Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

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Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
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White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Paul Barrett
To cite this Article Barrett, Paul(2006) 'White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas', Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 28: 1, 95 119 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10714410600552902 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714410600552902
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White Thumbs, Black Bodies: Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Fantasies in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Paul Barrett
In the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the player is invited to step into the world of Carl Johnson, CJ, as he returns to his hometown of San Andreas. Modeled after South Central Los Angeles and set in the early 1990s, San Andreas might be described as an interactive Boyz n the Hood. It offers the player the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasies of middle-class youths through the representation of poor, inner city, African-American existence. While the intentions of the game are primarily to offer a fun experience, which it undoubtedly does, there is a great deal of learning that goes on in playing the game. Both in the very structure of the game and within the subtext of San Andreas, there is a glamorizing, and even spectacularization of violence, a marking of young black bodies as disposable, an insistence on a culture of cynicism as well as a particular formation of African-American experience that is extremely problematic. Furthermore, there is a sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and a withdrawal from any commitment to political or collective social agency that runs throughout the game. Taken together, these undercurrents in the games environment and narrative serve to naturalize and reinforce (as well as justify) neoliberal policies that divest power from politics and collapse public concerns into private worries. Similarly, the ideology of the game provides, and operates in tandem with, the necessary ideological conditions for both the U.S. war on terror and the war against Iraq. In his text on the pedagogy of video games, Jim Gee argues, amongst other things, that video games offer an opportunity for players to be involved in very sophisticated role playing, allowing 95
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people to understand the world from multiple perspectives. He also claims that good video games (he describes a good game as one which makes me think new thoughts about what I value and what I do not) reflect, in their design, good principles of learning1 and can present gamers with a wide range of challenges which call for active, critical learning and lead to the development of important problem-solving skills. He argues that these games are an important form of education that deserve further attention. Gee is certainly right in saying that these games are important forms of education that deserve further critical attention, but his analysis is limited in that he is concerned primarily with how concepts, identities and politics are represented in video games, paying little attention to what is being represented in these games. While it is true that video games offer players an opportunity to role play and understand the world from another perspective, an analysis of that perspective, how it is scripted and what it excludes, seems essential to understanding what sort of pedagogical work a particular game does. These games do, after all, present stories that, while they typically do not claim to be factual, do play a socially formative role and have consequences that reverberate in larger political spheres. Video games offer narratives that are formative in terms of individual and social understandings of race, youth, and citizenship in the modern, neoliberal, globalized world. They allow players to step into a new identity and perform the world from the perspective of an other, so the way in which that world, as well as that other is constructed is extremely important. Questions such as what these games have to say about notions of agency, democratic participation, the role of public, democratic spheres and so forth are all essential to understanding how these games function as cultural, pedagogical machines. One of the most concerning pedagogical implications of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the way that the game represents blackness as inextricably reduced to the body. The importance of CJ as a body is stressed throughout the game, as there are multiple ways in which the player can tailor CJs appearance to best suit their sense of how he ought to look. In the early stages of the game, the player is informed that not only must CJ exercise routinely in order to avoid getting fat (the game makes no apologies about multiple fat jokes), but he must also work and eat to gain muscle, and thereby have the muscular, masculinized body that accompanies his gangsta persona. As part of the game, the player must take CJ to the gym and perform routine workout tasks such as weightlifting,
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boxing, and so forth. These physical actions take precedence over the players ability to engage CJ in any form of dialogue. Where the player is able to attack other characters in a variety of ways kicking, punching, shooting, as well as a variety of special movementsdialogue is limited to only two options: talk positive response and talk negative response. The player is not able to select what the character will say, but instead presses a button to choose either a generic negative or positive response. The very act of speaking then becomes a mechanical, reflexive, bodily action where what the black character actually says is not important. In this sense, the black male becomes defined primarily as a body. In insisting on the black agent as something strictly physical, there is a disconnect between any sense of personhood from the physical makeup of the individual. Of course, CJ is an automaton, controlled by the player, but this acts only to further mark the black male as primarily a body, disconnected from notions of autonomy and agency. Paul Gilroy takes up this question of the representation of the black body when he explains that,
associating blackness with intelligence, reason and the activities of the mind challenges the basic assumptions of raciology [. . .] whereas giving The Negro the gift of the devalued body does not, even if that body is to be admired. The black body can be appreciated as beautiful, powerful, and graceful in the way that a racehorse or a tiger can appear beautiful, powerful, and graceful.2
The representation of people as something strictly corporeal marks them as subhuman and strips them of political agency. Any agency they might possess is physical, typically sexualized, and rooted strictly in the body, as is the case here. Furthermore, racism as well as a fascism underlies this representation; it disconnects actors from their own agency: they are solely physical beings, controlled by some external power or logic. This is certainly true in San Andreas where the black male is strictly a body who literally is controlled by some external authority. These images of black people as nothing more than bodies recalls the scenes of abuse at Iraqs Abu Ghraib prison, where black bodies are shown in demeaning, dehumanizing poses with their faces covered, or as an array of faceless torsos and ligaments stacked atop one another. Judith Butlers notion that those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human3 seems particularly relevant when one considers these images alongside news
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footage of black males robbing convenience stores, faces obscured with ski masks or pantyhose (a style that many rappers have taken to wearing in music videos), and the images of black bodies, faces covered with black hoods, shackled and pinned down at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Understanding these images as they contribute to a dominant representation of black bodies as disposable, one begins to see the way in which black bodies are constructed as non-persons. The black body becomes commodified and compartmentalized: a body without agency or personhood, present only from the neck down. This question of the black body, particularly in its relation to the white video gamer, takes on another dimension when one considers that during much of San Andreas the white player is commanding his black avatar to shoot black characters. A great deal of the killing in the game is black-on-black, creating a strange pedagogy of black-onblack or white-on-black violence. Chuck D notes a similar situation at a Snoop Doggy Dogg concert: he describes the video prelude to the concert, set in a liquor store, where Snoop, holding a gun on a black manturns to the camera and asked the audience should he smoke this nigga? 11,000 people, 75% being white, [started] screaming, smoke that nigga!4 Add to this the fact that black culture has become such a central part of white youths consumption habits, and one begins to get a sense of the precarious way in which black life is marked as disposable and dangerous, not only according to white perspective, but in popular culture as a whole. Consider, for instance, the cover of 50 Cents Get Rich or Die Trying which depicts the rapper behind a glass shield riddled with bullet holes, the target of anonymous violence. From rap videos to video games to mainstream cinema, images of blacks running, being shot, shooting at one another and so forth accumulate within public consciousness to mark the black agent as primarily a body, and the black body as both the source and the target of anti-social violence. Kardinal Offishal speaks to this hip, pedagogical aesthetic of seeing the black body as riddled with bullets, being chased and generally threatened or killed when he says, Little kids talking bout they wanna feel a [gun]shot cuz they love 50 Cent.5 Consider, for instance, the image of the black male in the Ghostface Killah song Run where the chorus is:
Run! If you sell drugs in the school zone = Run! If you gettin chased with no shoes on = Run! Fuck that! Run! Cops got, guns! = [. . .] Run! If you aint
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do shit, you it = That next felony, nigga, its like three zip = So, run! Hop fences, jump over benches! = When you see me comin get the fuck out the entrance! = Run! Fuck that! Run! Cops got guns!6
The video for the song is packed with images of black bodies being chased through poor, urban environments resembling a live-action reenactment of San Andreas. Similarly, the video contains images of groups of black males, tightly packed in housing project stairwells and jail cells posturing threateningly towards the camera. This is, of course, coupled with images of white police officers as correctional officers and riot police. Gilroy speaks to this question of representation of black bodies when he describes the black public sphere as an exclusively male stage [. . .] in which sound is displaced by vision and words are generally second to physical gestures.7 The language of blackness in popular culture becomes a language of physical gestures and masculinized posturing. The black male is seen both running from the police as well as stalking the corridors of the urban environment, positioned within a strange duality as both the target and source of terror and violence. These repeated descriptions, and enactments of the stalking and killing of the black body, typically set to the tune of thrilling hip hop music and pornographically hyper-violent imagery and cinematography, marks the black body as disposable, as a non-person. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is no exception, as many of the missions in the game involve beating, shooting, killing and robbing other gang members, who are typically black or Latino. Of course one may end up killing some bystanders or police officers (the latter of which are decidedly white, the former of mixed races), but this is not the purpose of each mission and there is little reward for these periphery activities. All of this action is set to hip hop music from the early 1990s, and the PC version of these games typically allows players to replay the action in slow motion, ensuring they can thoroughly enjoy the ritualized slaughter of gang members, the police, and innocent civilians. This goes beyond, then, simply marking the black body as something completely valueless and disposable, as it couples the killing of black bodies with a pornographic, thrillinducing, aesthetic of hyper-violence. The representations of black bodies as disconnected from any sense of personhood or agency continue, as the player must take CJ to the gym, changing his physical makeup depending on which activities he performs. Similarly, CJs appearance can be
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customized in terms of attire and haircut. There is an array of typical black styles to choose from, ranging from baggy prisoner outfits, to black-power medallions to geri curls to Afros and so on. The implication here is that blackness is a style, something that can be taken on and off. Politics, whether in the form of Afrocentrism or gang collectivities, are marked as outfits and appearances: the histories and ideas that underlie these cultures are of no significance. The player, operating through CJ, can move through these identities, sampling each of them as something strictly aesthetic, with visits to the in-game clothing stores, barber shops, and gyms. Black culture becomes nothing more than a commodified aesthetic, with no associated political or social meanings. This total decontextualizing of the politics and culture of African-American existence not only constructs a public memory that is absolutely depoliticized, as well as atomized, with no way of referencing collective struggle or meaningful democratic participation, but it also feeds directly into the white myth of identity as something completely transformable. White identity is constructed as a passport to cultural appropriation, where, in order to experience a cultural other, one need only have the right style and accompanying persona. When African American existence is represented as nothing more than a purchasable aesthetic, it can be experienced in its entirety by white people. Whiteness becomes a cultural passport, translating Gees notion of virtual identities8 into the depoliticized and decontextualized thrill of racial slumming. White players can enter into black existence, which is marked here strictly as an aesthetic of fashion, street language, and masculinized, sexualized physicality. Questions of systemic discrimination and the everyday experiences of racism are of no relevance here. This ignoring of histories of discrimination and accumulated advantages9 of whiteness takes away the very language of understanding the relationship between power and race. In place of any political understanding of race is a particularly constructed black aesthetic, suggesting that through the appropriation of these black styles, languages and postures, whites can experience African-American existence. In paying no attention to the impact that race has on both individual and collective political agency, San Andreas reinforces neoliberal ideologies in that it naturalizes the conditions in which the black characters are placed. When the game begins, CJ and the player are dropped into the urban nightmare that is San Andreas. Driving along the wrong
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street at the wrong time of day is reason enough for why CJ is suddenly shot at. Similarly, there is no explanation for the state of CJs own neighborhood, a pseudo-shantytown literally under a bridge. Nor is any explanation given as to why CJs friends are all unemployed, parentless gangbangers. Instead, the game begins with these things as a giventhey are natural to the environment in which the game is set. There is no sense that the violence in CJs world has come from somewhere, that perhaps there are larger social factors at work here. The game completely forfeits any discussion about how CJs neighborhood became a place of violence and pathological behavior. Issues such as three-strikes laws, the vast and disproportionate increase in the imprisonment of African Americans since the early 1980s,10 the impact of neoliberal economic and social reform, or the collapsing of public concerns into private interests are completely ignored. In place of a consideration of larger social causes, one is left to imagine that either this violent, unemployable, pathological behavior is the permanent, natural state of African Americans, or that somehow CJ and his friends have found themselves in this situation as a result of their own individual failings. There is, of course, a racism that underpins this scenario, suggesting that the African Americans in CJs neighbourhood, the Latinos in the other poor neighborhoods and, of course, the whites in the rich neighborhoods are in their positions strictly of their own accord. By disconnecting the poverty that San Andreas claims to represent from any historical context, the game, by default, reinforces the neoliberal line of an absolutely isolated sense of agency. The refusal to ask questions that might historicize this poverty or add some sort of political context to questions of inner city ghettos or black unemployment serves to naturalize this neoliberal view of the world, echoing Margaret Thatchers famous line that There Is No Alternative. The racism that underlies this lack of context stems from a complete dissolving of any sense of the public: the histories, environments, and actions of the characters in the game have no connection to any larger public history. When the public is represented in San Andreas, it is configured as a site of terror, insecurity, and uncertainty. The public arena is marked as a site where violence is not only probable, but imminent. Death occurs absolutely meaninglessly and indiscriminately. If one could shift the narrative focus of the game from CJ to one of civilians, or any other non-player characters, the game would be nothing more than a countdown to a random, violent death. In
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designating the public as strictly a place of violence and fear, the urban space is stripped of any potential to become a site of collective agency and democratic change, and instead becomes a stalking ground for gang violence and black and Latino youths. This sense of fear and the notion of any non-privatized or non-controlled space as being imminently dangerous feeds directly into the ideologies of neoliberalism and the privatization of public life. What argument can be made for expanding public democratic spheres when they are constructed as sites of fear and terror? Similarly, the configuring of collective and individual insecurity and fear as something born out of street violence, or the threat of terrorism, rather than as connected to the neoliberal, global order, the decoupling of politics from power and the collapse of the public sphere provides a convenient way of blaming the victims as well as reinforcing the neoliberal order. Zygmunt Bauman speaks to this issue when he explains that,
Threats to safety, real and imputed, have the advantage of being fleshy, visible and tangible; . . . [and that] the popular concerns about safety, nicknamed law and order, dwarf the popular interest in the productive mechanisms of insecurity.11
This is particularly true in the post9=11 era (for lack of a better term) where the threat of terrorism has been mobilized in the interests of an all-out assault on democratic, public life. The pedagogical achievements of the repeated (ad nauseum) images of hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center, in mobilizing a true fear and distrust of anything public, uncontained or unscripted are immeasurable. They are successful in not only drawing focus away from neoliberalism as a source of insecurity but also further neoliberal aims in their attack on the public sphere and its institutions. These images of fear, terror and of the dangers of public life operate in direct tandem with the images of violence and the general worldview in San Andreas. This Pavlovian repetition of images of terror, fear, and distrust of the public, urban space is even more prevalent in another video game: Manhunt. Created by the same company that produces San Andreas, Manhunt has the player assume the role of a convict who is thrust into a Running Man style urban nightmare where he must make his way through ghetto streets and kill or evade everyone he meets in order to win his freedom. All of this is directed by an overseeing warden of the ghetto, whose interest in snuff
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cinema has motivated this experiment. Accordingly, the games overseer presents the action from cameras positioned throughout the abandoned ghetto alleys and neighborhoods. When the player kills an enemy in a particularly brutal manner, such as strangulation from behind, the in-game camera shifts from an overhead perspective, to one resembling a hand-camera. The picture is grainy, unsteady and has the same attention to grotesque detail as the worst snuff or slasher film. One game reviewer gleefully describes it as a
great-looking video filter effect . . . [creating scenes that] are chock-full of blood (which tends to gush right onto the camera), gurgling noises, and pure shock value. The stylish, gory presentation of these sequences, combined with Manhunts surprising assortment of weapons and three executions per weapon, means that you wont grow tired of seeing these despicable acts performed frequently throughout the game (that is, if you can stomach them in the first place).12
Combining the spectacle of home video, performed for the viewing and gaming public, with the pornographic, gritty stylizing of mass killing gives a real sense of the culture of violence and fear that is mobilized around public spaces such as the city street. The urban center is a place of stalking terror, where black bodies are constantly on the prowl. While the main character in Manhunt is white, many of the gang members he kills for his overseers pleasure are not.13 The use of cameras in this game as the lens through which the violence is narrated is particularly telling, as it suggests that the gamer, the viewer, is away from the drama: the viewer is watching the spectacle as it is performed. In a perhaps unaware moment of truthfulness, Manhunt speaks to the importance of the spectacle of violence, but rather than connecting it to a mobilizing of fear or a justification for war, it instead celebrates it as a triumph of the ultimate bloody, visual experience. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation confirms this delight in the spectacle of violence in her reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Her immediate response was that This is a really strange art project. It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someones head. She goes on to explain her reaction to the feelings of horror and outcry that the attacks generated: I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.14 Wurtzels sense that the spectacle
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of the violence overrides any sense of compassion for the victims or anger over the atrocity, suggests an impossibility to understand violence in any sort of political context. Political responses to mass killing are forms of overreacting and a political discourse is seen as going on about it. Instead, the implication is that one ought to enjoy the violence for its explosive visual stimuli. The insistence on violence as nothing more than spectacle, to be viewed from the safety of a Manhattan apartment, or more likely a gated suburb, implies that violence is both apolitical and natural. Through this frame of representation, violence becomes a part of everyday life, a law of existence unto itself. Furthermore, in the absence of a political discourse on violence, a questioning of how violence serves particular political interests, violence becomes a valid political discourse in itself. Finally when violence is seen as natural and unavoidable, power and violence both become self-justified (violent actions and power justify themselves). Under this configuration of the political, agency becomes synonymous with violence and politics becomes little more than a fac ade for exercising violent power. The refusal to question the logic of violence, or the romanticism and sexuality that it is intertwined with, serves not only to naturalize and thereby justify violent political actions such as the U.S. led war against Iraq, but also to ignore the way in which violence serves power. Butler raises this issue when she describes the violence in the frame in what is shown15 and how the shock and awe strategy suggest that [the U.S. government was] producing a visual spectacle that numbs the senses and, like the sublime itself, puts out of play the very capacity to think.16 The spectacularization of violence reduces the potential for critical response, ignoring questions such as how violence might be contextualized, how the state acts as a violent institution towards people of colour, or how neoliberalism inflicts a systemic violence on those in the economic south. In its place is the sheer glee of enjoyment in a violent spectacle always out there, always happening to someone else and always disconnected from any sense of politics. The reduction of violence to nothing more than spectacle helps to configure the public sphere as a perpetual Hitchcockian shower scene, with the urban terrorist lurking behind every corner. This is further supported by the representations of the state throughout San Andreas. Within the game, the state has absolutely no presence aside from that of a carceral role. Other than the police, the military, the ATF and other similarly violent, disciplinary organizations, the
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state is completely vacant from the game. There are no democratic representatives, schools, community centers, city hall, civic buildings, or anything remotely resembling a democratic, public state. There is no sense that the state can be used as protection, or offer any assistance, against the oppression which CJ and his friends are exposed to. There are no government representatives and no larger social institutions through which to pursue any sort of assistance. Using Bordieus language, the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace . . . of the social struggles of the past17 is completely absent, leaving only the right, disciplinarian, side of the state. This shifting of the state from a public, representative institution to a strictly carceral body of management is directly in line with the neoliberal imagining of the state. This representation of the state is in direct contrast with the constant representations of the market which run throughout the game. Not only does the player earn money for completing tasks, but there are a wide range of shops and malls in which the player can spend that money. San Andreas represents a sort of pure capitalism, or a realization of the neoliberal dream in which the market becomes the apparatus around which all institutions are organized. The ability of a player to take the car, money or gun of another character, by any means possible, is justification enough to do it. There is no social presence that mediates transactions, but instead profit is the overriding imperative for all acts. It is extremely telling that the reality that the game claims to represent is based so heavily on the market and so completely ignores any role of the state other than that role in which it can oppress and inflict harm. San Andreas seems to be organized according to the principles that the saintly Alan Greenspan18 would approve of, as it mirrors neoliberal guru Milton Friedmans claim that it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts.19 If liberalism is based on the idea of the social contract, and neoliberalism on the stripping away of the social, leaving nothing but the contract, then San Andreas does an excellent job of representing a pure neoliberal order, as any form of collective social responsibility is subordinate to the profit motivation and market law. These representations of race, violence and the militarization present in San Andreas are all part of a larger militarization of popular, particularly urban, culture. From rap music to sports utility
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vehicles to video games, both the public sphere and mass culture are increasingly becoming imagined according to principles of militarization. 50 Cent confirms this trend when he gleefully describes a newly purchased SUV as not only bulletproof but, Bombproof [. . .] The president be riding around in shit like this.20 This is, of course, necessary for the crack dealer-turned-rapper whose claims to being shot nine times becomes a confirmation of black authenticity, and thereby pop stardom. This presents not only a construction of the black, urban male as one mired in a culture of violence, but also a sense that the true experience of blackness, the authentic black experience is one of crime, shooting and violence, naturalizing and even sexualizing the violence many young black men experience. Furthermore, the depiction of 50 Cent on his The Massacre album cover, as a cartoonishly-muscular warrior figure, not only militarizes the public sphere but also links the black body to war. The message is clear: black people are biologically predestined for soldiering. Similarly, the urban environment that the black male occupies, that is constructed as a site of excitement, danger and uncertainty in film and music videos is also a site of violence, chaos and generally pathological behaviour. This is in direct collusion with the representation of blackness in San Andreas where violence, a kill or be killed attitude, a hyper-masculinized sexuality and similar attributes that constitute the urban predators, are the central traits of the games major characters. Another instance of this increased militarization of popular culture is found in the advertisements for the Government Clothing line that depict young, white hipsters, wearing designer fashions, in Abu Ghraib-like scenarios. The print ad portrays a dingy shower cell, stripped of its fixtures where one white youth is handcuffed and hanging from a ceiling, while another is drinking from a toilet as he is walked, on a leash, by a white guard. The hanging youth has bruise marks around his eyes and an ammo clip around his waist, the other youths have their faces turned away from the shot. The type includes the word GOVERNMENT in bold block letters and then some accompanying Arabic.21 In smaller type, the ad promises more prison pictures and movies on their website. The website offers a similar array of images with white hipster twenty-somethings posing in the clothing line as they reenact scenes of interrogation, torture and abuse, set in dark dingy bathrooms, shower cells and on gurneys. Not surprisingly, the video displays a series of similar images of torture in designer clothes,
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all set to the tune of aggressive hip hop music. Drawing obvious parallels with Abu Ghraib, the website explains that this is a sneak peak into something thats happening somewhere in a far away occupied land. . .22 In recreating the scenes of Abu Ghraib (the famous scene in which an Iraqi prisoner is dressed up as a Christmas tree is reenacted here with a handbag taking the place of the garbage bag used to cover the prisoners face), these white fashion designers and models claim that the political and moral aspects of these images are of absolutely no importance. These images of abuse and denigration become nothing more than pop culture imagery, open to appropriation for the purposes of marketing and ironic kitsch. One of the implications here is that not only can military images be leveraged as marketing tools and as elements of popular culture, but that there is an inherent sexuality in the abuse and military torture that these images reenact. In the print ad, we see the pelvis and the underwear of the hanging model just above his ammo clip. In other images, close shots of bulging male underwear and military officers with open cleavage mingle sexuality with images of abuse. These images both take on a desirable quality and blur the lines between market and political realities. The ads also suggest that it is reasonable for white people to step into these roles and reenact these scenes of abuse. There is nothing restricting white people from playing out these roles of abuse, as any notion of the political culture or history that generates such imagery is completely absent. In its place is a slick, market driven sexualizing of military torture.23 Another aspect of these advertisements, and a dominant trope in popular culture more generally, is that young bodies are marked as either threatening, disposable, or more typically, a combination of both. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, there is a lot of critical work that describes the way in which youth is present [in popular imagination] only when its presence is a problem, or is regarded as a problem,24 and this is certainly true in the Government Clothing images. This sense of youth as aimless, lazy and disconnected from social, democratic life is only compounded when dealing with urban youth, particularly young black men, as they bear the brunt of not only a cultural attack on youth, but also on people of colour. Consider the lyrics to a hit UK hip-hop song from rapper Skinnyman, the chorus of which is, If I make it till tomorrow, Ill be surprised or the punk band, Millions of Dead Cops
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(whose name alone speaks to youth perceptions of the state), whose song Born To Die that explains that, Im born to die = Im born to fry. Ice Cube begins his verse on Straight Outta Compton with When something happens in South Central Los Angeles, nothing happens = Its just another nigga dead, Nas describes himself as a menace, yo, police wanna murder me, and Public Enemy, who describe America as a land that never gave a damn = about a brother like me have the image of a black man in the crosshairs of a snipers scope as their logo. Even the name, Public Enemy, implies an awareness of black youth as being marked as enemies of a white public. Needless to say, one doesnt need to look far in popular representations of youth, particularly black youth, to find images of young people, as both a target of violence and a source of cultural anxiety. Young black men in particular routinely describe themselves as a target of a systemic violence. Neither San Andreas nor these Government Clothing advertisements do anything to upset these themes of black representation as both the source and target of the terror and violence of the public sphere. Instead they both revel in these images, celebrating them as a source of enjoyment and spectacle for a depoliticized public. This militarization of popular culture is present in other video games as well, such as Tom Clancys Ghost Recon or the US Army sponsored Americas Army, to name only a few. The latest edition of the Ghost Recon series is set in an aggressive, hostile North Korea where a rogue military leader25 is armed with a nuclear bomb.26 Americas Army, sponsored by the U.S. Army and available for free download, and at army recruiting offices around the United States, aims to educate [the player] about the U.S. Army and its career opportunities and values.27 The game itself is a first person shooter in which players take on the role of army soldiers in training scenarios and in online combat against other players. In order to play, the user must register with a U.S. military gaming server, which stores the users personal information, and tracks his or her progress in the game. Having hundreds of thousands of young people register in their servers is no doubt a dream come true for Pentagon war planners, despite the claim that Recruiters will not have any information about the players unless players purposefully identify themselves and request information.28 Similarly, the U.S. Army hosts network parties where gamers can meet, at no cost, and play the game over computers provided by the U.S. Army, get free Americas Army t-shirts, and of course meet with
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U.S. Army recruiters. One recruiter is described as having put up fliers and made phone calls to offer free food and a day of free Americas Army gaming to any interested boy, girl, man or woman over age 13no commitments required. A khaki Humvee was parked outside. The same recruiter makes the militarization of popular culture all the more clear when he explains that, This isnt some kind of psychological thing to brainwash anybody. . . . Its getting the U.S. Army name out there in a positive light. [. . .] Its like Coca-Cola. [. . .] Its branding.29 While the game is certainly not a direct path into military service, it imbues the player with a particular portrayal of the U.S. military as well as contributes to the blurring of military and popular culture and the acceptance of military presence in everyday life. The familiarizing of the military, and the portrayal of the military provided by this game, are far from apolitical acts. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the game in terms of its pedagogical aims is that, while the game itself offers extremely detailed and accurate weapons and combat scenarios, one element of realism that isnt present in the game is any sort of bloody or gory death. This is presumably in the interests of allowing the game to be accessible to younger players (an Army recruiter explains, with no sense of reservation or irony, that The game CD will only be distributed to those individuals that can prove that they are over 1330) as well as to, obviously, sanitize the realities of death on a foreign battlefield. These are just two instances of a larger militarization of video gaming culture in general. Other games such as Rainbow Six: Raven Shield, SWAT 3, Operation Flashpoint, Delta Force 2, Ghost Recon, Rogue Spear and many others all simulate and celebrate war, and more generally, violence, as a masculine rite of passage. And of course, these themes are mirrored in popular television and cinema with programs and movies such as 24, Harts War, Gods And Generals, Band of Brothers, The Alamo, Alexander and Troy, to name only a few. In this context of war as entertainment and military action as a masculine rite of passage, the comments by U.S. Lt. General James Mattis that its fun to fight people and that guys . . . that aint got no manhood . . . its a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them31 become acceptable and commonplace.32 War and entertainment occupy the same ideological space and can both be understood in terms of their capacity to provide the viewing public with a thrilling spectacle. It is in this context that the human-rights abuses of Guantanamo Bay are converted into fodder for a reality television
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program in which contestants are subjected to periods of enforced nudity and religious and sexual humiliation.33 Similarly, the FOX program 24, which gives a day in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), represents an Amnesty Global lawyers attempts to stop his terrorist-abetting client from being tortured, as nothing more than an impediment to stopping acts of terror (the human-rights lawyer is tipped off to the potential torture by the lead terrorist in the program). Bauer explains to the lawyer that, I dont want to bypass the Constitution, but these are extraordinary circumstances to which the lawyer replies The Constitution was born out of extraordinary circumstances . . . this [interrogation] plays out by the book, not in a backroom with a rubber hose. Bauer stares at the lawyer forlornly, saying only, I hope you can live with that.34,35 The outrage over the use of torture and abuse, with obvious parallels to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, is recontextualized here as a sort of liberal blindness which actually aids terrorists. The program also includes a Muslim-American family that is, in fact, a sleeper cell living within the United States, planning to assassinate the president and detonate nuclear weapons within American cities. War, torture, terrorism, patriotism, and the creeping fascism of the Bush administration become reduced to a form of entertainment absolutely disconnected from politics or democratic agency. While clearly these are forms of entertainment, and are intended to be taken as such, they are also pedagogical vehicles that contribute to an ideological environment in which war and neoliberalism become all the more justifiable. 24 producer Joel Surnow agrees that the show is conservative-leaning, and his comments that Doing something with any sense of reality to it seems conservative36 reveals the sort of reality that programs such as 24 attempt to reproduce. The incapacity of these forms of entertainment to challenge the neoliberal construction of reality is indicative of the way that popular culture has been militarized and dissent is being silenced. This militarization of popular culture works in direct collusion with the advance of the neoliberal agenda, the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. In the climate of such a militarized culture, the red white and blue concrete highway barricades placed around the Sears tower become a common occurrence, as do the presence of paramilitary units on the streets of New York, surveillance planes flying over London, and random road checks during times of heightened terror alerts. The militarization of popular culture
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contributes to a social environment where the perceived threat of violence justifies an absolute privatization of agency. Collective political agency becomes essentially ruled out when the public sphere is configured as a site of constant fear and terror. In this sense, then, the so-called war on terror, coupled with the politics of neoliberalism, together wage a war against the very principles of democracy and the democratic institutions that are necessary for a functioning public sphere. Included in that war against democracy and its institutions is a war against any sort of collective political agency: a war against the American population itself. The marking of young bodies as disposable and as sources of terror only accelerates this process, a process which Donald Rumsfeld himself confirms when, calling for a greater amalgamation of civilian law enforcement agencies and the military, he explains that Terrorists, drug traffickers, hostage takers and criminal gangs form an antisocial combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil societies.37 The implication is that not only is there a need for a greater militarization of the public sphere, a move directly in opposition to any notion of democratic public life, but that the special laws mobilized to combat international terrorism must now be applied domestically to other anti-social elements. Read through the euphemisms of drug traffickers and criminal gangs, and the focus is clearly on people of colorblack youths within and outside of America. In many ways the war on terror translates, domestically, into a war against young people in general. Consider the $237,000 spent in Missouri to battle Goth culture.38 Missouri congressman Sam Graves argued that Goths are preying on Missouri youth and that they contributed to youth violence, youth drug use and other serious problems.39 $132,000 of the grant was returned to the state after no Missouri Goth culture could be found. Similarly, there is the instance of the nine-year-old Tucson Arizona girl who ran away from Arizonas Children Agency and was subsequently handcuffed and shot by police with a Taser rifle.40 Or the use of a taser by police to subdue a 130-lb 50 -600 female Florida teenager.41 There are countless other real-world instances demonstrating the ways in which the culture of adult fears translates into an attack on young people. The category of youth becomes a mixed category mobilizing adult paranoia as well as adult distrust and what might even be described as borderline hatred. Couple the representations of youth with the divestment from those institutions that typically
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assist young people, and the increase in the institutional disciplining and imprisonment of youth, and one begins to understand how notions of youth are formed in neoliberal culture. Youth are marked, in popular culture and in the current political environment, as unworthy of investment, as a threat to the social order, as a burden on the hardworking adult world, and most importantly, as throwaway bodies. And of course the U.S. Army has taken advantage of this militarization of popular culture, and this marking of youth as dangerous and disposable, as a means of increasing their recruitment numbers. The army has developed a series of vehicles that double as entertainment and recruiting centers: the Army Cinema Vans, the Army Cinema Pods, the Army Adventure Van, and the Navy Exhibit Centers visit a total of 2,000 schools per year, presenting their high tech educational shows to 380,000 recruitable students42 a year. Similarly, Two National Science vans, sponsored by the military and the National Science Center, also tour the country. In each case, the Pentagons Recruiting Commands and local recruiters use school grounds, school facilities, and school time to glorify the armed forces and their version of history.43 The way in which the public institution of the school becomes transformed into a site for military recruiting purposes is representative of the shifting role of the American state under George Bush. This is seen again in Bushs No Child Left Behind Act, which is not only severely underfunded and privileges an education measured strictly by standardized testing,44 but also includes a provision, buried deep within the act, that requires schools, as a condition for public funding, to provide the U.S. Army with a complete list of students names, addresses, and phone numbers for recruiting purposes. Coupling the attempts to draw students out of schools and into the military with the serious funding crisis in which public schools find themselves, and the way in which the bodies of youth are marked as disposable, and youth themselves become constructed as burdens, as unwanted persons, becomes all the more clear. This marking of youth as unwanted and unnecessary feeds directly into the new global neoliberal order which has created a mass of unwanted persons. This superfluous population is unnecessary to the neoliberal global order. For many youth in the economic north, their role in this new global economy is peripheral at best (in many ways this is true of the majority of the population, not just youth).
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They are able to interact with it only insofar as they can staff its fast food restaurants, work in its strip malls, and so forth. But to have any meaningful authoritative role in this new order, and in the future of the world more generally, is not part of this world economic plan. They are, in the neoliberal context, an unwanted, surplus population. It is no surprise then that as of June 2003, 12.8% of the African-American male population aged 25 to 29 was in prison, compared to 3.7% of Latinos and 1.6% of whites.45 Similarly, under George W. Bush, the African American incarceration rate is 5.7 times higher than it was in South Africa under the apartheid regime.46 And of course, the United States stands in a strange coalition with Saudi Arabia, Congo, Yemen, Iran and Nigeria, as the only countries in the world that execute young offenders (China and Pakistan have recently committed to ending the practice).47 The rise of the prison population, as well as the rise in military recruitment48 all point to a general need to dispose of young bodies, particularly young black bodies. This need, endemic of the neoliberal global order, is reinforced by San Andreas in its representations of black youth. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reinforces many of the ideologies central to neoliberalism, as well as many of the representations of identity and politics central to the war on terror as well as the war in Iraq. The absolute privatizing of any sense of agency within the game offers no structure or language by which to imagine any sort of collective, or at least public response to the oppression that the characters experience in the game. Baumans description of public sphere under neoliberalism as emptied of its own separate contents . . . it is now but an agglomeration of private troubles, worries and problems49 reads as though it were a description of the public as represented in San Andreas. Any potential for a vocabulary of resistance is completely absent, where the right of the individual to accumulate wealth, through any form of self-justified power, is seen as the greatest social freedom. In a game where the most basic act of perhaps not killing your fellow citizen for his = her vehicle or wallet is only considered an impediment to the accumulation of wealth and power, questions of social agency or the responsibility of democratic citizens are unimaginable. In place of such questions is the neoliberal dystopia where the rights of the individual trump any sense of the responsibilities of the citizen, and the rules of the market are naturalized and universalized while the possible democratic role of the state or of other collective institutions are completely erased from the games
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representation. In this sense San Andreas refigures agency as something completely privatized and atomized, echoing Margaret Thatchers claim that there is no such thing as society.50 The public realm subsequently becomes a site of violence and terror, and any considerations of a public good, or of democratic possibility are totally absent. This decoupling of politics from power reinforces a culture of cynicism where any form of public participation or social change seems pointless. In place of any potential for meaningful, democratic citizenship is a worship of individualized, competitive forms of agency in which collective action or resistance is impossible. In this sense politics has no capacity to disrupt configurations of power. In fact power and the public world of political change are completely disconnected in the world of San Andreas. Power lies in the market, in the repressive functions of the state and in the capacity of the individual to commit violence and accumulate wealth. Where a democratic, public sphere would offer an opportunity for social change, in the privatized world of San Andreas, selfjustified (in the sense that the capacity to do violence justifies that violence), individual acts of violence become the only means of exerting ones own agency. In this sense the drive-by shooting is the closest representation of collective action in San Andreas. The naturalizing of racist systems of social organization also serves to justify neoliberal claims to the right of the economy to operate unimpeded by such market irritants as affirmative action or other policies that address and aim to correct the accumulated disadvantage which African Americans experience. San Andreas either completely decontextualizes or just outright ignores racist cultural practices that lead to African Americans being unemployed more than whites, imprisoned more than whites, locked in racial ghettos, and so forth. In ignoring questions of historical racism and injustice, San Andreas suggests that the problems that African Americans experience is due to individual failure. This failing of the individual is further reinforced by the notion that the white person can experience, or step into, black identity. Histories of racism and the accumulated effect of cultural intolerance are unimportant and do not restrict the white consumer from entering into black culture. This further dehistoricizes racist practices and suggests that any failings of individuals are strictly their own, with no connection to any larger collective forms of discrimination. San Andreas naturalizes the values of neoliberalism, presenting ideologies of the market
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and the spectacle of violence as universal and completely sutured. Again, this question of the collapse of a public, collective oppression into a private failing is central to neoliberal ideology. Finally, the translating of violence into nothing more than spectacle, the way in which San Andreas (amongst many other popular culture representations of violence) converts violence into a source of entertainment, with no meaning other than its capacity to thrill and entertain, both detracts from, depoliticizes and, of course, ignores, the very real systemic violence that is done against real bodies, through the policies of neoliberalism, as well as the war on terror and the war against Iraq. Also, in reducing violence to nothing more than visual pop culture fodder, feeding into an apolitical spectacle of fear and hate, the very real violence that is done under the justification of the war on terror and neoliberal policies, becomes all the more acceptable. This makes it simpler to mark black bodies as humans who are not humans51 and enact very real violence against those bodies. In decoupling violence from its political causes, San Andreas acts to naturalize and, thereby make more acceptable, the violence of the real world. These criticisms understood, the question remains, what can be done? First, critical analysis of cultural texts such as San Andreas is essential to understanding the very real pedagogical and political work that these texts do. San Andreas is both extremely fun and extremely popular, and the notion that it is somehow below the radar of acceptable critical analysis simply by virtue of it being popular or vulgar misses an important opportunity for critical, public intervention. This sort of analysis, where questions of representation and politics are taken very seriously, and understood within a specific context, are all the more important when the text being considered is so immediately relevant. After all, this is a text which is being read by a great number of people, most of whom are outside academia, and more importantly, it is a text that generates meaning. It actively constructs a worldview that has implications in the larger, political sphere. With this in mind, speaking back to the text, and offering a critique of how it constructs these meanings seems crucial to any public intellectual work. But this is not enough. Critical engagement is important, but it is not the final step in responding to a text like this. Rather, there must be some sense of how to challenge or disrupt the ideological work that San Andreas does. Alternative representations have to be generated that can historicize and politicize narratives like San Andreas.
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The stories of young African Americans are certainly worth telling, even at the cost of discomforting some white liberals, but they ought to be told within the context of larger structures of racial discrimination and connected to the broader political questions of a possibility for collective resistance: a politics of hope. The narratives must explain how the world came to be configured in this way. The divestment of the state from public life and the insistence of market values as a reasonable model for all forms of social relations must be put in the context of a war on the poor and on people of color. In doing so, the stories of people who have been the victims of brutal systemic racism and oppression might be told in their appropriate contexts. Finally, it seems clear and essential to me that these stories must be told, at least in part, by the people who live them. This calls for a reconfiguring of the systems of learning and production, and putting the means of producing such cultural texts into the hands of anyone who would take them up. This not only means offering people the necessary time to consider these issues, but also giving them the vocabulary to engage these texts critically, with questions of representation, the divestment of power from politics and social agency at the forefront of the discourse. It would seem that democracy is difficult to imagine without democratic forms of representation, and therefore, there must be an uncoupling of individual wealth from the material capacity to produce cultural texts, in all forms, and generate meaning. While I dont want to prescribe some kind of solution, or suggest that there is a single approach to correcting these problems of representation, my sense is that these suggestions will offer one way in which a meaningful sense of political agency, as well as a reconsidering of the value of the public, democratic sphere can occur.
NOTES
1. James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (New York: Palgrave, 2003) 59. 2. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 174. 3. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004). 4. Chuck D, Four Oh? Available at http://www.publicenemy.com/index.php?page page3&item 20 (Accessed 1 August 2000). 5. Kardinal Offishall, Kardis Korner. Unpublished. 6. Ghostface Killah, Run, The Pretty Toney Album, Def Jam, 2003. 7. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186.
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8. James Paul Gee What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (New York: Palgrave, 2003) 59. 9. Michael K. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 30. 10. Michael K. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 141. 11. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 49. 12. Greg Kasavin, Manhunt Review for Playstation 2 at GameSpot. Available at http:// www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/manhunt/review-2.html (Accessed 19 November 2003). 13. One might read this scenario of the white protagonist attempting to escape the urban nightmare, while being pursued by gangs of masked youths (black and white), as touching on the underlying fears of the inner city present in a great deal of mainstream, white American culture. 14. No author, The Miramax Scared Shit List Available at http://www.lowculture. com/archives/000258.html (Accessed 10 November 2003). 15. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 147. 16. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 148. 17. Pierre Bordieu, Acts of Resistance Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998) 2. 18. Gerald Baker, Is This Great, Or What, Financial Times (31 March 1998). 19. Robert W McChesney, Noam Chomsky and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism. Available at http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2001/08/14796.php (Accessed 1 April 1999). 20. Shaheem Reid, 50 Cent: Money To Burn Available at http://www.mtv.com/ bands/123/50 Cent/news feature 021203/ (Accessed 2 December 2003). 21. That the Arabic will be unintelligible to most viewers of the ad is of no consequence. It acts only as a token of style, a fashionable piece of design used to bolster the gritty political realism of the ad rather than as an actual language used to communicate any particular message. 22. Government Prison Pics. Available at www.governmentclothing.com (Accessed 25 November 2004). 23. It is no surprise that these advertisements appear in Vice Magazine, a publication which celebrates the reduction of political issues into questions of aesthetics and individualized style. Using terms like sand nigger in an attempt to show race irony and targeting homeless people in their Fashion Donts section, Vice Magazine caters to a white, hipster demographic that forfeits political awareness for ironic non-ideologies that, nevertheless, coalesce neatly with right wing ideologies of individualism, racism and the notions of the free market. 24. Henry Giroux, Doing Cultural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy. Available at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Giroux/Giroux1.html (Accessed 9 December 2004). 25. Erik Wolpaw, Tom Clancys Ghost Recon 2 Review for XBOX at GameSpot. Available at http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/tomclancysghostrecon2/review-2. html (Accessed 22 November 2004). 26. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il takes the symbolic value of such games quite seriously, as the game was banned by his regime, explaining that [Americans] have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now,
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27.
28. 29.
30. 31. 32.
33.
34. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39.
40. 41.
42. 43. 44.
45.
but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths. (see http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id= 21777&category=gamers) Scott Osborne, Americas Army Review for PC at GameSpot. Available at http:// www.gamespot.com/pc/action/americasarmyoperations/review.html (Accessed 3 October 2002). Americas Army Support FAQ. Available at http://www.americasarmy.com/ support/faq win.php?p=1#faq2 (Accessed 22 July 2004). Jim Downing, Army To Potential Recruits: Wanna Play? Available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002111412 wargames07e.html (Accessed 7 December 2004). Americas Army Support FAQ. Available at http://www.americasarmy.com/ support/faq win.php?p=1#faq2 (Accessed 22 July 2004). General: Its fun to shoot people. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/ 03/general.shoot/ (Accessed 4 February 2005). Lt. Gen. Mattis was not disciplined for his comments, but was told that he should have chosen his words more carefully. It is not his love of slaughter that raised any interest but his forgetting to couch his expression of the thrills of killing in the appropriate euphemisms of the U.S. Army. Dominic Timms C4 lines up Guantanamo-style torture show. Available at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/uk news/story/0.3604.1408237.00.html (Accessed 8 February 2005). 24 Executive Producer Joel Surnow, FOX, 18 April 2005. In an earlier episode, when Bauers use of torture is questioned, a steel-jawed Secretary of Defence chillingly explains, that we need men like that. Christian Toto, 24: An hour of realism. Available at http://washingtontimes. com/entertainment/20050427-085529-9412r.htm (Accessed 1 June 2005). Jim Lobe, U.S. Media Miss Rumsfelds Dirty Wars Talk. Available at http:// www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1124-01.htm (Accessed 24 November 2004). Harpers Index for August 2004. Available at http://www.harpers.org/HarpersIndex2004-08.html (Accessed 1 September 2004). Steve Eder, Group criticizes federal funds to counsel youths against Goth culture. Available at http://pub96.ezboard.com/fgothicchristiansunitefrm1.showMessage? topicID=750.topic (Accessed 3 March 2004). L. Anne Newell, Taser hit on girl, 9, stirs talk on ethics. Available at http:// www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/23559.php (Accessed 5 May 2004). J. D. Gallop, Police Review Taser use on Student. Available at http://www.florida today.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050602/NEWS01/506020326/1006 (Accessed 2 June 2005). Army Adventure Vans. Available at http://www.objector.org/recruiting-vans/ army.html (Accessed 7 December 2004). Army Adventure Vans. Available at http: == www.objector.org=recruiting-vans= army.html (Accessed 7 December 2004). Michael Dobbs, No Child Law Leaves Schools Old Ways Behind. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId= A32348-004Apr21&notFound=true (Accessed 22 April 2004). Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. Available at http://www. prisonsucks.com/ (Accessed 10 December 2004).
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46. Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. Available at http://www. prisonsucks.com/ (Accessed 10 December 2004). 47. Death Penalty: USA only country to execute child offenders record denounced as truly shameful. Available at http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/15118.shtml (Accessed 21 January 2004). 48. Saeed Shabazz, The dirty world of military recruiting. Available at http://www. finalcall.com/artman/publish/article 1502.shtml (Accessed 21 July 2004). 49. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 65. 50. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 30. 51. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 77.

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