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Governmentality, critical criminology, and the absent norm.

Article Excerpt
Since the late 1980s, Michel Foucault has become perhaps the most common theoretical base for emerging Canadian criminologists. Disenchanted with Marxist-informed critique, researchers turned to Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977) and re-conceptualizations of governance (Foucault 1991) as part of a wider break from the essentialism and power-knowledges of modernism. In favour of "practices," "techniques," and "discourses," Foucauldian criminologists have also, in the main, eschewed "ideology" and "interests" in reframing subjugated narratives. (1)

Toward an analysis of the relationship between critical criminology and Foucault-based "governmentality," this article proceeds with a brief examination of the constituents of disciplinary integrity. This is followed by commentary on relations of power and subordination. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's (1989) critique of Foucault, I argue that while governmentality slices criminal justice policy and practice to expose hidden continuities and breaks, the sharpness of the cut depends upon normative assumptions that remain contradictory or ungrounded, and this stands in the way of praxis.

I "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold"

Richard Ericson and Kevin Carriere (1994) have attributed a "fragmentation of criminology" to the blurring of boundaries in academe and modern science and to the depredation of the risk society in the context of discourses articulating myriad institutions to one another. They subject other criminologists, including John Hagan and Clifford Shearing, to criticism for attempting to organize the criminological oeuvre on, respectively, positivistic sociology and the problem of order. They contend that fragmentation is not a problem for criminology and that attempts to unify the field, even in the critical or radical perspectives, are essentialist, modernist, and doomed to fail. Nevertheless, they argue for a criminology that interrogates the ways in which the discourses of criminology, criminal law, and other institutions "meet and cohere" and for consideration of how the risk society shifts focus from "deviance--control--order" to "knowledge--risk--security." Criminology has grown and fragmented because it articulates with these "logics of risk" and is located within "academic and institutional change in the risk society" (Ericson and Carriere 1994: 93).

Stephan Fuchs and Steven Ward (1994: 506) argue that in "highly decentralized fields with weak resources for producing facts," permanent crises in social solidarity, organizational cohesion, and professional communication may be experienced. Scepticism, relativism, and anti-foundationalism are more common in such fields, as is radical deconstruction. Such fields are highly fragmented in self-contained schools that cannot readily be unified on methodologies or truth-claims. As a consequence, they become acutely susceptible to external political agendas and ideologies. Fuchs and Ward contrast this to "closely coupled fields that have strong resources and professional networks for producing facts and objective knowledge" (1994: 506). The latter, including most of law and the physical sciences, manage to "black box" their main operating assumptions and spend little time in deconstruction because they "have little time or reason to undermine the epistemic and social authority of their own practices as merely contingent and culturally relative" (1994: 506). (2)

Does disagreement about the core or essential problem or question produce a discipline or field that is fragmented, and does fragmentation invite or better insulate against external politicization? Ericson and Carriere point out that left realist and peacemaking criminology are mistaken in attempting to essentialize the discipline. Yet, until the influence of Foucault in particular and post-structuralism in general, (3) critical criminology was, for the most, part identified with some version of transcendental transformation or value substitution. With the shift among many critical criminologists toward governmentality as a general framework for inquiry, there is an apparent disinclination to essentialize or prioritize any value. If there is a normative vacuum or lack of agreement regarding the criminological core, will this invite the kind of susceptibilities and potential irrelevance for the discipline that Fuchs and Ward describe?

It would seem, rather, that there are common assumptions, shared even among Foucault-inspired criminologists, that do provide even this variant of critical studies a kind of cohesion that staves off a permanent crisis. Ericson and Carriere, while...