Too Close to the Money: A Theory of Compulsive Gambling

Too Close to the Money A Theory of Compulsive Gambling Ole Bjerg Abstract This article explores the relationship between gambling and capitalism. The subjective being of the compulsive gambler provides insight into the role of money in capitalism. Using the Lacanian approach of Žižek, money is analysed as a sublime object of capitalist ideology. In gambling, however, the subject engages money in a very direct encounter with the Lacanian ‘Real’, circumventing the ordinary symbolic order of capitalism. This results in a momentary de-sublimation of money, stripping it of the metaphysical properties otherwise vested in it by capitalism. For the compulsive gambler, the de-sublimation has become permanent, making it impossible for him to function as an ordinary capitalist subject. He has come too close to money, leaving him in a pathological state of being out of joint with capitalism. Key words addiction ■ capitalism ■ desire ■ Lacan ■ Marx ■ Žižek In gambling money is seduced, deflected from its truth. Having been cut off from the law of equivalences (it ‘burns’) and the law of representation, money is no longer a sign or representation once transformed into a stake. And a stake is not something one invests. As an investment money takes the form of capital, but as a stake it appears in the form of a challenge. (Baudrillard, 1979: 139) T HE MOST obvious risk from gambling is losing one’s money. However, when a gambler bets $1000 on the outcome of the roulette wheel, the roll of a die or the result of a horserace, there is more to it than simply putting a given amount of money at stake. In gambling, money is lifted out of its ordinary circulation in the capitalist economy and led astray into a ■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 26(4): 47–66 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409104968 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 48 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) universe of chance. Thus the very concept and meaning of money is challenged. For most people, gambling is just a curious diversion from everyday life, a compartmentalized activity in their lives in capitalist society. But for some people, the experience of winning or losing, seeing money ebb and flow at the whims of chance, has such traumatizing effects that their very being as subjects of capitalist society is distorted. They become compulsive gamblers. This article explores the role of money in gambling and in the development of compulsive gambling. It will be demonstrated that money serves an ideological function as ‘the sublime object of capitalism’. What happens in gambling is a form of de-sublimation of money. The status of money as a bearer of special symbolic meaning is undermined, and the gambler’s entire economy of desire, structured around money, implodes. The argument of the article builds on the theories of Marx, Lacan and Žižek, and the proposed theory of compulsive gambling is discussed in relation to existing empirical studies of the disorder. What Is Gambling? Poker, black-jack, roulette, craps, slot machines, betting on horses, betting on football, betting on dogs, bingo, lotteries, lotto. The list of forms of gambling seems to be endless. We will start our analysis by identifying the very basic components of gambling across its various forms. A crucial distinction in the definition of gambling is the difference between games of chance and games of skill (Reith, 1999: 93–4). Roulette, for instance, is a game of pure chance. The likelihood of winning is totally independent of the player’s skills. The gambler has no influence on the outcome of the game, and he can have no prior knowledge to optimize his betting strategy. Contrary to the belief of many gamblers – problem gamblers in particular – there is no way of being a good or a bad roulette player. You can be a lucky roulette player. But factually speaking luck is only a post factum ascertainment that the round turned out to your advantage. The next round is a new game and luck in the previous round does not have any influence on the chances of winning this round. The same goes for slot machines, bingo, lotto, lotteries and other games of pure chance. While it is impossible to be a better or worse roulette player, it is possible to be a good poker player. And it is possible to be a very bad one. In poker, an element of chance is involved in dealing the cards. But once the cards are dealt it is possible for the individual player to improve his chances of winning by playing his hand optimally. ‘You have to know when to hold ’em/Know when to fold ’em’, sings Kenny Rogers in his famous song about ‘The Gambler’. But even the best poker player cannot eliminate the element of chance in poker completely, hence it remains a gambling game regardless of the player’s skills. Other games in this category are whist and backgammon. We may order the different forms of gambling in a continuum according to the degree of chance involved (Figure 1). At one end we have roulette, Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 49 Chance Skill Roulette Fruit machine Lottery Lotto Bingo Sports betting Black-jack Craps Poker Whist Backgammon (Chess) Figure 1 A continuum of gambling games lotto, lotteries, gaming machines and other games of pure chance. At the other end we find games that combine chance and skill, such as poker, whist and backgammon. Between these two points we find sports betting, blackjack and craps. These games involve some degree of skill and knowledge but they are played against ‘the house’, thus giving the player less possibility of being in control of the game than, for instance, in poker. At the very end of Figure 1 we find chess. When chess is played by skilled players, the degree of chance is reduced to such a minimum that we may no longer speak of gambling. Any type of gambling may lead to pathological problem gambling. Still, there seems to be a tendency for problem gambling to occur in connection with games of pure chance rather than games involving skill. Several research projects point to gaming machines as the most commonly preferred form of gambling among pathological gamblers (Abbott and Volberg, 1996; Becoña, 1993, 1996; Black and Moyer, 1998; Jørsel et al., 1996; Nielsen and Røjskjær, 2005). In the following, I will primarily be considering games of pure chance. So the first criterion for gambling is for the game played to have an element of chance that cannot be eliminated by possible player skills. But gambling has a further and equally crucial element: money. Anyone who has ever played roulette for matchsticks knows the difference money on the table makes. Money in gambling is a medium for registering the players’ involvement in the game (Reith, 1999: 146). Money ties the gambler to the game. It is the money that puts the player at stake. In the Middle Ages we find numerous examples of players continuing their gambling despite having lost all their money. Instead they put themselves and their freedom at stake, risking ending up as the winner’s slave (Jørsel, 2003: 28; Reith, 1999: 48). The contemporary equivalent is the gambler who builds up gambling debts with increasingly more dubious creditors, until he ends up in a slave-like relationship to hard criminals, who force him to commit crimes to pay off his debts. The money functions as the player’s representative in the game, and when the money runs out, the player himself must take the place of the representative. We have now identified the two essential elements of gambling: chance and money. In the following we will see, in accordance with the theoretical Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 50 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) perspective of Lacan and Žižek, how money may be conceived of as part of the symbolic order, while chance is a manifestation of the Real. Let’s take the money first. Money Is Never Just Money Money is rarely just money. Money functions as measure for value, which may be applied across various social and cultural settings. It is also ascribed all different sorts of meaning in different contexts. A crucial distinction in Marx is the distinction between money and capital (Marx, 1867: 161–91). Money is the symbolic expression of the commodity’s value. But money takes on a different character depending on the form of circulation in which the money (M) and the commodity (C) enter. The immediate circulation of commodities has the form C–M–C. I have a sack of potatoes, sell it for $100, and for the $100 I purchase a sack of flour. The circulation starts with a commodity, the potatoes, and ends with a commodity, the flour, while the money is just a neutral intermediate for the exchange. However, another circulation, with the form M–C–M, is also possible. I have $100. For this $100 I purchase a sack of potatoes, which I then sell on for $110. Both the starting point and the ending point for this circulation is money, while the commodity is only an intermediate. The two points are not qualitatively different but quantitatively different, since I have increased my balance by $10. In this circulation, where the purpose is not the use-value of the commodity (I need flour to make a bread) but the increase of my balance, money has taken on the character of capital. In contrast to money, capital is an active element, capable of generating value from itself: ‘It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs’, as Marx so vividly describes it (1861: 255). Hidden in the circulation of capital lies a certain premise, which Marx deserves credit for having revealed. Capital’s production of surplus-value is possible only under the condition that we find on the market a commodity whose use-value is to generate value. This commodity is of course labour. I purchase five hours of labour from the baker for $100. During this time he is able to convert my sack of flour into 100 loaves of bread that I may then sell for $300. The baker has increased the value of my flour from $100 to $300, and I have made $100 on my investment after the baker’s salary has been paid. In this way, the surplus-value in the circulation of capital seems to be coming from nowhere. It is produced by the baker (the worker), who is then cunningly exploited by me (the capitalist). If we apply the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic and the Real, we may see both the immediate circulation of commodities (C–M–C) and the circulation of capital (M–C–M) as taking place exclusively within the symbolic order. Money and capital are in themselves symbols. And both commodity and labour enter the circulation only insofar as they have been ascribed a symbolic identity according to their place in the circulation. In other words, they are only commodity and labour because they are socially Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 51 constructed as such. A commodity becomes a commodity only when it is valued and offered on the market. Lacan describes the relationship between the symbolic order and the Real as one where the chaotic, meaningless and irregular Real is cancelled out by the operation of symbolization. ‘The letter kills’ (Lacan, 1964: 848). This is exactly what is happening in both circulations. The chaotic pulsation of the Real is substituted by symbolically recognizable entities, which then circulate in a relatively structured and regular fashion. Lacan illustrates the move from the Real to the symbolic by means of a small game (Lacan, 1966). By tossing a coin 10 times a random sequence of heads and tails is produced. We may get the following result shown in Figure 2. In the first instance this sequence is a purely chaotic, irregular and meaningless manifestation of the Real. Now we organize the individual tosses into overlapping units of three, i.e. numbers (1, 2, 3), (2, 3, 4), (3, 4, 5), etc. and these aggregate units are symbolized according to the following rule: (HHH, TTT) = (a); (HTT, THH, TTH, HHT) = (b); (HTH, THT) = (c). Hereby a new sequence is generated representing the original sequence of heads and tails (Figure 3). While the outcome in the sequence of individual tosses is, of course, still completely random, the symbolization has introduced an element of regularity and order in the symbolic chain. Certain successions have been made impossible and others necessary. For instance, c cannot follow immediately after a since this would imply a shift in the row of tosses from heads to tails or vice versa. And such a shift would generate the unit b between the two other units. Another example is the fact that between two a-units, there must necessarily be an even number of b-units. b symbolizes a shift in the series from heads to tails or vice versa. If there have been three heads in succession, there will have to be 0, 2, 4, 6, etc. such shifts before we can come back to three heads in succession again. Lacan’s point with the model is to show how order and regularity emerge ex nihilo from the symbolization of the pure randomness of the Real, even though the symbolization might initially appear to be an ‘innocent’ recording of real events. ‘[W]e see separate out from the real a symbolic determination which, as faithful as it 1 H 2 H 3 H 4 T 5 H 6 H 7 T 8 T 9 H 10 T Toss no. Heads/tails 5 H c 6 H b 7 T b 8 T b 9 H b 10 T c Toss no. Heads/tails Symbolic chain Figure 2 Series of tosses 1 H 2 H 3 H a 4 T b Figure 3 Symbolic chain Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 52 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) may be in recording any partiality of the real, merely produces all the more clearly the disparities that it brings with it’ (Lacan, 1966: 51). Is not this exactly what happens in the capitalist process of circulation? Cannot capitalism be described as an order symbolizing the Real in a way that imposes a certain regularity with certain possibilities and impossibilities on reality? Something is defined as commodity, something as labourer and something as capitalist. M–C–M is comparable to the symbolic chain in the model above. Just as a and c could not stand next to each other, certain impossibilities are inscribed in the circulation of capital. For instance, the barter economic transaction C–C, trading one commodity for another without money as an intermediate, is not possible within the capitalist circulation. If such transactions nevertheless take place in practice, they happen outside of the institutionalized capitalist economy. The capitalist symbolic order institutes certain regularities that are not present in the Real beforehand. The regularities pass by names like ‘the law of demand and supply’, ‘market forces’ or ‘the invisible hand of the market’. On the basis of these regularities it may be calculated which sequences follow from each other and which do not. The capitalist may calculate that when he buys the labour of the worker at a price below the use-value of the labour (M–C), he may sell his commodity at a profit (C–M’). However, the worker, having nothing but his labour to sell, cannot generate any surplusvalue for himself as long as the exchange-value of his labour is below the use-value. So C–M’–C is impossible. The capitalist can be relatively sure that his investment will yield a profit, and the worker can be relatively sure that he will be exploited. However, the relationship between the Real and the symbolic also has a dimension other than this operation of social construction. Parallel with the Real being cancelled out in the process of symbolization, the Real retains a crucial and constitutive function for the symbolic order. The symbolic order is not able to sustain itself purely by its own means. In the final instance, it is dependent on a ‘piece of the Real’: For things to have meaning, this meaning must be confirmed by some contingent piece of the real that can be read as a ‘sign.’ The very word sign, in opposition to the arbitrary mark, pertains to the ‘answer of the real’: the ‘sign’ is given by the thing itself, it indicates that at least at a certain point, the abyss separating the real from the symbolic network has been crossed. (Žižek, 1991: 32) This piece of the Real is produced within the symbolic order, but at the same time incarnates a surplus of meaning not entirely reducible to operations within the symbolic order. The Real appears as a form of immanently produced transcendence, which, in an almost Gödelian sense, is what makes the symbolic order possible. In the process of symbolization something is ‘left behind’, only to be found again later as something beyond symbolization guaranteeing the whole operation. The Real is highly Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 53 paradoxical insofar as it is simultaneously inside and outside of the symbolic order. By being dependent on the Real, the symbolic order is in itself also paradoxical. The relationship between the two, and the realization of both of them, is secured by ideology. ‘“[I]deology” is the “self-evident” surface structure whose function is to conceal the underlying “unbalanced”, “uncanny” structure’ (Žižek, 1997: 82). We shall see how this applies in the case of capitalism. Profit appears as a special object in the circulation of capital insofar as this is the object towards which the capitalist directs his desire. This is the very object that determines him as a capitalist and a desiring subject at all. In other words, profit is the sublime object of capitalism. At the same time, it is also a dead spot in the capitalist symbolic order. To both the capitalist and the worker (as well as the economists and philosophers Marx is debating with) it is not apparent where profit is coming from. The worker lives in a state of false consciousness. He hasn’t looked through the real class relations and hasn’t realized that the capitalist’s profit is generated through his own exploitation. But not even the capitalist is fully aware – as conspiracy theorists like to think – that profit is produced through a simple relationship of exploitation. The capitalist is as much inside ideology as the worker. The argument for this is found not in Marx, but in Weber. In his famous analysis, Weber (1905) shows how Protestantism and capitalism converge in the belief that prosperity in economic life is a divine sign of predestination for salvation. The Protestant (the capitalist in spe) conceives of profit as an ‘answer of the Real’ (Žižek, 1991: 29–32) endowed with a special meaning by far transcending the raw monetary value of profit. In this way, profit not only determines the self as a particular being, a capitalist, it is as if the profit bears a message that there is a higher power able to see something in the self, which is more than itself. The capitalist self gets the feeling that ‘God has spotted that very special thing about me which makes me predestined for salvation. He has spotted that something which I myself can hardly recognize!’ The conception of profit as an answer of the Real is not just reminiscent of Protestantism, from which capitalism over time has freed itself by evolving into a purer and more complete form. The imaginary projection does not have to have such explicit religious content as in Weber’s analysis, but in the capitalist desire for profit there will always be more at stake than a pure desire for money. Money is never just money. Even today we find everywhere the idea of wealth as a sign that one is somehow a special person. It may be on account of one’s merits, hard work, inventiveness, talent, ancestry, etc. All these are qualities which distinguish you individually as something special. The market is ascribed the ability to spot that in ourselves which is more than ourselves, and which we can hardly spot ourselves. The preservation of the belief that the market distributes the goods of society on account of our real qualities as persons and not on behalf of processes internal to the symbolic order is a necessary precondition for the preservation and legitimization of capitalism as such. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 54 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) This kind of ideological manoeuvre presupposes that we keep a certain distance from the object. Were the capitalist and the worker fully aware that profit emerges from a structural imbalance in the circulation of capital between the worker’s salary and the use-value of his labour, and that their own position in the circulation as capitalist and worker respectively is more or less coincidental, then the illusion of profit being a divine sign of eternal salvation or some other kind of answer of the Real would not be possible. In contemporary advanced capitalism, the belief in money as bearer of special meaning may, as Žižek points out, assume the form of ‘cynical distance’ (1989: 28–33). Even though we may on an intellectual, critical level be aware that money is distributed in society according to structures of unjust exploitation or other arbitrary principles, on the fundamental level of fantasy, the illusion of money as an answer of the Real is still intact. Thus cynical distance is not a deconstruction of ideology, but simply yet another way of keeping the required distance from the object in order for the fundamental illusions of ideology to be preserved. Money and Gambling Even though capitalist ideology is very inventive in developing new means of self-preservation, it is possible to identify minor implosions in capitalism, where the sublime object of money is de-sublimated. Gambling is just such an implosion. As we have seen, money changes its character according to the way it circulates. Hence the movement from the simple circulation of goods to the circulation of capital is a movement from money to capital. Gambling is a third type of circulation in which money assumes a wholly different third character. What kind of a transaction is actually taking place when the roulette player places $1000 on red? You might think he is buying a commodity in the form of entertainment and excitement. In this way the transaction would fit nicely into the general capitalist circulation with the consumer (the gambler) purchasing a commodity (the gaming experience) from the capitalist (the casino). Within the general capitalist framework, one might also think that the gambler is making an investment in the expectation of a future profit, and in this way is almost acting as a capitalist. Although not entirely invalid, neither of these conceptions seems to catch the very specific character of gambling as a money transaction. When the roulette player bets his $1000 on red, he buys absolutely nothing. He does not buy no thing, but nothingness itself. What the roulette wheel, the fruit machine or the dice do is to create an opening in the symbolic order where the Real may be confronted directly. In this very opening the gambler places his money. In the construction of the Lacanian model above, the randomness of the toss of the coin is transformed into regularity in the symbolic chain. This construction is not a direct and immediate symbolization of the coin tosses. It involves a number of intermediate calculations in which the tosses are grouped into overlapping trios, and then grouped and symbolized as a, b Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 55 and c. It is these intermediate calculations that introduce the regularity. They function as a membrane between the Real and the symbolic. A similar procedure is at work in the symbolic order of capitalism, where certain regularities are also introduced via ingenious intermediate calculations, e.g. that the worker is paid for the exchange-value and not the use-value of his labour. In gambling there are no intermediate calculations and therefore no regularity. The circulation of money in gambling may be formalized M–R–M, where R = the Real. The gambler buys a little piece of the Real, which in itself is nothing but the hard rock of the Real,1 and therefore almost instantly ricochets him back into the symbolic order as either winner or loser. We saw how both the simple circulation of commodities and the circulation of capital take place exclusively on the side of the symbolic order. The characteristic of gambling as the circulation of money is that it crosses this line (Figure 4). The circulation performs a small loop where it connects to the Real in a very direct and obvious fashion. Money is not tied to a symbolic entity in the form of a commodity, but directly to the Real in the form of chance. At the same time, this means that there is no regularity in the way profit is generated and distributed. It can either emerge out of nothing or disappear into nothing. And it is impossible to predict when it will do one or the other. Gambling is a direct confrontation with the Real, without the protective filter of regularity which the symbolic order of capitalism otherwise provides. To gamble is to turn off the ‘social firewall’. The difference between gambling and capitalism may be illustrated by the previous Lacanian model (Figure 3). The capitalist’s investment in the workers’ labour is comparable to a bet that c will not follow immediately after a in the symbolic chain in the lower row. In contrast, the gambler’s bet on red at the roulette table is like putting money directly on the outcome of the coin toss in the middle row. In contemporary society, the difference between capitalism and gambling is only one of degree, and this difference is often blurred. On the stock market, for instance, chance obviously plays a significant role in the circulation of money, and the outcome of certain investments is not immediately predictable. Commodity Capital Gambling R The Real The Symbolic C–M–C M–C–M M Figure 4 Forms of circulation Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 M? 56 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) This is the basic structure of the circulation of money in gambling. In the following we shall see how the gambler perceives and understands the game. When Dice Play God Next to money, chance is the other fundamental component in gambling. Even though we may treat it as a matter of course in our daily lives, once we start contemplating it, it quickly ceases to be just that. In a society where there is belief in an almighty God, or other magical forces, there is no room for chance. Every event in the world is perceived as an expression of the will of God and therefore contains a meaning to be decoded as a message from the transcendent divinity (Reith, 1999: 13). In societies without chance, ‘technologies of chance’ may be used as a means to communicate with the divine. Evans-Pritchard reports how, in order to get guidance on an important decision, the Azandes decapitate a chicken and then interpret messages in the pattern drawn on the ground by the sprayed blood (Evans-Pritchard, 1937). We also find numerous examples of priests or shamans throwing sticks or bones, in order to then read answers from the gods in the way they land (Reith, 1999: 15). And the first gaming machines (one-armed bandits) were constructed with inspiration from different devices used for fortune telling (Costa, 1988). With the development of causal deterministic science in Western societies comes the Newtonian idea that physical reality may principally be calculated down to the last little detail. When the world nevertheless manages to surprise us, it is due to our own incomplete knowledge about specific situations. In this way chance enters the world, but only as the name for a practical lack of information about a reality acting in accordance with absolutely given laws. From the 1660s onwards, probability theory developed as a method to close the gap between the actual and the possible calculability of reality (Hacking, 1975). Probability theory makes it possible, on the basis of a series of previous events, to calculate the chance or risk of the occurrence of a certain event, e.g. a shipwreck, even if we have only incomplete knowledge of the complex causal relations actually determining the event, e.g. weather conditions, state of the ship, reliability of the crew, etc. This scientific and intellectual development is what Hacking (1990) refers to as ‘the taming of chance’. The basic idea of probability theory, expressed, for example, in Poisson’s law of great numbers, is that individual events are connected in such a way that on an aggregate level they will be approaching a given norm. However, the chance ‘tamed’ by probability theory is only generalized chance. The law of great numbers only applies to ‘great numbers’, whereas the ‘small numbers’ remain lawless. ‘The reality about which probability theory speaks is always an abstracted real without compelling pertinence to any specific moment or situation’ (Kavanagh, 1993: 14–15). Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 57 The gambler’s interest is characterized by being primarily directed towards the individual outcome. Hence probability theory has only limited relevance to him. ‘True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win’, says Dostoyevsky’s famous gambler, but he continues: ‘yet what business is that of yours or of mine?’ (Dostoyevsky, 2004 [1866]: 11). This is what distinguishes him from the casino, and this is what makes him play against the casino in the first place, since the casino is destined to win insofar as the game follows the law of great numbers. While the casino stays safely within the symbolic order, certain in the knowledge that in the long run it will win, the gambler interacts directly with the Real. Calculations of probability are in a Lacanian sense symbolizations of the Real. Like the model of coin tosses above, probability theory groups individual events in larger units (great numbers), whereby certain regularity is introduced, making predictive calculations possible. Instead of a meaningless and irregular chaos, we have a meaningful, probabilistic order. Lacan and Žižek point to the fact that any symbolization is structured around its own impossibility, around some impossible kernel, stubbornly resisting symbolization (Žižek, 1989: 122). ‘[Symbolic] reality itself is nothing but an embodiment of a certain blockage in the process of symbolization. For reality to exist, something must be left unspoken’ (Žižek, 1991: 45). In probability theory, this kernel is the individual instance. We can calculate the probability of a certain outcome for a certain situation, but there will always be a minimal remnant of chance determining the situation in the end. To assign a probability to an instance is to symbolize it. However, the individual, random occurrence contains an irreducible element of the Real. By linking himself to chance, the gambler opens up the symbolic order towards something beyond what may be symbolized. This is comparable to the shaman communicating with the spirits by throwing bones. In gambling, something also shows itself which is not otherwise visible. This something is the Real, and the Real is nothing. And precisely because it is nothing, it can be anything. The Ideology of the Gambler We have now seen how gambling consists of two basic elements: money and chance. Money is part of the symbolic order, while chance is on the side of the Real. What we need to look at more closely is the ideological dimension. With this dimension we will also be completing the Lacanian trinity of imaginary, symbolic and Real. The Weberian analysis of Protestantism and capitalism shows how lack of transparency in capitalist production and distribution of value is exploited as a screen onto which divine meaning may be projected. Profit is the sign of the predestination and salvation of the capitalist. Today, profit is indeed no longer seen as a sign of divine salvation, but the idea that money is somehow a sign of individual excellence seems to have survived intact. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 58 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) The non-transparency of the principles of value distribution is even stronger in gambling than in capitalism. Thus the surface available for ideological projection is proportionally larger. At the same time as the gambler ties himself to chance, he does not really acknowledge chance. For him, chance becomes a blank screen available for different kinds of ideological projections. Some gambling research guided by cognitive psychology has investigated how pathological gamblers suffer from so called ‘cognitive distortions’ in their perceptions of the game and the game setting (Gaboury and Ladouceur, 1989; Griffiths, 1994; Jørsel, 2003; Ladouceur et al., 2002; Nielsen and Røjskjær, 2005; Toneatto et al., 1997). These distortions may take on different forms:2 some gamblers believe themselves to possess a special knowledge that allegedly enables them to ‘figure out the system’, e.g. to calculate the numbers in a lotto draw based on the numbers drawn in previous rounds. The gambler develops a kind of quasi logical system, committing what is often referred to as ‘the gambler’s fallacy’ (Jørsel, 2003: 89; Ladouceur et al., 1998). At the roulette table, Dostoyevsky’s gambler provides a classic example of this kind of reasoning: I deduced from the scene one conclusion which seemed to me reliable – namely, that in the flow of fortuitous chances there is, if not a system, at all events a sort of order. This, of course, is a very strange thing. For instance, after a dozen middle figures there would always occur a dozen or so outer ones. Suppose the ball stopped twice at a dozen outer figures; it would then pass to a dozen of the first ones, and then, again, to a dozen of the middle ciphers, and fall upon them three or four times, and then revert to a dozen outers; whence, after another couple of rounds, the ball would again pass to the first figures, strike upon them once, and then return thrice to the middle series – continuing thus for an hour and a half, or two hours. One, three, two: one, three, two. It was all very curious. (Dostoyevsky, 2004 [1866]: 20) In another version of such cognitive distortions, the gambler believes that he possesses a special intuition or emotional perception by which he may sense the game, i.e. sense whenever a gaming machine is about to make a great payout. Jansbøl describes how one gambler compares the game with playing in a musical session with other people. The gambler’s musical ability to listen, be attentive and aware of the other musicians could, according to him, be transferred to the gaming environment, where he would in a similar fashion be able to sense the roulette game (Jansbøl, 2005: 136–8). Yet another kind of cognitive distortion is of a magical kind, where the gambler believes himself able to influence the outcome of the game by means of different rituals, such as standing in a certain way at the roulette table or bringing a mascot to bingo. The gambler’s beliefs, that he may predict, influence or in other ways improve his own chances in the game, are obviously contradictory to both scientific probability theory and common sense. The cognitive psychology approach to gambling does indeed view these beliefs as irrational, erroneous Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 59 perceptions of reality, which it is the object of therapeutic treatment to correct (Ladouceur and Walker, 1998). There is no reason to refute the findings of cognitive psychology. However, we may translate them into a Lacanian perspective by understanding the ‘cognitive distortions’ as the gambler’s imaginary or ideological ideas of how the game perceives him. In other words, he ascribes to the game a certain gaze by which the world of objects looks back at him. In the expression, ‘fortune smiles at him’, there is the idea of a certain power (fortune) addressing (smiling at) precisely me. In this way, the game sees something special in the gambler, which is not otherwise visible. This is in principle the same as what happens when the capitalist market allegedly sees something in the Protestant (his predestination) which is not otherwise visible. In Auster’s novel The Music of Chance, two brothers experience great fortune first by winning the lottery, and second on the markets of financial speculation. One brother describes their feeling of luck: [G]ood luck has continued to come our way. No matter what we do, everything seems to turn out right. So much money pours in now, we give half of it to charity – and still we have more than we know what to do with. It’s as though God has singled us out from other men. He’s showered us with good fortune and lifted us to the heights of happiness. . . . at times I feel that we’ve become immortal. (Auster, 1990: 95) The gambler produces a fantasy that, in the game, there is a power that is able to see in him that which is more than himself, and which no other, including himself, is able to see. He produces a fantasy that the game provides access to something more real than the immediately visible social reality. In playing . . . gamblers are doing more than simply engaging in a game, but are, in a sense, questioning their destiny. The query ‘will I win?’ takes on metaphysical significance, far transcending the outcome of the game and amounting to the gamblers’ questioning of the basis of their very existence. (Reith, 1999: 176) ‘The stake is a summons, the game a duel: chance is summoned to respond, obliged by the player’s wager to declare itself either favourable or hostile’ (Baudrillard, 1979: 143). In short, the game provides what Žižek calls the ‘answer of the Real’ to the gambler’s question. From Gambling to Problem Gambling The Lacanian account of gambling presented here also redefines what is at stake in pathological problem gambling. We have seen how gambling consists of two components: money and chance. Within cognitive psychology, the basic pathology of the problem gambler is defined as the fact that he has an unrealistic relation to chance, since he erroneously believes himself able to control, influence or predict events that are objectively Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 60 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) random (Ladouceur and Walker, 1998). Instead of this thesis, I will here argue for an understanding of problem gambling which is almost its double negation: the basic pathology of the problem gambler is not the fact that he has an unrealistic relationship to chance, but on the contrary, that his relationship to money is realistic, all too realistic. It is true that the problem gambler does not behave fully rationally in the game, insofar as he is not fully aware that the game is completely random and hence cannot be predicted or influenced. The question is, however, whether the problem gambler in this respect is so much different from the ordinary gambler, or from people in general in the way they live their lives. Are we aware of the divorce statistics when we engage in marriage? Do we think about cancer statistics when we start smoking? And do we have traffic casualty statistics in the back of our minds when we get into our car? In so many aspects of life we do things that are irrational or downright foolish from a statistical point of view. So when the problem gambler denies chance, he may not be so radically different from the rest of us. The crucial difference between problem gamblers and ordinary gamblers may rather lie in their relationship to money. In capitalist society, profit functions as the sublime object of ideology by incarnating the answer of the Real. Strictly speaking, the worker has no access to profit, so to him it represents a distant dream, something to read about in magazines. But even the capitalist does not have unlimited access to profit. He may very well let the worker work for him, but in practice this also demands some managerial work from the capitalist to ‘make the wheels turn’. Furthermore, the market sets certain limits to the amount of profit even the most able and greedy capitalist can accumulate. It takes time and effort to appropriate profit. In this way, work lies as a constant buffer between profit and the subject of capitalist society. Thus a certain distance between the desiring subject and the sublime object of this desire is maintained. As is continuously pointed out by both Lacan and Žižek, this distance is a necessary precondition for the maintenance of the object as sublime. However, in gambling, the gambler does experience a kind of unlimited access to profit. He bets $100 and wins $3500 with no actual intermediate. What stands between the gambler and the unlimited win is exactly nothing, in the form of chance. As an absence of regularity, the Real of chance is a form of nothingness. A typical moment in the development of a gambling addiction is the experience of a relatively high win on a relatively low bet at an early stage in the gambling career. This phenomenon is referred to as ‘the big win’ (Walker, 1992). Even though far from everyone who experiences a big win ends up developing an addiction, for many problem gamblers the experience seems to have had a trigger effect in relation to their compulsion to gamble. ‘Money won is twice as sweet as money earned,’ says Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in the film The Color of Money. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 61 However, too much sweet can make you feel sick. To see money coming to you practically out of the blue and seemingly without limitation can be an exhilarating experience. But it also entails a kind of desublimation of money. In gambling, money is no longer something you have to work hard to accumulate in even small amounts. It is rather something you may win out of hand in unlimited amounts. According to Marx, the value of a commodity equals the amount of work laid down in its production. This may help to explain the gambler’s relationship to money. Since he has done nothing to gain it, it also loses its value. Hitting a jackpot is ridiculous, a joke, sense in nonsense. When people hit jackpots, first they scream, then they laugh, then look around for someone else to laugh along. It’s odd. You have just bet, say, $10 and got $5000 back – 500 times your money. You just made two or three months’ salary in a breath, so you laugh. It must be at least partly relief, but mostly you are laughing because this event is an echo of all that you know to be so but in your everyday life have set aside for the more efficient functioning of social, political, and economic systems and the greater psychological good of everybody. This money just fell on you and it makes no sense. It’s as nonsensical as love or cancer (Barthelme and Barthelme, 1999: 92). The gambler’s experience of hitting the jackpot is a borderline ideological phenomenon. It is, so to speak, a post-ideological phenomenon, insofar as the money loses its ideological power. For a split second, it is revealed to the gambler that all the meaning ordinarily projected onto money is nothing but that, just a projection. He is staring directly into the Real, realizing that ordinary reality is only a symbolically constructed illusion. Thus money loses its function as a symbol. It loses its ability to represent anything. It is very telling that, instead of playing with ordinary money in casinos, you play with plastic chips (Kusyszyn, 1984). Even though ordinary paper notes and coins do not look particularly sublime, plastic chips are a downright parody of money. They look like play money, Monopoly money, funny money, and this is exactly what they are to the gambler. ‘When you had enough stacks of blacks, the idea that each one of them represented so much food, so much rent, so much car payment, escaped along with the rest of ordinary reality’ (Barthelme and Barthelme, 1999: 84). As noted before, the difference between gambling and capitalism is a matter of degree, rather than absolute. Dealing on the stock market may result in a similar experience of money losing its value. This is especially true when trading futures and options, where losses and gains may fluctuate exponentially compared to the amount invested. Hence it is noteworthy how some stock traders may clinically be diagnosed as compulsive gamblers (O’Brien, 1998; Pavalko, 2001: 33–6). To the ordinary gambler the game, in which the money is de-sublimated, is a minor excursion from his general life. He has a fun night at the casino, winning some, losing some, but the next day he is back at work in the ordinary reality, and the experience at the casino has affected him no more than a casual dream. The problem gambler, in contrast, is unable to Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 62 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) return to daily life in capitalist society, which is in so many respects structured around the illusion of money as a sublime object. The pathological gambler’s problem is a kind of disillusionment with money. He has experienced how money is just a symbolic construction, distributed arbitrarily, and therefore not worthy of being taken as a sign of predestination or some other form of individual distinction. However much he may want to, he cannot forget what he has seen in the game, and therefore cannot recreate his ideological conception of money. This means that his entire conception of the world disintegrates. The ordinary gambler may employ his capacity for ‘cynical distance’ in order to integrate the gambling experience into his ordinary world-view. But the problem gambler has had an experience that distorts the very fundamental level of ideological fantasy, throwing him permanently out of joint with capitalism. ‘[T]here is “reality” only in so far as there is an ontological gap, a crack, at its very heart’ (Žižek, 1999: 60). It is the function of ideology to conceal this gap. Gambling and, for some, specifically the experience of the big win, has revealed this gap in the heart of the symbolic reality. The problem gambler’s thoughts and his general urge to gamble emanate from an acute urge to close the gap. That he is drawn to gambling is of course paradoxical insofar as it is precisely in the game that the gap has been revealed. Apart from the big win, another typical phenomenon among problem gamblers is chasing, where they keep returning to the game in order to win back what they have lost (Lesieur, 1979, 1984). This is obviously a very risky strategy. It is also paradoxical, since research shows that even when the problem gambler actually wins by continuing his game, he rarely spends the money to pay off his gambling debts, but typically just prolongs the gambling (Nielsen and Røjskjær, 2005: 62). However irrational chasing may seem it does have its own special logic. When the problem gambler explains his continuous gambling as a way to try to win back what he has lost, he is actually telling the truth. And when he does not stop, even when he has won, it is because he has not won back what he has lost. The real loss faced by the problem gambler is not the actual amount of money as such. It is the loss of money as a sublime object, as the structuring principle of his ordinary symbolic reality. The problem gambler has lost his desire for money. When gambling is no longer structured by the desire for money, another force takes over. ‘Once we move beyond desire – that is to say, beyond the fantasy which sustains desire – we enter the strange domain of drive: the domain of the closed circular palpitation which finds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesture’ (Žižek, 1997: 30). The move from desire to drive is illustrated by the following account: Early on you notice that winning and losing are not so different. Both involve this huge buildup of pressure; the higher the stakes, the greater the pressure, the more intense the experience. This is one of the reasons you end up betting Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 63 two or four thousand dollars at a throw, because whether you win or lose, you still have 85 percent of the experience, you still get 90 percent of the thrill. The losing part is not fun, exactly. In fact, fun doesn’t come into it, but the heat, the dizzying adrenal rush, is much the same whether the chips come back to you or go in the dealer’s rack. . . . It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s that you play. (Barthelme and Barthelme, 1999: 119–20) At the same time as the problem gambler is driven by the satisfaction of gambling as such, his compulsive behaviour may also hold the hope of escaping the dead-lock. What he is trying to win back is not the lost money as such (even though he may say so) but rather the lost desire for money. He is hoping that another big win may re-awaken his desire. Perhaps he even hopes that if he just loses a sufficiently large amount, in the very loss he will again feel the desire for the money that he is now losing. The tragic irony is of course that every time the gambler either wins or loses a large amount, money will appear so much the more arbitrary and meaningless to him. He has lost his desire by having come too close to the object, too close to the money, and his problem is now that by staying in the game he is staying close to the money. Tellingly, one of the first steps in the therapeutic treatment of the problem gambler is to cut off his access to money. He is told not to carry cash around. His credit card is cancelled. He is told to make deals with family and friends not to lend him any money, etc. Translating this therapeutic step into our Lacanian approach, it may be seen as a way to reestablish distance from money, the distance from the object necessary for desire to be re-installed. This is a direct attempt to re-sublimate money and re-establish the problem gambler’s economy of desire. Conclusion It is said of bumble bees that from an aerodynamic point of view they should not be able to fly. However, they are not aware of this and therefore fly around happily in their ignorance. Like the bumble bee’s ability to fly, the functioning of money in capitalist society seems to rely on a certain amount of belief and non-knowledge on the part of the capitalist subject. Social reality is ‘a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain nonknowledge of its participants – if we come to “know too much”, to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself’ (Žižek, 1989: 21). In the game, the gambler has experienced how money changes hands in a completely arbitrary and meaningless fashion. This experience has had traumatic consequences for his illusion of money and his perception of capitalist reality. In the game, the problem gambler has had a traumatizing experience whereby his problem is now that he ‘knows too much’, and is no longer able to maintain his ordinary capitalist reality based on the illusion of money as a sublime object, distributed in society according to a higher Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 64 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) meaningful principle. The problem gambler has come too close to the sublime object of capitalism. When, in therapy, he is cut off from money, it is comparable to being captured in the board game of Ludo, and then having to move one’s piece back to the beginning to start over again. Cutting him off from money is an attempt to move the problem gambler back to a state of a pre-capitalist barter economy. From there he has to start over again, and on an individual level, almost move through the historic evolution from barter economy to fully developed capitalism. In this way it is hoped he will again be able to handle money with the devoutness appropriate to capitalist society. The precondition for this is that he is therapeutically or otherwise enabled to ‘forget’ his disillusioning knowledge about the true nature of money. The compulsive gambler is like an unfortunate grounded bumble bee, who, in order to fly again, has to regain its former ignorance of the fact that it cannot really fly. Notes This article is part of a larger research project on pathology and capitalism. The author is grateful to Veluxfonden and Sygekassernes Helsefond for providing the financial support for this project. Kåre Jansbøl, Lene Koch, Uffe Lind, Magnus Larusson, Per Nielsen and Steffen Røjskjær have generously contributed with valuable comments on the work. 1. This metaphor for the Real is inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous passage on the limits of language: ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned’ (Wittgenstein, 1945: §217). 2. The following list far from exhausts the possible distortions. For more detail see Toneatto et al. (1997) or Ladouceur et al. (2002). References Abbott, M.W. and R.A. Volberg (1996) ‘The New Zealand National Survey of Problem and Pathological Gambling’, Journal of Gambling Studies 12(2): 143–60. Auster, P. (1990) The Music of Chance. New York: Penguin. Barthelme, F. and S. Barthelme (1999) Double Down – Reflections on Gambling and Loss. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Baudrillard, J. (1979) Seduction. New York: St Martin’s Press. Becoña, E. (1993) ‘The Prevalence of Pathological Gambling in Galicia, Spain’, Journal of Gambling Studies 9: 353–69. Becoña, E. (1996) ‘Prevalence Surveys of Problem and Pathological Gambling in Europe: The Cases of Germany, Holland and Spain’, Journal of Gambling Studies 12(2): 179–92. Black, D.W. and T. Moyer (1998) ‘Clinical Features and Psychiatric Comorbidity of Subjects with Pathological Gambling Behavior’, Psychiatric Services 49: 1434–9. Costa, N. (1988) Automatic Pleasures – The History of the Coin Machine. London: The Bath Press. Dostoyevsky, F. (2004 [1866]) The Gambler. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 Bjerg – A Theory of Compulsive Gambling 65 Evans-Pritchard, E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gaboury, A. and R. Ladouceur (1989) ‘Erroneous Perceptions and Gambling’, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 4: 411–20. Griffiths, M.D. (1994) ‘The Role of Cognitive Bias and Skill in Fruit Machine Gambling’, British Journal of Psychology 85: 351–69. Hacking, I. (1975) The Emergence of Probability. London: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jansbøl, K. (2005) Tilfældighed og kontrol: En etnografisk undersøgelse af det danske spillemiljø [Chance and Control: An Ethnographical Study of the Danish Gambling Community]. Copenhagen: Department of Anthropology KU. Jørsel, M.B. (2003) Ludomani – ikke flere indsatser, tak! [Compulsive Gambling – No More Bets Please!]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Jørsel, M.B., P. Mamsen and P. Nielsen (1996) Spil uden grænser [Boundless Gambling]. Middelfart: Ringgården. Kavanagh, T.M. (1993) Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance – The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-century France. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kusyszyn, I. (1984) ‘The Psychology of Gambling’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 474: 133–45. Lacan, J. (1964) ‘Position of the Unconscious’, in Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1966) ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton. Ladouceur, R. and M. Walker (1998) ‘The Cognitive Approach to Understanding and Treating Pathological Gambling’, pp. 588–601 in A.S. Bellack and M. Hersen (eds) Comprehensive Clinical Psychology. New York: Pergamon. Ladouceur, R., C. Sylvain, C. Boutin and C. Doucet (2002) Understanding and Treating the Pathological Gambler. Quebec: John Wiley. Ladouceur, R., C. Sylvain, H. Letarte, I. Giroux and C. Jacques (1998) ‘Cognitive Treatment of Pathological Gamblers’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 36(12): 1111–19. Lesieur, H.R. (1979) ‘The Compulsive Gambler’s Spiral of Options and Involvement’, Psychiatry 42: 79–87. Lesieur, H.R. (1984) The Chase – Career of the Compulsive Gambler. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Marx, K. (1861) Grundrisse. New York: Vintage. Marx, K. (1867) Das Kapital – Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Nielsen, P. and S. Røjskjær (2005) Ludomani – Karakteristika, psykopatologi og behandlingsforløb [Compulsive Gambling – Characteristics, Psychopathology and Course of Treatment]. Middelfart: Ringgården. O’Brien, T. (1998) Bad Bet: The Inside Story of the Glamour, Glitz, and Danger of America’s Gambling Industry. New York: Random House. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015 66 Theory, Culture & Society 26(4) Pavalko, R.M. (2001) Problem Gambling and its Treatment – An Introduction. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publishers. Reith, G. (1999) The Age of Chance – Gambling and Western Culture. London: Routledge. Toneatto, T., T. Blitz-Miller, K. Calderwood, R. Dragonetti and A. Tsanos (1997) ‘Cognitive Distortions in Heavy Gambling’, Journal of Gambling Studies 13(3): 253–66. Walker, M. (1992) The Psychology of Gambling. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Weber, M. (1905) Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], pp. 27–277 in Die protestahtische Ethik I – Eine Aufsatzsammlung. Tübingen: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Wittgenstein, L. (1945) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (1991) Looking Awry – An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject – The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Ole Bjerg is a postdoc at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Recent publications include the book For tæt på kapitalismen – Ludomani, narkomani og købemani [Too Close to Capitalism – Compulsive Gambling, Drug Addiction and Compulsive Buying] (MTF, 2008) and the article ‘Drug Addiction and Capitalism: Too Close to the Body’, Body & Society 14(1) 2008. He is currently working on a sociological research project on poker and capitalism. [email: [email protected]] Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Copenhagen Business School on May 13, 2015