THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 101

THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING: SUBJECTS IN A STATE

Fiona Nicoll
It is difficult to understand why gambling has attracted so little attention from cultural
studies and feminist analysis which have made such important contributions to explanations
of contemporary society since the 1980s The shape of modern gambling not only reflects
the nature of social relations in any society, but also powerfully determines new social and
political outcomes. Without grappling with these conceptual issues, many gambling
studies remain entrapped, albeit unintentionally, within a narrow, liberal orientation which
limits their concerns to descriptive analysis of the functioning of gamblers and gambling
institutions. An understanding of contemporary gambling and its rapid global expansion
requires different conceptual tools and a more explicitly political project.
1

Culture is a stake which, like all social stakes, simultaneously presupposes and demands that
one take part in the game and be taken in by it; and interest in culture, without which there
is no race, no competition, is produced by the very race and competition which it produces.
The value of culture, the supreme fetish, is generated in the initial investment implied by
the mere fact of entering the game, joining in the collective belief in the value of the game
which makes the game and endlessly remakes the competition for the stakes.
2
This essay forms part of a larger research project titled Cultural Economies of Gambling which
examines the effects of public debate and research that focuses on the problematic individual
gambler and problematic communities of gamblers rather than problems created by the terms
on which businesses and governments with a shared commitment to implementing a neo-liberal
program of social reform invest in gambling. Recognition of the central role of the economy
in cultural theory is widespread.
3
Less accepted is the constitutive role of gambling in shaping
cultural meanings and practices regarded as broadly economic. This may be because gambling
is a uniquely ambivalent research object, destabilising oppositions between work and play;
business and pleasure; investment and consumption from which culture and economy derive
their meanings as related, yet distinct, spheres. My understanding of gamblings relationship to
the economy as a whole is captured in Derridas concept of the supplement; that is, something
that both adds to and completes the economy. As cultural meanings and uses of the economy
have shifted with neo-liberal configurations of governmentality, so too have meanings and
uses attached to gambling. Investigating the global rise of gambling industries (facilitated in
part by the development of new delivery platforms such as internet and mobile devices)
4
and
associated problems should therefore provide valuable insights into contemporary formations
of subjectivity, value and power. While most of my research is based on Australian material,
this project has a comparative dimension which focuses on the relationship between legalised
102 NEW FORMATIONS
gambling, Indigenous sovereignties and the racialised value of white possession in other settler-
colonial nations such as Canada and the US.
In this essay I demonstrate the extent to which gambling and gamblers are researched
and regulated in isolation from the environments, feelings, interactions, allegiances, sights
and smells that constitute gambling as a cultural domain. I examine some of the productive
effects of a discourse of problem gambling, including the establishment and funding of
services; the development of new legislation, the stigmatisation of individuals and groups and
the demonisation of particular gaming technologies in popular culture. And I argue that the
complicated relationships that individuals and groups have to gambling practices, regulations,
environments and popular representations produce their own effects, one of which is to unsettle
the boundary between the happiness of recreational gambling and the unhappiness of problem
gambling on which neo-liberal governmentality relies.
BETWEEN ATTRACTION AND REPULSION: FEELING MY WAY
In commencing this esay on subjects, practices and spaces of legal gambling and the discourses
surround them, I am mindful of Sara Ahmeds arguments for the importance of positively
engaging with the emotions that both stick to and move researchers and our objects. This
promises to takes us beyond an individualised understanding of emotion as subjective interiority
to an approach that might elaborate the sociality of emotion.
5
In what follows we will see that
most accounts of legalised gambling in Australia avoid addressing the social dimensions of
gamblings affects in favour of research that problematises individuals, groups and technologies.
As a consequence subjects and practices of gambling appear in isolation from the popular
representations, advertisements, educational brochures, novels, films and television shows that
together constitute gambling as a meaningful cultural and economic activity.
6
Some examples
illustrate the powerful affect that both attaches to and moves subjects, practices and technologies
of gambling.
There is a television advertisement for Brisbanes casino which is housed in the original
nineteenth-century Queensland State Treasury building and has retained this history in its
name Treasury Casino. Renovations have seen only minimal changes to the buildings original
exterior and interior lay-out reinforce links to its original use, with private gaming rooms for
high rollers located in former offices off the corridors. The advertisement opens with a shot of
a young white and apparently heterosexual couple reclining on what appears to be a hotel bed
after a vigorous session of sex. He turns to her and says words to the effect of That was amazing.
How was it for you. To which his partner turns and replies, gazing dreamily into space It was
good but it wasnt exactly Treasury. Her voicing of the name Treasury triggers a montage
of images of casino activities and the young woman then breathlessly narrates a series of words
and phrases including on-line jackpots and wheel of fortune ... She collapses back on the
bed, apparently exhausted with sheer ecstasy and her partner with a glint in the eye asks: Do
you want to go again?
I also have a T-shirt purchased in Brisbane which displays a cartoon symbol in profile of two
men each with the handle of a vibrating one-armed bandit or poker machine in his arse while
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 103
coins pour out of his cock. Above the image are the words WARNING POKIES. Two points
that struck me about the image are: its very literal re-contextualisation of the money shot with
which traditional pornographic representations climax, and that its representation of poker
machines erotically vibrating players is very close to the truth. Im not sure when this image
was produced but in the past five years pokies giving subtle vibrations timed to go off with
the animated and musical features have been installed in most Australian gambling venues.
There are some obvious comparisons and contrasts between these two texts. In contrast
to the Treasury advertisements portrayal of a happy white heterosexual couple, the T-shirt
iconography is racially un-marked and at once homoerotic and masturbatory. And whereas the
Treasurys vision of legalised gambling is one of glamour and winning, the T-shirt paints it in
terms evoking pathology, addiction and loss. While the ad is concerned with feeling good, the T-
shirt evokes bad feelings. Yet the thread of eroticism binds them together in legalised gamblings
broader discursive field. Whereas gambling at Treasury feels even better than sex, the T-shirt
is suggestive of the masochistic use of poker machines to make us hurt so good. Between these
two cultural texts about legalised gambling and its affects lies an ocean of ambivalence.
7
The examples of the advertisement and T-shirt above highlight the affectively charged
ambivalence about legalised gambling
8
implicit in the first part of my title The Problematic Joys
of Gambling. The second part of the title Subjects in a State addresses affective dimensions
of citizenship within neo-liberal governmentality that are especially evident in discourses
surrounding legalised gambling in Australia. The remainder of this essay will focus on the
relationship between the two figures which dominate these discourses: the problem gambler and
the poker machine. There are several related reasons why these figures should be so dominant
in research projects and within broader media and political constructions of gambling in
Australia. Firstly, the number of poker machines (or pokies) has grown dramatically in most
state jurisdictions over the past two decades
9
so that Australia now has over 21 per cent of the
worlds poker machines (or 133 machines per 10,000 adults) and pokies comprise well over
half of all types of gambling expenditure in most states;
10
they are also usually located within
licensed venues in the lowest socio-economic regions. Secondly, the machines installed in these
venues are the most voracious in the world, able to dispense with $5.00 in the single press of
a button and deliver losses of up to $720 per hour (compared to $130 in the UK and $52 in
Japan). And, thirdly, Australians not only lose close to the equivalent of the annual defence
budget; these losses are born by the c. 20 per cent of players who provide c. 80 per cent of pokie
revenue.
11
The relatively recent march of poker machines into licensed venues in most Australian
states
12
is the product of and reproduces conflicts between the states which are responsible for
regulating gambling and which directly benefit from the high taxes they deliver from punters
to government treasuries. This makes problem gambling a key issue in debates between states
which have different regulatory regimes. For example, Western Australia (the only state to have
contained pokies within the states casino) regularly produces figures demonstrating lower levels
of gambling expenditure per capita and less demand for services (such as emergency housing
and food relief) to address the negative impacts of problem gambling. And South Australia
and Victoria have claimed to be minimising problem gambling through a range of measures
104 NEW FORMATIONS
including smoking bans, the inclusion of a clock on the interface of poker machines and
limiting the denomination of currency that can be put into them. Newspaper headlines similar
to the following one in Brisbanes Courier Mail, as well as exposs on television current affairs
programs, are commonplace in all Australian states: At-risk punter levels surge. ALMOST a
quarter of a million Queenslanders gamble so often they are at risk of becoming dependent
on it.
13
TALKING ABOUT GAMBLING
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we
must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and
those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or
which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and
they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
14
In spite of the current pervasiveness of a discourse of problem gambling, the problem gambler
is a relatively recent arrival on the scene of disciplines and institutions of medicine and
psychology. As Gerda Reith notes, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gambling
was understood in religious or moral terms as a form of vice or sin. It wasnt until 1980 that
gambling was included in the American Psychological Associations Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual as an impulse control disorder. Recently, chemical and genetic causes have also been
sought by researchers to explain why some people gamble destructively.
15
At the turn of the
twenty first century in Australia, earlier understandings of excessive gambling as vice or sin
have been almost entirely displaced by the figure of the problem gambler as an object of social
and medical pathology. Consider for example an article published in Australian Readers Digest
titled The Psychology of Pokies. The subtitle asks Why are poker machines so addictive? and
reassures us that Science is providing some answers.
16
The article itself is structured around the
experiences of a problem gambler Joy Mills. Before launching into the latest psychological and
biochemical explanations of her addiction to pokies, we are informed - in the 12-step tradition
of anonymity that this is not her real name. A list of contact numbers for help is provided
as part of the article and readers are invited at the end of the piece to take a self-test on the
Readers Digest website to determine What sort of pokies player are you?
There are several important implications of the focus on the relationship between the problem
gambler and the poker machine for research agendas and public debate in Australia. The first
is that cultural studies of legalised gambling which could approach these figures as powerful
fictions are rarely invited or funded. Instead research is encouraged to show that specific social
or cultural groups (e.g. women, Asian or Indigenous people) have particular vulnerabilities
to developing problem gambling while research that examines the spaces and practices of
gambling (particularly in casinos, hotels and clubs) in which individuals from a diverse range of
backgrounds co-exist and interact is neglected. This is because research conducted on the former
lines feeds directly into government decisions about how to maintain a source of revenue on
which they are dependent while being seen to minimise negative impacts of problem gambling.
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 105
This has two effects on the research culture of gambling studies in Australia. The first is that the
collaboration between governments and business within which legalised gambling is promoted
and regulated often remains beyond analysis or critique and the second is that researchers own
affective investment in spaces and practices of gambling are consistently ignored or disavowed
through a focus on the problem gambler as the other requiring regulation and protection.
This pervasive dissociation between public discussion of gambling and everyday cultural
practices of gambling has been noted by several authors. For example, in a paper delivered
at the 2004 National Association of Gambling Studies conference Alan Windross, a former
racing industry executive, declared himself to be simultaneously an unashamed gambler and
researcher on recreational gamblers in his paper titled Recreational Gamblers: Forsaken by
Researchers; Forgotten by Media. And in his 1998 book, Gambling Government, psychologist
and academic researcher, Michael Walker, writes I am continually surprised by the extent to
which those in government who regulate the gambling industries, those who research gambling
issues and those who seek to help gamblers in trouble are not themselves regular gamblers.
17

Notwithstanding the reluctance of researchers and other public authorities to closely explore
our own relationship to the object of discourse, however, as Costello and Millar point out, it is
nevertheless almost mandatory to preface ones discourse on problem gambling with words to
the effect Like any other Australian, I enjoy a punt on the Melbourne Cup
18
Or as a Liberal
member of parliament in Victoria prefaced his call for abolition of poker machines following
revelations about a woman who had stolen 1.6 million dollars to put down the throat of a poker
machine, I am quite happy to tip $10 or $20 into a gaming machine [but they are] causing
enormous damage to individuals, families and the very fabric of our society.
19
I think part of this reluctance on the part of researchers to position ourselves as enthusiastic
consumers of legal gambling products is due to the strong affect of shame that contagiously
attaches to gambling in the context of forums where problem gambling is at issue. However, considering
that poker machine gambling is widely recognised (including by the industry itself) to be a
particularly blue collar form of entertainment,
20
I suspect that it also lies in the cultural politics
of taste. In his introduction to Distinction, which showed how judgments of taste about high and
popular cultural products function to classify classifying subjects, Pierre Bourdieu identifies
taste as one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class
and the field of cultural production. And he notes an irreducible essentialism within the field
of aesthetic production and consumption. Regardless of your levels of educational achievement,
when it comes to art, you either have the capacity to exercise judgments of taste or you dont.
Rather than being on the school curriculum, judgments of tastes are, as Robert Kiyosaki, author
of the best-selling Rich Dad: Poor Dad series of financial self-help books argues with reference to
good business judgment, something those endowed with cultural capital teach their children
informally over the dinner table.
There is a sense in which the problem gambler is constructed as the antithesis of the
aesthete or the intellectual - defined by Bourdieu as individuals whose consumption of culture
is characterised by the (apparently) disinterested playing of the game of classification, which lies
at the heart of the faculty of judgment. Intellectuals and artists are so situated in social space
that they have a particular interest in disinterestedness and in all the values that are universal
106 NEW FORMATIONS
and universally recognized as highest.
21
Popular and academic representations of the problem
gambler could not be further from this description. We imagine that the gambler classified as a
problem revels in the gaming rooms kitsch dcor and is oblivious to the judgments of others
as he feverishly invests his hard earned wages into a poker machine, luring him like a siren to
the rocks of destitution with its flashing icons and catchy musical phrases. The problem with
this picture of the problem gambler is that it fails to engage with players own understanding or
practical knowledge of what they (and/or we?) are doing when we wager on pokies and other
forms of legal and illegal gambling. This raises the question of what we as academic researchers
have invested in not problematising prevailing representations of the problem gambler?
Apart from our cultural preferences in leisure and entertainment, other compelling reasons
exist for Australian researchers to maintain silence about our affective and critical orientations
towards legal gambling products. With the exception of some of the minor parties and an
Independent South Australian MP elected on an explicit No Pokies platform, support for legal
gambling crosses major party lines. Thus, debates about gambling in public forums increasingly
take two things for granted: on balance, legal gambling is a good thing for governments and
consumers and the impacts of problem gambling need to be minimised if not eliminated
altogether. What is rarely if ever discussed is the way the discourse of problem gambling itself
is producing an underclass of blameworthy victims that can be held up as negative exemplars
of neo-liberalisms project of producing financially literate and self-serving subjects who know
better than to expect the state to protect any of their rights save that of freedom to invest in
private enterprises as owners and consumers.
In this context, perhaps, building on Michel Foucaults concept of biopower and Achilles
Mbembes concept of racialised necropower on which the former depends, legal gambling
can be understood as a regime of finopower.
22
In the name of improving services, eradicating
inefficiencies and individual choice, the social welfare networks that supported the bio-
political state have been gradually dismantled in affluent nations causing governments to
develop policies that discriminate between those in whom financial independence can be
successfully cultivated - on one hand - and those who are beyond hope - on the other. So
the crisis of the public health system and dependence on gambling revenue converge to
produce scenarios whereby the regular donations from those labelled as problem gamblers
provide revenue for under-funded hospitals which these people may not be able to easily
access due to having made the bad choice of investing their leisure time and savings in
pokie play.
STATES OF HAPPINESS AND ADDICTION
Discourses of addiction not only set out criteria by which some people are defined as outside
the realm of proper and viable subjectivity, they also produce the right sort of body, the
right way to live, the right way to be and the right sort of relationship to have to oneself
and to others the growth of addiction demands scrutiny because it is a notion through
which specifically liberal forms of political power and government operate efficiently and
seductively.
23
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 107
Moderate gambling has become increasingly dependent on a provident and self-regulative
stance taken by gamesters, and that it is precisely the concept of addiction that is socially effective
in demarcating this Even if gamblers could be objectively classified as addicts they, or others,
do not have to acknowledge that. Addicts first have to come out To operators, legislators
and police, addicts remain ordinary consumers, as long as they adhere to their standards of
gaming behaviour Through these and other classificatory practices (e.g. criminal pleading
for leniency due to gambling addiction) addiction is put to work as a disciplinary concept,
exorcising gaming excess and at the same instant enabling fancy, moderate gaming.
24
Returning to Ahmeds insistence on the importance of recognising the sociality of emotions,
I want to explore some affective ramifications of the rigid and highly productive distinction
between recreational and problem gamblers or gamblers respectively labelled as happy
and unhappy. In contrast to the meticulous attention to every dimension of the misery of the
problem gambler, the particular quality of the happiness that gambling is assumed to bring
to recreational gamblers is rarely theorised. The lack of attention to, or coy neglect of, the
happiness that gambling brings to so many Australians is partly explained by some reflections
by the authors of Accounting for Taste: Australian Everyday Cultures, a major research study on
Australian taste inspired by Bourdieus Distinction:
Inevitably there are significant aspects of Australian cultural life that we have not been able to
include in our statistical portrait Our discussion of class, for example, would have benefited
if we had asked about the ownership of shares and other assets. That said, it is notoriously
difficult to obtain statistically reliable information about the cultural practices of the richest
and most economically powerful classes and we remain unsure whether asking questions of
this kind would have thrown much light on the cultural preferences of the high bourgeoisie
who, in our study, as in most forms of social inquiry, remain more or less invisible.
25
To the extent that the happiness experienced by Australian gamblers, from casino high rollers
through to stock-market speculators, remains outside the investigative scope of cultural research,
our understanding of the affective spectrum entailed in participation in legal gambling will
remain heavily weighted towards the various forms of unhappiness attached to the losses of those
individuals and groups deemed vulnerable to addiction. Legendary gamblers like the recently
departed media and gaming mogul, Kerry Packer, will be left to stand metonymically for the
silent majority of recreational gamblers.
A lack of research on recreational gamblers has two important and related effects. It precludes
interpersonal comparisons from figuring in the calculations of happiness produced by economic
models of legal gamblings benefits. As James Doughney argues in his book, The Poker Machine
State, which critically evaluates economic arguments offered to support the growth of legal
gambling in Australia:
The idea of consumer sovereignty which underpins the consumer surplus is that the rational
consumer knows his or her mind best, expresses his or her choices in spending decisions in
108 NEW FORMATIONS
free markets and thereby sends out the sovereignty signals that determine what is produced
and in which quantities. We know what it is we choose and we do so mindful of the benefits
(or utilities) we rationally expect [but] spending patterns are influenced by marketing so
much that it is impossible to identify whose benefit is being measured (pp145-7 Neo-
classical demand theory requires that all other things remain constant except relative
prices. Tastes and income are assumed to be unchanging (p129) [But] the consumers
surplus cannot measure benefit due to changes within the [individual gambling] session
It is wrong to treat each dollar and each person as equivalent in kind loss may result in
harm and the consumers deficit or loss of enjoyment from the thrill of the punt depending
solely on the quantity lost (pp157-8). Measuring benefit when people lose is problematic
The only situation the consumer surplus would seem to explain is that of the dedicated
frivolous gambler who knows he or she will probably lose but doesnt care as long as they
get enjoyment (p160).
26
Social psychology research also challenges the abstract individual consumer on which basic
assertions about the benefits delivered by gambling to recreational users are made. Recent
research by Mathew Rockloff and Victoria Dyer studied how individual gamblers are affected
by the imagined or implied presence of others. They found subjects playing simulated poker
machines in laboratories behaved differently depending on whether they believed they were
gambling alone or whether others were gambling in adjacent rooms and that the belief that
others were winning provided an incentive to continue spending money on the machines.
They concluded that gambling is a social experience even in the absence of interaction among
players.
27
That this is the case is particularly clear with reference to online gambling where
many sites not only provide interactive screens in which players can talk with one another during
play but also provide graphic depictions of players in a three dimensional representation of a
casino gaming table.
Rockloff and Dyers research underscores the inherently social character of gambling as
a cultural, economic and leisure activity but it doesnt tell us much about the intersubjective
encounters between gamblers in actual venues where others are not imagined or believed to also
be playing but are sitting beside us as embodied subjects marked by histories and contemporary
practices that distribute meanings and identities according to axes including race, gender, sexual
orientation and ability. The embodied dimension of gambling as an intersubjective practice is
clearly registered in online gambling sites such as Paradise Poker which present us with differently
gendered and raced cartoon players to inhabit in the course of our session. This makes physical
and virtual spaces of gambling a key site of togetherness in difference within which subjects
negotiate relationships characterised by what Ien Ang describes as complicated entanglement,
in which difference and sameness are inextricably intertwined.
28
Viewed as a social rather than
an essentially individual activity, we might be able to distinguish between different styles and
ethics of gambling, including but not restricted to competitive, co-operative and collaborative
gambling.
So how are we to understand the considerable investments in not producing knowledge about
and representations of and regulations of legal gambling as a social activity where subjects who
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 109
are differently positioned within histories and hierarchies co-exist and interact? To begin to
answer this question it is useful to consider Ahmeds account of the strange encounters between
embodied others in postcoloniality. She examines the way that stranger fetishism - or the
idea that the stranger is an ontological presence prior to our embodied encounters with him
or her obscures the social relations which allow us to face that which we have already designated
as the beyond.
29
In this context, I am interested in the way that, notwithstanding its relatively
recent arrival onto the scene of knowledge production and governance, the problem gambler
is nevertheless a strangely familiar figure. Simultaneously a threat to the ineffable happiness
of recreational gamblers and incapable of responsible self-governance, the problem gambler
is above all an individual who must be protected from him or herself. Like Ahmeds fetishised
stranger, he/she is a vehicle of an essentialised ontological difference in the first instance, and
recognisable as a member of a particular social group only in the second instance.
For neo-liberalisms vision of an imagined community of equal and freely choosing individuals
to obtain, and for gamblings business-as-usual to continue uninterrupted by accusations of
racial stereotyping or profiling, it is imperative that problem gamblers are self-identified rather
than singled out for special treatment such as being banned from premises by casino or hotel
employees. There is a whole industry in place, comprising psychologists, priests, financial
counsellors, doctors and academic researchers dedicated to subjectifying those who have
borne large losses as a consequence of their purchase of legal gambling products as problem
gamblers. Having been identified as such and accepted the diagnosis the problem gambler
is free to become part of a self-exclusion program
30
jointly developed and administered by
state governments and the gambling industry to minimise harm to individuals and to protect
recreational gamblers from the spectacle of the unhappiness of those whose losses have cost
them dearly. But while some individuals may well benefit from participating in self-exclusion
programs, the hierarchical organisation of care entailed by entrusting ones welfare to the
experts has the effect of producing the very individualised subjects that gamblings character as
a space of inter-subjective encounters is potentially able to disrupt.
If, as Ahmed argues, it is through strange encounters with embodied others in everyday
life that the possibility of new, collective solidarities emerge, beyond the opposition between
common and uncommon, between friends and strangers, or beyond sameness and difference,
31

the discursive production of the problem gambler figured as the stranger that must be expelled
to sustain the joy of recreational gambling is a worrying development. To the extent that this
encourages gamblers to read one another as always already recreational or problem gamblers,
the collective and individual histories written on our bodies and carried through our speech
become matters of indifference and strange encounters within which context one might be able
to inquire in a non-disciplinary manner whether the person sitting at the poker machine next
to me is happy or still enjoying him or herself are unlikely to occur. The corollary of this is an
affective reorientation within spaces and practices of gambling as punters are liberated from
having to care about the person sitting beside us, knowing that responsibility for this care has
been transferred to the consulting rooms of professional experts whose positions are more or
less directly funded by the taxes they are generously donating in any given gambling session.
Should the person sitting beside me fail to avail themselves of these professional services, come
110 NEW FORMATIONS
out as a problem gambler, and exclude themselves, it is my prerogative to feel disgusted by
their failure to exercise self-responsibility.
Before turning to the following section on how subjects of legal gambling are racialised and
articulated in relation to Indigenous sovereignty claims it is necessary to briefly address the
rhetorical claim that governments have become addicted to the tax revenue raised by legal
gambling. This claim is usually made by those opposed to the expansion of legal gambling forms
and/or those dealing with its devastating aftermath within low-income communities and I suggest
that it fails to address an important distinction. That is: while the negative impacts of gambling
for individuals or specific groups inhere in the monetary losses they must bear, governments
cannot lose from their investment in legal gambling forms. This distinction matters a lot if one of
the bases on which we distinguish states of happiness from states of addiction is that, in contrast
to the former, the latter must also take something from the subject. If nothing is being lost by
individuals as a consequence of engaging in cultural practices ranging from eating and sex
through to shopping, playing sport and gambling, how can we distinguish addictive activities
from those which bring happiness? Hence, signs of addiction typically include relationships
destroyed, assets repossessed and loss of employment.
The only losses that governments stand to bear from legal gambling relates directly to the
number of individuals or groups who manifest these negative symptoms of addiction. And
research clearly indicates that such losses of productivity and happiness are minor relative to
the gains these same individuals deliver to governments through their regular tax donations
through pokies. Even these losses can be minimised to the extent that individuals are able to
be governed as self-responsible subjects rather than as noisome victims of government and
corporate greed. For these reasons I think it is important not only to resist the rhetoric of
addiction in accounting for government investment in legal gambling but to adapt Raymond
Williams famous challenge to contemporary deployments of the term masses
32
and insist that
there are no problem gamblers, only ways of seeing people as problem gamblers. So how do the
many ways of seeing people as problem gamblers in Australia prevent more important questions
from being asked about the ownership of legal gambling and governance of gamblers?
PATHOLOGISING WHITENESS: GAMBLING WITH INDIGENOUS RIGHTS
[The] possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty works ideologically to naturalize the
nation as a white possession by informing and circulating a coherent set of meanings about white
possession as part of common sense knowledge and socially produced conventions
33
The whole notion of separateness puts indigenous Australians into a different category and
they are not. They are first Australians, they are ours and they deserve to get the treatment
that everybody else gets (my emphasis). Amanda Vanstone, Minister for Indigenous Affairs
and Immigration.
34
In a special focus on communities section in a recent issue of Queenslands broadsheet
newspaper, The Courier Mail, a story titled State tax take jumps as pokie loss hits $1.73b sits
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 111
beside another story by the same journalist titled Lawsuits planned on stolen wages claims.
The latter describes the refusal of many Indigenous people to accept a one off-payment of
$2,000 to $4,000 for wages confiscated by Aborigines Protection Board between 1940 and
1970. While lawsuits are being filed by those determined to obtain the actual amount of
wages that were illegally withheld from them, a state government spokeswoman promised any
unclaimed funds would be used to benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
35
That these
two stories can exist side by side without generating discussion or debate about how gambling
revenue might be used to fund the payment of fair compensation to those whose wages were
stolen, demonstrates the extent to which the economy and gambling as one of its increasingly
significant components, have become disarticulated from questions of Indigenous rights and
justice in Australia.
In the previous section I argued that studies and public discussion of gambling departing from
the premise that, like recreational sex, legalised forms of gambling provide a source of happiness
for most people and a source of unhappiness for a problematic minority prevent important
questions being asked of the relationship between the expansion and promotion of particular
gambling technologies, federal welfare policies and state-federal taxation arrangements. This
has enabled pokie addiction to become metonymically associated with an underclass that is
the specific targets of neo-liberal government intervention. In Australia this is most obviously
apparent in relation to Indigenous people whose entitlements to political representation
and services have been under sustained and bi-partisan attack for ten-years of the Howard
government in the name of a policy of practical reconciliation.
Practical reconciliation policies introduced in Australia include regimes of mutual obligation
where basic services and facilities are provided to remote Indigenous communities only if they
agree to do something in return. One of the first and most publicised cases of mutual obligation
involved members of the Mulan community in central Australia signing a Shared Responsibility
Agreement (SRA) to wash their childrens faces in return for the instalment of petrol bowsers.
Other proposals currently on the table are the withdrawal of welfare benefits from parents who
dont send their children to school and from young people who fail to look for work or study
opportunities.
36
This has occurred in a context where the national Indigenous representative
body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) after being discredited
through a campaign of media attacks on the credibility of its leadership has been dismantled
and replaced by a National Indigenous Advisory Group directly appointed by the federal
government.
The orientation of white Australians towards Indigenous people and other Australians
racialised as non-white has been explained by critical whiteness theorist, Aileen Moreton-
Robertson, in terms of the possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty.
37
That this
captures the affective disposition of the current government towards Indigenous people is clear
in the terms used by Indigenous Affairs and Immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, to justify
the abolition of ATSIC: the whole notion of separateness puts indigenous Australians into a
different category and they are not. They are first Australians, they are ours and they deserve
to get the treatment that everybody else gets (my emphasis).
38
This statement, which manages
to simultaneously issue a veiled threat and to pre-empt accusations of racial discrimination, is
112 NEW FORMATIONS
also suggestive of the racist way in which Indigenous policy experiments are forming the ground
for targeted government interventions towards and calculated neglect of other disadvantaged
individuals and groups in Australia.
Anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued that white Australians become afflicted by a
deficit of social hope when our sense of national ownership appears to be under threat. He
argues Compassion, hospitality and the recognition of oppression are all about giving hope
to marginalized people. But to be able to give hope one has to have it and he asks why
is it that the great majority of the population of the Western world are left with so little hope
for themselves today, let alone for sharing with others?
39
Within the ideological framework
of white possession identified by Moreton-Robinson and Hage, Indigenous rights are
presented as drains on an existing reservoir of white social hope for the future while Indigenous
responsibilities are presented as a way of conserving hope. This requires that a line be drawn
in the sand between the abuses of Indigenous Australians and resources which are relegated
to the past and a brave new world in which their demands for justice, having been successfully
painted as motivated by greed and irrational resentment (or, in a more explicitly racist register,
as driven by the romantic idealism of white intellectuals) are able to be put aside to focus on
fixing pathologies within Indigenous communities in the here and now.
It is in this context of a pathological and pathologising whiteness that welfare payments are
sometimes termed sit-down money by proponents of practical reconciliation and that gambling,
along with drinking alcohol is regularly listed as one of the self-destructive pastimes from which
Indigenous people should be discouraged in engaging. The extrapolation of the term sit-down
money from original local Indigenous contexts to a wider public sphere enables white politicians
and media institutions to construct a voyeuristic theatre of Indigenous pathology which effectively
disarticulates white people from passive welfare dependency at the same time that it constructs
Australians of middle-Eastern appearance in relation to terrorism and Asians (both over there
and born here) as over-achievers.
40
While all three groups are presented as interlocked threads of
a fabric that threatens to smother the happiness of white Australians (both overseas and locally
born) the affects adhering to each are distinct. Feelings include satisfaction that a stick rather
than a carrot approach is being taken to the administration of Indigenous Australians; fear of
invasion by Muslim extremists and pre-emptive acts of violence (such as organised violence
targeting people of middle-Eastern appearance at Cronulla Beach in December, 2005) and
worry about our children being out-paced by the academic and professional success of Asians.
To the extent that the economic agency of Australians is shaped by a possessive investment
in patriarchal white sovereignty that constitutes the ground of national identity, mastery of legal
gambling forms and technology is arguably a skill that every successful and self-responsible
subject must acquire in order to feel complete. In this context, I dont think its coincidental
that the iconography of Australian gambling venues and poker machines is dominated by
tropes of white colonial history, from explorers and gold-diggers to bush-rangers. An interior
panel of the Treasury Casino in Brisbane features a mural which pictures the casino as a mirage
in the desert with three white adventurers in acubra hats celebrating a trunk filled with gold
coins in the foreground. Such Orientalist and imperialist themes are the rule rather than the
exception, with an entire suite of machines linked to a jackpot dedicated to the Adventures of
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 113
Major Money, a lantern-jawed safari-hatted cartoon character who strikes it rich in a variety
of global settings, from outback Australia, through to South America, Egypt, the polar regions
and the Great Barrier Reef. Another colonial themed machine present across many Australian
venues is African Adventures, with safari animals interspersed with what appear to be portraits
of Masai warriors.
Two designs by Aristocrat, Australias oldest poker machine manufacturer that have survived
the test of time are The Queen of the Nile and Indian Dreaming or Moon Fire. The Egyptian-themed
machine evokes the treasures of one of the first great ancient civilisations discovered and
plundered by Europeans in the course of archaeologys colonial adventures. Indian Dreaming
offers images of warriors in head-dress, dream-catchers, tee-pees and a distinctive musical
theme of drumming and chants, evoking a patriarchal and spiritual culture. The only pokie
machine that explicitly includes reference to Indigenous Australians of which I am aware is
Aristocrats Kakadu Dreaming, which features a didgeridoo soundtrack and, in the absence of
representations of human beings, seems to disturbingly equate Indigenous people with native
flora and fauna.
While connotations triggered by these signs are rooted in the myth of Australia as the lucky
country, they also evoke challenges posed by Indigenous ownership in a context where the issue
of sovereignty remains unresolved.
41
Indian Dreaming design appears to reference the situation
in parts of Canada and the United States where particular groups of Indigenous people have
been able to own and operate large land-based and on-line casino businesses. The mere fact that
gambling has been used elsewhere to respond to social inequalities faced by Indigenous people
complicates the distinction made in Australia by advocates of practical reconciliation between
participation in a real economy of private enterprise - on one hand - and a welfare economy
based on government handouts - on the other. This is not to suggest that the predominantly
service positions (cleaners, croupiers, floor-managers) in which first nation people are often
employed in US and Canadian casinos and the limited number of Indigenous people entitled
to derive benefits from their ownership adequately address long-standing sovereignty issues.
But it does help to sever the metonymic connection between gambling and Indigenous
pathology currently mobilised in discourses of practical reconciliation in Australia. Gamblings
representation and regulation also underscores the extent to which cultural, economic and
political practices of globalisation are patterned according to specific white diasporic investments
and preferences.
42
If the iconography of some of the most popular poker machines implicitly references
unresolved sovereignty struggles in nations built on white settler-colonisation, the spread of poker
machines into previously unconquered spaces of the nation poses a different problem in relation
to the affectively charged discourse of Indigenous pathology. This is because it poses a direct
conflict between the desires of operators to make a quick buck and the obligation of governments
to protect vulnerable groups from developing problematic gambling behaviours. That is: how to
balance the right of recreational gamblers with the needs of Indigenous people to be protected
from this legalised vice? That such questions are implicitly framed by an increasingly anxious
possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty rather than the priorities of Indigenous
people is apparent with reference to the Yalata Aboriginal community which in 1998 initiated a
114 NEW FORMATIONS
ban on poker machines from a licensed venue 50 km from their homelands. This was due not
to a practical reconciliation agenda of stamping out gambling but rather a recognition that
the illegal gambling on regular card games organised in the community was less destructive
than poker machines.
Their objections to the [pokies] were that the people in the community were already poor;
that they gambled at cards but the winnings were distributed through the community and no one
went hungry; and that if [pokies] were introduced the money would be lost to the community
and everyone would go hungry.
43

The Yalata communitys rejection of pokies here can be seen as resistance to the encroachment
of white possession in both its private (business) and governmental (tax-raising) forms. Refusing
to invest in pokies and persisting with community card-games can be seen as a way of not simply
conserving social hope but of ensuring its circulation within the community. In a political context
where the Indigenous ownership of gambling enterprises is never mooted and where physical
hunger looms as a possible outcome of the introduction of pokies, the choice to keep pokies at bay
seems as much about avoiding that ultimate unhappiness as it is maintaining the happiness that
is produced by community card games. The Yalata communitys distinction between gambling as
a social and cultural practice - on one hand - and specific forms and technologies of gambling
on the other prompts further questions about the relationship between governmental regimes
of regulation and gambling technologies.
My research on cultural economies of gambling is partly an attempt to unravel a mystery
- if pokies are so bad for us why does playing them sometimes feel so good? If the problem
gambler is an abstraction of neo-liberal governance detached from embodied and specifically
located subjects and groups, could the poker machine itself, as it is refracted in discourses of
problem gambling, also be an abstraction? And if the answer is yes, is it possible that pokies could
become agents of good rather than evil? Of progressive rather than of regressive taxation?
44
Of
redistributive justice rather than of daylight robbery? Or, to put it another way, can we imagine
an economics of happiness
45
that doesnt simultaneously require the production of particular
individuals and groups as dysfunctional and beyond hope and, hence, social investment?
I want to conclude with some reflections on the technology on which the discourse of problem
gambling depends: the poker machine itself. What is striking over the past two decades of legal
gamblings expansion is the extent to which evil itself has become so quickly attached to these
machines.
46
This was apparent in the dedication of a two hour parallel session to the ritualistic
dismemberment and re-assemblage by industry representatives of an actual poker machine at
the 2004 NAGs conference. Was this just in case we thought they had a soul? A self-help manual
Stop Gambling by a clinical psychologist, Simon Milton, is prefaced by Tim Freedman, the lead
singer of The Whitlams who wrote a song titled Blow Up the Pokies dedicated to a fellow musician
who committed suicide after a long period of gambling addiction. In a more humorous register,
this theme is echoed in an installation piece by Australian artist Lauren Tan, Poker Machine of
Death, in which the reels of a poker machine spin to reveal different kinds of coffins and funerals
the player can win, from your basic model through to the most extravagant. More recently, a
Brisbane discount chain store recently provoked public outrage by selling a battery-powered toy
poker machine pitched at children aged 3 and over. A worker from a gambling health service
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 115
complained to the Courier Mail, Machines like these encourage young people to experiment
with forms of gambling I dont think this country needs electronic gaming machine toys.
They are not helpful or healthy.
47
More than the prospect of evil lurking within gaming technology, I worry about this
understandable projection onto poker machines of the negative aspects of the larger system of
governmentality Styze Kingma calls the gaming complex
48
for several reasons. I worry that,
in contrast to automobiles, which potentially bring even greater risks to young people, safe
techniques for poker machine play are not taught as part of the high school curriculum. I also
worry that, for very young children, automatic teller machines (ATMs) are much more likely to
be associated with free money than a slot machine toy. Considering the extent to which ATM
design seems to have been deliberately modelled on poker machine designs or vice-versa, I
think it would be important for children to learn (and for adults to remember) that one of the
differences between the two machines is that a poker machine cant be guaranteed to give you
money you dont have in contrast to ATMs which will almost certainly give you a cash advance
on your credit card.
In conclusion, I suggest that it is the extremely remote possibility of transformation whereby
a player subjectified as a potential problem gambler is transformed in an instant into a jackpot
winner that enables gambling to produce a form of happiness which is neither reducible to an
abstract consumers surplus nor the addicts illusionary desire for that which depletes him or her.
To the extent that spaces and experiences of gambling are punctuated by such rare transformative
moments, the vagaries of luck become a source of hope against neo-liberalisms otherwise relentless
production of winners and losers through the mechanisms of the economy proper. It is tempting
to present the transformative power of winning a jackpot as a temporary suspension of neo-liberal
injustice to benefit the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. But rather than mistaking for justice
the good feeling
49
that is triggered when globalisations losers very occasionally become winners
within the course of gambling play, I am thinking of something different. Perhaps those happy
occasions when gamblers defy the probabilities and realise the remote possibility of winning
serve to remind us of the contingency of the regime of power within which poker machines are
currently operated. So, in addition to the discursive opposition between the happiness of playing
and the unhappiness of being played by these machines, there must be possibilities for playing with
these machines and the laws which govern them and their consumers that could facilitate better
outcomes for subjects in a state. Ill end with two questions. Can we imagine ways of owning,
playing and regulating these machines that are less supportive of the possessive investment in
patriarchal white sovereignty than those that currently exist? And what would be the cost of these
changes to governments, businesses and gamblers in Australia?
NOTES
1. Jan McMillen, Understanding Gambling: History, Concepts and Theories, in McMillen (ed), Gambling
Cultures, Routledge, NY/London, 1996, pp32-33.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Harvard University Press, 1984, p250.
3. See for example, Paul duGay and M. Pryke, Cultural Economy, Sage, London, 2002, Meaghan Morris,
116 NEW FORMATIONS
Economics and Ecstasy: American Essays for John Forbes, Sydney, EmPress, 1992, Jo-Anne Pemberton, Inventing
The Economy, in The Abundant Culture, D. Headon, J. Hooton, Donald Horne (eds), Allen & Unwin, 1994,
Viviana Zeilzer, What Does Money Mean, in D. Miller (ed), Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences,
Routledge, London/NY, 2001.
4. In America the size of the gambling industry grew tenfold between 1976 and 1998. See Gerda Reith,
Gambling: Who Profits, Prometheus Books, NY, 2003, p10.
5. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p8.
6. Gamblings growing significance as an instance of everyday and popular culture can be appreciated with
reference to the fact that US citizens spent five times more money on gambling than movie tickets in 1991.
With the growth of gambling provision through online and mobile devices in the intervening period, this
expenditure is likely to have grown. James F. Smith, When its bad its better: Conflicting images of gambling
in American culture, in McMillen (ed), 1996, p101.
7. I should briefly point to some important connections between the affective dimensions of legalised
gambling and legalised sex work. As historian of sexuality Tom Laqueur argues in Making Sex, gambling,
stock-market speculation and nineteenth-century anxieties about onanism were understood by Freud and other
theorists of sexuality to be inextricably connected. See for example, Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body
and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, 1992.
8. An enduring and intimate entanglement between sex and gambling arguably forms an important aspect
of what it means to be the subjects of legalised vice in countries such as Australia, the US and Britain. For
example, the popular and controversial rise of raunch culture and celebration of pimping suggest that
paying for sex brings an enhanced eroticism to which reproductive, monogamous sex pales in comparison.
Yet, as with the voluminous literature on pathological gambling, there has been a flood of memoirs recounting
experiences of abjection and exploitation in the sex-industry which take audiences into more negative
affective terrain. Although there is not space in this essay to investigate these intersections, it is important to
acknowledge that a nexus between gambling, prostitution and legal and illegal substance use/abuse works as a
powerful matrix of contemporary cultural representations and practices evident in various forms, from casino
advertisements and poker machine iconography through to recent television series such as Blackpool (UK)
and Las Vegas (US).
9. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, governments of Australian states where poker machines had previously
not been allowed legalised them to stem the flow of tax dollars over their borders. In Victoria, the second
most populated state in Australia, the government was losing 400 million dollars per year to poker machines
in neighboring New South Wales prior to legalisation. See Tim Costello and Royce Millar, Wanna Bet? Winners
and Losers in Gamblings Luck Myth, Allen & Unwin, 2000.
10. Figures from Queensland in 2003-2004 show gaming machine expenditure made up 53.66 per cent of all
gambling expenditure - almost double that of the previous decade. Courier Mail, 22/02/2006, p8.
11. James Doughney, The Poker Machine State: Dilemmas in Ethics, Economics and Governance, Common Ground
Publishing, 2002, p22.
12. The largest owner of poker machines in Australia is currently the retail giant Woolworths through its
Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group Ltd.
13. Margaret Wenham, The Courier-Mail, (cover-story), 10/03/2006.
14. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol 1, Penguin, London, 1978, p27.
15. See Gerda Reith, Gambling: Who Profits?, Prometheus Books, NY, 2003, pp20-21.
16. Australian Readers Digest, November 2003, pp84-91.
17. Michael Walker, Gambling Government: the Economic and Social Impacts, UNSW Press, 1998 p4.
18. Australias most prestigious horse race held in Melbourne and a dedicated public holiday in Victoria where
it is run every year.
19. Paul Austin , Outlaw pokies, Liberal MP pleads, Age, 26/05/2005.
THE PROBLEMATIC JOYS OF GAMBLING 117
20. James Doughney, The Poker Machine State: Dilemmas in Ethics, Economics, Governance, Common Ground
Publishing, 2002, p22.
21. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, op. cit., p317.
22. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, Picador, NY and
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15, 1, 2003, 11-40.
23. Helen Keane, Whats Wrong with Addiction?, Melbourne University Press, 2002, p189.
24. Styze Kingma, Gaming is Play. It Should Remain Fun! in Pekka Sulkunen (ed), Constructing the New
Consumer Society, St Martins Press, NY, 1997.
25. Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow, Accounting for Taste: Australian Everyday Cultures,
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp6-7, 111-114.
26. Doughney, The Poker Machine State: Dilemmas in Ethics, Economics, Governance op. cit.
27. Matthew Rockloff and Victoria Dyer, An Experiment on the Social Contagion of Gambling Behaviour, in
Greg Coman (ed), Proceedings of National Association of Gambling Studies, 2004, pp255-260.
28. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, Routledge, 2001, p201.
29. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, Routledge, 2000, p3.
30. For more details on these programs see Evaluation of Self-Exclusion Programs, Gambling Research Panel,
Report no.2, Victorian Government, Melbourne, 2003.
31. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, op. cit., p180.
32. Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary, Convictions, 1958, N. McKenzie (ed), pp83-84.
33. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The High Court and the
Yorta Yorta decision, Borderlands eJournal, 3, 2 (2004).
34. Australian, 17-18 April 2004, p6.
35. Tanya Chilcott-Moore, Courier Mail, 27/02/2006.
36. Govt mulls linking welfare to school attendance, ABC Online, 10/03/2006, (http://www.abc.net.au/news/
newsitems/200603/s1588755.htm) accessed 10/03/2006.
37. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty, op. cit.
38. Australian, 17-18 April 2004, p6.
39. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, 2003, p9.
40. See Suvendrini Perera, Race Terror, Sydney, December, 2005, Borderlands eJournal, 5, 1, 2006.
41. The only pokie designs that include reference to Indigenous Australians, such as Aristocrats Kakadu
Dreaming, featuring a didgeridoo soundtrack seem to disturbingly equate Indigenous people with native flora
and fauna.
42. See Osuri, Goldie and Bobby Bannerjee, White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and
the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia, Social Semiotics, 14, 2 (2004): 151-171.
43. M. Brady, The Productivity Commission and an Aboriginal Community: Discussion Paper No.269/2004, Centre for
Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, 2004.
44. I am thinking, for example, of schemes that have been proposed for cashless gaming machines. A smart
card for pokie players might have benefits for those who donate most of their money to treasury coffers. For
low income earners in particular, a record of how much was lost compared to how much won could be the basis
of an annual tax refund.
118 NEW FORMATIONS
45. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, New York, The New Press, 1998.
46. A colleague pointed out to me with reference to the WARNING POKIES T-shirt referred to at the start
of this essay, viewed from another perspective, the figures and machine combine to form a satanic and slightly
feline visage.
47. Courier Mail, 2/04/2006, p39.
48. Kingma identifies the following as indispensable aspects of the gaming complex market composition,
availability, production and marketing, bureaucratic institutions and regulation, policing and health care. See
Styze Kigma, Gambling and the Risk Society: the Liberalisation and Legitimation Crisis of Gambling in the
Netherlands, International Gambling Studies, 4, 1, June 2004: 50.
49. See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, op. cit., p202.