Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

Abandoning a question mark is hardly an act of heroism, but it is fine if you have something to affirm. One may also be ironic about pragmatism, although one important variant of pragmatism itself includes a sustained plea for irony. But to affirm endlessly the different or a vacuous utopia is not to afffirm very much other than affirmation for the sake of affirmation (yes, yes). I would also observe that one may defend hyperbole in a manner that tests it through a discriminating sense of limits, including some debatable idea of practical or pragmatic limits that are bound up with where one believes oneself to be. One place I am is in an American university, and I think that a discussion of problems within that context is not insidious, at least when it is not dogmatic or insensitive to comparative issues. (Indeed Readings himself typically focuses on the American university.) If Royle really has something to say about other university systems that would contradict or qualify my argument, it would have been enlightening for him to have said it.

I think that the counterpart to the university in ruins--the university of culture--is itself a myth or at best an insufficiently framed critical fiction in Readings's account. To employ the terms I use in a recent article it is better seen as an absence than as a loss.1 The notion of a university in ruins that is opposed to a university of culture suffers from a lack of specificity that the opposition facilitates. Note that I think there is indeed strong pressure on the university by capitalistic forces, but those forces, as well as their relations to globalization and to the nation-state, would require the type of elaboration that the slippage between meta-meta-physical critique and historical (or pseudohistorical) commentary serves to obviate. Perhaps such an elaboration is beneath the purview of Thought, at least as Royle's response seems to construe it.