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Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1996, 288pp.
Constitutive Criminology offers more than an affirmative theory of crime. Of interest to social thinkers generally is the constitutive social theory underlying the approach to criminology which Henry and Milovanovic develop from a number of Postmodernist sources, most notably, Chaos theory. Modernist social theories are outlined and castigated, as in Postmodern analyses generally, as embodying a metaphysics which privileges particular discourses while silencing others and serving to recursively reproduce crime and other social harms. Specific modernist theorists are partially resurrected by the authors to the extent they anticipate Postmodern critiques. Notable here would be Giddens, whose theory of structuration posited a contingent social structure recursively reproduced by human agency, Friere's dialogical pedagogy which emphasised the transformative powers of speaking true words, and Matza's conceptualisation of delinquent drift, interpreted as indicative of a state of maximum indeterminancy.
What the authors term sceptical Postmodernism is useful critically, in the deconstruction of modernist assumptions, but not constitutively since its radical anti-foundational stance leads nowhere other than to nihilism. Henry and Milovanovic's integrative approach builds on an affirmative Postmodernism which takes seriously the contingent virtual realities which are socially constructed through interaction and discourse. Constitutive Criminology develops a self-consciously utopian and romantic vision of social change which the authors claim is necessitated by the failure of modernist-inspired change, principally Marxism. Constitutive theory, which is beyond both (sceptical) postmodernism and Marxism, is touted as a progressive alternative to both.
Overall, while I found the argument quite dense, the authors go to some pains to present their versions of others' texts in accessible ways, repeating meanings, using examples and reiterating points throughout, while maintaining the complexity of the conceptualisations.
Drawing on the Postmodern image of the de-centred subject, in the view of affirmative Postmodernism, human agents have a multifaceted nature which is both unique as well as socially and discursively constituted. Moreover, humans are subjects-in-process, continually recreating themselves while simultaneously continually recreating the social context which shapes their identity and potential as well as the identity and potential of others. Discursive practices produce culturally and historically specific representations (images) which are imbued with object-like reality and attain relative stability. They then become the co-ordinates of reconstructive action, based...