Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime
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Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime

Mike Presdee

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eBook - ePub

Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime

Mike Presdee

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About This Book

Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime attempts to make sense of the current increase in violence, cruelty, hate and humiliation, which has come to permeate daily life. The text argues that an overly organised economic world has provoked a widespread desire for extreme, oppositional forms of popular and personal pleasure. This desire has resulted in a cathartic 'second life' of illicit pleasures often deemed criminal by those in power. Amongst the exciting issues Mike Presdee addresses are: * joyriding
* street crime
* antisocial behaviour in private via the internet
* hate, hurt and humiliation in popular culture
* the popularisation and criminalisation of sadomasochism and dance music cultures.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2003
ISBN
9781134554577
Topic
Law
Subtopic
Criminal Law
Edition
1

1 Introduction

In the last two weeks of April 1999 there were a number of horrendous international and national events, the accumulation of which brought into sharp focus the nature of life in contemporary industrial societies. In a school in Denver, Colorado there was the ‘Trench coat’ massacre, followed the next week by a similar shoot-out in Alberta, Canada. The very next week five young men in New York were arrested for plotting a similar fate for their school and fellow students. This was followed by the death of 45 people in tornados. In Britain there were three nail bomb attacks in the London areas of Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, the last of which was placed in a crowded gay bar with devastating results. This followed seven days of armed sieges both in London and the north-west of England and, in London, the well-known British television presenter Jill Dando was executed on her own doorstep, creating media mass-mourning throughout the country. In the Netherlands Dutch police shot four soccer ‘hooligans’ whilst Moroccan soccer fans went on the rampage throughout the rest of the country. All of this happened in the middle of the Kosovan War, where the images and sounds of daily death and destruction became the standard fare of most of the media of the Western world, interspersed with the ‘gripping’ and ‘entertaining’ footage of people being destroyed by either human or natural disasters. The school siege in Denver was relayed to the world ‘live’ as television cameras followed the drama with a running commentary being given by trapped students on their mobile phones. Tornado destruction was followed eagerly by both professional cameras and the amateur camcorder.
Politicians, pundits and the media had a field day with predictions of the end of civilisation as we know it. The cartoon in the 2 May’s Sunday Times depicted the word ‘CIVILISATION’ blown to pieces and splattered with blood, whilst the Prime Minister felt the need to write his own column in the Sunday Times where he stated, ‘The bombers will fail because they are not part of modern Britain. They are the real outsiders in society. The minority.’ He went on to call the culprits ‘evil thugs’ and then used the rest of his statement to defend his and Nato’s bomb violence in the Balkans, thereby giving the message that it wasn’t the violence that was wrong but it was more a question of who used it and for what reason. Indeed, the Prime Minister through his actions con-firmedto both the national and international communities that: ‘Violence may change the direction of violence, invert the roles of violation and victim, but it necessarily affirms the principle of violence whatever else it achieves’ (Kappeler 1995: 258). It was as if the ability to control violence on a personal level and control violence at the level of the state were unconnected. Yet the Labour government’s then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Dr Mo Mowlam, reiterated in a statement on 26 August 1999 that she was ‘in no doubt that all violence, for whatever reason it is perpetuated, is unacceptable’.
However, the general targets for blame quickly became ‘young people’, as always, along with the notion of ‘evil’, as well as a whole collection of the usual scapegoats such as television and the Internet, as the whole of the ‘chattering classes’ tried to fathom out what was going on in Western civilisation. Almost all the newspapers carried articles from the Internet on how to buy weapons and how to make bombs, with page after page on how to conduct a successful war in the Balkans. The speculation as to who murdered Jill Dando and why was coupled with daily articles on how you would go about hiring a hit-man if you wanted to, how much t would cost and how a hit-man might go about it. The Observer carried the story ‘“Two in the head, one in the heart”: Tony Thompson is told how an expert hitman would have done it.’ (2/5/99). The Observer newspaper obviously realised that this was a service they could provide their readers, as if we all had someone we wanted dead and that this sort of service was commonplace. The Sunday Times carried the headline ‘Children of 14 carry guns for “status”’ with a photograph of ten-year-old Americans brandishing automatic weapons and the warning that ‘now they are spreading to Britain’ (Sunday Times 9/5/99). Yet at the same time there was throughout Britain a general feeling of fascination tinged with fear for a world that appeared to be rapidly turning ‘upside down’. Crime and violence seemed to have saturated all of life to the extent that for a while there seemed nothing else.
This book is an attempt to enter the murky waters of explanation. It is an attempt to put some pieces of the puzzle of crime, violence and transgression together to help us make sense of what goes on around us. Labelling all acts that we don’t understand as ‘evil’ leads us nowhere. It is in the end an intellectual cop-out that leads us away from the analysis of society and culture and guides us instead into the realm of the spiritual and the unknown and the unfathomable forces of darkness where we can have little or no effect and where we have no responsibility to understand. It persuades us that we have no need to look at our society, only that we need to examine inside the mind of the ‘evil’ individual.
I believe, however, that the context in which crime and violence are acted out is of paramount importance, and that an analytical ‘cultural criminology’ is necessary to achieve any in-depth understanding of crime, including violent crime and so-called ‘senseless’ acts.
As Norbert Elias eloquently pointed out in the early 1980s,
As things are, one may even fail to recognise violent action between or within states as a human-made catastrophe. Social scientists have not yet succeeded in demonstrating convincingly that killing is no answer to killing, whether in a good or bad cause. Nor have they succeeded in making it more widely known and also better understood that cycles of violence, whether they are kept in motion by integration or by hegemonial struggles, by class conflicts or by interstate conflicts, have strong self-escalating tendencies. War processes, for example, are difficult to stop even if they are still in the preparatory state of reciprocal threats of violence creeping towards its use. They almost invariably breed professional killers of one kind or another, whether these killers have the social character of dictator or general, of freedom fighter or mercenary. Their impulses and their actions are geared to mutual suspicion, hatred and violence: as levers of human catastrophes they are to be feared no less than the plague which once seemed to humans equally uncontrollable.
(Quoted in Goudsblom and Mennell 1998: 86)
The fascination with violence and crime clearly experienced in the final two weeks of April 1999 described above shows that there is also potential entertainment value to be realised from such acts. These ‘stories’ point clearly to the ‘violence of human possibility and imagination’ that Schechner (1988) talks about. The way that we enjoy violence, crime, humiliation and hurt is part of the equation and needs to be examined and thought through. Even the enjoyment of doing wrong, which many of us have felt at some time in our lives, becomes important as it puts us all in some sense ‘in touch’ with crime, connecting us to it in an emotional way so that we become acquainted with the emotions of criminal life through our own transgressions. Indeed, crime is as much about emotions – hatred, anger, frustration, excitement and love – as it is about poverty, possessing and wealth. In a society such as ours where emotion stands against the rational and material world, those without wealth are left only with the world of emotions to express their hurts, their injustices and their identity. Their transgressions, arising as they do from this world of emotions, are as a consequence seeped in emotive elements.Rage, anger and hatred are commonplace characteristics in the performance of crime.
The feeling of ‘getting away with it’ that comes as part of doing wrong, the buzz and excitement of the act of doing wrong itself, of living on the ‘edge’ of law and order, are all emotions that many seek out in the daily performance of their lives. Indeed, in a society where ‘compassion fatigue’ (Mestrovic 1997) is common, the seeking out of increasingly heightened emotional experiences becomes more and more a part of everyday life. The author Anthony Burgess in his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, explained his own self-disgust at his emotions when creating the violence of his novel A Clockwork Orange (1996) when he commented, ‘I was sickened by my own excitement at setting it down’. Here he recognised how his emotions had transgressed the rules of rationality and that there was something in his cultural inheritance that had led him to revel in and be excited by violence. Indeed, he requested that the film version of his novel, which concentrated on the violence, be withheld from the British viewing public.
Enjoyment, desire and pleasure are then important features of social life and in some way they are both transposed into cultural forms and emanate from them. Richard Schechner (1988) again points out that representations found and experienced as cultural artefacts are ‘evidence of the violence of desire, its twisted and dangerous possibilities’. Desire becomes the engine that drives us to seek out certain cultural acts whilst the resulting pleasure drives desire once again to find new limits. Gilles Deleuze points to the ‘sensualness’ of ‘wickedness’ when he identified two kinds of wrong-doing, the one ‘unthought out and common’ and the other ‘self-consciousand sensualised and intelligent’ (1997: 37). And Elias talked of how human groups took a ‘strange delight in asserting their superiority over others, particularly if it has been attained by violent means’ (Goudsblom and Mennell 1998: 89).
In the case of the Colorado killings, much was made of the young killer’s ‘Goth’ culture and fascination with Goth music and its focus on death, dying and darkness. (This reported interest in Goth culture was something that was later shown to be untrue.) This crude attempt to connect youth subcultures with murder continued in the week following the Soho bombings, when the Observer newspaper similarly reported a neighbour of the three arrested men as saying,
They would wear black baggy clothes and T-shirts with ‘Iron Maiden’ written on them. Their friends used to come round and they all seemed to be in Gothic clothes, looking like they were in a band.
(Observer 2/5/99)
In the Sunday Times the same witness talked of a man whom he ‘thought looked like a computer nerd. Both the men used to wear mainly black clothes and I saw them wearing Iron Maiden T-shirts’. Andrew Marr writing in the Observer noted:
There has been a lot of nonsense talked about the specially evil influence of the shock-rock star Marilyn Manson, adored by the Denver boy killers. He looks like a rather amateur copy of Alice Cooper . . . poseur-Satanists have infected popular music for decades. But there are under-cultures on the net, Gothic necro-fantasy which can grip kids going through that gloomy phase when one’s body is erupting with chemicals.
(Observer 2/5/99)
Whilst others talked of ‘psychopathy as a fashion accessory’ (Guardian 8/5/99), the film actor Leonardo DiCaprio declared he would never again appear in a violent movie.
No matter what we feel about these statements, it is clear that cultural forms and artefacts are an important element in our everyday lives and as such we quickly come into conflict, through the seeking of pleasure, with the dominant perspectives on life. It is here that we enter the realm of challenge, control, resistance and even carnival. It is here somewhere in the process of culture formation and identity formation that the criminalisation process itself begins. The response by authority to the unfathomable is to outlaw and to criminalise; this is part of the process of the criminalisation of what Chris Rojek calls the ‘deviant leisure’ of the oppressed and the dispossessed (Rojek 1995: 99).
What follows in this book is, in part, about pleasure, the performance of pleasure, the display of pleasure and the consumption of pleasure. (Part I attempts to analyse and Part II to contextualise.) Such pleasures are not of course universal; in a desire to exercise their pleasures, a certain group will inevitably displease others – at times directly, at other times indirectly. In some cases the construction of displeasure for some is the very fount of pleasure for others. As Deleuze points out, ‘The strange relationship between pleasure in doing and pleasure in suffering evil has always been sensed by doctors and writers who have recorded man’s intimate life’ (Deleuze 1997: 38). Christopher Lasch too recognises the relationship between pleasure, desire and commodity production:
In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure – on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production.
(Lasch 1979: 69)
Excitement, even ecstasy (the abandonment of reason and rationale), is the goal of the performance of many of the dramas related here. The quest for excitement is directly related to the breaking of boundaries, of confronting parameters and playing at the margins of social life in the challenging of controllers and their control mechanisms.Further I am concerned here, in the main, with pleasure sought and gained on the margins of social life and, more to the point, the illegal performance of those pleasures.
Much of this book is concerned with that part of life described by Bakhtin as the ‘second life of the people’ (Bakhtin 1984). It is from the second life of the people that the majority of ‘transgressions’ emanate. It is here that we find the genesis and rationale for behaviour that anticipates the ability to destroy, disrupt and dissent. The second life of the people is that part of life that is inaccessible and untouchable to the ‘official’ world of the scientific rationality of modernity and its politics, parties and politicians. It is the realm of resentment and irrationality par excellence and also the realm of much crime. It is that part of social life that is unknowable to those in power and which therefore stands outside their consciousness and their understanding. They cannot understand it or indeed even ‘read’ it as real life, but only as immoral, uncivilised, obscene and unfathomable social behaviour.
However, as politicians attempt to bend social life through social policies so it leaves us all without a ‘usable past’ to give direction to our lives, forcing us into the realm of the second life (Holquist 1984). In the end there becomes no differentiation between carnival and true life, the second life, where the only laws are the laws of freedom with no possibility of any real life outside of it. This unofficial life is where we express our fears of rational official life, with its meanings and consequences, its poverty and accompanying pains of inequality. This second life is where everyday life resides and where the rationality of law loses its power.
This second festive life expressed through carnival acts cannot be expressed in official rational life where it quickly becomes criminalised and demonised. It is a life that is expressed through the world of excess, obscenity and degradation. It becomes the only true site for the expression of one’s true feelings for life. It is where the irrational laughs and mocks the rational – where truth can be told against the coldhearted lies of rational, scientific modernity. The second life is lived in the cracks and holes in the structures of official society. It searches for and finds the unpunishable whilst official society seeks to dam up the holes and fill in the cracks, crim-inalisingas it does and making punishable the previously unpunishable. The second life is characterised by ‘freedom, equality and abundance’ (Bakhtin 1984: 9), whilst official life is lived in a world of oppression, inequality and poverty where carnival seeks to assert itself every day and through the everyday, making the second life the only real life with any real meaning. The expression of the second life of the people is performed and brought to life through carnival, which becomes for rational society understood as no more or less than the carnival of crime.
The process of violence involved is about powerlessness and meaninglessness and the loosening of cultural imperatives. In short it is about the total estrangement from the powerful. It is that part of life that celebrates the irrational, celebrates the incomprehensible, celebrates the crude, celebrates the nothingness of being powerless. This celebration of disrespect is manifested through the theatre of carnival, the debris of which is to be found in the daily performances and acting out of ordinary everyday lives. The world of the rational fragments the world of the irrational so that the ‘second life of the people’, no longer controlled and contained by traditional carnival, disintegrates and breaks away. The resulting debris of carnival now resides and takes refuge in the ‘everyday’ lived life of the ‘other’ world. It is a world characterised by defiance and the destruction of meaning. It is an untouchable world based on the threat of the bizarre, beyond the reach of the rational. It is a world where the ‘fart’ rather than the ‘thought’ is of more importance. It is truly the world of the carnival of crime.
The rules that come with the process of ‘acquiring’ and ‘ownership’ seemed more difficult to accept than those of stealing time and place. Stealing time, although an offence, was easier to hide and explain, but stealing ‘possessions’ was more complex, for whereas stealing ‘time’
could get you the sack, stealing ‘possessions’ could get you gaol. But why was it that some people were allowed possessions and others not? Why did some have bikes and others not? Some big homes and others not? Some honey and others not? Increasingly, as I got older, I became more sensitive about displaying myself and my everyday possessions that enabled people at a glance to ‘place me’; know where I was from and so know when I was ‘straying’; when I was out of my place. The accoutrements of class were becoming like a uniform, displaying my rank and position to everyone. I began to feel ashamed of my sewn-up satchel from ‘Woolies’, that stood out from the shiny leather ones hanging on the backs of other desks; and I sulked quietly in the corner of the changing rooms trying not to bring attention to my old-fashioned brown football boots, which appeared museum pieces compared to the black, shiny, low-cut modern boots pulled on by others.
From my shame slowly developed both defiance and aggression as I excessively and openly consumed all that I stole, displaying my fragile and dishonest wealth to everyone; a rather dishevelled and unkempt young boy growing fat and angry. As I put on weight, so I learned to push it around; and when I was ridiculed because of my hefty and ugly black metal-studded school boots, I responded in playground soccer games in a manner that got me a reputation of a cruel, efficient full-back who would knock you down or break your legs. Those fancy, well-cut, Bata shoes had no deterrent effect compared with a fully studded black boot aimed at defenceless shins. I started to learn about violence as an answer to ridicule, and I started to glorify ugliness, learning how to disrupt the sensitivities of those from more sophisticated backgrounds. I learned who would be offended by a fart or a belch, by leaning on the wall, by a tie hanging down, by a cap not straight: I would show them what I thought of their sophistication, their manners, their world!
(Presdee 1988)
I have moved a long way from talk about death, destruction and ‘senseless acts’ to the criminalisation of culture and everyday life, but it is my contention that the two are intimately linked and are part and parcel of the same debate. It is a difficult debate because it challenges what authority thinks is ‘right’ and makes connections between our ‘right’ lives and others’ ‘wrong’ lives. It puts us in the same box as those we consider criminal and as such makes the very thought uncomfortable and unthinkable. To suggest ...

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