The French Connection in Criminology: Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change

CHAPTER 3. The Second Wave: Interpreting the Past, Building the Present, and Looking Toward the Future

35 CHAPTER 3 The Second Wave: Interpreting the Past, Building the Present, and Looking Toward the Future INTRODUCTION In this chapter, we draw attention to how postmodern lines of inquiry can be interpreted. While we recognize that several skeptical versions of the perspective have received considerable attention in the literature, we suggest how affirmative renderings of postmodernism are not only possible but are already in operation. Indeed, on this latter point, we specifically identify the contributions of several second wave scholars who have appropriated the interpretive tools of the postmodern sciences and have fashioned integrative and affirmative strategies for engaging in law, crime, and social justice research. Several of these studies were cited in the first two chapters. However, in chapter 3 we specifically emphasize how the cross-fertilization of affirmative postmodern ideas and strains of analyses represent the birth of synthetic inroads awaiting refinement through future application studies. In order to accomplish our conceptual and integrative enterprise, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we revisit the pessimistic, fatalistic, and nihilistic forms of postmodern inquiry that underscore much of what is taken to represent this domain of scholarship in the academy today. Canvassing this material is useful as it summarizes the origins of the linguistic turn in postmodern analysis. Moreover, this section helps us understand why researchers in ‫ﱠ‬ law, crime, and social justice have been reluctant to embrace the more relativistic and anti-foundational agenda skeptical postmodernists advance. Second, we identify and explain several noteworthy facets of affirmative postmodern inquiry. Examining these constituents is not an exhaustive enterprise. Indeed, such an undertaking would be anathema to the philosophical underpinnings of this heterodox form of criticism. Instead, our intent is to tease out some of the more protean areas of conceptual analyses that, we believe, deepen and recast our understanding of crime, law, and justice, making prospects for structural and material change more likely.1 Finally, we consider several discernible attempts at postmodern integration. These include lines of thought that can be linked between and among first wave theorists, as well as efforts to establish synthetic forms of postmodern inquiry more generally. Again, this exercise is suggestive rather than definitive. Indeed, we want to put forth the thesis that an integrative and affirmative postmodern project is not only possible in theory, but also identifiable in practice. To this end, we conclude the chapter by delineating several representative examples of second wave scholarship that have appropriated the insights of affirmative and integrative postmodern inquiry and have applied them to enduring questions in law, crime, and justice. In the subsequent application chapters, we suggestively apply much of our synthetic and affirmative commentary as developed here, to notable themes in the crime, law, and social justice literature. THE SKEPTICAL FORMS OF POSTMODERN ANALYSIS Early developments of postmodern analysis tended to be of the skeptical or nihilistic form. For example, Derrida’s notion of “antifoundationalism,” tended to be interpreted in support of a conservative agenda. Since, according to the deconstructionist argument, any collection of criteria established to evaluate something could in turn be evaluated by another set of criteria, and that, in turn, by another (i.e., an infinite regress), why then bother? All is relative . Struggles are futile. Similarly, Baudrillard’s thesis of an endless hyperreality devoid of grounding tended toward a nihilism, a denial of historically contingent foundation. The absence of any grounded reality or agreed upon social contract implies that progress, change, and justice are merely a part of an illusory nonreality that signifies our fragile and fictionalized existences. Further, Michel Foucault’s assessment of power and the panoptic gaze established a hermeneutics of suspicion in which seemingly productive regimes of knowledge/truth functioned as stifling technologies of discipline and surveillance . In their wake, identity is policed; knowledge is territorialized; difference is vanquished. State-endorsed utility dynamics prevail. 36 The French Connection in Criminology Lacan’s work, too, was sometimes accused of being overly dependent on a more conservative notion of desire. Desire was said to arise from an inherent “lack” traced back to the inauguration of the child into the Symbolic Order. At this instant, the subject gains mastery and control by the use of discourse, but loses her/his primordial connectedness to the real. S/he is separated (castrated ) from the real while gaining a place from which to speak in linguistic coordinate systems.Thereafter, it was said, that these “gaps-in-being” (manqué d’etre...