Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism

Abstract

Van Ruller reviews "Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism" by Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic.

Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism, by Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1996. 288 pp. $79.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8039-7584-8. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8039-7585-6.

Henry and Milovanovic's book has a lot of pretensions, comparable only to the famous The New Criminology (1975) by the British authors Taylor, Walton, and Young. In both books the idea of a criminological revolution is propagated. The difference is that Taylor et al. were not aiming to replace the epistemological foundation of the discipline as are Henry and Milovanovic.

The book is hard to understand for a "modern" (pre-postmodern) reader who believes that the world can be characterized in terms of order, perfection, essentialism, causality, and individual autonomy.

Constitutive Criminology intends to give birth to a postmodern criminology. The authors are eager to avoid the negativity of the deconstructive postmodern attitude. Their effort is to find a new variety of criminology that overcomes both the restrictions of modern criminology and the fruitlessness of skeptical postmodern criminology. In this attempt they describe the traditional or "modern" criminology with considerable conciseness and clarity. In their variety of postmodernism, the subject is no longer the passive, determined prisoner of discoursesas conceptualized in skeptical postmodernismbut "recovering" like a patient after an illness. This conceptualization gives their views an optimistic, sometimes utopian flavor.

The authors try to dismantle the foundations of "modern" criminology by questioning some basic criminological concepts. Many modern criminologists think that certain existing social "structures" "cause" "crime." After reading this book one can no longer use these three words without doubting their ontological status. In this book the reader is made conscious of alternative ways of thinking. A substantial part of it is built on French philosophy, chaos theory, semiology, and other postmodernist elements.

This induces the authors to see events not as orderly sequences caused by factors that the criminologist has to discover by standardized quantitative research techniques. Although not completely throwing away the concept of causality, Henry and Milovanovic are talking more about chance and chaos than about causality. In their observations they emphasize the fact that man has forgotten that his system of crime control is a product of his own thinking and talking-i.e., discursive. This means that the penal system stands apart from nature, evidence, and necessity; it could have been different or absent. It-say the authors--as to be different. This gives the argument high moral ground and an emancipatory tendency. Without mentioning penal abolition, the authors are constantly provid.ng abolitionism with (sometimes) new arguments. They recommend thinking and talking about crime control in alternative, unconventional, nonreifying, and nonoppressive terminology. The "criminal" is an "excessive investor in harm." This style of talking about him or her is a new "replacement discourse" that replaces the old master discourses of the state, law, medicine, the manager, and others.

What is the value of this book for criminology? It is daring, stimulating, and sows doubt about conventional knowledge. It pierces the partitions between disciplines. In short, it has some great qualities, and it can provide criminology with a vitalizing impulse. Unfortunately, I see a few drawbacks. The borrowing on a large scale from many, diverse postmodernist thinkers is exuberant, and it seems to me out of control. Something like a conceptual jungle is created, in which the criminologist who wants to make use of the ideas of Henry and Milovanovic easily gets lost. Their views on causation require a new research methodology. What they present in this field (about chaos theory, corel sets, etc.) will not be understandable to the great majority of criminologists. It is sometimes downright esoteric, and needs to be translated into usable terms. I am afraid that this will be a difficult enterprise. The alternatives for conventional crime control, such as "social judo" and "narrative therapy," described in the last chapter, are interesting but not convincing. The authors write with great clarity. But when they next consider propagating their ideas about postmodern criminology, I suggest that they try for greater selectivity and sobriety.

Even without the writings of Henry and Milovanovic, we can expect a slow and steady infiltration of postmodern elements into the discipline. Indeed, this infiltration is already well under way.