Crippin’ the Flâneur: Cosmopolitanism, and Landscapes of Tolerance

Fiona Kumari Campbell

doi:10.36251/josi.6

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism, desire and the contracting of social relationships are enduring themes in both philosophy and social theory. In this paper I seek to explore these themes in order to ascertain what they might mean to disabled people and the ethos of ableism more generally. Modern Westernized life has since the Industrial Revolution been sited in cities fostering the growth of urban culture and an ethos of cosmopolitanism (Agamben, 2009; Beck, 2002; Cheah, 2006). The cosmopolitan outlook has become the signifier of that which is developed, advanced and civilized in society. The liberal project of the melting pot, of social tolerance is cast against the backdrop of city life (Brown, 2006). The paper will first examine the trope of cosmopolitanism and disability including the place of ‘spaces’ for marginal peoples. Second, it will provide a perspective on the disabled flâneur (Campbell, 2009; Simmel, 1908; Young, 2005) who ambivalently claims ‘outsider-insidedness’ and finally the paper moves to consider the significant question of social inclusion and the government of aversion through the deployment of discourses of tolerance. Keywords: cosmopolitanism; social inclusion, community, flâneur, tolerance; biopolitics; disability

Highlights

Cosmopolitanism, desire and the contracting of social relationships are enduring themes in both philosophy and social theory
If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense
In this paper I seek to explore these themes in order to ascertain what they might mean to disabled people and the ethos of ableism more generally

Summary

Crips Moving through Urban Life

Disability rhetoric correctly postures that disability is an afterthought (Goggin & Newell, 2005) bound to an exclusionary ableist matrix that sets the terms of engagement. A drive towards self-mastery may mean that it is not possible for some disabled people to be truly ‘free’ within the confines of liberalism. Walter Benjamin in exploring the characters of the metropolis looked to the margins – “he singled out the flâneur, prostitute, collector – historical figures whose existence was precarious economically in their own time. The flâneur in Poe’s (1912) poem ‘The Man of the Crowd’ does not have an independent existence of other human beings, but this does not mean he has an enabling interpenetrative relation with them This flâneur is a sign of life lived as tentative and precarious. Simmel points to the paradox of the flâneur being our own excluded [person] and represents something of us that is put out: Included in his exclusion: the stranger is an element of the group itself ... The theme of the cosmopolitan outlook and the figure of the flâneur are brought to bear on the subject of inclusion, its paradoxes and anxieties

Paradoxes of Social Inclusion

The Guilt of Inclusion

Where to Next?

Findings

Biographical Note