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Since 1919, The New School has been home to scholars, creators, and activists who challenge convention and boldly make their mark on the world.
To celebrate this groundbreaking legacy, we are opening our doors to the public for a weeklong festival of innovative performances, talks, workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and more.

On October 1–6, 2019, join us as we reflect on a century of world-changing ideas and together imagine a new kind of future.

The Festival of New is free and open to all.
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Tuesday, October 1 • 4:00pm - 5:00pm
What’s New? A Public Conversation on the “Tradition of the New"

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The New School was founded at a moment of sublime confidence in the Modernist conceit that history was aiming at a more perfect secular order for the ages. (The US dollar bill still carries this Latin motto, novus ordo seclorum, or, a new order for the ages.)

One hundred years ago, scholars, activists, and artists in entire domains of human endeavor—education, economics, and the social sciences; painting, design, and the performing arts—took a reflexive pride in being new, in testing limits, in helping to forge a revolutionary society of more perfect freedom and equality.

But is what's new always better than what already exists?

What if the very prestige accorded novelty in various human domains is best understood as an insidious ideology, a perverse byproduct of unleashed capitalism, a form of production that profits by creating, and then catering to, an ever-expanding variety of new wants, often for things nobody previously understood that they needed?
Speakers
avatar for Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley

Hans Jonas Professor Of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Simon Critchley is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. His work engages in many areas: continental philosophy, philosophy and literature, psychoanalysis, ethics, and political theory, among others. His most recent books include The Problem with Levinas and ABC of Impossibility, though he has written on... Read More →
avatar for Shelley Fox

Shelley Fox

Donna Karan Professor of Fashion, Director of MFA Fashion Design And Society, Parsons School of Design
Shelley Fox is the Donna Karan Professor of Fashion and the Director of the MFA Fashion Design and Society program at Parsons School of Design in New York. An award-winning designer, Fox has created numerous experimental and innovative collections that were sold internationally and... Read More →
avatar for Paul Goldberger

Paul Goldberger

Joseph Urban Professor Of Design, Parsons School of Design
Paul Goldberger is The New School University's Joseph Urban professor of design and the architecture critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. For 25 years he was the architecture critic for the New York Times where he... Read More →
avatar for James Miller

James Miller

Professor of Liberal Studies and Special Advisor To Provost, The New School for Social Research
James Miller is professor of Politics and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author most recently of Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to Our World (2018); and also the editor of the new English translation of Diogenes... Read More →

Tuesday October 1, 2019 4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall - UL102
  Conversations & Panels