Compulsive Gambling, Diagrammatic Reasoning, and Spacing Out
The past two decades have seen an extraordinary growth in regulated casino gambling and state-run lotteries in the United States. This expansion was spurred by the 1988 passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which mandated state governments to enter into good-faith negotiations with Indian tribes seeking to operate casinos and high-stakes bingo games. Concurrently, a series of decisions by various state governments (worried about tax revenue), municipalities (worried about jobs), and gaming corporations (worried about profits) has led to the development of Nevada-style casinos in non-Indian jurisdictions as diverse as Gary, Indiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi. Finally, during the 1990s, state lotteries began pooling monies into so-called interstate games (like Powerball), which are able to award jackpots of up to hundreds of millions of dollars and have substantially boosted the popularity of these games. In 2002, state lotteries generated $18.6 billion in revenue, while gaming corporations and Indian tribes earned $42.3 billion from casino gambling ( American Gaming Association n.d.).
One consequence of this rapid expansion of casino and lottery games has been the emergence of compulsive gambling, both in fact and as a focus of social science research, public health and policy debates, and media coverage. Recent studies estimate that at least 5.5 million Americans could be diagnosed as compulsive gamblers ( NORC 1999: viii). While compulsive gambling is less prevalent than either alcoholism or tobacco addiction, compulsive gamblers have the highest suicide rate of any addict population. The perils of gambling lie not in direct physical injury but in bankruptcy: one informant pointed out to me that “if you spend $1,000 a day on drugs, you’ll kill yourself, but you can drop $1,000 in a casino like that.” The compulsive gamblers I met through Gamblers Anonymous (GA), a twelve-step recovery program based on Alcoholics Anonymous, were generally intelligent, sensitive men and women who were capable of reasoning why they should abstain from gambling but entirely without insight into their condition. Psychologists and microeconomists working within the decision theory literature have done no better; systematic biases in the perception of risk and utility cannot be extrapolated to a “functional” model of compulsive gambling. Biopsychological research has established interesting correlations between gambling behavior and organic substrates (hormone and neurotransmitter levels) but has failed to address the more fundamental question that motivates this essay: Why is casino gambling—in particular—such a potentially addictive activity in the first place?
Although GA members were unable to provide transparent explanations for their gambling, they could track the basic contours of the paradox that motivated it. For many—but not all—GA members, gambling was oriented toward a problematic object I refer to in this essay as the jackpot. One informant described the sense of exhaustion he felt when he won the maximum prize (several thousand dollars) on a slot machine he was playing. He knew he would remain in the casino until he had gambled away his winnings—and he did so on the very same machine. This story presents the jackpot as neither an impossible nor a possible event: not impossible because it is figured as winnable; but not possible because no empirically giveable prize is adequate to it. What is at issue here is a kind of subreption by which two negatives are seen to cancel each other out, as if reframing in positive terms the lottery advertisement, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”1 This paradox is schematized by formal aspects of casino games, but it also depends on the fact that these games are played with and for money.
Indeed, the broadly compulsive nature of capitalist rationality has been an ongoing focus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory. Marx (1977) tied the sense of necessity underlying capitalist production to epistemic antinomies of political economy and its conceptualization of time, labor, and value. Max Weber’s famous genealogy (1994) traced the “iron cage” of capitalist rationality to a paradox in Calvinist beliefs about predestination. And Georg Simmel (1990) viewed the emergence of money as a progressive transcendentalization of economic relations that comes to define autonomous agents in terms of Kantian freedom and its attendant obligations. None of these accounts, however, speaks directly to the problem of compulsive gambling, although casino and lottery games (the kinds of gambling I am concerned with here) are oriented toward commodity-mediated forms of value. Witness Marxism’s failure to develop a critical analysis of capitalist consumption: it has either been treated as self-making microproduction (appropriate to a kind of analysis that often resembles corporate market research) or relegated beyond the domain of intelligibility (usually by way of the body). As we will see, this theoretical failure—itself antinomic in structure—marks a pragmatic nontransparency immanent in capitalist consumption in general and compulsive gambling in particular. One way to specify this nontransparency is to map a semiotic ethnography of gambling onto foreclosures in Peircean sign theory and pragmatist models of rationality, especially rational choice theory.
In fact, casino games and game playing are eminently tractable to the formal methodologies developed by linguistic anthropologists ( cf. Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003). The games I am concerned with here are not strategic games, like poker and blackjack, but games of pure chance, like bingo, slot machines, or the noncasino card game War, whose real-time play involves little or no decision making. If these games can be fairly described as mindless or distracting, it is not despite but because of their semiotic mediation. This mediation is textual and poetic in the precise sense these terms have for linguistic anthropologists, especially Michael Silverstein and his students. In contrast to verbal poetics, which draws on indexical tropes like rhyme, meter, and homonymy, the textual coherence of these games unfolds through indexical configurations of signs—such as playing cards, slot reels, or numbered markers—in space.
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Notes
Research for this essay was supported by a NRSA fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. I especially thank Beth Povinelli for her editorial and advisorial help. Kaylin Goldstein provided a careful, patient edit of the manuscript. I am also grateful to Andrew Cutrofello, Candace Vogler, Raymond Fogelson, and Michael Silverstein for their encouragement and guidance. This essay is dedicated to the memory of my friend Carlo Bartolomeo Martino. Illinois Lottery game based on bingo
- I thank Candace Vogler for bringing this ad to my attention.