Building Walls and Shooting Messengers: Teratology and the New Rules of Criminalisation

• In Event: New Rules of Criminological Method: Passion, Perversity and Pathology

Abstract

A key area in which ‘normal’ social interaction is now exhibiting its pathological character is in the growing shift towards isolationism, exclusion and a closing down of borders. Whilst many have seen this as a reaction to globalization, there are good reasons to suppose that it is better read in terms of far more primal cultural forces, forces which periodically reassert themselves when conditions are favourable. In this paper I consider the causal dynamics of such forces by way of a new kind of tool. This is ‘Teratology’ – both framework and method –which aims to provide a more systematic map of the impact of irrationality upon processes like criminalization. Whilst previous accounts of this dynamic, such as scapegoating or ‘othering’ have provided an entrée to the uneasy fusion between psychological processes like dread or disgust and social processes like exclusion, this paper argues that it is only with a far more precise approach – a literal ‘science of monsters’ - that we can begin develop more effective responses to a politics and a justice system driven by fear rather than evidence.

Author

• Mike McGuire, University of Surrey