For students of the humanities and social sciences in the modern era, the road to knowledge has invariably involved a detour into the dead end of theory. To be taken seriously as a fashionable thinker at a major university, you had to be willing to redirect any outbreak of original thought back to the impasse of the -isms: deconstructionism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism and that perennial favourite, Marxism.
No work of art was so great and no aspect of human behaviour so curious that it couldn't be reshaped and constricted to fit the One Big Idea. But now, according to a hopeful if somewhat informal study of trends in academic jargon, this mind-numbing analysis of culture may finally be on its way out.
Writing in the Web-based forum Gene Expression, a (self-described) 27-year-old researcher who goes by the handle "agnostic" has presented a series of graphs that chart the rise and fall of theory's favourite intellectual passwords ( ).
Agnostic searched for a variety of trendy terms in the online archives of JSTOR, a repository of academic journals. His working thesis (which admittedly took a few hits on Gene Expression's comment pages) was that a keyword's frequency would drop as the idea it represented became less popular.
What he found was that the use of many of the dominant terms in academic theory, after rising sharply from 1980 onward, have levelled off and even gone into decline. "Marxism" went first, beginning began to tail off after 1988. "Deconstructionism" peaked in the mid-nineties, as did its fashionably disdainful counterpart, "hegemony." "Feminism" as well as "postmodern-
ism" began slipping shortly thereafter. "Social constructionism" held out until 2002. Only "postcolonialism" and "orientalism" have resisted the downward trend, perhaps reflecting a reinvigorated anti-imperialism aroused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But agnostic prefers to maintain that social and political change in the real world makes no impact on the world of ideas - hence the Ivory Tower delight in Marxism long after the failed experiments of Lenin and Mao.
Of course, a slight numerical decline in a certain kind of jargon doesn't mean that academe has suddenly become more open to fresh ways of thinking - agnostic's critics noted that concepts such as diversity, equality and environmentalism may become the new standards by which ideas are measured, tempering the author's glee that "at long last, we've broken the stranglehold that a variety of silly Blank Slate theories have held."
And even as agnostic moved on to advance the thesis that humanities and social sciences departments are shifting to scientific terms of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive ability - reflecting a more biological approach to studying human culture - skeptics among his readership saw this as further proof of trendy academic group-think.
Still, says post-postmodern literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, putting a statistical spin on the state of theory is an improvement over the endless wrangling that occurs whenever theorists meet anti-theorists.
"The only way to settle such questions," he observes, "is by getting in the habit of finding clever ways like this to quantify them. I'd like to see literary scholars and other humanists develop this habit of mind."
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.