Review: Howard Feather, ‘Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday’

Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday, Feather, Howard (2024) London: Austin Macauley, 200pp, p/back.

Reviewed by Paul Clements

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.