Abstract
Volume 4 of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System appeared in 2011 (Berkeley, University of California Press), with promises of volumes 5 and 6 in the future, if he can ‘last it out’ (p. xvii). The latest volume deals with the ‘geoculture’ of the world-system in the period 1789–1914, a geoculture marked by ‘centrist liberalism triumphant’. This turn to culture intersects with the interests in play in the excellent collection under review here, which brings together a range of contributors ‘committed in one way or another’ to ‘the study of culture’ (p. 11) who enter, in various ways, into some fascinating tussles with Wallerstein’s work.
The problems with world-systems analysis for humanities-centred scholars seem clear enough – above all, perhaps, a ‘bigness’ problem in Wallerstein’s work, which is, to say the least, ‘somewhat unfriendly to the humanities’ (p. 4). That is, the world and long historical scope, theorized in a way which can appear to lend the system ‘almost theological omnipotence’ (p. 10), would seem obviously incompatible with humanities’-type emphases on culture, subjectivity, difference, agency, the local, and so on. More generally, hasn’t everything that has been happening across the human sciences since the beginning of the post-modern turn been in completely the opposite direction to the path taken by Wallerstein? For instance, as Robbins notes, in the last couple of decades, humanities scholars have often asserted that ‘what must be blamed is, precisely, thinking systematically’ (p. 57). Here, as Balakrishnan comments, only a few years after the end of the Cold War, ‘world-systems theory already seemed to belong to a bygone era of upheaval’ – not only in terms of changing theoretical emphases, but also with respect to the apparent distance separating the 1970s from a post-communist ‘modernity of liberal democracy, markets, and human rights’ (p. 227). Overall, though, the accounts assembled here, while often critical, are attentive, respectful, and appreciative, and I will attempt to touch on some of the more notable and interesting attempts at interchange across the quite diverse thematic contributions.
First, to continue with that ‘bigness’ issue, for those underscoring the ‘irreducibility of culture’, there seems an immediate and obvious ‘resistance to Wallerstein’ (Robbins, p. 46). As Moretti notes, world-systems thinking ‘brusquely reduces the many independent spaces…to just three positions’ (p. 70), a challenge to the drive for specificity and nuance so often found, say, in literature studies. And, of course, compounding this, is that within the world-systems now less than fashionable emphasis on system, priority is given to the economic dimension (the common division of labour) (Robbins, p. 45). This systemic and economically reductionist optic seems to threaten an automatic blindness to struggle, the active making of history, contingency (Robbins): events, actions, and movements, says Robbins, ‘tend not to appear on Wallerstein’s screen as more than blips’; ‘Everything is (or threatens to become) system’ (pp. 54–5).
Again, as Robbins notes, the ‘blaming the system’ modality of the dependency moment appears somewhat out of time, not only theoretically – with the ‘90 s turn to micro-history, language, identity and culture (Wigen) – but also in the simultaneous and related erosion of the rhetoric of denunciation. Part of this involves a suspicion that there is, after all, no system at all today, just a disorganized mess of multiple processes and events with unpredictable consequences (Robbins). This, for instance, seems an important line within the post-2000 globalization literature, which might otherwise have seemed an obvious ground for a strong return to world-systems thinking. One apparently feasible option for those not inclined to complexity- or systems-talk in thinking the social today might be the language of ‘alternative modernities’. The reception, though, for this alternative is perhaps surprisingly cold (Robbins; Tanoukhi; Barlow) – read, in the end, as contesting discourses of cultural inferiority at the expense of disguising ‘the severe political, social, and economic hierarchies that continue to structure the world’ (p. 9).
Where else to go, then? A perhaps predictable conclusion, by way of a surprising analogy with four models – national seas, ocean arcs, ocean basins, global ocean – for mapping the world’s oceans, is provided by Wigen: we don’t need to stick with any one theoretical approach, but can deploy any one of them pragmatically, depending on our questions. Another possibility is suggested by Barlow, in looking at the ‘modern girl’ phenomenon, which happens globally between 1919–41, and cannot be grasped either by Wallerstein’s Eurocentric universalism or by the contingency-focused regionalists, who simply invert the world-systems’ position. Instead, Barlow opts for a reading of this as understandable as the modern ‘Event’ (in Badiou’s sense – both singular and universal) of women. More in line with complexity-informed globalization thinking, Brenner, meanwhile, charges that Wallerstein ‘transposes state-centric mappings of space onto the global scale, and thus remains trapped within a basically territorial understanding of contemporary capitalism’ (p. 112). In contrast, the realities of contemporary globalization demand attention to its contradictory processes of deterritorializing and reterritorializing, to ‘qualitatively new geographies of capital accumulation, state regulation, and uneven development’ (Brenner, p. 130). And, in a sharp and compact chapter, Franco Moretti suggests that the relevance of world-systems theory (sameness) to the study of world literature is restricted to the period after the eighteenth century, while, before this, evolutionary theory (difference) provides a better explanatory route.
Another significant and unsurprising topic frequently broached is Wallerstein’s explicit commentary on the disciplines. Thus, the editors comment that the social sciences emerge as ‘the unmistakable hero of Wallerstein’s story’ (p. 5) of the two cultures and the emergence of the social sciences, leaving humanities scholars task-less. Thus, in a very nice summary of world-systems thinking, Lee moves to focus on Wallerstein’s embrace of the scholarly signs of the collapse of the liberal consensus (the questioning of rationality, determinism, progress, objectivism, modernity, linear explanations, Eurocentrism, and so on) (see also Palumbo-Liu’s chapter on Wallerstein and the rethinking of reason). The implicit question obviously consists of the compatibility of Wallerstein’s enthusiasm with the thrust of the entirety of world-systems theory. On this score, Robbins notes a central commonality between Wallerstein and the humanities, in an ‘anti-progressive impulse’ (p. 56) – a compelling issue about which more could have been said.
Overall, as I’ve said, the predominant attitude across the collection, despite important reservations, is warm towards the contributions of the world-systems approach. Wallerstein himself is less receptive in his chapter, towards the end of the book. In a pointed anecdote, he notes the typical anthropological seminar response to broad treatments of the situation of the South – ‘But not in Pago Pago!’ (p. 225); and he restates the need to explain the capitalist world-system: ‘It has its history, its structure, its contradictions, its prospects. I try to study this directly. Others study it implicitly. I think it might help us all if the latter reflected more openly on what it is they are really doing’ (p. 226). This obduracy seems, to me, on point, as do those moments when the contributors emphasize the continuing importance of what Wallerstein has accomplished – particularly at this time. Thus, Balakrishnan notes a shift from something like a 1990s end of history moment to the current moment of world turmoil as vindicating the global and longue durée lenses that Wallerstein has so stubbornly clung to. As the editors suggest, maybe it’s time to renew ‘our tolerance of what Lyotard called “grands récits”…to learn once again to tell large stories, and to tell them better’ (p. 9).