Addiction
The panic of the [addict] who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly finds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is. … He has bankrupted the epistemology of “self-control.”
—Gregory Bateson
*
By day, she advises others on how they might best insure against future losses, yet one gets the sense that she does not quite believe in what she is selling; it is as if her awareness that the levels of risk assigned to lives and investments by the insurance industry are always more arbitrary than stated leads her to take greater personal financial risks. Her gambling both employs and rejects the actuarial logic of insurance and the monetary value that undergirds it. “In my life before gambling,” she tells me, “money was almost like a God, I had to have it. But with the gambling, money had no value, no significance, it was just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all. … You lose value, until there’s no value at all. Except the zone—the zone is your God.”
*
O. B. laughs and holds up his hands—one of them large and tan with light brown hair and a gold ring, the other small, hairless, and pink, only partially developed. “I know all about scars,” he says, placing the small hand back into the big hand and settling both into his lap, “so I told her go ahead and take it off.”
As a young bowling champion in Southern California, O. B.’s disability had earned him the nickname “Onearm Bandit,” O. B. for short. The irony that his eventual slot machine addiction lent to this moniker was not lost on him. Beyond this irony, he has discerned a connection between his bowling and his machine play. “Back then when I had problems I’d go to the alley, concentrate on my game, socialize with friends. Today when I have problems, I come here—or to the gas station, or to the casino—to play video poker. I do it to forget, to get lost.” What he comes to forget is his profound loneliness, his tense relationship with his adult son, a drug addict, and the situation that awaits him at home, where he acts as sole caretaker for a bedridden friend who has succumbed to illness. “I could say that for me the machine is a lover, a friend, a date—but really it’s none of those things. It’s a vacuum cleaner that sucks the life out of me, and sucks me out of life.”
SUSPENDING MONEY VALUE
At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine money becomes a currency of disconnection from others and even oneself. Contrary to Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of gambling as a publicly staged conversion of money value into social status and worldly meaning, the solitary transaction of machine gambling converts money into a means for suspending collective forms of value.21 Although money’s conventional value is important initially as a means of entry into play, “once in a game, it becomes instantly devalued,” observes the gambling scholar Gerda Reith.22 “You put a twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’s no longer a twenty dollar bill, it has no value in that sense,” Julie tells me of bill acceptors in the mid-1990s. “It’s like a token, it excludes money value completely.” With credit play, says another, “money has no value, no significance, it’s just this thing—just get me in the zone, that’s all.” “In the zone state,” echoes Katrina, “there is no real money—there are only credits to be maintained.”
Attesting to the conversion of money value into zone value, Sharon admits that she would rather “play off ” a jackpot than cash it out, as this would mean halting her play to wait for the machine to drop her winnings, or, in the event that its hopper is low, for attendants to come pay her off. “It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.”23 As we have already seen, winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone. Julie explains: “If it’s a moderate day—win, lose, win, lose—you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone.” In gambling, Reith writes, money is “prized not as an end in itself but for its ability to allow continued consumption in repeated play.”24 If in the everyday economy time is spent to earn money, within the economy of the zone money is spent to buy time. “You’re not playing for money,” says Julie, “you’re playing for credit—credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”
Paradoxically, in order for money to lose its value as a means of acquisition, that value must be at stake in the gambling exchange. “The transaction must involve money,” Australian gambling researcher Charles Livingstone elaborates in a Marxian vein, “because money is the central signification of our age, the materialization of social relations and thus the bridge to everyone and everything that is to be had in modernity.”25 In other words, it is possible for a sense of monetary value to become suspended in machine gambling not because money is absent, but because the activity mobilizes it in such a way that it no longer works as it typically does. Money becomes the bridge away from everyone and everything, leading to a zone beyond value, with no social or economic significance. In the zone, instead of serving as a tool for self-determination, money becomes an instrument for “sustained indeterminacy,” as Livingstone puts it.
Peter Adams clarifies the nature of this indeterminacy by arguing that machine gamblers seek through play to transcend the limits of finitude: constraints of space and time, the gaze of intersubjectivity, and the bounds of personal mortality. The zone state, he argues, arises out of a delicate tension between finitude (embodied in the fact of a limited monetary budget) and the possibility of transcendence that comes with each spin or hand. The zone “is a fine balance,” Adams writes, “and [gambling machines] are the ideal instrument for achieving it.” Machines facilitate the “fine balance” of the zone by allowing gamblers to constantly recalibrate the rate and magnitude of their betting such that they may continue approaching the transcendence of personal, social, and financial limitations, without ever quite arriving at that transcendence.26 Julie breathlessly recounts the recalibrations that transpire over the course of a typical play session:
I got four aces four times, that’s 200 dollars a shot, 800 credits each time, that means I could have cashed out 800 dollars total. But each time I hit, I’d play it down to 200 credits from 800 credits and I’d say, “Well, I’ll just hit the aces again and then I’ll leave.” Then I’d get four of a kind and have like 437 credits and I’d say “I’ll just go to 400 and leave,” and then at 400 I’d just push the button again and drop below 400, and I’d say, “Well now I’m down past 400 I’ll just get back up to 400 and then I’ll cash out.” And then I’d find myself closer to 300 and I’d say, “Once I get down to 300 I’ll go.” And then when I go below that I’d say “Well, I might as well keep going, I’ve already blown what I was gonna blow—I might as well try to get the aces again,” and it would continue …
Whenever Julie arrives at the ending point she has set, she resets it, thus never reaching a point of stopping and cashing out. No matter how high her credits become, their value as tokens for “time-on-device” holds sway over their market value—even as this value initially (and ultimately) serves as the condition for her play. “In the long run,” Livingstone notes, the zone’s “stream of indeterminacy is determined, but the [machine] gambler is concentrated in the immediate, and in the immediate moment of pushing the button, indeterminacy, as it were, rules.”27It is when credits get too low that money’s determinacy moves to the fore and begins to matter once again. “I get really tense if I only have twenty credits left,” says Lola, “the tension, the anxiousness, starts building in me; all I really want at that point is enough credits to just keeping playing.” “When you start losing,” Julie tells us, “the pace picks up—you’re running out of player credit, you’re running out of money, you begin to chase …”28 As the worldly value-charge of money intrudes upon the zone, it introduces tension where tensionlessness is sought and relationality where dissociation is sought. “In the back of my head I know it’s going to end, I know the transition is going to come—no longer the world according to the zone, but the real world. The things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain.”
Even as the world crowds back in, the moment that definitively fractures the zone always feels sudden; before the instant of total credit expenditure, there is still a chance, however small, of continuing. In the moment of its total loss, money returns to the scene as a tangible limit and a medium of dependency. “Money disappears in the zone,” writes Livingstone, “yet in the moment when the money’s gone, so too is ‘the zone.’”29 The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.
This is not to say that money’s real-world value remains unaffected by zone value. “Gambling changed my relationship to money,” notes Randall. “I’d conserve gas so I’d have the money to gamble, and instead of going to the grocery store regularly, I’d wait to go to Walmart and do it all at one time—that way I wouldn’t have to waste the gas to go more than once. I economized.” In “machine life,” acts of everyday economizing—the responsible accounting behavior of the risk-managing self—are harnessed to the nonmaximizing, self-liquidating ends of the zone. “I pinch pennies at the store, skip a meal to save money, watch for sales or bargains, yet think nothing of dropping $100 into a slot machine and watching it go away in 10 minutes,” says Rocky. “Money became the means to gamble, that’s all it was to me,” Isabella remembers. “I’d pour out the milk so I had an excuse to go to the grocery store to gamble.” Caught between the zone and the ordinary world, gamblers “economize” in a register of value that has no clear reference point. Patsy tells me of the compulsive budgeting rituals she enacted in between her play sessions:
For me, getting the money together was part of the process. I’d go to the bank and get $1,000, $400, whatever amount. I had a weird thing where I could never just take out $20, or just spend $43—I had to spend in 100s. And other weird things too. … Like if I won, I could spend back to $500 but I would never keep $600; it would be okay to put back $800, but I had to keep another certain amount—there were lots of strange little rules that didn’t make any real sense, financially speaking.
After gambling, Patsy would sit and count her money, “over and over again, in my car, at stop lights in the dark, in my lap, hundreds of dollars—what was the use?” Money became fetishlike, unhinged from exchange value—a “weird thing,” as she calls it above, that served no clear purpose. “I spent a lot of time thinking about money, touching money, calling the bank to keep track of my money, to know the time frame of when checks cleared, counting it and counting it … but in fact, I wasn’t actually counting at all.” The year after Patsy stopped gambling she did her back taxes and was shocked to discover that over a six-month period of gambling, during which she had not been “counting,” her losses had exceeded $10,000.
“In a society such as ours,” asks the cultural historian Jackson Lears in his book on gambling in America, “where responsibility and choice are exalted, where capital accumulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow, what could be more subversive than the readiness to reduce money to mere counters in a game?”30 Because gamblers play with money rather than for it, he concludes that they pose a challenge to the maximizing ethos of American culture.31 Yet as their “machine lives” show us, despite their seeming renunciation of money they continue to act, however perversely, within the mainstream monetary value system. This becomes readily apparent when one considers gamblers’ extensive know-how and use of everyday finance and banking practices. In The Chase, Lesieur describes with remarkable ethnographic detail gamblers’ expert techniques for acquiring the means to gamble—some of them thoroughly or partially illegal, yet many involving complicated arrangements with mainstream financial entities.32 Then as today, gamblers operate inside the financial system, juggling mortgages, credit cards, bank loans, and alimony payments.
21. Anthropologists and game scholars have found that online, virtual worlds can be rich social arenas replete with transactional commerce, governance, romance, vocations, shared meanings and values (Dibbell 2006; Malaby 2006; Taylor 2006; Boell storff 2008; Turkle 2011). The zone of machine play is not a parallel world of exchange, but rather a world in which conventional value fades away.
22. Reith 1999, 146. As Baudrillard has written, “the secret of gambling is that money does not exist as value” (1990, 86).
23. Participants in a qualitative study on slot machine play in Australia argued that “winning straight away is no good.” One said, “Heck, I don’t want to win, I want to keep playing!” (Livingstone and Woolley 2008, 107). For behavioral research on the way in which big wins disrupts the flow of machine play, see Dickerson et al. 1992, 246.
24. Reith 2007, 42. Kocurek (2012) argues that the phenomenon of coin-operated video arcade gaming of the 1970s and 80s reflected the rise of credit culture and the new spending practices it demanded.
25. Livingstone 2005, 533.
26. Adams n.d., 35.
27. Livingstone 2005, 530; see also Adams, n.d.
28. The “chase” is gamblers’ shorthand for “chasing losses,” an expression that describes the race to regain what has been lost through further wagering (the opposite of “cutting losses”). For an extended discussion of the gambler’s “chase” see Lesieur’s book of that title, in which he wrote: “It is the chase that provides the initial push for the spiral the gambler becomes committed to and that gives the spiral velocity” (1977, 2). Lesieur’s description of gamblers’ narrowing “spiral of options” evokes Devereux’s earlier phrase, “circle of despair.” Devereux wrote of the gambler: “He sees himself getting in deeper and deeper; yet if he quits now, all this is irretrievably lost. The only way to get it back is to keep on playing” (Devereux 1949, 729).
29. Livingstone 2005, 533.
30. Lears 2003, 8; see also Lears 2008.
31. “This peculiar form of consumption appears as the consumption of nothing at all,” writes Reith of gambling (2007, 51).
32. Contemporary machine gamblers are less involved in illegal money-acquisition schemes than the card and sports gamblers that Lesieur (1977) described, most likely because they are not part of a gambling social network or culture of book making. The day-to-day life of machine addicts is more isolated, and their methods for acquiring money are more integrated with legitimate systems of consumer banking and credit.
(...)
SUSPENDING CLOCK TIME
The element of time is another resource of calculative selfhood that gambling addicts manage to revalue through their machine play—again, by distilling its real-world value to the point where it assumes another value altogether. “Time is liquidated to become an essential currency of the problem gambler,” writes Livingstone. “It may well be the most important and significant currency. But time as such is elided during the term of the session. It ceases to exist in its socially recognizable form.”34 While gambling addicts may remain for seventeen hours or even whole weekends at machines, the “clock time” (as they call it) by which those long stretches are measured “stops mattering,” “sits still,” is “gone” or “lost.” “I would get off work in the afternoon, and I would plan to play just one roll [of quarters]—but I would go right into a complete daze and look down at my watch and see I had to be at work again in two hours,” Randall tells me. “I would have gambled almost in a blackout for hours.”
The time of the machine zone departs from the order of chronos—“the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject,” as Deleuze and Guattari describe it—to follow instead the “the indefinite time of the event,” a kind of time measured by “relative speeds and slownesses,” proceeding “independently of the chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in other modes.”35 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi similarly observes that time in flow activities seems to “adapt itself” to one’s experience rather than the other way around, such that “the objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity.” Flow activities mark their own pace, achieving “freedom from the tyranny of time.”36 Commenting on the signature absence of clocks from casinos, Reith writes that “clocks are markers of a shared, objective temporal consensus, imposing order on the flux of human relations and their surroundings.” “In the timeless void of the casino,” she goes on, “the length (or rate of play) of a game becomes gamblers’ measure of time, constituting their own internal ‘clock.’”37 Like money, time in the zone becomes a kind of credit whose value shifts in line with the rhythms of machine play; gamblers speak of spending time, salvaging it, squandering it. Randall, noting a phenomenological kinship between his video poker play and his race car driving, comments that both activities make him feel he is “bending” time: “I go into a different time frame, like in slow motion … it’s a whole other time zone.”
Just as gamblers must maintain sufficient monetary credit to keep the “sustained indeterminacy” of the zone going, they must maintain sufficient temporal credit; too little time, and the real world will impinge upon the zone—work shifts to begin, doctors appointments to be kept, children to be picked up from school. When time begins to “run out,” players thus seek to extract more and more plays from it, as Julie describes in the passage below. In the same manner that she extends zone value by resetting her credit target every time it is reached, so she extends zone time by constantly resetting the endpoint of her play:
When the time comes to leave and the things I escaped from start crowding back into my brain, I find myself rationalizing, Well, I don’t really have to go today … and I ask an attendant to hold my machine while I run to the payphone to call and buy myself more time, and then back to continue, and now there’s three more hours. And when those three hours are up, I think, I’ll have to save money for the phone calls I’ll have to make to cancel all the appointments I am going to miss. … I’m thinking of how to arrange things so that I can stay there, how to economize.
In the intervals of tension that threaten the continuation of her play, Julie calculates in two registers of time at once—clock time and zone time. How can she parlay the former into the latter? Or, as she asks above, how to economize? At the edges of the zone, Julie must remain mindful of the coins she needs to “save” to cover the cost of phone calls that might free up clock time and thus buy her more zone time. (Again, we see that the zone never entirely loses its economic market metric, for real-world money is what buys the clock time that buys zone time.)
When she can buy herself no more time and real-world demands press upon her, Julie resorts to speed, as she does when her play credits are running dangerously low. “When I absolutely have to be somewhere, then I have to play as much as I can possibly play before leaving. I start chasing, I play faster and faster—Oh goodness, I only have fifteen more minutes, ten more minutes …” Like Randall, who feels that he can “bend time,” Julie’s conviction is that she can intensify her experience of gambling time by ramping up the “event frequency” of her play; less of a lag or hiatus between play events, she seems to reason, means that more can occur.38 In the zone, she experiences time as event driven rather than clock driven.
To understand event-driven time in its broader social-historical context, it is instructive to consider Walter Benjamin’s mid-twentieth-century analysis of manufacturing technologies, in the course of which he drew a comparison between the temporalities of assembly-line labor and that of gambling. Both activities involved a continuous series of repeating events, each having “no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition.”39 “Each operation at the machine,” he wrote of factory work, “is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it. … Starting all over again is the regulative idea of the game, as it is of work for wages.” This “starting over again,” this constant beginning that is discontinuous with all previous beginnings, meant that each act of labor or play was experienced as a nonchronological event “out of time.” Even as industrial work depended on clocks so that time could be precisely measured and segmented, that very mode of measurement and segmentation erased time by “screening off” each of its moments from the others. Likewise, Benjamin argued, the isolation of each gambling “moment” from the rest—“the ivory ball which rolls into the next compartment, the next card which lies on top”—removed gamblers from the ordinary passage of time.
While Benjamin highlighted how gambling dechronologizes time by turning it into a disconnected series of events, Goffman’s later analysis focused on the temporality of gambling events themselves, in which action and outcome are compressed into a single moment: “The distinctive property of games and contests is that once the bet has been made, outcome is determined and payoff awarded all in the same breath of experience.”40 Present-day machine gambling further shrinks the time span of uncertainty, immediately resolving the event of the bet with the quick press of a button. Its “rapid succession of events of anticipation and consummation,” as the Australian gambling scholar Jennifer Borrell writes, has the effect of continually collapsing an uncertain future into the present.41 Machine gamblers experience a time that has been technologically infused with a surplus of moments, allowing them to feel they can alter its course depending on how fast or slow they play.
The machine zone’s elasticization of time, like its elasticization of money, distills key elements of contemporary social and economic life. Clichés like “time is money,” “time is running out,” and “life moves fast” capture a phenomenon of which machine gambling is only one example—namely, that capitalism operates at increasingly high speeds. E. P. Thompson wrote of the new temporal relations that accompanied the transition to industrial society, in which working habits were restructured such that time was not something that passed, but something that was spent, as a sort of currency. He was concerned with “time-sense in its technological conditioning.”42 Since he wrote, the rise of digital information, communication, and transportation technologies has sped up production, travel, consumption, and financial transactions to a degree that previous eras would have considered astonishing. Digital technology has “compressed” time by packing ever-more moments into service-based and financial-sector work, media and entertainment, and private life.43 Under such conditions, the actuarial self must also be a time-maximizing self; she must either maintain a fast tempo or else fail to be the enterprising being she is supposed to be, falling “behind the times,” so to speak. One could say that the industry of machine gambling profits by issuing a perverse version of this imperative to gamblers, some of whom respond at the cost of acquiring an addiction. Whatever else they may be, intensive machine gamblers are individuals who embody the imperative to act at a continuous high velocity. As such, they reveal both the pervasiveness and the existential perils of the wider social valorization of speed.
If real-world temporal tendencies express themselves in the zone and in gamblers’ addiction to it, it is also the case that the technologically accelerated temporality of the machine zone enters into and saturates gamblers’ experience of real-world time. “Time in general, not just when I’m playing,” Sharon notes, “becomes very distorted. I feel like I can manipulate it very easily, salvage much more than I can from a small unit of it: go grocery shopping on the way to the casino, and while I’m there make a doctor’s appointment on the cellular phone, and then on the way home get the shoelaces I need. … Everything I do is relative to gambling time.” As Lesieur wrote, “the process of getting even is all [a gambler] thinks about when he reflects on his total situation. Therefore he concentrates on each immediate situation and the next bet he will make. The time span is shortened to the short-term chase and the specific event he is in.”44“I’d be later and later and later to work,” Patsy recalls. “At break time, I’d ask my supervisor, Do you mind if I go to the bank?—and I’d already be out the door. My sense of time was totally out the door. I was just wound. I’d win a royal [flush] and I’d be ticked off because I’d have to wait for them to come pay me off. The other workers would look at the clock when I came back and I would think, What are you looking at the clock for? Mind your own business.” At every chance, Patsy attempts to escape clock time, such that she becomes almost like a clock herself: she is “wound”; she is “ticked off” as time ticks by during her wait for a jackpot payoff; when she returns to work, resentful co-workers look pointedly at the clock. “When I wasn’t playing,” she told us at the start of the chapter, “my whole being was directed to getting back into that zone. It was a machine life.”
Natasha Dow Schüll
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
No comments:
Post a Comment