Dynamics of exemption: ‘Gang’ ethos in literature and film

Introduction

Gang studies have become an intricate area with roots in, among others, sociology, criminology, law, history, psychology and anthropology (Kinnear, 2008).

This Special Issue – which compiles selected contributions from a workshop held in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, Great Britain in 2013 – cannot and does not intend to engage with the entirety of this increasingly ramified field, but seeks to draw attention to the access literature and film can grant to the complex phenomena of moral re-evaluation, reorientation or affirmation which are automatically at stake when groups rebel against the order in place. The articles gathered here draw on both aesthetic media as a privileged way of delineating an encompassing causal matrix ¹ in which ‘gang’ activity (as both reaction and action ² ) can be situated and evaluated appropriately.

This dual epistemological interest – in the specific aesthetics of gangs and of moral assessments emerging from them – requires a broader definition of gangs than, for instance, the short synopsis that the Encyclopedia of Violence (Kurtz and Turpin, 2008: 33) proposes. The latter relies on two classic definitional strands. First, Malcolm W. Klein suggests that gangs are a group of youngsters (age) who are generally perceived as a distinct aggregation by themselves and by their social environment (i.e. they possess internally and externally facilitated group cohesion) and who have been involved in a sufficient number of criminal acts (delinquency), which in turn prompts a negative response from their ‘neighbourhood’ (labelling) (Klein, 1998; Klein and Crawford, 1968); the second common definition, given by James F. Short, omits the criminality and the subsequent labelling, but also insists that a gang is a group of unsupervised youngsters (Short, 1996). ³

Both definitions capture crucial aspects, many of which will – with variation and modification – reappear in this volume; however, although they are in themselves useful, they fall short of fully addressing the problematic which shapes this collection of essays: ‘gangs’ performatively or consciously enact criticism of social scenarios or, more fundamentally, of systemic societal problems (often as a result of marginalisation or even stigmatisation). In this Special Issue, then, ‘gangs’ are primarily understood as counterclaims to distributive practices, mores and to the prevalent political and social order, and therefore as an effective analytical tool in dissecting society and its (dys)functions: the articles do not primarily explore the workings, rituals, hierarchies of gangs, but rather the broader moral and cultural context in which they are portrayed and the standardised social norms on which they pass a judgement through their deviation; in short, we investigate the specific ‘ethos’ depictions of gangs formulate (which can, at the same time, mimic the conventional ethos they observe in society). The collective attempt to set the group apart renders this process particularly salient: a better understanding of ‘gang’ ethos is thus of relevance to the understanding of morality and justice which precedes and maintains any functioning legal system.

Pivotal long-term developments, such as globalisation and the culture of the New Capitalism, have certainly sharpened our view of notions of exclusion and highlighted its centrality to concepts of equality and freedom, or more generally, justice. In order to make full use of the heuristic potential of ‘gangs’ in this respect, it is essential to rethink the criteria that are traditionally part and parcel of definitions of ‘gangs’, first of all the concept of age. First, the social analysis of gang activity transcends youthful rebellion as a rite of passage: age is not an inherent aspect of the conflictual dramaturgy in the texts/films/TV series studied in this collection. Second, and more profoundly, the traditional ideas of deviation and criminality need to be fine-tuned in view of literature and film.

In the rest of this introduction, we propose that ‘delinquency’, seen in terms of labelling and recognition, better illuminates the social phenomenon of gangs. While the concept of criminality addresses questions of legality, delinquency, in the way we understand it in the following, predominantly relates to anti-conventional behaviour and engages with the overarching question of legitimacy.

Labelling and the concept of delinquency

Delinquency derives from the Latin delinquere (‘to fail; be wanting, fall short; offend’), and might of course coincide with criminality in some cases. It thus connects with the thinking of French sociologist Emile Durkheim (2007), who argues that crime is not necessarily a legal transgression, but rather an act that bewilders and scandalises society: this observation is often considered the origin of labelling theory, as expounded on by Howard Becker, one of the most prominent advocates of this approach in criminology. For Becker (1963),

[s]ocial groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender. The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied: deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label. (p. 9)

Labelling theory has heavily been criticised for what was perceived as moral relativism. However, as a heuristic approach which tries to ascertain what societies consider as a crime or as trivial offence, and what they see as accidental or as substantial, it can throw historical scenarios and shifts into sharp relief. This holds particularly true when gangs subscribe to similar objectives (wealth, personal happiness, power) as their ‘conventional’ counterparts in society, but pursue these aims by illegal means. In this sense, Robert Merton (1938, 1957) suggests in his early and seminal theory of anomie that gang culture is an illegal activity which seeks to achieve economic goals in a variation of the ‘American Dream’. As the learning of ‘criminality’ within these tightly woven social groups consists of an apprenticeship in values, skills, motives, drives, urges, and rationalisations for criminal activity, Merton’s gangs offer an instructive mirror image of society, emulating the legitimation strategies of modern society, such as, for instance, rationalised procedures.

An important way to differentiate between the legal and the illegal spheres, especially when their practices become indistinguishable from a moral viewpoint, labelling sustains the status quo, but it also has the opposite effect, bringing the moral dimension of the laws under scrutiny. Extant patterns of legality are revised, as legal and illegal activities are conflated by public opinion. The negative mirror image thus debunks legal acts as inherently immoral. Another view of ‘gangs’ emerges at the same time, highlighting their causally comprehensible or even morally legitimate claims in view of their conspicuous prior discrimination.

Reclaiming the ‘sensible’

Delinquency consequently becomes an integral part of the social negotiations of morality and ethics (in the sense that moral obligations to others are intrinsically connected to our ethical convictions as to what constitutes a ‘good life’). At the core of these negotiations lies the logic of recognition and ‘distribution’ in the broadest sense. What ‘gangs’ invariably dispute is the current distribution of privileges, rights, and resources in society. Consequently, their actions are based on a notion of entitlement and geared towards what they perceive as rectification of the status quo. This constitutes an intrinsically dynamic scenario for which Axel Honneth (1995) accounts in his book The Struggle for Recognition. For Honneth, recognition is a conflictual model. Taking his cue from Hegel, Honneth (1995) seeks to explore the ‘moral grammar’ of social change and the moral history of human society as a struggle for recognition. He maintains that ‘processes of societal change are to be explained with reference to the normative claims that are structurally inherent in relations of mutual recognition’ (Honneth, 1995: 2). The notion that individuals can only achieve a practical self-relation, if they understand themselves as the social addressees of the individuals with whom they interact, sheds light onto the intersubjective, evolutionary aspect of morality, or as Honneth felicitously puts it, the ‘struggle’ for recognition. This struggle does not feature individuals as solitary, Hobbesian wolves, but as dependent on mutual acknowledgement within the greater context of society and its emerging norms. Honneth’s idea of recognition is an illuminating concept. Understood as the claim of a person, a group or an institution to contribute to social processes with their specific attributes and properties, it throws light on certain varieties of ‘gang’ activity, which can also be read, in this ‘restorative’ context, as claims to recognition in face of actual or perceived exclusion from social processes and goods. ⁴

The dynamic aspect of recognition also dovetails with other theoretical attempts to rethink phenomena of participation in the light of processuality. Jacques Rancière, for instance, defines politics as the disruption of the given political order by a subject demanding a role within a reconfigured public sphere. For Rancière (2010), politics involves the ‘distribution of the sensible’, the question of who has the right to speak and be heard in a given society, of which voices matter. As Rancière (2010) says, ‘all political activity is conflict aimed at deciding what is speech or a mere growl’ (p. 4). Thus, the distribution of the sensible

establishes at one and the same time something common that is nonetheless divided into shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Rancière, 2004: 12)

The public sphere is at times ‘depoliticized’ when the prevailing order is merely maintained (a phenomenon to which he refers as ‘police’), but the exclusion from certain ‘parts’ can be countered with the ‘disruption’ of the given order (‘politics’ in Rancière’s sense as antagonism, dissensus), which allows the marginalised and excluded to re-enter the ‘political’ stage. For Rancière (2004), art and aesthetic practices are tied to this sphere of the ‘political’ because they play a paramount role in this ‘distribution of the sensible’. He sees ‘aesthetic acts’ as ‘configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivation’ (Rancière, 2004: 9). Literature is key for its capacity to allow new voices to be heard.

Against this specific backdrop, the axiology of ‘deviation’ has to be revisited: if someone decides to opt out of the ‘policed’ order, its laws do not apply anymore. This notion of exemption historically resonates with the tenets of natural law, such as the right (or even duty) to rebellion which postulates the overthrow of a government if it violates the natural rights of its subjects: in our scenario, this ‘disruption’ can challenge the established order in view of core political or human rights as well as in regard to the exclusion from certain substantive freedoms (e.g., ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, as Amartya Sen suggests) and limitation of core capabilities (ranging from bodily health to emotions, affiliation and control over one’s environment, as in Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach).

Contesting the order in place, or to be more precise, the rightness of the order in place, opens up a space of moral exemption from the rules this order imposes. In this sense, the exclusion from rights, goods, resources, the fulfilment of one’s own potential can psychologically pave the way for a notion of moral exemption from the laws and norms that underpin the exclusive and unequal order. This perception can then of course result in both morally grounded resistance and radicalised, unharnessed violence. Gangs – by their very existence – collectively do exactly that: they raise objections against the status quo and seek to reconfigure the sensible in a highly choreographed and stylised manner.

This issue

Against this backdrop, this collection of essays aims to discern these new forms of political subjectivation in ‘aesthetic acts’. Martha Nussbaum (1995, 2010) has, along with Rancière, already emphasised the importance of literature for the study of social justice, but this collection of articles will go further and foreground aesthetic media (specifically literature, film and TV) as essential sources for understanding the role of ‘gangs’ in the social construction of legitimacy and justice. By taking the study of gangs back to the medieval period, and by integrating early modern and modern literature with film, this issue gives the phenomenon of gangs a broad historical context. One thing that unites the essays gathered here is the interest in manifestations of liminal ‘space’, the investigation of its dangers and creative potential – as a ‘third space’ (Homi Bhabha) or as heterotopy (Michel Foucault) – but also the interaction of gang and society coming from a minority perspective (with regard to race, gender, class, power, etc.).