Academic institutionalization threatens the political stakes of critical theory

Evidence

So the enormous explosion of Cultural Studies in the US, its rapid professionalization and institutionalization, is not a moment which any of us who tried to set up a marginalized Centre in a university like Birmingham could, in any simple way, regret. And yet I have to say, in the strongest sense, that it reminds me of the ways in which, in Britain, we are always aware of institutionalization as a moment of profound danger. Now, I’ve been saying that dangers are not places you run away from but places that you go toward. So I simply want you to know that my own feeling is that the explosion of Cultural Studies along with other forms of critical theory in the academy represents a moment of extraordinarily profound danger. Why? Well, it would be excessively vulgar to talk about such things as how many jobs there are, how much money there is around, and how much pressure that puts on people to do what they think of as critical political work and intellectual work of a critical kind, while also looking over their shoulders at the promotions stakes and the publication stakes, and so on. Let me instead return to the point that I made before: my astonishment at what I called the theoretical fluency of Cultural Studies in the United States. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges a common assumption that academic success equals political success — resonates with critiques of ‘critical theory industry’ and meritocracy debates in higher education. — connects to: Academic canonization may domesticate critical theory’s radical edge — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 30; Critical theory ignoring material improvements itself becomes a fetish — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1417; Horkheimer prioritized institutional respectability over critical research purity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2110 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Hall calls ‘theoretical fluency’ dangerous but does not fully unpack why — worth chasing what precisely about fluency he distrusts.