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5 The Tourist Affect: Escape and Syncresis on the Las Vegas Strip
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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The Tourist Affect Escape and Syncresis on the Las Vegas Strip ROB SHIELDS How does one understand an isolated desert city devoted to gambling and leisure escapes such as Las Vegas? How does one understand the place, an urban environment like the four miles of The Strip, or the casino resorts and hotels along it such as the Belaggio? Is The Strip just a design icon (cf. Barbour 2000; Dannatt 2002; Gendall 2006; Irazabal 2007) or is it a trenchant social lesson? A key point of this chapter is that such places must be analyzed in relation to other places. They are all embedded in a network or spatialization that casts places in a qualitative light. This “topology” positions sites and regions as “places for this and places for that” (see Shields 1991; Shields forthcoming). In the spatialization of North American and global neo-liberal jouissance and accumulation, Las Vegas’s place is secured by its famous reputation. These places must be understood in a wider cultural context and their qualities probed to reveal how pleasure in the spatialization of neo-liberalism is actualized, even in the face of inequalities and exploitation. In the urban studies literature in general and the literature on Las Vegas in particular, the focus is on political economy and sociology, in particular of its immigrants (Baird et al. 2008) and tourists (Gladstone 1998). Even its impossible sustainability in the middle of the desert tends to be ignored (Poyner 1998), trumped by its status as a neo-liberal “campout ” for globalized capital and its labourers. Its image and the meanings of its facades have elicited some critique (Gottdiener, Collins, and Dickens 1999; Raento 2009), partly in relation to the enormous journalistic literature on contemporary urban consumption culture in the United States. 105 5 106 DESIRE However, the political economy of The Strip turns on another, affective, economy (Bataille 1988) that provides the opportunity to produce The Strip as well as driving its psychosocial and economic processes. Can attention to affect offer a level of social analysis relevant to critical topology and social geography? Although it has been the topic of a recent surge in geographers’ attention, notably from proponents of “non-representational theory” (cf. Thrift 2008),1 affect appears in many guises in social science research—in discussions of expectation, of fear, or of hope, as well as studies of attachment to place (cf. McCormack 2003). Flickering back and forth between actual and virtual moments of embodiment and emotion, what I will refer to as the “syncresis” of affect can be illustrated as the relation between rising or falling “capacity for action” as a disposition or outlook and material comportment and psychological states (Shields 2003; Citton and Lordon 2008). Las Vegas’s Strip presents itself as a street of dreams outside of normal jurisdictions and offers holiday experiences cut loose from the everyday lives of its mostly North American clientele. While foreigners do visit, they often do so for conferences and trade shows rather than to take part in the hotel and casino business that has made The Strip infamous.2 From the 1980s, neo-conservative policies encouraged public-private partnerships to develop cities, which converged with an “entertainment economy” predicated on consumption-oriented culture. These policies brought about investment in entertainment and sports venues, resorts, stadiums, and casinos (Hannigan 1998, 61–62). Las Vegas’s “Strip” of casino resorts sought to realize the entrepreneurial aura of a swashbuckling “casino capitalism” of la fin du vingtième, celebrating the spatial fix of capitalism’s new globalization in the form of simulated versions of the most famous landmarks and world cities, reproducing pyramids (the Luxor), Paris (Paris-Las-Vegas, see Lampert-Greaux 2000), art deco architecture (the Belaggio)—anything but the desert. Vegas became the most famous exemplar of the excesses of commercial culture in America (cf. Venturi, Izenour, and Scott Brown 1977). The synergy of the commercialization of popular culture with landed and financial capital meant that property speculation on new consumption sites such as malls, hotels, casinos, and theme parks was one important element driving the economy (see A. Scott 1980; A. J. Scott 1997, 2006). Places such as Atlantic City, Reno, and Las Vegas were the temple[s] not only of gambling or greed, but of the very creed and faith that represent the underlying values of the neoliberal USA. Entrepreneurs like Donald Trump and Steve Wynn, just a step ahead of bankruptcy and [54.204.117.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14...