Las Vegas Odyssey:
The Poetics of Domination
For those of us living in Las Vegas, the everyday performance of
domination that the city provides daily reminds us of our own vulnerability to
the fates. In Las Vegas, power displays itself in, to borrow a phrase from the
vernacular, an “in your face” manner. Las Vegas represents a “discursive
encoding” (Bredbeck 77) v^ich, if productively read, reveals a domination of
every type: sex, wealth, chance, weather, and time (variously of and by the
tourist) are represented by the Las Vegas entertainment industry and
experienced by the Las Vegas tourist and resident alike. The art form
symbolizing these forces is everything but subtle. The bigger, more ostentatious,
transparent, outrageous, and repetitious the representation, the more satisfying
the experience. It is a seduction by domination that “does not mask the
‘autonomy’ of desire, [or the] pleasure or the body” (Baudrillard 7) but rather
enhances that desire. This paper suggests that these displays of domination
fabricated and orchestrated for the benefit of tourist consumption represent
primal natural forces, forces beyond the control of the individual, and as a result.
Las Vegas exemplifies a poetics of domination.
Freud and Walter Benjamin argue that cities, like dreams, provide the
symbols and images for projection, displacement, and condensation. Architects,
manufacturing an experience that accesses memory and yearning, contrive a
landscape for the symbolic activity. The city becomes a site for acting out the
realization of private desire within the universal narrative of striving towards
fulfillment. The city symbolizes mythic expression, a site for human interaction
with the gods ^\4lo represent the forces of fate. A Freudian perspective sheds
light on the primal dynamics that underpin the Las Vegas experience. Freud
suggests the need for imagining gods is fundamental:
[A] man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons
wifli whom he can associate as he would with his equals—that
would not do justice to the overpowering impression wiiich
those forces make on him.. . . He turns them into
gods.. . . The gods retain their threefold task: They must
exorcise the terrors of nature; they must reconcile men to the
cruelty of Fate particularly as it is shown in death; and they
must compensate them for the sufferings and privations wiiich
a civilized life has imposed on them (Pile 695).