ABSTRACT
Discourses of addiction not only set out criteria by which some people are defi ned as outside the realm of proper and viable subjectivity, they also produce the right sort of body, the right way to live, the right way to be and the right sort of relationship to have to oneself and to others . . . the growth of addiction demands scrutiny because it is a notion through which specifi cally liberal forms of political power and government operate effi ciently and seductively. (Keane, 2002, p. 189)
[A] society without power relations can only be an abstraction . . . [but] to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary, or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. (Foucault, 1982, pp. 222-223)
Recognition of the central role of the economy in cultural theory is widespread (duGay & Pryke, 2002; Morris, 1992; Pemberton, 1994; Zeilzer, 2001). Less accepted is the constitutive role of gambling in shaping cultural meanings and practices regarded as broadly economic. This may be because gambling is uniquely ambivalent, destabilizing oppositions between work and play, business and pleasure, investment and consumption from which both culture and economy derive their meaning as related, yet distinct, spheres. As cultural meanings and uses of the ‘economy’ have shifted with neoliberal regimes of governmentality, so too have meanings and uses attached to gambling. As an integral component of global economic fl ows, gambling has played and continues to play a formative role in shaping local and national cultures in many parts of the world. This chapter aims to both illuminate and unsettle a cultural tension in Australian public discourse between statements such as ‘we are a nation of gamblers’ on the one hand, and ‘problem gambling is a national scourge’ on the other. The intersection of these statements marks a site of ambivalence where several questions are raised.
