Policing as poetry: Phenomenological and aesthetic reflections upon the bureaucratic approach to human predicaments

Police-citizen encounters in late modern society occur as the enactment of a bureaucratic approach to human predicaments. Police praxis depends upon the ability to translate these complex situations into bureaucratically resolvable "problems." This process of translation is part of the overall interpretation of experience, whereby meanings are created and ascribed to a given moment.; The creation of meaning inherent to any kind of praxis is understandable as an elemental form of poetry. This poetic aspect of praxis represents the existential intersection of experience with the specific ontological first principles that provide the basis for its interpretation. In the case of bureaucratic praxis, such as policing, these principles enable the problematization of human being, whereby human presence becomes meaningful through its reification as abstract subjectivity.; The underlying ontology of bureaucratic problematization exists in parallel form in the approach of mainstream social scientific praxis. Hence, the two forms of praxis are essentially interrelated. While the dissertation's immediate focus is upon the analysis of the ontological foundations of bureaucratic police praxis, it further represents a philosophical engagement with the disciplinary self-conception of criminology.; The dissertation pursues these intersecting goals using the approach of a phenomenological aesthetics of encounter. The guiding thesis of a phenomenological aesthetics of encounter holds that the ontological foundations of praxis may be disclosed using aesthetic forms to reveal aspects of human presence, which are otherwise overlooked in the self-interpretations of everyday action, and their second-order interpretations by mainstream social science. The dissertation presents narratives of police-citizen encounters, drawn from the author's professional experiences in policing, and interprets them through the juxtaposition of aesthetic representations of encounter, which are chosen from several genres, and used to illuminate aspects of human presence that are effaced when it is approached as an abstract, reified "problem."; These reflections upon the ontological foundations of praxis and their enactment in policing lead to an explanation of the inherently self-subverting nature of the bureaucratic approach to human predicaments, and of allied approaches in mainstream criminology. If it is truly to progress, praxis must develop critical knowledge of its underlying first principles.