ABSTRACT

Already, something crucial has been added to the mix by the new wave of cultural criminologists: any understanding of deviance must begin with the individual, with the passions and the exciting and violent feelings which crime induces in both offenders and victims. Crime therefore should be understood as the ‘existential pursuit of passion and excitement’ – a desperate attempt to escape the humdrum realities and banalities of ‘regular’ life. Utilising an eclectic mix of intellectual influences, this new body of thought-provoking work sets out to develop an explicitly ‘postmodern’ theory of crime based in many cases around the phenomenology of the criminal act (Katz 1988; Lyng 1990; O’Malley and Mugford 1994; Morrison 1995; Duncan 1996; Henry and Milovanovic 1996; Stanley 1996; Van Hoorebeeck 1997). Within this work, a ‘phenomenology of transgression’ is fused with a sociological analysis of late modern culture in what O’Malley and Mugford (1994) refer to as an ‘historically contextualized phenomenology’. Importantly, the term ‘phenomenology’ is employed in this work not in any formal or methodological sense, but in a more generalised manner as a means of evoking the dynamic nature of experience generally and the experiential (if not existential) dynamic that underpins transgression more specifically.13 Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that many of these themes can be found elsewhere in the criminological tradition (most notably in the writings of David Matza and Howard Becker), I contend that this new body of work offers something new, not least because of its engagement with debates on the transition into postmodernity.