Vice, Crime, and Poverty. How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld by Dominique Kalifa (review)

Dominique Kalifa is a leading historian of the social imaginary. His Vice, Crime, and Poverty, published in French in 2013, reveals the potentials of this project. People perceive and respond to social phenomena through a social imaginary which draws on the discourses and representations common to the society to which they belong. As these social phenomena and the society in which they are experienced changes, so does the social imaginary.

In the early nineteenth century, the urban middle-class in Western Europe and the Americas invented itself by participating in the construction of a taxonomy of the underworld (the bas fonds) which it inhabited with diverse figures characterized as poor, immoral, imprisoned, institutionalized, and criminal—that is to say the abnormal—that delimited what the middle class saw as normal. Journalists, novelists, and social scientists evoked disgust and fear of this underworld in the languages and structures of their genres, but drew narratives, tropes and facts from one another. The voyeuristic element in the presentation of the underworld as spectacle, marked by a fascination with the exotic and the erotic, developed as the distance of those situated below from an increasingly prosperous middle-class audience appeared to grow.

Kalifa identifies the end of the era of the particular underworld he examines in the mid-twentieth century. Over time, the social imaginary of the underworld fostered an urgency to address the social issues this discourse constructed. This took the form of urban renewal; the social sciences, which made the material situations of the inhabitants of the underworld more comprehensible to the middle class; and the extension of public welfare programs. Kalifa also points to the appearance in the social imaginary of an organized and wealthy criminal underworld, merchants of sexual experiences, of drugs and of alcohol during prohibition that those aboveground denied themselves and so paid all the more to obtain. In a populist turn, the middle class linked the social imaginary of the new underworld elite with the aristocracies of birth, finance, and celebrity with which it was fascinated as well and to which it assigned similar traits. The underworld persists today in the social imagination of the aboveground middle class and its tropes and characters assume new guises: the deceitful beggar has given way to the "welfare queen." Looking at science fiction, Kalifa suggests that we cannot imagine a future without an underworld.

The social imaginary of the underworld Kalifa examines had its origins in London and Paris in the 1830s and 1840s and spread worldwide through the popular press, novels, and later in films. He reveals the importance of a transnational cultural history in which images, metaphors and narratives move from one site to another. Kalifa identifies Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris as "the first great phenomenon of cultural globalization" (75); in the decades after it was published, every major city in the West saw the appearance of a book of its own mysteries. He makes the same observation with respect to the police chief Eugène Francois Vidocq's Mémoires. When the underground Kalifa examines gave way in the twentieth century to one centered on organized crime, the United States took the lead in disseminating worldwide the new social imaginary in popular fiction and film.

Kalifa recognizes that the social imaginary of the underworld often drew on the metaphor of the sewer, the place where the world above deposited a residue below. He says the disappearance of the cesspool "was conceived of as the absolute symbol of the diminution of the underworld" (169), but does not examine what took the place of the cesspool in Paris. In a particular form of urban renewal, the aboveground in Paris, at the height of the period Kalifa examines, marked its mastery of one manifestation of the fears engendered by the social imaginary of the underworld through celebration of the ecological conversion of what was threatening to a social...