Abstract
This essay offers both a critique of the theory and practice of criminology and an alternative programme via a sketch of a cultural criminology utilising cultural and literary analysis. The first part of the essay calls for the problematisation of the issues of value and representation in the criminological project and offers a competing account of the theoretical basis of the project of criminology based upon a cultural politics of difference and the ethics of radical alterity. The second part of the essay is a demonstration of how this theoretical basis might operate in practice through a “cultural criminological” reading of Maurice Blanchot's novelThe Most High (1948, 1996). This novel is an account of the relationship between language and transgression in a totalitarian society at “the end of history”. An alteration in the discursive practices of the criminological project premised upon a competing theoretical perspective suggests that criminology (specifically the relation between law and transgression, deviancy and regulation) can become an important element in explanations regarding the organisation and disorganisation of contemporary urban culture utilising the strengths of its prior application (specifically narratology) and abandoning its fear of culture.
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References
M. Blanchot,The Most High, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Translation of Le Tres-Haut, (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1948).
I have pursued this issue elsewhere at length. See for example C. Stanley,Urban Excess and the Law: Capital Culture and Desire, (London, Cavendish, 1996), pp. 105–127.
The work of Maurice Blanchot is only recently becoming recognised in the Anglo-American sphere. Perhaps the best introduction is provided by Ann Smock. See A. Smock, “Translators Introduction” to M. Blanchot,The Space of Literature, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 1–19. Smock's introductory essay contains a useful selection of commentaries on Blanchot. See also J. Gregg,Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994).
P. Goodrich,Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law, (Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1995), p. 13.
A project we see commencing with works such as S. Henry and D. Milovanovic,Constitutive Criminology, (London and New York, Sage, 1995), W. Morrison,Theoretical Criminology, (London, Cavendish, 1995) and A. Young,Imaging Crime, (London and New York, Sage, 1995). See generally the collection edited by D. Nelken,The Futures of Criminology, (London and New York, Sage, 1994) and S. Pfohl,Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History, (New York, McGraw Hill, 1985).
I have utilised the phrase “jurisdiction of dissent” which has been developed by Peter Goodrich. See P. Goodrichsupra.
Perhaps the best introduction to this form of analysis remains that provided by Catherine Betsey. See C. Belsey,Critical Practice, (London and New York, Methuen, 1980).
See M. Foucault, ‘Qu'est-ce que la critique?” (1990)Bulletin de la Société francais de philosophie, 84th Year No. 2. See discussion by Stanley, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
The ethics of radical alterity have been articulated by Emmanuel Levinas. See E. Levinas,Totality and Infinity, (Pittsburg, Duquesne University Press, 1969). See the commentary and application by C. Douzinas and R. Warrington,Justice Miscarried: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Law, (London and New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 132–186.
The idea that desire can be subject to similar analysis as that of political-economy is developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze (together with Felix Guattari): see G. Deleuze and F. Guattari,Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, (London and New York, Viking Press, 1977). Discussion of the “flow” of desire as a power-relation and as the basis of excess, loss and abundance in terms of law and transgression can be found in Stanley, op. cit., pp. 121–122.
See J-F. Lyotard,The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988). See discussion by Stuart Sim: S. Sim,Jean-Francois Lyotard, (London and New York, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), pp. 69–91.
On the pre-semiotic see the discussion by D. Milovanovic,Postmodern Law and Disorder: Psychoanalytic Semiotics, Chaos and Juridic Exegeses, (Liverpool, Deborah Charles, 1992), pp. 109–110.
The working through of ideology with linguistics is the theme of the political theory of E. Laclau and C. Mouffe,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, (London and New York, Verso, 1985).
The two books which first attracted me to the stories of “out-laws” were M. Morse,The Unattached, (Harmondsworth, Penguin-Pelican, 1958) and N. Polsky,Hustlers, Beats and Others, (Harmondsworth, Penguin-Pelican, 1971).
See for example the ground-breaking work of D. Hebdige,Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, (London and New York, Methuen, 1979) and S. Redhead,Unpopular Cultures: The Birth of Law and Popular Culture, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995) and S. Pfohl,Death at the Parasite Cafe: Social (Science) Fictions and the Postmodern, (London and New York, MacMillan, 1992).
The work of these theorists has been most interestingly assimilated within human geography. See for example the following collections: M. Keith and S. Pile (eds),Place and the Politics of Identity, (London and New York, Routledge, 1993) and S. Pile and N. Thrif (eds),Mapping the Subject, (London and New York, Routledge, 1995). Note must also be taken of the work of David Harvey and Edward Soja. See D. Harvey,The Condition of Postmodernity, (Oxford and New York, Blackwell, 1988) and E. Soja,Postmodern Geographies, (London and New York, Verso, 1989).
See J. Baudrillard,Symbolic Exchange and Death, (London and New York, Sage, 1993) and G. Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure”, in G. Bataille (A. Stoekl ed.),Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
On the notions of “governmentality” and “surveillance” see G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds),The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, (London and New York, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991).
See Stanley, op. cit., pp. 42–44.
A. Stoekl, “Introduction” to M. Blanchotsupra n.1, p. ix.
See S. Ungar,Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
M. Blanchot,Faux pas, (Paris, Editons Gallimard, 1943), p. 363. Cited by Stoekl, op. cit., p. 23.
See the account by Beevor and Cooper: A. Beevor and A. Cooper,Paris after the Liberation, 1944–49, (New York, Doubleday, 1994).
A. Kojeve,Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, (New York, Basic Books, 1969).
G. Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel,” in D. Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937-39, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 90.
J. Gregg,Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 17.
See M. Blanchot,The Unavowable Community, (New York, Station Hill Press, 1988), and J-L. Nancy,The Inoperative Community, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Published as J. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature, (London and New York, Routledge, 1992), pp. 221–253.
In Blanchot, the State at the end of history, in and through its very universality, recognises that all violence, all death, must lead not to the State's downfall but to its permanence, its immortality. Universally, in its immanence, becomes invisible and evaporates: the State is everywhere and everything, and therefore every act, no matter how “illegal” or hostile to that State, inevitably acts to reinforce it and further its goals. Indeed, every act is the State. Not only is the violence of the past recuperable: with history, all violence is immediately recuperated, in one way or another.
See the discussion by A. Stoekl,Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge, (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 115–118.
M. Foucault, “La Pensée du dehors,” Critique, (1966), 229: 523–546. Translated as “The Thought from Outside,” inFoucault-Blanchot, (New York, Zone Books, 1990).
Available in M. Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews with Michel Foucault, in D. Bouchard (ed.), (New York, Cornell University Press, 1977).
Foucault (1990), op. cit., p. 38.
Op. cit., pp. 36–40.
M. Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in P. Adams Sitney (ed.),The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, (New York, Station Hill, 1981), pp. 21–62 at p. 38.
Stoekl (1996), op. cit., p. xvii.
Gregg, op. cit., p. 191.
C. Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” in P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J-L. Nancy (eds),Le retrait du politique, (Paris, Galilee Press, 1983); J. Baudrillard,In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, (New York, Semiotext(e), 1983).
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Stanley, C. Politics and ethics in cultural criminology. Crime Law Soc Change 26, 1–25 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02226102
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02226102