1In contradistinction to their relatively simple and constant portrayals in mass medias, academics produce various and highly complex discursive forms of criminals. In this paper, I propose an analytic ordering of academics’ criminals, suggesting a sociology of sociology of deviance which tries to grasp its ways of thinking. My wish is to reflect on the variety of both theories and epistemologies through which truths on criminals take form on the academic scene. Truths that cross over that scene and penetrate the social, bringing words to talk about criminalized individuals - which is already a way to intervene on them. The following pages do not offer an analysis of the social effects of academics’ discourses, but the paper could be read as proposing conceptual tools and epistemological investigations preparing the ground for such an analysis.

2The thesis to be exposed is the following: the totality of scientific utterances regarding criminalized deviance can be distributed in three sets, on the basis of the meaning given to crime. As I would like to show, theories referring to deviance or social control take criminalized deviance as being the result of a pathology, of a rational choice, or of constitutive social practices. The methodology employed in the constitution of these three sets has drawn its inspiration from the one suggested in Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir (1969). My project here is not to meet the requirements proper to this oeuvre. I simply propose a first isolation of three discursive practices. Pathology, choice and social construct are their respective fundamental axiomatic principles, establishing distinct forms of discursive regularities in academics’ works related to criminalized deviance and its control.

3Foucault’s concept of “discursive formation” refers to a set of relations, enabling and imposing regularity to discursive events. It is not horizontally, but vertically, that the unity of a discursive formation is given. A discursive formation can be individualized not from its elements’ homogeneity, but from the practice’s regularity making such elements possible (Foucault, 1969, 95). The individualization of the discursive formations proposed in this paper is limited to what Foucault called “the primary differentiation of objects”. “Discourse, writes Foucault, is something else than a site on which would depose and stack up themselves, as on a simple surface of inscription, objects that would have been instituted in advance” (1969,58). What is at stake is the description of modalities organizing discourses, that is, “practices which form the objects of which they speak” (1969, 66). My suggestion is thus that there are three ways to discursively produce the object criminalized deviance. Or, to write it slightly differently, that each discursive formation autonomously, in its own original way, differentiates an object proper to itself. This does not imply that the concepts of one particular discursive formation are not being observed inside another one. But it implies that all relations governing their mobilization are proper to each discursive formation.

1. The Product of Evil

5Theorizations which place in any form of evil the source of deviance, of which I shall soon show the main manifestations, constitute the usual way to think about normative transgression in academics’ ivory tower - maybe also outside of it. This has been particularly illustrated by Foucault’s analysis of knowledge production in fields such as criminology, psychology and psychiatry. Numerous sociological analyses of social control also testify to the importance of discourses positing that deviance is, in the first place, symptomatic. This is notably the case of analyses which form themselves around notions of inequality or social exclusion. The extraordinary variety of theoretical utterances linked to this first discursive formation is easy to apprehend. In effect, in this system, one can theoretically travel from human body chemistry to political economy’s mutations, maybe after having stopped by, among the many possible destinations, Freud and God.

1.1. Deviance as Sin

1.2. Biopathologized Deviance

Brain laterality is (…) related to criminality. Most individuals are right-handed and left-hemisphere dominant; however, 10 percent of the population is left-handed and either right- or left-hemisphere dominant. Many more males are left-handed, and many more left-handed males are criminals than right-handed males. Whatever is responsible for this pattern of hemispheric dominance, it does influence criminal and antisocial behavior (Jeffery, 1994).

7After having examined deviance as sin, writings in sociology of deviance usually then look at the so-called ‘classic’ period of criminology, where the attention is directed towards the use of reason to establish just punishments. This is chronologically correct. Nevertheless, I wish to postpone the analysis of this Enlightenment movement - in which some place the act of birth of criminology - because it is located in the second discursive formation of criminalized deviance. Discourses proper to such a ‘classic’ period represent an emergence, not a break from the discourses of deviance as evil. Of course, there is a rupture if we compare chronologically both discursive and non discursive practices. But the utilitarian philosophy of reformers such as Beccaria (1764) and Bentham (1789) operate ‘elsewhere’ than in, or on, the first discursive formation. A new way of conceptualizing deviance and control, a new object is born. The first discursive formation’s structure - let us imagine that Foucault could have tolerated such a word - is not even lightly touched. Gall’s (1758-1828) and Spurzheim’s (1776-1853) phrenological theories, which posit that the shape of our skulls explain our conforming or deviating behaviour, are testimony of the endurance of the first formation; but also, and more than anything else, the ‘other’ birth of criminology: the publication, in 1876, of Lombroso’s Uomo Delinquente. In it, the body was offering itself as the first vector of expansion of the modern construction of deviance as a product of evil. The ambient positivism then drives the search of the cause, to liberate society from the men, and today, also the women, that would endanger it.

1.3. Psychopathologized Deviance

To initially counter the patient’s defensive attitude toward treatment, the therapist might briefly summarize his problem as a lifestyle disorder that has roots in childhood or early adolescence, develops over a long period of time, and has serious negative consequences. It may also be pointed out that ASPD [Antisocial Personality Disorder] is a silent menace because persons suffering from this disorder usually can’t recognize the symptoms in themselves, and typically do not feel any discomfort until the disorder is quite advanced (Beck and Freeman, 1990).

10I entered the universities’ world through undergraduate studies in clinical criminology at Université de Montréal. Among the body of knowledge that I was asked to minimally possess to obtain a diploma were various theses on the “criminal personality”, which refer to the notion of antisocial personality or, more often, to that of the psychopath. We (group/class) were asked to learn to recognize a psychopath, with analytical grids, while watching Hollywoodian productions. Ideal-typical forms of the psychopaths that we, ‘wanna be’ criminologists, were certainly to keep watch over, and maybe to help; such forms were illustrated by Brad Pitt’s persona in Kalifornia, and Robert de Niro’s in Cape Fear - to cite but two examples. Learning to produce pathological difference through what behaviour reveals of the psychic economy: this was the project established after the invention of the born criminal by Ferri and Garofalo, Lombroso’s most talented students.

13If, as I have suggested, one can imagine the possibility of observing the formation of the object deviance on a purely biological basis, this seems quite difficult in what regards psychopathologized deviance. The psychiatric approach is too linked with biopathologized deviance, and psychoanalytic, gestaltist, humanist and cognitive-behaviourist schools are, at least certainly today, put in relation with the biological or the sociological (socialization, peers’ influence, etc.). Maybe this can be interpreted by the fact that contemporary biopathologists authorize themselves to pretend to a commensurate access to the causes of deviance, which would be devoid of any subjectivity (hormones, molecules, DNA, and so on), while contemporary explorers of human psyche no more authorize themselves such a pretension, or are discredited if they do so.

1.4. Sociopathologized Deviance

Crime occurs when citizenship is thwarted, its causes lie in injustice, yet its effect is, inevitably, further injustice and violation of citizenship. The solution lies not in the resurrection of past stabilities, based on nostalgia and a world that will never return, but on a new citizenship, a reflexive modernity that will tackle the problems of justice and community, of reward and individualism, which lie at the hearth of the liberal democracy (Young, 1998).

14Sociopathologized deviance is formed, in contemporary sociological discourses, as a reaction to various kinds of injustice. Injustice is here understood in its liberal accepted meaning, that is, as any discrepancy on the plane of either liberty or equality. Such unequalitarianistic conceptualizations of deviance usually refer to a structuralist or stratified apprehension of society, which notably leads academics to place particular groups in a dominating position, and to think of social control as the exercise of a vertical power, from the top over the bottom.

15Émile Durkheim’s legacy is still weighty in contemporary conceptualizations of a sociopathologized deviance. His two main contributions to the sociology of deviance are his functionalist reading of normative transgression, and the development of the notion of anomy, of which he furnished an acclaimed illustration in his oeuvre on suicide (1897). Anomy directly refers to the very birth of sociology, which institutionalized itself on the quest of solving problems attributed to Modernity. Before Durkheim, Auguste Comte has searched to single out the principles on which social unity could be founded anew. Such a project of medical sociology, bringing solutions and remedies to the pluralization of social norms, is particularly explicit in Durkheim’s L’éducation morale (1925). It is the feeling of having lost collective landmarks which is so central to a deviance given meaning through the prism of anomy: the cause of normative transgression is to be located in a fragilized unity. The pathologized difference is conceived as the result of a too wide heterogeneity of the forms of socialization. In order to preserve a presumed normative community, evil should be attacked at its roots: the (deficient) socialization of children. This is notably the core of Hirschi’s thesis (1969): the deviant has had a deficient socialization, which impairs self-control and commitment to social institutions. The object criminalized deviance is then conceptualized on the basis of its lack of attachment, of investment, on both levels of values and behaviour. The notion of anomy will thus lead academics, for example, to try to empirically demonstrate that religiosity is inversely proportional to deviance (Hirschi and Stark, 1969). Another example can be found in Talcott Parsons’ oeuvre. As Durkheim, he did not see any problem in taking as referent a normatively united society. He proposed, with Shills (1951), that delinquency is an incomprehensible, irrational behaviour, which would results from the failure of the social mechanisms functionally devoted to produce unity, particularly socialization, which precede the ultimate means that coercion is. Such a formation of the object deviance with a reference to anomy has been severely criticized in Mills’ The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists, in which he argued that such a notion was supported by a romanticized rural community. Although anomy is still used in conceptualizations of sociopathologized deviance, it is as a rhetorico-nostalgic tool or secondary cause. As noted above, the cause of evil has become injustice in its liberal accepted meaning.

• 17  This citation reveals a conception of the ethnographic practice which corresponds to its dominant (...)

Criminological theories are abstract constructions about behavior that criminologists have, for the most part, never seen. What criminologists know about crime and criminals has come from studying criminals in captivity (jails, prisons) and from crimes reported, though frequently not observed, by local police and other law enforcement agents. The validity of criminological theories is then tested with measurements (statistics) collected by instruments (surveys, interviews) used on criminals who have been removed from native environments. This sanitized style of studying criminals and crime has brought us dozens of criminological theories and dozens more strategies to intervene in criminal behavior. If any of these theories were correct and interventions effective, we wouldn't need so many of them (Fleisher, 1998, 55).17

22Exception being made of the already addressed conceptualizations of the object deviance as adaptation to the discrimination proper to inequality in social opportunities, trying to understand normative transgression in approaching its phenomenological dimension leads to a new variant in the construction of sociopathologized deviance. Deviance would answer a need of transcendence in the context of an alienating and rationalizing Modernity, which leaves no room for the expression of the irrational and the affective. Risk taking - edgeworking - nevertheless does not suffice to construct the object deviance. The ultimate cause is still the differential distribution of opportunities, not to realize the “winners’ model”, but to experience transcendent experience through legal means.

As a consequence of the inequality of resources in society, some of the ways of transcending mundane life are more open to some groups of people than to others. Skydiving, for example, may offer a transcendent experience, but it is unlikely to be available to many young black members of the urban underclass. Crack, on the other hand, may provide a similarly transcending experience (which is only more "artificial" on a very narrow reading of artifice), but unlike skydiving is available to all, rich or poor. Moreover, the poor, perhaps more than any others in modernity, are faced with lives in which meaninglessness and the destruction of the self are ever-present possibilities. For this reason they have less to lose if they choose to prefer short-term (and relatively certain) pleasure and excitement over long-term (and uncertain) calculative rationality (O’Malley and Mugford, 1994, 209).

1.5. The Symptomatology of Difference

23Even if I only caught sight, and quite selectively, of the immensity of theoretical universes attached to most common varieties of the discursive formation of deviance as the product of evil, we can easily grasp the powerful penetration of the notion of symptom in reflections on difference. Apprehending difference is here realized in a symptomatological fashion - underneath deviance is a body defect (from skull shape to its biochemical economy), a psychic problem (from Oedipal conflict to a bad way to interpret reality), a social injustice (from deficient socialization to the organization of economic relations), or a mix of the preceding. This supposes that the possibility to identify both difference and its cause is posited. Here, whether we are in biological, psychological or sociological realms, the object deviance is formed in the very act of seeking the pathology which would have caused it, simply because difference is established by its pathologization. We are in murky waters, mixing cause and effect in a schizophrenic genesis: the pathology that difference would reveal is comprehensible only through a given form of symptomatology of difference.

24The discursive formation of deviance as the product of evil presents no epistemological variations: (post)positivism reigns. (Post)positivism posits the possibility of a complete (or approximate) apprehension of the object deviance, taken as independent of this very act of apprehension. All manifestation of biopathologized and psychopathologized deviance are inscribed in this epistemology. The object deviance presents an abnormal body/psyche of which science can reveal the mystery. Questions guiding the scientific practice are (for example): what explains illicit drug use? What are the risks that Jane Doe’s embryo will turn out delinquent if Mrs. Doe smokes tobacco? If she does not? Etc. In many cases, the sociology of deviance sits in the same epistemological chair.  For instance, it is the case in all unequalitarian analysis which do not take into account the problems confronting constructionists (these will be examined in looking at the third discursive formation.) The construction of sociopathologized deviance then leads to question similar to those raised by bio- and psychopathologists: What? Who? Why? For example: what explains illicit drug use? What are the ‘subcultural’ values which enable adhesion to a ‘deviant lifestyle’? Why won’t crack users work for Bill Gates? Etc. That the cause be located in the body, in the psyche or in society, the object deviance is taken as given: normative transgression is a symptom of abnormality which can be objectivized. His body, her psyche, our society is sick.

2. The Product of the Strategist

While the medical model reduces crime, suicide or drug addiction to the status of symptom, strategic or actionist analysis posits that the deviant act can be conceived as a solution to a problem, or as a means towards an end. It is useful to presume that, in the situation proper to a murderer, a thief or any other deviant, he had “good reasons” to behave the way he did (…) Reasons to deviate are numerous, and it is not certain that they really are different from the reasons for which we act in conformity to social rules (Cusson, 1992).

25The emergence of the second discursive formation of criminalized deviance corresponds, as noted above, to what is referred as ‘classical’ criminology. Historians’ teleological habit results in the fact that it is usual to attribute the cause of the XVIII^th century penological reform to civilization’s progress towards a greater humanity (Weiss, 1987). That is, the move “from revenge to constraint” (Cohen, 1985, 76) is often interpreted as a profoundly positive achievement. It is true that one of Beccaria’s influential treatise’s foundations is to humanize punishment in an era of public infliction of pain. But revisionists did rewrite this story. Foucault’s Surveiller et punir replaces the cause of a progressively more humane social response to normative transgression by a generalized movement of punishment, in which the ‘power to punish’ inserts itself “more deeply in the social body” (1975a, 98). Here, it is less important to take side in the debates around the causes of the birth of classical criminology, than to examine the new way to think the object deviance that was generated.

2.1. Strategic Deviance

Disorders constitute a continuum, its first degree being represented by those that tend to destruct society directly, and its last one by the smallest harm done to one of its members (…) Any act which is not included within those limits (…) can not be named an offence, nor be punished as such, except by those who find their interest in naming it that way (Beccaria, 1764, 73-74).

28The central theme of the second discursive formation is thus reason - excluded is the case of ‘criminal madness’. While psychopathologized deviance assumes that it is abnormal to try to gain advantage over one another, strategic deviance posits that it is the result of a normal, rational choice, exerted towards well-being in the absence of constraints. Let me cite Beccaria once again:

There is no one who would spontaneously leave a part of his liberty for the public good. It is only in novels that such a wild dream can exists; if it was real, everyone of us would wish that pacts binding others do not bind oneself; every man look at himself as the center of all possible combinations on the globe (Beccaria, 1764, 63).

29Utilitarians’ philosophy shall be discredited by the scientificization of the pathologization of difference. The Italian positivistic school will play an important role in that matter, by pretending to objectively and empirically demonstrate the determinants of deviance as product of evil. Nevertheless, strategic deviance is still of actuality since other utterances, also claiming a scientific status, modernize classic criminology. Indeed, an actionist criminology (Cusson, 1992), more often designated by the perspective or theory of strategic analysis (Cusson, 1993b, 1986), has taken form. Academics outside this Montreal School prefer to speak of a “criminology of the act”, while Anglophones will usually qualify it a “rational choice approach” (Cornish and Clarke, 1986).

Offence is conceived, in strategic analysis, as a behaviour oriented towards results, with its own rationality, taking account of the opportunities offered to the actor, as well as of his adversaries’ actions (…) Strategies are a man’s actions on his surroundings and, above all, on others: his offensive and defensive moves; his tactics to influence someone else; to persuade, manipulate, dominate, constrain, suppress him. This is what crime is (Cusson, 1989, 76-77).

32The last citation introduces the notion of opportunities. The “totality of actions taken against crime”, those institutionalized, as well as those of single individuals, enters into strategic analysis. Criticizing the construction of bio/psychopathologized deviance on the basis that it would lead to forget the “structuring effect of social control”, Cusson takes it as one “independent variable influencing crime” (1998a, 1993a, 38-39). The argument is loyal to the author’s economic decisionism: the more a behaviour provokes an effective social reprobation, the less frequent it is. We now know why, for example, there are less robberies in banks than in small shops. Or, but it is the same thing, why our strategist generally attacks small shops instead of banks. The macrosocial thus furnishes a first pole around which takes place the rational endeavour of the strategist in his evaluation of “criminal opportunities”; social changes (technological advances, etc.) are taken into account criminal and opportunities evaluated in the spaces and times in which the strategist travels. In their simplest expression, those opportunities are favourable conditions to prohibited acts in a given time-space; the contact of the strategist with a mouth-watering prey. For instance, Gassin (1988) spoke of “precriminal situations”.

33Of importance is the fact that the social opportunities spoken of by unequalitarians can be, in the second discursive formation, constructed as resources that the strategist may use in his jousts against others. Indeed, Matza (Sykes and Matza, 1957; Matza, 1969) developed the concept of “techniques of neutralization” to enable a classical interpretation of free will in his rejection of etiological criminology. When referred to deviance as strategy, the use of those techniques can be conceived as the individual’s strategic modification of values. In explicit contradistinction, conceptualizations realized in the first discursive formation conceive the use of these techniques as ‘thinking errors’ (to cite but one example). Strategic deviance could thus posit that actors are able to ‘grasp’, signify and use what is taken as the cause of pathologized difference in theories on deviance as the product of evil. Considering numerous sociopathologists’ discourses, strategic analysis thus has the merit to avoid looking at the actor as a “cultural dope” (Garfinkel, 1967), such as the one created by, among others, Francfort-style critics (see Joas, 1996; Denzin, 1992) and Bourdieu’s habitus (see Rubenstein, 2000).

34Informed readers of Cusson may nevertheless assert that he does not depart from the symptomatology of difference. Moreover, the moral judgements that cross over his writings may strengthen this eventual assertion. And, above all, the fact that everywhere he speaks of “delinquents” (one of his books is entitled Délinquant pourquoi?, he defines the criminal tactic as an “answer of the delinquent to a criminal situation”, etc.). If strategic analysis postulates an inclination to deviance, how can we think of strategy as an axiomatic principle independent from evil?

Increase in burglary in the second half the XX^th century is largely the result of choices that most of us made. Instead of fortifying our houses to block access to intruders, we have preferred to absorb burglary consequences in assuring ourselves against theft and in placing our money in bank accounts (Cusson, 1993c, 55).

3. The Product of a Social Construction

38Inside the third discursive formation of criminalized deviance, the object is not taken as resulting from a determination which can be associated to pathology or to a normalized profitable choice. The object is seen as a product of the social practices which constitute it as such; deviance is constructed by the social practices which apprehend it. We can identify three variants in this discursive formation,  constructed, produced and uttered deviance. The first one refers to discourses positing the existence of acts which are constructed as deviance through moralizing and criminalizing processes. The second refers to the work of Foucault, in which the object deviance is not only socially constructed, but also technologically produced. In the third, uttered deviance would be conceptualized as the sole result of a language creating reality. Its timid manifestation place this variant mainly on a plane of possibility. In all cases, in the third discursive formation, the object deviance is approached at the junction of words and things. In contradistinction to discourses examined thus far, the ontological status of the object is problematized, being conceived as dependent of the epistemological posture adopted by sociologists. The problematization is realized as the break between ontology and epistemology is reduced, or even abandoned.

3.1. Constructed Deviance

Deviance is not a quality of the act committed by an individual, but rather the consequence of the application, by others, of norms and sanctions to a “transgressor” (Becker, 1963)

39In the 1920s United States, in the intellectual effervescent climate that the representatives of the Chicago School (Burgess, Park, McKay, Shaw, Thomas, Znaniecki) have installed, Edwin Sutherland begins to elaborate his theory of differential association. A first form was proposed in 1934, and with it a whole new section of sociological research will open up. In posing as a principle, notably, that criminal behaviour is learned, and this through the same mechanisms implicated in learning any other conduct, Sutherland had the cheek to propose a huge relativization of the object deviance. Sociopathologized deviance was becoming an object produced in social interactions implying conflicting normative universes. If the theory did not focus on the interpretation of the qualification of a given behaviour as deviant, such a focus was suggested in making criminal conduct a skill learned through mechanisms akin to those implied in acquiring the skill to lace one’s shoes. Sutherland’s inspirations can be placed in Gabriel Tarde, Thorsten Sellin and the fathers of symbolic interactionism, James, Mead, Cooley and Dewey (see Denzin, 1992). That we should give credit to Sutherland or to his intellectual fathers for the revolution that the publication of the theory of differential association would operate is a matter of little importance.   

43It would seem that constructionism formed the object deviance as the product of a constitutive language. But in my view, this is only partially the case, and only since Ibarra and Kitsuse (1993) suggested transformations to constructionism associated to postmodernism, which I will examine later. The distinction is epistemological: constructionism refers to what I may call an ethico-constructivist epistemology, while postmodernism establishes itself on a pretension to an epistemology that I will call radical constructivism. The distinction is operated throughout a higher integration of reflexivity in radical constructivism, which would help solve epistemological and theoretical problems in conceptualizing, notably, language and communication in constructionism. To (maybe) write it more precisely, the ethico-constructivist posture, in contradistinction to the radical one, maintains a distinction between language and social reality. The result is, for example, that constructionism is interested in the construction of drug addiction as a social problem, while postmodernist utterances would posit that there can be drug addiction only by the performance of a language giving it its existence. Thus, the ethico-constructivist posture rests on the pretension that there ‘are’ social problems, their degree of moralization/criminalization varying.

3.2. Produced Deviance

45Michel Foucault’s unclassified Surveiller et punir illustrates a second variation in the discursive formation of deviance as a social construction. I shall name it the carceralist perspective. The author giving power an ubiquitarian quality may constitutes one dimension of his thesis enabling us to see how he distinguishes himself from the above variant of the discursive formation of deviance. Indeed, in carceralism, the power constituting the object deviance is omnipresent, instead of being in the hands of a dominating group controlling it (unequalitarianism) or constructing it (constructionism). Carceralism posits that the penitentiary logic has colonized the social, giving birth to a disciplinary society.

46In carceralism, deviance refers to the indocile or abnormal body. It is formed through the care given to its defects in regard to norms established by different social institutions - prison, school, factory, etc. In the same movement, such an intervention is seen as marking out normality in various spaces and times put into an order towards the production of utility. According to Foucault, the formation of the object deviance is the result of a circular logic, in which the production of the object rests on the institutionalized normalizing efforts devoted to redress it, such efforts leading to a finer and finer construction of the reality taken as object. He thus writes that processes objectivizing the indocile body “are born in the very tactics of power and in the arrangements of its exercise” (1975a, 121). Knowledge constitutes the abnormal body, this knowledge being in turn constituted through the power operating the institutional normalization of bodies. For what regards delinquency, the Lombrosian born criminal thus becomes the product of the knowledge developed through institutional intervention on the offender. In contradistinction to the first discursive formation, in which delinquency is formed on the basis of criminal offending, produced deviance is conceptualized as a result of the institutional response to offences.

The penitentiary technique and the delinquent man are like twin brothers (…) Do not think that the internal elaboration of penitentiary methods finally revealed the “objective” existence of a delinquency that could not be seen in juridical abstraction and stiffness. They did appear together, and in each other’s extension, as a technological set forming and cutting up the object on which its instruments are applied (Foucault, 1975a, 296).

47The institutional social reaction to normative transgression, in such logic, would not results in the transgressor being corrected, but, instead, in the delinquent being produced. Prison fabricates delinquents, and delinquency is “the prison’s revenge against justice” (1975a, 297). The production of delinquents in prison is notably realized, according to Foucault (1975a, 310-313), through the imposed standards of life. Prison strives for incarcerated people’s docility in mandatory useless work, in a context where incarceration “takes place on the mode of abuse of power”. Such conditions guarantee inmates’ solidarity, that which plays in favour of the creation of ‘criminal networks’. Prison is a crime school. The production of delinquency is also realized in condemning individuals to become recidivists, in closely monitoring offenders constituted in delinquents as they are set free anew. The object deviance is thus the indocile body resisting discipline and normalization. It is the “fortunate expression” of individuality and of our incompressible human nature. Deviance is an “energy standing up straight” (p.339).

48The production of delinquency is thus twofold. On the one hand, the delinquent is fabricated by the knowledge developed on bodies which are the focus of a normalizing power in institutions. On the other hand, the very exercise of this power transforms the subject as transgressor into a delinquent subject, ‘materializing’ the knowledge born in the meticulous examination of his body and psyche (see also Rose, 1999). To write it otherwise, for Foucault, the object deviance is both discursively and technologically created, in discourses on offenders and in social practices taking charge of them. Deviance is thus not simply socially constructed. It is also materially produced.

3.3. Uttered Deviance

He explained to her that this is what differentiates his conflict theory of criminology from the others. She understood this: that the content of conflict criminology differed from the more conventional science of the causes of crime. But did it differ in its contentment? Did it differ in the fundamental pleasure which positioned the imagination of the criminologist materially in history as master of the natural facts of crime? This question disturbed her significantly. As she pursued this question she found herself losing her center; a slide into a different pleasure - the pleasure of difference; a slide into a different criminological practice - a politics of difference; a different conjuncture of power and its relation to knowledge. When she spoke to him of this disturbance and its different pleasure he had nothing to say. He had been telling her about his conflict theory of criminology, but she was speaking of a criminology that conflicts (Pfohl and Gordon, 1986).

53Postmodernist playfulness seems to find few followers in sociology of deviance. Such an attitude can only be the privilege of academics no longer having to care about justifying the social pertinence of their works to obtain pay or grants (delivered from still ‘modern’ criterions). Lea’s above mentioned point of view also seems to suggests that postmodernist playfulness is not popular, in sociology of deviance, for it would be a-political (in my view, this is quite debatable). Can we have fun with crime? Such a question, in the end, refers to intellectuals’ role. Since the 1990s, affirmative postmodernist criminology is developing around the works of Dragan Milovanovic, Stuart Henry and T.R. Young (Arrigo (1998, 1997) also joined the gang). At the center of its political considerations is the necessity, for criminologists, to impose some “replacement discourses”. I won’t deal here with the political project of a Newsmaking Criminology (Barack, 1988). Instead, I would like to try to understand how affirmative postmodernist criminologists unite deconstruction and reconstruction of the language-based constitution of criminalized deviance.

54The theoretical complexity of this postmodernist criminology clearly shows its affirmative nature, in contradistinction to a playfulness of which the theory’s core is found in analytical philosophy (its political project is held in the idea of continuing discussion in a tolerant pluralism; Rorty, 1991b, 1991c, 1991d, 1980). To constitute itself affirmative, ‘postmodernist’ criminology takes two theoretical avenues.

55The first one essentially takes over the Francfort School legacy, and presents itself as a critique of the dominant ideology in the making of criminalized deviance. One then seeks to identify the “master signifiers producing and reproducing the dominant social order” through their action on reality, and particularly to show how “the desiring subject is imprisoned in restrictive discourses” (Milovanovic, 1997b, 1995, 10, 1994a, 1993; Henry and Milovanovic, 1991). The authors’ critical position leads them to note the “subjugation” of certain knowledge/discourses, and to identify the dominant narratives constructing criminalized deviance. The conceptualization of criminalized deviance which operates in this perspective is formulated this way: “crime is defined as an expression of energy to make a difference over others, to the exclusion of those who, in the instant, are rendered powerless to make their own difference. Crime is the power to deny others” (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, x). Law becomes the ‘cause’ of crime for its violent categorization of conflicts. Such a conceptualization is inscribed into a refusal to construct crime as constructionists do, that is, as the sum of criminalized conducts. This notably permits the authors to assert that some ‘crimes’ are not criminalized (ex.: “a lot of what occurs in family life”, some governmental policies, etc. (Pepinsky, 1997, 1991; Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, 116)). In sum, delinquency here becomes a manifestation of power, unequal relations, behaviour causing harm and suffering, of which the meaning is constructed in a dialectic of power and control implying dominant social narratives (ideology) and their phenomenological correlates in conflicting interactions. Such a vision would permit an emancipation from positivistic conceptualizations of deviance, establishing a difference between criminals and non criminals; an emancipation which would be made particularly possible by the abandonment of the search for the cause of this very distinction (Young, 1997a; Milovanovic, 1995, 1991). In contradistinction to the playful attitude, the affirmative one aims to go beyond postmodernism, in authorizing itself to develop “contingent universalities” (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, 119), universalities without which the ‘denying of others’ could not be established. What is at stake is thus the (re)construction of crime in equalitarian politics; deviance is still sociopathologically conceptualized.

57Contrarily to what is pretended by its representatives, this criminology does not abandon the ‘modern’ search of causes. Rather, the notion of causality is modified with the help of the “postmodern science” (sic): “a nonlinear assumption may lead researchers to develop model of causation that allow for the discontinuous, the random, the spontaneous, ironies, contradictions, and chance events that have no other explanation” (Milovanovic, 1997b, 217; Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, ch.7). Chaos etc. would thus bring better predictive tools for the “behavioural science” that criminology would be (Young, 1997a, 44-45). Used in conceptualizing criminalized deviance, chaos etc. would enable us to ‘understand’ that (to borrow an example from biopathologizing works) two monozygotic embryos produce one “delinquent” and one “non delinquent”, or else that very little changes in taxation policies cause a disproportionate increase in crimes against properties. Still another ‘heuristic’ application of the popular “butterfly effect”:

In a basin with two attractors (each of which can be viewed as a torus loosely connected to each other), the geometry of behavior becomes ever more uncertain; one may move between anti-social and prosocial behavior; one may be involved in both criminal and prosocial behavior at the same time. Indeed, the one act may be criminal while the next unpredictable run of acts is prosocial. The concept of "the criminal" becomes very fuzzy while the geometry of crime becomes very complex (Young, 1997b, 82).

58Using chaos etc. thus reveals itself as a pretension to go beyond the possibilities offered by mainstream criminology, characterized by its (post)positivistic epistemology and its absence of epistemological reflection on the object criminalized deviance. As illustrated by the above examples, affirmative criminology using chaos etc. reveals itself as an attempt to positively found anew its scientific basis. It is in vain that the reader may look for constructivist considerations when pieces of data are placed in the theoretical universe of chaos etc.. We thus note the authors’ incapacity to theoretically conjugate decontructionism, chaos etc., structuration theory, semiotics, etc. Henry and Milovanovic (1996) pretend to achieve such a conjugation, but the use of the two theoretical avenues that I have delineated is realized in distinct times (de/reconstruction or chaologization). The poverty of chaos etc. in the interpretive endeavour is made clear as we see the authors leaving this universe and invoking Merton’s or unequalitarians’ theses, alienation and consumerist capitalism, or even Baudrillard’s hyperréalité (1981), to ‘understand’ the ‘chaotically ordered’ moves from prosocial to antisocial conduct (Young, 1997a, 47, 1997b, 87; Milovanovic, 1997b, 231, 1994b, 251). Reflections on the language-based constitution of criminalized deviance have disappeared to make room for an essentialization of criminals, as individuals exerting a power over others.

3.4 Ethical and Radical Constructivism

59In the third discursive formation of criminalized deviance, the epistemological posture that is taken by constructionist and carceralist utterances is the one I call ethical constructivism. We could also call it selective constructivism. In these utterances, we see a certain distancing from the object deviance, reminding the Durkheimian imperative to “systematically discard any prenotion” (1895, 34), and the epistemology suggested by the authors of Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, 1980). In a first time, interpreting the construction of difference is conducted inside a search for the material modalities of the social construction of the ‘thing’ that the ‘social fact’ deviance is. In a second time, it is realized inside an examination of the discursive modalities of the social construction of the object deviance, which could then have no existence without these modalities. I have wanted to show how Foucault attempted to reunite these two epistemological moments, and to catch sight of some of the resulting confusions.

60Constructivism is ethical because it is inscribed in a so-called critical sociological practice, the possibility of which being given by keeping a scission between the constructed object and its sociological construction (selective constructivism). In my view, it is for political reasons that this scission is maintained: if analyses of the discursive modalities constructing the object deviance take place in a scientific practice which finds its purpose in emancipating projects - (post)positivistic epistemology is rather oriented towards technical management of things and human beings (Habermas, 1976). The new kind of questions that this posture calls for is: how? For example: how is the object deviance discursively formed in criminological utterances? Thus, in ethical constructivism, the object is taken as the result of a process of designation, or of an institutional intervention, which become the objectivized symptom, not of any form of abnormality, but of a potential victimization or oppression having material, not simply discursive, effects. The existence of ‘reality out there’ is still taken as independent of the utterances constructing it. This very independence is put into question by postmodernists, who should, in a refusal to dissociate language and reality, pretend to radical constructivism. But I have shown that the constitution of an uttered deviance is more a possibility than a practice. Authors self-labelling themselves “postmodernists” usually practice an ethical constructivism after having established, through their critics of ‘modern’ criminology, the need for a radical constructivism. The evoked project of establishing “replacement discourses”, enabled through the authorization to develop “contingent universalities”, clearly shows that the interruption of deconstruction is realized on the political battlefield. Epistemologically, this “postmodern” criminology cannot be distinguished from the works of unequalitarians having a constructivist moment. Finally, for what regards ‘chaologists’, their espoused epistemology is obviously (post)positivistic. Their endeavour is postmodern only if we understand this qualification, not as it is usually done in social sciences, but simply in that way: the “science” chaos etc. comes after ‘modern’ science. Modifying the notion of causality does not impede the search for the cause of a still pathologized difference, which is at the center of this scientific project.

4. Last Words