They’re Out to Get Us!: Crime, Control and Fantasy Life.

• In Event: New Approaches to Crime and Surveillance in a Post-Truth Society

Abstract

Rather than begin with the assumption that people come to issues around crime and its control through the vehicle of reason and by the search for its truth, this paper makes the case for understanding our relationship to crime and control as structured predominantly through the medium of a rich and disturbing fantasy life. This paper considers what is meant by fantasy life and explores some of the constitutive fantasies about crime, criminals and social control that shape the contemporary imaginary. It considers criminal fantasies grounded in ontological insecurities about mutant hordes erupting within the body of society, or attacking it from without (always so many and so large); and considers how the control machinery of the state oscillates within an imaginary populated by contradictory feelings of paranoia, emasculation and euphoria.

Author

• Simon Hallsworth, University of Suffolk