Flying through the Cuckoo’s Nest: Countering the politics of agency in public criminology

Abstract

In this article, we devote ourselves to the task of reconceptualizing agency in the public criminology movement. We develop an imaginative political framework to circumvent the relational tensions currently ensnaring public criminology discourse. Employing the psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Žižek, we engage the public criminology literature and its agential-activist notion of political engagement to reveal three primary directives dismissive of alternative praxes of resistance: faith in the State and public, hypocrisy eschewal, and legitimacy. By invoking the distinction between these modes of political engagement through the “fictional social realities” depicted in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we provide insights into how public criminologists can overcome concerns occluding other modes of “going public.” With such a move, we believe that public criminology’s capacity to “translate crime scholarship out of the academy” will evolve and become open to the possibility that “doing nothing” is more effective than may first appear.

Writing sociological fiction

“…Within this diverse body of work, many scholars reflect back their analysis to consider disciplinary implications in ways valuable for our focus here on writing. This includes Penfold-Mounce et al’s (2011) work on the sociological imagination of the HBO TV show The Wire , and Steckle et al’s (2020) recent work on Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . They highlight the social insights these texts offer, into ‘American urban social decay’ (Penfold-Mounce et al, 2011: 157) and agency and resistance within the institution (Steckle et al, 2020: 300–301) respectively, and acknowledge their pedagogical value.…”

Populist Counterpublics: Exploring Populist Mobilization, Crises of Representation, and Popular Subjectivities in Canadian Politics

“…This means that when someone flips from CBC News on politics to watching a reality show, they feel a negated sense of duty to the rational-communicative public by feeling guilty about indulging in "trash TV" (i.e., they should be informing themselves through news but are choosing not to). In short, contrary to Habermas' assertion that the public operates on the basis of knowledge, it actually operates on the basis of desire, driven by a faith in publicity that is embedded into our structures in ways that believe for us (Steckle, Johnston & Sanscartier, 2019). Dean uses the example of talking heads that debate political issues for us-as individuals, we never have to lift a finger.…”

“…By ensuring all information is available to the public, publicity papers over the gap between where the public is and where it should be by supplying the ideological treadmill on which publics supposed to believe chase the final, unattainable state of enlightenment. Most importantly, belief is not isolated to individual psychologies, but is embodied and crystallized in "procedures of democracy" that reproduce faith in democratic systems on our behalf (Steckle et al, 2019).…”

“…For its part, white nationalism should be judged negatively as a threat to tolerance and politics writ large, but we should take great care not to let that judgement lead us to framing the movement as mere residuals of wider, more "important" structural shifts as so often happens under the moral analytics of "neoliberalism" (Flew, 2014;Sanscartier, 2017b). In short, suspending our own moral judgement of a populist context until after we have analyzed its relational qualities (beyond an overly simplistic, unidimensional axis of oppression-resistance) will help form more robust theorizing of these phenomena, and how to better address them in the future (see Steckle et al, 2019).…”

Stories of Madness: Exploring Resistance, Conformity, Resiliency, Agency, and Disengagement in Mental Health Narratives

“…As Newman (2016, p. 56, emphasis in original) sums it up within his post-anarchist frame, it is "a withdrawal from the game of power and counter-power altogether…[to] an indifference to power." Being indifferent to power is desirable because it asserts space from the very entity that creates friction and constantly collapses strugglesstruggles that are vulnerable to failure because of a problematic faith in the public's capacity to obtain democratic enlightenment and widespread change through rational debate against the State (Dean, 2001;Steckle et al, 2019). Localised acts do not await revelation but rather reveal the capacities and potentialities of agential behaviour to challenge or support the status quo.…”