We live in a network of institutional settings, each one with its own rules, goals and rewards, the ensemble of which mediates our existential reality. The cumulative effect has long been identified under the rubric of alienation for which the corporate institutional power brokers have supplied their own palliative, epitomized in the term 'spectacle.' – excerpt from The New Society for Universal Harmony

In The New Society for Universal Harmony, Lenore Malen uses pseudo-documentary photos, video and audio transcriptions, testimonials, case histories, and arcane imagery to archive the functioning of her own reinvention of the utopian society established in Paris in 1793 by the followers of Franz Anton Mesmer, known as La Société de l'Harmonie Universelle. Malen's New Society comes out of her long-term installation project and live performances of case histories and treatments performed at the fabricated Society imagined in Athol Springs, New York. The book expands the scope of the project to include original fiction and essays by fellow Harmonites Jonathan Ames, Geoffrey O'Brien, Pepe Karmel, Nancy Princenthal, Irving Sandler, Susan Canning, Barbara Tannenbaum, Jim Long, Mark Thompson, and others, as well as the first-person account of Malen's discovery and two-year involvement with the Society. The New Society examines our own culture's yearning for the perfect cure; what the Harmonites undergo and report is darkly funny and frequently impossible gesturing at the illusive search for spiritual peace and universal harmony, a search made more desperate in the present social-political-ecological climate.