PhD in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York - Fulbright.no

Moving to New York City is not like moving to a place where you’ve never been before. It’s like moving to a place that has already inhabited you for a long time. You know it from the literature of Paul Auster and Tom Wolfe, the films of Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen. You have watched Sex in the City on television, listened to the music of John Zorn and Philip Glass, seen pictures from the great depression and glanced at the Metro section in the New York Times. You know about Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village and Central Park even if you’ve never been there. The boroughs of New York has reached you long before you set you foot there. For New York is not confined to its own space. It radiates away from itself and reaches everywhere. It is an idea that continuously expands and recreates itself, adapts to new generations, new historical situations and political demands, new ways of artistic creation and, of course, always finely adjusts itself to the dreams and hopes of the thousands who come here every year. At one point one has already asked oneself: I wonder how it would be living there? The funny thing is that this idea does not disappear when you move here. With a certain amount of luck - which is indispensable in NYC - it becomes rather an obsession.

Entering one of its universities is one of the best ways to become introduced to the materiality of New York City. The New School for Social Research is located on downtown Manhattan in an old shopping mall from the 1960’s. From the energetic noises on 5th avenue one suddenly enters a modern reconstruction of Plato’s dim cave. A lot of the offices and seminar rooms lack windows. The light is sparse. The monotonous summing form the escalators never escape you. The temperature is either too hot or too cold. The air doesn’t move. But the parallel stops there. The tempo and the energy among the students and faculty within this cube are more breathtaking than any defect air-conditioning. With lectures to ten o’ clock in the evening, a reading plan that equals to one book in the week, three papers and three presentations each semester, written and oral exams, language and logic requirements, continually defending ones philosophical or intellectual position in front of students and faculty, one really haven’t got time to nurturing any romantic ideas about New York City. Suddenly one lives in New York City.

Sunlight enters the New School for Social Research from its past. Founded by Columbia University faculty in 1919 who publicly criticized the war, the New School became famous as the University in Exile during the Second World War, creating a haven for intellectuals and artists threatened by National Socialism in 1930’s Europe. Philosophers as Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt became able to flourish here. Fresh air is presently slipping through the closed walls of the New School through a faculty continually in touch with intellectual trends inside and outside the US borders, including among them highly acclaimed intellectuals as Julia Kristeva and the lately passed Jacques Derrida. The sounds from the future are already heard from students participating in the intellectual debate through journals and conferences, working with and criticizing the established intellectuals of the present. Living and working in this milieu, one suddenly becomes a real New Yorker. That is to say, as least as ‘real’ as any New Yorker is who is not born in New York.

For the good thing with New York is that nobody has monopoly on what a ‘real’ New Yorker is. Since every New Yorker knows who is not a New Yorker, and every New Yorker only recognize oneself among other New Yorkers, we all act as if we actually where real New Yorkers. That is to say, we continuously work towards the realization of our own individual goals. The price we all share is that we have to live on 300 sq feet which we pay twice as much for as we would for a double sized apartment in Oslo. We have no kitchens to sit down in and eat all our meals away from home. We drag our laundry out in the streets and wash it at Laundromats. We never sleep more than 6 hours pr. day. In the morning we pick up a bagel and coffee on our way to the lectures. We read curriculum on the metro. Sometimes, when I read about a new exhibition on the Museum of Modern Art, or even just watch a travel program about NYC, the idea still gets back to me: I wonder how it would be to live there? Immediately it strikes me: that’s exactly what I’m doing.