On the Historical Forms of Knowledge Production and Curation: Modernity Entailed Disciplinarity, Postmodernity Entails Antidisciplinarity

This article continues and extends my previous efforts to characterize modernity and to map the change in state of mind constituting the transition to postmodernity. Here I make a case for marking that transition by the dramatic fall, between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, in the cultural valuation of professions and of disciplines. I show that four culturally presupposed values—proceduralism, disinterestedness, autonomy, and solidarity—along with discipline, in a characterological sense, were characteristic for modernity and indispensable to the conception and sustentation of disciplinarity. Then I evidence the inversion in contemporary culture of each of those five value presuppositions. In this way I show postmodernity to be antithetical to disciplinarity.