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.

Extracts from Feather, H. (2012) 'Cracking Capitalism...'

 

 

Cracking Capitalism…

 

 

The network of interdependencies amongst human beings is what binds them together… a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people…it expresses what we call ‘society’ …as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals…nor a ‘system’ or ‘totality’ beyond individuals, but rather a network…(Elias, 2000, p.   )

 

 

 

       Where are the cracks[1]?

 

 

The recent focus on networking as a means  to personal success may be no more than the sensing of an epiphenomenon, an echoing of an everyday reality, the spectral presence of capital in what we take to be spontaneous contacts on the Internet etc.  However, the trite business-speak de nos jours (cf. J. Hobsbawm on networking[2]) may also be an indicator of something profoundly central to capitalist modernity: something lateral that escapes hierarchy,  subsumption, subjection to formations of capital.[3] The modus operandi of student protest, the Occupy movement, for example  suggests a form of networking that evades commodification –how is this possible, what are its grounds?  We will examine the spontaneous connections which underlie  more formalised, institutionalised social arrangements. These are not to be confused with ‘networking’ but are peer-oriented, often unnoticed ways of working upon which more conscious organisational processes are based- be they ‘horizontal’ or hierarchical formal arrangements.

        The concern of this discussion is with the way the  coordination and reciprocation constitutive of networks gets subsumed within modern capitalist social formations as its everyday life and the potential for circumventing this subsumption of the visible cracks, tensions which, for example, protest movements represent. The paper is a survey of some ideas that might facilitate seeing through or around modern capitalism.

 

 

          The way  into this discussion is made via a slight detour  into the exchange engendered  over the existence of hierarchy and networks by Giddens’ structuration theory.

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[1].   This discussion was provoked or stimulated by  reading Holloway’s Crack Capitalism. The piece is not a response to Holloway and interprets cracks not as alternative spaces but as something more dynamic, conflictual representing not just escape routes, but rather a systemic intertwining of different forces which open up lines of visibility.

[2]   The Guardian, 2012, ‘It’s not what you know, but who- the return of an unfortunate reality’ June 30^th, p.43

[3].  See David Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, for a critique of ‘horizontalism’, the pitfalls of which, hopefully, this paper avoids.   

 

         Mouzelis (1995, pp.123-4)  points out that Giddens in his theory of duality of structures does not  deal with hierarchy -although referring to power as a resource in relation to legitimacy. The implication here then is that this is a ‘flat’ theory rather than a theory of stratification, a theory of interconnection.

           

             Clearly (with Mouzelis) hierarchy is real but at the same time it is abstract; it posits relationships which exist outside the way people relate spontaneously beyond the bureaucratic definitions and  requirements of  formal settings; in that sense it is a reorganisation of concrete, informal relationships, ways of doing. As such it is a mode of abstraction from interactions as networks of associations and as such, arguably secondary to these, that is, the networks are its ontological ground because they already contain the content which appears in hierarchisation .

             ‘Labour’ as Marx (1974, p.78) argues , has a ‘two-fold social character’: the shape the value of commodities takes ultimately depends on ‘living labour’, the concrete relationships between producers, producers and products and producers and capitalists. Use value is  open-ended and depends on specific contexts and so commodities are shaped by creative forces outside the generality of the value form and  carry this with them to be extracted in different ways by different concrete users

         Arguably, every  hierarchy is also a network in which stratification is grounded: the members of hierarchies relate to each other as interactants, as elements of a network, as rhizomes, as well as rank statuses etc.

 

           The following is an illustration of how this conflict between subsuming organisational power and the popular, everyday, informal network  becomes visible.  Linux Open Source computer programming (Kelion, 2012) offers a way of linking various trade products such as Microsoft’s Windows packages to free software which in important ways parallel and provide access to those packages, i.e. provide alternative access to computing and the Internet.  Microsoft (ibid.) described Open Source programmes as ‘a cancer’ and ‘un-American’.  It reveals both the possibility that using the Internet can be improvised and controlled by users and renders visible the subsumption of networking by powerful organisations; one can see how Microsoft is ultimately dependent on coordination because Open Source does what they do without formal hierarchy. The  politics of the Internet is revealed, shown to function through the occlusivity of subsumption i.e. networking is made mysterious rather than everyday; it is blackboxed.

 

               

Teams and co-ordination: another way of thinking about  informal agency within hierarchised structures       

             Organisations frequently use ‘team’ or network strategies as these are believed seen to increase  potential for innovation, synergies, information flow, cross fertilisation and so on, via in effect creating new discursive formations. It’s an attempt to objectify, render visible, processes that go on anyway as the organisation’s taken for granted or black-boxed modus operandi. Hence formal ‘teamwork’ etc. is the misrecognition of the way the organisation actually functions i.e. the coordination, networks, interrelations which have been already subsumed as the ground of its bureaucratised structures. Company human relations techniques therefore attempt to harness  the drift of such informal logics for the benefit of company telos.  However, this is a case of the uncanny, as organisational strategy takes management ideas as its apparent ground by reproducing in objectified form something that already goes on informally.

 

                We can see then that subjects relate to an other in the mediated way that the other is given to the subject, that is as the subject’s otherness.  In coordination of activities with other subjects it is therefore its own  sense of relation  that the subject  has to negotiate, rather than its direct relation to an other as directly given to a subject’s consciousness. Elsewhere Mead (1970, pp.152-64) expresses a cognate idea:  relating via the ’generalised other’, and so on. This is a ‘different’, non-identical subject which exists in relation to, mediates self-identity. In other words, the other is given via its relationality, as for example, Sartre’s regulatory third shows. Harvey’s concept  of relational space is also productive here in that it enables us to view the subject as a coordinated existent constituted across different spaces.

 

One recalls here Beauvoir’s (Beauvoir, 1972, p.17)  argument that although in patriarchy men dominate women, they still require recognition in eyes of women, experience dependency on them  and thus there is the basis for mutual relation. The argument here is moreover posed in more general terms

 …if following Hegel, we finding in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed  only in being opposed- he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.

       But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim…willy nilly, individuals and groups are forced to recognise the reciprocity of their relations 

And in Beauvoir (1944)

                  I must recognise my situation as founded by the other, even while affirming my being beyond the situation…Only the freedom (subjectivity) of the other is able to give necessity to my being (pp. 83-4, 95-6). 

We can see from this that Beauvoir posits a mode of interrelating or intertwining of subjects which is a kind of conflictual intersubjectivity, one which exists between peers as such and also one which cuts across hierarchy to create a peer dimension there.

         Such reciprocity, coordination or network is a de-objectifying moment, one in which hierarchies, black boxes, categories are opened up and contents presented as interrelation, a kind of Deleuzian, rhizomatic moment.

 

 

 

 

Michael Dummett's Interpretation of Frege's  Context Principle / Theory of Meaning

is discussed at length in Feather, H. (2000/2010) Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Social Theory whereDummett's approach is seen as offering a basis for phenomenological social theory.

Hannah Arendt and Critical Theory

 

Critical Theory- critique of society in terms of the standards it upholds i.e. whether it does actually meet them…freedom, justice, truth, aesthetic standards etc.

Arendt as an influence on Habermas’s theory of communicative  action- the lifeworld as the basis of society, social systems

Arendt and phenomenological social theory. Influenced in turn by Schutz’s  idea of the life world as an open horizon where we avoid the classification, stereotypes, pigeonholing, objectification etc. found in institutional life. Lifeworld as taking everything in as we go along through the day etc., absorbing the formal world as a series of unstructured experiences which can then be  modelled/personalised to suit the individual’s outlook, situation. Improvisation.

Importance for Arendt: unpacks the power associated with  institutional life  e.g. bureaucracy, the world of strategic action. Weber’s iron cage melts away- institutional power depends on the people ultimately.

The public realm.  A concept from which Habermas derived his public sphere as the world of political action. Salons, debating societies, political groupings, parties, pressure groups. Engagement with the media as means of debate, spreading of ideas…

Political Action is foundational. It’s only through action in the public realm that we can create new departures- laws, constitutions etc. Arendt derives this insight from the Roman republic with its mass meetings in the Forum where the citizens decided state policy. Plebleian v. Imperial factions.  No neutral bureaucracy, direct democracy.

 

Differences with Habermas

Habermas argues that instrumental rationality allows a value- neutral consideration of ‘the facts’ about policies by disinterested state officials (following Weber). Arendt claims there is no value neutral instrumental rationality. Goals always influence our  calculations…we will go for a goal even if it less ‘efficient’ in terms of profit etc. See below.

Also,   rejects Habermas’s view that political action can take place effectively through the established institutions of the state in modern societies- Parliaments, state administration and parties

Gives examples from history of politically foundational action outside mainstream institutional life. Change from ‘below’: the people invent their own institutions-  French Revolution, Paris Commune, Russian Revolution, Hungarian workers’ councils (1956). Other examples might be the spontaneous self -organisation of workers and students in Paris in May ’68  (‘Autogestion’).

Habermas is opposed to the idea of direct democracy as bureaucracy contains neutral rationality- a systems functional rationality which is required for the coordination of society- follows Parsons here.

He also sees the rationality of the lifeworld and public realm as diminished by blocking mechanisms used by money and power to prevent arguments being heard e.g. press monopolies, advertising, concentrated political power, big business (food and drinks industries etc. re sensible eating/drinking) etc. He calls this censorship of ideas/understanding  ‘structural violence’.

 

Power

For Arendt power exists wherever people come together to act in concert  (cited in Habermas, 1986, p.78).

As with Foucault Arendt argues that the political system cannot dispose/use power at will. Power is a good for which the political groups struggle (slightly circular!) and with which a political leadership manages things.

Both find this good already at hand, already existing. They do not produce  it.

‘The impotence of the powerful’- they have to borrow their power from the producers of power

The producers of power- the people acting within the public realm. 

Idea of  the sovereign people.

 

Totalitarianism

Arendt- it is constituted out of elements existing in any contemporary setting- if they come together in a certain way (e.g. state securitisation, war on terror, surveillance techniques etc.)

4 Elements of totalitarianism

1.    Imperialist and capitalist expansionism  (also mimicked by Hitler and Stalin in Europe)

2.     Decay of the nation-state  (crisis in nation -state ). Brought about by imperialism- nation dominates over state- ethnicity dominates state in terms of rights , citizenship (see Hollande and the Hijab)

3.    Racism-  imperialist justification for conquest and biological basis for community makes citizenship redundant

4.    Alliance between capitalists/bourgeoisie and the mob. The  mob as the socially rootless, unscrupulous adventurers, chancers engaged in on-going criminality

NB. In a crisis bourgeois society abandons/downgrades economic goals and plays the race card- restricting immigration, scapegoating immigrants and minorities- as at present, arguably? Here the mob might include tabloid journalists as operating on the margins of criminality, perhaps?

 

 

 

Arendt: the Public Sphere and Totalitarianism

 The decline of the public sphere or realm  is associated by Arendt with the growth of totalitarian tendencies. Power of the state and business over the people/public (‘the totally administered society’- Frankfurt School  -important parallels with Critical Theory)

Canovan  (1992, p.121) –the distinctiveness of her position is that instead of seeing modern society as impersonal, rational, individualistic…she sees it as stiflingly uniform, paternalistic and monolithic. …it is like the familiar liberal nightmare of bureaucratic socialism (E. Europe under ‘communism’)  except that for her that nightmare includes liberal societies themselves

 

The political & cultural  trends behind totalitarianism:

1.    The Enlightenment- bureaucracy, homogenisation, abstraction, rationalisation, reification, erosion of individuality, spontaneity, difference

2.    Romantic Conservatism (neo-feudal view)- rejection of the following: reason in favour of myth e.g. ‘the nation’ and its ‘destiny’, rejection of science, democracy and  the republican ideal (the sovereign people)

 

Influences on Arendt:

1.    Enlightenment: political equality- the sovereign people, reason

2.    Marxism: The Frankfurt School critique of modernity as a crushing bureaucracy,  homogenising capitalism (passive, standardised consumers), decline of the public sphere –see also influence on Habermas

3.    Romanticism- she maintains some elements of this- plurality, diversity, uniqueness, individuality, spontaneity  (Goethe, Novalis etc.)

 

The origins of totalitarianism are the basic trends which come to make it up,  not historical causes or roots (Bernstein, 2008). Some features of this are:

 

(a) Homogenisation and the decline of individuality, difference,  plurality into robotic ’man’, ‘radical evil’ (see the death camps- Bettelheim and the ‘walking dead’ as extreme cases of this);

 (b) the power of nations over states which means territorial identities over universal ones,

 (c) the growth of superfluous population –peoples without rights, citizenship.

 

   

 

References

 

Arendt, H. (1986),’Communicative Power’, in S. Lukes (ed.) Power, Blackwell, Oxford

Canovan, M. (1992) Hannah Arendt: an interpretation of her political thought,  C.U.P. Cambridge

Feather, H. (2000), Intersubjectivity and Contemporary Social Theory: the everyday as critique, Ashgate, Aldershot (on Schutz)

Habermas, J. (1986), 'Hannah Arendt’s Communication  Concept of Power' in Lukes (ed.) op.cit.

 

 

 

 

Review of Merilyn Moos's The Language of Silence

Merilyn Moos, The Language of Silence, Cressida Press in association with Writersworld, 2010, 288pp., £10.00 pb., 978 0 9566467 005

The ‘nation’s subconscious’ is figured by its secret services, Le Carre tells us. And one might  then  say that  this tells us  something about how culturally generic and interiorised processes of  state practice are, the constitutive role of state apparatuses in cultural formation of the individual, but more of this later. The Language of Silence is  inter alia a story about a key implication of this: the effects of state security, the culture of securitisation.

           This fictionalised biography, which covers three generations of a family, is concerned with loose ends- to do with place, relationships, commitments and rather than tying them up it shows them as irremediably riven. The plot is characterised by contingency as three generations are shaped by world historical events. During the search for past family members people appear and then just as suddenly vanish back into the general diasporic melee.  Relationships are thrown into doubt, distrust and damaged lives supervene, paranoia is evoked, but what is the source of the fear?  The Holocaust  and its ramifications for successive generations is the underlying theme but the story also raises wider questions about the nature of modern states and how they produce the  state of exile, both as structural processes of displacement and as an individual’s interiority. Hence contingency is  not  simply that-  contingent- but a structural feature of the text and the reality it purveys.  Whilst this might be an obvious concomitant of Nazism  and Stalinism, which the first generation experience, there are broader implications both on terms of how second and third generation deal with this history in the context of the way ‘liberal’ states function to securitise societies.

        The story tells us something important about the way the state is experienced in modern capitalism. Classical liberal theory, following on from Hobbes celebrates both the sovereignty of the individual and their security. The paradox of modern states however is that the claim  of individual freedom comes at the price of individual angst…securitisation of society is at the same  time the paralysis of the individual by fear that ‘security’ engenders. Here the state is seen is seen as separate from, external to the individual and so the individual then becomes the source of the problem of security

          In this way the citizen confronts themselves as sutured/disconnected from the social, generic basis of anxiety and  viewing the state as externality  on the one hand, whilst on the other its product, anxiety is seen as purely internal to the individual. This kind of bureaucratic disconnect is perhaps the flip side of commodity fetishism’s presentation of the individual as directly confronted as a ‘consumer’ by the  market where again mediations are displaced.

           These conundrums of the disconnect are explored in the story in the way that plot and character suggest a kind of  abyssal relationship with their cultural context. The question of exile is dealt with  via the first generation’s incomprehension of context, place, identifications and the sense of being a permanent refugee.  Attitudes are expressed rather than articulated and thus a whole world is conjured where experience cannot be related or identified as one’s own. i.e. the generic side of experience is  paradoxically received as exterior to the individual. The trajectory of the exile is characterised by dead ends, as temporal dislocations affect the ability to escape the mode of ‘living in the past’. It’s impossible to make sense of context and its directionality.

       Hence a permanent state of interpersonal othering is engendered but  the key implication is the othering of the state: that even in its more benign manifestations the nightmare of the modern state as ideal- typical Weberian construct, the iron cage, is  somehow inherent; its objective extremity is present in every detail, process. Processes of bureaucratic selection within the population connote something final whether in mass murder as in reactionary modernity (fascism) or the 11 Plus and benefits system in the liberal variant. The lived continuity of the everyday is displaced with  a sense of discontinuity, entrapment, isolation, absolutised categorisation.

         However, generally speaking such a classificatory power, a kind of taxonomic terror, functions as a bad reified everyday and simply passes below the radar: processes of othering simply don’t register, they’re not explicitly manifest, but routine. The language of classification here is purely indexical, a product of usure, where as Derrida notes, language acts behind our backs, carries on its communicative logic without saying so. Hence in the story  otherness/othering  is illustrated in the too explicit critical framing of Christianity in a classroom encounter which marks out the speaker as a stranger by virtue of transgressing the silent meanings.

         Othering then  in the story and ‘real life’ suggests a problem of representation: how do we move beyond the abyssal or exile state, the terminus of sense, the  suture?  Loss, detachment, mourning, dislocation, disorientation are features of the structural operations of the state seen in Gramsci’s terms as the integral state but as fetishistic representations they appear as problems of the individual confronting an external body. Jameson has aptly noted MacIntyre’s insight that the effect of bureaucratisation is to reduce us to individuals, the dissolution of commonality. Arguably this projects the fear which is in fact a structural feature of  the state’s own ‘fractured’ existence.

     How can these experiences be represented- maybe by othering the state as source of fear. Popular conceptions of officialdom demonstrate the everyday reversal of official taxonomy, state logic. In the story political articulations of this and ensuing  commitments provide a means of signifying and displacing, ameliorating  the disconnects, and the involvement of the third generation in anti-capitalism and environmental politics appears as a redemptive elaboration of the reversal. Functionaries of the modern capitalist state become in Merleau-Ponty’s expression L’On, or literally, ’the they’ .

Howard Feather

Link to Merilyn's website: www.merilynmoos.tumblr.com

Henri Lefebvre: the social production of space
3 types of space- physical, social and representational
Traditional view- space is empty and fixed by its physical boundaries. This idea of space is associated with the classical physics of Newton as the space within which bodies move. As such Lefebvre, 1994 Prod. of Space (p.169) describes it as a view of space as being substantial, absolutely fixed and empty. As against this view Liebniz argued with/against Newton that space was relational i.e. it could only be grasped in terms of what it related to what e.g. the spaces of urban life exist relationally in the sense that they are linked aspects of a single division of labour- industry, finance, consumption, leisure, administration are all interdependent spaces of urban life.
This idea of space is of a space that doesn’t exist separately from the things (as above) that occupy it. (ibid., pp.169-70). All activities nevertheless also exist in physical environments (absolute space) at the same time. Relational (social) space can be reduced by speeding up the connections between different activities e.g. via use of the Internet or faster modes of travel (see below on this).
For Lefebvre (The Urban Revolution) space in modern capitalism is often determined by property values: this determines who lives where- a relationality of class residential spaces. Lefebvresees this as an abstract relationality of money values (commodity relations).

How these types of space come together

Our own experience of space is as an amalgam of these three pure types and  for Lefebvre the experiential dimension is key to everything else.

Lefebvre- the  three types of space are thus  overlaid or organised by social constructions of space which we experience as ’lived space’. In other words, lived spaces are also spaces of representation in that they concern how we symbolise space, what meaning it has for us. For example, the built environment of the city is a physical space which has social spaces such as physically-based car parks and cathedrals which have a certain meaning for us. Depending on the construction of space so we experience it and imagine/represent it. Cities dominated by car parks are experienced and symbolised differently from those say, dominated by cathedrals.

Space becomes increasingly abstract as the city/urban centres develop: there are more specialised spaces in such cities- industrial, administrative, financial spaces/places for instance. Spaces are increasingly dominated by rental values and their consequence- property developers. The latter often control urban development

Space and time are interlinked: our sense of space is linked to the time it takes to move across it. Hence the horse, car, train or plane provide different senses or constructions of space.
Globalisation produces a compression of space as the Internet and global interconnectedness make the world seem smaller: producing a different kind of space i.e. smaller space. Hence spaces must be thought of relationally -the space of walking compared to the space of the jet plane etc.

Space is about power relations- territoriality, for example.

Space is heterogeneous- broken up into places of specialised activities – activity spaces (Massey)

Spaces have their own time or rhythms of development

E.g. Milton Keynes shopping centre contains the spaces of leisure (strolling, gathering, meeting, passing the time of day), the spaces of consumption (shopping times) and the space of calendrical time as it is oriented to the high point of the summer sun (summer solstice). The space-time rhythms of urban developers also intrude in shop rentals and their attempts to control public access to the shopping centre (see Owen Hatherley in Maev Kennedy: 'Milton Keynes shopping centre becomes Grade 11 listed building', Guardian, 16th July, 2010 and his  A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

Representational spaces- these are the activity spaces occupied/produced by those who develop ideas in the form of symbols, images, concepts, theories…for example anthropologists, architects, sociologists, advertisers, artists, journalists and so on

Representations of space- products of the imagination which has lived through the experience of particular relational activities e.g. travelling from A to B, working with other professions, trades which provide a sense of relative nature of work/skills etc. and their different rhythms/routines of life

Criticism of Lefebvre- whilst he sees property values as abstract rather than real critics have argued that money and property values, although abstractions from everyday life in that they don’t recognise individual, personal or intrinsic worth of things but only their market value, are nevertheless real in that they determine where we can live, what we can buy etc. i.e. they are real abstractions. For example, towns and cities have tended to become standardised with the same sorts of stores and banks etc. in the high street. In this way the high street becomes an abstraction or generalised, rather than particular to a given town; it is part of a wider pattern, not individual. (see David Cunningham in Radical Philosophy 133, Sept/Oct. 2005, 'Metropolis and Urban Form')
          A further objection is that space seems to take on a life of its own rather than being linked to, structured by the activities that  produce it as an on-going dynamic flux, thus it becomes a thing rather than a shaping process or relation.

David Harvey- many of these ideas have been taken up by the urban geographer, David Harvey. He uses them in an article ‘Space as a keyword’ in the book David Harvey: a Critical Reader (edited by Castree & Gregory)