I'm teaching an online course on collapse

at The New Centre for Research and Practice, starting February 9th

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be teaching an online course on collapsology for the New Centre for Research and Practice in a month’s time – you can sign up now.

The course is in two parts, starting with four weekly sessions from Sunday 9th February 2025, with a second chunk of four sessions starting Sunday 4th May 2025.

Watch the announcement video here or read on.

If you’d like a more general primer on what I think about collapse, you can listen to an interview with New Models from last year here. This is, however, now a long way out of date.

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The course

In the first four sessions, we’ll be covering what I’ve called ‘The Three Collapsologies’: traditional, applied and critical.

Traditional collapsology is the canon of social collapse. Canonical collapses, canonical explanations. It’s in this part that we’ll explore both the long (and frequently dubious) history of explaining collapses, from the most overstuffed (the Roman Empire) to the marginalised, and also look at new and sometimes fruitful attempts to break out of this tradition, from the field of Existential Risk to the outer edges of climate modelling.

Applied collapsology is what we’re witnessing right now in Gaza: it’s the long history of processes of social destruction, the systematic destruction of the conditions of life. In the twentieth century, very few societies collapsed as isolated units, but many were deliberately pushed towards the edge. We’ll read Henry Kissinger and historians of genocide against each other to make sense of traditional collapsology’s horrifying twin.

As a philosopher like Theodor Adorno might tell you, this process of deliberate social destruction is intertwined with the neutral sciences of societies. Destruction is the shadow of study.

So what to do about it?

Critical collapsology is the new construction I’m spelling out in the course. It’s an attempt to integrate the normative and empirical dimensions of collapsology. Or, put more plainly, to work out how ‘how society sticks together’ tells us ‘what to then do about threats to it’. Of course, even if collapse is a grim and terrifying prospect, it’s not obvious that we should attempt to prevent it. It’s not obvious that society has to be defended. But that’ll be discussed further in the course.

The second part of the course, which will take place in May, follows on from this, but is more directly about the increasingly intense WHAT NOW? question. It’s about the reconstruction of emancipatory politics in the face of collapse.

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The courses at the New Centre are high-quality but extremely open. If you’re an artist, or a designer, or an organiser, or a historian, or a philosopher, or an ecologist, or a scientist, or a trauma specialist, or coming from more or less any disciplinary background or none, you will be able to find something in this course for yourself, in both what I’ll be talking about and what the community will care about.

There will be full readings provided, there will be collective readings, I’ll be on hand throughout, and you’ll have the opportunity to submit a project (of more or less any form) at the end of the course. The New Centre also has one of the best and richest online communities for the discussion of philosophy, politics, and arts which you’ll be invited to join.

Each section of four lectures is $225 (one in February, one in May) if you want to do it for credit (enough to pay the instructor enough for the time it takes to prepare lectures!). The New Centre does pretty generous full and partial scholarships.

Here’s that sign up link again for February: https://thenewcentre.org/seminars/critical-collapsology-theory-and-the-ends-of-worlds/

I’ll post the link for May when I have it.

Please pass the link on to anyone who you think might be interested!

The formal course blurb

Collapsology has been one of the most strikingly underthought areas of the social sciences. Conceptually surrounded by the problem of the ‘indeterminate totality,’ as well as the hackneyed quality of invocations of ‘the apocalypse,’ the practice of studying social disintegration remained fragmentary and ad hoc. We still need new critical approaches to this canon and its implications, as participants in a society whose future is highly uncertain and whose historical condition of possibility was itself the destruction of other societies. What do we owe future societies when we consider the prospect of collapse? What do we owe past societies? In this Seminar, we will explore the field of collapsology and what it means for us. Crucially, these will not be taken as two separate questions but as a single field of concern. Can we embed ‘what it means for us’ into our accounts of how collapse actually occurs, integrating the normative and descriptive layers of theory?

The careful consideration of collapse is of special importance to anyone who wishes to work with projects that operate over spans of time that exceed a few decades. Anyone with a radical political project, for instance, must contend with the possibility of a rapid period of transformation that makes their project not only more operationally challenging but potentially conceptually incoherent. Yet noticing the possibility of our own obsolescence short of our outright extinction also opens a rich philosophical terrain. What does it mean to have values that are once historically contingent and claim their universality to be unrealised? What kind of medium is history itself and how does it resist us? This question is at once densely theoretical and eminently practical, demanding analyses of key questions in ethics and metaethics but also the challenge of designing new institutions that might carry forward revised goals, or at least encase them sufficiently so they can be transported to our descendants.

Part 1: Theory and the End of Worlds

Session 1: An introduction to ‘traditional collapsology’.

In this introductory lecture, we will discuss some major theories for why societies fall apart, which form much of the basis for current ideas about collapse. These are focused on moral, environmental, demographic, and energetic reasons. We will introduce the philosophical problem of the ‘indeterminate totality’ as well as the way a discipline of ‘collapsology’ has functioned on the outside of more conventional social sciences.

Session 2: Recent developments in Existential Risk Studies.

Much has recently been achieved in overcoming the weaknesses of traditional collapsology. In this second session we will look into some of the more nuanced approaches to questions of risk and the development of multi-causal explanations for collapse. Surveying research from CSER and other major institutions, we will take a skeptical look at the very notion of collapse and offer a broader taxonomy of periods of rapid social transformation and loss of agency.

Session 3: Applied collapsology.

The third session will look in detail at the changing tactics of social destruction, from the theory of the imposition of the Eurocene to early counterinsurgency tactics in the Americas. We look at the development of lineages of strategic destruction and the kinds of social structure they imply. What relationship does this darker canon of induced destruction—which arguably forms the majority of 20th century collapses—have with the more stately canon we were introduced to?

Session 4: An introduction to Critical Collapsology.

In the final session, we will discuss a framework that addresses many of the problems raised in the previous sessions. The critical aspect of collapsology emerges from a reading of institutional forms as at once producing affordances, constraining developments, and entailing normative tasks for agents to accomplish. Developing these aspects of the history of collapse will allow us to make common cause with feminist and Marxist theories of social reproduction, particularly those that relate to the question of the ‘mute compulsion’ of capitalism as an economic system.

And here’s the blurb for the second part, to take place in May.

Part 2: The politics of limitless risk

In Part 1 of this seminar, we established a new frame for studying the rapid decomposition of social structure, called ‘critical collapsology’. This theory more adequately conceptualises the vulnerabilities faced by global capitalist societies and sketches an orientation towards collapse. However, it remains relatively abstract. In Part 2, we will look at the particular histories that have led us to our vulnerable present moment and develop a radical politics adequate to this moment, after the agency to forge orienting utopias has dissipated. Part 2 will ask: How did the world become so vulnerable? How have people responded to vulnerability before? Why is the end of utopia a problem for the left? What institutions should we make now?

The first seminar will run as a collective mapping project for enumerating the risks we currently face. We will introduce the techniques of horizon scanning, the Delphi method, the basic principles and theory of prediction markets.

The second starts from the premise that collapse is already an object in the field of contemporary politics. This seminar surveys responses people have already made to the prospect of it. Each of these responses imagines a particular mode of collapse and proposes a response to it. These are variously drastic and gentle, gestural and programmatic.

In the third seminar, we will turn to the question of the reformulation of a 'communist core' in politics and its status given the possibility of collapse risk. The communist task requires actualisation in a world that is at once made possible by this capitalist one and frustrated by it. Marx and Engels, writing in The German Ideology, write of communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." What if those premises are no longer in existence?

In this final seminar, we turn to practical questions. What political possibilities persist through any future collapse, both materially and conceptually? What kinds of different strategies of resilience, emergency-response, and making one's thoughts into a minimal highly transportable protocol, might be required at different points in a collapse? What should we build now?

Seminar 5: A recent history of vulnerabilities

Run as a collective mapping project, this seminar attempts to produce a concrete picture of the risks that face us in the present. What specific types of collapse risk do we face? How can we differentiate and link them? To understand this, we also explore the new epistemological tools that might allow us to find out what kinds of risk we face. This seminar is run not as a standard lecture, but as an experiment in collective decision-making, in which we construct a timeline and theory of vulnerabilities in the present, breaking off into smaller groups to construct and then resynthesise our views of the future. In doing so, we introduce the techniques of horizon scanning, the Delphi method, the basic principles and theory of prediction markets, as well as critical texts on these tools.

Seminar 6: Strategy towards and within Collapse

Collapse is already an object in the field of contemporary politics. This seminar surveys responses people have already made to the prospect of it. Each of these responses imagines a particular mode of collapse and proposes a response to it. These are variously drastic and gentle, gestural and programmatic. Some are assertive of their capacity to prevent collapse, or live well within it, and others are fatalistic or enjoin their readers to ‘let go’. In the seminar, we will collectively assemble a compilation of existing strategies and attempt to proffer a taxonomy of the strategies themselves, the kinds of collapse they implicitly model, and the kinds of futures they might have.

Seminar 7: Collapsology and the left

The complex temporality of socialist thought produces problems for the left when faced with the possibility of collapse: although 'the left' is a product of modern social structures, it claims a universalisable task. This task requires actualisation in a world that is at once made possible by this capitalist one and frustrated by it. Marx and Engels, writing in The German Ideology, write of communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." What if those premises are no longer in existence? In this penultimate seminar, we will turn to the question of the reformulation of a 'communist core' in politics and its status given the possibility of collapse risk. This also requires engaging recent revisionist histories of the origins and passage of universalism. This will open us onto some of the central questions of philosophy: what is the relationship between conditions of realisability and norms? What does ‘ought implies can’ mean for those who would try to find an ethics not just for their individual lives but for historical change more widely?

Seminar 8: History as Medium and the design of institutions

In this final seminar, we turn to the question of history. If collapse is an event in history, what does it tell us about what kind of medium history is as a whole? And, armed with such an insight, how might we then approach the question of strategy for the long term? These are questions that reframe some of the central questions of our lives and throw them into uncertain relief: how does the way that world has composed me relate or not to what I ought to do? They are also immensely practical questions about how we understand our commitment to the things we take to be good and how we involve ourselves in the practice of designing institutions that can take forward our goals. What possibilities of sustaining such a project persist through any future collapse, both materially and conceptually? What kinds of different strategies of resilience, emergency-response, and making one's thoughts into a minimal highly transportable protocol, might be required at different points in a collapse? What should we build now?