The sonic habitués of the Strip: listening in Las Vegas

Abstract

How has neoliberalism transformed the way we hear? This essay focuses on the way in which gamblers listen in the casinos of Las Vegas, examining how, in a paradigmatic example of the post-Fordist attention economy, casino capital captures the psychological and affective capacities of players. In an environment where every detail is purposefully designed to increase revenues, sound design plays a very important role in keeping players in their seats and increasing the length of time they spend playing, as well as the size and speed of bets. Against the backdrop of Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of neoliberalism as a “destruction of attention”, I draw upon two conceptual frames to analyse the modalities of listening produced on the Las Vegas Strip and to distinguish them from Adornian structural listening: (1) Martin Heidegger’s discussion of boredom and animal captivation; and (2) Félix Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit as it anticipates Catherine Malabou’s theory of plasticity.

Keywords:

• Listening
• Las Vegas
• attention
• distraction
• habit
• casino capital

Notes

1. I am thinking particularly of the importance of cognitive capitalism in recent Italian political philosophy, but the call to update Foucault’s analysis can also be seen, for instance, in Gilles Deleuze’s notion of societies of control.

2. For a rigorous account of the production of the neoliberal subject that highlights this continuity, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2013).

3. It goes without saying that Stiegler’s analysis of attention under capitalism, like Berardi’s that I discuss below, owes much to the Freudian conception of drive, mediated via Lacan, as well as Deleuze and Guattari.

4. I borrow this term from David Harvey’s highly influential theory of spatiality under capitalism.

5. Richard Leppert, in a similar vein, in his foreword to William Cheng’s Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination, describes that “being lazy can be its own form of work” and that “in Vegas … people really work at gambling ... surrounded by the music and sound ‘effects’ of success” (2014, xv).

6. My concept of use here is shaped both by Derrida’s notion of usure (1990b) and by Agamben’s use (2015).

7. On the “accelerated aesthetics” of new media and their capacity to produce new temporalities of sensory perception, see Vernallis (2013).

8. While it beyond the scope of this paper, it would be fruitful to compare the sound design of high-grossing freemium games with that of slots machines. As Karen Collins points out, games promote different modalities of listening that cinema by virtue of their interactivity and their expanded multimodality (2013, 22), but I believe there is also a distinction to be made between video games and casino slots. My hypothesis is that the architectural design and wider ambient sound design in casinos – together with the sense of isolation within a public, social setting – interacts with machine sound in complex and nuanced ways to modulate attention and thus merits its own, more spatially-inflected, phenomenology. One ought also to contrast the kind of looping background audio which may, as Cheng suggests, induce sonic desensitisation (2014, 51), with that in which sound events actively modulate attention by providing a trail of breadcrumbs.

9. Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of Heidegger’s analysis highlights this resemblance: “In being left empty by profound boredom, something vibrates like an echo of that ‘essential disruption’ that arises in the animal from its being exposed and taken in an ‘other’ that is, however, never revealed to it as such ... Both are, in their most proper gesture, open to a closedness; they are totally delivered over to something that obstinately refuses itself” (2004, 65).

10. While Agamben and Derrida deconstruct the human–animal binary, Elizabeth Povinelli’s astute critique of biopower (2016) extends this to non-organic life.

11. Sianne Ngai makes a related point when, insisting on the myriad uses of tedium, she deconstructs the opposition between shock and boredom by introducing a notion of “stuplime exhaustion” in which “boredom resides in relentless attention to the finite and small” in contrast to the transcendence of sublimity or the distancing of irony (2005, 277–278).

12. On Derrida’s read, the history of metaphysics is the history of “humanualism” (Derrida 2005, 152): a hand that can grasp distinguishes human from animal. Today we are perhaps witnessing something like an attention without the possibility of grasping.

13. To some commentators, Agamben appears to repeat Heidegger’s anthropocentric division and the metaphysical exclusion of the animal, but careful reading of this passage and also situating it in the context of Agamben’s wider project reveals that it is precisely a critique of this “anthropological machine”.

14. This distinction is essential to and yet easily overlooked in Agamben’s thought: for example a number of critics wrongly suppose, when he deconstructs the binary between biological and political life, his category of bare life coincides with the former when it in fact names this biological precisely insofar as it politicised.

15. Derrida (2007) translates the Heideggerian withdrawal with the French re-trait, indicating both a stroke of a pen or brush and also a retreat. In a play on Derrida’s terms, I suggest that this this mode of paying attention on the Las Vegas Strip might be called a distrait.

16. Åsdam’s “Las Vegas Cut” (2008) can be heard alongside other recordings in this collection at https://archive.org/details/Fifteen_Sounds_of_the_War_on_the_Poor_vol1-6289

17. On this point, I follow Alberto Toscano’s analysis (2006) of habit as individuation.

18. Janicaud, Dominique 1968. “L’habitude selon Maine de Biran et Ravaisson”. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 158: 65–87. Cited in Toscano 2006, 110–111.

19. See also Adorno (1988) where he insists that music’s fetish-character and the accompanying regressive forms of listening are a new development.

20. Derrida repeatedly thinks listening as a relation to the transcendental (1990a) and specifically connects it with the problem of the fetish in Glas (1986). While sound studies has largely focused its discussions of Derrida on his deconstruction of phonocentrism, see Veit Erlmann’s discussion of “Tympan” (2014, 47–48).

21. See also Benjamin (2003) and Kracauer (1987).

22. See above all Jean-Luc Nancy (2007).