Pluralistic institutional openness can disguise strategic defense against political attacks on humanities

Evidence

But the moment of institutionalization has more dangers written into it from the outside as it were. And sometimes this can push people who are trying to do Cultural Studies in that pluralistic direction. For instance, one of the places where Cultural Studies is growing is in institutes of humanities which have emerged, out of the enormous goodwill and funding generosity of universities and institutions, but partly as places where the specific educational attack on the humanities, on the politicization of the humanities, on the destruction of a canon, can be contested. There are places of resistance which have been thrown up around some of that, so that critical intellectual work can get done. Not all the institutes are like that, but I know some where that is one of the reasons why they appear to be very pluralistic, because a number of people are coming under the umbrella of Cultural Studies as a mode of defense. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 279

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Hall’s broader account of why Cultural Studies institutionalized in specific political conditions — belonging scholarly political formations, not just abstract theory.

Related

• Interdisciplinarity’s subversive force becomes slack pluralism once institutionalized (similarity 0.84)
• Academic institutionalization threatens the political stakes of critical theory (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural Studies’ interdisciplinary subversiveness risks becoming slack pluralism when institutionalized (similarity 0.83)
• Academic institutionalization can drain the political tension from intellectual work, not theory alone. (similarity 0.82)
• Institutionalizing a critical field can strip it of political meaning (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies was politically committed intellectual work from its start (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies began as New Left politics sheltered inside the university (similarity 0.80)
• Academic pluralism often masks political constraints rather than expressing intellectual freedom (similarity 0.80)
• Academic success can convert a political-intellectual project into a depoliticized abstraction (similarity 0.80)
• Open-ended projects still require closure and stakes to be political (similarity 0.79)