ABSTRACT
The history and dominant themes of cultural criminology have been discussed and rehearsed elsewhere, especially in the recent cultural criminology edition of Theoretical Criminology (Vol 8 No 3, 2004). Here I want to concentrate on one particular recurring theme: the prioritising of biographical accounts of everyday life – with their ability to produce superior descriptions and explanations of crime and transgression – over and against quantitative accounts of crime, criminality and criminalisation that re-produce numerical life rather than everyday life. Since the emergence of academic disciplines structured on ‘rational’ lines, there has been a seemingly irrevocable disjuncture between scientific knowledge and everyday experience, with the former dominating research into the latter. This quantitative rational scientific approach is epitomised by those government agencies that I have described elsewhere as ‘fact factories’ (Presdee 2004), their role being the production of ‘suitable’ facts to support governments and their existing and future political agendas. But too much information is no information. The more facts we have the less we really know. Facts are in reality a form of disinformation, an obesity of the system that distorts rather than informs and gives shape. They become the ‘sacred shit’ of a rational society (Baudrillard 1990: 43).
