Abstract
This article explores the relationships between crime, collective responses to it, and the social production of so-called great criminals. It argues that crime, especially sexual and violent crime, produces significant imbalances in individuals habitually subject to instrumental actions, identitarian thinking and positive law. These imbalances are emotional as well as cognitive and, under certain conditions of communication, can generate states of multitude, that is, collective states linked to an intense affectivity and to the prevalence of mythic or symbolic thinking. These states reach their limits and become condensed in the mytho-historical figure of the great criminal. In this sense, great criminals are a function of such multitudinous states: points of imputation that concentrate and catalyze the affective imagination unleashed by collective effervescence.
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Notes
Heterogeneity is a notion that tries to give a name to the experiences of radical alterities from everyday life, experiences that cannot be named in terms of the habitual language that provides the categorical framework within which the event that will be perceived as heterogeneous occurs. According to Georges Bataille (1970), the experience of violence can be called heterogeneous—in opposition to the ‘homogeneous’ social world composed by technique, science, bureaucracy and the individual. He coined both notions (homogeneity and heterogeneity) in the 1930s by critically making use of the concepts elaborated by Durkheim and L’Année Sociologique group to study archaic religions. To Bataille, the shocking experience of heterogeneity is analogous in secular societies to the experience of the sacred in traditional ones. For him and his colleagues at the Collége de Sociologie the fact that the sacred lacks its traditional historical expressions (religion and monarchy) does not mean that its syntax and its affective economy have disappeared. Rather, it means that it has freed itself from its old references and that it is available to acquire new forms, especially when a commotion in the profane day-to-day generates a shock intense enough to rouse its experience again. In their analysis of interwar European societies, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris and Monnerot showed that the feeling of the sacred and the symbolic thinking that corresponds to it reach vertiginous heights among generally disenchanted individuals. They showed that heterogeneity corresponds to the sacred, if not in the consciousness of those individuals, at least in their experiences and practices. That is why, in my opinion, Bataille’s theoretical developments may be useful to investigate the current socio-psychological dynamic of collective beliefs and affectivity, and to affirm that important dimensions of the ‘secular’ criminal question can be explained in these terms. For the relationship between the Collège and the legacy of L’Année Sociologique, see Caillois (1950), as well as Richman (2002). For the major texts of the Collège, see Hollier (1988). For an elaboration of possible conceptual bonds between Durkheimian sociology and Bataille’s critique of culture, see Alexander (2001).
In fact, crime is a limit-notion of any socio-symbolic order, and the criminal is a mytho-historical figure tout court and not only in conditions of massive fear. By following the Collège’s theoretical framework, it is possible to state that crime and criminals can only be thought of mythically, whether in times of upheaval or regularity. In Bataille’s terms, criminal violence does not belong to the societal space of economical, juridical and political positions, and it can only be grasped by a way of thinking that is also opposed to this space: ‘the symbolic or mythical thinking, which Levy-Bruhl mistakenly called primitive’ (Bataille1986, p. 46). Postulating a fundamental heterogeneity between violence and the world of labour and reason, only in mythical discourse does Bataille find the chance (including the sense of randomness this word evokes) to talk about violence without covering it with radical ignorance, without making it reasonable. For him, the means of access to the ‘truth’ of criminal violence is not scientific discourse but the mythical (or better, poetical) word.
To begin to understand collective reaction to crime, as well as the myth of the criminal and its functions in contemporary societies, the original articulation between Durkheimiam and Maussian sociology and psychoanalysis produced by Bataille seems to be a solid and stimulating point of departure. But to give a total account on this matter, this point of departure needs to be articulated with other references. To make Bataille’s sociological approach fully contemporary it is necessary to complete it with a theory of the mass-media production and mediation of collective emotions, beliefs and representations. In this regard, among others references, Tarde’s (1901) sociology of crowds and publics (available to the members of the Collège, but apparently neglected by them) could be useful, as well as some works of Baudrillard (1983, 2002)—in many ways dependent on Bataille’s conceptions. This important subject was not developed in the present article. I limited myself to localizing the conceptual place of mass media in a very general manner by relating it to the notions of visibility and staging. Nevertheless, as I intended to show, central aspects of the contemporary criminal question, linked to general psychosocial dynamics in societies of spectacle, can be productively analyzed with the Collège’s conceptual tools.
René Girard (1985) wonderfully illustrates the inverse mutation of collective affectivity (from attraction to repulsion) by analyzing how Job, the biblical character, was the ‘victim of his people’.
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Tonkonoff, S. The Dark Glory of Criminals: Notes on the Iconic Imagination of the Multitudes. Law Critique 24, 153–167 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9120-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9120-6