Academic institutionalization can drain the political tension from intellectual work, not theory alone.

Evidence

MEAGHAN MORRIS: I am not a pluralist but I actually like both those models—organic and specific intellectuals—because I think they describe different kinds of possibility that exist for people in the present, certainly in my country. But one thing that bothers me about the rhetoric of the organic intellectual is the way the problem of theory/practice/politics can get posed. At one moment, you said that if you don’t feel the tensions in your work, it’s because theory has let you off the hook. But sometimes it’s not that theory lets you off the hook, it’s that the academy or the forms of academic institutionalization can drive tension out of people’s work, can absolutely kill the angels in a sense. And this, I suppose, is a question about how you see the resilience of Cultural Studies in the face of that. … I wonder whether Cultural Studies has a sufficient identity to do that. The reason I’m not a pluralist is that I don’t think pluralism is an option, I think it’s the problem. I think that when the academy institutionalizes the fact of pluralism, it makes it hard for people to care about the difference between various arbitrary closures. So what I would want to see is a definition against pluralism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the metaphor of ‘wrestling with angels’ used in opposition to institutionalized, ‘unangelic’ teaching — links to discussions of feminist theory’s renewal cycles.