Crime, law and symbolic order : the rhetoric of transparency

In this article, the author demonstrates how the discourse of the law-abiding community is made possible by a pattern of social meaning that, on the one hand, makes necessary the threat of mystery and "otherness" while aiming for the transparency of knowledge. Underpinning this conflicting characteristic of a control-oriented culture in the grasp of unsicherheit (lack of safety, security, certainty) is the collision of virtual and consensus realities. The elision of intimacy and strangeness compels a need to "know" the other, if only so as to make the exclusion of that other from community ever more total, and proof of one's own inclusion and "place" in a culture of displacement.