Ten Aphorisms on the Archaeology of “Ism”
Non-Fiction by Peter Babiak
1
The suffix “ism” migrated to English from the ancient Greek “ismos.” Attaching “ismos” to a base noun created a new noun signifying an act of behaving in a manner framed by the first noun, as in “Judaismos,” “Christianismos,” or “barbarismos.” Though today it’s defined as shorthand for an ideological position — “A form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character” — “ism” retains an aura that belongs more to the enchanted world of language than to the people, places, and things grammarians say nouns denote, in the same manner that most of our significant social and political concepts are secularized theological concepts. We all have ideas about what language is, as Ferdinand de Saussure reminds us, but these ideas are “far from the truth.”
2
The Oxford English Dictionary puts the first use of “ism” as a word at 1680, a time of religious and political schisms that marks the beginning of “modern” history. This caricature appears in The Vision of Purgatory, by Edward Pettit: “He was the great Hieroglyphick of Jesuitism, Puritanism, Quakerism, and of all Isms from Schism.” Since the Reformation, which saw the invention of “atheism,” deism,” and “Satanism,” the suffix has become a staple of public discourse, often attached to nouns as a negative attribute: at its worst, Protestantism’s rebuke of Catholicism involved a distrust of metaphor and the destruction of stained glass and other figurative representations in Catholic churches in the name of literalism — an unmediated communication with God.
3
Like other tropes of modernity — “rights,” “representation,” “equality”— “ism” goes viral in the Enlightenment when the public sphere is reconsidered as a struggle over the meaning of words and democracy is understood as constituted linguistically. The suffix frames the relevant terms, as in “empiricism,” “rationalism,” and “utilitarianism.” Speech, Rousseau writes, is “the first social institution,” and to overcome “despotism” democracy constitutes itself in a performative speech-act: each person sets aside their individual will and joins the “general will,” the political destiny of humankind thus structured on a linguistic model independent of nature and the individual subject.
4
For all its emphasis on science, the Enlightenment considers democratic institutions in linguistic terms. A case in point is “empiricism,” which begins with Locke’s claim that the human mind is originally a tabula rasa, “white paper void of all characters, without any ideas,” and that ideas happen when nature writes on those blank slates in the form of “experience.” Against the “mysticism” of “absolutism” and “irrationalism,” Enlightenment “empiricism” says experience is the true and democratic source of knowledge, along with “materialism” — today misunderstood as “consumerism” — though “empiricism” in its first manifestation signified “quackery” or “the pretension of an ignorant person to medical skill.”
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In response, “Romanticism,” coined in 1798 by the poet Schlegel, names an oppositional movement that prizes medieval architectural forms over classical ones — hence the rise of “Gothicism,” which refers to building structures long before styles of dress and musical tastes — and embraces “dynamic organism” over “static mechanism.” This “ism” anticipated those sturm und drang “isms” still embraced in the world of arts and letters: “aestheticism,” “existentialism,” and “sentimentalism.” “Nihilism,” in particular, manifests a tone of generalized antagonism to what one journalist in 1824 called a “rejection of fundamental social and political structures,” a sensibility inscribed in many of our “isms” today.
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The essence of Romanticism and its affiliated “isms” inflects the revolutionary thrust associated with political economy in the 1800s — “liberalism,” “socialism,” “communism,” “anarchism” — all of them emphasizing the communication of ideological aspirations in terms of policies and manifestos, though all favouring the “materialism” of action over the “idealism” of thought. These “isms” are closest to what we call “ideology,” and one of them, “liberalism,” appearing as a word in 1819, involves a set of written principles about how society should be organized. “Language,” Mill writes, “is the light of the mind,” and “all great improvements in the lot of mankind” happen when “a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”
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American “conservatism,” a rationalised version of economic “liberalism,” vaunts the role of “individualism” over any governmental or social vision. In the 1986 film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris says “isms are not good. A person should not believe in an ism. He should believe in himself,” typifying the recalcitrant distrust in “the isms,” a phrase that in the mid-1800s is synonymous with a derogatory opinion of reform movements like “abolition- ism,” “feminism,” and the enduring bogeyman “socialism.” One southern periodical ran editorials on “Our Enemies, the Isms and their Purposes,” heralding a “fundamentalist” worldview pitting American “literalism” against modern, intellectual currents — and in the final days of the Trump Administration, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, derided “woke- ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they’re not who America is.”
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The best thing to happen to the history of ideas in the 2000s is the “linguistic turn,” a recalibration that moves the focus from believing that what we do when we think is engage in an empirical activity about reality to understand the relationships, uses, and functions of the words we use when we think. Koselleck, one of the most eminent historians of the last century, argues that the suffix “ism” is a prime example of how public discourse takes on a future-oriented character: “ism” nouns are “concepts of movement” producing “temporalisation,” which is another way of saying that these action-nouns don’t signify pre-existing realities but rather talk people, places, and things into existence because their existence is constituted in their appearance as words. “Instead of analyzing a limited number of possible constitutional forms,” he points out that “isms” “promote the construction of new constitutional situations.”
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A linguistic truisism, Halle says, is that “one uses familiar words, words one has heard and used before, and one does not expect to use or encounter new words,” yet the OED has 2,932 entries for words that end with “ism,” and the “isms” keep proliferating. In 2015, the year the OED made “emoji” word of the year, Merriam Webster named “ism” its word of the year because a group of seven “isms” triggered volumes of lookups on its website: “socialism,” “fascism,” “racism,” “feminism,” “communism,” “capitalism,” “terrorism.” Like them, other prominent “isms” of our age — “ableism,” “autism,” “binarism,” “bodyism,” “cissexism,” “identitarianism,” “lookism,” “speciesism,” “trans antagonism,” and other ostensible “terminologies of oppression” — serve as motivating nouns that, regardless of how absurdly idiosyncratic they seem, aim to change the world by nudging people to their use. Though it is also true, as Adorno once said, that “the denial of objective truth through the recourse to the subject” — “psychologism,” the triumph of a therapy culture / framing people as vulnerable subjects
— “decays into contingency and turns into untruth.”
10
Implied in most “ism” nouns is a dialectical tension between language and life which points us back to its Greek etymology, where the suffix was a rhetorical signature whose meaning, though motivated by reference to some empirical condition, derives from its practical use in specific social and political contexts. The word “colonialism” is illustrative here, since in its first appearance as a word in the mid-1800s it signified “ways or speech of colonial persons,” and only decades later came to mean “the system of colonial rule.” The same could probably be said for the other “isms” that retain a trace of their roots in speech and writing — “barbarism,” “legalism,” “solecism,” “witticism” — though all ism nouns signify things that are first and foremost creatures of language rather than simple facts of empirical reality. »