Risky Cosmopolitanism: Risk and Responsibility in Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Characters repeatedly ask other characters what they would risk (for love, for safety, for others) in Catherine Bush's 2000 novel The Rules of Engagement; avoidance of risk, and search for its opposite, caution, act as primary catalyzing forces for action in novel.(1) Arcadia Hearne, novel's protagonist, abandons her family and Canada for (seeming) safety of London in face of personal violence when Evan, her boyfriend, and Neil, man with whom she has had an affair, fight a duel over her. Basra Alale, a Somali refugee whom Arcadia encounters in London, must leave Somalia via Kenyan refugee camps and London to arrive in Toronto in face of lingering violence of Somali civil war and broader legacies of Somali clan traditions. Amir Barmour, with whom Arcadia becomes romantically involved in London, must leave Iran on foot, arriving in England via Frankfurt to escape ideological violence of Iranian mullahs. The global movement of all three characters centres on questions of risk and responsibility as, in all three cases, they are forced to leave others behind in order to evade risk. Yet, instead of a narrative that progresses towards safety and away from risk, Rules of Engagement posits risk-taking as inevitable, suggesting that one must engage it rather than avoid it. Nonetheless, novel does not suggest that all risks are commensurate; instead, Bush outlines a model of cosmopolitical engagement that centers on transformation of personal risks into global cosmopolitical responsibility. I argue in this paper that Rules of Engagement theorizes a model of cosmopolitanism that brings together competing theoretical discourses on topic by emphasizing connection between/inseparability of elite and subaltern cosmopolitan subjects in a system defined (per Ulrich Beck) by global risk. For Bush, this recognition of risk foregrounds necessary centrality of responsibility to a global cosmopolitics, acknowledging affective potential of personal experience (and, by extension, aesthetic). Hannah Arendt argues that while our political life rests on assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals, the 'alien' [remains] a frightening symbol of fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy (301). This link between an artificial (yet reassuring) equality and a terrifying individuality highlights ideological ground of a critically reflexive or ethical cosmopolitanism. Such a cosmopolitanism is ultimately compelled to address interconnection rather than just self, refiguring relationship between individual citizen and global polis. Rules of Engagement offers one possible way of speaking to this problem: question of responsibility--and a particularly cosmopolitan version--as a way of mediating between narcissistic self and global common. Rather than privileging one version over other, or outlining possibility of existence of subaltern cosmopolitanism, Rules of Engagement instead brings these two versions together, showing way they operate in concert. The narrative and character twinning that Bush establishes between Arcadia and Basra mirrors connection between (so-called) elite and subaltern cosmopolitan subjects. Through global systems of capital and cultural exchange, elite and subaltern are never so far apart as these two words would suggest; instead, they are intimately linked and mutually constituting. In other words, it might be helpful to think of experiences of elite and subaltern cosmopolite as expressing a difference in scale rather than a fundamental difference in kind. But what does this mean? What does this connection entail? …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".