ABSTRACT
Cultural criminology is of importance because it captures the phenomenology of crime – its adrenaline, its pleasure and panic, its excitement, and its anger, rage and humiliation, its desperation and its edgework. I wish to argue that cultural criminology not only grasps the phenomenology of crime but, for that matter, is much more attuned to phenomenology of everyday life in general in this era of late modernity. We are confronted at this moment with an orthodox criminology which is denatured and desiccated. Its actors inhabit an arid planet where they are either driven to crime by social and psychological deficits or make opportunistic choices in the criminal marketplace. They are either miserable or mundane (see Hayward and Young 2004). They are, furthermore, digital creatures of quantity, they obey probabilistic laws of deviancy – they can be represented by the statistical symbolism of lamda, chi and sigma, their behaviour can be captured in the intricacies of regression analysis and equation.
