ABSTRACT
Although previous chapters have argued that language (‘fucking shit’) and practice (‘drugs came naturally’, ‘we just took them’) emerge from within a form of being that is immersed in its imminent and doxic relation to the objective regularities that constitute its social world (‘everyone was doing it’), the subjective relation to the world is not simply governed by the mundane brutality of the everyday experience of economic dispossession and constant exposure to the consequences of urban deprivation. Drawing influence from the work of Martin Heidegger, this chapter argues that the relation to the world that I have referred to as ‘imminent’ or ‘immersed’ is only sustained through what I will now refer to as ‘confirming encounters’, that is, social encounters with similar others that reinforce the selfevidence of a doxic relation to the world that ‘just happens’ to produce a language and practice of recreational crime and drug use. This is why Heidegger refers to the ‘average everyday’ mode of being as ‘they-self’ (which possesses a ‘worldliness’ that comes from its ‘being-with-others’) as opposed to ‘myself’. The evidence of this average everyday mode of being, of course, is present in the speech forms employed by respondents which described recreational crime and drug use through the public language of ‘we’, for example, by expressing themselves in terms such as ‘everybody was doing it’.
