Volume 31 no. 2

... What narrative, then, can replace the narrative of culture in an age when the idea of a national culture embodying values to which the machinery of education is self-consciously harnessed has lost much of its force? Readings's answer is the narrative of cultures, not one but many, indifferently authorized and offered not as normative benchmarks and imperatives - the best that has been thought and said and that to which we should continue to be true - but as possible modes of being in a field of possibilities always proliferating. The word "'culture' no longer has a specific content" (UR, p. 17) ¹; it no longer refers to a particular project identified by the specific values that impel it. Rather it is an empty placeholder for whatever "hot" and likely transitory project a group of academics can get resources for. As Readings puts it, "Everything, given a chance, can be or become a culture" (UR, p. 17); anything can be taught, anything can find a place in the curriculum, not because of its connection to one moral/educational vision or to a national political project, but simply because it exists and someone wants to "study" it. All that is required is that the study of X or Y or Z be conducted on a level of sophistication and detail that marks it off from casual, nonacademic observation. There must be data, hypotheses, rival accounts of crucial matters, tests, conclusions, suggestions for further research, and all of these must be presented to the student with the same seriousness that attends the study of American history, or organic chemistry, or the eighteenth-century English novel. If this requirement is met, you can proclaim that your course in supermarket inventory or athletic shoes or TV sitcoms of the 1980s (these are not hypothetical examples) meets the highest standards (which have nothing to do with content), and you can bestow on it the honorific Readings finds singularly appropriate to the "University without an idea" (UR, p. 118); it can be deemed "excellent."

The "techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence" is just the ticket for a university conceived without any particular sense of purpose because it is so deliciously empty (UR, p. 14). Just as anything can be a culture, so can anything be performed with zeal and excellence." 'Excellence' is like the cash-nexus in that it has no content" (UR, p. 13). "Excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or ... non-referential" (UR, p. 22). That is, in applying it, you make no substantive judgment on the activity or course of study that now wears it as an epithet. "What gets taught or researched matters less than the fact that it can be excellently taught or researched" (UR, p. 13). In a landscape in which some contestable moral or political agenda has been replaced by the endlessly replicable but vacuous notion of excellence, there is no longer any "need to argue about differing definitions" of a worthy project because "everyone is excellent, in their own way," with no pressure at all to decide that some ways are more legitimate than some others (UR, p. 33). In a university committed to excellence, rather than to ideas or specific cultural outcomes, you can give an award, as Cornell did, for "'excellence in parking,'" and mean by "excellence in parking" either restricting the number of parking places available or increasing the number of parking spaces available. "The issue here is not the merits of either option [that is what precisely drops out] but the fact that excellence can function equally well as an evaluative criterion on either side of the issue ... because excellence has no content to call its own" (UR, p. 24).

1 See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); hereafter abbreviated UR.