Excessive theorizing can empty power of its material exercise

Evidence

There is no moment now, in American Cultural Studies, where we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power—politics, race, class, and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in Cultural Studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this overwhelming textualization of Cultural Studies’ own discourses somehow constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself. Now, this is not to say that I don’t think that questions of power and the political have to be and are always lodged within representations, that they are always discursive questions. Nevertheless, there are ways of constituting power as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any signification. That is what I take to be the moment of danger in the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in this highly rarified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to critiques of academic poststructuralism emptying politics of materiality — echoes debates in other chapters and the broader ‘politics of theory’ theme.
• SEED: Angle: how institutionalization tames radical scholarship into professionalized textual play — a critique applicable beyond Cultural Studies to any critical discipline.

Related

• Over-theorizing power as textuality can empty it of real political meaning (similarity 0.88)
• Ongoing theorizing, not finished Theory, is what Cultural Studies requires (similarity 0.85)
• Cultural Studies must balance holding a position with open-ended ongoing theorizing. (similarity 0.83)
• Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning (similarity 0.82)
• Abstracted theory that loses local situatedness betrays Cultural Studies’ core method. (similarity 0.82)
• Academic institutionalization threatens the political stakes of critical theory (similarity 0.81)
• Academic success can convert a political-intellectual project into a depoliticized abstraction (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies and Marxism never had a perfect theoretical fit (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies engaged Marxism through its omissions, not its established doctrines. (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies’ interdisciplinary subversiveness risks becoming slack pluralism when institutionalized (similarity 0.79)
• Accessible scholarship must still produce genuinely new knowledge, not confirmatory slogans. (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural Studies history is interrupted by exterior forces, not unfolded internally (similarity 0.79)
• Academic institutionalization can drain the political tension from intellectual work, not theory alone. (similarity 0.79)
• Circular theory that only restates known conclusions produces no genuine knowledge (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Abstracted theory that loses local situatedness betrays Cultural Studies’ core method. #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 129
• Circular theory that merely reaffirms known political conclusions produces no new knowledge. #corroborates (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 266
• Absolutized Theory misreads Marx by omitting his movement between abstraction levels #expands (0.60)