Escape Attempts

The Theory and Practice of Resistance in Everyday Life

Stanley Cohen, Laurie Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138141841
• eBook ISBN: 9781134921164
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From sexual fantasies to holidays this marvellous book charts our escape attempts. In a series of dazzling commentaries the authors reveal the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which we seek to defy the despair of the breakfast table and the office But the book is much more than a first-rate cartography of everyday life. It crackles with important theoretical insights about how `normality' is managed. This fully revised edition contains a superb new introduction, `Life After Postmodernism', which exposes the conceits of the postmodernist adventure and which should be required reading for anyone interested in making sense of everyday life.

1

Open
Prison

This is a book about everyday life, the precariousness of that life, and the tenuousness of the identities that we construct within it. It searches out, follows and accompanies people into their homes, work-places, holidays, hobbies, cinemas, pubs, football grounds, love affairs, books and daydreams.

God knows how many other sociologists have announced that everyday life is just what they are after. And yet rarely in the elegant theories, the careful research on the sociology of the family, industry, education, mass media, adolescence, mental illness, deviance, organization, social welfare, religion … does everyday life appear. There are few accounts of boredom, elation, despair, happiness or disappointment, no sense of the one obsessive problem which we always knew was ours (but sociologists never let on to us that other people shared): how to get through the day.

Like everybody we have ever known and everybody we have read about, we are forever assessing our degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with everyday life. Few days go by in which we do not consider how much better or worse life was yesterday or last year. On some mornings we feel at home in the world, happy with its arrangements, and content about our relationship to them, only to find at midday that the world was less than we thought, that it presses uncomfortably against us, that we have to find some way in which we can follow or divert its demands. Our days are punctuated by expressions of content and discontent, riddled with feelings of fulfilment and frustration, satisfaction and resignation.

Every morning when we wake we confront a familiar world. Considering the day ahead we mark off that which might be pleasurable from that which will produce anxiety, irritation, boredom or depression. Every day's living constitutes a series of projects in which we either accept the arrangements that await us, or attempt to manipulate them, so that they will be more amenable, more compatible with the view that we hold of ourselves.

In this book we talk about how people make out in their world, the whimsical, pathetic, desperate, outrageous ways in which they manipulate its demands. The dilemmas they encounter and resolve in this process have been translated by philosophers, poets, and sociologists into the abstract language of alienation, anomy, estrangement, angst, dread, fear and trembling, and the sickness unto death. We wish to be more concrete, to heed Saul Bellow's advice:

Novels are being published today which consist entirely of abstractions, meanings, and while our need for meanings is certainly great, our need for concreteness, for particulars is even greater. We need to see how human beings act after they have appropriated or assimilated the meanings. Meanings themselves are a dime a dozen.¹

We will therefore try to see how people act in everyday life, to examine the working philosophies which accompany them from the breakfast table, to the office desk and back to the marital bed, the spontaneous wisdom which they bring to bear upon the concrete problem of living.

Closed Prison

The book's birthplace couldn't have been much further removed from this eventual concern with everyman's days and nights: hours spent talking with a group of long-term prisoners in a converted chapel of the maximum-security wing in Durham prison. There was little of everyman about them: murderers, serious sex offenders, bank robbers, protection-racket bosses. And when we first came into the wing in 1967 to run a series of sociology classes, we found it difficult not to be fascinated by the criminality, the uniqueness of the men who lived there.

After a class in the wing we met in the pub alongside the jail and tried to discuss such impersonal matters as the content of our lectures, and their general reception and the nature of imprisonment but in a very short time we would fall back into earnest chatter about the characteristics of the individual prisoners. Some of this talk rose little above the type of gossip about notorious criminals which fills the Sunday papers; we were as interested as anyone else in finding out what famous criminals really looked like, in comparing their ‘underworld’ stereotypes with their actual behaviour. Could that amiable individual who talked so learnedly of Plato really be the ‘most dangerous man in Britain’? We justified the talk, however, by reference to our criminological interests. We were after all sociologists of deviance who had, over the years, developed a commitment to the understanding of abnormal behaviour, in particular to the attribution of intelligibility and rationality to actions which other criminologists regarded as irrational or psychopathic.

We were inclined at that stage to view our inmate students as primitive social critics. We entertained slightly romantic notions about the extent to which their outrageous crimes could be seen as an attack upon capitalist society. Of course, we could not pretend that the activities of the prisoners were explicitly political. On the surface, their crimes seemed more directly related to the satisfaction of selfish personal needs than to the promotion of any revolutionary ideology. But there seemed to be some affinities worth exploring, some motivations which were shared.

Gradually our pub talk began to infiltrate our lectures. The prisoners showed no great eagerness to confirm our tentative hypotheses. They listened politely to our discussions of anarchism, banditry, guerrilla warfare and sexual deviance but chose not to find any connection between their own activities and those of our romantic subjects. Several of them were prepared to make routine condemnations of capitalism and all its ways but these condemnations hardly lay at the heart of their own criminal careers. These they regarded more as ways of making out in the world than radical techniques for confronting it.

Our problem was that we were unable to shift away from a concentration upon their crimes. It was their outrageous deviance which distinguished the men from others that we knew; the first task was to make sense of that behaviour. We spent so much time talking about the world outside the prison — the anarchists in Spain, hippies in Haight Ashbury, Hemingway's Paris — that we paid little attention to the men's day-to-day prison predicament. The men didn't talk about it very much and in any case it had already been covered in the standard sociological literature on the ‘pains of imprisonment’ and the ‘inmate sub-culture’.

Our complacency about the relatively unproblematic nature of their life in prison — our sense that it was much the same as that experienced by other prisoners, and already adequately comprehended by existing sociological descriptions — was finally undermined by the arrival of a research team who had come to study ‘The Psychological Effects of Long-Term Imprisonment’. The men in the wing immediately objected to the limited range of effects which were to be studied — changes in reaction times, and in such personality attributes as extraversion and introversion. ‘What about the real problems — the real effects?’ they asked. We began to listen. We were in an odd position. The men regarded us as likely sympathizers in their campaign to make the research more comprehensive, but we had little idea about the nature of the ‘real problems’ which they felt deserved attention. So we turned the talk back to them, tried to suspend our voyeur-ish interest in them as criminals.

It started slowly. In the beginning nobody wanted to be first to speak. As we realized later, there was a sense in which publicizing the problems was difficult for the prisoners. It placed them again to the forefront of consciousness, made them matters which required renewed attention. But gradually we found a way of talking together, not about the evident physical problems of living in the wing, the locks, the landings, the guards on every corner, the oppressive heat, the lack of ventilation, but rather about the types of inner subjective life which developed in response to these oppressive circumstances. We began to realize that the whole business of actually getting through each day, let alone each month, or year, or decade of their sentence, was a far more precarious and problematic journey than we had ever taken it to be. The central question was about how to accommodate to prison life. In what ways should one resist or yield to its demands in order to make life bearable, in order to preserve some sense of identity?

And behind this question lay their greatest anxiety — the consequence, as it were, of failing to solve the accommodation problem — the sense of imminent deterioration. Outside prison this is hardly a problem. Most of us simply continue to live, relatively secure in the knowledge that we remain the same person, with the same interests, ideas, intelligence and self-consciousness. But inside the security wing consciousness had to be monitored and guarded against the insidious processes which attacked personal identity. If you did not constantly attend your own state of mind then you might drift into that condition which characterized some of those in the prison who already had served long sentences, men who now appeared to be more dead than alive, ‘zombies’, ‘catatonics’, ‘vegetables’. The men we knew were determined to avoid this type of degeneration. Accordingly every key aspect of life had to be examined anew in order that it might be manipulated — either in thought or in action — so as to improve the chances of retaining self-identity in this new world. It was a fight in which all were involved, and none the less real because the evidence of its existence was to be found in the subtle manipulation of everyday life rather than in the dramatic or revolutionary gesture.

Fear of deterioration provided a general background to the men's conception of their world: it was far from being the only matter to which they attended. In our research we established some of the other concerns which dominated their minds. Many of these matters also might go unattended outside prison, but suddenly stepped out of the familiar run of everyday life once you found yourself inside for twenty years, such usually taken-for-granted matters as time, friendship and privacy. We found, for example, that the prisoners tried to avoid any timetabled discussion of the years that they had to spend in prison. This imperilled accommodation to the regime. Unlike short-termers who might make calendars or wall charts which indicated how long they had to serve, these men saw freedom as too distant to be a matter for constant reflection. Their internal timetables were not marked out in terms of the days or months of their sentence but were constructed around such matters as the change in seasons, the gap between visits or letters, the length of time that had been spent in a particular security wing.

Ways of making time pass were also problematic. If routines were resorted to then there was the terrible danger that these might degenerate into obsessions; instead of helping to pass the time they might speed the process of degeneration. A commitment to work also raised its own problems. What exactly did work mean in this context, when that which was called work in one prison — the making of children's toys — was presented in another as an example of a hobby which the prisoner might enjoy?

What then should you think about work; what was the appropriate attitude? There were differences between the men in the choice of solution, but for all of them with varying degrees of explicitness, it was a problem which had to be resolved. Some prisoners decided that work, for all its incongruity in prison, could not be ignored: it was an element which demanded attention. But this did not mean that they gave themselves over to it, became committed or spontaneously involved within it. Instead they might undertake it in a distant cynical style, a mode of relating to reality which allowed them to stand back from what they did, to preserve their identity from any contamination which might result from taking such absurd matters seriously. Others decided that some spontaneous involvement in work was the only way to make time pass, so self-consciousness would be suspended and they would try to become immersed in the task, whilst keeping a wary eye upon themselves lest their chosen way of time-wasting developed into an obsession.

Work, time, deterioration were then some of the everyday matters which intruded into consciousness and which had to be controlled and attended to in particular ways. Neither was it just thoughts about the external world which had to be monitored — purely internal reflection also had to be scrutinized. Certain imaginings and fantasies could be embraced but others must be rejected; some might induce a dangerous depression, prove so compelling that they shattered an already tenuous link with reality. The temptation to slip away into fantasy had to be actively resisted. Only by continuous cognitive engineering could consciousness be constructed in such a way that life remained bearable.

We were beginning to modify our interest in those who sought to declare dramatically their total disenchantment with society. We were becoming intrigued by the much more routine ways in which people periodically distanced themselves from a world which they found too much for them. And instead of assuming that such distancing was explicable in terms of the men being in some crude way, antisocial, we now looked for different modes of consciousness — ways of thinking about how to think, which informed such distancing.

Some of these matters were raised in the book that we wrote about our prison research, ² and we hoped to develop them further in later interviews with long-term prisoners. But the wing at Durham closed and the Home Office refused to allow us to continue interviewing elsewhere. We ended our book by disparaging the metaphor of ‘life as a prison’: the literary exploitation of prisons, TB sanatoria, asylums, labour camps to make statements about the human predicament. Such metaphors, we thought, stripped the prison predicament of its unique phenomenal qualities. But as we left the prison world behind and returned to our families, jobs, friends, leisure activities, we were slowly beginning to understand the general sociological implications — by no means metaphorical — of the peculiar prison experience.

Although the prisoners had gone away, the problems they had raised remained with us. The glimpses that we had been given of the complex cognitive engineering which was required to get them through the day, the subtle ways in which they wrestled with the distinction between themselves and the prison world, the use of strategies of dissociation to deal with everyday problems, all of these matters seemed to have relevance for life outside prison.

Everyday Life

We recognized that the problems which occupied consciousness in the outside world were very different from those selected in prison. Such matters as time, work, privacy and deterioration might still be attended, but in the outside world they would lack the salience they had for the men in E-Wing. It is not that they go unattended but rather that attitudes and beliefs about them have already been constructed. The passage of time, for example, is not a topic which continuously presents itself to consciousness. We will periodically reflect upon it — but most of the time ‘it just passes’. Those who try to bring home to us the facts of deterioration and death have to contend with minds which are already ‘made up’ in a way which keeps such ideas at some distance. The message of the wayside pulpits that ‘death is at hand’ can be maintained at the very edge of consciousness because of our central involvement in continuing life projects which give the phenomenal lie to any ideas of anything coming to a sudden end. We close the gaps between our present and our end in such a way as to reassure ourselves about the significance of our present involvement. We hold ourselves within the present and the immediate future, reflecting upon those limited spans of time which are related to specific projects. As Philip Larkin has written:

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives

They link us to our losses … ³

The prisoners who faced thirty years did not find their vision blurred by an immediately visible web of developing prospects but instead could stare right across the void of their sentence into the eyes of death itself. For them death and deterioration had suddenly come into perspective and they wrestled with ways in which they might again be placed on the periphery of consciousness.

There is a density to everyday consciousness which at most times gives us a sense that ‘life is going along’, ‘things are as comfortable as could be expected’. There may be moments when we look around and wonder where we are or what we are doing but we soon pick up the threads again and get back to the rich fabric of life. For much of the time we're propelled by rituals and conventions; if the day begins to go stale on us, to seem slow-moving or pointless, then soon we will get caught up in a minor flirtation, a meal, a journey, a family visit. Not that everyday life would be tolerable if it merely consisted of the uneasy passage from ritual to ritual, from convention to convention. Such a life would be difficult to distinguish from that served by the long-term prisoner. However, we do not typically see our own life as a mere succession of discrete events, we recognize that our activities, rituals and conventions are fastened firmly to a set of structured ideas. Of particular significance are the various timetables and careers within which we are located.

We stand at a certain point in our occupational career, aware of our chances of promotion or retirement … ‘Will Spencer eventually decide to go to Australia and allow us to take over his job and secretary?’ We are caught up in the career of our marriage, how well is it going at the moment, its prospects for survival … ‘Did John really mean what he said last night about a divorce?’ We are involved with the educational career of our children, our leisure career, the state of excellence that we have attained at golf or amateur dramatics. At times we will allow our mind to wander over the state of our sexual career — are we still as active as we were, is our interest declining or increasing? — and linked to this will be thoughts about the developing state of our body, the loss of old defects, the emergence of new: our adolescent acne has m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Escape Attempts
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction to the Second Edition: Life after Postmodernism
• 1 Open Prison
• 2 The Mental Management of Routine
• 3 The Nightmare of Repetition
• 4 The Inner Theatre of the Mind
• 5 Free Areas, Escape Routes and Identity Sites
• 6 Getting it Together
• 7 Momentary Slips through the Fabric
• 8 Over the Wall
• 9 A Case of Mistaken Identity
• Notes and References