The New School of the Anthropocene is an act of repair as well as an experiment. We seek to reinstate the intellectual adventure and creative risk that formerly characterised the university before it capitulated to market ideology and managerial bureaucracy.
We are an ensemble of experienced academics, artists and practitioners, gathered in response to a context of unimaginable climate catastrophe and irreversible species extinction; of sanctioned inequality and the authoritarian turn. None of us regards education as a business and our students as customers.
We recognise the pitiless financialisation of higher education and the dismal situation of students, for whom the accretion of vast debt is a passport for crossing the threshold to adulthood and social participation.
We acknowledge the role of the university as military-industrial research base for the chemical and informational technologies that execute genocide and ecocide.
We observe the demoralisation of exploited teachers within a casualised workforce whose energies are drained by a technocratic culture of audit and administration. We witness the purposeful and systematic dismantling of adult education, the crude instrumentalisation of learning and a joyless culture of accreditation.
Collectively we can do better. We see that higher educational institutions in their current form abjectly fail to foster the new critical and creative ways of working collaboratively that are necessary for social transformation and ecological recovery.
The New School gives radical new possibilities - affordable, flexible, democratic - for non residential university education. We continue to explore in our fourth year how we shift from reproducing the destructive practices of the present and preparing students for what David Graeber termed “bullshit jobs,” and instead forge a viable future for the generations to come.
As The Industrial Workers of the World (aka. Wobblies) declared in 1905, “We form the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions . . . What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change and fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope that society has. This is the only way societies change.””
The name of the New School reflects the understanding that the influence of human activity on the Earth's atmosphere and biological support systems in recent centuries has been so significant and abrupt as to constitute a new post-Holocene epoch, which geologists have called the Anthropocene.
We use this term not to privilege the human as a precarious biosocial subject, made suddenly aware of his [sic] precarious location within a planetary system of out-of-joint feedback loops and at risk of extinction. For the voices of decolonial and indigenous activists, environmental historians, political ecologists and ecofeminists remind us that we have been living for five centuries in the age of capital (the “Capitolocene”), of plantations (the “Plantationocene”), and within sacrificial relations (the “Wasteocene”).
And so we use the word “Anthropocene” critically to signify a taking of responsibility for the ecocidal ruin we’ve unleashed upon our planet; and a shift away from our terminal neoliberal economy of extractivism towards an ethics of care rooted in co-existence, reciprocity and mutual aid, with the earth reframed as a shared biographical habitat.
In response the New School has designed a radical postgraduate-level curriculum called the Imagination of Synthesis, an approach to pedagogy invented by the 20th-century English poet-scholar, Eric Mottram. This fuses critical enquiry and creative practice as an approach to studying and assessment, whereby we might cultivate the forester-poet, the painter-activist, the urbanist-auteur, the gardener-intellectual . . .
The New School has woven this approach into the theme of Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989), which discusses the interconnected ecosystems of the mind, society and the natural world. The curriculum directly addresses the omission of Arts and Humanities disciplines in the consideration of social and ecological crises through re-examining the cultural narratives and metaphors that shape the human location on earth.
Teaching is designed to encourage learning through experimental thinking: the study of the imagination being the purpose of art, which might best equip people to deal confidently with our contemporary condition of polycrisis.
As such, the New School swerves away from the neoliberal obsession with training and skills: a means of limiting citizens by preparing them to operate fixed procedures within a social mechanism. The human imagination recognises no such constraints and we have no interest in “workforce alignment” or nurturing micro-entrepreneurs of the self.
Our curriculum instead reflects the understanding that to be educated is to inhabit a world that affords a variety of unpredictable responses. We recognise the need to create producers, not consumers, of meaning, and that collaborative community is a vital principle of learning.
We refuse any professional abstractions of the word ‘academia’ from a community context and believe in learning by doing and the importance – and pleasure – of collaboration. In short, we are interested in ideas.
“It is quite wrong to make the distinction between the action on the psyche, the socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on a strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy.”
“Say to them: ‘Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.”