Becoming Criminal

[Bryan Reynolds] frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of 'transversal theory,' which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience... Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an 'official' language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520's, continued beyond the Puritan's rise to power in the early 1640's, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture.

Becoming Criminal is ambitious Althusserian analysis of the criminal subcultures of Renaissance England. For Reynolds—who was, as he tells us, initiated into a fascination with criminality when he was a high school student in Scarsdale—the rogue pamphlets, anti-theatrical tracts, and repressive legislation of the late sixteenth century are not the expression of paranoia in high places. Rather, they disclose the existence of a strange 'transversal power,' an alternative, oppositional culture whose values threatened the established order and whose visionary energies continue to haunt our own world.