Philosophy, Crime, and Criminology

Part Four: Aesthetics and Crime

part four Aesthetics and Crime The study of aesthetics addresses many provocative questions involving image, style, perception, and symbolism. These are matters that transcend the modernist scientific polarities of factual and counterfactual , form and content, reality and representation . A philosophy of crime that is steeped in the logic of aesthetics exposes, challenges, and/or displaces cultural depictions of such phenomena as beauty, truth, and justice. In this aesthetic excursion, the line between good and evil, virtue and vice, law makers and law breakers is blurred, reconfigured, and, in the extreme, obliterated. As chapter 7 explains, the study of aesthetics is a field whose attention is directed at once toward the limits of the human imagination and the transgression of those limits as a site for the transcendent in representation . Through a brief genealogy of Kant’s notion of the sublime, the chapter lays out a point from which to consider the development of modern aesthetics and the emergence of a post-structuralist perspec- tive, a turn that the author assumes to be among the essential markers of an aesthetics of crime and criminology. The chapter then outlines an aesthetics of crime based upon Foucault’s theoretical insights, arguing that, in the act of prohibition and the intentional removal of the practice of punishment from visibility, a dislocation and consequent proliferation in crime occurs. The spectacle of crime, removed in practice, is translated into an aesthetics of representation that is consequently severed from crime’s actuality, resulting in an invisibility and consequent aphasia that establishes the contemporary parameters of sociocultural understandings of crime. Criminology’s task remains importantly to move beyond traditional social constructionist perspectives of crime by acknowledging that its foundations rest upon this elemental crisis of representation. The chapter concludes with a case study of these various theoretical points in cultural practice. Chapter 8 furthers this philosophical inquiry by examining the aesthetics of cultural criminology. As the author notes, efforts to comprehend the nature of crime and its control have typically relied upon favored ways of modernist thinking, invoking the false dichotomies of form versus substance, and the corresponding hierarchy of presumed rational scienti fic inquiry. This investigatory model presumes that surfaces must be stripped away so as to reveal the deeper structure of meaning that lies beneath them. However, over the past decade, the emerging subfield of cultural criminology has offered a considerable departure from conventional interpretive sociology and theoretical analysis. At its core, this heterodox orientation problematizes crime and crime control by proposing a radical ontology. As chapter 8 explains, the philosophy of aesthetics concerns itself with representation, style, image, and perception. As theoretical critique, it asserts that illusion and reality, form and content, beauty and disfigurement co-constitute the social reality of crime. As a provocative alternative, cultural criminology coalesces the factual and the counterfactual, the authentic and the counterfeit, regarding them as part of an interwoven kaleidoscopic tapestry, a textured and layered pastiche where surfaces contribute to rather than detract from the overall meaning-making process. Indeed, these are sites of knowledge awaiting discovery, interpretation, and interrogation. In addition, chapter 8 explains how cultural criminology represents an ontological and epistemological filter of sorts through which conventional criminology can be demystified and debunked and a counterdis220 / aesthetics and crime course on crime and its control can be articulated and valorized. More fundamentally, however, the chapter delineates how cultural criminology has relied upon its own heterodox theorizing to assess criminology proper. Arguing that traditional interpretations of criminology’s intellectual limitations are rooted in a flawed aesthetic, cultural criminology proposes a philosophical approach more consonant with the aesthetic imperative of representation, style, image, symbol, and perception. The chapters in this section reveal the manner in which the sundry representations of crime are themselves problematic, limiting the horizon of meaning for aesthetic truth and criminology proper. To this end, the chapters expose the taken-for-granted iconic scenes, spatial discontinuities , and indexical images that constitute the popular discourse on crime and its control. Accordingly, the growth of criminological verstehen depends on how cultural manifestations of crime, criminals, and criminal behavior are interpreted and transcended both in theory and action. This is a task of deconstruction and reconstruction, one that seeks to wrestle with the philosophical foundations of crime emanating from the contemporary crisis in image, sign, and symbol. aesthetics and crime / 221 ...