CHAPTER 2
Intensity
EMPIRE OF THE INTENSITIES: A RANDOM WALK DOWN LAS VEGAS BOULEVARD
Capitalism no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive.
—MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI, Empire
Walking down the Las Vegas Strip at night, you can’t help feeling that you’re at the center of a brave new world of commerce. The Strip seems a perfect example of both the product and the engine of the American economy. Vegas, in other words, represents a kind of ground zero of the postindustrial American economy, with its just-in-time (which is to say, all-the-time) delivery of extremely high-concept sensory overload, staffed by wave after wave of service labor. As Marc Cooper writes, “If Lenin once summed up Communism as ‘Soviet power plus electrification,’ the highest formulation of the New American Economy might just be ‘casinos plus part-time jobs’ ” (1997, 30). And every twenty-minute change of dealers and croupiers displays the flexible specialization integral to this post-Fordist economy.
However, one could argue that today’s Las Vegas is an exemplary economic site in more ways than one: it obviously works according to the logic of the service economy, but it also figures the shift from such a post-Fordist world to the emergent and troubled new economy that one reads about every day in the Wall Street Journal. Those trying to name and diagnose this new economy often file it under the old rubric of neoliberal “finance capital,” that regime in which speculative capital is wagered on a future of supposed or projected worth rather than invested in the production and mass marketing of new commodities or services. In other words, the future of capital seems to rest not so much on the innovation of products or manufacturing processes (a Fordist model) or in the colonization of new services or clients (the post-Fordist model), but in a futures market on capital itself, in a kind of gambling on the future worth of stocks and other speculation devices. As Fredric Jameson argues in “Culture and Finance Capital,” the future of capitalism “resides no longer in the factories and the spaces of extraction and production but on the floor of the stock market, jostling for more intense profitability. But it won’t be one industry competing with another branch, or even one productive technology against another more advanced one in the same line of manufacturing, but rather in the form of speculation itself” (1997a, 251.) The future of capitalism, in other words, rests not on the extraction of profit from commodities or services but on the production of money directly from money—making profit by wagering on an anticipated future outcome. And the future, it seems, is now.
This, I take it, is what Hardt and Negri point toward in the epigraph to this chapter: capitalism is no longer primarily “extensive” (seeking new markets, new raw materials, untapped resources), but rather has become “intensive.” Capitalism today seeks primarily to saturate and deepen—intensify—its hold over existing markets, insofar as global capitalism of the twenty-first century has run out of new territories to conquer. And the intensities of finance (how do you squeeze more profits out of the stuff you already have?) become the linchpin practices of this risky new economy. Because it’s a sector of the economy where capital is staked “intensively” (directly in order to generate more capital) rather than “extensively” (creating new tangible goods or services, which are then bought or sold to produce capital), the regime of finance capital has often been nicknamed “casino capitalism” (see Strange 1997). As Marx himself wrote, stock markets and futures markets work according to the logic of gambling—where no commodity is directly produced or consumed. According to Marx, it is precisely this gambling logic that gives bankers and other speculators “their nicely mixed character of swindler and prophet” (1997, 572–73).
In Capital, M-C-M' names the dialectical formula whereby accumulated wealth (M) is invested in the production of commodities, thereby becoming capital (C); the commodities produced by that investment capital are then sold to produce profit (M'). Thus begun, the dialectical adventure of money continues—with ever-more accumulation, evermore investment in the production of commodities, and ever-more profits reaped by the capitalist: M-C-M'. Recalling this economic vocabulary of classical Marxism, one might say that finance capital skips a step, and its formula might be written as Marx writes the formula for all money lending and finance, M-M': “money creating more money,” as Marx succinctly puts it in Capital: Volume 3 (1894, pt. 5, sec. 24.2). In other words, an increase in finance capital requires no direct or overt mediation by a commodity or service: no commodity (C) mediates between investment (M) and profit (M'); no actual goods or services are required to represent or serve as a placeholder for the abstract value of invested money; and no labor power is required to account for the transformation or generation of surplus value as profit. One might say in a kind of shorthand that M-M' comprises the formula for all forms of gambling, where money is directly intensified—made greater or smaller—rather than transformed into a different state through the mediating work of investment, labor, commodity production, or exchange.1
Following this logic to its limits on the streets and gaming tables of Las Vegas, one might argue that contemporary Vegas doesn’t primarily produce either goods or services; rather, it produces what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call actual and virtual “intensities”—the thrills of winning, the aches of losing, the awe of the spectacle, weddings and divorces.2 Like the booming speculation markets in stocks, futures, and options that fueled its reinvention, Vegas’s primary products are two: winners and losers. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, capital of all kinds—phantasmatic, symbolic, monetary—is staked in the hope of producing more.
Insofar as Las Vegas specializes in the production of such intensities—direct, hypnotic states of excess, loss, and expenditure—it deserves some renewed attention as a privileged site in the emergence of the newest American economy. If we spent the 1970s and ’80s “learning from Las Vegas” the cultural lessons of a triumphant kitschy postmodernism (see Venturi 1977), I want to suggest that there are a number of emergent economic truths that we can learn from Las Vegas several decades later.
The most insistent thing we’ve already learned from Las Vegas is that so-called economic truths are inseparable from cultural or aesthetic ones. You don’t have to spend much time in Vegas to witness the utter collapse of the base/superstructure model and obliteration of the classical Marxian idea that capital speculation is wholly parasitic and cultural, producing nothing of consequence for the real economic base.3 From Bugsy Siegel’s original gamble in the desert, through the Rat Pack years of livin’ large, right up to the new Theme Park Las Vegas (rebuilt on junk bonds and culture industry profits), all of Las Vegas’s economic power is built on a series of cultural speculations; and even today its economic power and well-being are based largely on its cultural identity as the home of excess: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Vegas has plenty to teach us about the economic base of today, but we learn first and foremost from Las Vegas that this economic base is always already shot through with superstructural, cultural capital.4
Capital that’s merely parasitic, that adds or produces nothing “real,” can’t build this kind of massive empire in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas is a kind of testimonial to contemporary modes of power and functions oddly like the symbols of bygone imperial dominance that Vegas so gleefully appropriates: the Egyptian Pyramids and the Sphinx (Luxor), the glory and decadence of Rome (Caesar’s Palace), the Italian Renaissance (Venetian and Bellagio), the power of the Sultans (Aladdin), and even the utopian modernism of the City Center complex.
Ancient capitals of empire functioned as centers of both cultural and economic power, with the sheer spectacle of their symbolic excesses working to cement a pedagogical relation between the imperial force of empire and the symbolic spectacle of aesthetic expenditure. On a pilgrimage to ancient Rome from the provinces, one would be led to recognize very quickly (if somewhat unconsciously) that the awe-inspiring architectural spectacles of Rome were made possible by the very same forces of imperialism that rule your home village—just as the vacationing Iowa Knights of Columbus group learns, at some level, the truths of the new economy through Las Vegas’s logics of intensity and speculation.
And there is still much learning going on in Las Vegas every day; it’s a place of hard economic lessons, indexed by an old joke: “Vegas: I arrived in a $50,000 Mercedes; I left in a $500,000 bus.” However, I want to shift ground somewhat and suggest that we don’t so much learn from the spectacle of intensities that is Las Vegas (“learning” implies critical distance and rational judgment; it implies that we can decide to accept or reject the lessons played out there). Maybe these days we don’t learn from Las Vegas as much as we are forced to respond to the emergent mode of power—the new global casino capitalism—that is Las Vegas. Or maybe, like an ancient Roman subject from the hinterlands, we are even compelled to obey Las Vegas.5
Hail Caesar!
Perhaps the best site to begin surveying this burgeoning empire of commerce and culture is Caesar’s Palace Casino and Hotel, located at the center of the Las Vegas Strip, an appropriately labyrinthine imperial site. If Jameson had a hard time making his way around the Bonaventure Hotel in LA, one shudders to think of the disorientation he’d experience in the “Forum Shops at Caesar’s”: an unapologetic overlap of hotel, casino, restaurant, theme park, and shopping mall—all done up in some hyper-postmodern version of the ancient past. Around Caesar’s shops are scattered mythological Greek figures like Poseidon, Homer, and the Trojan Horse—all emblems that, we may recall, were already ancient by the time of Plato, some four hundred years before the reign of Augustus Caesar. The statuary rubs elbows with a roaming live Cleopatra and her buff Roman Centurions, all of whom will gladly pose for pictures with Caesar’s honored guests.
The Forum Shops are a hybrid of the contemporary suburban mall and the nineteenth-century flaneur’s arcade (curiously decked out with ubiquitous Roman aqueducts—flows, everywhere flows). You’re ferried into the Forum from the sweltering Strip along a series of covered moving sidewalks—a welcome fit for an emperor. When you want to leave, however, you have to trudge the five hundred yards back to Las Vegas Boulevard like a plebeian—through the Caesar’s casino (if you can find the poorly marked exit) and out over the unforgivingly hot acres of blacktop set aside for horseless carriages. While you’re there, the “experience” of the Forum Shops is rounded out by the usual American mall stores (Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch) as well as unusual ones (Burberry, Versace, Cavalli); restaurants launched by ubiquitous uber-chefs Wolfgang Puck and Bobby Flay; and a huge aquarium, which both complements the statuary in “Poseidon’s Fountain” (right next to the Cheesecake Factory in the Roman Great Hall) and serves as a backdrop for one of the rare free shows in Vegas, the “Fall of Atlantis.”6
In Caesar’s new empire, the myths of the absolute past and the promises of the deferred future are mishmashed together for easy, intensive, one-stop “experience” shopping. The heroes of Atlantis, Troy, Greece, and Rome did not die in vain; they perished to help create this new empire of “freedom”—which, as we all know, means subjective empowerment as consumer choice, the only water fit to satisfy our thirsts. But, one might ask the FAO Schwartz Trojan Horse (which curiously talks, making it an appropriately anachronistic mix of Mr. Ed and the Oracle of Delphi), What do you get for a crowd that has already experienced everything? The answer: more of the same.
Contemporary Las Vegas is not so much a figure for imperialist expansion or assimilation—the old-time “Fuck you, we’re movin’ in” Vegas of the Mob and the Teamsters—as it is an ongoing, live experiment conducted to see what happens when a certain imperial project has completed itself, when there are no more lands for Caesar to conquer: “the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” as Hunter Thompson (1998, 68) put it. In other words, Las Vegas’s current modes of power are no longer primarily deployed in the service of legitimating the enterprise or overcoming an enemy (the government, the middle-American prude, the other casinos); those battles have already been decided. Rather, emergent modes of both corporate and subjective power in Las Vegas are aimed at intensifying what you’ve already got: expanding market share and deepening the demographic base by deploying new forms of value-added entertainment “experiences.”
In short, the economic force that’s deployed in Las Vegas functions not by conquering or assimilating new territory but rather by intensifying new versions of familiar things: for example, Paris (with its own Eiffel Tower), the Venetian (with its replica frescoed ceilings and gondolas in the annexed shopping mall), and New York, New York (the building itself constructed as a faux version of Manhattan, complete with a Statue of Liberty). The wholly rebuilt Aladdin, a posh theme-park version of the eponymous Mob casino, was opened at the dawn of the new century—overtly completing the feedback loop of anachronism by taking the past of Las Vegas itself as the original historical script to be remixed and remastered. (That proved not “intense” enough a concept, so the Aladdin became the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino, with its Hollywood-film theme, including movie memorabilia in every guest room—the stars’ throwaways serving as the altar relics of privatized capitalism.)
In such settings, you don’t so much consume goods as you have experiences where your subjectivity can be intensified, bent, and retooled. In contemporary Las Vegas, you are offered opportunities for doing work on yourself (experiencing, seeing, feeling) rather than opportunities for confronting, overcoming, purchasing, or otherwise consuming some “other.” As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write, “In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward . . . biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (2000, xiii). The force of the new globalized economic empire—the empire one spies from Caesar’s Palace—doesn’t primarily turn outward in an expansive, colonialist, or consumerist assimilation. Now it turns inward toward intensification of existing biopolitical resources. The final product, in the end, is you and me.
And gambling is the logical cornerstone of such an empire, insofar as risk is the perfect figure and vehicle for this new economy of intensities. In any endeavor, but especially economic ones, risk of various kinds is irreducible. You can’t simply accept or deny risk wholesale; no actor has that kind of control over contingency. Any actor or collective can only modulate risk—speed it up or slow it down. Certainly, risk can be canalized—some outcomes made more likely, and some less likely; but risk per se cannot be subsumed or assimilated. Risk constitutes a flow that can’t be overcome but one that can be affected only by being intensified—being made greater or smaller, faster or slower. This intensification, to take only the most obvious example, is what’s on display when gamblers “chase” losses: increasing their bets, and their risk, in the hope of getting even.7
Such is the logic of intensity, then, on both the global and the subjective levels: in a world that contains no virgin territory—no new experiences, no new markets—any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources, modulate them in some way(s). This, in a nutshell, is the homology between the cultural logic of globalization and the economic logic of finance capital, neither of which is dedicated to discovering wholly new sources of human or economic capital: neither is set on cold war goals like seeking out raw materials or new territory to bring into the empire. Rather, the challenge for the globalized logic of finance capital is to find new mechanisms to work on money itself—new modes of risk intensification like derivatives, swaps, futures, currency trading, arbitrage.
On a subjective level of intensities, then, the paradigmatic Vegas casino experience is no longer modeled on the existentialism of Dostoyevsky’s Gambler: a masculinized, heroic confrontation with a mysterious “other” (God, fate, chance, destiny, sex, money).8 Here in Vegas, authenticity is no longer won extensively by challenging such an other but by a more direct, intensive retooling of the self. Even the strictly speaking corporate force in town is not aimed essentially at overcoming the competition. In contemporary biz-speak, the hostile corporate takeover or leveraged buyout (staple of the junk-bond era that provided the money to build the theme-park Vegas) is a distant memory—soooo ’80s. “Mergers” and “synergy” are the new watchwords of empire.
Caesar, in other words, is not at war with the Flamingo or the Bellagio; they are all merely coexisting provinces within the same essentially peaceable kingdom. As a mundane example of this synergy, note that casino chips in Las Vegas are—unlike competing national currencies—essentially interchangeable: the other big casinos will treat Caesar’s chips as the coin of their realm as well, which only makes sense, because you can’t spend capital if you don’t liquidate it—if you can’t morph it into a form where it can immediately flow. Monetary chauvinism—like so many practices of the cold war nation-state—is just plain inefficient. At least since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the millennial “defeat” of Soviet power worldwide, it seems that there is no “out there” for casino capitalism to vanquish, no dialectical other against which to define or test itself.9 Such an empire can expand only by intensifying its victory, since there are no new lands to conquer.
Empire of the Intensities
Not coincidentally, such a very literal sense of empire’s completion pervades another high-profile exercise in Romanesque anachronism at the dawn of the new millennium, Ridley Scott’s Academy Award–winning film Gladiator (2000). In the opening scene, we’re introduced to our protagonist, General Maximus (Russell Crowe, not channeling Charles Olson), who’s about to lead his men into the final battle of the Roman Empire’s last great campaign, circa AD 180. Maximus is the favorite general of the reigning emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), the last Caesar of Rome’s Golden Age. Victory against the “Germanians,” we are told by the opening credits and by Caesar himself, will suture and complete the empire’s imperialist expansion. After this battle, which the Romans are sure to win, the peaceable kingdom of Rome’s Golden Age will have been wholly forged: there will be no more wars left to fight, no territory left to assimilate.
And seemingly no more movie, no more story to tell. Once this opening battle is over and the empire is secured, what’s left to narrate? Audiences seem unlikely to respond favorably to a three-hour chronicle of an aged Caesar and his favorite general playing checkers and reminiscing over libations at the Old Soldiers’ Club in Rome. As far as a promising Hollywood plot goes, the bureaucratic management of more-or-less peaceable kingdoms (whether Marcus’s management of civil empire or Maximus’s desired return to the domestic sphere of the family) hardly seems the stuff of spectacle-laden, epic cinema in the tradition of Ben-Hur or Spartacus. After seeing Maximus lead his men into the last battle for empire—a sweeping, gory, jump-cut-laden slaughter of the Germanians—do we then look forward to one hundred minutes of Maximus mowing the lawn and ordering the kids to clean up their rooms?
Luckily, Caesar’s venal son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) steps in to save the plot. Seeing that Caesar distrusts him and favors Maximus—or, worse, that Caesar intends to turn power over to the Senate—Commodus murders his father and ascends immediately to the role of emperor. Aside from the simple motivating force of Commodus’s lust for power, the audience can’t help noting that Commodus also grasps a complex historical truth: after the defeat of the Germanians, the old emperor has outlived his usefulness. The skills of the father—assimilating and annexing land through warfare—are not the skills required for managing a vast transnational and multicultural empire. As Hardt and Negri write of a parallel in our globalized world, post–cold war politics becomes a matter of regulating “hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command” (2000, xii–xiii).
Paradoxically, Gladiator’s conquering Caesar has no place in the multicultural, global empire that he’s brought about—where a kinder, gentler form of coercion, bloodshed, and violence will have to be invented and practiced.10 Needless to say, neither does Maximus—commander of the tightly ordered and homogeneous world of the Roman legions—have any clue concerning the administration of such an unwieldy and complex new world order. But Commodus has some ideas. In fact, he’s hip to the productive qualities of biopower and the coercions of the culture industry: keep the masses fat and happy by giving them entertainment, he surmises. Bring back the gladiators!
If we enter the world of Gladiator at the end of Roman imperialism proper—where the project for the foreseeable future becomes managing diversity rather than assimilating territory—what better tactic than bringing back the crowd-pleasing, heroically nostalgic intensities of gladiator battles? Scott’s film—somewhat disingenuously, given its participation in this empire of nostalgia and representation—shows us that like our own colonial cold war, Roman imperialism was indeed brutal; but the film retroactively portrays those days of disciplinary imperialism as honorable, satisfying, and “real” in some way. We see this trace of authenticity repeated in Maximus’s signature trope, deployed throughout the film: he picks up a handful of local soil before entering any battle, thereby cementing his existential bond with the earth and the land—with the forces of nature and the stability of the real.
Certainly Gladiator suggests that the imperialist world of the film’s opening was a dangerous place—paradoxical, fraught with contradiction. Men had to act and fight for a nationalist abstraction, “Rome,” without really understanding why. But the faux, staged gladiator fights of the post-imperialist empire (those that dominate the rest of the film) will never offer anything close to this kind of authentic subjective heroism. In the end, Gladiator shows us a world where the hard-fought battles of imperialism bring about the ancient analog to the slap-fights that festoon twenty-first-century reality TV programs. The eclipsing of Roman colonial expansion leads to an even more sinister kind of image-based totalitarianism: a spectacle economy staged for the amusement and, finally, control of the Roman masses—represented as decadent, fickle, Colosseum-bound couch potatoes. If Augustus ruled them with discipline, fear, and grudging respect, Commodus—a sort of Baudrillard in a toga—will amuse them to death.
I take this detour through Gladiator for a reason. First, the film quite overtly wants to function as a Spartacus (1960) for the new millennium; and like Stanley Kubrick’s film, Scott’s Gladiator offers—among other things—a historical allegory by which we might come to understand, and maybe even resist, the sinister powers of our own day. The most obvious target of Kubrick’s film—and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo’s script—was the anticommunist hysteria of 1950s America. The (in)famous scene where dozens, then hundreds, of slaves stand up and pronounce “I am Spartacus!” functions as a kind of critical inversion and refusal of the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee’s practice throughout the 1950s—and, more broadly, the scene functions as a reaction to McCarthyist racial, ethnic, and political intolerance and hysteria in the US. Rather than offer up the names of others—“name names”—to absolve yourself of guilt, Spartacus models a mode of resistance to political blackmail: “I am Spartacus” could be roughly translated as, “If freedom of thought and action is the charge, then yes, we are all ‘guilty,’ and proud of it. We are all Spartacus—we are all communists, Jews, African Americans, poor people, homosexuals.” In Spartacus, we see the slaves standing up to power through solidarity, and in the process the film provides a democratic model of collective action—a united subaltern strategy that promises to confront totalitarian threats of any stripe.11
Scott’s Gladiator likewise uses the model of the ancient Roman Empire to comment on recent events. But, half a century later, Scott’s presentation of global capitalism is inexorably different from Kubrick’s cold war moment. Rome, for example, is depicted in Gladiator as a crowded, multicultural, and transnational city, much like contemporary global metropolises New York, Shanghai, or London. The gladiators, slaves with whom Maximus falls in after his family is slaughtered on the orders of Commodus, uniformly hail from the distant, annexed Roman colonies: the Middle East, Africa, Spain, Germania. And among Scott’s contemporary targets seems to be the exposure of a kind of postmodern plantation system, with all the shit jobs of our empire still performed by those from the so-called third world. More directly, however, Gladiator attempts to name and critique the globalized urban mass’s obsession with media spectacle—the subtle voyeuristic coercions of “extreme” sports, political spin doctoring, trash talk shows, reality TV, celebrity gossip, millionaire quiz shows, and so on. Like the decadent Romans portrayed in the film, we post-postmodern capitalists are trained by our media masters to watch rather than act, consume rather than do.
Presumably, following the lead of Spartacus, Gladiator should try to produce a strategy for us, a model for resisting the commodified spectacle that the film so effectively demonstrates. There should be another way mapped—a response that might act as a vehicle for collective resistance, a road to some better place. But, alas, recall that the film is framed by the completion of empire, the literal absence of any such outside. In our world, as in the world of Gladiator, there’s literally no place else to go: the dominant mode of power has succeeded in covering the known earth. And in the end, Gladiator responds to this situation fairly predictably—offering nothing but nostalgia for an older form of domination, longing for the good old days of discipline. Throughout, but especially in the end, the film rather shamelessly lauds the imperialist, masculine labor power of Maximus and Augustus (“good”!) and excoriates the feminized and incestuous practices of the image-monger Commodus (need I say, “bad”—even his name suggests heading for the toilet). Indeed, they don’t get much more reprehensible than Commodus: incest and the hint of child molesting are bad enough, but this guy’s even shown to be a bad sport, having fatally wounded a bound and helpless Maximus moments before their final battle in the Colosseum. So Maximus is forced to stumble through—and of course win—the battle while dying from this wound.
After the mutual death of Maximus and Commodus in the Colosseum, the Senate is poised to take power at the conclusion of the film, with Senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi) as their leader. But this ending gesture toward “democracy” can’t leave savvy, image-saturated movie audiences entirely happy. Senator Gracchus portrays himself as the ancient counterpart of a Kennedy liberal (“Not a man of the people,” he reminds us, “but a man for the people”). However, Camelot hasn’t fared so well in revisionary American history: Jack Kennedy was elected president largely because of his slick media savvy (or the 1960 Nixon’s lack thereof), and he’s remembered these days less for any populist credentials than for having brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and a level of White House philandering that would have made Bill Clinton blush. Besides, if audiences recall their high school textbook history, they know what’s on the menu for Rome after the Golden Age of Marcus Aurelius: decline and fall. In the end, Gladiator suggests that only the reluctant but heroic leadership of someone like General Maximus—an Eisenhower for the ancient world—could have saved the empire: if we liked Ike, we’d have loved Max. But saddled as we are with our own venal, image-obsessed political and corporate emperors, we global capitalists in the United States should expect the same immanent moral and political decline as the Romans.
In Gladiator’s vision of the Roman epic film, a strategic mode of resistance to the violent othering of cold war imperialism (“I am Spartacus!”) is replaced by a nostalgic mourning for that very world of imperialism: “I wish I could be like the conquering Maximus! But they don’t make ’em like that anymore.” Spartacus’s collective response is replaced by Gladiator’s atomized yearning for individual authenticity. And, needless to say, such a Golden Age of subjective authenticity is always already a thing of the past, an object of commodified nostalgia in late Augustan Rome as well as in contemporary Disneyfied Hollywood.
Taken as a contemporary political and historical allegory of cold war imperialism giving way to an even-more-dangerous, media-saturated globalized capitalism, Gladiator leaves us with very little strategic room to move, other than pining for the good old days of imperialism—when you knew who the good guys were, when you could be heroic and authentic, when the blood was real. Resistance to the global flow of fleeting images, the film suggests, can be found only in the intensive authenticity of your own private experience, turned up to Maximus: a quirky individuality that’s available—maybe even on sale—at sublime locations like the Forum Shops at Caesar’s, as well as mundane sites like your Netflix queue. And seemingly everywhere in between.
In any case, rest assured that it’s coming soon—in fact, over and over again—to a theater near you, as virtually all Hollywood films contain a version of this message: resist the system by courting intense experiences, always modulating your own authentic, flexibly specialized subjectivity.
Post-Postmodern Empire
Of course, this new empire of postimperialist biopolitical production travels under a more recognizable pseudonym, one we read in the paper every day: globalization. In their mammoth book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out that “Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges” (2000, xi). It’s all one world now, we’re told over and over again, by people on the right and the left.
But how exactly is this new world of globalized, triumphant capital different from the old colonial hostilities of the cold war? Is this really a peaceable, postimperialist kingdom? The answer seems to be, yes and no. The new mode of empire’s power—as Gladiator shows us—is different, but it’s no less forceful. Hardt and Negri write, “Although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history” (xv).
As Foucault puts forth in his work on disciplinary regimes, iron-fisted mechanisms of regulation are both expensive and inefficient—a lesson that international business learned long before the cold war nation-state did. Foucault argues that the disciplinary apparatus was born gradually alongside imperialist expansion in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and reached its height in the twentieth. As Hardt and Negri explain, “In a disciplinary society, the entire society, with all its productive and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of capital and the state, and that the society tends . . . to be ruled by criteria of capitalist production. A disciplinary society is thus a factory society” (243). For Hardt and Negri, the American New Deal represents the apex of this disciplinary vision of society as a vast but centrally controlled and regulated factory.
By all accounts, however, this kind of Fordist New Deal welfare state has been systematically dismantled by worldwide conservative political hegemony and the rise of the new economy. In a world of cyber-work, e-commerce, wireless communication, distance education, virtual markets, home health care, and the perpetual retraining of flexibly specialized labor, the disciplinary world of partitioning and surveillance (the office, the school, the bank, the trading floor, the mall, the hospital, the factory) seems like it’s undergone a wholesale transformation. As Deleuze argues, “We’re definitely moving toward ‘control’ societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. . . . We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate [primarily] by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. . . . In a control-based system, nothing’s left alone for long” (1995, 174–75). Deleuze further elaborates on the distinction between discipline and control: “In disciplinary societies, you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” of power (179). So, while societies of control certainly extend and intensify the tactics of discipline (by linking training and surveillance to ever more minute realms of everyday life), they also give birth to an entirely new form of power.
Discipline itself constitutes a form of power different from its predecessors—the sovereign power of the spectacle, the banishment of the leper, or the confinement of the plague victim (see Foucault 1979,195–200). The panoptic power characteristic of modern discipline acts not directly on bodies but on the body’s potential for actions: as Deleuze explains in Foucault, “Force is exercised on other forces” (1983, 35). In short, the Foucauldian power of surveillance doesn’t directly mark bodies, as the sovereign power of the scaffold does; it is a (much more efficient and economical) regulatory mechanism—you don’t know exactly when you’re being watched, so you adapt your behavior at all times to the power of being seen. Such a form of power acts on your actions; its primary target is your “virtual” possibilities, which in turn more economically regulate your actions.
Surely, surveillance in the globalized world of control has been taken to a new, even more disembodied and therefore efficient state; your Web browser, your DNA, your credit or debit cards, your subway pass, cellphone usage, or credit report all suggest that you are tracked in ways that make the warehousing of bodily traces (like photographs, surveillance tapes, fingerprints, or blood types) seem positively quaint by comparison. If you can’t even escape your undergraduate alumni magazine, how can you hope to evade the grip of transnational corporations?
Discipline has been taken to the limit of what it can do; and in this intensive movement, discipline’s limit has become a threshold, inexorably transforming this form of power into a different mode, a “lighter” and even more effective style of surveillance that can only accelerate the already lightning-fast spread of that monstrous form of power/knowledge known as globalization. And Hardt and Negri build their concept of post-postmodern empire precisely on this notion of the waning of disciplinary power and the waxing of the society of control: “The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks” (2000, 23).
Hardt and Negri suggest that we are witnessing not so much the end of imperialist or disciplinary power, but its intensification and transmutation into another kind of power. At its completion, one might say that the disciplinary power of imperialism doesn’t merely halt, but it’s forced to work differently, to develop another modus operandi. As Hardt and Negri argue, the present-day empire of transnational capital comprises “something altogether different from ‘imperialism.’ ” They explain:
Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually, nearly all the world’s territories would be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other. (xii)
As Gladiator’s Romans no longer fight the Germanians and Caesar’s Palace is no longer out to slay the Venetian, so the logic of post-postmodern capitalism no longer works primarily according to the rigid disciplinary logics of exclusion, othering, and noncontamination. As GATT, NAFTA, the euro, and the WTO attest, the nation-state no longer functions primarily as a machine “to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other”; rather, the nation-state now seeks primarily to hold the door for transnational capital—though, of course, this task regularly requires crackdowns of a terrifyingly “old-fashioned” disciplinary nature.
Such brutal tactics are still in fact prominently on display wherever global elites—the leaders of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, G-20, major political conventions—meet, and where dozens of “potential” protestors and protest leaders are summarily arrested or banished to far-flung “free speech zones.” And of course, the War on Terror has brought such first-world barbarity front and center—with “enhanced interrogation,” arrest without warrant, and illegal rendition remaining approved US government tactics long after the George Bush administration has faded into unpleasant memory. And in times of economic downturn, you can still count on xenophobic political scapegoating of immigrants, or so we’ve seen globally in recent years: Turks in Germany, Muslims in Scandinavia, Mexicans in the American Southwest. In short, simply because the nation-state’s primary reason for being has changed, we shouldn’t therefore assume that it’s been evacuated of its disciplinary power or its investments in confinement. This is especially obvious in the context of the US not only in terms of terrorism, but with its burgeoning prison-industrial complex: throughout the 1990s, the American prison industry boasted growth rates second to only one economic sector—that’s right, gambling.12
So the emergent economy of globalized control doesn’t simply supersede or wholly displace the society of the nation-state’s discipline. However, in the world of post-postmodern capital, nationalism’s political boosters dream not of purity or overcoming a threatening other but rather of the endless, smooth flow of capital and goods (though not so much people) across boundaries of all kinds. These days, everyone from politicians to CEOs to the Arby’s fast-food chain joins in the global refrain “different is good”: and, needless to say, one can’t imagine any cold war leader worth his SALT talks saying such a thing. The world of imperialism is, by definition, a world where “different is bad”—otherness is an obstacle, there only to be excluded, demonized, or assimilated. But difference in the postmodern world isn’t there to be overcome; it’s there to be intensified.
The logic of intensification is the (non)site where the logic of the individual subject overlaps with the logic of globalization. As the subjective pole of existentialism—with its thematics of alienation, mutually assured destruction, binarized subject/object splits, its heroic confrontations with the other and with death—is inexorably tied to the era of extensive imperialism, so the subjective pole of contemporary experience intensification is equally tied to the economic and political logic of globalization. The “flexible and fluctuating networks” of postmodern globalization function according to an intensification of Foucault’s notion of productive power, which teaches us that power doesn’t hold good unless the subject can take some pleasure or knowledge from its bargain with a dominant mode of power. There has to be something “in” it for the subject. This is the breakthrough modus operandi of empire, its direct linkage to subjective intensities, the complete “culturization” of political and economic life. As Hardt and Negri argue, “The society of control is able to adopt the biopolitical context as its exclusive terrain of reference” (2000, 24).
Unlike the discontinuous, desiring subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis (and the nation-state to which that subject was bound), the new globalized subject of empire requires no rigid boundaries to transgress, no central or Oedipal laws by which to orient itself. As Hardt and Negri continue, “In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding borders” (xii–xiii). It is precisely its deterritorialized status—the biopolitical network of intensities—that inexorably links the individual subject to the logics of globalization and capital.
In the end, we may have to admit that Gladiator, at some level, has it right: the image-based intensities of the new culture industry are the ironic fruits of the West’s economic “victory” in the cold war, the form of power that flourishes in our era of globalized finance capital. Rather than lament the victories of these intensive economies, we had best do some hard thinking about how these economies work, what they can and can’t do, and how they might produce results otherwise. Because whether we like it or not, today it seems that Wall Street and Main Street are connected by the intensities we see played out along Las Vegas Boulevard.