and that the goal represented by a cosmopolitan sociology is

pending in the expansion of the dialogue these pieces initiate.

Keywords: Cosmopolitanism; Eurocentrism; planetarity; pelagics; hydrarchy;

offshore

This is an exciting and welcome collection. It represents a powerful state-ment from within the public sphere of sociology that the default settings of

methodological nationalism cannot be allowed to continue and the ethnocen-

tric conceits of sociological reason are ready to be re-written on a worldly scale

which is both different and better. The provocative and stimulating papers

have raised a host of worthwhile questions as well as providing substantive

pointers for future research.

Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande have been pursuing this direction for some

time. They are increasingly forthright about the perils and the opportunities

before us. Here, they repudiate ‘false universalism’ and declare that there is an

obligation to address the fact that most contemporary sociological theory is

both out of date and provincial. They recoil from the discipline’s symptomatic

reluctance to face up to the transformation of social, political and economic

life through the consolidation of global risk society. This change means that

‘pulling down the walls of euro-centrism’ is now an absolutely necessary

(though hardly sufficient) starting point for the development of an alternative.

A new general theory can be defined as a cosmopolitanized sociological

outlook which would be uniquely able to grasp the entanglements wrought bycosmopolitization processes currently accelerating around us.

Gilroy (Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Sciences) (Corresponding author email: p.gilroy@

lse.ac.uk)

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01329.x

The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 3



Beck and Grande’s familiar, principled assault on methodological national-

ism is renewed and sustained. Their project is not historical but future-

oriented. It focuses initially on the novel pedagogy required by an emergent,

cosmopolitan sociology. Beyond that, lies the goal of a coalitional cosmopoli-

tics that surpasses contemporary nomophilia and its naïve faith in regulation

engineered from the top downward.They embrace the normative responsibili-

ties that devolve from these priorities.

The perils and possibilities of the present moment animate their desire for a

better interpretative synthesis in which for example, individualization and risk

are seen to be on global paths, and the dissemination of rights talk, bureau-

cracy, transformed markets, and new kinship and household forms provides

the basis of a worldly conversation about sociality and humanity that will be

plausible.This aspect of Beck and Grande’s intervention shadows but does not

acknowledge the work of the Cold War generation of anti-colonial theorists.

As a result of their own forced entanglement in a belligerent, Europe-centred,

modernity, that group emerged from the ordeal clear that a repetition of

Europe’s crimes and errors (even if it was conducted in the name of develop-

ment) could not bear the weight of the new definitions of humanity which were

required. Think, for example, of Frantz Fanon’s weary mode of address at the

end of his classic study The Wretched of The Earth:

. . . the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. We

can do anything today provided that we do not ape Europe, provided we are

not obsessed with catching up with Europe . . . we need a model, schemas

and examples . . . When I look for man in European lifestyles and technol-

ogy I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders. (Fanon 2004:

236)

The would-be cosmo-sociological successor to arguments like these skips over

the impure, vernacular and sometimes anti-European cosmopolitanism thatgraced the salons of Bandung and Paris as well as the pages of tricontinentalist

initiatives like the journal Présence Africaine. Instead, it draws critical energy

from the de-provincializing, stance of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arjun Appadurai

and other scholars of postcolonial relations mostly based outside Europe in

US academic institutions. Its locational ironies aside, this choice is appropriate

because the constellation created by their influential work endorses the plu-

ralization of modernity which can then be seen in compressed or attenuated

forms as a result of conquest and dependence as well as transnational tradingand technological transfer. That expanding academic archive endorses the

idea that more needs to be done than making modernity and coloniality

synonymous. Detailed indictments to that effect offered by important Latin

American thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and others, are

sidestepped in a strategic act of interpretive generosity towards modernity

Planetarity and cosmopolitics 621

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010British Journal of Sociology 61(3)



which allows the struggle for sociology’s soul to be continued and the master

category of modernity to be retained in an amended form. It survives sustained

exposure to the demands of skeptical alterity which might have been expected

to trouble it more deeply than they do.This is mostly the result of contributions

that transpose the basic Beck/Grande problematic into untried social and

historical settings. Happily, that shift generates rather more than simply a

renewal of comparative approaches.There are welcome glimpses of an exciting

process of mutual education that is also capable of chipping the crust of

incorrigibility from the universalist rendering of European particulars.

Of course, Beck and Grande see that the timely, reconstructive labour they

propose and practice must itself be a recognizably cosmopolitan project. It

should correspond to the issue of how ‘western’ interests can renegotiate their

conflicted relationship with a world that they unjustly dominated, the worldwhich may now be leaving them behind. How the ‘west’ might be able to

re-join that imperiled collectivity is pending in these pages.The special signifi-

cance of action to manage the impact of climate change is acknowledged but

even that priority cannot be relied upon to organize the unstable equilibrium

of global risk society’s centripetal and centrifugal effects.

The act of salvage to which most of the contributors are committed is a

delicate operation with several elements. The colonial, imperial and postcolo-

nial dynamics of both first and second modernities have to be reintegrated

theoretically. Then, a properly global, open and humble reassessment of

second modernity – seen in its various compressed and attenuated, extra-

European forms – will enable European thought to break out of its restrictive,

ethnocentric frame and to deliver ‘reflexive cosmopolitization’ as a powerful

alternative to methodological Eurocentrism on one side and to recently resur-

gent civilizationism on the other. The aim is to enrich European sociological

understanding by folding the way it has been understood by its Others back in

to its operations. The collaborative, dialogic mood of the project is therefore

part of the process of making and sustaining an imagined cosmopolitancommunity.

This becomes an attractive option where the repudiation of securitocratic

civilizationism and shallow culturalism are to the fore. However, exactly where

this cosmopolitan turn stands in relation to the cosmopolitanism of capitalism

and the equally cosmopolitan spirit that has shaped global opposition to it is

not always clear. That blur takes nothing away from the audacity of the

underlying aspirations but the silence that supports it is the result of political

choices which might be better served if they were made explicit.Where the project is most successful, we encounter something like a

rebadged version of the righteous intention to purge sociology of its ethno-

centric habits and as Charles Taylor suggested long ago, to develop deeper

modes of understanding through the self-conscious, methodologically water-

tight production of a ‘language of perspicuous contrast’ which would be

622 Paul Gilroy

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(3)



neither wholly our own nor entirely alien. The discussion of individuation that

emerges from these papers offers an especially rich illustration of that

possibility. If Taylor’s ambition was elevated by his Christian faith, Beck and

Grande’s version of that hope is built upon their profane attachment to soci-

ology’s explanatory energies. These very different vehicles deliver analysis to

the same fortuitous location – an interpretative perch from which ‘. . . it will

frequently be the case that we cannot understand another society until we

have understood ourselves better as well ‘ (Taylor 1985: 129).What this means,

and how it can produce a real transformation of understanding that surpasses

mere comparison is probably easier to discern outside sociology than inside it.

One small, still dynamic example resides in Moby Dick ( Melville 1986)

where Melville’s maritime narrative encompassed various hydrarchies and

captured some of the distinctive characteristics of the port cities that wereamong the nineteenth century’s most cosmopolitan locations. At one point, he

casually compares the streets of New Bedford, New England’s whaling capital,

to those of other similar places worldwide:

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently

offer to view the queerest looking non-descripts from foreign parts. Even in

Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes

jostle with affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and

Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared

the natives. (Melville 1986: 125)

The ironic reversal in that final sentence not only affirms the author’s cosmo-

politan imagination. It reveals his hermeneutic command of what can be called

a seafarer’s estrangement from the assumptions underpinning their own

culture, particularly with regard to the pressing injustices of racial hierarchy.

For Melville, that distance was essential in distinguishing significant human

differences from trivial, minor ones. In that regard, the law of the sea was not

the law of the land. Reflecting a century later on Melville’s legacy while in

prison awaiting deportation from Ellis Island in New York harbour, the Trin-

idadian communist, C.L.R. James, pointed out that developments onboard the

Pequod were significantly ahead of those that could be found onshore. Off-

shore relations anticipated features of territorial sociality which would not

become fully visible for some time to come. For James, Melville’s relationship

to the sea and its global commerce had enabled him to see the future of

capitalism more clearly than any other writer of that time. The sea, and the

distinctive habits it inculcated into ports and, most importantly, into the het-eroglot, seafaring proletariat, elevated Melville’s insights to the greatest criti-

cal significance.

Melville is not the only representative writer of industrial civilization. He is

the only one there is. In his great book the division and antagonisms and





madnesses of an outworn civilization are mercilessly dissected and cast

aside. Nature, technology, the community of men, science and knowledge,

literature and ideas are fused into a new humanism, opening a vast expan-

sion of human capacity and human achievement. Moby Dick will either be

universally burnt or be universally known in every language as the first

comprehensive statement in literature of the conditions and perspectives for

the survival of Western Civilization. (James 1978: 105)

Melville might also have been among the first to anticipate the catastrophic

termination of promethean, Atlantic modernity and its transformation by a

worldy successor project more capable of dwelling sustainably with nature. In

the gay spirit of the novelist’s early excursions into what might pass these days

as Actor/Network theory, Beck and Grande’s conceptual palette is deployedhere in elaborate form and then interrogated by thinkers based in other

regions and disciplines, notably from Pacific and East Asia. Their periodization

and conceptual tools provide the heuristic basis for a fusion of horizons which

promises to represent the world, perhaps for the first time from a variety of

angles that correspond simultaneously to centres of power, commerce and

knowledge that are both emerging and fading.There is a pleasing contrapuntal

movement about the way these intersecting perspectives are combined to

address modernity’s entanglements.

All involutionary impulses are contained and under the sign of this cosmo-

politan method, the differences that must remain on view are not registered on

a temporal scale. They exist relationally, in the same present that we inhabit in

common. No social relations are ahead and none are behind. Once again, the

claims of civilizationism are undone.

Much of the urgency with which this is expressed derives from the climato-

logical, financial and biomedical problems that are fuelling world risk society.

Beyond that immediate coming to terms lies the evasive prize of a method-

ological cosmopolitanism, a new way of understanding the world that is in stepwith the processes of cosmopolitization being registered inside and outside of

the academy – in the constitution of our disciplines and styles of thought.

We run into a problem here because of the authors’ great loyalty to socio-

logical particularity. Their project calls the status of disciplinary divisions

quietly into question and then forces those habits to retreat in the face of a

more problem-centred notion of academic life. The institutional shape of the

university only grudgingly admits these reflections which have been common-

place in the pluriverse of the museum and the art world from which Sarat

Maharaj addresses us so eloquently. Indeed, the idea of a cosmopolitan reck-

oning with the world has come late to European sociology where a muted

critique of linear progress centred on other targets and the myopic mainstream

was largely able to evade the varieties of critical self-scrutiny that were intro-

duced into the discipline of Anthropology at a much earlier point.

624 Paul Gilroy

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(3)



Perhaps there is a bigger struggle with the grain of sociology as a discipline

than the contributors to this anthology can allow? They seem to share a weak

sense of how sociological ways of seeing and styles of thought might be actively

disposed against the project they advocate.

It is not only pop civilizationism that generates opposition to the idea that

modernity can be uncoupled from progressive movement, from the founding

sense that things are moving forward. Placing the twentieth century dialectic of

progress and catastrophe behind them they favour a worldly mix that defies

sublation and marks its distance from earlier cosmpolitanisms by its hesitation

to redeploy that word. The problem of self-provincialization recurs when the

critique of methodological nationalism can proceed unencumbered by similar

critiques of methodological racism, methodological parochialism and forms of

nationalism which are not only methodological in character.The periodization of first and second modernity leaves a degree of linearity

intact even when it is complicated and augmented by the idea of entanglement.

There is an implicit historicality to that sequence which gets submerged but

has not been entirely abandoned. The problem it creates is compounded

because the urgent, future-oriented stance on display creates the impression

that the authors have little time either to consider how the social and socio-

logical reason were configured by protracted, colonial relationships with alter-

ity or for a ruthless, critical genealogy of the inadequate, tainted and imperial

cosmopolitanisms that many voices see as resurgent in the antinomies of

human rights and armoured humanitarianism.

This is the context in which the rewriting of sociology has been proposed. It

cannot be accomplished unless their cosmosociology is able to place itself

carefully with more than a Kantian compass. Montesquieu’s contrastive

studies of law and institutions point in the same direction but his freedom to

create his own Persia can no longer be indulged. Like Rousseau’s view of the

transition from natural to social modes of being in the world, sociology’s

various antecedents lay in thought experiments that were entangled in colonialanthropologies and embedded in the dynamics of European expansion. Nor

will the problem of security be lightly disposed of. Today’s warmongering

schemes rekindle the extended cosmo- and geopolitical fantasies of Mahan

and Mackinder, Kjellén and Haushofer all of whom get collapsed into the

caricature of Schmitt which serves so many trivial discussions of planetarity

and empire.

Cecil Rhodes announced that he would conquer the heavens if he could. His

thwarted desire anticipated the vantage point of the drone pilot, sitting, invul-nerable at an adapted games console in Colorado or Florida yet dealing out

death and collateral damage in Helmand or ‘Afpak’ to ensure security on the

streets of London and Washington. That example raises another troubling

issue for though the contributors here make ritual acknowledgement of the

damage done by wars, the tacitly Kantian foundations upon which their



gilroy, p. planetarity and cosmopolitics. (the british journal of sociology)

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