ABSTRACT
It is instructive at this point to consider two previous attempts to contextualise Katz. In the interesting, if somewhat baroque, work Constitutive Criminology (1996: Chapter 7), Henry and Milovanovic attempt to develop the Katzian position along similar lines to those set out above by focusing on the question of diminishing control in postmodernity. They engage with three classical sociological commentaries that have all characterised the process of modernisation in terms of increased regulation – the work of Weber in relation to the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy; Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary forms of social control; and Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the territorialisation of desire – to suggest that, over time, capitalism gives rise to a loss of freedom and control. Despite acknowledging the value of Katz’s work, Henry and Milovanovic criticise Katz, along with other nonmaterialistic analyses of the causes of crime (including Halleck 1971 and Salecl 1993), for what they describe as their inherent modernism and limited scope (according to Henry and Milovanovic, such purely phenomenological accounts of crime are simply ‘tension-reduction models rooted in homeostasis and the modernist (order) paradigm’ (1996: 156)). Moreover, they contend that Katz and other like-minded scholars have failed to consider the broader macro environment within which all individual experience occurs. Such shortcomings, they suggest, can be addressed by recourse to their own ‘constitutive criminology’ (1996: 158).15
