Where Have All the Isms Gone?: On the Evolution of Knowledge

Not very long ago the History of Ideas had been organized according to movements within each field. In Anthropology, for example, Malinowski was associated with Functionalism, Levi-Strauss with Structuralism, etc. Post-structuralism and postmodernism each in their turn at first appeared as “the next big thing.” These terms are familiar to many of us today and have been applied analogously outside of anthropology: in the arts, in literary criticism, and even in mathematics. But having arrived at this point it appears that important thinkers, while still developing new ideas, have entered a sort of cul-de-sac in terms of movement affiliation. Movements in the past could co-exist and compete – think of Gestalt, Behavioral and Psychoanalytic psychologies – each represented a robust, distinct, and durable subculture within the field. Today in comparison, the organizing terminologies and their associated paradigms seem splintered and less self-organizing.

This quick outline will undoubtedly provoke counterexamples, but at the same time it should be recognized that the very project of dividing disciplines into historical eras has been challenged. Post-structuralism set out specifically with the intention of demolishing the notion of a "grand narrative" or a "direction" to each discipline that, according to this critique, falsely imply that we are perfecting our understanding, our moral betterment, our aesthetic taste. And so, we might ask: for better or worse, has postmodernism sawed off the branch it found itself on?

Thomas Kuhn made famous the study of paradigm shifts in science. According to his analysis shifts in scientific doctrine are instigated by discoveries that germinate within, but ultimately cannot be reconciled with, the existing paradigm. As these build to a tipping point, the discordance that ensues propels that field on to a new paradigm. In this fashion, Darwinism replaced Lamarckianism and Einstein’s Relativity supplanted Newtonianism. As one indication of its appeal Kuhn’s approach has been applied in fields outside of science, including in the arts, education, historiography, and in philosophy itself.

And yet, the transmission of knowledge in the sciences and humanities now seems to have shifted into a new gear. We find of late new influences that diffuse the way ideas are organized and spread within disciplines. A cluster of factors seems to be at work. The dissemination of knowledge that historically was more tightly managed by academia is now scattered, refracted, and repackaged on the Internet. The social matrix itself has become splintered, with little islands of “true for me” popping up and taking root. And most recently, AI’s facile generation of real and fake publications, programs, and personalities creates a disorienting hall-of-mirrors effect. Whatever factors are at play here, we seem to have opened a new phase in the history of knowledge.