Platonic Noise by Euben J. Peter; Euben J. Peter Peter;

Author:Euben, J. Peter; Euben, J. Peter Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

VI

The Polis, Globalization, and the

Citizenship of Place

As my work proceeded, it acquired anunexpected and in ways alarming dimension. I could not help being struck, again and again, by an overpowering sense of de´ja` vu, far more than for any other period of ancient history known to me:the distant mirror that Barbara Tuchman held up from the fourteenth century A.D. for our own troubled age is remote and pale compared to the ornate, indeed, rococoglass in which Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamon reflect contemporary fads, failings and aspirations. . . from the urban malaise to religious fundamentalism, from Veblenism to haute cuisine, from funded scholarship and mandarin literature to a flourishing dropout counterculture, from political impotence in the individual to authoritarianism in government, from science perverted for military ends to illusionism for the masses, from spiritual solipsism . . . to the pursuit of the plutocratic dream. Contemporary

cosmopological speculation seems to be taking us

straight back to the Stoic world view.

—PETER GREEN1

[T]he clock of transition runs at three different paces. “The hour of the lawyer” is the shortest; legal changes may be enacted in months. “The hour of the economist” is longer: dismantling command economies and establishing functioning markets must take years. But the longest is “the hour of the citizen”:transforming ingrained habits, mental attitudes, cultural codes, value systems, pervasive discourses. This may take decades and presents the greatest challenge.

—RALF DAHRENDORF2

THE QUESTION that frames this chapteris easily stated even if its answer is not. Is there an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the experience of political dislocation and the theoretical struggles to understand it that accompanied the eclipse of the classical polis, and our experience of globalization, as process and ideology, and our attempts to understand it? More particularly, do the various efforts to redefine citizenship in the face of the huge transformations of scale then provide an inspiration or object lesson for current efforts to redefine citizenship in globalized deterritorialized terms?

Most analysts of globalization insist that we must think as citizens of the world, and that this entails a nonspatial conception of citizenship. Something similar is present with the Stoic idea of cosmopolis and insistence that we think of ourselves as citizens of the world. One view of citizenship is that it not only confers rights and obligations, but entails acquiring an identity and becoming a member of a political community with a particular territory and history. But if Richard Falk and William Connolly are right that global citizenship operates temporally so that we must give up our fixation on particular place as the ground of citizenship—Connolly calls this the “optics of political nostalgia”—then we, like Hellenistic thinkers, find ourselves in a situation where political conditions no longer correspond to traditional categories of political thought.3

Yet it is not clear who the “we” are, since it seems that many people in the world remain rooted in a place and depend upon a particular culture and language for their identity and sense of well-being. Nor is it clear what it means to think globally.

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