How do we gauge the importance of a long-winded study of deviance as ours was? Was/is it just an alibi for the story of modern institutions and social control? Is it a story of a perceived deviance opening and ushering new areas of freedom from domination? After four years of research and deliberation we expected to have arrived at the stronger statement on the phenomenon. What we presented here is a tentative argument; it is confident only in so far as we know what the answer cannot be; its tentative nature is key to our scholarship because the work of reconstituting the way we imagine sociology, the way we talk to each other across the 227 borders of the contemporary period, is harder than we first thought.