Cultural Criminology Unleashed

Edited by Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison, Mike Presdee
London, U.K.: Glasshouse Press, 2004

This challenging enterprise requires a forthright interrogation of how one interprets simultaneously both the familiar and the foreign—how one transforms the familiar into the foreign and the foreign into the familiar. This volume analyzes “crime” by considering the impact of layered carceral contexts of culture on consciousnesses, both individual and institutional. Acknowledging both the intellectual limits of extant thinking, this volume provides a more prudent approach that seeks to make sense of the often-ignored relationships that conditions a priori the forms of ideological struggles and identifiable institutional trends. Moving beyond common sense and popular interpretations of crime—fuelled as they are by distorted statistics and biased media accounts—this volume of readings proffers a different set of perspectival and substantive materials that understand that which inform prevailing fragmented and distorted criminological interpretations. Readers are urged to move outside of their comfort zones to challenge their respective socialized understandings of “criminal” and “justice.” An unleashed cultural criminology consists of what is said (the message) together with how it is being said (the method), replete with memory and imagination. It is precisely this concern for the latter that sets this experiential project apart from other criminological investigations. The strengths of this volume rest not on any one paper but in the collective representation of different voices and the different forms of (re)presentations. Collectively the contributors demonstrate courage by challenging current neo liberal criminological canons. The strengths of the contributions are the organic connections with so many hitherto neglected vantage points: interdisciplinarity, philosophy and critical theory. This authentic style of presentation—spontaneous, exciting and passionate offers a very rare, refreshing and empowering set of analytic tools with which to approach the hegemony of criminology. The message and the method of the papers are deliberately oppositional; the contributing authors, each in their own way, each with their own style, resist the totalizing view of “common sense”. Indeed, the uniqueness of this project conceptually and methodologically exists in the different voices (tone and tenor) of the contributors. Additionally, this edited volume investigates the ontology of the “crime – culture nexus” in terms of its various permutations of power.

In Part One Theorising Crime, Culture and Criminology the authors problematise the relationship between control and culture by responding to the following questions: what are the mechanisms through which the dominant culture impacts on the control of crime? How does culture mediate the relationship between ideologies and institutions? Cultural criminology expands the boundaries of criminology by using the ‘evidence’ of everyday existence (cultural artifacts) which tell us more about the nature of crime than a report full of jargon, dubious credentials, stupefying statistics and fictive facts. Rather than celebrate egocentric distortions such as individualism, possessiveness, materialism and the reproduction /consumption of narcissism, cultural criminology contributes to the transformations of the prevailing imaginary, sentiments and emotions.

Part Two Across the Borders of Crime and Culture highlights the referential character of crime as an index of cultural affiliation(s). An interdisciplinary commitment to social justice inquires into time and space, the intersections of ideologies, institutions and identities. The eloquent theorizing herein highlights the contexts and consequences of the culture of (neo) liberalism that reproduce insidious hegemonies of privilege.

In Part Three, Marginal Images discourse and social subjectivity, social identity and practical consciousness are organized through a specific articulation of images, objects and words, as well, as techniques of desire and emotions that are not necessarily rational, logical, subliminal and unconscious. The character of criminal attributions shape and is shaped by the quality of this culture as textually mediated social relations that become hegemonic narratives in everyday lives. The articulation of experiences and the limits of these interpretations are studied in terms of the reproduction of ideologically appropriate subjects.

Part Four Breaking Open the City demonstrates how the city is a contested terrain and a discoursal practice, reflecting both local and universal institutions and processes. Like many previous writers (Lefebvre, de Certeau and DeBord) the contributors grapple with the effects that produce by the operations that situate the city as an everyday place of practice colonised by capitalism, as a locus of struggle that historicises experience. Image and metaphors as well as morality and mythology contribute to an understanding of the forms and functions of socio-cultural regulation.

Part Five Terms of Engagement facilitate an appreciation of how one “makes sense” of the above power relations? Given that the “criminalized” form and inform identities in relation to conflicting social narratives of the self and subjectivity, they mediate culture and character by challenging and reworking their respective stories of identity, individually and collectively. In brief, identity production, discursive displays of experience and histories of selfhood assist in interpreting cultural narratives of regulation.

Part Six Questions of Agency and Control examines the differential impact of layered carceral contexts of culture on the individual and collective consciousness. Typically, too much is deferred to the capacity of criteria (exchange values, utility of instrumental logics) that institutionalize both meaning and authority. As the culture of impoverished or at best mediocre ideas triumph, thought is held hostage to a conceptual imperialism that distorts, alienates and coerces into compliance an all too ready susceptible general consciousness. Dominant modes of mental production succeed in dividing, invading and colonizing according to fundamental imperatives of capitalism. Any thought that challenges or “really makes a difference” is too readily silenced into submission. Regrettably, ideas are frequently celebrated only after they have been calibrated and re-routed successfully according to the market-driven mechanics of instrumentalism and the optics of rational materialism. Likewise, crime is often explicated in relation to titivating debates moulded by titillating chatter impugning foreign values and thoughts. Prevailing ideas about crime are not only institutionally sponsored but are interpreted popularly as valued and legitimate information. Embedded in all tiers of domination and unequal relations are cultural mythologies (law, justice and morality), cultural colonizers (“the experts”) and cultured consent (vulgar co-optation and a generalized manufactured consensus) that succeed in further marginalizing the “disadvantaged”. Culture constitutes a fertile terrain for exploring tensions of the above noted agency-structure foci. Agency and structure continuously change in relation to each other.The connective tissue of agency and structure construct differences in degrees of emphasis. “Structured agency” incorporates the idea of created values (intrinsic to being, emotions, unconscious, and instincts) and imposed values (subcultural, institutional). Values are socially constructed as individually experienced (habituated institutions) in meaningful interactions usually with similarly circumstanced others. Agency and structure correspond to freedom (notion of a liberated consciousness) and citizenship (notion of herd entitlements). Agency exists within historical and material conditions.

Rather than simply debunk or disparage the orthodoxies of conventional texts Cultural Criminology Unleashed encourages criminologists to grapple with the subtext of their own credulities, especially the fixated nature of their own subjectivities. Conventional criminological and contemporary popular approaches reduce crime to monolithic, totalized and essentialist conceptions within a narrow theoretical vision that informs an overarching conceptual closure. In order to move beyond liberal orthodox ideas that socialize ‘common’ experiences, this volume asks, how is one’s knowledge constructed? What grounds the experiences of knowing anything about crime? Epistemologically, all “knowledge” is rooted in experience. Knowledge ought not to be solely packaged to satisfy market conditions and careerist ambitions but also to respond to critical faculties, to struggle in documenting our experiences, consciousness, intention, and their relational contexts. The concept of relatedness, the opportunity to transcend disciplinary frontiers and the challenges of synthetic convergence of diverse intellectual perspectives contribute enormously to the conceptual and substantive promises of a nascent cultural criminology. For those readers heavily invested in mainstream criminology and dominant scholarly traditions, this book will be uncomfortable to read both in content and in style. It is hoped that it will also be unsettling. An unleashed cultural criminology reveals that which remains too concealed in criminology – fundamental criminal injustices!