Sustaining a Performance

“A Doll’s House” has always been one of my favorite (non-early modern) plays. Nora works to sustain a performance which is, ultimately, unsustainable. Rather than ending in hopelessness, though, Nora leaves the realm of false performance. Of course, the alternate ending that Ibsen was forced to write offers little hope, as she is confined to the domestic, false world.

The unsustainability of Nora’s performance (which is defined by a childlikeness dependency) may be reflected by the current state of the university. The university, its faculty, and its students are rendered as dependent on external institutions (government, corporations, etc) for funding and legitimization. I admit that I am curious as to why Imre and Garry put “A Doll’s House” alongside “The University without Culture?”. In reading the two side by side, I could not but read “A Doll’s House” as a call to break away from the patriarchal power structures on which we are dependent in order to create a new sort of performance -- perhaps one which is sustainable because it is intrinsic rather than tied up in an economic imperative.

In “The University without Culture?”, Bill Readings links the corporate model to the university (this was also evident in Angus’ Love The Questions), but skeptically. Ambiguous ‘excellence’, Readings posits, could become the core of corporations and universities, aligning the two (as well as other institutions/organizations that operate within the world economy): "[Excellence] functions not merely as the standard of external evaluation, but as the unit of value in terms of which the university describes itself to itself, achieves the self-consciousness that is supposed to guarantee intellectual autonomy in modernity. Given that, who could be against it? . . . Is it surprising that corporations resemble universities, healthcare facilities, international organizations, which all resemble corporations?” (472)

Despite connecting universities with corporations, Readings expresses concern that, tied up in economics, the university potentially loses its status as an institution for enlightenment, as its ability to function as a site of intellectual autonomy is compromised. He wonders, “What intervention can be made in the university today, as it abandons its role as the flagship of national culture, but before it embarks irrevocably upon the path of becoming a bureaucratic corporation?” (476-477). Is there any way in which the university can break away from the corporate model? Less tenured positions, lack of funding, cultural complacency, etc., etc. threaten to dismantle the university -- at least the university which privileges enlightenment.

Will the corporate university, which produces a product (skilled workers rather than critical thinkers) that contributes to a nation’s corporate industry, be what remains . . . Is this the state of the university now? . . . Or should the university give into its ‘patriarch’, and align itself with corporate models in order to maintain the appearance of cultural value, even if it loses something of its core? Obviously, people took issue with Nora’s choice to break away and forge an independent, non-normative identity; otherwise, Ibsen would not have been asked to rewrite the ending. But what is normative for the university is rapidly changing -- so how must the university perform now and how must we perform as a part of it?