BOOKS
RUNNING ON EMPTY
ESCAPE ATTEMPTS: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RESIS–
TANCE TO EVERYDAY LIFE. By Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor.
Pelican . $2.95.
THE SERIAL: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF MARIN COUNTY. By Cyra
McFadden.
Alfred A. Knopf. $4.95.
If
I were asked to name some representative books of the
seventies, these two would surely make the list. They are wry and
worldly; they slip down easily; their tone hovers between cynicism and
resignation, with an occasional dash of nostalgia.
If
you compare them
with the cult books of the sixties-say R.D. Laing's
The Politics of
Experience
and Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test-how
much more.sensible and nuanced they look; but also, how constricted
in their sense of life's possibilities! Do the real adventures of our time
now take place in the kitchen, at the vet, or down at the singles bar?
Have our concerns really dwindled, as
Escape A ttempts
suggests, down
to that most mundane and intractable of human projects: "how to get
through the day"?
Cohen and Taylor themselves are recent converts to the belief that
everyday life should be the central concern of social theory. As trendy
young sociologists in the sixties they were fascinated by those at the
ragged edge of modern society-Mods, Rockers, vandals, jailbirds, and
the like. But now they admit to having romanticized and exaggerated
the alienation of these hard cases; on the other hand, they have come to
feel that it takes only a slight shift in focus to see
everyone
as a deviant,
always longing to remake the world closer to his heart's desire. Society
is always throbbing with subversive energies, they now argue, and the
real problem is to explain why these energies nonetheless leave what
they call "paramount reality" substantially intact.
Escape Attempts
seeks an answer to this paradox within our banal routines of domestic–
itv. work, and recreation. and our pquallv banal attempts to break free.
Such routine activities can be experienced in three ways, say
Cohen and Taylor. The first is simple acceptance or "unreflective
accommodation." Marcuse and others of the "false consciousness"
school have claimed that indoctrination by the mass media has reduced
