Project overview
- Project Members: Prof Temenuga Trifonova (Lead), Dr Ali Baybutt, Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, Dr Rebecca Birch, Antoine Bourges, Dr Sadhvi Dar, Dr Dai George, Dr Kirstin Smith, Dr Matthew Sperling and Dr Ben White
- Project name: Retreat and the Politics of Escape
About the project:
The symposium Retreat and the Politics of Escape will explore how practices of retreat, withdrawal and resignation operate simultaneously as strategies of self-care and acts of resistance to the capitalist logic of overconsumption and commodification.
In recent years, the idea of ‘retreat’ has proliferated as a social and cultural response to widespread feelings of exhaustion, overconsumption, and precarity. From the viral popularity of Marie Kondo’s philosophy of decluttering, to Anthony Klotz’s framing of the ‘Great Resignation’ as a mass withdrawal from labour, to the growth of wellness tourism and retreat centres, people are increasingly turning to practices of cleansing, withdrawal, and escape. These movements gesture toward dissatisfaction with dominant modes of capitalist production and consumption, yet they also reveal the ambivalence of retreat as both a critique of and a commodity within late capitalism.
On the one hand, retreating from and refraining from can be a form of quietism and hence a form of resignation from the political that ends in conservatism. On the other hand, however, it can be form of resistance. We can see this sort of retreat/refusal, for example, in Sara Ahmed’s “being a killjoy”, a refusal to “play the game” of patriarchy et cetera; or it can be a form of infrapolitics, in the sense that James C. Scott uses the term: a refusal to take part in the “official transcript” of social life and a turning to other, less audible or visible unofficial transcripts. To retreat, then, might not be to give up or give in - it might be a restorative place from which to return, re-treating oneself after ill-treatment. What about those who cannot retreat from tyranny? What are the consequences when retreat isn’t possible? Retreat is not only lived but also mediated and staged.
We will, therefore, ask: How do films narrativize withdrawal from society, work, and consumption? How do performances stage retreat as refusal, disappearance, or stillness? How do literary forms (creative and creative-critical) articulate retreat, whether as survival strategy or rebellion?