The history and dominant themes of cultural criminology have been discussed and rehearsed elsewhere, especially in the recent cultural criminology edition of Theoretical Criminology (Volume 8, Number 3, 2004). Here I want to concentrate on one particular recurring theme: the prioritizing of biographical accounts of everyday life - with their ability to produce superior descriptions and explanationsof crime and transgression - over and against quantitative accounts of crime, criminality and criminalisation that re-produce numerical life rather than everyday life. Since the emergence of academic disciplines structured on ‘rational’ lines, there has been a seemingly irrevocable disjuncture between scientific knowledge and everyday experience, with the former dominating research into the latter. This quantitative rational scientific approach is epitomized by those government agencies that I have described elsewhere as ‘fact factories’ (Presdee: 2004), their role being the production of ‘suitable’ facts to support governments and their existing and future political agendas. But too much information is no information. The more facts we have the less we really know. Facts are in reality a form of disinformation, an obesity of the system that distorts rather than informs and gives shape. They become the ‘sacred shit’ of a rational society. (Baudrillard 1990:43)
But why this aversion to and wariness of institutional/political rational scientific research? Firstly I have a problem with its unquestioning sense of whatcrime is and is about. For administrative criminology, crime is unproblematic in that it is simply that which is described and measured. There is a certainty contained within this approach. After all you don’t measure a room for a new
carpet if you don’t know the nature of its length, breadth and area. We measure what we know and know of. If we know of crime we can measure it, record it, quantify it. For administrative criminology, crime and disorder constitute taken for granted categories, unproblematic in their reality.
download the Story of Crime: Biography and the Excavation of Transgression
