The Vertigo of Late Modernity by J. Young

London : Sage ( 2007 ) xii + 231pp . £21.99pb ISBN 1-4129-3573-9 Eloquent, direct, scholarly and sometimes poetic, The Vertigo of Late Modernity is the latest instalment of Jock Young's attempt to sketch the sociological contours of the contemporary world. Here, Young repaints the portrait of his version of ‘late modernity’ whose outlines were presented in The Exclusive Society (Young 1999). In some respects the present book is an autocritique of themes in that earlier work – in particular, it finesses the binary division between ‘included’ and ‘excluded’ (as social states) to focus on a more fluid interaction between inclusion and exclusion (as socio-cultural processes). Whilst the book does pay attention to economic and political changes per se, the running narrative through which Young builds the analysis of inclusion/exclusion is as much about perception and feeling as it is about the structural conditions in which the former are grounded. It recounts the ‘feeling’ that rewards are not fairly distributed and the ‘perceived’ fecklessness and transgressions of a ‘perceived’ underclass (pp.41–4, 206; see also pp.65–8 on ‘changes in the perceived class structure’) whilst, at the same time, the ‘feeling’ of being politically and socially marginalised (rather than the actuality of being politically and socially marginalised) is said to underpin both civil disorder and crime (p.128). Indeed, the ‘slow riot of crime and violence’ that besets this late modern society is really an ‘eruption’ of the tensions that ‘haunt the everyday world’ (pp.180–1), fuelled by the ‘bulimia’ of ‘massive cultural inclusion ... accompanied by systematic structural exclusion’ (p.32). In Young's narrative, it is the contradiction between these two social processes, rather than the bare fact of either one, that exposes the ‘ontological insecurity’ of late modern existence and propels crime to the forefront of social antagonisms. Young calls on critical social scientists to develop a ‘passionate sociology’ in response to this proposed state of affairs (p.21) and he certainly produces one. The Vertigo of Late Modernity is an ethics-on-its-sleeve kind of book where the reader is told in no uncertain terms that the globalised, neo-liberal, post-Fordist, marketised, consumerist-oriented, star-struck, hedonistic, post-Golden Age society of the ‘me’ generation is the primordial social soup out of which have emerged endemic and internecine forms of crime, violence, incivilities and disorder (pp.47–8). The bulimic society of this late modernity is said to have generated the cultural disconnection, broken life narratives and shattered collective symbols that characterise an ‘elsewhere’-oriented way of life. In the disengaged urbanism of the late modern contemporary city no-one lives any longer in the here and now: the great urban populations, like the myriad ‘cultures’ to which they (disjointedly) belong, have become detached from each other and from any fixed points in space and time. Thus, there is no shared political vision, no mutually reinforcing value system, no communally validated cultural script through which to grasp the present or face the future. There is only the ‘seduction of a culture which at once attracts yet undermines all sense of one's own worth and identity’ (p.153). Although Young seeks to move beyond simple binary oppositions in the account of late modernity there is, nonetheless a very starkly drawn contrast with the ‘Golden Age’ of non-globalised, non-neo-liberal, non-post-Fordist, non-marketised, non-consumerist-oriented, non-star-struck, non-hedonistic world of Young's post-war youth. The contrast is used, primarily, to heighten the sense of precariousness that Young attributes to contemporary social life: the ‘fear of falling’ that is said to grip the middle masses of the modern metropolis. Yet, for all that the book is a model of clear sociological writing, acute critical insight and sharp moral contrasts, its theory of crime is relatively underdeveloped. It may (or may not) be the case that the roots of crime in contemporary society are to be found in the contradictory processes of inclusion/exclusion but theorising the empirical actuality of crime is a rather different matter. In this regard, Young proposes that crime arises as a ‘revolt against the mundane’ (p.19; see also p.169 on the ‘tedium and vacuousness’ of life), or possibly a ‘reaction to a world dominated by institutions and discourses dominated by neo-liberalism’ (p.20), or a response to the coupling of relative deprivation and misrecognition (p.36), or humiliation (pp.55–6, 95), or ‘feelings of discontent’ (p.192). Quite how these reactions, responses and feelings combine to explain such a wide spread of behaviours as indecent exposure, parking offences, money-laundering and illegal logging, for example, is not clear. Any adequate explanation of the connections and distinctions between these activities (and how they are differently ‘crimed’) needs to situate them in their particularity as well as their generality. It is certainly the case that a macro-sociological portrait is necessary to any worthwhile account of crime and deviance, yet it is also the case that the macro portrait is not a sufficient platform on which to erect such an account. In sociological terms, The Vertigo of Late Modernity joins the ranks of Zygmunt Bauman's recent work in its passionate disquisition on late 20th Century social change. It is this broad sociological analysis, rather than the details of crime causation, that will stimulate the interest and the attention of critical social scientists across very many disciplines

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Feeling · Late modernity · Literature · Middle class · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Underclass · Anthropology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sociology and Norbert Elias · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

• The Exclusive Society

  Jock Young•The exclusive society•2007

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