#Layers of fear theory full#
I, 101) of society only unfold their full meaning against the background of the dominance of organicistic models of society in the early social sciences. In their different connotations these attributes refer to both a moral (darkness) as well as hygienic (dirt, stench) danger of poverty and thus to the above mentioned nexus of crime and disease the civic imagination of the nineteenth century drew its general fears from.Ħ. Such biological depictions of the dangerous classes as being a virus, infection, canker, disease or ‘social pestilence’ (Mayhew 2009, vol. London Labour and the London Poor, as Christopher Herbert (1991, 204) argues, is probably ‘the most significant ethnographic text of its age pioneering work of urban sociology’.Ĥ. Concerning the difference between the ‘savage’ and the ‘barbarian’ – a difference which however appears to be for the most part annihilated in the nineteenth century discourse on pauperism – see Foucault (1997, 174 passim).ĥ. In particular Alain Corbin (1982, 167–77) has worked out the metonymical linkage between attributions of darkness, dirt and stench in the nineteenth century descriptions of the poor. It is for this reason that Mayhew, while having been long time completely forgotten as a social scientist, since the 1970s is being rediscovered as having elaborated the first wide-ranging ethnography on urban poverty. A famous example of this epistemic modification is given by the young Friedrich Engels, who, in his preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England (1969) – a preface, which was originally written in English and intended for distribution within the industrial proletariat of Great Britain – uses the notion of ‘working classes’ while, in the book itself, solely applying its singular form.Ģ. Regarding the contiguity between the ‘dangerous individual’ and the ‘crowd’ see in particular Vogl (2006).ģ. The exceptionality of London Labour and the London Poor lies in Mayhews ethnographic collection of over 400 so called ‘life stories’ of the poor. Only throughout the social-revolutionary movement – especially through Marx's attempt in elaborating a decidedly theoretical notion of class – the reference to a singular working (and bourgeois) class with its implication of class being an analytical concept as well as a collective subject was gradually initiated. However, it should be noted that this undifferentiated usage of the notion of class(es) is quite characteristic for the early social sciences of thefirst half of the nineteenth century. Thus, by virtually taking the current usage of the notion of the dangerous classes seriously, I want to emphasize the possibility to epistemically sharpen post-structuralist analyses of contemporary social caesurae and ruptures precisely by reading them against the negative background of the nineteenth century fear of the dangerous classes.ġ. Frégier uses the notion of ‘class’ in plural as well as singular form, without any differences in meaning implied. In reference to Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology as well as Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude I want to call attention to what seems to be an affirmative reinterpretation of the notion of thedangerous classes in post-structuralist theories. The last chapter of the article outlines what seems to be a reactualization of the notion of the dangerous classes within current social theories on urban violence and exclusion. In the article particularly three aspects of this epistemological fear – the fear of heterogeneity, of a levelling of borders and of hybridization – are presented and contextualized within a wider epistemological horizon, namely the nineteenth century ideal of objectivity. The epistemological fear of the dangerous classes – this is the thesis – results from the confrontation of the researcher with an object of analysis that keeps withdrawing itself from any analytical fixation and adjustment as such. However, corresponding to this seemingly social threat, on a much deeper level an epistemological threat was caused by the dangerous classes as well. From the dangerous classes – all social scientists agreed – emanated a fundamental threat to society. The article focuses on the nineteenth century fear of the ‘dangerous classes’.
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