For a ruthless cultural criticism of everything existing

Some scholars contend that cultural criminology has abandoned the critical analysis of capitalism’s criminogenic tendencies, resorting instead to a myopic subjectivism that romanticizes transgression and misses broader structures of inequality. On the contrary, cultural criminology can be seen to incorporate a constellation of critiques designed to expose the distinctly cultural dynamics of late capitalism and its crimes. From this view, cultural criminological analysis overcomes the dichotomization of structure and agency by locating structural arrangements within moments of lived experience, and by exploring in these moments the often confounded possibilities of agency, subversion, and control. In this way cultural criminology calls into question dismissive distinctions between crimes large and small, and continues to investigate the complex process by which crime and transgression are invested with collective meaning.