The University Without Culture?

I. Culture

It is very tempting to see what Gerald Graff has called the “culture wars” as a healthy sign that the debate on United States national culture is once more taking place where it ought to, in the university. ¹ Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive, but to be tenured and approaching middle age seems very heaven! ² Yet is the United States a “country in romance . . . where reason seems the most to assert her rights,” like Wordsworth’s revolutionary France? To put this another way, are the culture wars better understood as a prelude to a new modernity or as a postscript to the modern? Is this a new age dawning for the university as a project, or does it mark the twilight of its critical and social function? And if it is the twilight, then what does that mean?

After all, one of the most discussed books on postmodernity is Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a study of the implications of the questions posed to the legitimation of knowledge by postmodernity, a study which is explicitly framed as a report on the university institution, “at this very postmodern moment that finds the university nearing what may be its end.” ³ The question of the postmodern is a question posed to the university as much as in the university. Yet since the postmodern has by and large ceased to function as question and become another alibi in the name of which intellectuals denounce the world for failing to live up to their expectations, I prefer to drop the term for present purposes, in order to avoid confusion. The danger is apparent: it is so easy to slip into speaking of the “postmodern university” as if it were an imaginable institution, a newer, more critical institution, which is to say, an even more modern university than the modern university.

At the moment I am more interested in diagnosis than in denunciation, in trying to understand why the debate on national identity in the United States has returned to the university. First of all, though, it is necessary to note that the debate is less specifically American than it might seem. Rather than being the result of any specific betrayal, it in fact draws its energies from an endemic condition of contemporary higher education. ⁴ That is to say, the American “culture wars” are one symptom of the fact that the decline of the nation-state as the primary instance of capitalism’s self-reproduction has effectively voided the social mission of the modern university. That mission used to be the production of national subjects under the guise of research into and the inculcation of “culture,” a “culture” which has always been thought, since Humboldt, in terms inseparable from national identity. The strong idea of “culture” arises with the nation-state, and we now face its disappearance as the locus of social meaning. Once the notion of national identity loses its relevance, the notion of culture becomes effectively unthinkable: the admission that there is nothing to be said about culture as such is evident in the rise of the quasi discipline of “cultural studies,” symptom of that fact that culture no longer has a specific content. It seems to me that this scenario presents a series of options. Either we seek to defend and restore the social mission of the university by simply reaffirming a national cultural identity that has manifestly lost its purchase—the conservative position, or we attempt to reinvent cultural identity so as to adapt it to changing circumstances—the multicultural position.

A third option is to abandon the notion that the social mission of the university is ineluctably linked to the project of realizing a national cultural identity, which is tantamount to ceasing to think the social articulation of research and teaching in terms of a mission. This is a considerably more difficult proposition to accept for both the right and the left, since it means relinquishing our claim to be intellectuals and giving up the claim of service to society as a whole, the claim to both know and...