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

CONCLUSION. Back to the Future:Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change

133 CONCLUSION Back to the Future: Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change INTRODUCTION In this concluding chapter, we reflect on four important themes underpinning our collective call to write this book. First, we return to the first-wave postmodern luminaries and their significance for charting several new directions in the development of social theory and its application to various facets of institutional and civic life. Second, we reassess what this book endeavored to accomplish, mindful of its many suggestive, provocative, and novel approaches for rethinking a number of enduring debates in crime, law, and social justice. Third, we explore the relationship between theory and practice, emphasizing the dialectics of struggle in all social movement activities (e.g., prison resistance , victim offender mediation, intentional communities). Fourth, we ponder what work remains, especially if the disciplines of law and criminology are to promote meaningful and sustainable reform. In summary, then, this conclusion chapter represents a momentary step backward, enabling us to recall and to retrieve the future of change, of transpraxis, and of what could be. This is the postmodern legacy that awaits us all. ‫ﱠ‬ RECALLING THE FIRST WAVE Motivated by the perennial desire to construct alternate political, economic, and cultural landscapes, generations of activists, philosophers, and educators have constructed ideal images of its people and their possibilities (Laclau 1990). Typically, these images have reflected a unifying signification of an idyllic past; one that promised to complete the grand human project. While often mythical, representations of the past through invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) and nostalgic utopia (Benjamin 1969) spawned coalescent themes that propelled the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the considerable advance of science through positivism (Laclau 1990). Just as Marxist theory contemplated an evolutionary path to a more humane and just distribution of resources by ushering in a new mode of production (communism), modernist ideals articulated the emergence of an ever more reasonable, logical, and rational set of cultural relationships, institutions , and individuals. In short, human beings were “ever becoming.” We were, as Jürgen Habermas (1984) suggests, the unfinished product of modernity. So, why fix it if it is not broken? The collective intellectual effort presented in this book stands in stark contrast to the evolutionary views of human progress characteristic of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the first wave intellectuals discussed in the first two chapters signify the manifestation of an afterimage (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987); an event so important that it leaves an indelible mark on history. Represented in these first wave thinkers is a serious challenge to the momentum generated by theory, method, and policy promoting the free thinking, freely acting “individual.” In fact, the idea of the individual itself has been dismissed as an artifact of the Renaissance. While a radical idea at the time, given its distinct cognitive and praxis-oriented separation from the powers of the king and church, the historical “individual,” it turns out, is a far more complicated entity. Indeed, a new theory of the “subject” was needed to capture the constitutive, intersectional, and contingent aspects of identity; one that initially was built upon turn of the century phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to delve more deeply into the psychoanalytic, semiotic, and chaotic realms of organic composition. The emergence of first wave postmodern scholarship signaled a challenge to theories driven by notions of evolutionary growth, human selfsameness , and the drive toward stasis, unity, and grand “Truth.” To possess the Truth meant the construction of a discernible “inside” and “outside;” a complete and composite entity that was retrievable, quantifiable, knowable, and, 134 The French Connection in Criminology where necessary, correctable. These dualisms do a disservice to the understanding of the monistic subject (Grosz 1994). And while recognition of this phenomenon for the constitution of group identity could be found in, among others, Georg Simmel (1950), it took the work of Barthes (1974), Derrida (1981), Baudrillard (1983a), and others to firmly establish what Connolly referred to as the “politics of paradox.” This expression of difference, as definitive of human consciousness and action, promotes a reenergized politic, especially , as we have seen, in the realm of crime, law, and social justice. For as Laclau (1990, 20) has deftly claimed, “Contingency does not therefore mean a set of merely external and [obligatory] relations between identities, but the impossibility of fixing with any precision—that is, in terms of a necessary ground—either the relations or the identities” (emphasis in original). Like a meteor shooting through the...