Their demand for inclusion in debate is “luxury production”

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

The third, and most distressing, category is that of luxury production—what Canadian intellectual Melissa Freedman calls insider trading for the advantaged elites of theory high or low. There is certain usefulness in figuring out just how an expressive cultural form does its work. However, in the rush to understand, a theoretical eclecticism, mingled with an institutionally encouraged tendency to substitute adequate abstraction for adequate theory, produces work which readers become servants of rather than work which serves readers. The point is not that reading must always seem transparent and require neither dictionary nor sustained contemplation. Nor is it that complexity is itself bad, nonproductive, or coopted by definition. Nothing could be further from the truth. But what has happened is that an inward-looking practice is effectively closed off, a dead end of all the labors that produced it—perhaps like a diamond forever, but so what, and at what human costs? In universities over the past generation or so, theory has assumed pride of place in most of the traditional academic disciplines—especially in the humanities—and, by extension, in the oppositional studies corners as well. In fact, it is quite possible that the theoretical urgency running through oppositional studies has been sluiced back to the mainstream, refreshing stagnant waters there. In any event, in the United States, “theory,” its own discipline and end, pays. Somewhere along the way, intellectuals are so overwhelmed by discovering the production of knowledge that they have forgotten about “just knowing something,” as Barbara Harlow puts it.