The University in Ruins

1
The University in Ruins

• Bill Readings

Wei Wei Liu--SoCo 2006
2
May 68--Paris

• A general strike across France, beginning at
  universities and other schools
• 10 million workers (2/3)
• De Gaulle administration, police
• Left-wing causes

3
A youth disturbed too often by the future
Be young and shut up
Return to normal
4
University of Paris

• Question of modernization
• Administrative contract and new disciplines
• Fouchet Plan of 1966, protests in 1967
• Restricted entry, social discipline
• 1968 link to Vietnam War
• The university emerges as an institutional
  question

5

• Student resistance not only to the feudal system
  but also to the states attempt at modernization
• Critique of nation-state, disaffection from
  institution (contemporary?)
• Revolt against knowledge as a commodity
• Removal from the institution and its culture
• The challenge is to avoid both nostalgia for
  national culture and consumerism

6

• Bill Readings
• Associate Professor,
• Department of
• Comparative
• Literature,
• University of Montreal

7
The Modern University
Reason
Culture
excellence
8
ReasonKant

• Defining modernity
• Single regulatory idea
• Reason is the organizing principle for other
  disciplines, but has its own faculty (philosophy)
• Unifying reason and the state, or knowledge and
  power

9
CultureHumboldt

• German Idealists
• Culture as the sum of all things studied,
  cultivation of character
• Research and teaching
• Common life to the people, as a nation (German
  nationalism)

10
What is the universitys function as an
institution?

• Decline of the nation-state and the national
  cultural mission
• Rise of economic globalization
• End of culture and Cultural Studies
• The administrator, commodification
• Idea of excellence

11
So what does Readings propose?

• The second moment at which Cultural Studies
  becomes, institutionally speaking, the strongest
  narrative for humanistic inquiry, marks the
  impossibility of participating in living
  culturewhen the denunciation of exclusions
  becomes the only way to understand our abiding
  sense of nonparticipation despite the fact that
  we are no longer excluded. We are no longer
  excluded, not because racism, sexism, and class
  difference have come to an end. They manifestly
  have not. Rather, we are no longer excluded
  because, in the strong sense of the word that the
  Idealists gave it, there is no longer any culture
  to be excluded from (103).

12
Thought vs. excellence

• Just as empty as excellence, but doesnt pretend
  to be an ideaavoids packaging and consumerism
• Self-consciously divorced from truth
• Thought is a question, not an answer
• The name of Thought, since it has no content,
  cannot be invoked as an alibi that might excuse
  us from the necessity of thinking about what we
  are saying (160)

13
A community of dissensus

• Does away with static consensus and presumption
• In the horizon of dissensus, no consensual
  answer can take away the question mark that the
  social bond (the fact of other people, of
  language) raises. No universal community can
  embody the answer no rational consensus can
  decide simply to agree on an answer. To preserve
  the status of the social bond as a question is to
  tolerate difference without recourse to an idea
  of identity (187).

14
Can an individual escape the community and its
obligations?

• The network of obligations in which an
  individual is caught up is not entirely available
  to the subjective consciousness of that
  individual, so that we can never pay all our
  debts. Indeed, the assumption that we can pay all
  our debts is fundamentally unethical, since it
  presumes the possibility of overcoming all
  responsibilities and obligations, achieving
  freedom from them. Autonomy, as freedom from
  obligation to others, holds out the impossible
  imagination of subjective self-identity
  (185-186).

15

• To speak of obligation is to engage with an
  ethics in which the human subject is no longer a
  unique point of reference. The obligation is not
  to other humans but to the condition of things
  (187).
• Our obligations are not finite or calculable
• In teaching, one must understand the existence of
  otherness
• To understand these obligations would be to
  understand what it means to be human, which we
  dont

16

• This ties into the idea that there is no single
  idea of culture, a result of globalization
• The University will have to become one place,
  among others, where the attempt is made to think
  the social bond without recourse to a unifying
  idea, whether of culture or of state (191)
• Thought offers freedom from a social mission but
  also responsibility to society

17

• Is Readings actually proposing something, or does
  he just want us to think about and reevaluate our
  own roles within the university?
• How can his thoughts and proposals actually be
  applied to universities? What would they stand to
  gain?