Visceral Cultures and Criminal Practices

Abstract

This paper will claim that capital's historical process produces durable forms of violent criminality because intense phases of this process constitute specific cultures at the emotional level as `visceral being'. As the productivist era recedes, the globalizing neo-capitalist market-place, based on circulation, consumption and social administration, is currently establishing itself as the principal form of economic life. Because these activities demand ever more eviscerated and domesticated forms of life, visceral cultures, once functional in the productivist era, are now finding themselves redundant. Some individuals and micro-communities heavily committed to this obsolete way of life are finding little alternative but to invest what have become very durable emotional dispositions as cultural capital in the field of criminal practice. Because the ontological foundation of these forms of life is viscerality, the liberal administration's politico-legal regulation of symbolic interchange, provision of equalized opportunity or encouragement of active citizenry can have only limited ameliorative effects on escalating levels of violent crime. Mutating forms of violent criminality are the products of historical material processes; they are susceptible to human intervention only if politics moves beyond its current role of managing market forces to one of direct engagement with the central systems of capitalist value and logic that drive these processes forward.