Theorizing Crime and Deviance by Steve Hall

Author:Steve Hall [Hall, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138388628
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Later (Chapter 9) that ‘breakdown of trust’ will be located as a traumatic and formative historical event in English bourgeois culture, but for the moment we can see that evil is dependent on the power it can arbitrarily exert on others, and it is this power that in its social form has been transferred into the abstract form of money. The corruption of the post-war political class and their abandonment of the settlement on behalf of the global financial elite constitute a traumatic breakdown of trust on a mass cultural scale, more so because the municipal welfare technicians had manoeuvred themselves into a position of in loco parentis. It did not produce serial killers and child molesters, but it did send a heavy current of cynical nihilism through the social body.

Perhaps only a counter-current of asceticism can negate the traumatized-narcissistic will that seeks to impose suffering on others, an unwelcome Puritan intervention in the age of freedom and sensuous expression. Nietzsche was the high-priest of uninhibited expression, but his mistake was to see the outward directed drives as spontaneous, and he fell back into the naturalism he was trying to escape. Thus he could not see the aroused will for what it was, a post-aristocratic high-intensity artifice created by the voiding of community and the stimulation of anxiety, and the social process of blocking aggression and inculcating guilt as the historical construction of the super-ego, forcing aggression inwards to sublimate the will and convert its aggression to symbolic forms, harnessed via its organization as a social struggle for distinction into an economic driver (Hall et al., 2008). It was thus a small step from Nietzsche to Ayn Rand, and far from moving into a period of transcendence where the human being overcomes the struggle of the ideal against the supposed natural impulse, we moved into a period where the struggle was shifted to a far higher level of intensity yet, at the same time, a far lower level of spontaneity and idealism. Manufactured desires and drives tailored to economic expansion and ushered to the borders of jouissance struggled against a flexible and concessionary ethico-legal means of managing them. This occurs in a condition where the eternal return has cancelled the dualism of past and future, but in the negative sense, where the solidity of the past and open possibility of the future are both denied by the permanent present of market pragmatism. Deleuze’s wish that within the confines of market pragmatism some sort of idealized Nietzschean affirmation will return to usher in a world of delightful difference and previously unknown happiness, along with Foucault’s dream of discursive closure and renewal as the dynamic force for new forms of life as the disciplinary society is dismantled, have been shattered on the concrete ground of empirical reality as the same old prejudices, fears, struggles and tensions have yet again broken free from their shackles; resource scarcity, geopolitical wars, mass global unemployment, genocide, crime waves, corruption, torture and so on. Do we have

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