New book by Keele Criminologist

Helen Wells, graduate of Keele and now lecturer on the Keele Criminology programme has just had her first book published by Ashgate. The book The Fast and The Furious: Drivers, Speed Cameras and Control in a Risk Society is based on her PhD research carried out at Keele between 2002 and 2006 and is published as part of the Human Factors in Road and Rail Transport series. The book offers an explanation for the continued debate about one  particular and emotive road safety intervention - the speed camera - by situating that debate within contemporary literature about the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) and more broadly understood experiences of risk faced on a daily basis by drivers. Rather than a focus on risk as something that can be objectively assessed, measured and managed separately from the social context in which it is encountered, it suggests that ‘risk’ is something that permeates this particular debate from every angle.

You can read sample pages of the book (or even buy it!) here.

The book has received the following reviews:

‘Helen Wells sets out on an important and timely quest to place roads policing through speed cameras in the context of a “risk society”. Rightly, she avoids a debate about their effectiveness. Rather, she looks at changes in policing through greater use of technology and at the roles played by researchers, pressure groups and experts. As an expert cited, I found this a fascinating survey of a controversial topic.’
– Robert Gifford, Executive Director, Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, UK
 
’We’ve waited a long time for this fresh perspective on a topic that touches us all in risk society. Using a multi-method, multi-site empirical study as her basis, Wells unpicks the many and contradictory strands of the speed camera debate, deliberately retaining a neutral stance and positioning the whole enterprise within a risk narrative. As such it delivers a powerful analysis of what was seen to “go wrong” through giving “voice” to drivers, and serves up timely insights for the enforcing authorities. A real tour de force!’
– Claire Corbett, Brunel Law School, UK

’A real thought provoker for anyone who has ever had an opinion about speed cameras! Through the voices of drivers, enforcers, persuaders, and decision-makers, this is an insightful look at the debate on arguably the most contentious of ‘techno-fixes’. In explaining how, in many people’s eyes, “safety cameras” became “speed traps”, Wells reminds us that opinions cannot be changed by scientific evidence alone and that public acceptance is a prerequisite for any intervention.’
– Lindsey Simkins, Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, UK

The Hurt Locker: What is the Death Drive?

By

Mark Featherstone

I have recently written two papers on the psychoanalytic idea of the death drive and the ways in which it manifests itself in society. In these papers I focus on the war on terror and the ways in which violence, destructiveness, what psychoanalysts call aggressivity, and other perversions such as sadism have become widespread in western society.

My argument in these papers is that although we regard these perversions as horrendous distortions of what it means to be a social being when they occur in events such as a the Baby P case, it should come as no surprise to us that these events happen because our culture is in many ways characterised by violence and sadism. Consider contemporary popular culture. We watch 24, where Jack Bauer tortures people on a regular basis, play Grand Theft Auto, and enjoy torture porn movies, such as the Saw franchise. For the cultural sociologist Henry Giroux, our popular culture provides us with an education in cruelty and creates a general atmosphere where violence and aggression is tolerated and in many cases encouraged. This is not the place, however, to discuss the finer points of Giroux’s theory or enter into age old debates about media effects.

Instead, the reason I start with reference to this work is because it was in the context of having recently written these papers that I viewed Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed film The Hurt Locker and recognised that it perfectly captures the idea of the death drive as a social and cultural phenomenon that transforms violence, aggression, and more centrally destructiveness from social pathologies into aspects of a norm or ethical principle of deadly risk to be employed as a guide for living and dying. Moreover, my sense was that The Hurt Locker, a film about bomb disposal in Iraq, could be used to show how psychoanalytic theory could be employed in social analysis to reveal a meta- or socio-psychological condition, on the basis that film condenses these kind of conditions into a text that we create in order to tell ourselves about our own society and culture.

The idea of a link between the psychological condition of the death drive and contemporary society raises some interesting questions. First, we must ask ourselves, how is condition this written into the film and how can psycho-social analysis reveal its presence? Second, we have to think about timing. Why now? What is it about contemporary society that makes the death drive current, since as we will see, Freud saw the death drive as a kind of ahistorical phenomenon, which is somehow hard-wired into humans? However, before we start to answer these questions, let us think about the idea of the death drive.

Freud wrote about the death drive or thanatos in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In his view human psychology is governed by two opposing principles – a life drive (eros) and more fundamentally, a death drive (thanatos). For Freud thanatos emerges because human existence is characterised by trauma. Human birth is traumatic. In Freud’s eyes the newborn experiences birth as a traumatic separation from its mother. This experience is then repeated later in life when the child learns from its father that it will eventually have to leave its mother behind and become an adult in its own right. All of this psycho-sexual trauma means that humans are wounded creatures.

For Freud we are naturally wounded creatures and we spend our lives searching for a sense of completion and peace. But there is no ultimate satisfaction. There is no way to return to the state of peace that we experience before the original moment of trauma, birth. There is no way to return to the womb. In Freud’s view this is why human life is largely characterised by a kind of raging turmoil set on the return to the peace originally experienced in the womb which in his view can only be repeated in one experience, death. Hence the founder of psychoanalysis regarded humans as essentially self-destructive creatures who have evolved various defence mechanisms for staying alive.

The first of these mechanisms is called projection, whereby the desire to destroy oneself is projected onto other people in the shape of what psychoanalysts have come to call aggressivity. But how to control aggressivity, which would essentially transform humanity into a self-destructive species? The answer is society or what Freud calls civilization. Civilization controls our violent impulses and prevents us from killing each other, but only at the cost of limiting our instincts. Society is, therefore, a social control machine.

This is the meaning of Freud’s idea of the life drive or eros. The life drive counter-acts the death drive by re-directing our natural instincts to destruction into social construction and social development. But unfortunately, civilization offers no lasting peace and we are haunted by thanatos. For example, we may seek out peace and completion through religion, which tells us about heaven and the afterlife where the endless desire to find the thing which will complete us no longer exists, and other secular forms that offer ecstatic experience, such as sex, narcotic, and alcohol addiction. All of these forms of addiction numb the pain of life and provide us with the momentary relief Georges Bataille talked about in terms of le petite mort, or the little death, meaning the moment of orgasm, ecstasy, or inebriation, where we lose ourselves, go blank, and descend into nothingness for a short period of time.

The little death is, however, just that, a small death. The limit state of ecstasy is forever balanced by the need to carry on, by the need to persist, by the need to live provided by eros. Eros means that the apocalyptic moment of death is postponed for as long as possible. The apocalypse is, therefore, not now, but rather distributed across life in whatever limit experiences we can manage to cram into our limited time in the world.

This Freudian theory is, of course, perfectly captured by the film, The Hurt Locker, which tells the story of an American bomb disposal expert in Iraq, William James (Jeremy Renner), who takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience. The film clearly shows that he feels most alive when he is closest to death, a condition supported by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who spoke about being-towards-death, and told us that we should live every moment as though it was our last, in order that we might live a full and meaningful life. I think that this much is explicit in the manifest content of the film. However, a deeper, psychoanalytic understanding of the film, requires an interpretation of the latent meaning of the scene of bomb disposal itself that we might talk about through Heideggerian language, being-with-bombs. I use the term being-with-bombs because in Freud’s theory humans live with bombs every day of their lives. We all live with psychological bombs lodged deep in our unconscious minds waiting to explode, turning our lives to rubble. The death drive, the product of the trauma of birth, is, of course, the ultimate unexploded bomb, the bomb that Freud knew could never be defused or disarmed. In Freud’s thought the best we can ever do is to avoid detonation. We can hold our selves, or in Freud’s language our egos, together and keep the death drive in check.

It is this situation, this psychological complex, that is beautifully captured by The Hurt Locker. The psychological complex of the struggle between the life and death drives is perfectly depicted by James’ confrontation with the bomb. The moment when he is most alive, the moment when he is potentially about to die, the moment when he confronts the bomb, is the moment when the life drive meets the death drive and life hangs in the balance.

Should we consider the work of one of Freud’s followers, Melanie Klein, we can reinforce this theory, so that it becomes more than simply a metaphor. For Klein, who wrote about the life and death drives as they play out in child psychology, psychological processes are always embodied processes that we also project onto the world around us. In this respect, the link between the life / death drive complex and bomb detonation is no longer simply a metaphor because the threat of psychological collapse is the threat that the body will be exploded to pieces. Moreover, the fact that the war between the life and death drives is played out in terms of bomb detonation is not simply a metaphorical connection, since it is possible to see the latter social political reality as an expression of a deeper psychological reality in the same way that everything in the world is from a psychoanalytic perspective an expression of human psychological reality.

Following this train of thought, we can consider the meaning of the bomb suit, which the detonation experts wear to protect themselves from blasts. The bomb suit is the Freudian ego, the front stage social self, that defends us against the chaos of the death drive that threatens to blow us to bits. When James dons the bomb suit to confront the bomb he is caught on the line between the life drive, designed to keep us alive by turning us into unified selves, and the death drive, that threatens to blow us to bits, but when he throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive. Herein lies James’ ethic of deadly risk, his attempt to realise Heidegger’s idea, being-towards-death, in what for Freud would be a perverse form, being-with-bombs.

In Freudian / Kleinian terms, the bomb is also a projection of the self because it consists of a hard shell containing powerful explosive material. In light of this process of objectification, the disposal experts’ tinkering with the bomb’s wires and components is really an expression of his attempt to work out his own life / death drive complex through the object that will ultimately decide whether he lives or dies. And should he live, he will confront bombs, different bombs, but essentially the same bomb, over and over again, because the war between eros and thanatos never ends, apart from the moment when we finally succumb to death and thanatos reaches its telos. Freud called this condition which runs through life the compulsion to repeat. Klein talked about it in terms of the vicious circle. Either way, what it means is that the battle between the forces of life and death is always on and will never end so long as humans are alive and continue to be born.

It is an understanding of this fact that gives the film its existential edge. We see James’ attempt to live a normal life. He spends time with his son and his divorced wife, who he tells his friends stuck with him for some reason that he can’t fathom, but he can never leave the bomb behind. So he returns to the front and the war re-starts. At that point the film ends.

What we can see then is that James’ psychological war with himself is played out across the urban war zone of Iraq. The idea of the war zone is crucial here for enabling us answer the vexing question, why now? What is it about our society, the society of risks we might also call the society of the death drive, that makes it more risky and more deadly than previous societies, given that Freud thought that the death drive is a primal human condition?

Essentially the answer to this questions reveals the beauty of The Hurt Locker, which is that it is plays out a deep existential conflict common to all humans in a contemporary scene and manages to suggest that there is something very particular about this contemporary scene that thrusts this deep existential conflict front and centre.

In Freudian theory we know that war, the war in the self, and the projected war with other people, is resolved by society, and the norms and values of society. What we have not mentioned is that these norms and values are only effective because authority, the primary authority of the father figure, is internalised in the form of what Freud called the super-ego. The super-ego, the law in our heads that tells us that you cannot do this, that, or the other, is the authority that keeps us in check and prevents the war from breaking out, holds society together, and ensures that the life drive maintains some semblance of control over the death drive.

What the film illustrates through its depiction of the Iraq war, which symbolises the condition of perma-war that has come to characterise contemporary globalisation, is what psychoanalysts knew in the 1960s, which is that authority is on wane and that the forces of violence and chaos are now, more than ever before, barely contained by civilized social structures. We can see this condition today. Globalisation is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what the recent economic collapse was all about? Is this not what the war on terror is all about? Society is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what theories of broken Britain are about? Is this not what panics about youth deviance are about? And the self? The contemporary self is in a state of barely contained chaos on the edge of complete breakdown. Is this not what the story of James in The Hurt Locker is really about? Is this not what gives this film its particular resonance?

So all of this is contained in The Hurt Locker, a film that illuminates the chaotic nature of globalisation through its depiction of the Iraq War and the chaotic nature of the self thrust into these chaotic circumstances in the form of a bomb disposal expect who plays out the endless struggle between the life and death drives every time he confronts a bomb in the field. In this way we can see how it is possible to link psychological theory to cultural analysis to form a complex theory that can shed light on the contemporary human condition, a condition that takes in the microscopic level of social psychology and the macroscopic level of globalisation.

Hands up who's a better than average driver?

By Dr Helen Wells

The President of the Police Superintendent’s Association Ian Johnston will next week talk to his Association’s conference about how the public’s confidence in the police is “dented and bruised” . One policy which will be receiving his attention is the use of speed cameras, which he suggests are one of the causes of this decline in public confidence. He will note that more needs to be done to convince the motoring public that using speed cameras to catch speeding drivers is “a legitimate and fair activity”. But why does a technology which, we are constantly told, is helping to save hundreds of lives a year on our roads need to be justified, and why does the public continue to resist the message that they are a legitimate road safety tool?

Whenever I think about these questions I come back to the statistic that 80% of drivers think that they are better than average. What this means out on the roads is that we are unlikely to respond well to measures that are introduced to limit the amount of danger that ‘average’ drivers cause in a specific set of circumstances. Unfortunately for the government, police and the variously-titled Safety Camera/Road Safety/Casualty Reduction Partnerships that operate speed cameras, the speed limit is one such manifestation of the average – set at a level at which it is believed the average motorist will be causing a risk, based on average levels of traffic flow, in average weather conditions, with average amounts of pedestrians around. As such, the majority of above-average drivers are likely to consider themselves unfairly restricted by limits that are applicable to drivers with what they consider to be inferior skills to their own. They are also, of course, going to consider themselves unfairly punished when they engage in behaviour that would be risky if other people were doing it, but they feel is perfectly safe for themselves.

Viewing things from this perspective may also help explain the government’s often-quoted statistic that between 70 and 90% of drivers ‘support the use of speed cameras as a road safety tool’. Perhaps, logically, we are accepting of interventions that promise to protect us from the inferior driving of others, while hostile to those which seem to punish us for engaging in behaviour that we believe to be safe. After all, receiving a Notice of Intended Prosecution through your letter box a couple of weeks after you engaged in the punishable act is testament to the fact that you got home safely and hence that your behaviour didn’t hurt anyone. Punishing people for behaviour that causes risk – not necessarily harm – is perhaps always going to appear a little unnecessary, regardless of any legitimate deterrent effect it may have.

If most drivers do, indeed, consider themselves to be less risky than those they share the road with, then speed camera enforcement can be viewed as not just illegitimate, but as a risk in itself. Drivers who, for various reasons, consider their driving licence to be essential to their day to day functioning may well feel that the ‘real’ risk being posed on the roads is not caused by their driving at 34 mph in a 30 mph zone, but in the potential revocation of their licence as a result of four speeding convictions. The camera can then be viewed as a source of risk, not a source of protection from it, and become fair-game for a variety of increasingly popular ‘personal crime prevention’ measures, ranging from radar detectors, to false number plates to direct vandalism of cameras – all of which protect the ‘victimised’ driver from the risks of punishment.

A professional driver once told me that there are three things that people hate being told they are bad at – parenting, driving and sex. Ian Johnston’s task, however, may be to convince drivers that they are not actually as good as they think they are. If he wants to improve the image of the police in the eyes of the public, this might not be a good place to start.

Read more about the unintended consequences of speed cameras in Helen Wells' research article in the Internet Journal of Criminology.

Britain from Above...

By Dr Rebecca Leach

The BBC's expensive new flagship documentary series Britain from Above hosted by Andrew Marr launched on Sunday 10th August 2008 with a thrilling roller-coaster ride through 24 hours of British life. It was certainly excellent, if slightly terrifying, television: what would happen if the man in charge of sorting out electricity surges when Eastenders finishes were to sneeze at the wrong moment? And should we pity the poor man who has to carry a sick bag in the helicopter while spotting flaws in the overhead wire network, taking six months to do one patch only to have to begin all over again? And, god forbid, how does London cope when a lorry sheds its load on the North Circular: would civilization end?

Actually, it probably would. To be more precise (and sociological), the programme was such great TV because it was a graphic reminder of how dependent we are on each other and on the complex systems which make things, er, go. And stop. Is it a surprise that a series reminding us of how reliant we are upon complex organisations surfaces at a time when the management of risk has become paramount? Britain - like other complex, Western societies - has been more or less quietly gearing up for what the government likes to call new threats. Yes, bombs are still real threats (and a small paranoid bit of me was watching from behind the sofa, thinking 'No! Don't show us where the important buttons are... I don't actually want the general public to know how to switch off the national grid...') but in the current climate, perhaps the more salient risks are social, economic and environmental against which we must develop 'resilience'. Dull but crucial: the road haulage system was highlighted as being the most important and dependent service for our daily well-being. One shock to this fragile system (and we've seen only short and minor ones over petrol prices lately) which leads to food and basic necessities no longer being available and civil disorder may swiftly ensue.

How depressing this situation is. Depressing, first, because our just-in-time delivery system and economic turnover relies on such carbon-heavy resources. And second, depressing because many people who have watched the show experienced it as revelatory: 'I never knew how much went on behind the scenes' they say. Hmm. So you imagined that your exercise in individual consumer choice was just that? With no other implications, dependencies, systems of provision and distribution, costs and risks? I grudgingly accept that the BBC are doing a good educational job of showing these interdependencies, but it is still awful that people don't think about what 'society' and 'economy' really are when they go about their daily economic activities.

Now, more than ever, it seems the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are being proved right: are societies re-ordering themselves so that relative risks become the key variables (compared to, for example, social class)? And with such high dependency on incredibly complex, technological but fragile systems as the national grid (in which high-tech solutions have to be juggled alongside cultural behaviour such as TV watching), have we truly entered a phase of reflexive modernisation (according to Beck and Giddens, in which the limits of the modern are fundamentally questioned)?