In his book The University in Ruins (1996) the late Bill Readings wrote that cultural studies "arise when culture ceases to be the immanent principle in terms of which knowledge within the University is organized, and instead becomes one subject among others. Women's Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Postcolonial Studies arise when the abstract notion of 'citizen' ceases to be an adequate and exhaustive description of the subject, when the apparent blankness and universality of the subject of the state is able to be perceived as the repository of privileged markers of maleness, heterosexuality, and whiteness" (87-88).

Readings's argument is offered to characterise the moment when the social mission of the modern University -- the production of national culture(s) and the national subject(s) -- is voided by the decline of the nation-state as the primary instance of capitalism's self-reproduction (89). Readings added: "Once the notion of national identity loses its political 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 institutional rise of Cultural Studies in the 1990s" (89-90).

Readings's book raises two kinds of questions. On the one hand, his critique of the University of Culture, the University in the service of the Nation-State, and of the University of Excellence, the bureaucratic, posthistorical University, must be examined contextually, and to begin with in the national contexts of higher education. On the other hand, what the institutional rise of cultural studies in the 90s has rendered evident is not that there is nothing to be said about culture as such; it is, rather, that the question must be examined from another angle, namely in the context of the market of intellectual production explored by Jon Beasley-Murray (see Angelaki 2:3, 1997).

Culture and Excellence in Portugal
Larry Grossberg put it crisply: Cultural studies is radically contextual. Context is everything and everything is context for cultural studies. And Raymond Williams noted that it is only in our own time and place that we can expect to know, in any substantial way, the general organisation. My response to The University in Ruins is articulated in the contexts of power and practices I live and work in, and try to change.

In the mid-1940s António José Saraiva, an influential cultural historian, pointed out that in Portugal, from the 16^th century onwards, all attempts to implant a culture had failed. For Saraiva, culture was to be implanted from above, and the problem of culture in Portugal -- the problem of the viability of culture -- had to be considered in the light of the University elite Portugal did not have.

Saraiva meant the modernising culture of nation formation, but he never noticed it. He just invoked the word culture -- and there was nothing he had to say about culture as such (in fact, he worked in literary history). If the University in Portugal had proved incapable of fulfilling the historical mission of the University of Culture -- in Readings's terms -- that incapability had to do with a complexly delayed process of modern nation-formation and of social, political, economic and cultural modernisation.

The late A. J. Saraiva belonged to the generation of intellectuals, some working in exile and some within the country, who changed the Portuguese University. The University of Lisbon I knew in my lived experience as a student in the early 60s already had an intellectual elite who were researching and teaching the national culture and educating and training the national subjects who would modernise the nation. But they did not pause to define culture or inspect the concept -- it was still the magical word of democratic modernisation.

That elite educated and trained the generation who carried out the April Revolution in 1974. And the revolutionary generation educated and trained by that intellectual and academic elite was the first to have something to say about culture as such. In the 60s Williams, Thompson and Hoggart became known among us students -- and we read and discussed them against our teachers, who could well have done without them and our questions and debates. It was with cultural studies that we began to have something to say about culture as such.

What Readings called Excellence came in the wake of April 1974. Universities in some developed Western countries were changing their focus from the ideology of national culture to High Theory and to Excellence. The Portuguese University -- or rather, from the late 70s one should speak of the Portuguese Universities, as they became competingly differentiated -- had to follow this lead, and change gear from national culture and modernisation to the lights and games of late modernity. As the Universities began 'post'modernising much of the modernising so urgently required by the still under-developed nation fell to the Polytechnics. In the "Humanities" degree courses, the Universities found themselves trapped between the high goal of restricted intellectual production and the competition of the Polytechnics in teacher training; afraid of losing students -- their customers -- the Universities resorted to asserting their academic status and tradition as institutions of research and teaching both in their bargaining with the government for money and in their competition with the Polytechnics for students.

Excellence and bureaucracy
Cultural studies appeared on the Portuguese academic scene in the first year after the April Revolution -- from left Leavisite, marxist and structuralist positions. As part of the struggle for an educated, participatory democracy. Then came, from the government of the day, the new curriculum, defining literary studies as the essential "Humanities" project, and the new University Teaching Career Rules. Once again culture became a word about which there was nothing much to say.

The turn to excellence in the Portuguese Universities occurred in the late 70s and early 80s with the coming into force of the new Career Rules. Three features of the new Career Rules must be mentioned: the first is that the career became defined as an end in itself; the second is that the very notion of social, cultural or political accountability was erased; the third is the bureaucratisation of University structures and of the teaching career.

The Career was defined as a disciplinarily structured progression from assistantship to professorship. This excluded the language teachers and professionals with jobs outside the University or the wrong kind of degree. Under several pretexts and arguments -- from pay to "quality teaching" reasons -- the Career was closed upon itself and framed from within itself: the progression from assistant to professor, through the intermediate stages of assistant and associate professor, was envisaged in terms of the increased command of professional specialised kowledges in a discipline or ensemble of disciplines and regulated by the evaluation of the scientific production of the Career teachers. The University Teaching Career became an end in itself.

An end in itself, the Career has become divorced from broader social needs, cultural processes and political commitments. I use this word "broader" advisedly, because the Career indeed serves the consolidation and reproduction of upper class values andmeanings, if only by elevating the Career teachers' pay and status above the working and middle classes. The Portuguese Universities are now exempt from all social, cultural and political responsibilities. They are no longer accountable to the nation -- national modernisation, the national culture, national citizenship are no longer concerns of theirs. It is rather the nation which is accountable to its Universities: it must give them the students they need to improve their teacher-student ratios and support their claims for more money.

The University Teaching Career has also become highly bureaucratised. For one, the whole definition of the career, with its stages and ranks, is bureaucratic, but more decisively because the Rules make management and administration teachers' duties. It is not only that University teachers as such have been turned into managerial and administrative staff -- which is bad enough; it is also, and even worse, that their sitting on committees has been made part of their career, allowing them reductions in their teaching schedules and -- indeed, the ultimate joke -- making it possible that given the right connections (or, say, affiliations) a career can be made, and progression assured, not on intellectual production, not on scientific research, not on contributions to disciplines, but on committee-sitting (duly seasoned with the odd paper or good management of odd papers).

The situation now obtaining in higher education in Portugal is marked by the contradiction between the logic of national culture and modernisation and the logic of excellence, high theory and restricted intellectual production. In an incompletely modernised country such contradiction will prove a persistent one: the rivalry between Universities and Polytechnics is just one of its aspects. On the one hand, both the Universities and the Polytechnics still have in common the mission of modernising the nation and developing and reproducing the national culture; on the other hand, both the Universities and the Polytechnics are framed by the competing claims of the two fields of intellectual production characterised by Jon Beasley-Murray, the field of restricted and the field of large-scale intellectual production. Last but not least, they are educating and training students no longer nationally-motivated, young women and men who do not primarily think of -- or feel, or imagine -- themselves as an autonomous national subject in the making, but who are intent on participatory citizenship of some kind.

Cultural studies and democratic participation
Cultural studies reappeared on the academic scene in the 90s. Not as an institutionally given, but as a project of intellectual practice put forward by particular formations. What students come to cultural studies looking for is a democratic theory of culture and pluralist citizenship. They want to say and do something about culture. But the pressures of High Theory are active on the scene, setting limits to the project. Here as elsewhere, global hegemonic meanings and values offer plausible alternatives to a cultural politics of citizenship as participating practice.

In the intellectual field constituted as a market, the field of restricted intellectual production -- that of high theory, of the scholarly, academic books and articles which command the greatest symbolic weight and power -- has succeeded in constructing itself as the whole field of intellectual production. As Beasley-Murray points out, the cultural value of this restricted field "fosters a sense of autonomy from the exigencies of the political or more generally social worlds . . . and tends to be marked through the ascription of signs of distinction, of style defined solely in relation to an ever-smaller and more elite circle of those who have similarly built up this specific form of intellectual legitimacy" (129-130).

Bill Readings argued that because the "problem of participation becomes most acutely the object of reflection when we no longer know what it would mean to participate . . . the endeavor of Cultural Studies is the contemporary way to speculate on the question of what it means to be in the University" (118). The problem of participation -- as Raymond Williams put it, of an educated, participating democracy and of a common culture -- may have been constructed as invisible in the bureaucratic, corporate universities of our time, and in/by the elite circles celebrating the field of restricted intellectual production, but it has not disappeared from our late modern societies and remains a central issue in and for cultural studies. After all, cultural studies was from the beginning contextually focused on making the invisible visible. Can one change what one does not see?