Social Theory of Displacement : Austin Macauley Publishers : 9781398481190 : 139848119X : 26 Apr 2024 : 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 bene