We have never been liberal--bourgeois identity and the criminal(ized) other.

• Date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Kearon, Tony
• Published date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Kearon, Tony

Divorced from both the site and the experience of material production, separated by virtue of the mystified opacity of our own professional codes from the real systemic function of the reproductive functions we serve, what appears around us in our lives as administrators, social service workers, teachers, etc., is apt to look like a welter of random codes to be administered and observed. Insofar as the code succeeds in passing itself off to us as "self-reflexive," the resultant view taken towards one's work will inevitably be at once frustrating, depressing, self-contemptuous, and blissfully self-exonerating (Pfeil, 1990:116).

Criminology was born of post-Enlightenment liberalism, and every significant attempt to define its scope and purpose, every major twist in its convoluted inner dialogue, have been made within or in reaction to that original discourse.... The great unwritten book in criminology is a serious examination of the basic principles of liberalism, their historical changes and mutations ... and how this relates to crime and punishment (Cohen, 1988: x).

In Western society, we demand a "sad tale" of some sort from deviants to make them forgivable (Maruna, 2001: 145).

Introduction--Middle-Class Identities, Liberal Sensibilities, and the Marginalized Other

IN SEVERAL KEY INTERVENTIONS IN RECENT CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY, AN INCREASINGLY punitive, exclusionary, and vindictive range of attitudes toward groups on the social, cultural, and economic margins of liberal democratic society has been identified (see, inter alia, Garland, 2001; Young, 1999; 2003). One of the most significant aspects of this punitive turn in beliefs and attitudes toward the socially excluded, economically marginal, and potentially criminal(ized) other is the apparent extent to which it has increasingly incorporated some sections of the middle classes that have historically been associated with narratives of welfarist intervention, rehabilitation, and reform. This emerging literature convincingly constructs an inseparable link between the increasingly demonized and excluded other and the growing existential insecurity of the formerly "liberal" socially included. As the certainty and solidity of the economic and social status that underpins everyday life becomes increasingly fragile and transient for many sections of the socially included, images of the socially excluded as lazy, spendthrift, deviant, and reliant on a welfare culture gain an increasing salience (Murray, 1990), matched by an increasing opposition to policies designed to help the "undeserving" poor and growing doubts about the efficacy or desirability of extensive state-funded systems for welfare and social security (Garland, 2001).

Although this increasingly punitive and vindictive shift in attitudes on the part of some socially included groups has been unpacked and quite convincingly linked to processes of maintaining identity and ontological security, we do not fully understand how (or why) some sections of the socially included apparently still construct and maintain defensible and ontologically affirming self-identities around a continued adherence to socially liberal sensibilities. Neither do we fully understand the less overtly antagonistic (but in some respects equally problematic) relationships between these processes of liberal identity formation and the socially excluded themselves.

Consequently, this article will engage with the same processes of middle-class identity formation and maintenance that underpin much of the work on the so-called punitive turn in liberal middle-class sensibilities. However, it will argue that the processes of criminalization of a stereotypically deviant other are not simply a product of the fundamental ontological crisis in middle-class identity in late modernity that has been charted most notably by Giddens (1991). In many key respects, the development and maintenance of defensible liberal sensibilities have throughout modernity been predicated on the continued existence of a symbolically constructed and imagined subaltern other that is demonstrably different, deviant, and endemically rebellious.

Throughout this article, I will use the notion of a liberal "sensibility" as a short-hand term for the complex constellation of beliefs, practices, and emotional states that Williams (1977) refers to as structures of feeling: "... meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt ... affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity" (1977: 132). Within these structures, there is a complex homology between lived experience, collective identity, and practice and the imagined/symbolic relationship between the group and the wider social world (which Williams believes can most often be "recovered" through analysis of the cultural/social practices and artifacts of the group). In this context, emerging liberal structures of feeling/sensibilities from the 19th century onwards engage in a very particular, symbolically constructed and imagined relationship with the other in general, and with the subaltern other in particular. The genesis and implications of this relationship will be examined below.

Thus, the mythic construction of a quantifiably different, criminal(ized) other was (and in many respects still is) a central component of the processes of identity formation and maintenance mobilized by a growing urban(e), educated, professional, salaried, socially "liberal" fraction of the professional-managerial middle class that emerged during the 19th century and that staffed, shaped, and supported the emerging interventionist, welfarist modern state in general (Crossick, 1977, 1983; Morris, 1983; Kidd and Nicholls, 1999), and the rapidly expanding infrastructure of criminal justice in particular. The liberal sensibilities that emerged during this period were fundamentally wedded to the identification and amelioration of diverse social problems (Evans, 1982), implicitly paternalistic and explicitly interventionist (Gunn, 2000), were posited as an incrementally reformist critique of the acquisitive/exploitative excesses endemic in capitalism (Kidd and Nicholls, 1999), and were (until the late 20th century at least) notionally predicated on the possibility of inclusive assimilation of the marginal and excluded other (Young, 1999). Yet this process was (and is) fundamentally dependant on the continued existence of a stereotypically marginalized, socially excluded and deviant other, that serves a dual role--as the visible (and passive) subject and affirmation of the reformist gaze and increasingly (as the 20th century developed) as a source of overtly oppositional identities, cultural texts, and practices to be appropriated and re-presented as part of the continuously developing liberal sensibility. This process of constructing and reconstructing liberal identities and sensibilities also (paradoxically) implicitly constructs an imagined other in a process that continues to re-inscribe marginal and socially excluded groups as deviant, oppositional, and criminal.

To develop this argument, this article will begin with a brief (and necessarily dense) cultural history of the emergence and continued development of a liberal sensibility from the late 19th century onwards in the context of debates about the production and presentation of self-identity. I provide a macro-sociology of a range of micro-sociological processes that shape and define a particular professional-managerial class fraction through diffuse cultural formations, practices, ideologies, and ontologies of the self. This history will draw largely on examples relating to Britain, but the arguments are equally applicable to emerging liberal sensibilities across the Anglophonic world. It will then sketch the extent to which, as the 20th century developed, processes of liberal identity formation increasingly drew on an imagined marginal, rebellious other as a source of oppositional, alternative identities.

Modernity, Identity, and an Emerging Liberal Sensibility

In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1991) problematizes a range of fundamental assumptions about the character of the "modern" identity and its supposed fundamental break with pre-modern sensibilities. He argues that the core assumptions of what it is to be "modern" are rooted in a series of false binary oppositions between the pre-modern and the modern, nature and science, objective and subjective, the rational and the emotional, and so on, to the extent that dominant conceptions of the "modern" are so imbued with pre-modern attitudes, sensibilities, and practices as to be untenable. This article develops in a similar vein, arguing that if we unpack liberal sensibilities and examine their key components, particularly in terms of the imagined "excluded, subaltern other" that is inscribed within these sensibilities, we discover a number of profoundly illiberal implications that must be addressed by those of us who consider ourselves (however tenuously) as "liberal."

The extent to which an emerging urban capitalist modernity...