Is it all coming together?

Abstract

In order to be able to move beyond neoliberalism there has to be a theoretical paradigm that can contribute to charting the characteristic silences and blind spots that give plausibility to neoliberalism and implausibility to its contestation. The paradigm of normal social science that underlies mainstream urban studies, though valuable within limits, cannot ultimately chart such gaps and distortions. This essay—one of a series—seeks to sketch and illustrate an alternative paradigm, a ‘revolutionary’ or ‘weird’ approach to social science/knowledge. It draws on: work by Derrida, contemporary non‐academic sources including the arts, particularly two murals by Joel Bergner; on work from and/or on relatively distant pasts, in philosophy, drama and history; and on recent studies of aspects of contemporary society, particularly neoliberalism and its contestation. Reference is made particularly to entrapment and disjunctions in general and prisons in particular. Neoliberalism is ‘located’ here within a dislocated series of time‐spaces. Individual figures and types (including immigrants, ‘mediators’ and political leaders) are represented as moving, with varying degrees of consciousness, individually and/or collectively, across these dislocated time‐spaces. It is argued that work along these lines provides an intellectual and exploratory basis for a paradigm for social science/knowledge that can contribute to a New International, one that is able to mediate, re‐assess and inform the contestation and supersession of neoliberalism and associated disjunctions.

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