Interdisciplinarity’s subversive force becomes slack pluralism once institutionalized

Evidence

I also agree with what you said about pluralism. And I think that one of the difficulties for us results because Cultural Studies has always been interdisciplinary, for very good and, I think, very important reasons. Some of the subversive force of Cultural Studies, along with a number of other forms of critical work, results from its having contested the institutionalized spaces of knowledge as disciplines and regulators. And so even in its rather loose way, it’s surging across the boundaries and taking a number of vocabularies from different places in order to explain a problem. This is one of the most important things about it. But obviously in the moment of institutionalization that can become just an extremely slack form of pluralism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 278

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Cultural Studies’ interdisciplinary subversiveness risks becoming slack pluralism when institutionalized (similarity 0.90)
• Pluralistic institutional openness can disguise strategic defense against political attacks on humanities (similarity 0.84)
• Academic institutionalization can drain the political tension from intellectual work, not theory alone. (similarity 0.84)
• Disciplinary paradigms fail alone and require transdisciplinary supplementing (similarity 0.84)
• Intellectual fields must self-clarify locally rather than rest as pluralistic umbrellas (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural study is permanently displaced because signifying practice eludes direct linkage to social structures (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural Studies engaged Marxism through its omissions, not its established doctrines. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies lacks a single origin and instead constitutes multiple unstable formations (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies must balance holding a position with open-ended ongoing theorizing. (similarity 0.80)
• Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning (similarity 0.80)
• Academic institutionalization threatens the political stakes of critical theory (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies was never a unified or stable formation (similarity 0.80)
• Intellectual fields are sustained by conflict and instability rather than consensus (similarity 0.80)
• Academic institutionalization can eliminate productive theoretical tension (similarity 0.80)