Book Launch

Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday is a book by Howard Feather that was published on April 26, 2024. The book explores the idea that modern capitalism's disorientations and double takes can lead to existential anxiety, which motivates a constant search for reassurances of individual and collective identities. It also discusses how the dominance of formal institutions in modern life suggests that people can "find themselves" within these settings.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/irf-book-launch-social-theory-of-displacement-by-howard-feather-registration-881773647717

Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday Paperback – 26 April 2024

by Howard Feather (Author)

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What is happening when we mistake one thing for another? Disorientations and double takes are a key part of the lived experience of modern capitalism. But the corollary of this is an existential anxiety which motivates a perpetual search for reassurances of our individual and collective identities.
How do we escape self-estrangement and alienation on any level of existence? The experiential gaps in formal bureaucratic and marketised 'life' present us with absolute boundaries or difference, and hence binary forms of identity. The search for identity is then accompanied by an inability to deal with the hybridity and cognitive dissonance of everyday life.
The fragmentations of institutional life nevertheless produce something that passes for a world of reciprocal recognition (we are all colleagues, part of a 'team' and so on). In fact, at the same time this pulls the rug out from beneath a sense of mutuality with fellow incumbents of such formal, contractualised settings. The dominance of formal institutions in modern life promotes the idea that we can 'find ourselves' within these settings and it does so by insinuating within itself the experiential world that it lacks.
Here, informal social worlds appear in chimerical and caricature form. Modern capitalism feeds off and mimics the spontaneity, contingency, and collegiality of the lived world in order to present itself as the genuine article.
Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday attempts to unravel the conundrums posed by living in these parallel worlds of reciprocity and contractualism.