ABSTRACT
The disciplinary and departmental arrangements guaranteeing the reproduction of the structures of knowledge that reached their greatest extent and the pinnacle of their gatekeeping authority between 1945 and the mid-1960s are in a state of crisis. In a similar fashion, contingency, context-dependency, the collapse of essentialisms and multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial frameworks are closing the gap between the humanities and the social sciences. The reality of the contemporary world of knowledge is that the indivisibility of chance and necessity that gives rise to irreversibility and creativity in natural systems is moving the sciences back towards 'human studies'. In academia, the recognition that all knowledge has a social aspect makes the possibility of 'containing' the study of human reality within existing disciplinary arrangements of increasingly dubious utility and, given the work scholars actually do, very difficult. In the era of the masses, the media were conceptualised as the 'social technology' of ideological control.
