Penal Modernism and Postmodernism
Files
Description
There is a widespread sense today that contemporary penality is undergoing some kind of transformation. Until quite recently, accounts of contemporary penal transformations tended to be quite narrow in their focus and quite modest in their claims. In the last year or two, however, a new and stronger thesis is beginning to emerge, one that is much broader in its scope and much deeper in its implications. The new suggestion is that the penal realm, like other areas of social and cultural life, is becoming in some sense “postmodern,” and that this historic shift forms the broad explanatory framework within which the diverse trends of contemporary penality can best be understood. Postmodernism is, of course, very old news in cultural studies, social theory, and some branches of philosophy, where the term has been a hot topic of debate for the last fifteen years. Once the term postmodern escaped from the lexicon of artistic styles into broader debates about the nature of contemporary experience, it rapidly became a kind of catchall adjective to describe the various intellectual and political predicaments of an age in which foundational claims (in respect of knowledge, value, truth, and so on) are viewed as “mere” conventions. Now, a decade and a half later, when the word has begun to lose its initial incendiary appeal, and has started to settle down as a more or less defined position in a number of well-worn debates, it has at last reached the distant shores of criminology and penology, where its precise implications have yet to be worked out. The importation of modish intellectual terms is often dismissed as the product of an academic fashion industry, driven by the marketing strategies of publishers and the status concerns of writers who hope to impress by their taste in terminology. But it is also the case that writers who are seeking to develop new perspectives in their field do so using the language and concerns of contemporary intellectual life. Consequently, the appearance of the vocabulary of postmodernism in this latest field is liable to produce original insights and radical perspectives as well as the slavish repetition of fashionable postures developed elsewhere. One can only judge the matter in terms of the substantive analyses actually produced, and seek to avoid the polarized “love it or hate it” response that the mere mention of the term postmodernism now frequently provokes. The claim that penality is becoming postmodern takes a number of forms and has been put forward by a number of writers, but the precise meaning of the claim is still rather inchoate. Writers such as Stanley Cohen (1990) and Jan van Dijk (1989) have used the term postmodern to refer to certain aspects of contemporary criminological discourse. Others such as Carol Smart (1990), and John-Paul Brodeur (1993) have proposed postmodernism as an intellectual and political stance relevant to thinking about crime and punishment (and especially to thinking about that thinking). Robert Reiner (1992) has discussed the problems of policing what he terms a “postmodern society.” However the postmodernist thesis has been put forward in its strongest form by Jonathan Simon, first of all in an article entitled “The New Penology” (coauthored with Malcolm Feeley) and more recently in his 1993 book Poor Discipline, where he titles one chapter “Penal Postmodernism: Power without Narrative” and explicitly raises the question, Are we postmodern? A common feature of these references to the postmodern is that they all have something of a gestural character. Their use of the term evokes a whole range of new attitudes, discourses, and practices, against the broad background of a new social and cultural configuration, but the precise meaning of the postmodern in criminology or penology is rarely specified in any detail. Even Simon's writings, which are by far the most substantive and interesting, are disappointingly thin when it comes to a positive characterization of what is postmodern about the present. (He is much better on what has become problematic about the modernist past.) Since most readers of criminological theory have some understanding of what postmodernism has come to mean in other fields, it has been possible to use the term in an ill-defined way and yet still succeed in communicating something (though that something is often very imprecise). At a minimum, the suggestion is that penality now increasingly exhibits certain new characteristics, which are distinguishable from those of the recent past (i.e., from penal “modernity”) and which resemble the kinds of postmodern phenomena that analysts have identified elsewhere in contemporary culture and society. The task of specifying precisely what the postmodern elements of penality might be is an important exercise that has not yet been undertaken. I hope that the analyses developed in the following pages may succeed in provoking further work in this direction.
Source Publication
Punishment and Social Control
Source Editors/Authors
Thomas G. Blomberg, Stanley Cohen
Publication Date
2003
Edition
Enlarged 2
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Penal Modernism and Postmodernism" (2003). Faculty Chapters. 680.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/680
