ABSTRACT
The concept of cosmopolitanism has always borne a certain utopian aspect, which is frequently connected to its ostensible embrace of social and cultural difference. This is the gist of Marx’s greatest compliment to the capitalist class: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. […] National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.” In this vision, cosmopolitanism seeks to create spaces of difference, in which the idiosyncratic identities of this or that cognizably homogeneous place can be challenged, corrupted, and blended into forms that stand out as sites of alterity, which have been (after Foucault) called heterotopias. Yet in this process of deterritorialization, to invoke a Deleuzian concept, the play of differences becomes part of the whole cloth of the system itself, an increasingly global system whose contours exceed the traditional frames of reference. The cosmopolitan utopianism requires, if only figuratively, the metropolis as a dynamic microcosm of its overall worldview. This chapter examines cosmopolitanism from a geocritical perspective, exploring the ways in which social spaces and the cartographic imagination affect our understanding of the cosmopolitan today.
