SYSTEM FAILURE: We Don’t Need to Be a Part of This Institution to Continue to Exist
Ben Nicholson and Amelia Jones
This article is written with alternating “discursive” and “dialogue”-based sections. We label these as such. The dialogues took place over Zoom in April and May of 2025. The combination of two methods of thinking is intended to move us beyond purely academic analysis into a living and lively working out of ideas. It will, we hope, become clear how this method relates to our larger System Failure project, which is described below.
Introduction
Discursis
Universities are in crisis, with freedom of speech being suppressed, if not outright crushed, and funding models collapsing in the face of the rise of right-wing attacks in and beyond the US. But this “system failure” has been a long time coming. This article is a part of System Failure, a larger project that the two of us co-founded in 2023 to address the destructive neoliberalization of higher education and arts complex institutions (including museums, art schools, etc.) in North America, the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand over the past five decades. As we elaborate here, this reorganization of institutions along the lines of efficiency, privatization, rationalization, branding over substance, shifting power from faculty to administrators and boards, eliminating faculty and schools, and other neoliberal mandates has increasingly evacuated meaning and purpose from the research and creative work being done in relation to the arts complex and higher education institutions, demoralizing us as creative and intellectual workers.[1] One of our key starting points comes out of Amelia’s recognition, having taught in the US, UK, and Canada, that the persistent emotional anxiety experienced as an academic working for the twenty-first century university can be traced to the schism between what many (if not most) arts and humanities scholars, curators, and creators think our goals are—largely progressive, community-minded, relational, and idealistic—and the anti-human and anti-relational values and practices of the institutions for which we work.
System Failure, which addresses the state of institutions fundamental to work in the arts and humanities, including universities, art schools, and museums, has included a range of activities, most notably public conversations during panels and workshops we have organized at major conferences in the US and UK, as well as ongoing gatherings over Zoom with artists, scholars, and curators from the US, UK, Canada, and beyond.[2] What we have come to recognize through these lively coalition-building encounters is that the consolidation of neoliberalism from the 1980s through the early 2000s, which, in the case of universities, has stripped them of any ethical core beyond the financialized interests of the corporate oligarchs now comprising boards of trustees and overseers, has opened the door to the quick capitulation of university “leadership” teams to the fascist far-right attacks of 2025 in the US and worryingly similar policy shifts in the UK.[3] With university presidents and provosts increasingly functioning as hollow vessels chosen without meaningful faculty input to serve the wealthy members of governing boards (very few, if any, of whom are academics or familiar with higher education beyond their own experience as former students), while faculty are silenced and sidelined, it is not surprising that the majority of universities in 2025 have capitulated almost instantly (in the case of Columbia University, for example) to external pressures coming from the far right (this is specific to the US so far, but we hypothesize it will spread).
In the US, the right wing has been fighting to control or dismantle education, seen as a bastion of left-wing propaganda, at all levels for at least 50 years.[4] But the attacks have ramped up: since before Trump was reelected in 2024, a covert coalition of white supremacist and extreme right-wing forces started not long after the George Floyd protests in 2020 to work through right-wing governors to control universities by damning diversity initiatives (DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—programs), which right-wing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, cancelled across public universities in his state, using the term “wokeism” to mischaracterize the goals of such initiatives. Given the focus of System Failure, it is worth noting here that DEI has far greater purchase and visibility in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, where researchers, curators, and artists often wrestle directly with questions of power, visibility, and social inequities. DeSantis and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas were the first to infiltrate state universities directly, replacing administrators with their own flunkeys and eliminating or deeply compromising curricula in the arts and humanities by censoring any class or subject matter deemed related to diversity initiatives—literally stated as projects or curricula that hurt white people’s chances at success or even our feelings.[5] Christopher Rufo and the architects of the far-right Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 have led the charge.[6]
With the war in Gaza flaring since the fall of 2023, sparking 2024 student protests on campuses, right-wing congressmembers as well as key centrist Democrats began attacking university presidents in a series of public hearings by accusing them of turning a blind eye to antisemitism on their campuses (conflating antisemitism with criticisms of Israeli policies and Zionism), opening the door for Trump’s administration, immediately after his inauguration in January 2025, to claim that the elite universities of the country require government oversight.[7] With Trump’s illegal and threatening executive orders coming in floods since then, US campuses are now openly and directly being threatened with the withdrawal of federal funding and cancellation of international student visas, obliterating two of the major funding mechanisms of American universities today (federal science funding and international tuition dollars).
In 2025 we can see clearly where the neoliberal hollowing out of universities has led: direct attacks on diversity initiatives across the arts and humanities and the weaponization of antisemitism by the far right in the US have created an environment in which campuses and museums are capitulating in advance and most administrators, as well as many faculty members and curators, are self-censoring, as well as censoring institutional websites, to avoid attracting attention from the Trump regime.[8] The very fact that university leaders almost all seem to believe that kowtowing to fascists will somehow allow them to continue to proceed as usual tells us the lack of integrity and ethical vision has become dominant across US higher education.[9] This is a catastrophe for freedom of speech and the integrity of research and creativity. But—because these attacks are also trashing neoliberal structures and eviscerating the empty slogans that have dominated universities for decades—this terrifying and destabilizing moment might also be an opportunity to build something new, as we will address at the end of this article.
System Failure is driven by two key motivations: 1) an intellectual/scholarly study of neoliberalization and the threat of wholesale destruction to higher education and arts complex institutions; and 2) an activist exercise of coalition-building through the conversations we elicit and encourage at our events as well as the ongoing Zoom conversations. These two driving forces culminate in the noted events and conversation, facilitating the gathering of information to enrich the research side of the project, and, perhaps even more importantly, empowering us and our fellow participants by arming us all with a more complete overview of what is happening across Western institutions in the arts and humanities and providing an international network of supportive colleagues. This sharing of experiences and knowledge explicitly refuses the atomization on which neoliberalism’s regimes thrive, and even more dramatically condemns the compliance-in-advance attitudes of our institutions in their cowardly responses to the British government’s Orwellian imperatives and, more recently, to Trump’s illegal executive orders. This article is co-written by the two co-founders of the initiative as part of this collaboration with the hopes of inspiring and empowering more potential coalitional connections from the readership of FIELD.
System Failure, which began as a critique of the neoliberal arts and higher education institution, is now a wakeup call, and this article reflects that urgency. There are three sections following this introduction. Section 1, Personal Histories, provides background on how each of us got to this project and why we think it is urgent. Section 2, Neoliberalism, summarizes key studies of neoliberalism to explain how understanding its effects on Western institutions is crucial to understanding the fascist suppression of free speech currently besetting them (in some cases, as noted, from within). Section 3, Strategies of / for Survivance draws on Gerald Vizenor’s idea of survivance in the context of North American Indigenous communities, as going beyond the mere maintenance of “survival” in relation to the onslaught of colonization to embrace joy, empowerment, and creative thriving.[10] Given the role of colonization and empire (along with the motivating engines of capitalism and industrialism) in bringing us to our current impasse, it seems fitting to learn from Indigenous theory, acknowledging the wisdom of peoples who have long been forced to fight the seemingly inexorable, crushing forces of individualism, greed, and white supremacy connected to colonization forces that have brought us to the violent and destabilizing moment of 2025.
This article also opens up the framework of System Failure even more to suggest that what is happening in higher education and the arts in the UK and US and beyond is an obvious microcosm of both the failure of political imagination that led to their neoliberalization (a system, we can now see, of ever increasing extraction and atomization, making the rich richer and more powerful and the poor, especially those who are trans or gender nonconforming, stateless or refugees, subhumanly subordinated) and thus has opened the door to the resurgence of white supremacist fascism across the Western world. Everyone wants a solution, but fascism is the worst possible outcome. Building on what Sylvia Wynter theorized as the “hybridity of humanness” as “simultaneously storytelling and biological beings” who exist in continually shifting “praxis” in relation to not just all humans but all living and non-living materialities around us, we suggest that our way forward into mutual survivance will be forged through a full acknowledgment that we are relational with the world and must give and connect rather than simply extracting and isolating.[11] Hence let the storytelling begin.
I. Personal Histories: “I somehow ended up in Silicon Valley…”
Dialogue
Amelia Jones: Can you talk about your educational, family, and work background and connect this to why you’re drawn to examining neoliberalism in the academy—which is how we first connected when you were writing your dissertation on that topic from an artist’s point of view.
Ben Nicholson: My mom was an elementary school teacher. I grew up in a household where I had modeled for me not just the “value of education” as a path to a job, but as endeavor of exuberance, particularly in relation to reading and storytelling; education was joy, curiosity, social exchange. I came from rural New Hampshire where I went to a very small school with the same group of 40 students from 1st through 8th grade. Though I was an early user of the internet, I had a relatively provincial sense of the world. In my first semester in college, I ended up taking a class in electronic music composition where I was thrilled to discover that there were people out there that spend their time composing, discussing, and sharing strange music. I’d never encountered that kind of concentrated investigation and the accompanying insistence that meaning making is generated by people sharing, working, and playing together.
By the end of college, I had student loan debt. I somehow ended up in Silicon Valley in 2011 and joined a startup in which some very wealthy people had invested. The reason for my company’s financing was the idea of the exit, lucrative returns for the venture capitalists. I didn’t realize this at the time. I thought we were just there to build something that people liked. We were based in Palo Alto while Steve Jobs was in hospice, dying, just blocks down the street from our office. He passed away in the fall of 2011 and, shortly after, the infamous Walter Isaacson biography was published, the one with Jobs on the cover in black and white, with his turtleneck, stroking his beard. I noticed the executives picking up and reading the book.[12] Within a few weeks their behavior changed. They started to be more cruel, more flippant, making decisions without consulting people. They were emulating Steve Jobs, as though behaving like Steve Jobs would make the company successful.
From the narratives of the most successful tech-broligarchs—Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—there emerges a mythology to which millions (potentially billions) of people subscribe, a story that insists that, whatever field you’re in, and we see this especially in academia, your quest is to voraciously and competitively grow your value while pushing others aside, so that you can ascend to a position where you have command over the world. In Silicon Valley, I found myself going behind my boss’s back and talking directly to the CEO about things that my boss was doing wrong. I was jockeying for a more advantageous position for myself. And I was getting positive feedback from the executives: “Oh, you’re going to be the CEO of your own company someday!” They were affirming that I was succeeding in Silicon Valley. But every day I was on the verge of a panic attack. I felt miserable, like this thing that I was being told was good left me with a pit in my soul.
This is another story, but I eventually left Silicon Valley and returned to art school to get an MFA. When I decided I wanted to continue my studies at the PhD level, I was determined to investigate neoliberalism as a model of subjectivity rather than an economic system, one that was perhaps refined in Silicon Valley but exported to all powerful institutions (including the academy). This was ultimately the dissertation work I did at USC, where I met you, Amelia.
Amelia Jones: For me, I came to neoliberalism through the university and arts complex (from my curatorial work with museums and galleries). Given that academics in the humanities and arts often consider ourselves progressive, how did we get to the point where most of us have acceded to the neoliberalized university—and are trapped by it? For the first 10 years of my career, I thought it was my fault that things were so stressful in my academic workplaces. And then for the next 10 years (I’ve been teaching for almost 35 years), I slowly started to realize, “Wait a minute, this is structural.” In the last fifteen years I have started trying to do something differently. Since I started working with you and we founded System Failure, I’ve begun talking to groups of people around the world about the situation. It took 30 years of flailing around to get to the point where I recognize that I can be in these institutions differently. And one of the things I’m realizing is that it’s such a waste of time to be angry at USC or the forces I encounter who have power at USC. It’s such a waste of time to be angry at one’s dean or provost or president, because the problem is systemic. They are just reflecting and reinforcing the existing systems. If they weren’t there, whatever other person would be there most likely (although, it must be emphasized, not necessarily!) would be doing the same thing.
Ben Nicholson: Whenever we talk about this system, we tend to personify it. We’ve been calling it “neoliberalism,” but, ultimately, it’s lots of aggregated behaviors and impulses from many people, not the efforts of an individual person that perpetuates this system. We need to recognize that it’s not USC, or the dean, or the CEO. It’s a whole way of living together.
Amelia Jones: Yes and we also have to act collectively to make change. I keep having arguments with people who say protests aren’t doing anything. I argue back: they are fundamental to our surviving and thriving. Aside from coalescing people around shared outrage and plans for change, they also signal to the rest of the world that we’re not just capitulating.
Ben Nicholson: This relates to what I think of as “Silicon Valley Solutionism,” the idea that the world is a set of problems and we should seek solutions to those problems, that our social efficacy is related to our discovery of solutions; this solutionism has really dulled people’s sense of what it means to participate politically. If you reject that whole idea of solutionism, you recognize that the protests are not about instantaneously eradicating oppressive systems. Protest contributes to many different efforts, coming from many different people, addressing many different acute harms, and they are a way of demonstrating that there is power in ideas and their articulation.
We need a completely different concept, for those of us steeped in neoliberalism, of what it means to be political collaborators. We can only hope that there’s a recognition that the time scale over which change occurs is indefinite. There is no plateau that we arrive at. It’s an ongoing struggle, but it doesn’t need to be a joyless one.
Amelia Jones: We’re all conditioned to be neoliberal and we forget that life isn’t just about achieving goals. I was always an extremely goal-oriented person, due to my father’s competitiveness and the breeding of that ethos into me and my siblings. And I’ve had to start letting go of that, because that’s not actually the best way to live a life.
II. Neoliberalism: “It’s like a guillotine hanging over our heads all the time”
Dialogue
Amelia Jones: To date we’ve used the term “neoliberalism” as a kind of shorthand to sum up a vast system that’s been implemented over the past 50 plus years in all Western institutions, including universities and the arts. But let’s zoom in: what is your definition of neoliberalism? And how does it shape your understanding of your creative and intellectual practice?
Ben Nicholson: It’s important to note that I was born in 1988 and so I’ve never lived in a world prior to the onset of neoliberalization. I’ve always lived in a world where adults, when introducing themselves, will typically say their name and then what they do for a living. Under neoliberalism what you do for a living is seen as defining, especially for middle-class and wealthy people.
For me, it’s important to focus on neoliberalism as a continuation of the imaginaries of liberal humanism. These are Enlightenment ideas that include a notion of growth and progress, that progress ought to always be pursued and is exemplified by European culture. These ideas are deeply steeped in a kind of Eurocentric and patriarchal—ultimately white supremacist—world view defining how the world ought to function. It’s an ideological system that proposes specific ideas of what a person ought to value in their life—linked to the belief in the perpetual exponential growth of oneself as a kind of economic agent.
That is what neoliberalism foists on people: an understanding of the world, and a sense of value and meaning in relation to how much you’re able to function as a perpetually growing, exponentially growing economic agent. Proponents of neoliberalism would claim that this ideology is the ultimate equalizer, because, hypothetically, anyone can strive to grow and better themselves and participate in the economy. And so, they would claim it’s a race-blind and gender-blind system, providing equal opportunities for everyone so long as they have the gumption to pursue it. It’s really important to understand how neoliberalism maintains white supremacy in relation to the ability to enter into economic markets as some type of perpetually ascending vector into the heavens—an ability that, in spite of assertions of equal access, has everything to do with how you are recognized societally as someone who is permitted to do that. Further, neoliberalism plays a role in moment-to-moment cultural decision-making processes in our increasingly globalized world, permeating into the day-to-day lives of many people in terms of how they imagine and see themselves in the world—it’s like a guillotine hanging over our heads at all times.
We have to go beyond neoliberalism as an economic project—I think it’s more important to focus on how it’s actually experienced by people. It is an affect. Franco Berardi, for example, wrote a book called The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009), which does a really nice job of trying to bridge the economic side of the question with what it actually feels like in your body to experience neoliberalism.[13] He talks about it largely in terms of depression and panic. Amelia, how were you drawn to neoliberalism as a discursive framework?
Amelia Jones: For me, it was years of suffering in my academic institutions as well as in curatorial positions and trying to figure out why I was suffering and what was going on in / with these institutions. Faculty and staff were, in every university I’ve been in, alienated and often pitted against each other. Leadership is either nonexistent or toxic, transmitting imperatives downward from upper administration rather than seeking to support faculty, staff, and students. Very few of my administrators have seemed to understand what faculty are even doing, or to understand what I thought were the obvious core values of universities: non-instrumentalized creativity and research and teaching. Increasingly, and here the consolidation of neoliberalism was key, the public discourse within and about higher education—adopted within administrations of universities, especially in the UK—assumed that every program, every professor, every class, every student should be evaluated in terms of measurable “outcomes.” Ultimately this started to mean that fields in the arts and humanities were seen as useless because they do not result in clear career paths to “jobs,” but, rather, are oriented precisely against such rationalized ideas of knowledge. I saw arts and humanities departments in the UK being eliminated, and in the US the increasing gap between what I think I am doing and the stated—highly superficial—branding rhetoric of my institutions.
So mostly just by crashing around in the dark I started to see people here and there using this term neoliberalism, and that eventually seemed like the most useful overall term. I’m now questioning whether it currently is suggestive enough to encompass those issues of lived experience you mentioned, Ben. It’s certainly not the only term and I think we have to acknowledge that it exists largely within, and not beyond, white-dominant conversations around politics, institutions, and culture. To that end, I’m interested in also foregrounding an expansively defined anti-racist and decolonial theory—including the work of Sylvia Wynter, who brilliantly maps the limits of European Enlightenment philosophy (which fantasizes the subject as unitary, full-within-himself, and always already white male) to rethink being in the world by arguing, rather, for humanness as praxis—as something we have to practice every day, something we do. This insistence on going beyond books explicitly theorizing neoliberalism—from David Harvey to Gary Gerstle to Nancy Fraser and Nancy McLean—which are almost entirely written by white scholars, allows me to note how human experience (of power, oppression, and how we are situated in the world) is entirely conditioned by aspects of how we identify ourselves and are identified by others, how, as Wynter puts it, we are hybridly human in relation to everything around us.[14]
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Discursus:
Canonical accounts of neoliberalism tend to define it as primarily an economic system with cultural results. In these accounts, neoliberalism is an ideology-cum-economic policy initially founded in the late 1940s by a group of men in the Swiss Alps called the Mont Pelerin Society and led by Friedrich Hayek, who promoted what Wendy Brown describes as “a moral-political project that aim[ed] to protect traditional hierarchies by negating the very idea of the social and radically restricting the reach of democratic political power in nation-states.”[15] Control, in Hayek’s model, is covertly white supremacist and openly Euro-US-centric, as evidenced in his assertion in a 1984 address to the Mount Pelerin Society, that: “[w]e must return to a world in which not only reason, but reason and morals, as equal partners, must govern our lives, where the truth of morals is simply one moral tradition, that of the Christian west, which has created morals in modern civilization.”[16]
Gary Gerstle and David Harvey also more or less fall into this camp of defining neoliberalism as first and foremost an economic system, failing to account for its dependence on cultural assertions—such as Hayek’s openly Eurocentric, white supremacist attitude. At the very beginning of his 2005 book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey writes: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”[17] Although Harvey later suggests that the backlash towards the rights movements may have been motivated by a white male desire to reassert power, this feels forced given his emphasis on economic policies throughout the book.
Citing the Louis Powell memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971, Harvey does foreground the importance of the neoliberals’ commitment to corporate interests and, in turn, their ambition to control universities. In that memo, Harvey notes Powell’s argument that “the National Chamber of Commerce… should lead an assault upon the major institutions—universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts—in order to change how individuals think ‘about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual’”; and he notes Powell’s assertion that “US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort, particularly when pooled.”[18] Harvey’s account makes clear how neoliberalism, from its rise in the late 1970s to the present, is directly connected to right-wing and explicitly corporate ideologies. But it is also crucial to note that it is connected to the “liberal” parties in Canada, the UK, and the US (including the Liberals, Labor, and the Democrats, respectively). Harvey and Gerstle foreground these complex alignments, pointing out (as Ben notes above) that the genesis of neoliberalism in the Classical Liberal ideas especially of English Enlightenment thinkers connects it directly to liberal leaders such as US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The core shared values of both “conservative” and “liberal” neoliberals involve the monetization of all levels of human life, rendering its complexities superficial and commodifiable already by the early 2000s (foreshadowing the ubiquitous power of social media to reduce all complexity to flows of information). So much British theorist Mark Fisher makes clear in his influential 2009 book Capitalist Realism. As Fisher asserts, “[t]he power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects… a monetary value.”[19] Tellingly, his example of this monetization of everything humans engage with is the objects in the British Museum, a quintessentially colonialist and imperialist institution, and one relating directly (as the psychic “other”) to the art museum; these objects are “torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spaceraft.”[20] Reminiscent of the language of postmodern theorists of the 1980s and 1990s, his other examples relate to how capitalism liquifies meaning: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”[21] Wendy Brown confirms Fisher’s focus on monetization by asserting that “neoliberalism’s world-making rationality focused exclusively on its drive to economize all features of existence, from democratic institutions to subjectivity.”[22]
While we are building on these previous studies, we assert unequivocally that they either completely ignore or do not go nearly far enough in foregrounding the fact that, fundamentally, this monetization and instrumentalization of all aspects of human life is at its core white supremacist and patriarchal (the latter pointing to both its misogyny and its heteronormativity). It is an extension of the extractive psychology of colonization, of the oppressive “othering” mechanisms of European colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteronormative patriarchy, and in fact could be said to consolidate these forms of violence into a political project that is multi-dimensional and definitely not only, or even primarily, “economic.” Neoliberalism functions in and through culture to privilege a form of humanity that is aligned with the phantasmagorical ethnically pure, heterosexual, economically advantaged, alpha white man—disempowering everyone else. Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Donald Trump currently embody, in slightly different ways, this paradigm.
To flesh out this assertion we turn to theorists such as Sylvia Wynter, who integrate theories of racial capitalism and feminism into the picture. But also to scholars such as Henry Giroux and Lisa Duggan, who put questions of identity and power at the forefront of their studies of neoliberalism. Giroux’s 2005 article “The Terror of Neoliberalism,” for example, argues point-blank that any critique of neoliberalism must challenge it as “both an economic theory and a powerful public pedagogy and cultural politics.”[23] Duggan’s 2003 book The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy proffers a similar argument, noting that neoliberal discourse and practice operates to prioritize economic policy, which it promotes as “primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise,” separate from “politics and culture.” [24] It is precisely this illusion of separation, she argues, that allows neoliberalism to privilege the kinds of people who project their status through money and/or through the idea that they “understand” money (white men, in our world today). But, Duggan asserts:
In the real world, class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, religious and ethnic boundaries are the channels through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow…. The illusion that such categories of social life can be practically as well as analytically abstracted one from another descends from the conceptual universe of Anglo-European Liberalism, altered and adapted to the U.S. context during the early nineteenth century.[25]
Even more importantly for System Failure, Duggan goes on to explicitly argue that the dismissal on the far right and on the far left of what has often been derisively called “identity politics” is acceding to this illusion, and that the left in particular must stop “reproduc[ing] within their own debates, the rhetorical separation of economic/class politics from identity/cultural politics,” concluding that leftists “attack and dismiss cultural and identity politics at their peril.”[26]
In sum, neoliberalism is a floating signifier that must be debated and interrogated. It can be a useful way of summarizing the shift from modern to postmodern, Classical Liberal to “new” forms of liberalism, and the institutional shifts that we highlight in System Failure. But it must not be relied on as an “origin story” for our current suffering, or at least not without many caveats—particularly those that understand, from a perspective outside that of the canonical white male “liberal,” “conservative,” and even to some degree orthodox “Marxist” theorist, the complexities of this multi-leveled and fully experienced set of interconnected systems that have set the stage for our current lived situation.[27] As Sylvia Wynter puts it, “as humans, we cannot/ do not preexist our cosmogonies, our representations of our origins.” If we fail to address “systemic injustices,” seeing them as “law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo oeconomicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!,” we are stuck with the oppressive systems from the past, which are now becoming more entrenched and intractable.[28]
Most importantly, Wynter goes on to query, building on Frantz Fanon’s questioning of the superficial “masks” through which we are racialized, gendered, and otherwise subordinated to the gaze of power: “[h]ow can we come to know/think/feel/behave and subjectively experience ourselves—doing so for the first time in our human history consciously now—in quite different terms? How do we be, in Fanonian terms, hybridly human?”[29] This is a powerful way to get back to the hybridly human ways we interact with everything and everyone around us, reminding us of our relational interdependency and exploding the myth of the “economic miracle” model of neoliberalism that deliberately suppresses the structures of power putting it in place through cultural and other means (such as universities).
III. Strategies of / for Survivance: “the messy, honest thing we do in classrooms”
Discursis
Surviving and thriving in today’s brutal late capitalist world requires community and connectedness to counter the alienation of rationalized institutions, exacerbated by screen life which, in turn, encourages rising divisiveness—conditions exploited by politicians increasingly fascist in their machinations. As Édouard Glissant frames it, the opposing, critical power of a “poetics of relation” refuses the division into “us and them,” reminding each of us that we always exist in relation. By “taking up the problems of the Other,” Glissant concludes, “it is possible to find oneself,” but oneself as relationally connected to others.[30]
Recognizing the necessity of relational connection in the face of violence, alienation, and oppression, Vizenor’s Indigenous concept of “survivance” is crucial. Despite all of the violence, death, and oppression that First Peoples have experienced at the hands of colonizers, they do not just survive, accepting the inevitable erasures and violence of colonization; instead, Vizenor argues, they practice survivance, navigating state power and dominant modes of culture through evasiveness and assertiveness (as needed) along with irony and humor. Against obliteration, they wield their languages, creativity, and understanding to live empathetically in relation to each other and to the natural world. Most importantly, while survival is tied to the Western concept of the coherent individual self (in capitalism, implicitly competing with others for resources), survivance understands our interrelatedness and stresses our working together.[31] Because Indigenous people have suffered in particularly extreme ways from the aggressions of European modern systems integrating cultural othering with military violence and material extraction, they have much to teach those of us only now beginning to feel attenuated versions of these aggressions. We are both white middle-class highly-educated scholars (Ben also an artist and Amelia also a curator) who acknowledge the way in which our “natural” alignment with white privilege makes it difficult to think outside of these systems that have long benefited people like us. We need Indigenous thought, as well as Black feminist work and Critical Race Theory, given our limited capacity in the past to acknowledge the violence of the systems that have supported our work (more or less), and the current incapacity among established academics (still predominantly white) to understand what is happening to higher education and liberal culture in general.
Dialogue
Amelia Jones: Right now working at USC is crazy making. There is little connection between what the upper administration thinks they’re doing and what faculty and students think we’re doing at the university. The system doesn’t relate to human life. That’s how they can ignore the mismatch between what we are producing by way of research and creativity (especially in the humanities and the arts) and their values of efficiency, outcomes, and student career paths.
Ben Nicholson: They’ve abstracted the university away from labor, students, and professors. They just want the university to be a pot of money that makes more money, which is the problem with having business, hedge funds, banking, advertising, and tech people running universities. They actively dislike the thing that, functionally, is their “product” (higher education) as though it’s an inconvenience for them. Of course, students and faculty are still convening in classrooms and using university resources to do affirming, critical, care-filled things, yet the structure of the university often attempts to prevent any of those things from leaking out into broader culture.
Amelia Jones: Yes and now Trump’s people are openly stating they are trying to destroy the university. Given these forces, what are our goals and our vision with the System Failure project?
Ben Nicholson: I think higher education should not be defined by a narrow focus on vocation. The instant that you take traditions of making and thinking and exploration and curiosity concerning how we exist together, what we do together, and insisting that they need to make money at the other end you’ve lost. Instead, we should prioritize working on a student-by-student basis, seeking to understand what each student is excited about, what each student is experiencing and reacting to in the world. Professors, with their own fears and concerns and desires, should then take the material of their courses and be given permission and encouragement to develop continuous relational dialogues with the students amid the unfolding of their curricula. In this way, the classroom is not about programming for a vocational outcome, but is a place of highly active, engaged social exchange.
Amelia Jones: Just to play devil’s advocate, how is that approach going to change anything?
Ben Nicholson: What I’m describing feels necessary but is in no way sufficient. You’ve pointed out that surviving and thriving are not separate things. It’s in this sense that we need to start from a place where we’re not completely succumbing to the mandate from the university to turn the classroom into some sort of half-hearted vocational training, allowing the students to drift further and further away. This is a long-term project—I’m literally thinking in terms of decades, if not generations. This a process of slowly empowering new generations of students and faculty, and then encouraging others to do the same, and in aggregate over time. We do need this grassroots component so that if and when there is some type of more top-down opportunity for a change in governance, or the way that we socially organize, people have the capacities to respond to it.
Amelia Jones: That’s what the fascists want to stop—the messy, honest thing we do in classrooms. This must be the best thing to do, because it’s the most threatening to them, since they’re all about controlling and excluding people. We can always read, we can always talk to each other, and we can always create. And no one’s ever going to stop people from doing that.
Yet how do we know what our power is in relation to these systems?
Ben Nicholson: I’m especially interested in Hannah Arendt’s distinction between force and power.[32] Power is not about the ability to wield violence. Power is the thing that emerges when you have a body of people who are willing to work cooperatively to manifest the kind of world they desire. It’s fundamentally a relational phenomenon (which, of course, can be harmful or helpful). The inverse of that, the thing that often stifles the people coming into their power, is the fear of force—we’ve talked about this in relation to neoliberalism in terms of atomization. For those who are highly neoliberalized (those who have not already been excluded from the benefits of neoliberalism), the threat or the force that can be applied to people is the ejection from a job or the ejection from financial growth.
Given that the university continually applies this threat of force to maintain neoliberal power, can the university be changed so that it can be a place where power can be attained and exercised by students, staff, and faculty? I think we need to be more capacious in our thinking about what we’re doing, what we care about, and how we do it, and not be so fearfully attached to the institution. We don’t need to be a part of this institution to continue to exist.
Amelia Jones: Yes. The being attached is a problem. We’re attached to something that no longer exists (or, if it does, it must exist in and through us as its activators, not through the bureaucrats!).
Ben Nicholson: In response to atomization, how has collaboration informed your approach not just to resisting neoliberalism-cum-fascism, but actively thriving amidst these oppressive forces?
Amelia Jones: This is an interesting question for me because I never wanted to collaborate very much in the past. I enjoy organizing things collaboratively—exhibitions, performance programs—but my greatest love is writing, which is often an individual endeavor. But I think this collaboration you and I have, which has now blossomed into a huge collaborative group, it had to happen because I couldn’t continue by myself. I wish I’d had this awareness in my first 20 years of being an academic, I just felt so lonely and exhausted and unwell all the time. No one in the institutions ever mentored or directly supported me, and I don’t mean that I’m unique—to the contrary. This whole system is abusive. That said, there are many exceptions—all my friends are exceptions, or they wouldn’t be my friends; my former students with whom I keep in touch and are now friends. I have the immense joy of having had a long career and networks of amazing, generous, creative friends around the world.
At USC Roski I’ve been the Vice Dean since I arrived at USC in 2014 (I’m just stepping down now, in 2025). I focus on faculty wellbeing in spite of the expectations handed to me for the job, which are the opposite—exhorting me to impose mandates from above. If I’m just making this one other person feel better by showing them that their complaint is valid, sharing that I’ve had similar experiences, and working with them to find options, then maybe that’s the best thing I can do; the older I get, the more important that kind of thing becomes, and I think my work as Vice Dean supporting colleagues did spark my interest in the collaborative side of System Failure.
Ben Nicholson: One of the methods of being meaningful within neoliberalism involves being in a perpetual state of competition. In resistance to the mandates of neoliberalism, you might find yourself in collaboration more. It’s horrifying to think of a world where people are driven only to compete with one another.
Amelia Jones: It’s also more confusing than that because the neoliberal university is constantly telling people to collaborate. And at the same time they make this hard to do; the systems are not amenable to facilitating actual collaboration. This exemplifies the gaslighting aspect of neoliberalism—they say they are supporting you, and use the language of collaboration and creativity, but in effect the institution is doing the opposite.
The weird thing about the far-right attacks on the university is that there are some aspects of it where they’re destroying something that needed to be destroyed. Not that these far-right ideologues are reasonable people, or that they’re doing a good thing in any way. But these systems are twisted and not functioning in equitable ways, and somebody needed to question them. I wish this criticism and these attacks had come from the progressive side. The far right obviously has no integrity and is operating on cynical bases to destroy aspects of our society they consider “liberal.” So they don’t really care about antisemitism or DEI or Chinese spies pretending to be students (their explanation for why they are revoking many student visas)—these are just excuses for them to exert control over the so-called elite universities, all of which depend on government funding and foreign students.[33] But they understand enough about the use value of the idea of anti-elitism to accuse colleges of being societally malignant and “unfair” (by implication or direct claim, to white people).
Ben Nicholson: If these failing systems are going to be pulled apart then we need to be ready to replace them. I don’t want to put a positive value judgment on what’s going on with the Trump administration’s fascism, but it’s certainly different from what could have been expected under the ongoing maintenance of neoliberalism. Optimistically, or maybe opportunistically, there’s something that can be done with the fact that this is happening, something that isn’t just immiseration and harm. Neoliberalism is great at hiding and obscuring things, complicating them so that you don’t feel like you can respond to them. And Trump is just ripping all those veils away.
Amelia Jones: It’s all in the open now. We can see all the good liberals who don’t care about people being deported or trans people being demonized. They’re obsessing about tariffs and property values because all they really care about is their own financial self-interest. I really don’t want to align with that perspective. That said, I must acknowledge that I do align in some ways, with my lovely house and little lifestyle that I’m terrified to lose…. We’ll see, if it comes to that, how brave I am.
Ben Nicholson: Though this work we’re doing is preparing for horrific eventualities, it’s also about trying to proactively think about what we can do with the agency and power we have, which requires that we imagine who we are (and who we could be, together), beyond our current institutional lives, in another world.
Notes
[1] For an outline of the bureaucratic and financial management of UK universities (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), see UK Parliament, “Higher Education in the UK: Systems, policies, approaches, and challenges” (published Monday 15 July, 2024), online at:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9640/ ; accessed June 16, 2025. See also Sarah James, “The Crisis in Art Education,” Art Monthly n. 468 (July-August 2023), 10-13.
[2] We ran panels on System Failure topics at Association of Art Historians at University of Bristol (April, 2024); ASAP (Association of Arts of the Present) in New York City (October 2024), the conference “A Manifesto for Arts Education,” at University of Newcastle (February 2025), and at College Art Association (CAA) in New York City (February of 2025).
[3] On these points, see Amelia Jones, “Why are universities so easy to break?,” Art Monthly 488 (July-August 2025), 38-39. Also, through Amelia’s connection with the Trans+ Virtual Centre of Excellence in the UK, run by Tōmei Bacon, she has learned (via a June 26, 2025 email from Bacon) that there is now a “new oversight focus on Higher Education in the UK, in response to the draconian measures being implemented by the OfS [Office for Students, the higher education governing body of England] and EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] around DEI freedoms” (her emphases). For some expansion on what is going on, see Ian Pace and Abisheck Saha, “The OfS’ new free speech guidance will transform English campuses,” Times Higher Education (June 20, 2025), available online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ofs-new-free-speech-guidance-will-transform-english-campuses . The ideological slant of this opinon piece, which lauds this putatively positive “transformation,” is made clear in the reactionary and misleading claim at the end of the article, “[t]his guidance has the potential to temper dogmatic implementation of the ‘decolonise the curriculum’ movement and the growing influence of anti-rational, post-truth ideologies such as Critical Social Justice and Critical Race Theory.” There is nothing “anti-rational” or “post-truth” about Critical Race Theory, nor of these other modes of critical thinking; CRT simply and directly identifies the structural racism of Western institutions.
[4] See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), especially chapter 2, “The Incredible Shrinking Public,” which addresses the concerted attempt by right-wing trustee, Candace de Russy, to wrest control of the SUNY (State University of New York) system. De Russy stated her goals in a 1995 memo to her fellow trustees as follows: “rank ordering the campuses in preparation for closings and mergers, requiring greater faculty productivity as part of union negotiations, raising tuition, reversing policies limiting privatization and identifying opportunities to reduce the tax burden, eliminating English-as-a-second-language courses, and reviewing affirmative action policies in light of California’s 1995 rejection of the state university’s race- and sex-based programs. And… reasserting the Board’s ‘proper’ role in selecting campus presidents,” 33. More recently, the right wing in the US has directly stated their desire to destroy higher education; see J.D. Vance, “Universities are the Enemy,” speech for National Conservatism Conference (2021), on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw ; and Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, “’The Universities are the Enemy’: why the right detests the American campus,” The Guardian (May 6, 2025); https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/06/maga-republicans-us-universities . This desire on the part of the right wing to destroy higher education must not be confused with the passion circulating around far left proposals in the wake of the massive student protests of 1968. For that perspective, see André Gorz, “Détruire l’Université,” Les Temps Modernes, n. 285 (April 1970); tr. Mitchell Abidor as “Destroy the University,” Marxists.org; available online at: www.marxists.org/archive/gorz/1970/destroy-university.htm (accessed June 24, 2025).
[5] See: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca and Christie Nold, “Opinion: Why the narrative that critical race theory ‘makes white kids feel guilty’ is a lie,” Hechinger Report (August 2, 2022), online at: https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-why-the-narrative-that-critical-race-theory-makes-white-kids-feel-guilty-is-a-lie/ . The article reflects the common conflation in 2022 of “critical race theory,” which is not taught in primary or secondary schools, with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives due to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s weaponization of “wokeism.”
[6] The official 920-page document of the project is entitled: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project. The Mandate for Leadership, and it is freely downloadable here: https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf . It has become terrifyingly evident that the Trump administration is using this document, and the presence of its architect, Russell Vought, as Director of the US Office of Management and Budget, as a “how to guide” for their actions (we won’t say “policy,” because their actions are illegal and not implemented as policy through legislative means). And, disturbingly, Christopher Rufo has gleefully described his tactics in public media; see Rufo, “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out,” Wall Street Journal (January 3, 2024); https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-we-squeezed-harvard-claudine-gay-firing-dei-antisemitism-culture-war-a6843c4c?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink . See also, Jessica Winter, “The Texas School District that Provided the Blueprint for an Attack on Public Education,” The New Yorker (May 25, 2024), online at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-texas-school-district-that-provided-the-blueprint-for-an-attack-on-public-education ; and Susan Dominus, “Recruited to Play Sports, and Win a Culture War,” New York Times Magazine (January 31, 2004); https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/new-college-desantis-florida.html
[7] On the role of centrist democrats, see: Adam Gabbatt and Edward Helmore, “Democrats rally to Biden’s defense over response to pro-Palestinian student protests,” The Guardian (May 5, 2024); https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/05/democrats-biden-pro-palestinian-student-protests.
[8] The Trump administration’s executive order abolishing DEI, entitled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” was issued on January 20, 2025, the day he was inaugurated, making clear that this was a priority of the Project 2025 team; see: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/ . USC immediately removed DEI language from the university website and pressured deans to do the same for schools.
[9] To date, only one university president out of thousands in the US—Michael Roth of Wesleyan University—has spoken out directly and repeatedly about the reactionism and anti-constitutionality of censoring speech on campus through spurious and weaponized charges of antisemitism. See Michael Roth, “How Higher Education Can Win Back America,” The New York Times (December 27, 2024); https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/opinion/college-education-tuition-egalitarian.html
[10] See Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1-23.
[11] Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species—Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” Sylvia Wynter, with Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 31, 34. This relates to what Zen Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing”; see Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1987). It is also highly consistent with Indigenous and other Black feminists’ arguments, suggesting the power of thinking and acting relationally as a counter to Eurocentric norms.
[12] Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
[13] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, tr. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).
[14] Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species,” 9-90.
[15] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 13. For an internal definition of the Mont Pelerin Society, which included extremely influential economists such as Milton Friedman, see: https://montpelerin.org/about/ .
[16] Friedrich Hayek, cited in Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 89.
[17] David Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. See also Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
[18] Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 43. Wendy Brown, in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, is also succinct on how neoliberalism is connected to the right wing attempts to control higher education: “As the Left struggles to articulate the various powers generating differentially constructed and positioned social subjects, the Right overwhelms this struggle with a discourse reducing freedom to censorship and coercion. As the Left seeks to make visible the complex histories and social forces reproducing white male superordination and hegemony, the Right mocks social engineering, groupthink, and the injection of social justice into a space properly organized by (the presumptively norm-free) selection for excellence, on the one hand, and ‘viewpoint diversity,’ on the other,” 42-3.
[19] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Washington, DC and Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 4.
[20] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 4. See Amelia Jones’s article on the division of the natural history and the art museum as foundational to capitalist, imperialist, colonialist modern Europe, “Ethnic Envy and Other Aggressions in the Contemporary ‘Global’ Art Complex,” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, special issue on Okui Enwezor, ed. Jane Chin Davidson and Alpesh Patel, n. 48 (May 2021), 96-110.
[21] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 4.
[22] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 11.
[23] Henry Giroux, “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics,” College Literature 32 n. 1 (Winter 2005), 14.
[24] Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, xiv.
[25] Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, xiv.
[26] Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, xxi, xx.
[27] It becomes extremely clear in researching neoliberalism that the discourses defining and critiquing it suffer from the tendency in political and economic theory in general to be limited to white voices and often to men. Orthodox Marxist theories are unfortunately prime examples of this phenomenon, albeit some of the most brilliant theorists addressing the role of culture and identity (including gender roles and sexuality as well as perceived race and ethnic identity) in social hierarchies are certainly informed by Marxism—for example, Sylvia Wynter and Silvia Federici.
[28] Wynter, in Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species,” 36, 38.
[29] Wynter, in Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species,” 36, 38, 45.
[30] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), tr. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11, 18. This text is modified from Amelia Jones, “Creative Community for Survivance,” special section “Looking After: On Art and Healing,” ed. Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan, Brooklyn Rail (March 2024); online version can be found at: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/03/criticspage/Creative-Community-for-Survivance .
[31] Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance.”
[32] Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 143-145; see also Stephan Kampowski, “Power and Authority—Gleanings from Hannah Arendt,” Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science issue 1 (December 7, 2024), available online at: https://humanumreview.com/articles/power-and-authority-gleanings-from-hannah-arendt .
[33] It is worth noting that some institutions not considered “elite,” such as, in the case of California, the public “California State” (or Cal State) university and Community College systems, were designed post WWII more as vocational training campuses, respectively, for those aspiring to teach and those training to work in lower middle class or working class occupations. Ironically, the Cal State faculty are unionized and in some cases wield much more power than those of us at supposedly “elite” campuses, who are discouraged or prevented from unionizing. (USC claims that we cannot unionize as we have “faculty governance” and are thus “managers”; they have even done the job for Trump by suing the National Labor Relations Board, which supports unions and which the Trump administration is antagonizing.) I am grateful to my Cal State colleagues, Jane Chin Davidson (Cal State San Bernardino) and Joanna Roche (Cal State Fullerton) for sharing their experiences.
