What is Criminology About?

Philosophical Reflections

Don Crewe, Ronnie Lippens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138025400
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686361
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Since its inception, criminology has had trouble answering the question of what it is about. But although many consider the answer to this question to be self-evident, this book pursues the provocative possibility that criminology does not know what the object of its study is; it merely knows what it is called. Aiming to foster dissent among those who claim to know what criminology is about – and those who don't – writers from different schools of thought come together in this collection to answer the question "what is criminology about?" Building on a resurgence of interest in the nature of the object of criminology, their responses aim to deepen, and to expand, the current debate. This book will, then, be of considerable interest to contemporary proponents and students of criminology and law.

Part I
Elements

Chapter 1
What is criminology about?

Reflections on the image of the line

Ronnie Lippens

Introduction

It would probably amount to kicking in open doors if one claimed that criminology is actually about lines, i.e. dividing lines in particular. Indeed, since its formal inception in the nineteenth century (let us perhaps, for the sake of argument, agree on this chronology), criminology has been the place where a number of questions were pondered. Each of those questions refers to lines. Why is it that some people cross ‘the line’? Or, why is it that we always end up with such ‘lines’ in the first place? How is it that only a particular set of behaviours (or those persons and groups associated with those behaviours) have been prohibited (or excluded), placed out of bounds so to speak? Why them, and why not those others over there? And what should we do with those who decide to transgress the lines and bounds? Should they be quarantined behind this or that line? Or should attempts be made to bring them back this side of the line, back into the fold, as it were? Should we make efforts to prevent any such crossings of ‘the line’?

All this may sound very banal, very open-door-like, and much of it has been explored elsewhere (e.g. in Lippens 2003) and should perhaps not be rehearsed here. However, there is one particular question which criminologists have posed only very rarely, i.e. can there be a human world without any dividing lines at all? Could we possibly imagine such a world? Many a criminologist may have silently cherished the hope that the answer to that question might be a wavering ‘yes’; some may still do. Perhaps they accept only grudgingly, or at least reluctantly, Durkheim’s deep insight that yes, even in the community of saints, there will be the inevitable dividing lines. It is hoped this chapter might be able to contribute to answering that particular question, in however small a measure.

The aim here is to explore the question from two perspectives which often find themselves at opposite sides of the philosophical spectrum. The first might be called Spinozism and it includes the work and thought of Benedict de Spinoza and a series of authors whose work could, arguably, be deemed to have neo-Spinozist characteristics (e.g. Henri Bergson and, more recently, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). Let us, for the sake of brevity, use the acronym SP to denote this perspective. The second perspective consists of the twin perspectives of phenomenology (as conceived and developed by Edmund Husserl) and existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre’s in particular). We may perhaps be allowed to use the letters PE here by way of an acronym. The work of the aforementioned philosophers is explored with an eye on answering one of the most basic questions that criminologists could agonize over, ‘Is a human world without dividing lines imaginable?’. The answer, in a nutshell, will sound something like this, ‘no, for images are lines, and lines are images’.

As said, SP and PE tend to occupy opposite sides of the philosophical spectrum. This is so for a number of reasons and many are discussed below. Let us just mention one, arguably the most crucial point of irreconcilable difference. In SP, the idea of a vacuum is vehemently denied and opposed, whereas in PE the vacuum, or the void, is actually the starting point of philosophical speculation, if not analysis. In his Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), Spinoza was very adamant about this (Spinoza 1996: 12): there can be no vacuum in Nature or God (Spinoza used both terms interchangeably). Nature/God is of one substance (and one substance only). All that is in Nature/God is just a mode of this one substance. A vacuum would have to be just one particular mode of the substance of Nature/God. But that, of course, implies that it could then never be a vacuum. Consciousness too is only a mode of the substance of Nature/God. There is nothing really special about consciousness, but here is where PE would beg to differ. There is something special about consciousness, and philosophers such as Sartre, for example, maintained that it is a void. It is a vacuum. This means that there are, at the very deepest level of conscious existence, strict boundaries, indeed dividing lines that are of an absolute nature. The separation between the void of consciousness on the one hand, for example, and everything else that it is not, is absolute. These positions are irreconcilable and as we shall see, they are also very important.

Having said that, however, both SP and PE agree on this: that the world —the human world in particular — cannot but generate lines of division. Let us for the purpose of this chapter focus on the world at the point where it would include the thing that in the PE perspective would be called ‘consciousness’. Indeed, authors within the PE perspective are only interested in the world in so far as it is a world that includes ‘consciousness’. SP and PE will tend to agree: the world (the world that includes consciousness in particular) inevitably generates lines of division. There can be no escape here. To be more specific even: the human world, or human life and human existence, will inevitably generate lines of division, and with division will come, equally inevitably, opposition and conflict.

In SP, we thus have a perspective where it is accepted that from a condition that is marked by the total, absolute lack of separation and division (the oneness, if you wish, of the substance of the world) flow, unavoidably, division and separation. In PE, on the other hand, lines of division emerge from a condition which itself, at its very deepest depths, already carries the seeds of radical, absolute separation. All this may not bode very well for those remaining criminologists who are still secretly harbouring hopes for a world where all division has been eradicated (the use of words here is, of course, deliberate) and where human existence has transcended to a state (again a deliberate use of words) of total inclusion and ‘oneness’.

This chapter includes explorations only of just two philosophical perspectives, i.e. SP and PE, and very incomplete explorations at that. It should go without saying that the reader may not hope to find anything in this chapter that goes beyond the mere scratching of the surface of both philosophical perspectives. There simply is no space available here to go into more depth. It is hoped, however, that this chapter is read as an invitation to take this line of exploration further or, as the case may be of course, to critically disassemble and re-assemble the dividing lines in it (here again the choice of words is significant, as we shall see).

Spinoza and neo-Spinozism

Affecting bodies

Spinoza’s Nature/God may be of one substance, it stretches into infinity. The substance of the world modulates infinitely. Bodies are formed in it incessantly. Those bodies impact on each other in cause-effect chains that are infinite and that cannot be uncovered or traced by any of the bodies which are too finite and too limited. It is impossible for them to grasp the infinitely vast chains of causes and effects that affect (i.e. have an impact on) them, and which they are fully part of. As said above, according to Spinoza, there can be no vacuum in Nature/God, since the world, or Nature/God, is of one substance. ‘[...], it follows also’, he states, ‘that corporeal substance, insofar as it is a substance, cannot be divided’ (Spinoza 1996: 12). And since there is no vacuum, there cannot be free will: ‘In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another and this again by another, and so to infinity’ (Spinoza 1996: 62). The ‘mind’ also is, of course, only a ‘mode’ of the substance of the world. This world knows no good or bad. It just is. It is an infinite substance in which an infinite variety of modalities impact on each other in infinitely complex cause-effect chains. However, there is also an ‘ethics’ in Spinoza’s Ethics. The point is, claims Spinoza, to strive to increase the capacity of bodies to impact on other bodies, and to be impacted by them. In other words: if there is a ‘good’ then by that it is understood ‘what we certainly know to be useful to us’ (Spinoza 1996: 116). ‘Useful’ is ‘whichever so disposes the human body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external bodies in a great many ways’ (Spinoza 1996: 137). ‘Good’, then, is what increases bodies’ ‘power of acting’ (Spinoza 1996: 70). This ‘ethics’, it should be noted in passing, has of course obvious implications for social or criminal policy. Spinoza explores a number of ways in which the capacity of bodies to act could be increased. The foremost among them is, however, the application of reason, i.e. through a deeper understanding of the cause-effect chains that the world is made of. A deeper understanding of these chains, Spinoza surmises, should allow bodies to exercise a certain level of control over themselves and their life conditions. A lack of understanding in bodies only leads them to be merely impacted upon, i.e. to be a mere effect in cause-effect chains, and to be a victim of ‘passions’ (Spinoza 1996: 165). Another way to increase bodies’ capacities to act is ‘friendship’, i.e. joint endeavours whereby all partaking bodies share one another’s capacities and potential.

So, then, where is the ‘line’ in Spinoza’s world? It is telling that Spinoza himself saw the infinite network of cause-effect chains as ‘a question of lines, places, and bodies’ (Spinoza 1996: 69). This is a phrase that would much later be evoked by neo-Spinozists such as Gilles Deleuze who considered the work of ‘schizoanalysis’ (i.e. the analysis of vital, productive, restrictive, but always clashing life forces) to be ‘this analysis of lines, spaces, becoming’ (Deleuze 1995: 34). But there is another sense in which the line appears in Spinoza’s world. When bodies impact on each other they generate ‘impressions’, or ‘traces’, in each other. Those impressions are ‘images of things’, that is, images of bodies and objects. Those images, once formed, are then also objects or bodies that can be held by bodies, ‘In just the same way as thoughts and ideas of things are ordered and connected in the mind, so the affections of the body, or images of things are ordered and connected in the body’ (Spinoza 1996: 163). In other words, the world (or Nature/God) is an infinite complex of bodies impacting on other bodies whereby, in this very process of impacting, images are generated which in turn are stored and connected in bodies, making the infinite cause-effect chains even more complex. To increase bodies’ capacity to act, or their ‘power of acting’, actually amounts to increasing their capacity to generate, store and mobilise (i.e. connect and disconnect) ‘images of things’.

This, as we shall see, is a point that was to be built on by later vitalists such as Henri Bergson, but seriously criticised by existentialists such as Sartre. For our purposes, however, we could do worse than stress that, only very recently, a number of neuroscientists are beginning to make use of Spinoza’s insights to make sense of their own empirical data. Antonio Damasio for example was struck by how Spinoza’s insights — in particular his notion of the ‘idea of a body’ — can be brought to bear on the analysis of the workings of the human brain (Damasio 2003). The human brain (i.e. the human body), when experiencing the world (i.e. when experiencing ‘impact’ from other bodies in the world) incessantly generates images. In this process, the human brain/body also generates images of its own body (the ‘idea’ of its own body) as it is positioned spatially in the world, surrounded by impacting bodies that are external to it. If and when this occurs, the brain/body ‘feels’. Thus, when the human brain/body experiences the world, it will ‘feel’ it at the point where an image of its own body-amidst-its-impacting-surroundings is generated. This image is one that is marked by a line, i.e. the line that traces the contours of the body in its surrounding space. Other writers such as Bernard Andrieu (2006) suggest that human thought (which works by ‘reflecting’ upon ‘mental images’) is, on the one hand, of course generated by and in the body but is, on the other, also ‘relatively autonomous’ from the mere matter of the body. ‘Relatively’ autonomous, for any autonomy rests upon an ‘illusion’. ‘Human thought’, Andrieu writes, ‘is produced by human bodies, but thought believes in its freedom because of the natural illusion of forgetting its relative autonomy. Yet this illusion has a real power over the body’ (Andrieu 2006: 153; emphasis added).

Other neuroscientists have, in turn, expanded on Damasio’s neo-Spinozist work. Gail and Richard Murrow (2013), for example, have used Damasio (and therefore, indirectly, Spinoza) to describe how the line around the image of the body-in-its-impacting-world is only the very deepest, basic form of a number of other imagined lines. The human brain/body not only has the capacity to generate images of its own body as it is being impacted upon, or as it impacts on other bodies, it does, upon impact, also, and constantly so, generate images whereby lines are drawn around potential (indeed: imagined) collective bodies. According to Murrow and Murrow —and this is their main thesis — it is precisely this capacity to imagine lines around collective bodies that is the origin of all sense of community, law or morality, however diverse and potentially infinitely varied, of course, all the thus imagined collective bodies may be. With all this in mind, one could say that to increase bodies’ capacity to act would actually boil down to increasing their capacity to imagine lines around as many potential collective bodies as possible.

Images and fabulations

Henri Bergson’s work — which itself would later thoroughly inspire Gilles Deleuze’s — is indebted to Spinoza’s but takes the latter’s insights further. Bergson takes from Spinoza the idea that the world is an infinite, indivisible expanse of ultimately ungraspable impacts or ‘affects’. But he adds to Spinoza’s insight. The world is in constant flux. It is constant, indivisible change or becoming. It is constant, unstoppable evolution. The world’s evolution, however, is not just adaptive, as a Darwin would have it. It is also creative, as Bergson argued in his Creative Evolution (1911; published originally in 1907). The world creates, and has done so particularly from the moment life — life that itself emer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Elements
• PART II Themes
• Index