Open Access Research Article
CRIME AS A LIMIT OF CULTURE
Published Paper
Article Details
AUTHORED BY
- ALTAMASH KHAN
Abstract
In this article culture is understood
as the ensemble of systems of classification, assessment, and interaction that
establishes a basic community of values in a given social field. We will argue
that this is made possible through the institution of fundamental prohibitions
understood as mythical points of closure that set the last frontiers of that
community by designating what crime is. Exploring these theses, we will see
that criminal transgression may be thought of as the actualization of a
rigorous otherness. This otherness, however, is nothing but the culture itself
in its extreme vectors, its contradictions, and residues. From there we will
differentiate three types of crimes: paroxysmal, archaic, and impossible. And
we will conclude that the criminal question it is not a ‘social problem’ among
others. Rather, it is a fundamental crossroad where the very constitution of
any culture is at stake. It is the question of the beginning and end of the
societal order and its subjects.
Keywords: Culture - Prohibition - Crime -
Paroxysm - Archaism - Impossible
Would it be possible to study
Brazilian society via the drug lords that populate its prisons? What do these
most famous of favela-dwellers tell us about that South American economic and
cultural power? And what are the corpses of more than seven hundred women found
in the desert outside the city of Juarez? What does their senselessness mean?
What language do they speak to describe the state that tepidly investigates them,
to account for the gender and class relations in contemporary Mexico? Or in
what strange forms do the recurrent school shootings figure the American Dream?
The legal logic and classical
political economy that inform our common sense have long wanted to view crime
as a radically individual act –perhaps the most individual of all. That is why
questions like these have no place there. Whoever breaks the law, those
discourses assert, does so from the solitude of their mental faculties or the
solipsism of their emotions. One becomes a criminal because it is convenient in
some sense; or because one has yielded (knowingly) to impulses that are
elementally one’s own; or for both reasons at once. Whatever transgression
cannot be understood according to this double-grid of personal responsibility
and calculated interest will be considered irrational or sick. In any case, the
criminal act always appears as an individual possession, and society as the
antonym of crime.
The sociological concept of anomie,
on the one hand, and the bio-psychological notion of instinct, on the other, do
not seem any better equipped to address our initial questions. Discourses
articulated around them call into question the utilitarian postulate of the
free will of the subject of the action (social or anti-social) and tend to see
every offender as abnormal – i.e., someone who is, to a greater or lesser
extent, proximate to a-sociality and senselessness. But precisely for this
reason, these arguments maintain the classic dichotomy of the classical
paradigm that they contradict. They do so by outlining two types of
explanation, which are not mutually exclusive. For those whospeak of anomie,
the criminal is an individual moved to violate rules because of a
poorsocialization. For those who see crime as an instinctual act, the criminal
would be subject to intra-individual forces that, being outside the social
realm, would lead him or her to transgress its laws.
All these propositions were
challenged by various theoretical strategies that sought to relate crime to
culture, and to recover criminal transgressors from the desocialization
perpetrated by psychiatry, criminal anthropology, and the sociology of early
Durkheim (1984). Those strategies point to a dismantling of the treatment of
crime as the property of a self-produced monad or as an anomic action that
always implies the “absence of rules”[2]
They help us to realise that to kill or to steal one need not be a monster or
sick, as the popular imagination as well as psychological and sociological
positivism like to think. They also help us to realise that transgressors, far
from living completely detached from any social environment, are usually
socialized in sub-cultural configurations with plenty of rules and values.
Such an undertaking seems, in
principle, theoretically (and politically) correct, and this essay intends to
participate in it. However, effort will be made to both expand on and make
specific this approach. We will argue that that crime and criminals (subcultual
or not), always pertain in fact and law to the society that rejects them, but
also we will try to account for their specificity.
To advance the understanding of both
topics, I would like to argue, it is necessary to comprehend 1) social space as
a field of multiple actions and interactions moved by multiple desires and
beliefs, b) culture as the ensemble of systems of classification, assessment
and interaction that establish a basic community of dominant
desires and beliefs (i.e. values) in
a given social space, and c) fundamental prohibitions as the system of
classification, assessment and interaction that set the last frontiers of that
community by designating what crime is. Criminal transgression, for its part,
may depend on a large number of varied motivations and we will try to give an
account of some of them. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that the only
thing that they all have in common is to be actions forbidden by fundamental
prohibitions. That is why ageneral definition can only be negative. Then, in
addition, we have to comprehend d) crime as a realization of desires and
beliefs excluded (by sign or degree) from both the representational and
affective economy of the symbolic order that fundamental prohibitions have
built.
These theses challenge traditional
understandings of crime by allowing for a radical critique of it as a social
phenomenon, while also preserving its specificity. Using this paradigm, we may
explain why the dominant culture perceives it as a dramatic change while also
identifying its structural relationship to that culture.
The social perception of crime as a
radical otherness can stem from exacerbating dominant cultural values, opposing
cultural hegemony, or re-emerging in ways that challenge existing discourses. I
propose categorizing crimes as "paroxysmal", "archaic", and
"pure" or "impossible".
Hence, as is evident from the start,
the questions formulated in the first lines will not be answered in this text.
These responses must be expanded on in the context of detailed and specific
research. It is no less true, however, that they can only be derived from an
adequate conceptual framework. What follows attempts to contribute to the elaboration of said framework, outlining the
theoretical space in which enquiries like these can take hold in a significant
way.
Culture, Fundamental Prohibition And
Crime
The concept of culture is far from
unambiguous, and there are many contradictory perspectives available for a
cultural analysis. Our starting point is the understanding of the human body as
a multiplicity of drives and of the social field as a space of multiple and
heterogeneous actions and relationships. Both multiplicities must be
articulated by systems of intelligibility and exchange in order for social
groups and individuals to occur. This implies understanding both multiplicities
as basically made up of beliefs and desires and recognizing them as the
material, or better put the energy, that all culture must take hold of in order
to function and reproduce itself. According to this (post-structuralist)
perspective, culture may be defined as a socio-symbolic order. That is, as an
ensemble, more or less coherent, of classificatory and evaluative frameworks
which, based on transcendent interdictions and supported by ritual practices,
seeks to structure a heterogeneous social and subjective field, granting it
certain identitary consistency and organizing it both symbolically and
affectively.
According to Barthes (1994), culture
is first and foremost a logical system of forms. Systems such as morality,
rights, religion, science, and ideology, as well as art, advertising, cookery,
and dress, provide communication and organizational patterns that serve as
models for interpretation and interaction. Models that can create a community
of shared meanings and practices in a diverse social field. This is how
they'make society'.
If this is true, cultural systems are
characterized neither by their usefulness (Malinowski); nor by their
motivational role in social action (Parson). They are better understood as structuring
what reality is, in the Lacanian sense. The fundamental role of any
socio-symbolic order would then be to transform a diverse and unsettled social
field into a relatively organized group, naming the things of the world and
establishing the corresponding positions of the subject within its structure
(Lacan, 2001: 67-72). If we accept this, we must also accept that culture does
not belong to an order of superstructures (in the vein of traditional Marxism),
but that it is itself an infrastructure: it is the cognitive and evaluative
grammar that allows for the appearance of objects and the reproduction and
communication of subjects. Consequently, the study of a culture is, primarily,
the study of the logical structure of a determined social group, and of the
identities and the exchanges that this logical structure permits.
Having reached this point, it is
necessary to avert the danger of the (structuralist) aporia consistent with
understanding culture as a closed system of subsystems that, furthermore, is
fully articulated s and practices that are ultimately impossible to totalize in
a closed system, in the poststructuralist sense, we are warned against this
risk. The double multiplicity of the social and the corporal means that efforts
are made to articulate the symbolic orders that we call cultures in order to
make them into unified and relatively coherent totalities, but without ever
achieving it (and nevertheless without giving up this resolve).[3]
Because of this, these structuring frameworks are never totally coherent, never
exempt from contradictions and always a matter of dispute and change. However,
they are capable of officiating as the cognitive and axiological matrix that
makes possible the regular and regulated communication between the members of
the social group that they produce.
That being said, it is necessary to
add another set of theoretical propositions that are equally monumental.
Propositions that place the criminal question at the very centre of every
culture. Namely: all socio-symbolic order is defined and held up by
interdictions that mark its ultimate boundaries. These prohibitions mythically
draw out the final perimeter of the group which is in this way determined,
separating it from a radical exterior which is left designated as chaos,
savagery or barbarism. Building up these final limits, they imaginarily sutures
the discontinuous outlines of the social fabric and gives it back the vision of
an intelligible and consistent totality. What makes them fundamental or primary
is not the quality of the relationships, actions, beliefs and desires they
condemn, but the structuring position they occupy. Their function, completely
extraordinary, lies in designating the final (or first) borders of culture.
That is to say, of the social symbolized.
With these presuppositions in mind,
the mythical closing points that produce a culture as an imagined totality may
be called fundamental prohibitions. That is, we can so name the master
signifiers who seems to transform a given social field into a coherent
totality, and who to a certain degree make it function in this way whenever
they are able to hegemonize it, producing the appropriate subjectivations.
Furthermore, let us seek to be consistent with a post-foundationalist
perspective by avoiding referring the primary character of such interdictions
to their historical invariability or anthropological universality, as is usual
in Freudian (and Lacanian) psychoanalysis. I
Emerging from the struggles of the
social field, the success of these interdictions depends on their capacity to
be mythically formulated, ritually sanctioned and collectively reaffirmed. They
show the proscriptive side of the symbolic order that they articulate by
pointing out and condemning what crime is. But in doing so, they imply as the
opposite of this definition what is affirmed to be most precious[4].
They delineate the values that they sustain (e.g. individual life, private
property) in the form of negative categorical imperatives (do not kill, do not
steal). These imperatives of exclusion have more to do with passion and
imagination than reason, and find both in this “synthetic” language and in its
penal ritualization, the most powerful supports of their efficacy[5]
Thus, its definitions appear to be universal and necessary even while having
precise socio-historical origins, and even when they are always liable to the
most diverse interpretations and disputes of power.
These restrictions define the
boundaries between a socio-symbolic order and its perceived non-complementary
external. This social group need a concept to explain the return of what they
don't understand, which is unavoidable given their inner workings. These types
of returns might be referred to as crimes.
An important consequence of this is
that there are no actions (or omissions) that can be criminal in themselves.
These prohibitions vary in each time and place, meaning that those behaviours
that are classified as criminal vary in each case – and that the gravity
attributed to each one is also variable. This is because in every culture, in
every historical moment, the actions considered most criminal are those that
most contradict the prevailing creed, much as the action that is most in
agreement with it is the most celebrated[6].
Said in yet another way, whatever is designated as criminal –whatever is
fundamentally prohibited– is always relative to the system of beliefs and
desires that dominate a culture in a particular time and place. This means,
among other things, that crime, like every evil, depends on the interdiction
that condemns it.
The "subjective pivot" of
the socio-symbolic system they create. As a result, people who violate them
must face the repercussions of their actions. These prohibitions embed
themselves in the subjects, forming a cognitive grid and an emotional economy.
They create norms that do not accept neutrality in the face of their
transgression, emphasizing what should never happen under any circumstances and
what is unlawful when it occurs. They engrave their directives in the
individual bodies, significantly influencing their valuations, perceptions, and
emotions. From here stem the contempt, wrath, terror, and/or horror that the
violation of such mandates cause in them[7].
Crime And Criminals
All discourse on the criminal
question must determine, implicitly or explicitly, an image of criminals as a
basis on which to formulate itself. At least since the end of 19th century, the
philosophical free will assumptions that sustained modern penal codes have been
challenged by different discourses that claimed for themselves the title of
scientific. Specifically, two discursive matrices have developed, penetrating
the penal administration as well as everyday thinking. Their substance can be
reduced –without sacrificing too much– to a view of crime as the action of
infra-individual and solipsistic forces, always external to society and
culture, or as the antisocial act of poorly socialized individuals. Between
them, the first major intellectual division of labor among the sociological,
anthropological, psychological and medico-legal disciplines emerged. All these
disciplines strove to unravel the mystery of the criminal act without resorting
the principle of the self-determined and transparent subject. Their lowest
common denominator, which made (and makes) these discourses complementary to
one another, is their refusal to advance what Lacan (1966:128) called "the
humanization of the criminal" –even when crime was accepted as a social
phenomenon, which has not always been the case.
These propositions, still current,
were challenged by various theoretical and political strategies that sought to
de-essentialize the transgressor, to save him or her from the dehumanization
(or, rather, the de-socialization) perpetrated by psychiatry, criminal anthropology,
and the sociology of the early Durkheim. One of these strategies postulates
that the transgressor, far from being an abnormal biological or psychological
type, in the manner of a monster or a fool, is a professional type, just like a
lawyer, police officer, or carpenter. That is, one who practices an occupation
with a certain regularity and is subject to a set of not only technical but
moral rules. Rather than unleashing an uncontrolled, autistic impulse, to
commit a crime is to act in accordance with a world of substantive and
instrumental meanings which one must necessarily learn from others. This
socialization occurs in the exactly same way as any other, but it takes place
within a (sub)culture. A criminal transgressor would then be a standard, but
differentially socialized, individual.[8]
This perspective goes against the
mythical assumptions that convert the transgressor into the one solely
responsible for the radical exteriority that he or she introduces. Through the
mediation of culture, it also questions both the “egocentric”claims on which
classical legal logic relies and the supposedly universal link betweenmental
abnormality and criminal action alleged by psychological and
sociologicalpositivism. Therein lies most of its value. Its strength is in
suggesting that one need not possess a particularly aggressive or sick
temperament to violate criminal law; in indicating that violence and madness
are distributed across various trades and professions (legal and illegal); in
remembering that every offender is someone who performs, in addition to crime,
the same types of daily activities as anyone else. This perspective shows, in
short, that it is convenient to place the criminal within the rest of the
normal subjective configurations to discover that crime can be committed
normally.
This viewpoint may be politically and
theoretically agreeable to some. However, it risks losing the specificity of
its aim, reducing it to the lowest common denominator that crimes and criminals
definitely share with the society and time to which they belong. To steal or
kill, it is not required to have a deviant personality. It is also true that
every transgressor, rather than living fully separated from the world of
established meaning, is in actuality and legally bound by the society that
rejects her or him. However, assuming this is agreed, the essential question
is: What characteristics define the illegal act? How does it specifically
address the order it violates? And what is the specificity of the transgressor,
if any at all?
To begin answering these concerns, we
attempted to define an analytical distinction between socio-symbolic order and
the social field, which prevents us from viewing a culture and its subjects as
non-conflicting, homogeneous, and complete entities. This knowledge allows for
a departure from the usual interrogation approaches addressing crime and its
perpetrators. It allows for a radical critique of crime as the property of an
auto-produced criminal, while outlining a theoretical model that prevents us
from losing sight of the specificity of the prohibited action in the same
movement that'socializes' its actors, demonstrating their fundamental reliance
on the socio-cultural field that stigmatizes them. This is a model that regards
prohibitions as impassable limits, constituting all identity, while bluntly
postulating that each socio-symbolic order, each culture, has its corresponding
criminals and crimes.
At this point, I'd want to present
another thesis to round out the previous ones and take one step further in the
investigation of the relationship between culture and what it has omitted in
order to establish itself. Three types of criminal transgression can be
identified based on the social field's variety, the need for transcendent
prohibitions to organize it, and the resulting conflicts. Criminal
transgressions can be classified into two types: "paroxysmal" and
"archaic."
The paroxysmal crime is that which,
for each culture, is their main values overacted: something like an avant-garde
action, only not counter-cultural but hypercultural. In these crimes the
hegemonic cultural logic is condensed and overflows. These prohibited actions
are the exasperation of the principles of egotism, pleasure, honour or justice
that dominate an established societal order with full force: i.e. to do
(literally) with competition, or any other non-systemic manifestation of the
war of all against all, of an eye for an eye, or of who kills by the sword,
dies by the sword. Archaic crime, on the other hand, tends to follow the same
rhythm and measure as its signifying universe, except that this universe is out
of step with a greater one that contains it antagonistically. Its actors live
in a world of untimely valuations, codes and conducts, which confront them with
the dominant culture. In contemporary societies, this is the world of mafias,
cartels, gangs, and any other clandestine association that resist state
expropriation of violence and the legal regulation of the economy.
To understand the individual body as
a collection of beliefs and desires, the social as a complex and conflictive
field, and culture as the result of founding exclusions, we must accept that
symbolic order requires the production of un-symbolizable remnants that
constantly challenge its frontiers[9].
When forbidden actions cannot be defined, we refer to them as "pure"
or "impossible" crimes. Positive meanings develop in both paroxysmal
and archaic crimes, creating a sense of otherness that defies categorization.
Parxoysmal Crime
Lombroso, along with much of the
nineteenth century, imagined that all crime was a sign of atavism. He saw in
each transgressor of criminal law a primitive body and soul, animalistic for
its ferocity, its physical and mental defects, and barbaric for its violence,
slang, and tattoos. This mythical image, to be discussed in the next section,
helps us locate the paroxysmal crime and its actors at the opposite pole: not
as a step backward in civilization, but as a strange, deformed vanguard of
civilization itself; not an illogical but an ultra-logical act, criminal for
rigorously enacting its epoch, for drawing all the consequences of the common
sense in force. These acts are criminal for entailing an audacious deduction, a
strict conclusion, extracted from the premises that constitute the zeitgeist of
the societal ensemble to which its actors undoubtedly belong –over-belongs, we
might say. And it will be this excess of belonging that will produce his or her
expulsion
This is not to say merely that what
precipitates in these crimes is the opposite of a blind instinct, nor merely
that the criminals’ violence refers to specific and discernible meanings; it is
also to say that these meanings are precisely those that sustain and give
consistency to the symbolic universe these crimes dislocate. In them certain
lines of force, decidedly significant in the dominant cultural constellation,
have reached an inflection point, a particular tension. They are acts in which
the hegemonic desires and beliefs are combined in specific, and superlative,
proportions. Its actors actualize, without distance, existing guidelines,
which, being exacerbated, followed to the end, become unloosed or inverted.
These criminals constitute points of imputation where prevailing principles
explode – or implode – because of the severity of it application. They are
individuals or groups who leave themselves violently by way of the final
consequences of these principles. The examples are many: rapists, batterers,
murderers of women in misogynistic societies; immigrant-hunters in xenophobic
societies; homicidal appropriations (or defenses) of personal belongings where
possessive individualism prevails.
Far from the misanthropes anticipated
by orthodox psychology and sociology, as well as the heroic rebels of anarchist
romanticism, paroxysmal criminals endure something like to violent, horrific
conformity, or a deformity caused by excessive conformism. They include all of
the components of Baudrillard's hypermodernity: saturation, redundancy,
hypertrophy, and a triggered effect with no known source. Their crimes are a
culmination of their era's potential: more consumptive than the consumer
society, more narcissistic than the culture of narcissism, more violent than
the society of exclusion, and occasionally more spectacular than the society of
the spectacle.
For example, imagine an engineer
shopping in a shoe store and hearing his automobile alarm. In the parking lot,
he witnesses two individuals entering a car and realizes his car audio is
missing. With his wife, he pursues the two strangers for 20 blocks. After
apprehending the suspected thieves, he stands in front of them with a gun and
shoots them in the head, leaving them stunned.
Ecstasy or vertigo are the primary
symptoms of such paroxysm. This applies to both the criminal and his audience.
Baudrillard (1983) defines ecstasy as a state of immovable speed. Vertigo is
the sense of emptiness and perplexity.
This criminal is not Dostoevsky's
destitute, humiliated, offended criminal seeking justice through uncivil means,
nor Freud's delinquent criminal motivated by an insufferable superego. Poor and
neurotic individuals are often motivated by unpleasant emotions. The anonymous
and spectral individual becomes a point of incandescence, causing an
uncontrolled nucleation that creates a universe without an outside.
These crimes seem as spontaneous and
violent accelerations of the social field, and their paroxysm is the overflow
of positivity rather than a negative violation. They are characterized by
diffuse tensions that lack a clear source of conflict. According to Henry
Miller (1962: 308), there is a sense of "murder in the air." It's
difficult to predict who will benefit from it and who will suffer the
consequences.
It's worth noting that the logic in
question prioritizes pollution and collapse over confrontation and revolution.
Revolution occurs when a social class, the bourgeoisie, creates its opposite,
the proletariat. This creates a violent negation of the bourgeoisie, resulting
in a future society that is a synthesis of negation and conservation. The
paroxysmal criminal reproduces current society's values while erasing its
disparities. Beyond a certain point, the rise of this form of crime raises the
possibility of a series of catastrophic events that might bring the planet to
an end.
Pure Or Impossible Crime
We are concerned with the advent of
atemporal or ahistorical crimes that are anti-societal, rather than extreme
representations of the past. The impossible crime, like paroxysmal and archaic
crimes, is an expression of societal logics that produce nonsense. This
criminal event occurs as a final act by a person or group and cannot be
entirely retrieved by representation.
To determine themselves, societal
discourses on the criminal dilemma always aim to identify, tacitly or overtly,
a variety of plausible explanations for illegal activities and criminal
transgressors. This is especially important in anthropocentric cultures like
ours, where violence necessitates human - and preferably individual -
culpability. In this regard, Foucault (1999) outlined the mud in which the
modern prison system found itself from its inception. Given the anthropology
that underpins its framework, that of a homo economicus subject to contractual
reason, all crimes that could not be reconstructed according to the logic of
utility appeared fruitless, disturbing, or monstrous, presenting an
increasingly inverse relationship between the violence committed and the
benefit gained. Paradigmatic in this sense was the case of Henriette Cornier,
the young servant who slit the throat of her neighbor's daughter and, when
asked for her motives, said, "It was an idea."
This horror lacked incentive within
traditional legal frameworks as it did not declare earnings to executors, who
were not defined as insane according to contemporary medical standards. These
were considered "motiveless crimes," meaning they were banned
behaviors that could not be understood by the system used to judge and punish
individuals.
Bataille (1985: 129) describes these
crimes as "non-logical differences" from the law, morality, and
present knowledge, resulting in terrible and violent remnants that defy any
imaginable meaning. That, if you will, is its definition. The act is
unintelligible and represents a leap from the conceivable to the impossible in
terms of existing discourses. The violence appears senseless and without
societal or individual benefit, leaving no one to speak up, including the
perpetrator.
Perhaps it can be said that Pierre
Rivière was the purest criminal for Foucault –or, at least, that Moi, Pierre
Rivière ... was Foucault`s most Bataillean book. It consists of a dossier
composed of the memoirs in which this 20-year-old French peasant tries to
explain why he killed his mother, sister, and brother. To Rivière’s text
Foucault and his colleagues added legal and medical reports of the case, which
they prohibited themselves from attempting to elucidate: "We decided not
to interpret it and not to subject it to any psychiatric or psychoanalytic
commentary" (Foucault, 1975: xiii). What meaning, then, does the
publication of Rivière’s text and the expert and legal glosses have? Why not
analyze or interpret it in search of its secrets? The silence Foucault produced
with this publication was the act in whose hollow all legal,
medicalpsychiatric, and criminological knowledge remained exposed, as they had
been assembled to conjure the crime they could not understand. Lawyers, judges,
medics, psychiatrists: everyone spoke about this case. Everyone spoke – says
Foucault, smiling – and yet nobody said anything. In this way he showed the
failure of this societal enterprise of recovering nonsense, of "enclosing
the outside.” But that silence also revealed his own fascination with the
criminal, his act, and his text: “we fell under the spell of the parricide with
the reddish-brown eyes.”(Foucault: 1975, xiii)
There, then, is a young man and his
impossible crime, stuck in the middle of a discursive network that
circumscribes them but cannot touch them. And there, also, is his closest, and
perhaps most faithful, counterpart: the silent horror and ecstasy of Foucault.
There are those who will not tolerate
this seizure of thought and language in the face of sublime transgressions.
Carlo Ginzburg (1980), among others, accused Foucault of being the champion of
a "black populism." Maybe he is right. Bataille also wanted to open
himself to that sacred silence and horror of the purest crime. But his wager
was the attempt to not be silent before them. More than ten years before Moi,
Pierre Rivière ...,Bataille (1965) wrote an important text concerning Gilles de
Rais, the fifteenth-century French nobleman who killed children “for pleasure”.
Here Bataille repeats the impossible operation that characterizes much of his
work. Driven by an ethic of limits, he wants to account for the unconditioned
exteriority that the monster de Rais figures, but without positivizing it; that
is: without emptying it, retrieving it, through language. And yet, he wants to
do this without ceasing to write. He tries, then, to resist the edge of
silence, to open language toward the crime, without ceding, or without ceding
completely, to its auratic and annihilating attraction.
Regardless, the point is that,
through the figure of the pure criminal, both Bataille and Foucault reveal the
essential ambiguity of crime. It happens that crime (like all social reality
that society denies in order to form itself) can always, and to varying
degrees, be reclaimed by meaning. It is recovered first by the current power
structure, which nearly always succeeds in functionalizing it, putting its
negativity to work for the sake of order, particularly through the criminal
justice system. And this happens in a thousand ways, possibly summarized as
follows: Crime produces or justifies the creation of a diverse set of devices,
regulations, and knowledge that transverse and govern the social body. This is
what Foucault (1979) demonstrates masterfully in Discipline and Punish. And
that, perhaps, is why the existence of Pierre Rivière gives him joy.
The crime is recaptured, secondly, by
the persistence in its actors of a self that seeks to exploit or profit from
the abyss that the crime opens within them. There are not many pure criminals.
Even when all crime implies an element of loss, disorder, nonsense, and the
putting-into-process of its subjects, criminals are usually motivated by a bare
will toward appropriation, toward possessing themselves and others. Like
everybody else, criminals try to avoid the movement of destruction unleashed by
their transgression, and to retrieve with one hand what they gave with the
other. It is true that they puts their and others’ lives at stake, but they
command respect, fear, objects and pleasures in return. Thus, they usually
evade and contradict an alien power in order to constitute their own. If it
differs radically from the established ways of life, if it does not fully
accept their hierarchies, their standards and their legitimacies, it is usually
to establish new (or old) economies, morals, hierarchies, and subjections.
Perhaps it can be said, ultimately,
that pure crimes and their subjects are as much heuristic operators as ethical
principles of interpretation. The event (real or imagined) of these crimes
creates a vacuum that allows one to observe, naked, the structure of discourses
desperate for foundations and control, while exposing their inanity and endless
will to power. This applies as much to morality as to scientific knowledge
(psychology, psychiatry, medicine, law, criminology, and even psychoanalysis).
Foucault made of this criticism his specialty. These crimes also reveal the
bottomlessness to which a culture and its subject are opened when they can no
longer pretend to be peaceful and unified: the exploration of this moment
characterizes the Bataillean art. They are crimes that reveal, moreover, the
irreducible ambivalence of transgressions: both their familiarity with revolt
and their complicity with domination. They constitute, finally, an excessive
principle to which an ethics can refer – an ethics that prefers martyrs to
despots, suicidal criminals to corporate gangsters.
Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1994) The Semiotic
Challenge. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bataille, G. (1986) Eroticism: Death
and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights.
Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Bataille, G. (1965) Le Procès de
Gilles de Rais. Paris: J. J. Pauvert.
Baudrillard, J. (1983) In the shadow
of the silent majorities: Or the end of the social and other essays. New York:
Semiotext(e)
Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders: Studies
in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Cloward, R. & Ohlin, L. (1960)
Delinquency and Opportunity. IL: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of
Labor in Society. New York: The Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1895) ‘Criminalité et
santé sociale’, Revue Philosophique, 39: 148-162.
Elliott, A. (2003) “Jacques Lacan as
Social Theorist” in Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory. New
York: Roman and Littlefield. P. 62-81
Foucault, M. (1999) Les Anormaux.
Paris: Seuil/Gallimard
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Author Biography
Sergio Tonkonoff got a PhD in
Sociology from Campinas University in São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests
include classical and current sociological theory, cultural sociology, and
crime, with publications in international journals. He has taught and conducted
faculty seminars in Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. He currently teaches
modern sociological theory at the University of Buenos Aires. Email address:
tonkonoff@gmail.com.
[1] Human Studies, August 2014 - DOI
10.1007/s10746-014-9322-4
[2] See, for example, Sutherland
(1937, 1978), Cloward and Ohlin (1960) and Becker (1963), Katz (1988) and Young
(1999).
[3] All these statements, as well as
the core argument of this section, are based on the Lacanian social theory
developed in Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and in Laclau (1990, 1996). It is also
based on the contribution realized by Zizek (1989) in this field, specifically
in his development of a (Lacanian) theory of the subject in many ways
complementary with Laclau’s and Mouffe’s propositions. For a detailed
articulation of the major points of both topics –the Lacanian social theory and
the Lacanian theory of the subject–see Stavrakakis (1999). For the place of
Lacan’s works in contemporary social theory see Elliott(2003)
[4] Both Tarde (1972) and Durkheim
(1984) agree on this, despite their differences on other matters.
[5] I propose to define as penal any
ritual that seeks to reaffirm a system of classification and the affective
economy that corresponds to it, through the mythological recoding and through
the spectacular staging of transgressions and punishments. Given the lack of
space to develop this (philo-Durkheinmian) definition in the context of this
article..
[6] Both Tarde (1972, 1895) and
Durkheim (1984, 1895) agree on this, rejecting the possibility of the ‘natural’
contents (i.e. universal and innate) of morals and crimes
[7] For an analysis of this
psycho-social dynamic see Tonkonoff (2013)
[8] This position, which has its
origin in Gabriel Tarde’s works (1972), is masterfully articulated in the
Differential Association Theory by Edwin Sutherland (1978). Close to this point
of view are the subcultural studies of crime.
[9] These unsymbolizable remnants
correspond to Lacan's category of the Real. See Lacan (1994). For a treatment
of the Real as limit of the signification see Zizek (1989)
Article Information
CRIME AS A LIMIT OF CULTURE
Authors: ALTAMASH KHAN
- Journal IJLRA
- ISSN 2582-6433
- Published 2024/04/16
- Issue 7
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