Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture

Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissm

Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, Craig Ancrum

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843922551
• eBook ISBN: 9781134010509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today's criminal identities and consumer culture. Using unique data taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession, the book aims to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities, investigating the incorporation of hearts and minds into consumer culture's surrogate social world and highlighting the relationship between the lived identities of active criminals and the socio-economic climate of instability and anxiety that permeates post-industrial Britain.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and lecturers in all fields within the social sciences, but especially criminology, sociology, social policy, politics and anthropology.

chapter 1

Introduction: The return to motivation

There is little doubt that crime is now a central issue of our times. From the gang cultures and outbursts of interpersonal violence that pervade some economically run-down locales (Dorling 2004) to the systematic gangsterisation of the global economy (Woodiwiss 2005), crime occupies a prominent place in public discourse. Criminology’s more critical attempts to identify and explain the social and politico-economic roots of the crime problem have been rich and varied, although perhaps not quite so successful as they once promised to be. If for the moment we avoid launching ourselves hastily into the extremities of the postmodernist denial of truth and knowledge, we might suspect the principal reason for this disappointment is that in the post-war era critical criminology largely avoided talking too much about crime and its harmful effects, preferring instead to focus on the contested political language of crime and the ‘conservative’ establishment’s unjust practices of criminalisation and labelling. However, since the mid 1980s a growing current within critical criminology, beginning with the left realist and feminist breaks with left idealism, has shown increasing awareness that the discipline has since the late 1960s relied too heavily on useful but limited concepts such as ‘moral panic’ (Cohen 2002) and ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall 1980, 1985). This focus displaced the exploration of the motivations behind the harmful acts that constitute criminality itself with relentless critiques of the practices of punitive reaction and the language/imagery with which the hegemonic apparatus of politics, law and mass media constructed public perceptions of crime. Although we certainly must not lose sight of the important issues of social inequality, unequal power to define and the political function of the ‘politics of fear’ in the legitimisation of the sort of authoritarian governance that can directly threaten civil liberties, this core liberal-left argument, on its own, has only limited explanatory power. Pleasingly, however, critical criminology is now getting into its stride down an alternative path, along which it can draw more attention to the crime explosion that characterised Britain and the USA from the late 1960s to the late 1990s as a reality inextricably linked to the increasing dominance of neo-liberal political economy.

The evidenced argument that increased equality across the economic, political and cultural dimensions of the social universe can indeed reduce crime, punitiveness and general incivility is still powerful and persuasive (Reiner 2007). However, just as the liberal-modernist hope that increased opportunities for prosperity and freedom would reduce crime floundered as rates rose in Britain and the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, the sharp rise of intra-class crime and violence among a depoliticised working class and the continuation of fraud and corruption among the wealthy business/political class in the 1980s and 1990s cast doubt on the efficacy of the whole project of social equality in the context of our current core values, begging the very basic question, ‘Equal rights to what?’ Just as global warming and other ecological problems cast doubt on the industrial-capitalist route to prosperity and happiness, the crime explosion cast doubt on all variations of the modernist politico-cultural route to solidarity. Today’s world, as Alain Badiou (2007) remarked, seems to be all about the language of formal liberty and equality in the absence of real fraternity, or solidarity, to use the gender-neutral term. As we write, news reports of white-collar fraudsters popping out of the woodwork and the deaths of young people at the hands of others wielding firearms and knives dominate the media in Britain, even in the ‘quality’ liberal press. Three young men are beginning lengthy sentences for kicking to death a father who remonstrated with them after they had committed an act of petty vandalism, while another three are receiving the same punishment for beating to death a young man with learning difficulties to ‘see who could knock him out first’. The general sentiment that something somewhere is going badly wrong can no longer be passed off as the mere product of a conspiratorial attempt to generate fear among the population with the aim of legitimising current modes of authoritarian control. The explosion in genuinely harmful forms of crime and violence in Britain has been undeniably real:

It seems that the broad pattern of change over the last half century is clear. The overwhelming, most dramatic change is the huge increase in recorded crime. Probably a significant (but ultimately unascertainable) proportion of this was due to reporting and police recording changes up to about 1980, so the statistics exaggerate the increase in crime. After 1981, with the advent of the BCS, it is possible to be more certain, especially about the 1980s when the two statistical series went in the same direction. Although a small fraction (about a fifth) of the recorded doubling of crime was attributable to more reporting by victims, there can be no doubt about the crime explosion that took place.

(Reiner 2007: 75, our italics)

Despite ostensible decreases from the late 1990s, which correlate with large rises in the prison population and the intensification of surveillance, risk management and correctional practices, the situation still remains problematic. Reiner (ibid.), in an expertly assembled digest of criminological work done so far on the relationship between crime and political economy, reminds us of the important details that lie underneath the general statistics; although the crime rate in England and Wales diminished after 1992, violence diminished only a little, while some forms of serious violence, such as robbery, continued to rise. Dorling’s (2004) detailed demographic work highlights the fact that in many troubled locales blighted by permanent recession, unemployment and burgeoning criminal markets the murder rate is six times the national average. However, simply blaming unemployment is no longer adequate; some forms of property crime actually tend to decrease in economic recessions because more people remain at home to bolster informal methods of control (Box 1987), and of course for a long time during the industrial-capitalist era unemployment, economic instability and social inequality were the spurs to working-class political solidarity and action rather than ethico-social implosion.

That said, what we saw in the 1980s was not merely another structural adjustment of the economy and the labour market leading to another standard recession. Rather, it was a radical shift in political economy and culture, a move to the unprecedented domination of life by the market, which created a large number of locales of permanent recession across Britain and the USA. As we shall see, the criminal markets developing in these areas now tend to operate in the relative absence of the traditional normative insulation that thinkers such as Polanyi (2002) and Galbraith (1991, 1999) – drawing upon the initial warnings of Adam Smith in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments – regarded as essential to the restraint of the inherently amoral and socially disruptive logic that lies at the heart of the liberal-capitalist market economy. Contrary to the prognostications of some (see Friedman 2000; Murray 1988, 1997), the 1980s was not a time of vigorous and inherently progressive cultural change. Although we do acknowledge – and we will get this in early for the sake of some of our less thoughtful and attentive critics who seem unable to deal with paradox (see for instance O’Brien 2007) – that there has been some progress in some dimensions, especially race/ethnic and gender relations and tolerance of different forms of sexuality, at the same time as this progress the Anglo-American world has also experienced the restoration of purified classical liberal-capitalism as we entered a period of intensified ideological control (Harvey 2007; Badiou 2002). We were told in a way that grabbed the imagination of a politically significant majority of the population that the unhindered market would work its magic and deliver us from the evils of economic stagnation and lack of opportunities for personal prosperity. In our para-political liberal-democratic system, increasingly atomised, nihilistic and cynical electorates needed to be persuaded either not to vote, or to vote for parties and politicians whose interests were in direct opposition to the mutual interests of the vast majority. The personal interests of competing individuals took centre stage as Anglo-American culture became dominated by ubiquitous and powerful ideological messages that stressed self-interest, acquisition and social competition.

In this period deep political regulation – of both the economy and the important institutions of cultural reproduction that characterised the post-war social democratic era – was rapidly replaced by deregulation on behalf of the needs of business. Acquisitive individualism was systematically embedded as a psychocultural driver in a global monetarist economic project that was more concerned with finance capital than productive capital (see Schumpeter 1994; Harvey 2007). To cut a long story short, the upshot is that investment in traditional industry declined, resulting in the loss of huge sectors of the North American and British industrial heartlands and the emergence of a large, insecure service sector of casual, low-paid workers and a so-called ‘underclass’ of long-term unemployed struggling for significance and prosperity in a fragmented social system characterised by deepening and widening inequality. This, passed off by neo-liberal ideologues as an act of ‘creative destruction’ promising better things to come, occurred alongside the continuing expansion of consumption and consumer credit, the increasing reliance on a buoyant housing market to guarantee personal loan repayments, and the flooding of the high streets with a vast array of cheap goods manufactured in low-wage economies abroad. The socially deleterious effects of this change were insulated only by a rationalised welfare system in combination with newly developed strategies of risk-management (see Hughes 1998; Beck 1992; Giddens 1998, 2007).

It was on this radically altered terrain in the 1980s that the most resounding phase of the ‘crime explosion’ took place, and it presents new challenges for criminological theory. Reiner (2007) outlines five necessary conditions for crime: labelling, motivation, means, opportunity and the absence of ethical and situational controls. Perhaps the least understood and most neglected is motivation, which tends to be approached at the individual psychological level. While psychologistic explanations can often bear fruit in the investigation of less common and more serious crimes, the psychosocial and cultural explanations that we need to explain the explosion in common forms of crime, whose perpetrators do not usually suffer from clinically diagnosable psychological or psychiatric problems, have been limited. Anomie, labelling, relative deprivation, sub-cultural differentiation, discursive subjectivity and their various derivatives have all had their moments, but have never offered really satisfactory explanations, even when attempts were made to integrate them. Even the more sophisticated new psychosocial studies now coming on line to construct integrated theories (see for instance Gadd and Jefferson 2007), while extremely useful for examining relational dynamics across various social and cultural axes and throwing light on specific case studies, are perhaps supplementary to the deeper exploration of what should be regarded as direct yet complex relationships between our core values and practices, our current conditions of existence and the individual’s motivation to commit crime.

In a tradition that stretched from Bonger (1916) to Ehrlich (1973), early criminological work correlating crime rates with poverty, inequality and unemployment was largely ignored and dismissed as ‘reductionist’ by both the Left and the Right, of course for entirely different reasons. The Left were keen to downplay working-class deviancy and focus on the crimes of the powerful, and the Right were keen to ignore consumerist values, political economy and the social conditions of existence in order to press their traditional case for personal responsibility and the rebuilding of traditional moral discipline along with its essential transmission mechanisms, such as the Arnoldian canon of high culture, the family, the church and the juridical disciplinary state. Most feminist and pro-feminist criminologists have been keen to shift the focus to male privilege and competitive, acquisitive masculine culture, despite the fact that most males commit no crime and female competitiveness and acquisitiveness are hardly invisible or controversial aspects of contemporary life. Neither side of the political divide appeared especially keen to develop more sophisticated analyses that addressed political economy and its underlying values, or to draw upon classic social and critical theories, which from the 1980s onwards were often dismissed as obsolete. Most work tended to focus on subjectivity, gender, language, discourse, bio-power, conflicting sociocultural relations, imbalances of politico-discursive power and the roles of policing, punishment and rehabilitative techniques; all fascinating and important topics, but topics that nevertheless failed to confront squarely the core problematic. The powerful, generative politico-economic, cultural and psychosocial currents that were gathering strength underneath what now seem like relatively petty conflicts over industrial capitalism’s booty were largely ignored, possibly because in the midst of our post-war complacency and optimism we imagined these currents to be either under control or reduced to mere residues by the progressive forces of liberal democracy. ‘Capitalism has its nasty side, but don’t worry, we “smart liberals” are on top of it’; perhaps we should imagine that ubiquitous little lullaby spoken by the voice of an airline pilot addressing the passengers before entering a zone of turbulence. However, now that real rises in violent crime and renewed fears about social disorder, geopolitical conflict, cultural disharmony and economic instability have cast doubt upon the inevitability of that progress, we must move back to a more critical mode of analysis and explore with renewed vigour – and perhaps with a little more respect for classical discourses and a little less for some of the more novel post-war thinking that has let us down quite badly – the deep generative relationships that exist between political economy, culture, psychology and harmful crime. These factors intersect and converge in consumer culture, as Reiner explains:

The emergence of a globalized neoliberal political economy since the 1970s has been associated with social and cultural changes that were likely to aggravate crime, and to displace all frameworks for crime control policy apart from ‘law and order’. The spread of consumerist culture, especially when coupled with increasing social inequality and exclusion, involved a heightening of Mertonian ‘anomie’. At the same time the egoistic culture of a ‘market society’, its zero-sum, ‘winner-loser’, survival of the fittest ethos, eroded conceptions of ethical means of success being preferable, or of concerns for others limiting ruthlessness, and ushered in a new barbarism. (Reiner 2007: 109)

This was accompanied, he goes on to argue, by the reversal of the ‘solidarity project’ and a common sense of citizenship; a reversal that occurred, we will emphasise again, despite progress in some quarters, which seems to suggest that progressive liberalism might have been compromised in an important way as it capitulated to competitive individualism. As Rose (1996) claimed, the post-1980s era has seen the ‘death of the social’ and the fracture of relations of mutual reciprocity that have always existed in one form or another across our diverse anthropological histories. These important social goods have now been replaced by what is quite possibly the most complete and pervasive form of atomised competitive individualism yet seen in British culture. As we have argued at length elsewhere (see Winlow and Hall 2006; Hall and Winlow 2007), we regard as extremely naive the notion that, in the midst of this atomisation and actuarial control, traditional communities are being replaced by new do-it-yourself symbolic communities that can revive relations of morality, respect and obligation and foster effective political opposition via myriad cultural micro-transgressions. The system cannot suffer ‘death by a thousand cuts’ because, as we shall see later, in the Lacanian sense these ‘cuts’ are exactly what it needs to breathe and reproduce itself. However, what we shall argue in this book is that in a very different way the social has been maintained; the corollary of the advanced capitalist economy is the colonisation of the former life-world by consumerism’s symbolic system, which seems to be constituted by images of a simulated social life and all the paradoxical struggles for both distinction and community that a real traditional social life entailed. Maybe the social is not as dead as Rose thought, and the truly atomised life exists only in specific dimensions of reality; perhaps the social lives on in a collectively imagined, mass-mediated form as a site for symbolic and para-political struggles that can be harnessed to the economy. Perhaps it is not simply the lack of a real social life but the emergence of an imaginary social world to replace it and organise atomised individuals into a frenetic competition that is the most criminogenic aspect of life in advanced modernity: this is the principal theme we want to explore throughout the book.

If we put political economy aside for a brief moment, in the post-war era there seems to have been a notably strong link between rising crime and consumerism. Earlier but less abrupt rises in the crime rate also correlated with the early twentieth-century phase of consumerist development in the 1920s, where the acquisition and display of wealth, performative ability and social distinction – in the form famously named by Thorstein Veblen (1994) as ‘conspicuous consumption’ – began to diffuse further outwards in the social body than it had done after the bourgeois revolutions in the eighteenth century. The practice of acquiring primarily for the purpose of display began to break down the traditional restraining cultures of asceticism and collectivism, disrupting the fragile project of political solidarity, undermining the vital functional, status-enhancing and identity-providing role of production in the realm of material reality and becoming the most common measure of value (Hall 2000). In what follows we will argue in more detail that when the formative pressure generated by this homogenising quasi-cultural method of measuring value combines with the social divisions, impoverished culture and competitive narcissistic individualism that characterise societies based on classical liberalism’s purified form of market capitalism, the result is, inevitably, criminogenic at the main points of disruption and opportunity. The main generator and conduit of this pressure is the consumer culture that throughout the twentieth century has become increasingly important to the expansionary logic of our post-needs capitalist economy. The evidence we present throughout the book suggests that this metaculture has clearly assimilated young people involved in crime. As each generation passes, living in this culture is increasing the number of individuals who lack the political and symbolic resources necessary to resist its compulsions and myths, and who therefore readily subscribe to its more deleterious tendencies. For instance, the ‘live now – pay later’ norm encourages the short-cut mentality and ratchets up consumer debt as well as cultivating egoism and an irresponsible, instrumental attitude towards others. Vital aspects of traditional working-class cultures that are now being systematically jettisoned by consumerism once constituted an anti-utilitarian buffer against the forces of augmented egoism, narcissism and competitive individualism, forces that are active in the legitimisation and normalisation of criminogenic practices in everyday economic and cultural interaction (see Barber 2007; Bakan 2005). It might be worth stating here, again for the benefit of some of the less thoughtful critics of this position (see, for example, O’Brien 2007), that we do not see the culture of the British post-war working class as an alternative candidate for Fukuyama’s (1993) ‘end of history’, and nor do we see it as a flawless model of human existence, better in every way than today’s cultures, to be deified, returned to in a romantic homecoming and exported across the known world. Nor do we deny that some aspects of today’s culture are indeed better. Caricatures such as this one are predicated on a poor understanding of history and culture; a more useful conception of historical change would lie somewhere between Braudel and Foucault, a mixture of continuities and discontinuities. What we claim is that the cultural ethos of anti-utilitarian solidarity that was recognised and cultivated by the socialist and social democratic political projects, and which had a fragile existence in some working-class cultures, was a vital quality that should have been a principal continuity, but it was placed under systematic attack by the forces of neo-liberal ideology in the 1980s, and significantly eroded in the socio-economic reality these forces brought upon us.

The dominant discourses of liberal-left labelling theory and conservative or neo-classical control theories colluded in the marginalisation of concentrated criminological explorations of motivations and ‘root causes’. The aetiological explanations of social democratic criminologists were denounced by both parties in what amounted to a quintessential ‘straw man’ argument, accusing them of pathologising individuals, culture and society and making crude and unsatisfactory mechanistic links between poverty, egoism and crime. In fact, as Reiner (2007: 9) argues, most of these criminologists ‘always stressed the importance of culture and morality in shaping how economic circumstances were experienced and interpreted, and thus in mediating any link with crime’. However, the liberal symbolic interactionist perspective, wherein meaning and morality are socially constructed in negotiations between groups that have different degrees of definitional power, unwisely assumed that these interpretations are relatively ‘free’. The conservative position, wherein they are constructed in the eternal Manichean battle between good and evil (with humans, of course, inclining towards the evil), unwisely assumed fixed tendencies, which required constant discipline by an elite class. In comparison to these positions, we will argue, what we might call the ‘radical social democratic’ school’s attempt to account for all variables from political economy to culture, psychology, social relations and statecraft was from its very beginnings (see Bonger 1916; Merton 1938) always far more comprehensive, rounded and sop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The return to motivation
• 2. Life on the precipice
• 3. Consumption and identification: Some insights into desires and motivations
• 4. Criminal biographies: Two case studies
• 5. Consumerism and the counterculture
• 6. Critical reflections on the intellectual roots of post-war criminological theory
• 7. Myths of exclusion and resistance: A critique of some current thinking on crime and culture
• 8. Consumerism, narcissism and the reorientation of the Western super-ego
• 9. Conclusion: Consumerism, crime and the pseudo-pacification process
• Glossary of terms
• References
• Name index
• Subject index