The criminal in the prison-house of language: Conceptual writing to re-present Havelock Ellis’ use of “the criminal” in his book, The Criminal

Abstract

Criminology has historically promoted positivism, a disciplinary orientation producing reward structures for some researchers committed to deductive work rooted in developing concepts, hypothesizing relationships, and empirical testing. Its is useful, then, to review where such tendencies were initially conceived and promoted. Havelock Ellis’ 1890 book The Criminal, a then-seminal review of literature in criminal anthropology, concerns many topics involving criminals and criminality. In the following conceptual writing, I present here, verbatim, all instances where Ellis uses the exact phrase “the criminal” in his book, along with any words following the phrase in the sentence. The resulting text then deconstructs and re-imagines the true object of Ellis’ work: the creation of the supposed object of his study as self-evidently Real, existing outside of linguistic and discursive parameters. Ellis as detective (searching for the criminal everywhere but right under his writing nose) could never fully apprehend his ever-escaping subject. Yet, through discourse, Ellis and his fellow criminal anthropologists laid claim as those best qualified for establishing the criminal’s essential identity, an ideal type still pursued through government funded criminological research.