Abstract
Jock Young’s contribution to sociology and criminology over the last 40 years is difficult to fully appreciate. As has oft been noted, his contributions to criminology involved interventions into methodological and policy debates as well as theoretical achievements for which—of course—he is best known. Looking back, though, one of the most important concepts in Young’s recent work has tended to be overlooked: social bulimia. This essay seeks to correct this omission by initially defining the concept that we believe Young was developing, though in incipient forms, beginning with his classic early study The Drugtakers (1971) through his last major work The Criminological Imagination (2011). After elaborating what Young meant by this idea, we apply social bulimia to three contemporary examples—terrorism, immigration and education—arguing for its utility, its wide-ranging cultural ramifications and its relevance for illuminating contemporary political, social and economic issues.
Defining social bulimia
None of this is to suggest that considerable forces of exclusion do not occur but the process is not that of a society of simple exclusion as originally posited. Rather it is one where both inclusion and exclusion occur concurrently—a bulimic society where massive cultural inclusion is accompanied by systematic structural exclusion. It is a society which has both strong centrifugal and centripetal currents: it absorbs and it rejects.
Even though social bulimia is most succinctly described in the second book of Young’s well-known trilogy The Vertigo of Late Modernity, the idea was first broached earlier in The Exclusive Society. Bulimia is a societal condition brought about by a highly contradictory process occasioned through several intersecting processes and dynamics: on the one hand, increasing stratification occurs amid an over-arching ideology that at least in name is committed to achieving the ‘good society’ (Young calls this ‘inclusiveness’); on the other, as he explains in Vertigo, people experience increasing and extraordinary levels of ontological insecurity amid unstable, unpredictable and precarious conditions. Thus bulimia refers to a convergence of societal thrusts, economic blockages, cultural intrusions, hegemonic values and systemic destabilizations that develop in tandem with a neo-classical, neo-liberal capitalist order (Harvey, 2009). We might describe it, therefore, as a societal condition brought about by a highly contradictory process occasioned through several intersecting processes and dynamics. These involve the pushes and pulls of the political economy with its restructuring of work, redistribution of wealth, an unmeritocratic reward system and heightening of class divisions in the post-Fordist era. But it also entails universalism of consumer culture; a technological revolution of information generation; the evolution of a social control industry with gulags, surveillance systems and constraints on civil and democratic liberties; and the porous and fluid nature of physical, social and cultural borders.
For Young, as these intensely historical processes mark the transition from modernity to late modernity, crime takes on a far more essential and essentialist character. For example, Young cites the radical epochal shift in the US and the UK criminal justice systems toward a ‘new penology’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992, 1994) (notwithstanding his criticism of their inattention to crime itself) that administrative and actuarial criminology help to constitute and legitimate, producing new cultures of control and political economies of punishment. Positivism plays a pivotal part in this process, he argues, aiding in the collection of measurable data, the fetishizing of scientistic methodologies and the reifying of human actions particularly those that can be easily pigeon-holed as deviant or made part of a decontextualized discourse on risk. He notes how this society is increasingly based on a set of beliefs about the pathological nature of individuals who are cast as socially constructed human pollutants, a view of social/political control tied ideologically and institutionally to a free market myth that rationalizes the irrational ownership and distribution of wealth and resources, brilliantly captured in his phrase ‘the chaos of rewards’.
We are indeed in a brave new world of governance through crime and fear of crime and the Other, according to Young, but it is not dystopic in the sense of the forces of darkness having won and the battle for a more open, egalitarian society over. Quite the contrary: while the systems put in place do indeed shore up the class power of the privileged from criminal justice to education to the economy and government, contradictions therein continue to mount as the cultural values of capitalism and the democratic promises of the American Dream clash with the exclusionary edicts of market structures at levels of intensity that increase with each new crisis. The massive personal and business bankruptcies of 2008, the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people whose homes were foreclosed, the working and middle classes who found themselves furloughed, and more: these were, and are, entirely predictable social injuries of a system intrinsically unstable and incoherent (as Merton, 1938, foresaw going back to the 1930s).
Thus Young insists that this ‘bulimic’ in/out structure of late modernity—allegedly inclusionary, actually more exclusionary than ever—is a lived condition, an experience, a set of meanings to be understood, felt, interpreted and implemented, not simply a series of new laws, pronunciamentos or supposedly impermeable boundaries remarking dividing lines between order and disorder, worthy and unworthy, good and evil. At the same time, new models of population management in the services of capital are put into place through social actors at various levels of the hierarchy complicit in their design and implementation. New bureaucrats, state agents and entrepreneurs of many occupational shades build careers out of the actuarial imaginaries of risk and threat that characterize the (neo-liberal) organization. The vast numbers of personnel involved in the global security industry is staggering and, while many a cheerful robot lives among them, there is no shortage of vindictiveness in the practices of control in which they become ‘specialized’. A recent choking death at the hands of police in New York of a middle-aged black man for selling cheap cigarettes is an excellent example of the conflict between ‘broken windows’ practices and the animus behind the exclusionary order of things and the norms and expectations of denizens who think they live in a civilizing world (Goldstein, 2014).
Consequently, social bulimia is how Young chooses to describe or document the shift from modernity to late modernity, from a society ‘intolerant of diversity, which it attempts to absorb … and of recalcitrant rebels whom it sees more of a challenge to rehabilitate and reform’ to a late modern world that ‘celebrates diversity and difference, which it readily absorbs and sanitizes’ while simultaneously, and contradictorily, seeking to ‘build the most elaborate defense against’ difficult people and dangerous classes (Young, 1999: 59). Yet, and here is the rub: Young insists that he not be misinterpreted as an advocate of historical dualisms. Mechanical interpretations of this transition should be avoided, he insisted, and he emphatically rejected any evolutionary valorization of this historical process (see his response to Yar and Penna, Young, 2004). Rather, he said, we must emphasize the contradictions in each era: both modernity and late modernity have tendencies of inclusion and exclusion except that, in the latter, it is exclusion which more intensely characterizes trickle-down policies ascendant within the body politic and mirrors society’s economically structured properties (see Piketty, 2014).
The bulimic condition, therefore, is a process in which people assimilate the values of their host country but are rejected by it through prejudice, racism and structural exclusion. As such bulimia is ‘not an experience of being alien, but a process of being alienated’ (Young, 2007: 164). In an attempt to maintain dignity, respect and identity facing the overwhelming forces of structural exclusion and cultural integration, the victims of the processes of Othering and bulimia attempt to reverse them. This is what Young (2007: 165) calls ‘the othering of the otherer’ whereby ‘those who are stigmatised reverse the tables, and change the rules of the game’. Thus, the othering discourse on Orientalism, that is, assigning to it the attributes of irrationality, violence, disorder, backwardness and an anti-modern stance, is met with an Occidentalist discourse, an essentialist position that places its own values above what is seen as the deficits and vices of western culture: its materialism, decadence, hypocrisy, lack of honor and respect for tradition, community and family values. This essentialism, Young argues, is occurring on both sides and does not automatically result in violence. Nonetheless, it is making its contribution to the facilitation of violence, and sets up its precursor ‘to the extent that dehumanisation allows the actor to render the other as outside, or on the periphery of humanity, it permits violence’ (Young, 2007: 157). It is only in the process of this dehumanization linked to the perceived threat of harm ‘when the other is seen as the cause of the problem, that essentialisation gives place to denigration and outright violence is likely’ (2007: 157). Whether in conventional warfare or terrorism, this process of othering is mutual, ‘each side generates images of dehumanisation and enacts violent acts which confirm the stereotypes of inhumanity’ (2007: 158).
Bulimic applications
We have defined social bulimia which was arguably present throughout his work as the concept continued to appear alongside Young’s radical left critique of capitalist society. Like Marx, Young was never content to simply interpret the world but wanted dearly to change it: for him, as the following examples show, what was important about the bulimic thesis was its conceptual utility.
Terrorism
In late modernity, the forces of cultural and economic globalization—the ‘spatial, social and moral overlap’ (Young, 2003: 390), the blurring of borders and the crossing over, hybridizing and merging of culture—impact both First and Third Worlds, leading to contradictions in western societies between them. Young argued that cultural globalization intensely affected the Third World, spreading western values and consumer aspirations, images of material comfort and abundance while stressing meritocracy and equality of opportunity. These images and messages powerfully contrast with a material reality that can no longer be concealed, making these blatant injustices visible and the experience of denial intensely emotional (Young, 2007: 155). The immigration/emigration flows that follow both the labor market possibilities and the seductive narratives of First World living conditions, form much of the basis for the low-paid service sector in western countries, that enable the lifestyles of the middle and upper classes, which Young (2007: 155) highlights in bulimic terms: we may talk of a ‘Global Merton’, a ubiquitous situation of anomie where widespread aspirations have been generated by the forces of globalisation and where massive relative deprivation is engendered in the Third World giving rise to a discontent which is unlikely to be allayed. For how conceivable can one justify on a meritocratic basis such disparities of income which occur merely become of the arbitrary factor of place of birth?
However, it is not only relative deprivation which leads to discontent: ‘the hubris of Western culture, its world dominance, challenges the traditional and the local, the political and the economic power of the First World sidelines and denigrates the hubris of Western’ (2007: 156). In a discourse reminiscent of the attitude of western societies toward their own poor, Young points out that the ‘developing’ nations are blamed for their own poverty, that is, they are poor because they are not ‘like us’, and the only way for them to escape their self-induced misery is to adopt the sensibilities and rationalities of what we think is the very essence of our western culture.
The idea of terrorism implies a contrast to what is perceived as normal patterns of war while, as both history and present conditions reveal, it can itself become the main justification for war. In western culture and politics, the conception of terrorism carries within it a binary of violence, reminiscent of Said’s (2003/1978) notion of Orientalism: an imaginary geography of the East as the realm of the chaotic, violent, disorderly, treacherous and irrational. Thereby lines between conventional warfare and terrorism are obscured and, as Young points out, similarities between the two entities often outweigh their differences.
For Young, binary and false notions of hermetically separated ‘cultures’ neglect the cultural and economic overlap between the developed and the developing worlds. While there is no doubt that people of the developing world experience a constant stream of denigration and humiliation visited upon them by the West, as Merton argues, individuals may adapt to the state of anomie and its impacts in different ways. Such reactions are diverse, Young argues, as are responses to Othering in developed societies, that is, stereotypical attributions can be accepted, assimilated or acted out by those affected by them. Young (2007: 156) also points out that they can also be met by a ‘counter-essentialization’, ‘an elevation of the perceived virtues of the oppressed as a counterpoint to the denigrating stereotypes’.
For example, in the case of many of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, Young notes that it was not their distancing from western culture that was a significant feature in their biographies but their immersion within it. Young (2007: 153) adds, in a characteristically bulimic reading, that seductive is a culture that ‘at once attracts yet undermines all sense of one’s own worth and identity’ and ‘where there is the denigration of being outside of the global realm of wealth and opportunity’. Osama bin Laden, as Young reminds us, was the scion of a wealthy father with tight family and business connections to the upper classes of western society, ‘hardly a person to whom the West was unknown’, says Young. Rather, ‘it was his [bin Laden’s] knowledge of the West that spurred his loathing of it’ (Young, 2007: 153). And again, those who committed the London bombing in 2005 were mostly second generation immigrants, who grew up in England, went to school and college in this very country, and had ‘decent’ jobs as carpet fitters or teaching assistants – young men seemingly successfully integrated in their ‘host’ society or those of their parents. As it is shown, the cultural and economic overlap of the First and the Third Worlds, leading to revulsion and resentment, is a process happening throughout all levels of society.
Immigration
As already observed, bulimia is particularly evident in processes of immigration under conditions of globalization. As Young (2007: 131) points out, in late modern western societies, economic globalization has been associated with mass migration from Third and Second World countries and in every instance has led to a social and spatial process of exclusion in the ‘host countries’, accompanied by the cultural ‘Othering’ of the immigrant: no other group than the immigrant has the power to mobilise prejudice and the magical ability to explain away problems inherent in the host society. For he or she is an alien other, a carrier of problems into the First World rather than a group who are most blatantly exposed to the problems inherent in the First World.
Thus, the immigrant is the Other, with his or her being opposed to the ‘cultural normality’ of western society, while the image of the immigrant is differentiated into two categories, those who are ‘deserving’ and those who are ‘undeserving’. The ‘deserving’ immigrant is subject to liberal Othering rather than conservative Othering where immigration is ‘portrayed as a passage of becoming, the immigrant is materially deprived and lacks the civilities of citizenship, ideally the immigrant improves him or herself both materially and in the acquisition of the trappings of citizenship’ (Young, 2007: 133).
Young takes the concept of bulimia and applies it to the immigration policies of New Labour in the UK in the 2000s. Here, Labour policies were the leitmotif of social inclusion, embracing the benefits of immigration both in terms of the economy and of cultural diversity, while insisting on the control and management of the immigrant population to prevent disturbances. The reversal of structures of tolerance that occurs in the transition from modernity to late modernity becomes evident with cultural difference incessantly absorbed, sanitized and incorporated. But, in a bulimic twist, it is ‘difficulty’, not ‘difference’ which late modern societies are less and less willing to endure (Young, 1999). Thus, New Labour advocated economic and refugee immigration but as a ‘managed’ population rather than as a free, unregulated, libertarian or neo-liberal addition to society.
Further, Young pointed out that within these immigration policies are two models of entry: the economic and the right to asylum for those who are subject to political persecution in their home countries. Implicit in the inclusionary discourse about the ‘deserving’ immigrant is the image of the ‘undeserving’ one; the latter becoming the subject/object of conservative Othering, replete with such social constructions as ‘the incorrigible’, ‘the alien’ and ‘the threat’ to which internal and external border control has to react in the interest of national security. Young again emphasizes the co-existence of both inclusionary and exclusionary societal moments, the dialectic inherent in the bulimic condition through a range of immigrant-related binaries: ‘us–them’; ‘majority–minority’; ‘pure–impure’; ‘law-abiding–criminal’; and ‘normal–deviant’.
Here, the immigrant population is widely seen as the source of crime, disorder and violence—an image that contrasts with recent research showing that first generation immigrants have generally lower crime rates than the indigenous population (see, for example, Sampson, 2008). As Lea and Young (1993) had already argued in What Is to Be Done about Law and Order, it is the second generation immigrants, those who are more assimilated to the values of the host society, who experience relative deprivation most intensely and acutely. Here, the discontent produced by the disparity between cultural inclusion and structural exclusion leads to higher crime rates. Here, it is again the Mertonian notion of the contradiction between culture and structure that Young evokes, seeing crime and deviance not being caused by individual pathology, or poverty, but by constituting ‘normal’ responses created by a given culture and structure of a society. As Young (2007: 138) argues, New Labour’s casting paid labor as the key process leading to social inclusion misunderstands relative deprivation and the discontent emerging for its experience: To shift individuals from unemployment to the lowest levels of employment structure, with long hours, poor pay and intense job insecurity, is not experienced as inclusion in the ranks of the ‘contented majority’ but simply being reclassified in the ranks of exclusion.
Education
Young argues that education is a major part of the bulimic process. In The Exclusive Society, he states that notions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity are at the core of the narrative of the American Dream and that mass education plays a critical role in the dissemination and inculcation of these messages. Thus, children are prepared for work and participation in the labor market with a staple part of this socialization contained in the interlocking imagery of earned success, achievable careers, the principles of hard work and just rewards. Cultural isolation from these processes is difficult to experience.
However, the role of mass education as a major institutional and ideological site of cultural inclusion leads to discontent when accompanied by structural exclusion. For Young, this points to basic flaws in conventional cultural theories of crime (namely Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) General Theory of Crime and Wilson and Herrnstein’s (1985) Crime and Human Nature), since they view crime as a result of the lack of culture and cultural incorporation and the individual’s (inherited) incapacity to learn the rules of society and attendant deficits of socialization and lack of symbolic embeddedness in the mainstream. In this argument, material or structural inequalities are irrelevant as crime and deviance accompany ‘the lack of an unquestioned and moralistic absolutist culture’ (Young, 1999: 79). In the bulimic condition, crime is seen not as the result of a lack of culture, or of material deprivation per se, but of the embrace of a culture of success, meritocracy and individualism and the experience of ‘deprivation in the context of the “American Dream” … where meritocracy is exhorted as open to all’ (Young, 1999: 81). As Young argues, the state of anomie in the bulimic society would not exist if cultural inclusion did not occur and the socialization into the American Dream and the dreams of Europe and Australia were not all pervading and successful.
A current example of this process is the ‘debt generation’. While youth are inculcated with the cultural message that higher education offers a safe pathway to upward mobility and a comfortable, secure lifestyle, they face the reality of a highly precarious labor market, stagnant rates of social mobility and insufficient financial returns to pay back their mushrooming student indebtedness. Increasingly, the student loan bubble works as a form of social control (Graeber, 2011), and it is not surprising that members of this ‘debt generation’ were a significant part of the Occupy Movements of 2011. The frustration, disenchantment and discontent expressed by these students come directly from their experience of the social bulimic condition and shows again the highly provocative nature of the concept and its widespread applicability.
Conclusion
We have outlined the basic tenets of Young’s concept of social bulimia. We argue that Young was always engaging the various contradictions of capitalist society, working through the relations between the political economy, culture and ideology in his singularly critical sociological and criminological way. A profound appreciation of theory and for examining the claims of empirical evidence was apparent from the beginning, demonstrating a criminological imagination that has rarely been equaled. In this vein, we consider his description of a bulimic society one of Young’s rich, provocative narratives that capture movements and changes in society and the conditions under which crime and reactions to crime emerge as important social issues.
The concept of social bulimia can be applied fruitfully to both sociology and criminology, and we have discussed several instances where he used this lens to illuminate what he felt were the driving forces of the phenomenon. Presently, this inclusionary/exclusionary dialectic is increasingly relevant as questions of internal and external borders haunt the politics of countries around the globe, not least the USA and Europe where prison gulags bulge with wasted lives and street gangs become the canary in the mine in times of neo-liberal austerity and social cruelty. But, like Young, we do not feel paralyzed by such seemingly endless contradictions of a system often at war with the majority of its subjects.
Although Young fully comprehended that these bulimic pushes and pulls were hard to negotiate, a reasonable chance nonetheless exists to move beyond them. He came of age when social critique was welcomed and arguably even required of intellectuals who unashamedly joined those coming to terms with multiple levels of marginality and histories of humiliation through ‘the struggle’. He was clear that rights or freedoms were not simply ordained and granted but came from principled scholars encouraging and articulating both individual and collective agency to re-imagine the present and the past. His attitude to borders of exclusion was demonstrated repeatedly: cross them, state your presence and ‘push the door open’. But what is the meaning of inclusion if we are ever to get there? As usual, Jock left us pondering this profound paradox along with an extraordinary legacy of ideas, commentary, observations and insights into the human condition that that we will surely need as we go forward. We are convinced that social bulimia is one of the insights that will grow old with use as we strive to follow in his huge footsteps.
Footnotes
Funding
Laura Naegler’s research was conducted in association with the Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology (DCGC), an Erasmus Mundus programme of the European Union. The European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained in this publication.