ABSTRACT
Young’s The Exclusive Society (1999) and his account of ‘ontological insecurity’. I will argue that it is against this backdrop of social anxiety that certain forms of criminal practice become highly attractive as a means of ‘exerting control’ and ‘constructing identity’ in increasingly socially precarious lifeworlds. This is more than a matter of different emotionalities in confluence. Rather, Young’s work points to what is missing in Katz’s focus on individual experience: namely, its failure to consider the broader structural, material and historical contexts within which individual experience occurs (see more recently Young 2003). Notably – and central to the argument of the present book – there is no sense of a historically contingent consumer culture in which the pursuit of excitement through transgression is cultivated via the ‘insatiability of desire’ and ‘the pursuit of the new’, short termism, ‘impulsivity’ and the desire for immediate gratification. As with ontological insecurity, so too excitement offers a way of seizing control of one’s destiny – of ‘living’ (or at least experiencing) ‘a controlled loss of control’ in the face of an overcontrolled, yet at the same time highly unstable, world. In examining the very different responses of the state and the market to this situation, the chapter focuses on the parasitical spiralling of rationality and resistance, joyriders viewing speed cameras as a challenge, the imperative of a radio ban for hard-core ‘gangsta’ rap music. The chapter ends with a ‘grounding’ in the gritty particulars of urban space – the inner city housing estate, the town centre and the new urban consumer zones – both present and the future.
