Theories of Crime and Crimes of Theorists

Abstract

Social science scholarship is increasingly addressing the dynamics of gender, race and class in various institutional contexts. Criminological research is no exception to this trend. Within the criminological sciences, postmodern research is also gaining greater attention and respectability. Notwithstanding the discipline's recent emphasis on postmodernity and cultural plurality, little attention has been given to criminological theory and how the voice of and way of knowing for women, minorities and the poor are represented within its own discourse. This article represents one preliminary step in that direction. At issue is the psychic configuration of criminological reality. Our method of analysis incorporates the conceptual tools of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, especially his reliance on several topological constructs. We argue that Lacan's complex social system provides us with the interpretative tools necessary to examine theories of crime as a manifestation of culture and the psychological roots of cultural inclusivity embedded within its discourse. Our provisional assessment suggests that while criminology offers important insights relevant to gender, race and class, it has essentially failed to make sense of these differences within its own theoretical language. We argue that this is because the language of modernist (and premodernist) criminology is already prestructured (psychically encoded) to exclude these differences.