Review
Author(s): Sadie Plant
Review by: Sadie Plant
Source: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 20, No. 3 (
Summer, 1995), pp. 416-417
Published by: Canadian Journal of Sociology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3340641
Accessed: 15-02-2016 03:09 UTC
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Stanley Cohen andLaurie Taylor, EscapeAttempts:TheTheoryandPractice
of Resistanceto EverydayLife. Londonand New York:Routledge,1992. 246
PP.
Firstpublishedin 1976, Escape Attemptswas itself an attemptto escape from
the abstractionof sociological categoriesand "be moreconcrete"in its efforts
to "talk about how people make out in their world, the whimsical, pathetic,
desperate,outrageousways in which they manipulateits demands."The arts,
the imagination,fantasy,druguse, sexualpleasure,alternativelifestyles,leisure
activities,hobbies:the book covers a fascinatingand wide varietyof areasin
whichpeoplecan be seen to be doingtheirown thing,resolutelyandagainstthe
odds.
The book has an interestingbeginning,emergingas it does fromdiscussions
with prisonersabout,essentially,how they manageto pass the time without
literallygoing up the wall. But this is also the greatweaknessof this text. For
if everydaylife is itself a prison,going up and "overthe wall,"to quoteone of
the book's chaptertitles,is preciselywhatthe imprisonedwant:escape,andnot
just survivalinside.EscapeAttemptsis full of wonderfulexamplesof people's
resilienceto mundanity,butit offerslittlein the way of strategiesfor destroying
this mundanityin the first place. And the naivety of its positions is almost
astounding."Thehobbyis one of the puresttypes of free area,"we aretold, as
if timeoff workwas enoughin itself to guaranteetheabsenceof powerrelations,
commodifications,and an additionalpanoplyof reasonswhy DIYers merely
decoratetheircells.
This book feels its age, and its revivalis timely only to the extentthatthese
aredays of baby-boomernostalgia.It is of courseof greathistoricalinterest,but
even in its own dayEscapeAttemptswas farless sophisticatedthan,forexample,
HenriLefebvre'scritiquesof the quotidienor RaoulVaneigem'sRevolutionof
EverydayLife. Both of those texts were, of course, developing critical,even
revolutionarythesesaboutthe objectsof theirenquiry.Vaneigem'ssubjectsare
not concernedwith momentaryescape, but the permanentdestructionof the
confiningstructuresof the everyday.And regardlessof the validityof such an
enterprise,this at least gives his worka criticaledge whichCohenandTaylor's
moredescriptivetext lacks.
Not thatthese difficultiesescape the authorsthemselves.In the introduction
to this second edition, Cohen and Taylor survey the extent to which the
everyday,its escape attempts,and theirtheoretizationof bothhave developed
in the last fifteen yearsto a point at which the analysesand recommendations
of theiroriginaltext seem sadly inadequate.The authorsmakea braveattempt
to accountfor these shifts, not least by introducingthe post-structuralist
positions absentfrom theiroriginaltext, as well as the broaderpolitical spectrum
which,since the 1970s,has explodedintotherainbowcoalitionof, for example,
416
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black and feminist resistances. These attempts to update the text are not,
however, up to the task. Neither Foucaultnor bell hooks (whose own "resistance" to capitalizationis ignored in this text) can simply be added on to a
seventiesposition for which the self was not only unsexed andderacialized,but
also unproblematicallyunified. And this, of course, is the final point: to what
extent is the very self in which Cohen and Taylorinvest so much itself integral
to the confines and constraintswhich they also see it contestingeveryday?No
amountof introductorylipservice to the last twenty years of post-structuralist
thoughtcan overcomethe innocenceof the originaltext in thisrespect,andwhile
it may well be that some notion of the subjectis indeed vital to the resistance
promotedby Cohen and Taylor,its statuscan no longerbe as blithely assumed
as it is in these pages. Indeed, that poststructuralisthinkingbecomes merely
anotherproblem for the free-spiritedindividualto overcome is a sign of the
implicit idealism which allows these authorsto treatthe interveningperiod as
years of changingtheoriesratherthatmaterialencroachmentswhich cannotbe
simply left or takenat will.
Nevertheless,it is easy to forget how imaginativeand innovativethis book
was at the time of its initialpublication,when it served as a significantantidote
to the drierreachesof sociological thought.And, readin conjunctionwith other
critiquesof the everyday,EscapeAttemptsremainsan insightfulandinstructive
text for all studentsof this area,even if those really looking for escape would
do betterto take some more recent advice.
Universityof Birmingham
Sadie Plant
Nicholas J. Fox, Postmodernism,Sociology and Health. Torontoand Buffalo:
Universityof TorontoPress, 1994. 183 pp.
Apparently,we are in a "post-"era. Some of the "posts"we encounter are
post-modernism,post-structuralism,post-industrialism,post-denominationalism, post-Marxism,post-bacterialism,post-journalism,and so on, ad nauseum.
This book, as the title implies, attemptsto relatepostmodernismto the field of
medical sociology. Since the "post-"approachesare often defined in terms of
what they are not, this is largely a critical analysis of mainstreammedical
sociology and a brief outline of an alternative"way of seeing." The proposed
theoryis derivedfrom such writersas Foucault,Derrida,Deleuze and Guattari,
Cixous, and Kristeva.The authoris a lecturerin sociology in the Department
of GeneralPracticeat the Universityof Sheffield.
The book itself is short- 160 pages of text, accompaniedby subjectindex,
authorindex and glossary of terms, and including a Preface, an Introduction,
andthreepartscomposedof six chapters.Althoughthe book is short,the reader
417
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