Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University

Chapter 4: Auditing Derrida

85 Auditing Derrida As long ago as 1995, a special issue of the Oxford Literary Review (17) was devoted to the topic of “The University in Ruins.”1 The obvious reference in the journal’s title to the work of Bill Readings was triply underscored in its pages. The volume was dedicated to Readings, who had been killed tragically in an air crash during the previous year. The first essay in the collection, “Dwelling in the Ruins,” was by Readings himself. And the editorial introduction, written by Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, drew heavily on Readings’s contribution to the debate about the contemporary “crisis in the concept of the university” (4)—a crisis with ramifications that rapidly extend far beyond the conceptual realm. Thus, following Readings, the introduction speaks of the increasing “domination of market-oriented criteria of evaluation and control” in today’s universities, and the “growing dominance” within them “of criteria of value based on what Lyotard calls performativity—the maximization of ratios of input to output gauged in terms of an institution’s contribution to the enhanced selfperpetuation of the broader socio-economic system in which it is supposed to inhere” (4). Clark and Royle show how this situation gives rise to a “managerial appeal to a rhetoric of transparency and accountability” that serves to disguise the historical transformation of the university in terms of a self-evidently necessary “response to economic imperatives.” Such managerialism “often takes the form of establishing a common currency of criteria whereby intellectual 4 86 ■ Counter-Institutions life can be compartmentalized and disciplines, departments, institutions or individuals compared, gauged and also—of course—set off against each other in a marketplace” (5). Thus, with the decline of the traditional idea, ideology, and cultural politics of the university inherited from the Enlightenment, a process described by Readings as “dereferentialization”—which devastates the university’s “content” by subjecting its activities to the tautological self-definition of “Excellence ”—is accompanied by a growing atmosphere of audit. Since it attempts to work through this logic, by means of which “Excellence” operationalizes itself at every level of the university, the introduction to this edition of the Oxford Literary Review is titled, fittingly enough, “Editorial Audit.” As Clark and Royle point out, audit doesn’t just find ways to evaluate its “object.” To a significant degree, it produces “fundamental changes” (5) in the university itself. This occurs on every plane. Scholarship is redefined as “research output,” to be calibrated into units of production that might be assessed according to criteria informed by economic and managerial pressures. The particular character of disciplines or departments undergoes continual redefinition and restructuring as the university succumbs to the modularization of its degree programs in the interests of administrative flexibility and control, which is in turn perceived—or presented—in terms of a need to be responsive to the marketplace. This set of circumstances is usually rebranded according to a weak idea of (the popularity or desirability of) “interdisciplinarity.” And audit systems are continually invented to “reflect” the very changes the self-same culture of audit helps to produce. Indeed, the instability of the “object” provides the rationality for new tiers, new regimes of evaluative machinery, shorn of any responsibility for the transformations and upheavals that, of course, they seek merely to capture in, say, a statistical picture of the academic world. Audit changes not just universities, departments, disciplines, and scholarship. It changes individuals . Scholars find it hard to avoid becoming professionalized as “career academics.” Academic work is often done to score career points, or it is pursued in the unspoken knowledge that its auditable value—increasingly, the sole indicator of merit—remains wholly indifferent to the nature of its intellectual claims or, indeed, its political orientation or implications. An ideology of assessable expertise or competence changes the stakes of risk-taking. Thus, it is hard for academics not to become passive or inward looking, even when their work might be thought to present a challenge at the conceptual level to the very system within which it is produced. In this context, one Auditing Derrida ■ 87 might even say that to write a book such as this one, which ostensibly wants to challenge or rethink the contemporary university in all its characteristic forms, is inevitably just a self-regarding exercise, merely adding a further dimension of self-reflexivity to the production of academic...