Re: Help

Dear Rachelle,

     Perhaps you have received some personal communications reguarding your
questions, however, the overwhelming roar of silence in responses to the
list reflects the seriousness of the lacuna in the literature to which your
original post gestures.

     Back in the early '80's, Terence Hopkins named two sets of processes,
world-scale division and integration of labor and state formation and
deformation, "that constitute the system's formation and provide an account,
at the most general level, for the patterns and features of its
development"; but in the same venue, Hopkins, Wallerstein, et al. also
claimed that there was a third fundamental aspect to the modern
world-system, "the broadly 'cultural aspect' ... even though little is
systematically known about it as an integral aspect of world-historical
development ... [and] much preliminary conceptual work needs to be done".
Wallerstein himself has written a great deal on the subject throughout his
career and I might suggest you look at the essays in _Unthinking Social
Science_, the report of the Gulbenkian Commission _Open the Social Sciences_
and Ch. 3 of _Historical Capitalism_, just for starters; both of the first
two treat the "two cultures" (science-humanities) split and the emergence of
the social sciences and their disciplinary demarcations.

     All the same, little seems to have really changed in the
world(-)systems community at large.  Certainly, there have been studies
whose subject matter would have to be situated in this third arena; however,
most of them, on close scrutiny, reproduce the nineteenth-century solutions
to constructing social knowledge that the world-systems perspective
endeavored to overcome in either the idiographic form where "culture"
functions as a description or "context" or the nomothetic mode where
"culture" functions as a variable in a comparative analysis.
Perhaps--hopefully--this purposefully broad and polemical generalization
will prompt others on the list to suggest work that does not fall into these
two classes, or at least take up what I believe not only to be an important
argument, but an intellectual agenda awaiting our attention.

     The real problem as I perceive it is that if this third arena is just
as integral (and not just reflective or superstructural) to the development
of the modern world as the realms of material production and distribution
(the "economic") or of decision-making and coercion (the "political"), then
we should be able to conceptualize it in terms of both the systemic
(possessing continuities in its relational patterns) and historical
(exhibiting irreversible change over the long term) aspects of the M W-S.
That would imply work focusing on evolving, but qualitatively recognizabe,
hierarchical structures (of knowledge) reproduced by unique and unitary
processes, exhibiting cycles and trends, driven by fundamental contradictions.

     Certainly, the difficulties in developing this field are immense.  For
instance, first, a great deal of important work has already been done in
other disciplines.  This literature has to be taken seriously and thoroughly
digested.  That's a tall order, but it's the only way of avoiding the
superficiality of simply rejecting new trends in theory and method or simply
applying them like cooky-cutter templates.  For example, work in complexity
studies from the hard sciences and poststructuralism/postmodernism in the
humanities have met both these fates.  I would suggest that we need to look
at them (as "objects" of analysis) for the deeper meaning they convey
through the oppositions they define.  Although my thinking has evolved
substantially since the article was written in the early '90's, have a look
at my attempt for the post-1945 period in "Structures of Knowledge" (1996,
Hopkins and Wallerstein et al., _The Age of Transition_).  As regards method
and theory, even though it is quite short, you might get some of the flavor
of this work from my "Thinking the Past/ Making the Future: Methods and
Purpose in World-Historical Science" (1998, _Mentoring, Methods and
Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hopkins_).  Second, and I think
crucially, we need to investigate the articulation of the processes of
knowledge formation ("culture" as the symbolic codes and material practices
defining the imaginative horizon of what is thinkable and thus doable at any
specific time and place) with the other processes of the M W-S.
Unfortunjately, my _TimeSpace of Cultural Studies_, a large-scale study of a
major knowledge movement from a world-systems perspective, is still in
search of a publisher but my "After History? The Last Frontier of Historical
Capitalism" is coming out soon in _Protosociologie_.  Eventually, my work on
the politics and economics of nineteenth-century knowledge formation (and
the creation of the liberal subject) in relation to some events of the
1860's (the reform movement in England, the rebellion in Ireland and the
uprising in Jamaica), conceptualized as instances of a process will appear,
but for the moment ... my paper for the upcoming PEWS--on social movements
and the structures of knowledge--may actually appear first.

     Well, this is what I'm doing, but I guess that part of what I'm trying
to say is that I'm afraid that in many respects we are at the beginning in
addressing the substance of your query.  For instance, the very category of
"science" is in dispute spatially and temporally (finally) among historians
and sociologists of science; however, the world-systems perspective suggests
that all categories should be analyzed as processes!  Here at FBC we do have
a Research Working Group that is concerned with the issue and I would be
very interested in what resources you find as your research progresses.
Perhaps others on the list will share their own work with us.

     Regards/Rlee

At 01:21 AM 3/4/99 +0900, you wrote:
>Greetings!  I am a researcher in Japan currently working on a paper re the
role of knowledge in the development and underdevelopment of countries.  In
particular, my research looks into knowledge as a factor of production and
how it contributes to the core-periphery problem using the World Systems
Theory as a framework.  
>
>Pertinent to my research, may I ask:
>
>1. How is science defined in the World Systems Theory?
>2. What is the role of knowledge/power structures in the World Systems Theory?
>3. What theory of production is embedded in the World Systems Theory, if
there is one?  If there is none, then why not?
>4. How applicable would the World Systems Theory be once we add information
technology, especially with the advent of the INTERNET?
>5. Lastly, can anyone please provide me with an annotated bibliography that
pertains to my research (i.e., knowledge, science and World Systems Theory
combined)?
>
>Thanks in anticipation.  
>
>Sincerely, 
>RACHELLE CASTILLO
>
>
>
>
>
>


Richard E. Lee
Fernand Braudel Center
SUNY-Binghamton
Binghamton, NY
13902-6000

tel:    (off) 607 777-2250
	(res) 607 729-7712
fax:          607 777-4315
e-mail: rlee@binghamton.edu