Editorial: The right to assert the order of things in the city

‘ … Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’ (Foucault 1972, 17) This editorial does not cede the ontological battle to the Colonial, Modernist Worldview in accepting the ‘commonsensical’ (from the perspective of the Colonial, Modernist Worldview …) assumption that the visible world of manifest facts—‘the real world out there’—is more real than the invisible, unmanifest world of ideas emotions, forms etc. (Needleman 1975; Nicoll 1998; Herman 2008; Blaser 2013). As such, this editorial explores the ideational continuities and discontinuities (Foucault 1972) of the articles assembled in this issue through an overtly nonlinear, nomadic perspective that is rooted in the Worldviews and associated conceptions of order that articulate the invisible lines of ideational continuity and discontinuity that run through the articles. Though a discrete, linear argument belies the nonlinear orientation of this editorial, there are a few arguments that emerge in the following pages: 1. freedom in the city is dependent upon ontological freedom, which is to say upon the right to assert ‘the order of things’ (Foucault 1994) in the city; 2. freedom in the academy is dependent upon ontological freedom, which might be best explicated by the assertion that freedom in the many and varied epistemological debates that are being waged within the academy cannot be attained without the freedom to assert the assumptions concerning the nature of reality upon which these epistemological debates are dependent; 3. perceived ‘freedom’ and ‘agency’ that come without the capacity and power to assert the order of things for one's self ought to be understood as the illusion of freedom and agency by which liberal democracy attempts to render hierarchical domination as sustainable rather than actual freedom and agency given that potentials for thought, feeling, behavior and conception of being are expanded and constrained by an individual’s commonsensical assumptions concerning the nature of reality. A true revolution of practice cannot occur without a revolution in the Worldview from which we conceptualize practice, be it in the city or in the academy (Barnesmoore 2017). As for a more general orientation to contemporary social science, this editorial and its nonlinear lines of exploration seek to inspire increased (and less ephemeral …) engagement with the burgeoning ontological turn (Horton 2015; Heywood 2017) in our discussions of cities in CITY.