Crime, Law and Symbolic Order

Crime, Law and Symbolic Order: the Rhetoric of Transparency Sara L. Knox (bio) Introduction In a radio address of June 22nd 1996, President Clinton addressed the federalization of notification and registration procedures for repeat sexual offenders. Clinton described the Wetterling Act as one decisive victory in an already advanced law and order campaign. Had not his administration “worked hard to combat the crime and violence that has become all too familiar to too many Americans”? Clinton’s “too many Americans” familiar with crime is a rhetorically bounded constituency — a constituency still recognisable today despite a change of administration and a distinctive shift of priorities around security and imminent threat. Law and order issues have become — since 9/11 — the rhetorical stuff of foreign, as well as domestic, policy. The community of the law-abiding rhetorically constructed by speeches such as Clinton’s may have slipped its borders but its discursive essence remains the same. Like scores of other politicians before and after him — at municipal, state and federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike — Clinton rhetorically winnows the sufferers from the perpetrators of violence, the victims of crime from the offenders. His use of the word ‘many’ works to constitute its majority by glossing a significant, and growing, minority of the criminalized.1 The ‘Megan’s Law’ speech is constructed around layers of projection and fantasy. It attempts to annex a future (“the freedom to walk around the block at night and feel safe, for the security of neighborhoods that aren’t plagued by drugs, where you can leave your doors unlocked and not worry about your children playing in the yard”) but works with a logic that is as nostalgic as it is Utopian (“We can make that America real”). Tailored to quiet doubts about the erosion of civil rights (as the Federal Government directs the States to institute over-surveillance of some its citizens), Clinton’s speech conjures a world without bystanders; one peopled with engaged witnesses — a community ethically connected but also linked by proxy or virtual ‘lines of sight’. What Clinton wants to see is “America . . . once again a place where people who see a report of a serious crime are shocked, not numb to it.”) Clinton’s meaning of the word “see” equates seeing with acting. Recognition of wrong and action against it ought to be simultaneous for those with the ‘innocence’ necessary for the registration of shock — that shock distinguishes ‘bystander’ from ‘witness’. Clinton rhetorically conjures a sociability (and a Social) without animus or anomie; a vigilant, embattled citizenry whose members may not vote, but are civic-minded enough to reach for their phones to dial the America’s Most Wanted hotline number, or to call the young mother next door to tell her a stranger has walked once too often down the rear access lane. Clinton’s invocation of an America of decent, law-abiding, empathic citizens uses a strategic move common in law and order discourse — he addresses an ‘embattled’ community of the law-abiding, and that address defines its addressee accordingly. “Membership of the community,” writes cultural criminologist Alison Young, “is bought through the fear of crime”.2 Whether through the contemporary incarnation of the Presidential ‘fireside chat’, or ad hoc comments from the Mayor’s office on high-crime urban areas, or a new community policing initiative, the methods by which we are “governed through crime” daily increase in degree and complexity. As Jonathan Simon explains “crime has turned out to be a major platform to reconstructing liberal governance”3 — responsibility and risk are no longer assessed in relation to collective social problems and dealt with by social policy, but are instead ever more closely associated with individual ‘choice’, with citizen-subjects figured, in the cultural lexicon of law and order, as victims or potential victims, as threatened witnesses, or as offenders: a triptych of subjectivities essential for the aesthetics of crime.4 In this sense, a politics of identification, and an “economy of representation of crime”5 are so thoroughly entwined that we are not just instrumentally governed through crime (in Simon’s sense of the phrase) but symbolically too. Crime narratives and images are generatively central to the cultural

Administration (probate law · Criminology · Order (exchange · Political science · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Transparency (behavior · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Law, Rights, and Freedoms

• Imagining crime

  Alison Young•Imagining crime•1996

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• Spectacularizing Crime

  Open Access•Peter J Hutchings, Peter Hutchings•Law and Critique•1999

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• Megan's Law

  Open Access•Jonathan Simon•Law & Social Inquiry•2000

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