Professional Documents
Culture Documents
HORIZONS
Darwinism, racism, but with the rise of fascism in the 1930s it lost
whatever weak ties it also had to a social problemsor the social
question (meaning: fear of the labour movement) approach. It has
remained an at best technocratic field of knowledge, in which soft and
hard technocrats still fight with changing gains and losses.
The functions of crime and punishment in society are many and diverse,
but among these one feature is obvious and cannot be disputed:
punishment entails (graduated forms of) social exclusion. In the
extremes of the death-penalty, transportation and exile it is total
exclusion for ever or at least for a long time. The interior exile of the
prison and similar total institutions is similarly near- total exclusion, even
if the person can be reached by visitors and counsel and
housework, bricklaying, electrical installations and other skilled jobs) for the
legitimate population. Some of this, conducted by small operators, is
understood and treated as crime.19 The international organizers and
supporters of this production and distribution of commodities and services
are mostly members of legitimate society, often from the very top of the
economy and state, especially the states armed and secret
apparatuses.
It is poverty and the fact of being a recent immigrant (including
internal migration) that easily positions people as having to offer their
labour for dirty work and at a sub-standard price. The important point is
that the demand comes
There is a lot of structural similarity between war propaganda and lawand- order talk.
There is the undeniable fact that the instruments of punishment have
also been applied in large-scale purges, even genocides.
cannot be seen that is just proof of how cunning they are. If a particular
exemplar turns out to be fair and nice, he or she is an exception or is
undermining our defences. War propaganda also knows of covert actions,
subversives and useful idiots and wants us to be distrustful of everyone:
evil is everywhere. To the author, it is just a little bit disquieting that very
similar expressions of such thinking pop up again and again in law-andorder talk.
As to the second point we can just stay in the twentieth century to
note the simple historical fact that the same instruments that were
developed for state punishmentlegal exclusion from citizen rights,
confiscation of property, transportation, incarceration, forced labour, death
penaltywere also used in outright and open social exclusion- and
extermination-programmes in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. All this was
done to categories of people who were defined in terms of race,
incorrigibility or (political or common) criminality (or more than one of
these)and the people so defined often met in the same concentration
camps.
Fascinating fantasiesharsh realities
It seems we have to realize that in the institution of crime and
punishment the logic of deserved administrative social exclusion is
kept alive and so are the principal instruments thatunder extraordinary
conditionscan also be used in large-scale social exclusion programmes.
There is also a strong connection between warfare/the military arm of the
states monopoly of force and punishment/the internalizing exclusion arm of
that monopoly.23
We can now comprehensively identify the functions crime and
punishment has in the mode of domination:
It legitimizes and executes social exclusion, it aspires to controlling
morality, it is a specific form of regulating conflicts. But then, on all these
levels, the contribution to actual social exclusion, social control and
conflict management is minimal statistically compared to the basic
mechanisms of the labour market, discipline and patriarchy in economic
terms. These substantively effective social mechanisms go largely unnoticed
in normal times, whereas the small and insignificant sector of crime and
punishment catches our attention and our fantasies, feeds a great part of
the culture industryand is in fact fascinating and satisfying for the
consumer. Most crime and punishment circulating in society does so as
stories and action movies. Their genres can be correlated to our three levels
again: there are stories of getting into trouble and out again24 at the
interpersonal level, domination challenged and enforced on the
organizational level and belonging and dropping out on the societal.
These fantasies are fascinating because they play on the basic motives of
people acting in societies, not least on their masculinity/femininity, their
rebellious as well as their authoritarian desires. Probably it is these
harmless fantasies by which the function of crime and punishment,
which materially is not very important for the mode of domination, is kept
intact and alive. What begins so
harmlessly ends quite dangerously in keeping intact the logic and the
instruments of social exclusion, which, under conditions that are not all that
unlikely, are put to use in the historical disasters of large-scale social
exclusion.
The expression crime and punishment represents a significant
coupling together of ideas, functions and institutions. This significance
becomes frightening when we consider how easily they are mobilized
toward warlike ends. In normal times, crime and punishment may be
largely ideologically constructedbut this remains ideology with human
victims.
Notes
Enlarged manuscript of the lecture given in the opening session of
the ESRC conference, Manchester, September, 1996. Thanks to Ian
Taylor and Bill Chambliss for help with the revision.
The paper is also a second part to my 1997 Fin-de-sicle
criminology Theoretical Criminology 1(1): 111129. As a third part I
have sincein co-operation with Helga Cremer-Schferdeveloped
further the approach presented here. The changing fates of state
punishment and criminology (as the mostly all-too-willing ideological part of
that apparatus) in this century can be described as integration and
disintegration of two institutions: crime and punishment and weakness
and care. This further paper will be published in Kriminologisches
Journal.
2 Taking up Foucaults lead this means detailed regulation of co-ordinated
actions and movements, invented and transported through the
centuries in the monastery, later applied to other total institutions,
including the factory settlement of early capitalism, eventually
generalized to a self-monitored reliability in cycles of routines that does
not need the corset of constant outside surveillance any more (Treiber
and Steinert 1980; Steinert 1993).
3 The core of this is household production dominated by an older
male who has to procreate, provide and protect, and for this uses and
regulates the non-wage labour of the other household members. The
positions, power relations and (self)definitions so established certainly
tranfers to other situations and have consequences for them.
1
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
the latter often is a cheap way out of doing what could be effective.
See Steinert (1992, 1995a, b).
Jordan (1996) has constructed an interesting and sophisticated
politico-economic theory of social exclusion from assumptions about
the formation and effects of such clubs.
Another advantage is that these people without social bonds and
connections can be used for purposes of domination, partly for the
dirty work necessary, but also for positions that have to be trusted
(Coser 1974).
See Caplovitz (1963) on the first point, Wilkinson (1996) as a
summary of findings as well as presentation of original comparative
material on the second.
National stereotypes seem to be very dependent on images formed in
wars and in war propaganda, even decades after the former enemies
have become allies. One example is the Western image of Japan as
analysed by Littlewood (1996) from literary and popular culture sources.
It is quite obvious that the national stereotype of Germany is still heavily
loaded by the Nazi past. Interestingly (and counter-factually) Austria
has long managed to keep out of that shadow.
A recent example that I happened to come across is provided by the
historian Hans Mommsen (1996) who, in the first paragraph of his
essay, speaks of the systematic liquidation of millions of innocent
human beings, primarily Jews (my translation).
This, by the way, leads to the interesting conclusion that the third
variety of the state monopoly of forcethe police with its task of
internal peace-keeping and disarmamentis actually the most
civilized of the three. It is not out to inflict pain like punishment and not
aimed at the unregulated killing and destruction of warfare.
This is one of the descriptions of what classical Hollywood drama was
about as well as the basic dimension of everyday stories about crime
and other troubles.
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