In the Ruins of the University

Abstract

My title is a conflation of two sources that would appear to mark two ends of a cycle between promise and petrification. The first a bowdlerization of Bill Readings’, now two decade-old work, The University in Ruins published after his untimely death. The second the title of a course taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1954-1955. By reaching back towards Merleau-Ponty's exploration of meaning, how meaning in instituted, how it is transformed, how sense is ‘deposited’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it in beings and institutions, and importantly how innovation can arise in such relations, I would wish to historicise a moment of threat to any such expectation of innovation, any hope that institutions might be expected to institute anything. Bill Readings’ eloquent work chimes with that accord for a ‘threatened field’, it echoes for me and in me, still, in its insights for the University today: “We have to recognise that the University is a ruined institution, while thinking what it means to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” There is, as Claude Lefort explained when considering Merleau-Ponty's course, but equally might have been channeling Bill Readings’ principle theme: ‘[ … ] no call to the future which does not imply a decline of the past.” In this essay I would like to put Merleau-Ponty's lecture within a University, and Bill readings’ book about a University into play with each other to understand something about my own institutional history, working alongside the theatre makers Forster & Heighes, at Dartington College of Arts, at Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, at the London International Festival of Theatre, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Roehampton University, and at King's College London. Institutions where nothing need happen, but something, apparently, did.

Notes

¹ I also took this seminal work as the starting point for the final chapter of Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven approaches to performance. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), with somewhat different outcomes. I am grateful to Gigi Argyropoulou for her encouragement to return to Bill Readings in this new context.

² Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘L'institution dans l'histoire personnelle et publique’, published as Institution and Passivity. Course notes from the Collège de France (1954-1955). Text established by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort and Stephanie Menase.

³ See Lefort (2010).

⁴ The false mourners’ first collective act was to chant ‘placebo Domino in regione vivorum’ (‘I will please the Lord in the land of the living’, psalm 114) and they were therefore collectively labelled as ‘placebo singers’.

⁵ See Read (2013).

⁶ See Gaskill (2014). On the day I was writing this – 19 February 2015 – my Facebook account alerted me to the closure of the Devising Theatre degree at Falmouth University in Cornwall in the UK, which was described as tracing back to the ‘innovations at Dartington of the 1970s’. I would take those innovations to be the labour of, among others, Colette King.

⁷ Readings (1996: 1–20). Here Readings lays out the three key terms of his work.

⁸ See Krikorian and Kapczynski (2010). The first time that I heard the phrase ‘University Without Walls’ – although I think the term ‘College’ was modestly used – was while travelling with Colette King to Amersfoort in Utrecht in the Netherlands, to one of her inspiring peripatetic meetings as part of the development of the Council of Europe Workshop on Theatre and Communities (1983). See Hulton (1984).

⁹ Click here at your own risk: www.lfhe.ac.uk

¹⁰ See Hunter et al. (2014–15).

¹¹ See ‘Lay theatre’ in Read (1995 [1993]a).

¹² See (2004) ‘On civility’, Performance Research 9(4).

¹³ All professors at the college were expected to teach two courses per semester according to Claude Lefort (2010: ix).

¹⁴ See ‘Translator's introduction’ in Merleau-Ponty (2010).

¹⁵ The titles for these were The Origin of Truth and The Prose of the World. See Lefort (2010: xvi).

¹⁶ Performance Research ‘On Sleep’, Vol 21, might well shed light on such apparent passivity.

¹⁷ See Lis Austin's forthcoming work on institutional histories, structures and politics.

¹⁸ Ceal Floyer now shows her installation work at the Lisson Gallery.

¹⁹ Joshua Oppenheimer now makes Oscar-nominated documentaries such as The Act of Killing (2013).

²⁰ See Elam (1996).