ABSTRACT
On the good days, anyway, we might hope that new directions in criminological theory would evolve from our critical engagement with the new directions taken by the social world that surrounds us. With this in mind, I’ve to some degree set aside my usual analytic work on crime and culture recently, as I’ve tried to make sense of the current crisis – a crisis that interweaves economic collapse, dislocation, and ecological decay with conflicts over immigration, development, and consumption, and all of it shot through with an overdose of profound uncertainty. Of course this crisis is moving along more than one trajectory, and it’s certainly not my intent to suggest that any single analysis can account for it. Yet it does seem to me that one significant direction emerging within the contemporary global crisis is a certain lack of direction – that is, drift. Drift seems to pervade current experience, to exist as both normative and spatial dislocation, to result from both economic development and economic collapse, to flourish in precisely those situations meant to contain it. Consequently, I’ve lately been thinking through a criminological theory of contemporary drift, not from any pre-existing expertise or interest (as I fear this chapter may make evident), but from a desire to understand where we’re heading, if we’re heading anywhere at all.
