Review: Howard Feather, ‘Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday’
Review of Howard Feather’s Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday (Austin Macauley, 2024) 200 pages
Abstract
Howard Feather examines the disorientation and self-estrangement of (post)modern life and theorises the displacement of social meanings and practices within capitalist modernity through the process of translation. Disorientation concerns disinformation and the effects of consumerism, contractualism and systematic ideological manipulation, in light of lived experience. The signature trait of displacement is dualism fostering physical and internal exile, and the binary effects of past and present, agency and structure, outer empirical and inner cognitive worlds, and particular and general understandings and realities. Feather outlines the conundrums of living in parallel worlds, whereby reciprocity and everyday social networks that enable us to express our identity and agency are continually displaced through a form of double-take equivalence. His trans-disciplinary focus employs a range of theories, examples and analysis to show how we ‘find ourselves’ in this confused social space that presents itself as the genuine article whilst exacerbating our social anxiety.
Reviewed by Paul Clements
This wide-ranging and rich exploration of the social theory of displacement employs a range of academics from aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, philosophical, psychotherapeutic, semiotic and sociological fields to show its scope with an eventual focus on how displacement highlights cracks in capitalist modernity. Feather illustrates both the importance of context and the uncertainty of meaning and gnaws away at the difficult relationship between our agency and systems that shape understanding. He reconsiders everyday reciprocal social relations in regard to: consumerism, contractualism, the formulation of unitary identities, hegemonic crises and the production of social anxiety, as well as the effects of language, ideology and discourse. He draws on notions of figuration and webs of mutual dependencies (Elias 1994); actor network theory that involves the interaction of networks of people, ideas, matter and technologies (Callon and Latour 1981); and structuration that recognises that social action is more than a binary focus on structure or agency (Giddens 1979). Networks of mutuality offer an alternative to formal contractual relations, with relatively equal and reciprocal interaction, ‘on the basis of collaboration where in a given context anyone is authorised to speak and authority is conferred by collective consent’ (Feather 2024: 167). His theme of common social meanings steeped in these social networks of mutuality appropriated by formal systems of operation, develops the notion of displacement through translation. The term translation traditionally associated with language also refers to actor network theory whereby agents within the network mediate and alter meaning contextually from one social situation or social world to another, and hidden processes of displacement offer up new perspectives. This may be affected negatively by the fragmentation of social relations, misrecognition and alienation that divorces processes and practices from outcomes. It creates parallel worlds whereby common life experience and abstracted mythology, past and present issues and ideas, are co-opted in diverse ways creating dissimilar but interrelated ontological realities. Modernity which is far from systematic may be encountered as self-estrangement, which exiles the abstracted individual who appears asocial and atomised countering everyday communication and reality.
Feather uses the example of refugees who are disconnected from their often-traumatic life and ‘face a radical disconnect where they are divorced from their own experiences: their cultural identities, memories, biographies, narratives and historical past’ (Feather 2024: 29) displaying displaced exile. Such identification is also experienced by children of refugees escaping Nazism (Moos 2015), whereby these descendants are translated often by subliminal ‘agents’ from one social world to another (whether these agents are handed-down artefacts, memories of family members and their narratives, particular people representing regimes of power, or traumatic psychosocial effects). Which distant events and social worlds impose on their present often ‘normal’ lifestyles, creating duality.
He employs the term ‘vaciller’ to describe the process of displacement. It sways and vacillates, a conceptual jolt emphasising the duality and unevenness of social meanings, as ‘lived experience is confronted, equivalenced and “appropriated” in a double-take style by the real abstractions of market and contract’ (Feather 2024: 21). Such arrangements operate within and across different fields, translated by people, objects, ideas, subconscious thoughts, social meanings and situations. Feather offers the classification of ‘sex’ as an experience of ‘vaciller’ where, citing Sandford (2011), ‘one meaning overlays, [and] appears in the guise of the other, signifying a conceptual jarring or “juddering”; a vacillation between biology and culture’ (Feather 2024: 18), and the creative basis for new networks and translations.
Displacement as physical and internal exile is an ‘othering’ of the self both socially and cognitively, and Feather draws on the Habermasian notion that our informal and relatively equal ‘lifeworld’ existence associated with mutuality and reciprocity is at odds with the hierarchical institutional and contractual ‘system’ world. Habermas (1999) recognised the colonisation of modern capitalist societies and the confused interpenetration of lifeworlds by systems. It creates (stereo)types that appear autonomous, but which invert individual experience offering a double-take and abstracted equivalency of this, promoted and supported by formal and rationalised contractual relations that encourage our self-estrangement (Feather 2024: 27-8). We ‘find ourselves’, however much these mythical positions translated by formal institutional and commodified language (and relations) cause alienation, which is a travesty of our experience.
Feather refers to Foucault and his ‘mode of subjection’ which distinguishes between emancipation of the individual and obligation to perform within the system (Foucault 1992) as we struggle to free ourselves from related subject positions that ‘empower’ but also disempower and entrap us. Fitting into a materialised notion of agency within a contractual society enables success and empowerment, which translation is different to agency that transforms and unlocks individual and collective potential steeped in mutuality and creativity, an everyday life that is not capitalised or contractualised to befit various institutional and structural remits and values. But these practices are mutually constituted, as ‘[a]ction in the lifeworld can appropriate aspects of the world of formal organisations/rationality and vice versa’ (Feather 2024: 27). Feather asks pertinent questions about the nature of liberty, idealism and free thought, which contrasts with the political reality, and the optimistic title of the book, ‘Adventures in the Everyday’, suggests some degree of equivalency with regard to agency. This owes a debt to de Certeau’s (1984) positive focus on practices of everyday life and the tactical translation by people of objects, ideas and social practices to enact small rebellions in the face of strategic systems of control. Nonetheless, we remain excluded from our experiences, abstracted and defined by others, as contractual society makes up our unitary identities as subjects, divorcing us from our various practices and outcomes. Displacement concerns duality, fragmentation that simultaneously exhibits coherence in our forever changing schizoid world. It also refers to Marx’s (1974) notion of alienation whereby the translation of productive activity is ‘non-being’, an expression of negative equivalence (Feather 2024: 17) and critique of capitalism.
Feather argues that as displaced and alienated beings we are in danger of being overrun however tactically astute people may appear to be. The misunderstandings and disjunctions thrown up also concerns mimicry by contractual systems forever seeking to establish formal alternatives and compromise in the guise of lifeworld, for example imitative informal networks of reciprocity used by influencers online. He describes such illusion as ‘equivalenced and “appropriated” in a double-take style by the real abstractions of market and contract’ (Feather 2024: 21). Equivalence may suggest relatively positive and equal co-option by the systems world of lifeworld, and the lifeworld of systems world, which ideal quid pro quo is not the case. In a similar vein Leather mentions Ranciѐre’s (2004) notion of the ‘partages du sensible’ as double-edged (Feather 2024: 160), which duality refers to the distribution of ‘sensible’ as a discrete idea of parcelling out cultural skills socially, which hierarchical notion ideologically frames and displaces the commonality of culture to which Ranciѐre refers.
In terms of the book structure, Feather sets out the dual notion of displacement within the framework of translation, firstly what occurs when mutuality is uninhibited by strategies of appropriation fundamental to capitalism (from contractualism and commodity), and secondly what occurs when it is inhibited negatively by these and clashes, introducing ‘vaciller’ and dissonant modernity (chapter 1).
He looks to individualisation and unitary identities in relation to the problematic production of identity in formal institutional ways that subsume lived relations to generate abstractions and misrecognition. This includes typologies of sex, which refer to wider issues of biological or cultural ‘nature’, whereby the subject is colonised by abstractions that fail to resonate with the lived world, creating anxiety and exclusion (chapter 2). The binary production of identity throws up endless problems with sex and gender categorisations, whereby the clash between the biological and conceptual body that the subject experiences, translates ever more displacement, whether catalysed by particular and general understandings or outer empirical and inner cognitive worlds that fail to resonate with every day or contractual life.
Hegemonic crises are created by subjects unable to identify new realities, displaced by moral panics which give rise to disorientation, insecurity and social anxiety (chapter 3). National and racial identities, for example, continually vacillate translated by social contexts and mythological mists that fail to articulate with the everyday. The objectivised and repressed subject is foreign to herself, which denies the political realities of everyday life, whether unemployment, warfare or poverty, and ultimately our humanity. Those exiled in society due to race, are often keen to mimic the codes of dominant society although this may exacerbate exile, but also to satirize these customs, which creates ambivalence that is evident in colonial discourse and immigrant diasporas as set out by Bhabha (1984), engendering displaced identities.
Feather considers language, power and ideology and the displacement of mutuality and everyday experience, whereby closed readings replace shared understandings, and legitimate and dominant language usurps common language to control meanings (chapter 4). A closed use of language or literal texts, translates institutional power, with personal and collective narratives displaced reflecting the commodification of everyday life and a readerly utility that employs ‘naturalised’ language discursively. Feather stresses the ‘emptiness of language’ in relation to the Japanese Haiku poem (chapter 1) as suggested by Barthes (2005), whereby a few words and a moment in time can offer creative thinking which disrupts, a synthesis that enables a positive ‘vaciller’. It can tactically counter, if only partially and sporadically, contractual strategies (de Certeau 1984), showing the multivalent and convoluted nature of power and communication and the capacity of people to creatively adapt and construct reciprocal networks.
Such emptiness of language suggests the reader has freedom and room to interpret outside established meanings. Feather builds on Barthes’ (2004) notion that texts become essentialised productions contested by everyday experience that offers reversibility, a grounding that contests the mythological production of the reader, questioning the semiotic fit of signified to signifier and associated connotation. This reversal process befits Lefebvre’s (2002) notion that meaning produced through everyday life is open-ended as people connect different meanings to ideas and experiences, which is an indispensable creative process. The contractual and commodified power of language produces and circulates meanings to control social networks through specific codes, contexts, repetition, and hegemonic means, although there is a continuum of the everyday that liberates and at the same time totalises meaning, a dual displacement that offers but denies a freer understanding and interpretation creating dissonance.
‘Cracking Capitalism’ (chapter 5) brings the focus on displacement to a head as social networks are displaced, translated by management discourses, for example, co-opted economically for problem solving in the workplace. In contrast the Occupy Movement and other social protests emphasise recognition and mutuality, highlighting that reciprocity is not always displaced by formal institutional life, with reciprocal networking evading commodification. There are examples of how alternative thinking disrupts hierarchy and routinisation, for example the Linux Open Source Network which compatibility with Microsoft packages translated informal popular networking through free software and access that undermined the profit motive. But the optimism garnered from such small victories is later recuperated and displaced, embroiled in a messy engagement with contractualism, capitalism and structural control illustrating a confusing dualism. Contractual logic unlike networks of mutual recognition isolates individuals and uncovers the Homo Clausus (Elias 1994) of economic liberalism, the socially unattached and closed individual who promotes individualism and capitalism without recognition of the collective and mutual basis of success.
I found Feather’s post-structural and dense narrative of displacement difficult to absorb in places and some of the indexing hard to follow. Nonetheless, his focus on displacement as translation that involves vaciller and equivalence, develops the instability of psychosocial processes and meanings, and the distortion and re-representation (or misrepresentation) of everyday realities resulting from the dualism created by capitalist modernity. As the book blurb suggests, the resulting self-estrangement produces social anxiety and provokes ‘a search for reassurances of our individual and collective identities’ (Feather 2024: back cover). The displacement and substitution of the lived world suggests that ‘Adventures in the Everyday’ (from the title) may not turn out to be as they appear.
References
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Paul Clements has worked for several universities and presently lectures at Goldsmiths College. His interest in cultural and social exclusion was formulated firstly as a youth worker and then working in prison with disturbed prisoners running arts groups. He also worked as a visual artist notably in health settings. His has written several books and besides exclusion his interests concern the determination of creativity, cultural value, dissonance, and resistance through art. His latest book is entitled Art, Elitism, Authenticity and Liberty: Navigating Paradox.
Email: p.clements@gold.ac.uk
