From object to encounter: Aesthetic politics and visual criminology
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Author | Alison Young |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480613518228 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
518228TCR0010.1177/1362480613518228Theoretical CriminologyYoung
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Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 159 –175
From object to encounter:
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480613518228
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criminology
Alison Young
University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Recent criminological research has engaged with images of crime such that there
increasingly appears to exist a need for a specifically visual criminology. Within visual
criminology, however, images are frequently constructed as objects of analysis rather
than as constitutive elements of the discursive field. This article draws upon the specific
context of the social, cultural and legal responses to uncommissioned words and images
in public space—street art and graffiti writing. Focusing on one instance of unauthorized
image making, I argue for the dynamic role of the image in the constitution of crime in
contemporary society and culture, thanks to the affective dimension of the encounter
between spectator and image. The complex range of responses to street art and graffiti
highlights ways in which visual criminology must ensure that it eschews an object-
centred approach to the image, and conceptualize it instead by means of an aesthetic
politics of the encounter.
Keywords
Art, cultural criminology, graffiti, law, urban space
Introduction: Thinking images
On a sunny morning, a man paints over an advertisement in a bus shelter in central
Melbourne. Is he committing a crime? Is he creating an image? Is he destroying an
image? What subject positions are involved in such an event, and what kind of ‘visual
criminology’ is required to understand it? One of the central tenets of critical crimino-
logical research in recent years has been that crime is discursively constructed. Although
Corresponding author:
Alison Young, University of Melbourne, John Medley Building, Parkville, VI 3010, Australia.
Email: ayoung@unimelb.edu.au
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
there is empirical solidity to the experiences involved in the commission of any act cat-
egorized as criminal, it is discourse that generates a vocabulary for the various subject
positions involved (‘victim’, ‘criminal’, ‘witness’, ‘judge’, ‘police officer’ and so on)
and critical criminology has been adept at tracing and analysing the intricacies of the
possible sensations, meanings and implications generated within various subject posi-
tions. One strand of this overarching research enterprise, with an acute potential to elu-
cidate the formation and implication of subject positions to do with crime, has involved
engagement with images of crime and is now being called a visual criminology (see, for
example, Carrabine, 2012; Hayward, 2010).
Criminology’s initial interest in images was somewhat limited, resulting in ‘a rela-
tively formulaic body of work’ (Hayward, 2010: 5): researchers focused upon media
representations of crime, with particular emphasis on issues of content and on concerns
with effects (asking questions as to whether images related to stereotyping or could influ-
ence behaviour, or resulted in an increased fear of crime). Subsequent scholarship has
developed an interest in representation for its own sake, sometimes in order to under-
stand the attractions of criminality (Goldstein, 1999; Katz, 1988; Leitch, 2002) and at
other times to analyse recurrent narratives, genres and forms of representation (Yar,
2010; Young, 2010a). Much of this work has been carried out under the heading of cul-
tural criminology, but many argue that the need for a sophisticated understanding of the
centrality of the image to crime has become increasingly urgent for criminology gener-
ally, ‘given the ascendant position of the image/visual in contemporary culture’ (Hayward,
2010: 9). Ferrell et al. (2004: 4) state:
Images of crime and crime control have now become as ‘real’ as crime and criminal justice
itself—if by ‘real’ we denote those dimensions of social life that produce consequences; shape
attitudes and policy; define the effects of crime and criminal justice; generate fear, avoidance
and pleasure; and alter the lives of those involved.
Only a few years later, this is put even more strongly by Carrabine (2012: 463): ‘it is
no longer possible to divorce crime and control from how they are visually repre-
sented and urge an end to the distinction made between “real” crime and the “unreal”
image’.1
Images, then, are no longer being viewed as epiphenomenal supplements, or as
devices (windows or mirrors) that reveal and reflect a social reality back to the researcher.
But in order to ensure that the agentic role of the image is not reduced to something
capable of impacting upon individuals (in a reinstatement of the ‘media effects’ model
mentioned above), it is crucial to ensure the image is conceptualized as a point of attach-
ment and identification—as a subject position through which we speak and think ‘crime’.
Ferrell (1997: 21) has argued in favour of taking seriously within criminology the
Weberian notion of verstehen (the subjective appreciation of others’ actions): ‘we must
find emotional affiliation with the various moments of crime and crime control in order
to understand them’, and over the last decade and a half, many criminological analyses
of the image have sought to understand the ways in which we live through and as our
images of crime. As Hayward (2010: 5) writes: ‘the goal must be to … understand and
identify the various ways in which mediated processes of visual production and cultural
Young
161
exchange now “constitute” the experience of crime, self and society under conditions of
late modernity’.
Although it is clear that the significance of the visual in the construction of everyday
life is now increasingly recognized in criminological research, there is considerable vari-
ation in approaches to the image. How should we think about/through/with images?
Carrabine (2012: 463) notes that the analysis of the image required by a visual criminol-
ogy is ‘long overdue’ but ‘no easy task’. The discipline of criminology as a whole has
tended towards interpretive approaches that see social structures, institutions, identities
and relations as externalized and externalizable things amenable to a range of analytical
techniques, and it would be all too easy for such an approach to dominate ways of think-
ing about the image.2 Although more critical versions of the social scientific mode of
criminological thought have certainly advocated that there is a need for reflexivity in the
researcher, it was not until what was (initially derisorily or pejoratively characterized)
the advent of and engagement with so-called ‘postmodern’ thought in criminological
thinking that there emerged a recognition that the image might have a constitutive role
whose impact has not yet been fully grasped.
Recognition of the constitutive potential of the image also points to ways in which a
visual criminology is something very different from its antecedents in subcultural theory,
which drew attention to ways in which members of distinctive cultural groups generate
cohesive semantic and social characteristics that serve both to confirm an individual’s
membership of the group and also to distinguish a group’s members from other parts of
society, and symbolic interactionism, which took an intense interest in processes of inter-
pretation but tended to allocate them to powerful classes and institutions such as the
media or the criminal justice system. Such insights were essential to the generalized
broadening of definitional focus that took place throughout much criminological schol-
arship, but were constrained by a limited conceptualization of processes of representa-
tion and meaning making. With the advent of an interest in the notion of a criminological
imaginary in the mid- to late 1990s (Lippens, 1998; Young, 1996) and the inauguration
of what rapidly came to be known as ‘cultural criminology’ in the 2000s (Ferrell et al.,
2004, 2008; Hayward, 2004; Presdee, 2000), a new direction in criminological scholar-
ship had been created, albeit one that initially tended to approach images as either repre-
sentational objects in need of decoding or symptomatic manifestations of the identities
of various cultural groups. As cultural criminology matured, through its extensive
engagements with ‘urban studies, media studies, existential philosophy, cultural and
human geography, postmodern critical theory, anthropology, social movements theory’
(Ferrell et al., 2008: 5), the particular and exacting demands of criminological engage-
ment with the image became inescapable.
What then is required in order to engender ‘a critically engaged visual criminology’
(Carrabine, 2012: 487)? In order to avoid the pitfalls of an object-centred approach to the
image, in which it is posited as a thing awaiting interpretation, a more fruitful paradigm
is that of ‘criminological aesthetics’, in which we analyse both ‘the images themselves
and the relation between the spectator and the image’ (Young, 2010b: 83). Such a para-
digm recognizes that the image and the social world cannot be distinguished from each
other and that meaning derives from the affective nature of the spectator’s encounter with
the image.
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Theoretical Criminology 18(2)
Although it is easy to treat ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ as identical, they are quite...
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