Crime Media Culture 2007 Williams 49 66

Crime,
Media, Culture
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Potential spaces of crime: The playful, the destructive, and the distinctively human
Christopher R. Williams
Crime Media Culture 2007 3: 49
DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074447
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WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME
Potential spaces of crime: The playful, the

destructive, and the distinctively human
CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS, University of West Georgia, USA
Abstract
Though most share an interest in answering the question, What are people trying to
accomplish when they commit a crime? criminologists have been largely reluctant to entertain the ways in which the accomplishment of crime reflects deeper, more fundamental
and distinctively human capacities and needs. Of especial significance in this context are
the human capacity and need for creative engagement. The interplay between human
ontology, experience, and behavior gives rise to a variety of such expressions and engagements, both normative and illicit in manifestation. Where history, culture, organization,
and biography erect limitations, human beings can be expected to seek out or construct
alternative, at times playful and at times destructive, experiential spaces for creative engagement. Drawing from cultural criminology, existentialism, and critical humanism, these
spaces are provisionally explored.
Key words
creativity; cultural criminology; deviance; humanism; ontology
INTRODUCTION
Most criminological theories share an interest in answering the basic question of criminal
behavior, namely, What are people trying to accomplish when they commit a crime and
why are they trying to accomplish it? (Groves, 1993: 24). In attempting to answer this
question, all theories of crime and criminality commit themselves to working at or within
certain levels of reality or, most often, a single level of abstraction (Groves, 1993). In their
search for causes, theorists typically assume the relevance of (usually) one such level at
the exclusion of others: some look to intra-individual forces rooted in human biology
and/or psychology; others veer toward micrological social dynamics such as those of
CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 3(1): 4966 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074447]
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CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)
family or small group relations; and yet others look to larger, macrological influences on or
determinants of human behavior, including concerns of culture and social organization.
Few theories, however, reserve a central role for what is perhaps the deepest, most
enduring and effectual level of reality: that of human ontology. To be sure, all theories
contain at least implicit assumptions about human nature and its link with human behavior
(see e.g. Einstadter and Henry, 1994). Some for instance those working within Freudian
or control theory conventions make such assumptions more or less explicit. Kornhauser
(1978: 39), for example, posited a view of human nature in which man is active, moved
to gratify strong wants, and argued for the need for a more complex statement of
human nature, one that recognizes mans desires for material and sensual gratification
and his striving for power (p. 32, quoted in Grose and Groves, 1993: 138). Much has
been written as well, or at least implied, about the malleability of human nature as it is
conceived within variations of learning theory, and the socially and culturally constructed
character of human nature and human needs as they appear in sociocultural varieties
of criminology. These implications and incorporations notwithstanding, human ontology
has yet to be provided a fully meaningful role in criminological discourse (see, however,
Arrigo, 2006; Klein and Chancer, 2006; Williams and Arrigo, 2006).
My objective in what follows is to provisionally examine the significance of human
ontology to crime, as well as its potential relevance to the study of crime. More specifically,
my concern is with human ontology as it intersects with the creative, artistic, and aesthetic
dimensions of being human. I begin by positioning concerns of human ontology and the
distinctively human within the greater project of understanding crime and criminality
particularly recent efforts that have sought to move beyond the conventional positivistic
and rational choice-making paradigms of crime causation. Against this backdrop, I
suggest that entertaining questions and concerns of the distinctively human thrusts us
into a consideration of the inherent creativity and need for creative engagement that
characterizes human existence. Having examined its centrality to human existence, I
offer some provisional discussion of how creativity and the derivative need for creative
engagement might influence human behavior including that cast as criminal or
deviant.
HUMAN ONTOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF CRIME

From the inception of criminology, explanations of criminal behavior have tended to
focus on certain identifiable elements of the criminals biological, psychological, and/or
social existence. By identifiable, it is meant those characteristics that lend themselves to
definition, conceptualization, and later empirical investigation those that, in theory, can
be measured in the interest of ascertaining some (typically causal) relationship to human
behavior. The range of such characteristics spans everything from genetics and chemical
constitution on the biological end of the causal spectrum, through personality, emotion,
and choice making, to peer-group influence and social structural determinants on the
sociological front. What are demonstrably absent from most such considerations of crime
and criminality, however, are those most basic and fundamental questions about the human
subject that criminologists have thus far been largely reluctant to entertain. To borrow
from Richard Taylor (1992), we might suggest that with few exceptions, criminologists are
perfectly content to go through careers of crime study taking for granted questions
of existence, purpose, and meaning (p. 1) that is, without seriously entertaining
some of the most basic and vital questions about the subjects of their inquiry. Echoing
Fontanas (1984) sentiments concerning the state of sociological inquiry, it could be said
of criminology that it has largely blind[ed] it[self] to the complexity and uniqueness of
its subject matter: human beings (p. 3). Though at odds with criminological convention,
this criticism is certainly not new. In his much-cited Seductions of Crime, for instance,
Jack Katz (1988) suggested that [t]he study of crime has been preoccupied with a search
for background forces, usually defects in the offenders psychological background or
social environments, to the neglect of the attractions within the lived experience of
criminality (p. 3). Katzs invitation was for a reconsideration of our very approach to the
study of crime and criminality, imploring us to overcome our fixation on rationalistic and
positivistic discourse in favor of greater attention to the subjective dimension of human
experience (see also Katz, 2002).
More recently, those working within the resurging tradition of cultural criminology
have borrowed much from the spirit of Katzs pleadings (see, e.g. Ferrell et al., 2004).
Mike Presdee (2004: 276) takes issue with the rise of administrative criminology that
which is preoccupied with the creation and excavation of so-called sociological facts.
Administrative criminology, he suggests, has produced an overdetermined descriptive
criminology, deprived of any social/human dimension (p. 276). In its place, cultural
criminology, as Hayward and Young (2004: 266) write, foregrounds experience and the
existential psychodynamics of the actor and seeks to re-contextualize crime within its
human and historical context (Presdee, 2004: 277). Reclaiming the expressive subject of
crime (Williams, 2004) requires a qualitatively different type of involvement with our subject
matter, namely, one that is less interested in explanation through causal propositions and
empirical methodologies and more so in employing interpretive strategies to understand
meaningful human behavior, its purposes, motives, and intentions (e.g. Groves and Lynch,
1990; Ferrell, 1997; Ferrell and Hamm, 1998).
There is, however, a deeper or more essential dimension of being human one that
informs subjectivity and lived experience that less often explicitly surfaces in discourse
on crime and deviance. In addition to psychological/phenomenological inquiries into the
human subject of crime, we might ask what it is that makes the human subject human
and, in turn, how these distinctively human characteristics inform human experience and
behavior. What is it that is unique about the human subject and what are we to make of
this uniqueness in relation to the attractions or seductions of criminality? It is questions
such as these that criminology has seemingly never been at home with and, perhaps
consequentially, that are perfectly easy never to ask (Taylor, 1992: 1).
Contemplating the distinctiveness of the human subject casts us into the realm of
metaphysics or, more correctly, ontology the philosophical study of being (in this case,
human Being). Following Aristotle (1923), ontological investigations are those that seek to
explicate the properties of Being as such, that is, those inherent in something by virtue of
its nature (again, in our case, human nature). To suggest that human beings have certain
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essential or distinctive properties, qualities, or characteristics is to suggest that there are

at least some human properties that do not exist accidentally as, for instance, products
of nurture or culture that may or may not exist cross-temporally and cross-culturally. The
essential properties of being human are those that we must possess, less we cease being
human properties, qualities, or characteristics that, taken away, would extinguish our
very humanity.
As noted, concerns such as these have certainly not held currency in contemporary
criminological circles. While in most instances this reflects the current scientistic obsession
with identifying concrete, antecedent causal factors that inform criminal behavior, in
other instances it reflects a continued skepticism of anything resembling essentialism
with regard for the human subject. Yet as Schacht (1994) argues, we need not dismiss
the value of such considerations simply because we reject the notion of some absolute,
immutable and eternal essence of humanity, or because we must admit that our humanity
is a historical, contingent, and plastic affair, admitting of great variation under different
social conditions (p. 146). The notion of the distinctively human, as well as those that
emerge from it realization, actualization, the fully human life, anomie, alienation can as
Schacht continues, be fruitful even in a post-essentialist philosophical world even after
the death of God, of traditional metaphysics, and of all absolutism and essentialism in
our thinking about human nature, value, and morality (p. 147).
Their lack of currency notwithstanding, the kinds of questions upon which ontology
forces us to reflect are the very kinds with which criminology might begin in its quest
to understand crime and criminality. Rather than drawing us exclusively to background
forces, they encourage us to entertain the dynamic interplay between that which is
unique about the human subject and the attractions that lie within the lived experience
of crime and criminality. Here, we find a human subject of crime which is neither purely a
consequence of antecedent forces, nor which exists categorically in Katzs foreground.
Rather, we find an active agent confronting and playing out the tension between human
ontology, subjectivity, and the material conditions of existence.
THE DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN

That there is such a thing as human history is the result not merely of the fact that the
generations perpetually arise and pass away, but rather, of the fact that human beings
have a capacity to create things. And it is this capacity to create that gives our
lives whatever meaning they have. (Taylor, 1992: 133)
From antiquity onward, philosophers and social scientists have offered varying accounts of
the distinctively human. For Aristotle (1988), we are rational, as well as social, communal,
and thus political beings (e.g. Yack, 1993). As he argued in his Ethics, the (distinctive)
capacity to reason distinguishes human beings from other species, and allows us to infer
human function, purpose, and generate a portrait of meaningful, fully human existence.
Others such as Hegel (1977) have noted that we are distinctively self-conscious beings,
thus giving rise to needs for and conflicts of identity and recognition (see also Grose and
Groves, 1993). Alongside our social and communal nature, our self-consciousness means
that we are inherently relational and inter-subjective beings. Still others have suggested
that human beings are uniquely situated among species to ask questions about what we
should or should not do. In other words, we have inherent normative capacities and are
thus essentially moral subjects (e.g. McShea, 1990).
The importance of reason, sociality, self-consciousness, the capacity for normative
evaluation, and other suggested characteristics notwithstanding, more recent critiques
have ushered in a different conception of what it means to be human, a different
conception of human function and purpose, of the meaningful, fully human life, and
thus of what human beings are fundamentally doing with their identities, actions, and
interactions (e.g. Williams, 2004). Issuing from and informed by German Romanticism,
existentialism, and the tradition of critical humanism, central to these accounts is the
distinctively human capacity for active, imaginative engagements with our world (Williams,
2004; see also Kupfer, 1983; Dissanayake, 1992). We are meaning and culture makers,
expressers and producers, creatively confronting and representing our existence to and for
ourselves and others. It is creativity, Rollo May (1959) once suggested, that is the most
basic manifestation of mans fulfilling his own being in his world (p. 57) an expression
of Being itself.
The distinctively human subject is thus not merely one of self-consciousness, reason,
and normative capacity but, more importantly, one who embodies and, through diverse
modes and practices of engagement, expressively realizes the creative essence which
underlies and gives rise to human existence. That creativity is a if not the principle
feature of human Being is with only cursory examination evident trans-historically,
cross-culturally, on all levels and in all spheres of human existence. Our uniquely creative
capacities, potentialities, and derivative needs as human beings can be inferred from
millennia of human behavior. Human history is one of planting seeds, producing material
objects, creating art and ideas, interacting with and loving one another all in ways that
reflect deeper, essential creative capacities, potentialities and a subsequent need to act
toward our existence rather than passively accept the human condition and our respective
social and cultural locations (Fromm, 1955).
This is what Fromm means to say in The Sane Society (1955) wherein he links the need
for creative expression with that for transcendence. By nature, he suggests, human beings
have a need to transcend their state as passive creatures. We are tied to the animal
kingdom by our body and its physiological needs, yet at the same time our self-awareness/
consciousness and capacities for reason and imagination engender an existential need to
transcend our condition through active, productive, creative expressions and engagements.
Unlike non-human animals that are not, by most accounts, endowed with the same
degrees of these capacities, human beings are not and cannot be content with passivity.
Instead, we are driven to act upon the world, utilizing the innate potentialities that derive
from reason and imagination. We are driven, Fromm argued, to transcend the role of the
creature the passivity of existence by becoming a creator (p. 36). In acts of creation, we transcend ourselves as creatures, raising ourselves beyond the passivity of our
existence into the realm of purposefulness and freedom (p. 37).
In important ways, then, our histories whether as individuals, groups, cultures, or
societies are histories characterized by transcendent acts of creation and expression. This
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sense in which human beings are creative beings, it should be noted, is not necessarily
that which implicates the conventionally artistic, beautiful, or even original. It is, further,
not merely a reference to activities by which something is produced; as Abraham Maslow
(1959) once suggested, creativity applies equally to people, activities, processes, and
attitudes (p. 90). Though certainly not exclusive of these more conventional referents, the
broader sense of the term incorporates the varieties of creative expression and engagement
that have and do permeate our everyday lives, and implies a more fundamental creative
need or desire that exerts its influence on each of our daily undertakings, whether in work,
play, or elsewhere (Kupfer, 1983).
This same essential characteristic and the corresponding need to which it gives rise,
it could be argued, also underlie and inform reason and rationality, give rise to emotion
and feeling, morality, language use and communicative acts, and fundamentally inform
each of our ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. What our various projects
as human beings have in common is that they are projects of creation and re-creation, of
imaginatively and expressively confronting the conditions of our existence (e.g. Williams,
2004). However creativity manifests itself, it is in this inherent creativeness of life
that its ultimate source is to be found (Sinnott, 1959: 286). Considering the inherent
creativeness of life brings us to the aforementioned intersection of ontology and the
creative, artistic, and aesthetic dimensions of human experience and behavior. For present
purposes, it is those illicit and otherwise non-normative varieties of human behavior that
are of special concern.
CRIME, CRIMINALITY, AND THE DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN

I have thus far suggested that criminologists would do well to attend to that which is
distinctively human in particular, the distinctively human capacity for creative engagement and the various derivative expressions and needs that might be ascertained within
this conceptual context. Our distinctively human capacities are realized and affirmed
and the existential needs to which they give rise satisfied through our activities, that
is, when we actively engage the world in such a way as to utilize those capacities and
fulfill those needs (e.g. Fromm, 1955; Kurtz, 2000). Accordingly, we might begin to ask
certain crucial questions of the intersection at which these capacities and needs meet with
and manifest within human activities particularly as these activities are, or are cast as,
criminal. Hereinafter, I offer a provisional examination of several concerns that emerge
from consideration of the intersection at which the distinctively human capacity for creative
engagement with the world meets with variations of deviant and criminal behavior.
The potential space of playful criminality

Accounting for the distinctively human means recognizing the ways in which human
beings are active subjects, capable of and involved in creative, self-expressive engagements
with the world. As a distinctively human capacity, creativity is inexorably linked with our
very sense of Being (Szollosy, 1998). British psychologist D. W. Winnicott (1971) observes
in human beings a creative impulse which he describes as a thing in itself. Human
existence is characterized, he suggests, by a primary creativeness that is irreducible and
inexplicable by reference to further properties. It is thus ontological, essential, a condition
of Being itself. As creativity is inextricably linked with our very sense of Being, ontological
realization necessitates the experiential affirmation of our creative capacities that is to
say, active engagements with the world whereby creative potentialities find fulfillment in
expressive experience.
Winnicott (1971) locates that experience in what he refers to as potential space. To
suggest of something that it is potential is to suggest that it embodies possibilities for
being or becoming inherent possibilities not yet articulated (Jemstedt, 2000: 125).
To suggest as much of space is to suggest that it is an area more precisely an area of
experience wherein lie possibilities for being or becoming, that is, possibilities for creative
engagement that serve to affirm our creative and expressive capacities and potentialities.
As an experiential location, potential space gives rise to what might be called a dialectical
interplay between inner and outer realities, where the ontology of human striving
(Grose and Groves, 1988) meets with the objective reality of human existence, manifesting
in various forms as engagement with, and activity upon, the world. In such interplays,
subjects can experiment, utilize talents and abilities, confront and overcome challenges. In
other words, it is through the opening-up of potential spaces that the creative capacity of
the subject is enabled and subsequently realized.
Potential space or, more directly, the ways in which human beings construct spaces for
subjective experience assumes especial importance in the context of contemporary culture.
Possibilities for ontological engagement and creative fulfillment are dangerously limited by
the depersonalizing, rationalist discourses of post-modern culture (Szollosy, 1998) where
creativity and expressivity are forfeited in the interest of instrumental, utilitarian values
(Williams, 2004). Hayward and Young (2004) witness a crisis of being a widespread sense
of ontological deprivation in a culture characterized by the increasing bureaucratization
of work and commodification of leisure (p. 267; see also, Hayward, 2004). Disunited
with the creative, imaginative, expressive dimensions of our nature, unable to realize fully
embodied, authentic experience, we must seek to construct experiences that open potential
spaces for creative interplay.
It is in this respect that we might turn to constructions of illicit experience. Criminal or
otherwise deviant experiences might be understood as exercises in the carving-out of
potential space. Illicit events can function as potential spaces for creative engagement and
ontological realization. Hayward and Young (2004), for instance, describe crime and transgression as breaking through the restraints, a realization of immediacy and a reassertion
of identity and ontology (p. 267). Acts of transgression can thus be acts of resistance
to cultural forces that threaten the ontological status of the human subject (Szollosy,
1998). Where the mass extermination of human spontaneity and the routinization
of everyday existence (Ferrell, 2004: 288) have erected boundaries around meaningful
human experience, potential spaces offer opportunities to playfully explore, freed from
the fetters and limitations imposed by material existence and the normative structuration
of experience (cf. Brody, 2001, 2002). Rollo May (1959) finds such expressive resistance
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in periods of momentary abandon or Dionysiac letting go in our mechanical civilization

where creativity [is] all but starved into permanent death (p. 63).
Where what Ferrell (2004: 292) describes as existential despair a Mertonian
retreat into fatalistic somnambulism perhaps typifies the normative response to this
impoverishment, so too could we consider the ways in which illicit or otherwise nonnormative engagements can be alternative responses to this same plight. Where the
regularities of everyday life are systematically drained of human skill and possibility,
devoid of the uncertainty and surprise that comes with human creativity (p. 294), the
construction or seeking-out of illicit moments of and spaces for authentic experience is
perhaps a normal and expected feature of post-modern existence.
Especially relevant in this context are illicit or otherwise deviant behaviors that are
characterized by a certain playfulness. Winnicott (1971) had suggested play as the
archetypal form of potential space. Practices of play both give rise to and fully embody
our creative and expressive energies. In play, we find the most essential and unadulterated
expressions of human creativity. In this sense, potential spaces can be thought of as
ontological playgrounds for creative engagement transitional areas within which
subjects experience themselves as creative, expressive beings, are provided opportunity to
satisfy strivings for creative expression, and therefore in which they are most thoroughly
grounded in their own ontology.
The playfulness and creativeness of non-normativity has been a recurring theme in
sociological and criminological literatures. Redmon (2003), for instance, describes the
risk-taking adventures typical of Mardi Gras, temporary autonomous zones, raves, S&M
clubs, and amateur stripping venues as, backspaces for playful deviance. Duncombe
(2002: 8) describes practices of cultural resistance as entailing the creation of free space
to create new language, meanings, and visions and to escape from the world of politics
and problems (p. 8). Jeff Ferrell (2004) finds in edgework a manufacture of moments
that embody self-made dynamics of engagement and excitement (p. 298; see also,
Lyng, 1990). These moments and spaces of illicit playfulness contain an ephemeral unity
of skill and adventure (Ferrell, 2004: 298) constructed or sought out opportunities
for ontological affirmation over and against a foreground of sublimated passions, the
regulation and rationalization of creativity, and the standardization of skill. Fromm (1973)
identifies such moments and spaces in acts of playful aggression such as sword fighting
and tribal war games that embody an artistic exercise of skill. We might suggest the
same of many everyday aggressive confrontations in school gyms, cafeterias, and parking
lots, individual and group confrontations on the streets or in alleys, and other pseudoaggressive behaviors where the aim is not destruction and harm, but the utilization and/
or demonstration of skill within moments of illicit excitement (Ferrell, 2004: 287).
Practices of cultural resistance, edgework, and pseudo-aggressive confrontations are
illustrative of the ways in which human beings routinely carve out alternative, sometimes
illicit, spaces for creative engagement with the world. The interplay within these experiential
spaces is phenomenologically akin to play a period of temporary abandon and creative
experience that dissolve boundaries and offers a moment of freedom from the oppressive
encumbrances of order, regularity, and rule (Williams, 2006: 185). Their playfulness
(and resistance) is indicated by their decidedly non-instrumental, non-utilitarian nature
(see e.g. Young, 1971). This, perhaps, is what distinguishes playful from non-playful
criminality. Play is an event whose purpose is the event; an experience whose goal
is the experience (Williams, 2006: 185). An important part of that experience is the
sense of authenticity and ontological grounding that accompanies the direct personal
authorship (Lyng, 1990: 878) that play provides. What is play, Sartre (1956: 580 1)
once asked, if not an activity of which man is the first origin, for which man himself sets
the rules? As Ferrell (2004) suggests of flying with skydivers, riding fast motorcycles
[ and ] adventures of the hip hop graffiti underground, each recapture[s], if momentarily,
the lost immediacy of self-made human experience (p. 293, emphasis added; see also
OMalley and Mugford, 1994; Ferrell et al., 2001).
Above all, constructions of illicit spaces are experiential discourses with human
ontology. Even where instrumental ends accompany illicit engagements (e.g. auto theft,
shoplifting, computer hacking), these ends can be secondary to the sensual, emotional,
creative, and sometimes spontaneous nature of the activity itself. Playful criminality is thus
largely independent of, and divorced from, goals other than creative expressivity within the
immediate experiential space itself. Even where entailing destruction (e.g. vandalism), its
destructive elements are often not meaningfully linked with the function and purpose of
the engagement. Yet the seeking-out or construction of locations for creative experience
occurs within a context of available means and materials inclusive of the people, physical
materials and physical space, talent and skill, and experience with which one has to create.
In other words, the construction of experiential locations may itself require innovative
solutions. This more Mertonian sentiment suggests that we might do well to consider
the ways in which potential space and creative engagement meet with existing space.
Existing space and the dialectic of creative engagement

Creativity, the humanistic Marx (1884/1964) had suggested, is a central element of our
essence as human beings. We are essentially creative beings, our nature giving rise to
creative, expressive needs similar to those that we have thus far been contemplating. It is
our creative, productive energies and capacities that separate us from other species and
that define us as a species (see also Lynch and Stretesky, 1999). Marx would remind us,
however, that we are as well to borrow a term from existentialism existing individuals.
This is to say that we are cast into and exist within particular locations in the world:
historical epochs, cultures, social classes, family environments, ecologies and social
ecologies, and so on. In short, our creative capacities inescapably meet with, and our
creative engagements inescapably occur within, material conditions of our existence.
Beyond recognition of the distinctively human need for creative engagement and its
influence of human behavior, then, we might also attend to the dynamic which emerges
where essence meets existence, as well as the ways in which this interplay gives rise to
behavioral manifestations. The process of creative engagement is a relational process, and
its outcomes are a function of this dialectical relation between the ontology and subjectivity
of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, people, and circumstances of her
or his life on the other (Rogers, 1959). Crucially, what this means is that potential space
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will be more or less limited by physical, psychological, social, and cultural environments
limited to those materials and conditions that the subject is provided as a function of her or
his material existence. Social locations, as Pfhol (1994) reminds us, open the door for some
types of social experiences while prohibiting or imprisoning others (p. 406). In keeping with
the terminology of the present discussion, we might say that social locations and certain
forms of social experience open doors to some potential spaces while prohibiting access to
other such spaces. In this light, it becomes important to look beyond the ontological side
of the creative dialectic, and consider the ways in which material locations and dynamics
present greater or lesser opportunities for productive expression and, consequently, gives
rise to more or less productive and socially desirable expressions of creativity. How, for
instance, do social and cultural locations affect our ability to recognize and realize our
creative capacities and, more to the point, our ability to fulfill our creative desires in socially
productive ways? Each of the various contingent realities with which we are inevitably faced,
and within which we exist, acts to shape possibilities for creative expression. Opportunities
at least, productive and pro-social opportunities will vary in accordance with historical,
cultural, institutional, and biographical realities. Consequently, the means by which
we seek to affirm our creative capacities will oftentimes be a product of the particular
circumstances within which we find ourselves, both collectively as cultures and societies,
as well as individually. While some persons, afforded talent and opportunity, may find
spaces of creative engagement in conventional artistic activities, literature, science, music,
or athletics, it is reasonable to assume that others will seek out or construct spaces wherein
emerge more destructive (or at least less normative) variations of expression. Whereas the
above discussion of playful criminality implicated broader cultural conditions which do
not discriminate in their affliction, we might also take up Mertons (1938) concerns with
means, opportunities, and social locations. Unlike the socially or culturally induced needs
central to discussions of strain theory (e.g. Messner and Rosenfeld, 1994), the need to
actively and creatively engage our existence is a distinctively and, thus, universally human
project. Absent escapist or retreatist accommodations, the force of these needs does not
dissipate even when opportunities for expression and fulfillment meet with limitations. We
would do better to understand the creative urge, creative drive, or perhaps aesthetic
impulse as one that actively seeks conditions within which it can be expressed, or realized
(e.g. Rogers, 1959). More so than a learned desire, it is better regarded as something like
a fundamental desire, something still inchoate, unformed, which is seeking to reach
expression (Sinnott, 1959: 26) by whatever means it finds available.
Thus, where ontological strivings are frustrated where there is an absence of what we
might call legitimate ontological playgrounds for creative engagement the construction
of alternative spaces or the appropriation of alternative means for realizing and affirming
ontologically grounded needs is a normal and expected human response. Where there
is an experienced discrepancy between essence and existence, an existential tension
eventuates, characterized as an unsatisfied desire which seeks to resolve itself through
seeking, finding, and utilizing alternative spaces for creative engagement. Consequently,
we might expect to find in social reality a limitless variety of expressions and engagements,
conventional and productive where such opportunities are attractive and afforded, and
unconventional and perhaps destructive in other cases.
In this respect, creative engagements need not and, conceptually should not, be bounded
by that which is conventionally artistic, beautiful, or even original. There is no difference,
Carl Rogers (1959) once offered, between painting, composing, [and] devising new
instruments of killing [creativity] makes no distinction between good and bad new
medicine and new forms of torture are equally creative (p. 71). The conventionally artistic,
Marx had intimated, are institutionalized and ideological realities. Within capitalist forms
of socio-economic organization, conventionally artistic talent is concentrated within a
select few (i.e. the artists) while, for the masses, essential creative and expressive energies
are redirected (or, in the tradition of Freud and Marcuse, sublimated) into labor and consumption (Williams and Arrigo, 2006: 33). As was implicated in the earlier discussion
of illicit playfulness, the routinization of labor and the monogamization of cultural
consumption create a scenario in which creative, expressive needs are demonstrably not
met, resulting in personal alienation and fostering counterexpressions of artistic license
and production, including deviant forms (p. 33). As well, creative engagement in the
conventional sense of creating something new or original requires that one have the necessary talent, practice and, most importantly, opportunities that permit persons to develop
and apply those talents (Fromm, 1959).
In absence of the latter, creative expressions and engagements are likely to assume
alternative forms which, at times, are less conventional and socially desirable but no less
expressions of creativity and no less efforts to fulfill the fundamental human need for
creative engagement with the world. When creativity comes upon boundaries or limitations
it will, to borrow from Pfhol (1994), search for alternative means by which to affirm or
even aggressively realize itself (p. 407, emphasis added). In this respect, non-normative
engagements may be closely tied to the human struggle for freedom (e.g. Williams, 2006),
a struggle which often necessarily entails opposition and negation. Creative fulfillment
requires the sort of positive freedom that is autonomy in action, and self-determined
activity depends on negative freedom from restraints which prevent action (Hofstadter,
1973: 174). Freedom and creative engagement thus form an intricate existential interplay,
where positive freedom is necessary for productive, creative engagement with the world,
and negative freedom exists for the sake of positive freedom (p. 174), acting to overcome
restraints in order that opportunities for the construction and utilization of potential space
might be realized. As Hofstadter suggests, every form of significant action which man
carries out in the whole life-process consists in an endeavor somehow to break through
the limitations and inhibitions of his environment (p. 176).
Destructive engagement
In addition to proposed linkages between illicit activity and moments of expressive
experience between crime and the construction of potential space there is thus a second
sense in which creativity and creative expression/engagement acquire relevance to crime
studies. Where strain models meet with a critical humanistic psychology, we might ask of
the consequences that amount when basic human needs linked with human ontology are
extensively suppressed, frustrated, or where conditions that would permit fulfillment of
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such needs are absent or prohibitively impoverished. I have suggested that where human
beings are denied productive ways in which to satisfy felt existential needs, they will turn
to alternative perhaps less productive and even destructive means of satisfying them.
As Grose and Groves (1988) suggest, persons will manufacture substitutes when denied
direct satisfaction of basic human needs. Crime and deviance, then, become substitute
satisfactions or displaced efforts to satisfy basic human strivings which cannot be
achieved under specific social structural circumstances (Groves and Groves, 1993: 141).
Beyond Mertonian-inspired talk of manufactured innovative substitutes, however, we
might ask what amounts in more extreme cases of creative suppression and frustration.
Following Fromm (1955), we can raise the central question, What happens when human
beings are not able to satisfactorily realize and affirm that which is most essential to
their nature through everyday engagements with the world?. Of the majority of playful
deviance and criminality, we might suggest that it is non-destructive. In other words,
even where destruction surfaces in playful activities, the aim of those activities is not
primarily harm or destruction as such (cf. Fromm, 1973). Hofstadter (1973), for instance,
perceives in the aesthetic impulse an anti-aesthetic, by which equal satisfaction is taken
in experiencing the overthrow of the beauty of taste, in bringing to the fore deviations,
deformations, and destructions (p. 171). Over against the beautiful, he suggests, there
are aesthetic traits that depart from beautys measure: the ugly, the sublime, the
grotesque, the absurd, the freak (p. 171). Though working in opposition to the aesthetic,
the anti-aesthetic is ontologically grounded in the same basic human capacities and needs.
In bringing forth deviation and distortion (p. 174), the creative engagements of the antiaesthetic necessarily entail the playful destruction of the normatively aesthetic. Certain
variations of destruction whether literal such as vandalism or symbolic are thus playful,
creative engagements of which destruction is an accidental or necessary by-product more
so than destruction for the sake of destruction.
In more problematic cases, however, the meeting of ontology, subjectivity, and existence
can produce a pathological dynamic, giving rise to destructive forms of criminality (i.e. that
which aims at destruction for its own sake). Fromm (1955: 37) had asked, How does
man solve the problem of transcending himself if he is not capable of creating?. Where
ontology does not meet with playful or otherwise non-destructive experiential locations,
creativity can turn against itself. In want of creative engagement if ontological needs
are hopelessly or helplessly frustrated the desire for creative expression can transform,
revealing itself as a desire for destructive engagement. In such instances, rather than crime
representing playful, normal and expected expressions of intrinsic creative capacities, it
might better be understood as a pathological, malignant manifestation of overly frustrated
or suppressed capacities and needs (see e.g. Marcuse, 1967). In this context, we might turn
to Fromms (1955, 1973) description of two ontologically grounded needs that interplay
with creative potentialities and whose frustration can produce destructive outcomes.
As was noted earlier, in The Sane Society Fromm (1955) describes what he terms the
human need for transcendence. Because we are endowed with reason and imagination,
we cannot be content with the passive role of the creature (p. 36). We are driven by
the urge to transcend the role of the creature and the passivity of our existence by
becoming a creator (p. 36). Creative engagement with the world, whether through art,
work, play, or elsewhere, satisfies this most basic need. Yet where creative fulfillment is
absent, the need for transcendence can manifest in destructive engagement: if I cannot
create life, I can destroy it (p. 37). As in acts of creation, in acts of destruction man sets
himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature (p. 37). In other words, creation
and destruction are not two instincts which exist independently, rather, they are both
answers to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the
will to create cannot be satisfied (p. 38, emphasis added).
In this context, Fromm (1964: 31; see also Fromm, 1955) discusses what he calls
compensatory violence the violence of those to whom life has denied the capacity for
any positive expression of their specifically human powers. Compensatory violence serves
as a pathological substitute for productive, creative engagement where possibilities for the
latter are inescapably bounded or frustrated by opportunity or other experienced historical,
cultural, institutional, and biographical limitations. Unlike playful violence which is in
the service of life, compensatory violence is directed against life its purpose to destroy
rather than create. Here, force in the service of hate and the desire to destroy stands as an
experiential substitute for productive activity and a compensatory strategy for overcoming
the unbearable suffering of passivity and powerlessness (Fromm, 1964: 31).
Elsewhere, Fromm (1973) describes a similar human need for effectiveness: to do,
to effect, to accomplish something (p. 235). The joy in being a cause follows from the
satisfaction of the need to engage and effect the world in ontologically meaningful ways.
As effective beings, we transcend our passivity and experience a sense of potency the
ability to effect is an assertion that one is not impotent, but that one is an alive, functioning
human being (p. 253). Creative engagements are exercises in transforming making an
imprint upon the world. Like the need for transcendence, that for effectiveness can be
fulfilled through artistic or intellectual engagements, through work or play, or through
everyday expressive practices of relating to others.
Where we cannot transcend and effect the world through such engagements, however,
we lack potency and we suffer. Unable to tolerate this powerlessness and passivity, we
are driven to restore [the] capacity to act (Fromm, 1964: 31). One means of doing so is
by having power over others, by experiencing their fear, by the murderer watching the
anguish in the face of his victim, by conquering a country, by torturing people, by sheer
destruction of what has been constructed (Fromm, 1973: 236). Here, Fromm (1964)
discusses the phenomenon of sadistic violence. Closely related to compensatory violence
in that it reflects a powerlessness and inability to transcend, effect, and meaningfully
engage the world, sadistic violence is an effort to restore potency through the exercise of
power over others. Sadistic acts of destruction go back to one essential impulse, namely,
to have complete mastery over another person To humiliate him, to enslave him, are
means toward this end, and the most radical aim is to make him suffer, since there is no
greater power over another person than that of forcing him to undergo suffering without
his being able to defend himself (p. 32). One may be reminded of crimes of sexual
assault particularly those that are sadistic or that otherwise express a need to control
or master the victim (e.g. Groth, 1979). In these cases, an underlying sense of personal
inadequacy or a mere desire to cause suffering to others stems from an experienced lack
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of effectiveness an impotence or inability to meaningfully relate to the world through

productive, creative engagements.
On a final note, destructive criminality, like its playful counterpart, should be understood
as issuing from the interplay between existential needs linked with human ontology and
social, cultural, and biographical locations. Interestingly, Fromm (1977/1995) anticipates
the lamentations of cultural criminologists (e.g. Ferrell, 2004) in identifying conditions of
boredom as creating a social and cultural climate in which destructiveness becomes
more likely. Boredom, he suggests, comes from the fact that man has become purely
an instrument that he feels like a cog in a machine that someone could replace with
another at any time (p. 79). As completely alienated human being[s] alienated from
ourselves and our distinctively human capacities, from one another, and from our everyday
engagements with the world the power of [our] own being rests unconfirmed,
unexpressed. We try to compensate for boredom through consumption spending our
time spending our monies (see also, Presdee, 2000, 2004). Yet this strategy leaves us
still without meaningful engagement. As boredom increases, so too do compensatory
destructive tendencies. The bored person, Fromm (1977/1995) continues, has yet
another way to experience intensity: destruction. I take revenge on [life], he suggests,
because I have not succeeded in giving meaning to life (p. 81).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

R. D. Laing (1967) once wrote that our behavior is a function of our experience If our
experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive (p. 27, emphasis in original). Indeed,
the link between human behavior and human experience is crucial for understanding both
destructive and non-destructive forms of crime and criminality. While few criminologists
have attended to human experience in this context, even fewer have seen fit to explore the
further link between human experience and human ontology. Those characteristics and
capacities that are distinctively human (e.g. reason, self-consciousness, creativity), I have
suggested, inform both human behavior and human experience the three constituting
an intricate existential interplay. Indeed, the exploratory and explanatory efforts involved
in the study of human behavior revolve around recognizing and making sense of the
oftentimes simultaneous influence of various levels of reality (e.g. intra-individual, microand macro-sociological) on human acting and interacting. In the more particular context
of crime and deviance, we would do well to recognize the diversity of ways in which
human ontology and its constitutive distinctively human characteristics are inseparably
linked with both normative and non-normative varieties of behavior.
On one hand, my intent has been to briefly and provisionally sketch how the inclusion
of ontologically grounded human experience and behavior might promote further
critical discourse within criminology. More directly, my concern has been with illustrating
the fundamental role of creative capacities in human existence, from which emerge a
distinctively human need for creative engagement with the world. Crucial to human life
inclusive of social and cultural realities within which life and the experience of life occur is
the evolution of creative potential and corresponding opportunities for productive engagements that affirm those potentialities (e.g. Fromm, 1955). In the light of intrinsic needs to
creatively and expressively engage the world, I have argued, we might understand many
forms and instances of destructive and non-destructive criminality. Where essence meets
existence, and opportunities for productive and meaningful engagements are limited by
historical, cultural, organizational, or biographical realities, the affirmation and realization
of creative potentialities will normally and can be expected to assume non-normative
and sometimes unproductive forms. Where conditions of existence can facilitate socially
productive engagements, they can equally serve to limit these possibilities for significant
numbers of people. In consequence, human beings will invariably seek out or construct
alternative spaces and/or employ alternative means to expression and fulfillment. Thus
in contradistinction to variations of psychoanalytic and control theory that borrow from
Hobbes the assumption that human beings distinctively human capacities and needs
must be controlled for the benefit of harmonious social living, I have proposed that we
understand at least some non-normative behavior not as a reflection of the absence of
control, but of the absence of meaningful opportunities for expression of these capacities
and fulfillment of these needs through active engagements with the world. Following
Fromm, I have asked the question, What amounts when we are not able to satisfactorily
affirm that which is most essential to our nature through conventional engagements with
the world? Though by no means exhaustive, I have suggested several possible responses
to these circumstances. What distinguishes the variety of responses both playful and
destructive from one another is not their ontological origin, but the purpose with and
for which they are undertaken as those purposes relate to their ontological origin. Playful
criminality is expressive and is undertaken for purposes of expression as a means, however
unconventional, of creatively and meaningfully engaging the world. Destruction, though
expressive in a different sense, stems from the existential and psychological frustration and
suffering that accompany the inability to have meaningful even substitutive creative
engagement with the world. If we cannot engage life in creative ways, Fromm suggested,
we will inevitably resort to compensatory behaviors that at times entail engaging life in
destructive ways.
Not only can consideration of the role of distinctively human creative engagements
thus provide inroads to understanding many criminal events, but the potential spaces of
those events can in turn stimulate provocative social and cultural critique. The recent explosion of cultural criminology, for instance, has stimulated a growing recognition of and
discourse surrounding the ways in which conditions of culture and society can promote
and facilitate productive creative engagements or, as is more typical of contemporary postindustrial society, serve to quash these potentialities. Where our relationships to ourselves,
others, and our activities are characteristically alienated; where conformity and obedience are measuring sticks of success; where sameness becomes a virtue, public schools
emerge as rehearsal halls for the sublimation of individuality to disciplined efficiency,
and the rhythmic vacancy of everyday life has ushered in the erasure of human possibility, the preclusion of self-made variations in pace, meaning, and intentionality (Ferrell,
2004: 2901), constructions of non-normative experiential spaces and illicit engagements
that emerge within them are perhaps less pathological than antidotal.
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CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Criminology,

Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of West Georgia, USA.
Email: cwilliam@westga.edu

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WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

Potential spaces of crime: The playful, the

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

HUMAN ONTOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF CRIME

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

essential or distinctive properties, qualities, or characteristics is to suggest that there are

THE DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

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CRIME, CRIMINALITY, AND THE DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN

The potential space of playful criminality

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

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in periods of momentary abandon or Dionysiac letting go in our mechanical civilization

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

Existing space and the dialectic of creative engagement

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

of effectiveness an impotence or inability to meaningfully relate to the world through

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

WILLIAMS POTENTIAL SPACES OF CRIME

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

Taylor, R. (1992) Metaphysics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Criminology,

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