Abstract
We all have our own way of conceptualising the themes and issues that connected the body of work Stan Cohen produced between 1966 and 2012. Laurie Taylor has argued that Stan’s enduring interest was ‘emotional management’, whether in the form of the emotional overreaction embedded in moral panics about youth cultures, the techniques of psychological survival deployed by prisoners, the bureaucratic rationalisation of intrusive forms of social control or the psycho-social underreaction to violations of human rights. For others, it is his commitment to intellectual skepticism that unites his work. This skepticism demanded rigorous interrogation of claims, explanations and credos, particularly those emanating from positions espousing realpolitik.
For me, Stan forged a distinctive humanist criminological agenda built out of his methodological concern with listening to and unpacking the negotiated nature of ‘accounts’ of every kind. In this sense he was always true to what he defined as a transactional approach to academic inquiry, identifying and analysing the points of contact between these different accounts. As he succinctly put it in an Open University interview where he discussed his research on the mods and rockers:
To see these three different realities – the world that it looked like for the kids; the world that it looked like for middle-class magistrates sitting miles away and who had never been to the beach; and the world that it was like for a Daily Express reporter were different worlds. Not different worlds in the literal sense but different worlds in the sense of different images of the same world. And that’s what sociology is. You have to find ways of reconciling, of finding relationships between them.
The analytical task is to identify what a given mediated account is trying to do, how it ‘works’ and, equally importantly, how it can be challenged. This is why, for Stan, Sykes and Matza’s psycho-cultural ‘techniques of neutralisation’ remains such an important article for criminologists. His subsequent work examined prisoner accounts of their experience of imprisonment; the historical accounts of the ‘progressive’ nature of changes in social control; and the visions of crime control accounts of penal administrators. His concern with differing accounts realised its full political potential in his last book, States of Denial, which has intended to shift the intellectual focus of human rights studies from the legalistic and political to the unsettling shores of the psycho-cultural. In effect, States of Denial is Stan’s attempt to humanise human rights studies. It is also where he confronts his own life and times. In the book Stan provides the reader with a box of conceptual tools enabling her/him to analyse under/non-reactions to ‘unwelcome knowledge’: the accounts given by governments regarding the circumstances surrounding human rights violations; the accounts constructed by human rights NGOs to persuade us to be concerned and give money; and the routinised ways that citizens and societies know and do not know about human rights violations. In seminars related to the topic, Stan’s only visual aid would be an ‘atrocity triangle’ that he would draw on the whiteboard. After reading States of Denial there is no conceivable excuse for not knowing. ‘Knowing’ and acknowledgement are hard work. Being motivated to actually do something as a result of that ‘knowing’ and acknowledgement is even harder work. And kindling moral outrage about human rights violations is hardest of all. As he noted, ‘In the hierarchy of which events and issues will be covered, a footballer’s ankle will get more media attention than a political massacre’ (2001: xiii).
Stan was never more content than when sifting through empirical examples looking for the fine distinctions between fact and fiction. These ‘vital lies’ were gleaned from a multitude of sources. He could not believe his eyes when he first saw the photographs of Abu Ghraib, and this produced a reconsideration of postmodern analysis, something that he had disregarded because it had descended into an ‘epistemological circus’ inhabited by intellectual tricksters and irresponsible cultural relativists. In an Index on Censorship article he defined Abu Ghraib as a post-moral form of torture defined by: ‘the carnival; the spectacle of unrestrained ludic sexuality; trick shop horrors; the fake jungles of reality television; the rewarded narcissism and cruelty of Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here’ (2005: 28).
Between answering a disconcerting number of emails asking him to adjudicate on whether something was a ‘moral panic’ or not, Stan was collecting material for a new introduction to a new edition of States of Denial. The original text would not be revised but his plan was to write the introduction in a similar style to the one he had written for the last edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Sadly, failing health and the side effects of medication meant that he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate and to remember what he had written and why. The new introduction would have worked across three examples of ‘living in denial’: the Catholic Church’s denial of child sexual abuse; the South African government’s denial of AIDS; and the denial of climate change. And of course in the ‘doing’ of denial he realised that new social media technologies were changing the rules of the accounting game in astonishing ways and posing a real methodological challenge to his research. How, for example, is one to make sense of multi-mediated gaming arenas where combatants deploy strategies of ‘denial’ and ‘acknowledgement’ across a multitude of contentious issues in a no-holds-barred fight over ‘truth’ and ‘reality’?
One of the things we can learn from Stan Cohen is to have the intellectual ambition to stretch the criminological imagination or, more precisely, the anti-criminological imagination. In an appendix attached to Psychological Survival: the Experience of Long-Term Imprisonment, one of the books he co-authored with Laurie Taylor, they clarify the differences between their research approach and the proclaimed scientific approach of conventional criminology:
It is important to understand the principal function of official research into crime and punishment is to reassure the public that the problem is being scientifically tackled. The research itself may or may not say anything significant, relevant or even interesting. Its results indeed may never get published. This is relatively unimportant. The main thing is the research’s WDP (Window Dressing Potential). To have a high WDP the research must fulfil the following criteria: it must be well financed; it must be comprehensible to most politicians and administrators; its aims must be presented in a simple direct way, preferably in the form of a hypothesis to be tested. Any complex theoretical and methodological problems must be kept on one side and the results, when they appear, should be ambiguous enough to reassure, while at the same time generating numerous statements of the ‘more research is needed’ variety. (1972: 205)
The WDP would now include references to ‘evidence-led policies’ and ‘data-driven outcomes’. Unsurprisingly, States of Denial meets none of the WDP criteria. Stan Cohen’s methodology, analytical approach, ethical stance and writing style was intended to expose and cut through all forms of window dressing and demonstrate the self-imposed limitations of conventional criminological imaginations. This is why his work will continue to stand the test of time.
I will finish by recommending a film that Stan never grew tired of viewing. Il Bacio di Tosca – Tosca’s Kiss – was made in 1984 by Daniel Schmidt, a Swiss director. The film is set in the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home for opera singers and musicians in Milan, established by Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. Disputed accounts and anarchic multiple realities define the everyday existence of the eccentric elderly inhabitants. The film follows Sara Scuderi, a prima donna soprano who talks to other residents, recounts the highlights of her career, and periodically bursts into song. Her fellow residents also remember and re-enact the roles that they played and argue passionately with each other as to who played what role in famous productions. If you decide to watch Il Bacio di Tosca, imagine Stan sitting there beside you, laughing and crying at the bitter-sweet absurdity of the human condition.