Bill Readings was a brilliant young academic philosopher with a shining future. I met him back in 1994..I found him difficult though to tune into as my earlier post revealed in The "Great" and the "Good"...the relevant extract of which is found reproduced here below ....
* One person who visited the vicar's offspring was Bill Readings who I met only once. He was an Oxford graduate, and was an expert on Communism, and Marx. When I met him I found him to be "too brainy" and "too intense" for my liking. He went to America to teach for a while, but tragically died young (34) in a airplane crash in October 1994. I remember seeing a pic of him in a well-known national newspaper with his mortarboard, and gown on graduation day in Oxford. Sad.
It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching?We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that historically the integrity of the modern University has been linked to the nation-state, which it has served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. But now the nation-state is in decline, and national culture no longer needs to be either promoted or protected. Increasingly, universities are turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of culture is being replaced by the discourse of "excellence." On the surface, this does not seem particularly pernicious.
The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic appeal too quickly. The new University of Excellence is a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, is more interested in profit margins than in thought. Readings urges us to imagine how to think, without concession to corporate excellence or recourse to romantic nostalgia within an institution in ruins. The result is a passionate appeal for a new community of thinkers. (ref Amazon)
The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to difference in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation.
'Melville and Readings have done a superb job, not only in their choice of essays, but in their elaborate and highly ambitious introduction. It is the best assessment that I know of the current state of contemporary art history and criticism, the most subtle analysis of the theoretical alternatives open to contemporary and future work in these disciplines.' - Keith Moxey, Barnard College and Columbia University;This volume brings together the work of distinguished critics and art historians in order to reflect and assess the impact of current critical theory on the discipline and practice of art history. Centring on the intersection of questions of vision with the problematic of textuality, the book addresses how issues of politics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and historiography have contributed to the emergent terms and practices of the new art histories.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Bill Readings Video
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