ABSTRACT
Cultural criminologists follow in a tradition established by Marx and the later humanist Marxists who argue that the essence of ‘humanity’ is not that we are rational calculating beings but productive and creative beings who carry with us a ‘world vision’ and ideology that shapes our own version of what is right and wrong (Lukacs, 1970; Goldmann, 1970). We nevertheless live out the ‘everyday’ within a social world which is structured at least in part by an economic system that insists on the pursuit of scientific rationalism in order to survive. In this context, ‘crime’ appears to the dominant political groups in society to be endemic and simply a reflection of their world turned ‘upside down’. Mike Presdee (2004: 276) observes that the overwhelming lure of transgression for the cultural criminologist brings with it a ‘fascination with the unacceptable’ in scientific rational society:
Culture delivers to us social sites where popular transgression – the breaking through of the constraints created around us – is considered
a crime in itself and where order and its accompanying rationalisations actually herald the death and the destruction of spontaneous life.
