May 29, 2012 · 9:19 am

freedom from

Escape began in the 1960s. It was tentative & difficult at first. But later under neoliberalism & identity politics everyone escaped, even the people who were being escaped from. As a result there was nowhere left to go. Escape in that sense was finished as a paradigm & thereafter could only be attached to adverts for hair care product. Escape turned out to be an end, not a beginning. It was a brand; a version of “they lived happily ever after” tenable only as long as you didn’t try to live the other side of it.

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10 Responses to freedom from

  1. nigel foster
    May 29, 2012 at 10:59 am

    Freedom’s just another word. . .

  2. Rusty Gold
    May 29, 2012 at 11:24 am

    I like the advert below. I feel cleverer just thinking… about it.

  3. Hakan Ozel
    May 29, 2012 at 5:05 pm

    Makes me want to reread Vineland..

  4. Hakan Ozel
    May 29, 2012 at 5:38 pm

    Been pondering this for the last hour and a few random musings…1) Not sure the LGBT community would agree with the statement “everybody escaped”. 2) Studying Post-Colonial Fiction at University I called it the “Now What” trope – what happens next, after marriage, after Independence, after “escape”? The idea that the answer is “nothing” is a scary one. 3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahFARm2j38c

  5. whiteonesugar
    May 29, 2012 at 6:05 pm

    Having made their getaway and successfully escaped, most of them discovered that actually they preferred a nice home, a nice husband, a nice job and pension.

    Two days in the wilderness is enough to send the suburbanite scurrying back. Hunger and dirt remind us all that escape is a pleasant myth to distract us from the empty monotony, but not somewhere to live. Now it is just another tatty part of the bread-and-circus system.

    Escape… With the new audi / nike / apple / daydream.

  6. Pingback: Escape from escape « Snarkmarket

  7. uzwi
    May 29, 2012 at 8:45 pm

    Hi Hakan Ozel: I found the above in a journal from the 90s; thought, “God, how 90s!”; & wondered what would happen if I put it up for people to discuss.

    Escape is never enough. Territorially it’s impossible anyway. You have to engage, you have to undertake long-term political reconstruction. That’s the task the feminist & LGBT communities have pursued so forcefully. If, instead of doing hard politics, you buy the escape dream, you end up in an ad for styling clay & get only the freedom to consume.

    Loved the clip, by the way: perfect reminder of the complexities that were already apparent in 1968; although to maintain that fragile emotional “truth” The Graduate has to avoid its own paradox, which is that the parents are as trapped by the situation as the children. Dustin Hoffman & Katharine Ross can only act out “escape” as long as Anne Bancroft stays in place as a kind of ghost context, enlisted to make freedom seem free.

    2012: now Mrs Robinson has walked away too, the situation looks less than clear cut.

  8. lindhquist (@lindhquist)
    May 30, 2012 at 9:05 am

    Can you escape inwards? I wonder. Seclusion from the world, just letting in glimpses of it. A thought deprivation tank inside your head. A pocket universe made of four walls, a window and a withering petunia.

  9. uzwi
    May 30, 2012 at 11:59 am

    Hi lindhquist. I can see that having disadvantages, as per “withering petunia”.

  10. lindhquist
    May 30, 2012 at 4:34 pm

    Yeah. The magic of misusing a language not your own! What if you’re withering away yourself, wouldn’t then the petunia be in a certain way terrifying in its beauty?

    Isn’t escaping downward into the self, backwards in time, the last and only resort of a crumbling mind? Not nostalgia, not REWIND, but compression, REPLAY and STOP.