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Breaking Down the Pseudo-Pacification Process: Eight Critiques of Ultra-Realist Crime Causation Theory

Breaking Down the Pseudo-Pacification Process: Eight Critiques of Ultra-Realist Crime Causation... Abstract This paper critically examines ultra-realist criminology’s two central crime causation theories: the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process and special liberty. We identify a number of shortcomings in these theories pertaining to (1) their explanation of gender-related disparities in criminal offending; (2) their explanation of violence reduction through Freudian notions of drives, libidinal energy, and sublimation; and (3) their explication of crime as an expression of capitalist values. Fundamentally, we suggest that in treating political economy as the underlying source of all causative power in society, both theories engage in what Margaret Archer terms ‘downwards conflationism’. To this end, ultra-realism offers what we term a ‘direct expression theory of crime’, in which crime is a synecdoche and direct unmediated expression of political-economic conditions alone. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s realist social theory, we conclude by sketching out several potential principles of an ‘indirect expression theory’ that avoid the shortcomings of ultra-realism in explaining the complicated relationship between political economy and crime. Introduction The role of political economy in shaping crime rates has long animated criminological research, with numerous empirical studies pointing to a relationship between the two (Box 1987; Currie 1997; 2009). Yet despite this robust empirical research, theoretical accounts of the relationship between political economy and crime remain, as Lynch (2013: 137) argues, underdeveloped. Seeking to rectify this issue, the perspective of ultra-realism, developed by Hall and Winlow (2015), has emerged as an influential critical criminological approach, offering a cornucopia of concepts for examining the various relationships between political economy and crime.1 Key among these concepts are Hall’s (2012) intertwined theories of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process and special liberty. Understood as mutually constituting processes (Hall and Wilson 2014), Hall’s (2012) theories offer an account of ‘contemporary subjectivity in its socio-economic context’ (Hall and Winlow 2018: 43). Each theory, in its own way, explains crime as a direct expression of capitalism. In the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, physical violence is understood as a desublimated expression of the functional socio-symbolic competition fostered by capitalism. In special liberty, by contrast, crimes and other forms of ‘positive harm’ are understood to arise out of capitalism’s fostering of a competitive, ruthless and entitled form of subjectivity (Hall 2012). Hall’s (2012) interlinked theories have been applied to explain a wide variety of criminological and social phenomena, including serial murder (Hall and Wilson 2014), workplace bullying (Lloyd 2019), fraud (Tudor 2019), the appeal of post-apocalyptic popular culture (Raymen 2018), and the rise of lethal violence in the post-recession United Kingdom (Ellis 2019). Notwithstanding their growing prevalence within the crime causation cannon—and in spite of various multi-focal critiques of ultra-realism2—neither the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process nor its notion of special liberty have been subject to systematic critical analysis. Given their increasing use to explain a panoply of harms, such an analysis is essential to the ongoing revitalization of criminological theory—itself one of the stated aims of the ultra-realist project (Hall and Winlow 2015). In this article, we therefore undertake a critical appraisal of ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. Our aim in doing so is not only to assist ultra-realists in fine-tuning their theory to avoid the issues we identify, but also to help foster the development of altogether new theories on the relationships between political economy and crime that avoid these issues. In total, we offer eight critiques of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Most tap into long-standing sociological debates about structure and agency, as well as discussions regarding the relative merits of ‘materialist’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches to criminological inquiry (see Ferrell 2007). Our reservations about ultra-realism’s crime causation theory are as follows. Firstly, we call into question the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’s ability to account for gender-related disparities in criminal behaviour. We propose that: (1) the pseudo-pacification process treats gender norms (i.e. ideas about how different genders should be and act) as epiphenomenal to capitalism; (2) the pseudo-pacification process ignores social reproduction, offering a framework that only examines crime through the lens of capitalist production and consumption; and (3) ultra-realism’s reason for dismissing gender norms as a factor in offending is founded on a denial of the antecedent fallacy. The second part of our analysis addresses ultra-realism’s explanation of violence through reference to drives, libidinal energy and sublimation, via its theory of the (breakdown of the) pseudo-pacification process. Here we argue that: (4) the pseudo-pacification process naturalizes violent drives, contradicting ultra-realism’s claim that human beings are hardwired for plasticity; and (5) in presupposing a hydraulic model of the psyche, the pseudo-pacification process sets up a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression. In the third aspect of our analysis we outline several reservations about special liberty; particularly with regard to its explanation of crime as an expression of capitalist values, and its (in)compatibility with the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. We suggest: (6) it is incoherent to understand special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process as mutually reinforcing processes; and (7) ultra-realism’s crime causation theory ignores the array of values, beliefs and vocabularies of motive for crime that are not solely an expression of capitalism. Our analysis concludes that: (8) in setting up a dichotomy between ‘causative’ political-economic factors and merely ‘symptomological’ non-political-economic factors (Hall and Winlow 2015), both of ultra-realism’s core crime causation theories engage in what Archer (1995: 3) has termed ‘downwards conflation’, ‘where the solution to the problem of structure and agency consists of rendering the latter epiphenomenal’. In theories that engage in downwards conflation, society is reified and individual action is understood as entirely socially determined, resulting in accounts that are unable to explain the formation of the structures they discuss (Archer 1995). Ultimately, we argue that through their downwards conflation, ultra-realism’s crime causation theories represent what might be termed direct expression theories: explanations of crime causation that posit an externally unmediated link between political economy and crime rates. Within direct expression theories, all other social phenomena are treated as epiphenomenal to the influence of capital in political economy. Epiphenomenalism within the framework of ultra-realism is particularly apparent in its explanation of the drivers for gender-related disparities in criminal offending, which, here we argue, treats gender norms as functional by-products of late capitalism. To address this potential shortcoming in ultra-realism, we alternately advocate a critical realism-informed indirect expression framework. As we will demonstrate, this approach provides a lens for examining the emergent and mediated nature of the relationship between crime and political economy. Pseudo-pacification and special liberty Before elaborating our critique, it is necessary to first unpack ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012). As Horsley et al. (2015: 18) explain, the pseudo-pacification process theorises ‘the shift from physically violent to pacified socioeconomic competition’ resulting from the ‘pseudo-pacifying’ demands of the market economy. Set up in contestation to Elias’s (1978) civilization process thesis and Mucchielli’s (2010) pacification process thesis, Hall’s (2012) theory of the pseudo-pacification process is offered by proponents of ultra-realism as an explanation for the decline of violent crime in 20th century capitalist societies. Drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalytic understandings of libidinal energy, drives and sublimation, Hall (2012) argues that this reduction in violent crime is the product of individuals being ‘pseudo-pacified’ into the socio-symbolic norms and practices of capitalism. This, according to Hall (2012), entails a process of sublimation, whereby aggressive libidinal energy underpinning interpersonal violence is channelled into the socio-symbolic competition that comprises and sustains capitalism. As Hall (2012: 254–5) defines it, the pseudo-pacification process entails: The sublimation and conversion of physical violence and visceral aggression to an economically energising form of competitive individualism fuelled by a struggle for social distinction; the energising of destructive, competitive drives and desires and the concomitant expansion and sophistication of external and internal control measures in a relation of mutual amplification. To be ‘pacified’ in this scenario is to play by the rules of capitalism and adopt the competitive behaviour necessary for capitalism to function. Crucially, the ‘pseudo’ element of the process refers to the premise that, rather than entailing a reduction of aggressive ‘libidinal’ energy, such energy is instead (re)channelled into economically aggressive practices of enterprise and consumption necessitated by capitalist political economies. Hall (2012) argues that the pseudo-pacification process has two key functions for capitalism: firstly, it stimulates ‘socio-symbolic competition’ and consumption to increase market demand; and secondly, it limits physical violence so that the market can function more efficiently (Hall 2012). In realising these functions, on the other hand, the process ‘generates immense undialectical tension between stimulated obscene drives and a complex system of desire-formation, repression, sublimation and economic utilisation’ (Hall 2014a: 28). Thus, physical violence is pacified and sublimated in the service of the market economy. Importantly, for ultra-realists, competitive individualism expressed through participatory economic competition and physical violence are different expressions of the same underlying ‘libidinal energy’ and drives. Indeed, as Hall (2012) explains: [A]s we became less violent and bloodthirsty we became richer and more pacified but possibly less honourable and ... less egalitarian; violence looks to have been sublimated into symbolic and toned-down practical forms rather than dispersed into the transcendental realm of spirituality. According to Hall and Winlow (2004), the sublimation of libidinal energy in Western, neoliberal societies is, furthermore, contingent upon the effective management of capitalism and namely, its ability to provide functions and services for the labour it exploits. When reward for labour is insufficient, physically violent behaviour finds a footing once more. Within this moment of collapse, human libidinal energy is diverted from the former socially palatable activities of capitalist exchange, production and socio-symbolic competition into interpersonal violence—a moment ultra-realists refer to as the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015). Though ultra-realists have been somewhat vague in detailing the scale or composition of this breakdown—for example, do single acts of interpersonal violence qualify as breakdowns in the pseudo-pacification process?—in several publications (see Hall and Winlow 2004; 2015), they argue that neoliberalism is the final straw that broke the back of pseudo-pacification: The breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process is the product of the failure of neocapitalism to find status and functions for visceral cultures that performed vital services in the nation-bound productive economies of high capitalism at the same time as its neo-liberal political classes presided over the wholesale dissolution of the traditional occupations, ethico-cultural codes, communities and political collectives that might have acted as secure platforms for adaptive change. (Hall and Winlow 2004: 298) In stimulating individuals’ drive to foster socio-symbolic competition, ultra-realists argue that the pseudo-pacification process creates a ‘general cultural current’ of what Hall (2015: 129) terms special liberty. At its most basic premise, special liberty can be understood as a ‘sense of entitlement’ to bring harm to another person in the naked pursuit of ‘instrumental or expressive’ interests (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). The notion of special liberty arises, in part, out of ultra-realism’s reconsideration of how ‘harm’ has earlier been accounted for in criminological theory. In explaining the various constitutions of criminological harm, Hall and Winlow (2015: 91) assert that ‘rights’ are assigned a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ quality, either preventing the ‘mistreatment’ of bodily autonomy or promoting ‘human flourishing’. According to their account, motivations for harm are also represented in positive and negative forms. Negative motivations for inflicting harm are presented as common, often unintentional by-products of the competition demanded by membership in the market economy of social relationships—or in other words, harms incurred in maintaining the separation between the ‘rich and successful [and] the precariat’ (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). Positive harm, by contrast, is instantiated by special liberty: the ‘sense of entitlement’ to first and foremost intentionally bring harm to others (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). Crucially, special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process are understood as ‘mutually reinforcing processes’ (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651), with special liberty providing capitalism with subjectivities tailored to driving production and consumption. As Lloyd (2018: 256–7) further elaborates: Hall’s (2012) concept of ‘special liberty’ delineates an individual embedded within the socio-symbolic structures of neoliberal ideology; epitomising the competitive individualism, envy and self-interest fueling consumer capitalism, the individual possessing special liberty is convinced of their right to maximise their market share and keep rivals from threatening their position, using any means necessary. Special liberty is therefore characterised by a constellation of key values and behaviours, including competitive individualism, ostentatious displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ruthless capital accumulation (Raymen 2016; Lloyd 2018). A ‘fantasized state of exception’ granting ‘the beholder the freedom to act with exploitative impunity’ (Kotzé 2019: 242); it is special liberty, ultra-realists argue, that primarily explains the ‘subjective motives’ underpinning a variety of contemporary crimes, from serial murder (Hall and Wilson 2014) to fraud (Tudor 2019). In concluding this review, it is worth situating ultra-realism’s two crime causation theories in relation to the perspective’s transcendental materialist framework—a Žižek-inspired philosophical lens and new ‘ontology of the subject’ developed by Adrian Johnston (2008), which is arguably the other major development of the ultra-realist perspective. Elsewhere, one of the authors (Wood 2019) has critically engaged with ultra-realism’s transcendental materialism at length, and critiqued, among other things, the psychoanalytically informed model of subjectivity it offers. Though the specificities of transcendental materialism—including Žižek’s (2012: 906) own disavowal of it—are not a primary point of concern in this article, it is worth noting that one of the key components of Johnston’s (2008) framework foregrounded within ultra-realism is its emphasis on neuroplasticity. As we discuss further below, the neuroplasticity of ultra-realism’s transcendental materialism is fundamentally at odds with Hall’s theory of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, which seeks to explicate interpersonal violence in connection with naturalised violent drives. Having outlined ultra-realism’s two central crime causation theories, we now turn to the first aspect of our critique: ultra-realist theory’s inability to convincingly explain gender-related disparities in criminal offending. Issue 1: Ultra-realism’s explanation of the gender gap in crime The gender-related disparity, or ‘gender gap’, in criminal offending is often recognised by criminologists as one of the few indisputable ‘facts’ about crime (Braithwaite 1989; Steffensmeier et al. 2005). Compelling general crime causation theories must, therefore, entail a convincing explanation of why crime (and violent crime in particular) is committed overwhelmingly by men. One of the hallmarks of the ultra-realist perspective in addressing this issue has been its resistance to, as Hall and Winlow (2003; 2007) put it, ‘culturalist’ crime causation theories that explain the gender gap in crime with reference to normative cultural expectations of gendered behaviour (see also Hall and Winlow 2015). While we will later evaluate such opposition to culture-oriented theories, it is first worth examining ultra-realism’s explanation of the gender gap in offending in the perspective’s its own terms. Rather than explaining this gap primarily as a product of culturally and socially reproduced norms, ultra-realist critics argue that fluctuations in local labour markets are foundational in gendered criminal offending. This approach is well summarised in Hall and Winlow’s (2003: 15) statement: Gender, like any other form of market-negotiated identity, needs to be related not just to the symbols and meanings of local or global cultural forms, but also to the insecurity, anxiety and hostility that increasingly characterise local labour markets and the global economy. This statement is not unreasonable, and we acknowledge the importance of criminologists examining the impact of local labour markets on crime rates. However, in giving short shrift to the role of gender norms, ultra-realism’s breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process theory remains unable to effectively explain why women from low socio-economic status backgrounds do not commit crimes at a similar rate to men from these demographics and backgrounds. Ultra-realism’s explanation for the gender gap in offending among ‘working-class’ individuals is that it occurs as a result of gender division of labour (Hall 1997; Hall and Winlow 2003). Namely, while administrative, intellectual and related emotional forms of labour associated with women have remained relatively stable in recent years, the offshoring and erosion of industrial manufacturing and processing jobs traditionally held by ‘working-class’ men explains a contemporary increase in the prevalence of crime perpetrated by men in this demographic (Hall and Winlow 2004). This exclusive socio-economic explanation of crime causation introduces a key multifaceted question that, we argue, ultra-realism does not provide a comprehensive answer to: why do these different forms of labour remain gendered? Providing a compelling answer to this question is crucial to any crime causation theory that attempts to explain the gender gap in offending as a product of fluctuations in gendered labour markets. As we will now argue, ultra-realism’s presuppositions preclude such an answer. Critique #1: The pseudo-pacification process treats gender norms as epiphenomenal to capitalism In its current state, ultra-realism all but disregards the question of why labour is gendered, treating gendered arrangements as an epiphenomenon of political economy (Connell 2002). In one publication that briefly explains the pseudo-pacification process, for example, Hall et al. (2005: 109) write: Seeing no attraction in the effete, over-accredited and routine forms of exploitation offered by neo-capitalist consumer/service work, many males continue to seek new functions and rewards for the unchanged qualities of the visceral habitus in the unregulated alternative economies emerging in areas where economic capital and cultural effort … have been withdrawn. Although the question of why the men ultra-realism refers to find service work unattractive is, therefore, essential to ultra-realism’s pseudo-pacification process, this question is not only unaddressed by the theory, but also not able to be adequately addressed by it. Reasons as to why this is the case have been unpacked in rich analytical detail within social reproduction feminism (Bakker 2007), and dual-systems theory feminism (Weeks 1998; Fraser 2013). One key contention shared by many scholars in these fields is that normative expectations and patterns of gendered behaviour cannot be explained through economistic ‘single system’ Marxian theories or ‘totalizing discourses’ that posit all gender inequality is driven purely by the functional needs of the economic system (see Weeks 1998; Fraser 2013). In such single system approaches, gender norms and oppressions are treated as epiphenomenal to the exclusively economistic tenets of a broader political economy. That is, gender norms are treated as a by-product of the economy, with no causal autonomy from their political-economic centre. This single system gender epiphenomenalism is challenged by a considerable body of empirical evidence indicating that cultural gender norms are of significant importance to understanding national variations in gender divisions of labour (Pfau-Effinger 1998; 2012). This issue is seen most clearly in Hall’s (1997) early development of the notion of ‘visceral cultures’ to explain the role of gender in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. While the visceral for Hall (1997: 462) entails ‘the body and its emotional constitution’, and represents a ‘primary motivational force in human life’, visceral cultures denote those capitalised by physical ‘hardness’—endurance, persistence and vitality—as well as egocentrism. Indeed, Hall (1997: 459) further argues that ‘it is much more likely that the primary force that motivates and reproduces most forms of life constituted in capital’s productivist era is neither structural nor ideology, but visceral’ (his emphasis). For Hall, the production of visceral cultures was functionally central to the formation of industrial capitalism because it not only provided capitalists with a workforce able to endure the physically demanding work of production, but also workers with the egocentrism necessary to negotiate the casual labour market’s intense competition. In Hall’s account, then, the fact that such visceral cultures construct physical labour as ‘men’s work’ can be understood as a functional product of the specific needs of capitalism. While this abstract association between egocentrism and physical labour may, at first instance, be called into question, from here, a further questionable connection is made between physical ‘hardness’ (qua endurance, persistence and vitality) and interpersonal violence. Hall (1997: 466) argues that: This process [of generating visceral cultures] sustains the sorts of dispositions towards unrestricted physical ‘hardness’ which manifests themselves as sporadic, unpredictable actions of intimidation and violence, erupting constantly … against a constant background static of undirected aggressivity. From our perspective, this model of violence introduces more problems to ultra-realism’s crime causation theory than it abates. Namely, it establishes an essentialist and potentially spurious link between endurance, persistence, physical rigor and egocentrism on the one hand, and ‘undirected aggressivity’, intimidation and violence, on the other. Just as egocentrism is not, arguably, a necessary condition of negotiating the casual labour market, so too are egocentrism and ‘hardness’ in the form of physical endurance and vitality neither necessary nor sufficient preconditions for aggressivity, intimidation or violence. Though he does not himself use the term, Hall’s visceral cultures thesis therefore posits a Bourdieusian form of hysteresis (Bourdieu 2000), whereby there is a mismatch between the new post-industrial field and a durable ‘visceral habitus’ (see Ellis 2015: 29). As Hall (1997: 468–9) puts it: ‘Hard lads’ are in the process of being left behind by history … in times of recession, [such men] are the perfect ‘oily rags’ for criminal (or anti-criminal) organizations; the ‘psychos’ and ‘nutters’ who will do just about anything, glorifying in their abilities to withstand physical pain and ignore danger. According to Hall (1997) such ‘visceral cultures’ are becoming increasingly redundant as the productivist era of capitalism recedes. As a result of deindustrialization and the emergence of technologies that have reduced the need for physical ‘hardness’ in the industrial sector, the visceral cultures generated in industrial capitalism have been sidelined and discarded by capital in favour of new dispositions. This contention leaves one crucial question unanswered: why do only some members of ‘visceral cultures’ become ‘hard lads’ who commit physical violence? Moreover, in bracketing the cultural norms underpinning working-class occupational identity, yet constructing a theory of pseudo-pacification that presupposes such norms, ultra-realism is arguably parasitic upon the very ‘culturalist’ frameworks that it critiques. Existing evidence therefore places ultra-realism, with its one-system theory approach to explaining the gender gap in offending through the gender division of labour, in something of a bind. Namely, to explain why men pursue certain forms of employment and not others, and in turn why men commit more crime than women, one must arguably turn to ‘culturalist’ theories capable of explaining patterns in social behaviour related to gender labour norms (Pfau-Effinger 1998; 2012). However, to admit to gender norms and cultural attitudes driving the gendering of different occupations, ultra-realism would have to concede that there exists a contemporaneous cultural sphere partly autonomous to an economic centre. Doing so would require proponents of ultra-realism to moderate their criticism of culturalist perspectives that foreground the socially reproductive capacity of gender norms. Accordingly, adopting a position that expectations and realities of gendered behaviour are in part shaped by influences partially autonomous to the economy would also then require an acknowledgement that extra-economic spheres of influence inform behaviour unrelated to commercial labour. Doing so would thus call into question a central premise of pseudo-pacification—that labour markets are the central driver of crime, hence the gender gap in offending can be explained with exclusive reference to gender divisions in different labour markets. Critique #2: The pseudo-pacification process ignores social reproduction, offering a framework that only examines crime through the lens of capitalist production and consumption In ultra-realism’s account of the pseudo-pacification process, the functional role of masculinity is explained as entirely related to production, as opposed to social reproduction. This conceptualization of the role of gender in criminal offending overlooks the potential for crime to emerge as a response to not only consumption and production processes, but also to breakdowns in social reproduction processes brought about by specific political-economic arrangements. Such breakdowns in social reproduction-related processes include, notably, the inability of parents to engage in positive child-rearing practices as a result of the stresses of economic marginalization, marginal work, social exclusion, poverty and a lack of adequate social supports (Currie 2009). Ultra-realism, in other words, focuses on the productive dimension of capitalism—namely, labour and consumption—to the neglect of social reproduction: ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Brenner and Laslett 1991: 314). Just as social reproduction theorists insist on the key role that reproduction practices play in sustaining capitalism (Bhattacharya 2017), so too do we maintain that theories on the relationships between political economy and crime must account not only for production and consumption, but also social reproduction. To do so, those with an interest in crime causation must move beyond ‘single system’ theories that explain gender relations as a product of late capitalist economic conditions, to acknowledge the broader fact that gender (and other social forms of) oppression predate capitalism; specifically in its ‘neoliberal’ dimensions (Bhattacharya 2017). Critique #3: Ultra-realism’s reason for dismissing gender norms as a factor in offending is founded on a denial of the antecedent fallacy As noted at the outset of this section, ultra-realism has been dismissive of frameworks that emphasise the role that cultural gender norms can play in patterns of offending. Indeed, ultra-realism’s perspective on this issue is neatly summarised in the following statement by Hall and Winlow (2015: 58): The feminist and pro-feminist assumption that violence and harm are typical products of masculine culture or ‘masculinity’ is based on the sort of statistical illusion that empiricists are very good at presenting to their peers and the public. Only a relatively small percentage of the male population commits serious crime or inflicts non-criminalized harms on others. Therefore, despite the inherent unreliability of statistics, although it looks likely that 80 per cent of crime/harm is committed by men, it is 80 per cent of this small percentage, not 80 per cent of the whole male population. It follows that because the majority of men do not commit crime, crime cannot be an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity. The logic underpinning Hall and Winlow’s (2015) reasoning here is, however, invalid. Firstly, they engage in the inverse error of ‘denying the antecedent’: an argument that; ‘If A then B, Not A, therefore, not B’. Their argument has the following logically invalid form: If A (most men commit crime) is true then B (crime is an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity) is true. A (most men commit crime) is not true, therefore B (crime is an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity) is not true. This is logically invalid because (1) the premises of the argument do not guarantee the truth of the conclusion; and (2) we can never validly deny an antecedent to reject its consequent. In other words, it does not logically follow that because most men do not commit acts of interpersonal violence, particular codes of ‘traditional’ masculinity play no role in men’s violence. Hall and Winlow’s claim that crime cannot be an expression of ‘traditional’, or in our understanding dominant socially reproduced forms of masculinity, on these grounds is, therefore, not valid. Secondly, an immanent critique can be levelled at Hall and Winlow’s (2015) claim through a tu quoque argument. Namely, if stuck to, the ultra-realist perspective introduces theoretical incoherence into ultra-realism’s second crime causation theory, special liberty, which Hall (2015: 129) asserts represents a ‘general cultural current’. That is, if only a small percentage of the population socialised into special liberty commit crime, it follows that because the majority of neoliberal subjects do not commit crime, crime cannot be an expression of neoliberalism’s cultural current of special liberty. Issue 2: Ultra-realism’s explanation of violence reduction through drives, libidinal energy and sublimation Ultra-realism’s inability to account for the gender gap in offending through its pseudo-pacification process model is not the only issue with the perspective. A second set of issues pertain to the Freudian-esque hydraulic model of the mind presupposed by the pseudo-pacification model. As discussed earlier, the sublimation of libidinal energy away from interpersonal aggression and into ‘socio-symbolic competition’ is central to ultra-realism’s account of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012; 2014a). Initially, it is worth noting that such hydraulic conceptions of libidinal energy channelled within a ‘dynamic unconscious’, are repudiated by many contemporary traditions within social and cognitive psychology (O’Brien and Jureidini 2002). Even if we accept the hydraulic model of the mind the pseudo-pacification model rests upon, we can identify key inconsistencies within the model itself. Namely, the pseudo-pacification process model posits that physical, interpersonal violence and aggression are underpinned by the same ‘drives’ as ‘socio-symbolic competition’. This is a key claim that we believe might be problematised with scrutiny. Critique #4: The pseudo-pacification process naturalizes violent drives, contradicting ultra-realism’s claim that we are hardwired for plasticity The first problem with the hydraulic model of drives and psychic energy described by ultra-realism’s pseudo-pacification model is that it posits a set amount of ‘libidinal’ energy that can be moved around, channelled or blocked, but not diminished or fundamentally transformed. Hence, rather than diminishing the ‘libidinal energy’ that also drives interpersonal violence, capitalism instead channels the energy underpinning such drives into a different form of violence: socio-symbolic competition. This model therefore posits a number of claims, each inviting contradictions into ultra-realism’s account of crime. Initially, the pseudo-pacification model has the unfortunate effect of naturalizing and universalizing violent instinctual drives (Hall 2012), which simply shift in their mode of expression depending on the milieu. At first glance, this point might appear to be an erroneous reading of ultra-realist theory given Hall’s (2012; 2014) transcendental materialist focus on the plasticity of the human neurological system: The core of the human neurological system is shot through with conflicting drives; therefore the human being has weak ‘instincts’. This means that the human being is malleable at the material level, hard-wired but only, paradoxically, for plasticity, which has been necessary for survival in multiple and changing environments. (Hall 2014b: 154) Such assertions of transcendental materialist drive plasticity and weak instincts are, however, fundamentally incompatible with the 'strong' instincts presupposed by the pseudo-pacification process. In explaining the pseudo-pacification process, for instance, Hall (2014b: 155) states: ‘The pseudopacification process’ fundamental psychosocial drive is provided by the sublimation of the once ubiquitous physical aggression that ordered Feudal societies, and its subsequent conversion into socio-symbolic competition ordered by the signifiers of consumer culture’. If this is the case, however, it introduces a temporal problem into Hall's (2014b) account. Namely, without naturalising aggressive drives, Hall’s theory can explain the sublimation of interpersonal violence into socio-symbolic aggression among those living at the dawn of capitalism. It cannot, however, explain the sublimation of interpersonal violence into socio-symbolic aggression among those born into capitalism without naturalizing this aggressive energy. For if aggression channelled into socio-symbolic competition is central to the ongoing momentum of capitalism, and not just its establishment as a new socio-economic system, then this aggression cannot be attributed to the preceding Feudal order, but to humanity’s constitution. And if it is the case that aggression is a ‘weak instinct’, then pseudo-pacification is the best we can hope for. Critique #5: In presupposing a hydraulic model of the psyche, the pseudo-pacification process sets up a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression Further to the above issue, the theory of pseudo-pacification sets up an opposition between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression as two distinct and separate expressions such drives may take. This posits something of a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression; all the psychic energy that is channelled into socio-symbolic aggression is taken away from physical aggression. The problem with this hydraulic conception of the mind becomes particularly clear when we address instances where individuals engage in interpersonal violence but remain committed to socio-symbolic competition through consumption and other capitalistic practices. Yet if we are to follow the processes proposed by ultra-realist theorists to explain the role of sublimation in the pseudo-pacification process (violent drives are channelled into socio-symbolic competition), then it should follow that the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process should entail the de-channelling or de-sublimation of energy away from socio-symbolic competition back to acts of physical aggression. If not, then proponents of the perspective might admit that there are different, and at least partly autonomous mechanisms underpinning the formation of socio-symbolically competitive subjectivities and the formation of ‘violent subjectivities’. In practice, ultra-realism’s theoretical premise is that with the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, individuals engage in acts of physical violence because of their commitment to socio-symbolic competition vis-à-vis consumerism and ‘anything to get ahead’ capital accumulation (Raymen 2016). However, this fundamentally contradicts the hydraulic model of the psyche used to explain the fall in violent crime as a product of the pseudo-pacification process. This contradiction becomes particularly pronounced when we examine the interface between the pseudo-pacification model and ultra-realism’s second crime causation concept: special liberty. Issue 3: Ultra-realism’s explanation of crime as an expression of capitalist values and special liberty Critique #6: It is incoherent to understand special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process as mutually reinforcing processes Although proponents of ultra-realism have variously argued that special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process ‘represent what look like mutually reinforcing processes’ (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651), this claim does not stand up to scrutiny. We argue that the theories actually work at cross-purposes, with the claims of special liberty theory contradicting the underlying presuppositions of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. There is, in other words, a central contradiction at the heart of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Namely, it is incoherent to simultaneously argue that: (1) increasing prevalence of violence can be explained by rises in special liberty (Hall and Winlow 2015); (2) reduction in rates of violence can be explained by the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2007; 2012); and (3) special liberty and the pseudo-pacification are mutually reinforcing processes (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651). If, for example, the pseudo-pacification process generates a general cultural current of special liberty, which encourages individuals to ‘transcend the normative restrictions’ set by this process (Hall and Wilson 2014: 650), then it cannot alone lay claim to decreases in the incidence of violence in capitalist societies since the beginning of the 20th century. Critique #7: Ultra-realism’s crime causation theory ignores the array of values, beliefs and vocabularies of motive for crime that are not an expression of capitalism We might also query ultra-realism’s assertion that the constellation of values that together capitalise special liberty, such as competitive individualism, ostentatious displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ruthless capital accumulation are a ‘general cultural current’ in neoliberal societies (see Hall 2012; ,2015; Raymen 2016: 21). Certainly this constellation of values may have driven the offending of individuals interviewed by ultra-realist criminologists (see Tudor 2019). It cannot be inferred from their data though, that such a particular constellation of values is ‘general’ in neoliberal societies (Hall and Winlow 2015). Indeed, in their positing of special liberty as a general cultural current (Hall 2015), we might make a critical assessment of ultra-realism that has similarly been directed at Merton’s (1938) strain theory—that it is built on a flawed consensus model of social values. Even if we were to accept that a consensus exists around the aforementioned norms and values, an additional problem remains—that these norms and values are far from the only systems of belief that might contribute to crime. Put simply, contemporary expressions of subjectivity under neoliberal capitalism are more variegated and complex than ultra-realism’s account describes. Personal and social identities pertain not only to attitudes towards consumerism (themselves varied in contemporary capitalist societies) but to a variety of personal commitments we invest in (Archer 2000). Further, there exist a variety of values, beliefs and ‘vocabularies of motive’ driving crimes that are not an expression of capitalism. Compelling evidence indicates, for example, that rape myth acceptance is a strong predictor of sexual violence perpetration (Bohner et al. 1998; Johnson and Beech 2017). Similarly, convincing evidence points to the impact of ‘honour cultures’ in sanctioning men’s violence against women (Vandello and Cohen 2003). While such social standards often intersect with economically driven factors in generating crime, they are not reducible to them, nor are the strictly economic aspects of political economy always a primary factor driving criminalised acts. Extra-economic values and social roles have no place in ultra-realism’s account of contemporary subjectivity, which insists that conspicuous displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ‘by any means necessary’ capital accumulation are the core social principles of contemporary capitalistic societies. Ultra-realism, in short, offers a monolithic account of contemporary neoliberal subjectivity where all extra-economic values and behaviours are epiphenomenal to the influence of capital and are thus of insignificant consequence in explanations of crime. Moreover, even in situations where it is apposite to explain crimes through recourse to hedonistic consumption and capital accumulation, such concepts are not, in and of themselves, sufficient to explain why some individuals pursue illegal or violent activities in the realisation of these values. To adequately account for crime, we must look beyond ultra-realism’s insistence on consumerism, competitive individualism and entitlement, to address how such factors interact with other factors examined by criminologists. Issue 4: Ultra-realism’s direct expression theory of the crime-political economy nexus In considering ultra-realism’s crime causation theory, we can make a distinction between two approaches to understanding the role of political economy in crime, which we might term ‘direct expression theories’ and ‘indirect expression theories’, respectively. In direct expression theories, crimes are a product of (1) individuals mirroring the values of a political economy and/or (2) responding directly to the conditions of their political-economic environment. Ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process correspond to these two interpretations of political economy’s role in crime causation. In Hall’s (2012) theory of special liberty, crime is driven by a sense of entitlement to harm others fostered by neoliberalism, while in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, crime is the result of individuals responding to being ‘left behind’ by neoliberal capitalism. The direct influence of capitalism on crime within ultra-realism theory is further signposted when Hall and Winlow (2004: 290) lament that: The pervasive acceptance that the capitalist system might not be superseded or even brought under democratic political control in the foreseeable future has, with a few notable exceptions … created something of a hiatus in which thought has been largely distracted from critical investigations into ways in which human beings are interfacing in more direct ways with the demands of consumerism and global market capitalism [their emphasis]. Crucially, such direct expression theories posit that the impact of political economy on crime is unmediated by other structural and cultural factors. In setting out the core principles of the ultra-realist perspective, Hall (2012: 150) for example, laments that in ‘liberal’ criminological theory, ‘everything is mediated by cultural systems and susceptible to the choices made by the autonomous sovereign ego, therefore even complex concatenations of causes and probabilistic conditions are out of bounds’. This reasoning leads to the following significant issue with ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Critique #8: In setting up a dichotomy between ‘causative’ political-economic factors and merely ‘symptomological’ factors, ultra-realism engages in downwards conflation, leaving it unable to explain the formation of the structures it discusses As elaborated in our critique, ultra-realism’s crime causation theories treat a variety of phenomena, including gendered power relations, as epiphenomenal to political economy, i.e. a secondary biproduct that possesses no causative power in and of itself. This has the potential to result in a number of outcomes; one of which is that ultra-realism’s account of social order is characterised by what Archer (1995) has termed ‘downwards conflation’: understanding social activity as determined by social structures, and agency as a product of these structures. In theories characterized by downwards conflation, ‘actors may be indispensable for energising the social system … but it is not they whose actions give it direction by shaping structural properties’ (Archer 1995: 81). Agency, in other words, is explained in terms of structure, leaving perspectives that engage in this form of conflation no latitude to explain how actors shape said social structures. In explanations of social phenomena predicated on downwards conflation, individuals are, as Archer (1995: 82) puts it, taken to be ‘literally the agents of structure’, with no causative function in determining or contributing to the development of structural environments themselves. As Archer (1995) further explains, there exist numerous examples of downwards conflation within social theory, including varieties of functionalism, structuralism, economism and technological determinism. In the case of ultra-realism, the perspective’s downwards conflationism is chiefly illustrated in the economism of the pseudo-pacification process, which understands the sublimation and stimulation of libidinal drives in terms of their functions for capital. As Horsley et al. (2015: 24) write, ‘pacification was – before individuals became accustomed to its codes and internalized its sensibilities – initially a functional by-product of political-economic change’. Elsewhere, Hall (2014a: 28) similarly asserts that the pseudo-pacification process represents the ‘functional stimulation and control of libidinal drives’ and that ‘mainstream culture and its institutions work on behalf of the pseudo-pacification process to socialise tough individual competitors willing to play by the rules’ (Hall 2015: 19). This unacknowledged economism points to a broader issue with Hall’s (2012) pseudo-pacification model; namely, that it offers a rather conspiratorial account of the birth of capitalism. In this account, capitalism, and the kinds of social relationships that have led to its expansion in different forms, were fully programmed at its outset by shadowy forces, rather than reproduced through the functions of industry (albeit in unreasonably deregulated forms), and the widespread societal adoption of contemporary capitalistic values. To put it in Dardot and Laval’s (2014: 8) terms, Hall’s pseudo-pacification process ‘takes the historical results of a process’—in this case, the stimulation of libidinal drives to consume and produce—‘for goals consciously decided on at the outset’; once in place, the process and its breakdown function according to a uniform economistic law that is driven by its own internal dynamics, and unchanged by the actions of individual agents and coalitions. A further consequence of the downwards conflationism that characterises direct expression models is that in explaining crime, ‘a homology [is] asserted between the societal system and the small group which [is] held to constitute a miniaturised version of the former because [it is] orchestrated by the same value system’ (Archer 1995: 7). Hence in ultra-realism, crime is understood as a synecdoche of both neoliberal values (special liberty) and the functional drives cultivated by capitalism to ensure production and consumption (the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process). As we have shown in our analysis of these ultra-realist crime causation theories, such theories are unable to explain why certain individuals respond to political-economic conditions by offending while others do not. Taken together then, ultra-realism’s direct expression theories offer a ‘totalising discourse’ on crime that conceptualizes the economy and labour markets as the driving force behind all spheres of society (Wood 2019). Proponents of ultra-realism might here object that we are misrepresenting their position on causation; that they do, in fact, admit a range of causal mechanisms beyond political economy. We argue that they have, though, on numerous occasions, made statements that indicate the opposite: that the only structure or factor which has any causative status in understanding crime is global political economy; specifically its economic, market-oriented aspects (Hall 2012; ,2015; Hall and Winlow 2015; 2016). Indeed, ultra-realism often contrasts such ‘causative’ political-economic factors with merely ‘symptomological’ factors (Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015; 2016). We might take, for example, Raymen’s (2019) claim about the always symptomological status of technology in a favourable review of Hall and Antonopoulos’s (2016) book, Fake Meds Online: To focus too much upon the issue of technology and the internet would be to fall prey to much of contemporary criminology’s tendency towards a spurious symptomology (Hall 2012), in which empirically observable trends such as the technologically-facilitated mutation of criminal markets are wrongly elevated to carrying a causative status. Fake Meds Online avoids this trap, skilfully situating the issue of technology and the internet in its proper sub-dominant analytical place, and instead keeps its focus fixed firmly upon the concrete causative processes of global political economy and its impact upon contemporary subjectivities. Here Raymen (2019) makes the questionable assumption that the largest system—the dominant capitalist political-economic model—is always the most analytically important one, and that causal mechanisms only pertain to the structures of capitalism. The assumed symptomological nature of all that is not political-economic means that ultra-realism does not inject gender, racialisation, culture, technology, sexuality, with any causative power: all are mere epiphenomena animated by the contemporary political-economic order. In short, ultra-realism’s counterposition of ‘causative’ political-economic factors against ‘symptomological’ factors: (1) wrongly universalise what constitutes a causative and symptomological factor; (2) present a false dichotomy that elides the importance of mediating factors; and (3) ignores the often-polygenetic nature of social phenomena. Regarding point (1), as critical realists such as Sayer (1999) emphasise, what constitutes a causative and a symptomological factor depends on the phenomenon we are examining. If, for example, we are examining whether predictive policing technologies perpetuate racial profiling, it makes perfect sense, contra Raymen’s above claim, to focus our investigation on the issue of technology, and in particular the production and effects of technology combined with entrenched practices of racialised policing. In investigating such a phenomenon, it would, in fact, be spurious to focus our analysis exclusively upon political economy, as opposed to technology, for we cannot reduce such a technology to the political-economic values and economic motivations of its creators. As Archer (2000: 167–8) reminds us: In a very serious causal sense, material culture ‘escapes’ its makers. Artefacts become independent of their makers, because practical meanings are carried by the objects themselves and their causal powers are built into them and may have been unrealised, or only partially realised, by their first inventor. For all the importance of examining the values inscribed into technologies by their creators, we cannot, in other words, ignore the intended and unintended broader effects of technologies. Alongside the other issues discussed in this paper, ultra-realism’s inability to adequately address these unintended emergent effects calls into question whether political economy is, as proponents of the perspective argue, invariably the necessary ‘level of abstraction’ (Floridi 2013) for examining crime and criminal justice-related generative mechanisms. None of these interrelated issues—downwards conflationism, epiphenomenalism and functionalism—plague what we term indirect expression theories. For indirect expression theories, crime is an emergent property of individuals embedded in differential circumstances shaped by a variety of factors including, but not limited to (political-)economic conditions. As Elder-Vass (2005: 316) explains, ‘emergence is operating when a whole has properties or powers that are not possessed by its parts’. Emergent properties denote those that are not possessed by the parts of an entity, but only emerge through a particular structural relation between these parts. For our purposes, the key benefit of treating crime as an emergent property is that it requires consideration of stratified, non-reductive accounts of crime, which acknowledge that ‘the generative mechanisms of high[er] order strata emerge from, but are not reducible to, the generative mechanisms of lower order strata’ (Wood 2019: 104). In other words, though it is necessary to situate crime within political-economic systems, it is reductive to (1) reduce its causes to these systems and (2) treat it as monocausal rather than polygenetic. Though not always expressed in terms of stratification and emergence, we suggest that indirect expression theories are characterised by such a stratified account of reality. Hence, where direct expression ends up eliding the emergence of phenomena at different strata of the world, indirect expression theories offer stratified accounts of crime, in which crime is shaped by multiple strata of nature (the biological, psychological, social and economic) and cannot be reduced to any one of these strata. Where direct expression theories inadvertently grant political economy a ‘monopoly over causation’ (Archer 1995: 3), indirect expression theories, such as Mucchielli’s (2010) pacification process, and Currie’s (1997) mid-range theory of post-industrial violence, are able to account for the concatenation of immediate political-economic and extra-political-economic factors that shape crime causation. Conclusion As our critical analysis of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory has demonstrated, it is essential that any theory of the relationships between political economy and crime avoids epiphenomenalism—wrongly withholding causative power from all but certain facets of the world. In the case of theories that engage in downwards conflationism, such as ultra-realism, this epiphenomenalism results in sociological accounts that disregard the agentic power of individuals. In ultra-realism’s account, individual actors play no role in shaping the structural and cultural environments they live within—they are instead mere conduits for the special liberty and socio-symbolic competition wrought through pseudo-pacification. Moreover, such epiphenomenalism results in theories that are unable to explain the very formation and change of the structures they grant sole custody of causation to. This issue is readily apparent when we interrogate ultra-realism’s theory of the pseudo-pacification process, which is unable to identify ‘what hidden hand ensures the functionality of ideological … state apparatuses in providing the non-material pre-conditions of production’ (Archer 2000: 29). Far from representing a free-floating structural and cultural edifice that determines all structures and subjectivities, capitalism is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the individuals, material structures and cultural systems it emerges from (Ferrell 2007). How then might we overcome these issues associated with ultra-realism’s crime causation theory? Here, Archer’s (1995) realist social theory is again instructive. In Archer’s parlance, neoliberalism, and capitalism more broadly, are emergent phenomena comprised of material structural emergent properties (SEPs) and ideational cultural emergent properties (CEPs). Although, according to Archer, SEPs and CEPs exert causative power on individuals through downwards causation, they do not determine individuals’ behaviour or subjectivity. Rather, individuals are understood to possess personal emergent properties (PEPs), such as reflexivity, that mediate their interactions with the natural, practical and social orders of reality, and enable them to forge and revise the personal commitments that animate their lives (Archer 2000). Importantly, accounting for such PEPs is not, as Hall and Winlow (2018: 52) argue, tantamount to ‘separat[ing] the individual moral agent from the system’s structures, dynamic processes, events and hegemonic ways of thinking and believing’. Indeed, Archer’s (1995; 2000) sophisticated conceptualisation of human agency repudiates the notion of an ‘eternal moral agent’ that Hall and Winlow (2018: 52) wrongly impute to her framework. Nor do the SEPs and CEPs of neoliberalism hold a causative monopoly over all extra-economic SEPs and CEPs. We also cannot conflate the structural and cultural emergent properties associated with neoliberalism, offering an account of political economy that grants no causative autonomy to its structures or ideology (see Archer 1996). Consequently, crime causation theories that account for political economy must resist offering ‘single systems’ accounts that view the economy as the underlying driving force behind all social phenomena. In sum then, to overcome the issues associated with ultra-realism’s direct expression theory, an indirect expression theory of crime and political economy would need to account for a diverse range of personal, cultural and structural emergent properties; and, subsequently, avoid treating key social factors, such as gender, as epiphenomenal to capitalism. Crucially, Archer’s (1995) approach provides a framework for resolving not only the structure/agency conflationism of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory, but also for moving past the unhelpful ‘materialist’ and ‘culturalist’ dichotomies that characterise the perspective. As Archer’s (1996) framework emphasises, we can treat neither structure nor culture as epiphenomena of the other; material structures and propositional culture hold autonomous causative powers which shape one another in turn. 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Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Footnotes 1 Ultra-realism’s significance within the canon of criminological theory is, for example, signalled by its inclusion in criminology textbooks (see Burke 2017) and handbooks (see Hayward and Smith 2017). 2 To date, most critiques of the perspective have been published in critical and constructive book reviews of ultra-realist texts (O’Brien 2007). In one of these, Walklate (2016: 112) expressed concern that ultra-realism may be seeking to replace one dogma (‘liberal theory’), with another (transcendental materialism), while the perspective remains unable to account for geographically and culturally informed nuances in explaining crime. Elsewhere, in article-length publications, researchers associated with the tradition of cultural criminology have critiqued ultra-realism’s conceptualisation and dismissal of emancipatory resistance (Ferrell 2019), and its conflation of gender and/or racialisation-focused analyses with ‘identity politics’ (Ilan 2019). Approaching the perspective through a critical realist lens, Wood (2019) has argued, inter alia, that ultra-realism’s proposed philosophical grounding for research is incoherent given its neglect of key incongruencies between Johnston’s (2008) transcendental materialism and Bhaskar’s (2008) stratified ontology. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The British Journal of Criminology Oxford University Press

Breaking Down the Pseudo-Pacification Process: Eight Critiques of Ultra-Realist Crime Causation Theory

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© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract This paper critically examines ultra-realist criminology’s two central crime causation theories: the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process and special liberty. We identify a number of shortcomings in these theories pertaining to (1) their explanation of gender-related disparities in criminal offending; (2) their explanation of violence reduction through Freudian notions of drives, libidinal energy, and sublimation; and (3) their explication of crime as an expression of capitalist values. Fundamentally, we suggest that in treating political economy as the underlying source of all causative power in society, both theories engage in what Margaret Archer terms ‘downwards conflationism’. To this end, ultra-realism offers what we term a ‘direct expression theory of crime’, in which crime is a synecdoche and direct unmediated expression of political-economic conditions alone. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s realist social theory, we conclude by sketching out several potential principles of an ‘indirect expression theory’ that avoid the shortcomings of ultra-realism in explaining the complicated relationship between political economy and crime. Introduction The role of political economy in shaping crime rates has long animated criminological research, with numerous empirical studies pointing to a relationship between the two (Box 1987; Currie 1997; 2009). Yet despite this robust empirical research, theoretical accounts of the relationship between political economy and crime remain, as Lynch (2013: 137) argues, underdeveloped. Seeking to rectify this issue, the perspective of ultra-realism, developed by Hall and Winlow (2015), has emerged as an influential critical criminological approach, offering a cornucopia of concepts for examining the various relationships between political economy and crime.1 Key among these concepts are Hall’s (2012) intertwined theories of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process and special liberty. Understood as mutually constituting processes (Hall and Wilson 2014), Hall’s (2012) theories offer an account of ‘contemporary subjectivity in its socio-economic context’ (Hall and Winlow 2018: 43). Each theory, in its own way, explains crime as a direct expression of capitalism. In the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, physical violence is understood as a desublimated expression of the functional socio-symbolic competition fostered by capitalism. In special liberty, by contrast, crimes and other forms of ‘positive harm’ are understood to arise out of capitalism’s fostering of a competitive, ruthless and entitled form of subjectivity (Hall 2012). Hall’s (2012) interlinked theories have been applied to explain a wide variety of criminological and social phenomena, including serial murder (Hall and Wilson 2014), workplace bullying (Lloyd 2019), fraud (Tudor 2019), the appeal of post-apocalyptic popular culture (Raymen 2018), and the rise of lethal violence in the post-recession United Kingdom (Ellis 2019). Notwithstanding their growing prevalence within the crime causation cannon—and in spite of various multi-focal critiques of ultra-realism2—neither the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process nor its notion of special liberty have been subject to systematic critical analysis. Given their increasing use to explain a panoply of harms, such an analysis is essential to the ongoing revitalization of criminological theory—itself one of the stated aims of the ultra-realist project (Hall and Winlow 2015). In this article, we therefore undertake a critical appraisal of ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. Our aim in doing so is not only to assist ultra-realists in fine-tuning their theory to avoid the issues we identify, but also to help foster the development of altogether new theories on the relationships between political economy and crime that avoid these issues. In total, we offer eight critiques of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Most tap into long-standing sociological debates about structure and agency, as well as discussions regarding the relative merits of ‘materialist’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches to criminological inquiry (see Ferrell 2007). Our reservations about ultra-realism’s crime causation theory are as follows. Firstly, we call into question the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’s ability to account for gender-related disparities in criminal behaviour. We propose that: (1) the pseudo-pacification process treats gender norms (i.e. ideas about how different genders should be and act) as epiphenomenal to capitalism; (2) the pseudo-pacification process ignores social reproduction, offering a framework that only examines crime through the lens of capitalist production and consumption; and (3) ultra-realism’s reason for dismissing gender norms as a factor in offending is founded on a denial of the antecedent fallacy. The second part of our analysis addresses ultra-realism’s explanation of violence through reference to drives, libidinal energy and sublimation, via its theory of the (breakdown of the) pseudo-pacification process. Here we argue that: (4) the pseudo-pacification process naturalizes violent drives, contradicting ultra-realism’s claim that human beings are hardwired for plasticity; and (5) in presupposing a hydraulic model of the psyche, the pseudo-pacification process sets up a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression. In the third aspect of our analysis we outline several reservations about special liberty; particularly with regard to its explanation of crime as an expression of capitalist values, and its (in)compatibility with the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. We suggest: (6) it is incoherent to understand special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process as mutually reinforcing processes; and (7) ultra-realism’s crime causation theory ignores the array of values, beliefs and vocabularies of motive for crime that are not solely an expression of capitalism. Our analysis concludes that: (8) in setting up a dichotomy between ‘causative’ political-economic factors and merely ‘symptomological’ non-political-economic factors (Hall and Winlow 2015), both of ultra-realism’s core crime causation theories engage in what Archer (1995: 3) has termed ‘downwards conflation’, ‘where the solution to the problem of structure and agency consists of rendering the latter epiphenomenal’. In theories that engage in downwards conflation, society is reified and individual action is understood as entirely socially determined, resulting in accounts that are unable to explain the formation of the structures they discuss (Archer 1995). Ultimately, we argue that through their downwards conflation, ultra-realism’s crime causation theories represent what might be termed direct expression theories: explanations of crime causation that posit an externally unmediated link between political economy and crime rates. Within direct expression theories, all other social phenomena are treated as epiphenomenal to the influence of capital in political economy. Epiphenomenalism within the framework of ultra-realism is particularly apparent in its explanation of the drivers for gender-related disparities in criminal offending, which, here we argue, treats gender norms as functional by-products of late capitalism. To address this potential shortcoming in ultra-realism, we alternately advocate a critical realism-informed indirect expression framework. As we will demonstrate, this approach provides a lens for examining the emergent and mediated nature of the relationship between crime and political economy. Pseudo-pacification and special liberty Before elaborating our critique, it is necessary to first unpack ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012). As Horsley et al. (2015: 18) explain, the pseudo-pacification process theorises ‘the shift from physically violent to pacified socioeconomic competition’ resulting from the ‘pseudo-pacifying’ demands of the market economy. Set up in contestation to Elias’s (1978) civilization process thesis and Mucchielli’s (2010) pacification process thesis, Hall’s (2012) theory of the pseudo-pacification process is offered by proponents of ultra-realism as an explanation for the decline of violent crime in 20th century capitalist societies. Drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalytic understandings of libidinal energy, drives and sublimation, Hall (2012) argues that this reduction in violent crime is the product of individuals being ‘pseudo-pacified’ into the socio-symbolic norms and practices of capitalism. This, according to Hall (2012), entails a process of sublimation, whereby aggressive libidinal energy underpinning interpersonal violence is channelled into the socio-symbolic competition that comprises and sustains capitalism. As Hall (2012: 254–5) defines it, the pseudo-pacification process entails: The sublimation and conversion of physical violence and visceral aggression to an economically energising form of competitive individualism fuelled by a struggle for social distinction; the energising of destructive, competitive drives and desires and the concomitant expansion and sophistication of external and internal control measures in a relation of mutual amplification. To be ‘pacified’ in this scenario is to play by the rules of capitalism and adopt the competitive behaviour necessary for capitalism to function. Crucially, the ‘pseudo’ element of the process refers to the premise that, rather than entailing a reduction of aggressive ‘libidinal’ energy, such energy is instead (re)channelled into economically aggressive practices of enterprise and consumption necessitated by capitalist political economies. Hall (2012) argues that the pseudo-pacification process has two key functions for capitalism: firstly, it stimulates ‘socio-symbolic competition’ and consumption to increase market demand; and secondly, it limits physical violence so that the market can function more efficiently (Hall 2012). In realising these functions, on the other hand, the process ‘generates immense undialectical tension between stimulated obscene drives and a complex system of desire-formation, repression, sublimation and economic utilisation’ (Hall 2014a: 28). Thus, physical violence is pacified and sublimated in the service of the market economy. Importantly, for ultra-realists, competitive individualism expressed through participatory economic competition and physical violence are different expressions of the same underlying ‘libidinal energy’ and drives. Indeed, as Hall (2012) explains: [A]s we became less violent and bloodthirsty we became richer and more pacified but possibly less honourable and ... less egalitarian; violence looks to have been sublimated into symbolic and toned-down practical forms rather than dispersed into the transcendental realm of spirituality. According to Hall and Winlow (2004), the sublimation of libidinal energy in Western, neoliberal societies is, furthermore, contingent upon the effective management of capitalism and namely, its ability to provide functions and services for the labour it exploits. When reward for labour is insufficient, physically violent behaviour finds a footing once more. Within this moment of collapse, human libidinal energy is diverted from the former socially palatable activities of capitalist exchange, production and socio-symbolic competition into interpersonal violence—a moment ultra-realists refer to as the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015). Though ultra-realists have been somewhat vague in detailing the scale or composition of this breakdown—for example, do single acts of interpersonal violence qualify as breakdowns in the pseudo-pacification process?—in several publications (see Hall and Winlow 2004; 2015), they argue that neoliberalism is the final straw that broke the back of pseudo-pacification: The breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process is the product of the failure of neocapitalism to find status and functions for visceral cultures that performed vital services in the nation-bound productive economies of high capitalism at the same time as its neo-liberal political classes presided over the wholesale dissolution of the traditional occupations, ethico-cultural codes, communities and political collectives that might have acted as secure platforms for adaptive change. (Hall and Winlow 2004: 298) In stimulating individuals’ drive to foster socio-symbolic competition, ultra-realists argue that the pseudo-pacification process creates a ‘general cultural current’ of what Hall (2015: 129) terms special liberty. At its most basic premise, special liberty can be understood as a ‘sense of entitlement’ to bring harm to another person in the naked pursuit of ‘instrumental or expressive’ interests (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). The notion of special liberty arises, in part, out of ultra-realism’s reconsideration of how ‘harm’ has earlier been accounted for in criminological theory. In explaining the various constitutions of criminological harm, Hall and Winlow (2015: 91) assert that ‘rights’ are assigned a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ quality, either preventing the ‘mistreatment’ of bodily autonomy or promoting ‘human flourishing’. According to their account, motivations for harm are also represented in positive and negative forms. Negative motivations for inflicting harm are presented as common, often unintentional by-products of the competition demanded by membership in the market economy of social relationships—or in other words, harms incurred in maintaining the separation between the ‘rich and successful [and] the precariat’ (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). Positive harm, by contrast, is instantiated by special liberty: the ‘sense of entitlement’ to first and foremost intentionally bring harm to others (Hall and Winlow 2015: 91). Crucially, special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process are understood as ‘mutually reinforcing processes’ (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651), with special liberty providing capitalism with subjectivities tailored to driving production and consumption. As Lloyd (2018: 256–7) further elaborates: Hall’s (2012) concept of ‘special liberty’ delineates an individual embedded within the socio-symbolic structures of neoliberal ideology; epitomising the competitive individualism, envy and self-interest fueling consumer capitalism, the individual possessing special liberty is convinced of their right to maximise their market share and keep rivals from threatening their position, using any means necessary. Special liberty is therefore characterised by a constellation of key values and behaviours, including competitive individualism, ostentatious displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ruthless capital accumulation (Raymen 2016; Lloyd 2018). A ‘fantasized state of exception’ granting ‘the beholder the freedom to act with exploitative impunity’ (Kotzé 2019: 242); it is special liberty, ultra-realists argue, that primarily explains the ‘subjective motives’ underpinning a variety of contemporary crimes, from serial murder (Hall and Wilson 2014) to fraud (Tudor 2019). In concluding this review, it is worth situating ultra-realism’s two crime causation theories in relation to the perspective’s transcendental materialist framework—a Žižek-inspired philosophical lens and new ‘ontology of the subject’ developed by Adrian Johnston (2008), which is arguably the other major development of the ultra-realist perspective. Elsewhere, one of the authors (Wood 2019) has critically engaged with ultra-realism’s transcendental materialism at length, and critiqued, among other things, the psychoanalytically informed model of subjectivity it offers. Though the specificities of transcendental materialism—including Žižek’s (2012: 906) own disavowal of it—are not a primary point of concern in this article, it is worth noting that one of the key components of Johnston’s (2008) framework foregrounded within ultra-realism is its emphasis on neuroplasticity. As we discuss further below, the neuroplasticity of ultra-realism’s transcendental materialism is fundamentally at odds with Hall’s theory of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, which seeks to explicate interpersonal violence in connection with naturalised violent drives. Having outlined ultra-realism’s two central crime causation theories, we now turn to the first aspect of our critique: ultra-realist theory’s inability to convincingly explain gender-related disparities in criminal offending. Issue 1: Ultra-realism’s explanation of the gender gap in crime The gender-related disparity, or ‘gender gap’, in criminal offending is often recognised by criminologists as one of the few indisputable ‘facts’ about crime (Braithwaite 1989; Steffensmeier et al. 2005). Compelling general crime causation theories must, therefore, entail a convincing explanation of why crime (and violent crime in particular) is committed overwhelmingly by men. One of the hallmarks of the ultra-realist perspective in addressing this issue has been its resistance to, as Hall and Winlow (2003; 2007) put it, ‘culturalist’ crime causation theories that explain the gender gap in crime with reference to normative cultural expectations of gendered behaviour (see also Hall and Winlow 2015). While we will later evaluate such opposition to culture-oriented theories, it is first worth examining ultra-realism’s explanation of the gender gap in offending in the perspective’s its own terms. Rather than explaining this gap primarily as a product of culturally and socially reproduced norms, ultra-realist critics argue that fluctuations in local labour markets are foundational in gendered criminal offending. This approach is well summarised in Hall and Winlow’s (2003: 15) statement: Gender, like any other form of market-negotiated identity, needs to be related not just to the symbols and meanings of local or global cultural forms, but also to the insecurity, anxiety and hostility that increasingly characterise local labour markets and the global economy. This statement is not unreasonable, and we acknowledge the importance of criminologists examining the impact of local labour markets on crime rates. However, in giving short shrift to the role of gender norms, ultra-realism’s breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process theory remains unable to effectively explain why women from low socio-economic status backgrounds do not commit crimes at a similar rate to men from these demographics and backgrounds. Ultra-realism’s explanation for the gender gap in offending among ‘working-class’ individuals is that it occurs as a result of gender division of labour (Hall 1997; Hall and Winlow 2003). Namely, while administrative, intellectual and related emotional forms of labour associated with women have remained relatively stable in recent years, the offshoring and erosion of industrial manufacturing and processing jobs traditionally held by ‘working-class’ men explains a contemporary increase in the prevalence of crime perpetrated by men in this demographic (Hall and Winlow 2004). This exclusive socio-economic explanation of crime causation introduces a key multifaceted question that, we argue, ultra-realism does not provide a comprehensive answer to: why do these different forms of labour remain gendered? Providing a compelling answer to this question is crucial to any crime causation theory that attempts to explain the gender gap in offending as a product of fluctuations in gendered labour markets. As we will now argue, ultra-realism’s presuppositions preclude such an answer. Critique #1: The pseudo-pacification process treats gender norms as epiphenomenal to capitalism In its current state, ultra-realism all but disregards the question of why labour is gendered, treating gendered arrangements as an epiphenomenon of political economy (Connell 2002). In one publication that briefly explains the pseudo-pacification process, for example, Hall et al. (2005: 109) write: Seeing no attraction in the effete, over-accredited and routine forms of exploitation offered by neo-capitalist consumer/service work, many males continue to seek new functions and rewards for the unchanged qualities of the visceral habitus in the unregulated alternative economies emerging in areas where economic capital and cultural effort … have been withdrawn. Although the question of why the men ultra-realism refers to find service work unattractive is, therefore, essential to ultra-realism’s pseudo-pacification process, this question is not only unaddressed by the theory, but also not able to be adequately addressed by it. Reasons as to why this is the case have been unpacked in rich analytical detail within social reproduction feminism (Bakker 2007), and dual-systems theory feminism (Weeks 1998; Fraser 2013). One key contention shared by many scholars in these fields is that normative expectations and patterns of gendered behaviour cannot be explained through economistic ‘single system’ Marxian theories or ‘totalizing discourses’ that posit all gender inequality is driven purely by the functional needs of the economic system (see Weeks 1998; Fraser 2013). In such single system approaches, gender norms and oppressions are treated as epiphenomenal to the exclusively economistic tenets of a broader political economy. That is, gender norms are treated as a by-product of the economy, with no causal autonomy from their political-economic centre. This single system gender epiphenomenalism is challenged by a considerable body of empirical evidence indicating that cultural gender norms are of significant importance to understanding national variations in gender divisions of labour (Pfau-Effinger 1998; 2012). This issue is seen most clearly in Hall’s (1997) early development of the notion of ‘visceral cultures’ to explain the role of gender in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. While the visceral for Hall (1997: 462) entails ‘the body and its emotional constitution’, and represents a ‘primary motivational force in human life’, visceral cultures denote those capitalised by physical ‘hardness’—endurance, persistence and vitality—as well as egocentrism. Indeed, Hall (1997: 459) further argues that ‘it is much more likely that the primary force that motivates and reproduces most forms of life constituted in capital’s productivist era is neither structural nor ideology, but visceral’ (his emphasis). For Hall, the production of visceral cultures was functionally central to the formation of industrial capitalism because it not only provided capitalists with a workforce able to endure the physically demanding work of production, but also workers with the egocentrism necessary to negotiate the casual labour market’s intense competition. In Hall’s account, then, the fact that such visceral cultures construct physical labour as ‘men’s work’ can be understood as a functional product of the specific needs of capitalism. While this abstract association between egocentrism and physical labour may, at first instance, be called into question, from here, a further questionable connection is made between physical ‘hardness’ (qua endurance, persistence and vitality) and interpersonal violence. Hall (1997: 466) argues that: This process [of generating visceral cultures] sustains the sorts of dispositions towards unrestricted physical ‘hardness’ which manifests themselves as sporadic, unpredictable actions of intimidation and violence, erupting constantly … against a constant background static of undirected aggressivity. From our perspective, this model of violence introduces more problems to ultra-realism’s crime causation theory than it abates. Namely, it establishes an essentialist and potentially spurious link between endurance, persistence, physical rigor and egocentrism on the one hand, and ‘undirected aggressivity’, intimidation and violence, on the other. Just as egocentrism is not, arguably, a necessary condition of negotiating the casual labour market, so too are egocentrism and ‘hardness’ in the form of physical endurance and vitality neither necessary nor sufficient preconditions for aggressivity, intimidation or violence. Though he does not himself use the term, Hall’s visceral cultures thesis therefore posits a Bourdieusian form of hysteresis (Bourdieu 2000), whereby there is a mismatch between the new post-industrial field and a durable ‘visceral habitus’ (see Ellis 2015: 29). As Hall (1997: 468–9) puts it: ‘Hard lads’ are in the process of being left behind by history … in times of recession, [such men] are the perfect ‘oily rags’ for criminal (or anti-criminal) organizations; the ‘psychos’ and ‘nutters’ who will do just about anything, glorifying in their abilities to withstand physical pain and ignore danger. According to Hall (1997) such ‘visceral cultures’ are becoming increasingly redundant as the productivist era of capitalism recedes. As a result of deindustrialization and the emergence of technologies that have reduced the need for physical ‘hardness’ in the industrial sector, the visceral cultures generated in industrial capitalism have been sidelined and discarded by capital in favour of new dispositions. This contention leaves one crucial question unanswered: why do only some members of ‘visceral cultures’ become ‘hard lads’ who commit physical violence? Moreover, in bracketing the cultural norms underpinning working-class occupational identity, yet constructing a theory of pseudo-pacification that presupposes such norms, ultra-realism is arguably parasitic upon the very ‘culturalist’ frameworks that it critiques. Existing evidence therefore places ultra-realism, with its one-system theory approach to explaining the gender gap in offending through the gender division of labour, in something of a bind. Namely, to explain why men pursue certain forms of employment and not others, and in turn why men commit more crime than women, one must arguably turn to ‘culturalist’ theories capable of explaining patterns in social behaviour related to gender labour norms (Pfau-Effinger 1998; 2012). However, to admit to gender norms and cultural attitudes driving the gendering of different occupations, ultra-realism would have to concede that there exists a contemporaneous cultural sphere partly autonomous to an economic centre. Doing so would require proponents of ultra-realism to moderate their criticism of culturalist perspectives that foreground the socially reproductive capacity of gender norms. Accordingly, adopting a position that expectations and realities of gendered behaviour are in part shaped by influences partially autonomous to the economy would also then require an acknowledgement that extra-economic spheres of influence inform behaviour unrelated to commercial labour. Doing so would thus call into question a central premise of pseudo-pacification—that labour markets are the central driver of crime, hence the gender gap in offending can be explained with exclusive reference to gender divisions in different labour markets. Critique #2: The pseudo-pacification process ignores social reproduction, offering a framework that only examines crime through the lens of capitalist production and consumption In ultra-realism’s account of the pseudo-pacification process, the functional role of masculinity is explained as entirely related to production, as opposed to social reproduction. This conceptualization of the role of gender in criminal offending overlooks the potential for crime to emerge as a response to not only consumption and production processes, but also to breakdowns in social reproduction processes brought about by specific political-economic arrangements. Such breakdowns in social reproduction-related processes include, notably, the inability of parents to engage in positive child-rearing practices as a result of the stresses of economic marginalization, marginal work, social exclusion, poverty and a lack of adequate social supports (Currie 2009). Ultra-realism, in other words, focuses on the productive dimension of capitalism—namely, labour and consumption—to the neglect of social reproduction: ‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Brenner and Laslett 1991: 314). Just as social reproduction theorists insist on the key role that reproduction practices play in sustaining capitalism (Bhattacharya 2017), so too do we maintain that theories on the relationships between political economy and crime must account not only for production and consumption, but also social reproduction. To do so, those with an interest in crime causation must move beyond ‘single system’ theories that explain gender relations as a product of late capitalist economic conditions, to acknowledge the broader fact that gender (and other social forms of) oppression predate capitalism; specifically in its ‘neoliberal’ dimensions (Bhattacharya 2017). Critique #3: Ultra-realism’s reason for dismissing gender norms as a factor in offending is founded on a denial of the antecedent fallacy As noted at the outset of this section, ultra-realism has been dismissive of frameworks that emphasise the role that cultural gender norms can play in patterns of offending. Indeed, ultra-realism’s perspective on this issue is neatly summarised in the following statement by Hall and Winlow (2015: 58): The feminist and pro-feminist assumption that violence and harm are typical products of masculine culture or ‘masculinity’ is based on the sort of statistical illusion that empiricists are very good at presenting to their peers and the public. Only a relatively small percentage of the male population commits serious crime or inflicts non-criminalized harms on others. Therefore, despite the inherent unreliability of statistics, although it looks likely that 80 per cent of crime/harm is committed by men, it is 80 per cent of this small percentage, not 80 per cent of the whole male population. It follows that because the majority of men do not commit crime, crime cannot be an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity. The logic underpinning Hall and Winlow’s (2015) reasoning here is, however, invalid. Firstly, they engage in the inverse error of ‘denying the antecedent’: an argument that; ‘If A then B, Not A, therefore, not B’. Their argument has the following logically invalid form: If A (most men commit crime) is true then B (crime is an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity) is true. A (most men commit crime) is not true, therefore B (crime is an expression of ‘traditional’ masculinity) is not true. This is logically invalid because (1) the premises of the argument do not guarantee the truth of the conclusion; and (2) we can never validly deny an antecedent to reject its consequent. In other words, it does not logically follow that because most men do not commit acts of interpersonal violence, particular codes of ‘traditional’ masculinity play no role in men’s violence. Hall and Winlow’s claim that crime cannot be an expression of ‘traditional’, or in our understanding dominant socially reproduced forms of masculinity, on these grounds is, therefore, not valid. Secondly, an immanent critique can be levelled at Hall and Winlow’s (2015) claim through a tu quoque argument. Namely, if stuck to, the ultra-realist perspective introduces theoretical incoherence into ultra-realism’s second crime causation theory, special liberty, which Hall (2015: 129) asserts represents a ‘general cultural current’. That is, if only a small percentage of the population socialised into special liberty commit crime, it follows that because the majority of neoliberal subjects do not commit crime, crime cannot be an expression of neoliberalism’s cultural current of special liberty. Issue 2: Ultra-realism’s explanation of violence reduction through drives, libidinal energy and sublimation Ultra-realism’s inability to account for the gender gap in offending through its pseudo-pacification process model is not the only issue with the perspective. A second set of issues pertain to the Freudian-esque hydraulic model of the mind presupposed by the pseudo-pacification model. As discussed earlier, the sublimation of libidinal energy away from interpersonal aggression and into ‘socio-symbolic competition’ is central to ultra-realism’s account of the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2012; 2014a). Initially, it is worth noting that such hydraulic conceptions of libidinal energy channelled within a ‘dynamic unconscious’, are repudiated by many contemporary traditions within social and cognitive psychology (O’Brien and Jureidini 2002). Even if we accept the hydraulic model of the mind the pseudo-pacification model rests upon, we can identify key inconsistencies within the model itself. Namely, the pseudo-pacification process model posits that physical, interpersonal violence and aggression are underpinned by the same ‘drives’ as ‘socio-symbolic competition’. This is a key claim that we believe might be problematised with scrutiny. Critique #4: The pseudo-pacification process naturalizes violent drives, contradicting ultra-realism’s claim that we are hardwired for plasticity The first problem with the hydraulic model of drives and psychic energy described by ultra-realism’s pseudo-pacification model is that it posits a set amount of ‘libidinal’ energy that can be moved around, channelled or blocked, but not diminished or fundamentally transformed. Hence, rather than diminishing the ‘libidinal energy’ that also drives interpersonal violence, capitalism instead channels the energy underpinning such drives into a different form of violence: socio-symbolic competition. This model therefore posits a number of claims, each inviting contradictions into ultra-realism’s account of crime. Initially, the pseudo-pacification model has the unfortunate effect of naturalizing and universalizing violent instinctual drives (Hall 2012), which simply shift in their mode of expression depending on the milieu. At first glance, this point might appear to be an erroneous reading of ultra-realist theory given Hall’s (2012; 2014) transcendental materialist focus on the plasticity of the human neurological system: The core of the human neurological system is shot through with conflicting drives; therefore the human being has weak ‘instincts’. This means that the human being is malleable at the material level, hard-wired but only, paradoxically, for plasticity, which has been necessary for survival in multiple and changing environments. (Hall 2014b: 154) Such assertions of transcendental materialist drive plasticity and weak instincts are, however, fundamentally incompatible with the 'strong' instincts presupposed by the pseudo-pacification process. In explaining the pseudo-pacification process, for instance, Hall (2014b: 155) states: ‘The pseudopacification process’ fundamental psychosocial drive is provided by the sublimation of the once ubiquitous physical aggression that ordered Feudal societies, and its subsequent conversion into socio-symbolic competition ordered by the signifiers of consumer culture’. If this is the case, however, it introduces a temporal problem into Hall's (2014b) account. Namely, without naturalising aggressive drives, Hall’s theory can explain the sublimation of interpersonal violence into socio-symbolic aggression among those living at the dawn of capitalism. It cannot, however, explain the sublimation of interpersonal violence into socio-symbolic aggression among those born into capitalism without naturalizing this aggressive energy. For if aggression channelled into socio-symbolic competition is central to the ongoing momentum of capitalism, and not just its establishment as a new socio-economic system, then this aggression cannot be attributed to the preceding Feudal order, but to humanity’s constitution. And if it is the case that aggression is a ‘weak instinct’, then pseudo-pacification is the best we can hope for. Critique #5: In presupposing a hydraulic model of the psyche, the pseudo-pacification process sets up a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression Further to the above issue, the theory of pseudo-pacification sets up an opposition between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression as two distinct and separate expressions such drives may take. This posits something of a zero-sum game between socio-symbolic competition and physical aggression; all the psychic energy that is channelled into socio-symbolic aggression is taken away from physical aggression. The problem with this hydraulic conception of the mind becomes particularly clear when we address instances where individuals engage in interpersonal violence but remain committed to socio-symbolic competition through consumption and other capitalistic practices. Yet if we are to follow the processes proposed by ultra-realist theorists to explain the role of sublimation in the pseudo-pacification process (violent drives are channelled into socio-symbolic competition), then it should follow that the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process should entail the de-channelling or de-sublimation of energy away from socio-symbolic competition back to acts of physical aggression. If not, then proponents of the perspective might admit that there are different, and at least partly autonomous mechanisms underpinning the formation of socio-symbolically competitive subjectivities and the formation of ‘violent subjectivities’. In practice, ultra-realism’s theoretical premise is that with the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, individuals engage in acts of physical violence because of their commitment to socio-symbolic competition vis-à-vis consumerism and ‘anything to get ahead’ capital accumulation (Raymen 2016). However, this fundamentally contradicts the hydraulic model of the psyche used to explain the fall in violent crime as a product of the pseudo-pacification process. This contradiction becomes particularly pronounced when we examine the interface between the pseudo-pacification model and ultra-realism’s second crime causation concept: special liberty. Issue 3: Ultra-realism’s explanation of crime as an expression of capitalist values and special liberty Critique #6: It is incoherent to understand special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process as mutually reinforcing processes Although proponents of ultra-realism have variously argued that special liberty and the pseudo-pacification process ‘represent what look like mutually reinforcing processes’ (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651), this claim does not stand up to scrutiny. We argue that the theories actually work at cross-purposes, with the claims of special liberty theory contradicting the underlying presuppositions of the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process. There is, in other words, a central contradiction at the heart of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Namely, it is incoherent to simultaneously argue that: (1) increasing prevalence of violence can be explained by rises in special liberty (Hall and Winlow 2015); (2) reduction in rates of violence can be explained by the pseudo-pacification process (Hall 2007; 2012); and (3) special liberty and the pseudo-pacification are mutually reinforcing processes (Hall and Wilson 2014: 651). If, for example, the pseudo-pacification process generates a general cultural current of special liberty, which encourages individuals to ‘transcend the normative restrictions’ set by this process (Hall and Wilson 2014: 650), then it cannot alone lay claim to decreases in the incidence of violence in capitalist societies since the beginning of the 20th century. Critique #7: Ultra-realism’s crime causation theory ignores the array of values, beliefs and vocabularies of motive for crime that are not an expression of capitalism We might also query ultra-realism’s assertion that the constellation of values that together capitalise special liberty, such as competitive individualism, ostentatious displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ruthless capital accumulation are a ‘general cultural current’ in neoliberal societies (see Hall 2012; ,2015; Raymen 2016: 21). Certainly this constellation of values may have driven the offending of individuals interviewed by ultra-realist criminologists (see Tudor 2019). It cannot be inferred from their data though, that such a particular constellation of values is ‘general’ in neoliberal societies (Hall and Winlow 2015). Indeed, in their positing of special liberty as a general cultural current (Hall 2015), we might make a critical assessment of ultra-realism that has similarly been directed at Merton’s (1938) strain theory—that it is built on a flawed consensus model of social values. Even if we were to accept that a consensus exists around the aforementioned norms and values, an additional problem remains—that these norms and values are far from the only systems of belief that might contribute to crime. Put simply, contemporary expressions of subjectivity under neoliberal capitalism are more variegated and complex than ultra-realism’s account describes. Personal and social identities pertain not only to attitudes towards consumerism (themselves varied in contemporary capitalist societies) but to a variety of personal commitments we invest in (Archer 2000). Further, there exist a variety of values, beliefs and ‘vocabularies of motive’ driving crimes that are not an expression of capitalism. Compelling evidence indicates, for example, that rape myth acceptance is a strong predictor of sexual violence perpetration (Bohner et al. 1998; Johnson and Beech 2017). Similarly, convincing evidence points to the impact of ‘honour cultures’ in sanctioning men’s violence against women (Vandello and Cohen 2003). While such social standards often intersect with economically driven factors in generating crime, they are not reducible to them, nor are the strictly economic aspects of political economy always a primary factor driving criminalised acts. Extra-economic values and social roles have no place in ultra-realism’s account of contemporary subjectivity, which insists that conspicuous displays of cultural capital, hedonistic consumption and ‘by any means necessary’ capital accumulation are the core social principles of contemporary capitalistic societies. Ultra-realism, in short, offers a monolithic account of contemporary neoliberal subjectivity where all extra-economic values and behaviours are epiphenomenal to the influence of capital and are thus of insignificant consequence in explanations of crime. Moreover, even in situations where it is apposite to explain crimes through recourse to hedonistic consumption and capital accumulation, such concepts are not, in and of themselves, sufficient to explain why some individuals pursue illegal or violent activities in the realisation of these values. To adequately account for crime, we must look beyond ultra-realism’s insistence on consumerism, competitive individualism and entitlement, to address how such factors interact with other factors examined by criminologists. Issue 4: Ultra-realism’s direct expression theory of the crime-political economy nexus In considering ultra-realism’s crime causation theory, we can make a distinction between two approaches to understanding the role of political economy in crime, which we might term ‘direct expression theories’ and ‘indirect expression theories’, respectively. In direct expression theories, crimes are a product of (1) individuals mirroring the values of a political economy and/or (2) responding directly to the conditions of their political-economic environment. Ultra-realism’s theories of special liberty and the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process correspond to these two interpretations of political economy’s role in crime causation. In Hall’s (2012) theory of special liberty, crime is driven by a sense of entitlement to harm others fostered by neoliberalism, while in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process, crime is the result of individuals responding to being ‘left behind’ by neoliberal capitalism. The direct influence of capitalism on crime within ultra-realism theory is further signposted when Hall and Winlow (2004: 290) lament that: The pervasive acceptance that the capitalist system might not be superseded or even brought under democratic political control in the foreseeable future has, with a few notable exceptions … created something of a hiatus in which thought has been largely distracted from critical investigations into ways in which human beings are interfacing in more direct ways with the demands of consumerism and global market capitalism [their emphasis]. Crucially, such direct expression theories posit that the impact of political economy on crime is unmediated by other structural and cultural factors. In setting out the core principles of the ultra-realist perspective, Hall (2012: 150) for example, laments that in ‘liberal’ criminological theory, ‘everything is mediated by cultural systems and susceptible to the choices made by the autonomous sovereign ego, therefore even complex concatenations of causes and probabilistic conditions are out of bounds’. This reasoning leads to the following significant issue with ultra-realism’s crime causation theory. Critique #8: In setting up a dichotomy between ‘causative’ political-economic factors and merely ‘symptomological’ factors, ultra-realism engages in downwards conflation, leaving it unable to explain the formation of the structures it discusses As elaborated in our critique, ultra-realism’s crime causation theories treat a variety of phenomena, including gendered power relations, as epiphenomenal to political economy, i.e. a secondary biproduct that possesses no causative power in and of itself. This has the potential to result in a number of outcomes; one of which is that ultra-realism’s account of social order is characterised by what Archer (1995) has termed ‘downwards conflation’: understanding social activity as determined by social structures, and agency as a product of these structures. In theories characterized by downwards conflation, ‘actors may be indispensable for energising the social system … but it is not they whose actions give it direction by shaping structural properties’ (Archer 1995: 81). Agency, in other words, is explained in terms of structure, leaving perspectives that engage in this form of conflation no latitude to explain how actors shape said social structures. In explanations of social phenomena predicated on downwards conflation, individuals are, as Archer (1995: 82) puts it, taken to be ‘literally the agents of structure’, with no causative function in determining or contributing to the development of structural environments themselves. As Archer (1995) further explains, there exist numerous examples of downwards conflation within social theory, including varieties of functionalism, structuralism, economism and technological determinism. In the case of ultra-realism, the perspective’s downwards conflationism is chiefly illustrated in the economism of the pseudo-pacification process, which understands the sublimation and stimulation of libidinal drives in terms of their functions for capital. As Horsley et al. (2015: 24) write, ‘pacification was – before individuals became accustomed to its codes and internalized its sensibilities – initially a functional by-product of political-economic change’. Elsewhere, Hall (2014a: 28) similarly asserts that the pseudo-pacification process represents the ‘functional stimulation and control of libidinal drives’ and that ‘mainstream culture and its institutions work on behalf of the pseudo-pacification process to socialise tough individual competitors willing to play by the rules’ (Hall 2015: 19). This unacknowledged economism points to a broader issue with Hall’s (2012) pseudo-pacification model; namely, that it offers a rather conspiratorial account of the birth of capitalism. In this account, capitalism, and the kinds of social relationships that have led to its expansion in different forms, were fully programmed at its outset by shadowy forces, rather than reproduced through the functions of industry (albeit in unreasonably deregulated forms), and the widespread societal adoption of contemporary capitalistic values. To put it in Dardot and Laval’s (2014: 8) terms, Hall’s pseudo-pacification process ‘takes the historical results of a process’—in this case, the stimulation of libidinal drives to consume and produce—‘for goals consciously decided on at the outset’; once in place, the process and its breakdown function according to a uniform economistic law that is driven by its own internal dynamics, and unchanged by the actions of individual agents and coalitions. A further consequence of the downwards conflationism that characterises direct expression models is that in explaining crime, ‘a homology [is] asserted between the societal system and the small group which [is] held to constitute a miniaturised version of the former because [it is] orchestrated by the same value system’ (Archer 1995: 7). Hence in ultra-realism, crime is understood as a synecdoche of both neoliberal values (special liberty) and the functional drives cultivated by capitalism to ensure production and consumption (the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process). As we have shown in our analysis of these ultra-realist crime causation theories, such theories are unable to explain why certain individuals respond to political-economic conditions by offending while others do not. Taken together then, ultra-realism’s direct expression theories offer a ‘totalising discourse’ on crime that conceptualizes the economy and labour markets as the driving force behind all spheres of society (Wood 2019). Proponents of ultra-realism might here object that we are misrepresenting their position on causation; that they do, in fact, admit a range of causal mechanisms beyond political economy. We argue that they have, though, on numerous occasions, made statements that indicate the opposite: that the only structure or factor which has any causative status in understanding crime is global political economy; specifically its economic, market-oriented aspects (Hall 2012; ,2015; Hall and Winlow 2015; 2016). Indeed, ultra-realism often contrasts such ‘causative’ political-economic factors with merely ‘symptomological’ factors (Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015; 2016). We might take, for example, Raymen’s (2019) claim about the always symptomological status of technology in a favourable review of Hall and Antonopoulos’s (2016) book, Fake Meds Online: To focus too much upon the issue of technology and the internet would be to fall prey to much of contemporary criminology’s tendency towards a spurious symptomology (Hall 2012), in which empirically observable trends such as the technologically-facilitated mutation of criminal markets are wrongly elevated to carrying a causative status. Fake Meds Online avoids this trap, skilfully situating the issue of technology and the internet in its proper sub-dominant analytical place, and instead keeps its focus fixed firmly upon the concrete causative processes of global political economy and its impact upon contemporary subjectivities. Here Raymen (2019) makes the questionable assumption that the largest system—the dominant capitalist political-economic model—is always the most analytically important one, and that causal mechanisms only pertain to the structures of capitalism. The assumed symptomological nature of all that is not political-economic means that ultra-realism does not inject gender, racialisation, culture, technology, sexuality, with any causative power: all are mere epiphenomena animated by the contemporary political-economic order. In short, ultra-realism’s counterposition of ‘causative’ political-economic factors against ‘symptomological’ factors: (1) wrongly universalise what constitutes a causative and symptomological factor; (2) present a false dichotomy that elides the importance of mediating factors; and (3) ignores the often-polygenetic nature of social phenomena. Regarding point (1), as critical realists such as Sayer (1999) emphasise, what constitutes a causative and a symptomological factor depends on the phenomenon we are examining. If, for example, we are examining whether predictive policing technologies perpetuate racial profiling, it makes perfect sense, contra Raymen’s above claim, to focus our investigation on the issue of technology, and in particular the production and effects of technology combined with entrenched practices of racialised policing. In investigating such a phenomenon, it would, in fact, be spurious to focus our analysis exclusively upon political economy, as opposed to technology, for we cannot reduce such a technology to the political-economic values and economic motivations of its creators. As Archer (2000: 167–8) reminds us: In a very serious causal sense, material culture ‘escapes’ its makers. Artefacts become independent of their makers, because practical meanings are carried by the objects themselves and their causal powers are built into them and may have been unrealised, or only partially realised, by their first inventor. For all the importance of examining the values inscribed into technologies by their creators, we cannot, in other words, ignore the intended and unintended broader effects of technologies. Alongside the other issues discussed in this paper, ultra-realism’s inability to adequately address these unintended emergent effects calls into question whether political economy is, as proponents of the perspective argue, invariably the necessary ‘level of abstraction’ (Floridi 2013) for examining crime and criminal justice-related generative mechanisms. None of these interrelated issues—downwards conflationism, epiphenomenalism and functionalism—plague what we term indirect expression theories. For indirect expression theories, crime is an emergent property of individuals embedded in differential circumstances shaped by a variety of factors including, but not limited to (political-)economic conditions. As Elder-Vass (2005: 316) explains, ‘emergence is operating when a whole has properties or powers that are not possessed by its parts’. Emergent properties denote those that are not possessed by the parts of an entity, but only emerge through a particular structural relation between these parts. For our purposes, the key benefit of treating crime as an emergent property is that it requires consideration of stratified, non-reductive accounts of crime, which acknowledge that ‘the generative mechanisms of high[er] order strata emerge from, but are not reducible to, the generative mechanisms of lower order strata’ (Wood 2019: 104). In other words, though it is necessary to situate crime within political-economic systems, it is reductive to (1) reduce its causes to these systems and (2) treat it as monocausal rather than polygenetic. Though not always expressed in terms of stratification and emergence, we suggest that indirect expression theories are characterised by such a stratified account of reality. Hence, where direct expression ends up eliding the emergence of phenomena at different strata of the world, indirect expression theories offer stratified accounts of crime, in which crime is shaped by multiple strata of nature (the biological, psychological, social and economic) and cannot be reduced to any one of these strata. Where direct expression theories inadvertently grant political economy a ‘monopoly over causation’ (Archer 1995: 3), indirect expression theories, such as Mucchielli’s (2010) pacification process, and Currie’s (1997) mid-range theory of post-industrial violence, are able to account for the concatenation of immediate political-economic and extra-political-economic factors that shape crime causation. Conclusion As our critical analysis of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory has demonstrated, it is essential that any theory of the relationships between political economy and crime avoids epiphenomenalism—wrongly withholding causative power from all but certain facets of the world. In the case of theories that engage in downwards conflationism, such as ultra-realism, this epiphenomenalism results in sociological accounts that disregard the agentic power of individuals. In ultra-realism’s account, individual actors play no role in shaping the structural and cultural environments they live within—they are instead mere conduits for the special liberty and socio-symbolic competition wrought through pseudo-pacification. Moreover, such epiphenomenalism results in theories that are unable to explain the very formation and change of the structures they grant sole custody of causation to. This issue is readily apparent when we interrogate ultra-realism’s theory of the pseudo-pacification process, which is unable to identify ‘what hidden hand ensures the functionality of ideological … state apparatuses in providing the non-material pre-conditions of production’ (Archer 2000: 29). Far from representing a free-floating structural and cultural edifice that determines all structures and subjectivities, capitalism is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the individuals, material structures and cultural systems it emerges from (Ferrell 2007). How then might we overcome these issues associated with ultra-realism’s crime causation theory? Here, Archer’s (1995) realist social theory is again instructive. In Archer’s parlance, neoliberalism, and capitalism more broadly, are emergent phenomena comprised of material structural emergent properties (SEPs) and ideational cultural emergent properties (CEPs). Although, according to Archer, SEPs and CEPs exert causative power on individuals through downwards causation, they do not determine individuals’ behaviour or subjectivity. Rather, individuals are understood to possess personal emergent properties (PEPs), such as reflexivity, that mediate their interactions with the natural, practical and social orders of reality, and enable them to forge and revise the personal commitments that animate their lives (Archer 2000). Importantly, accounting for such PEPs is not, as Hall and Winlow (2018: 52) argue, tantamount to ‘separat[ing] the individual moral agent from the system’s structures, dynamic processes, events and hegemonic ways of thinking and believing’. Indeed, Archer’s (1995; 2000) sophisticated conceptualisation of human agency repudiates the notion of an ‘eternal moral agent’ that Hall and Winlow (2018: 52) wrongly impute to her framework. Nor do the SEPs and CEPs of neoliberalism hold a causative monopoly over all extra-economic SEPs and CEPs. We also cannot conflate the structural and cultural emergent properties associated with neoliberalism, offering an account of political economy that grants no causative autonomy to its structures or ideology (see Archer 1996). Consequently, crime causation theories that account for political economy must resist offering ‘single systems’ accounts that view the economy as the underlying driving force behind all social phenomena. In sum then, to overcome the issues associated with ultra-realism’s direct expression theory, an indirect expression theory of crime and political economy would need to account for a diverse range of personal, cultural and structural emergent properties; and, subsequently, avoid treating key social factors, such as gender, as epiphenomenal to capitalism. Crucially, Archer’s (1995) approach provides a framework for resolving not only the structure/agency conflationism of ultra-realism’s crime causation theory, but also for moving past the unhelpful ‘materialist’ and ‘culturalist’ dichotomies that characterise the perspective. As Archer’s (1996) framework emphasises, we can treat neither structure nor culture as epiphenomena of the other; material structures and propositional culture hold autonomous causative powers which shape one another in turn. 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Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Footnotes 1 Ultra-realism’s significance within the canon of criminological theory is, for example, signalled by its inclusion in criminology textbooks (see Burke 2017) and handbooks (see Hayward and Smith 2017). 2 To date, most critiques of the perspective have been published in critical and constructive book reviews of ultra-realist texts (O’Brien 2007). In one of these, Walklate (2016: 112) expressed concern that ultra-realism may be seeking to replace one dogma (‘liberal theory’), with another (transcendental materialism), while the perspective remains unable to account for geographically and culturally informed nuances in explaining crime. Elsewhere, in article-length publications, researchers associated with the tradition of cultural criminology have critiqued ultra-realism’s conceptualisation and dismissal of emancipatory resistance (Ferrell 2019), and its conflation of gender and/or racialisation-focused analyses with ‘identity politics’ (Ilan 2019). Approaching the perspective through a critical realist lens, Wood (2019) has argued, inter alia, that ultra-realism’s proposed philosophical grounding for research is incoherent given its neglect of key incongruencies between Johnston’s (2008) transcendental materialism and Bhaskar’s (2008) stratified ontology. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. 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The British Journal of Criminology – Oxford University Press

Published: Apr 4, 2020

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