Forget crime

For all its hackneyed embellishments, facing the close of a century and the dawn of another does give pause for speculative reflection. My discussion proceeds from a view that disciplinary power–knowledge relations, which flourished in nineteenth- and twentieth-century control systems, face the prospect of a significant fall. The analytical objects, methods, claims and policies that occupied privileged positions within modern welfare states, and their discipline-based societies, are increasingly shaped by the priorities of a different, governmental, prince. In the process, erstwhile alliances between disciplinary and legal power–knowledge relations have been reordered by the colonizing advances of governmental ratios. These reorderings are substantial and have problematized criminology’s aspirations to discover the nature and causes of crime, as well as its quest to legislate corrective remedies. They also signal a wider ‘post-disciplinary’ condition in which the epistemological foundations of disciplinary power–knowledge relations have become the target of sustained scrutiny. As a result, these foundations no longer operate as unquestioned background assumptions, and so are unable to enforce subtle closures through the stealth of their silent embrace. Disciplinary power–knowledge relations must now openly engage truth struggles to survive. In this knowledge-producing ethos, criminology, like other disciplines, is forced to confront its ambitions, practices and prescriptions directly (Bauman, 1997; Nelken, 1994). ¹ Whatever else, this predicament provides a unique moment from which to review critical opportunities created by governmental encroachments into disciplinary crime-control arenas.