The Age of Dwindling American Empire: Soldiers, Gaming, and Affective Labor in Warzones

This essay examines the global logics of neoliberalism, and the biopolitical and affective modes of experience that neoliberalism generates. American soldiers, playing games and fighting wars, are living embodiments of the Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network, where boundaries are blurred, information flow is rapid, and cyber imagery prevails. But this is not merely a postmodern space of hybridity; neoliberalism is a biased, so-called laissez-faire re-organization of material and capital flows, designed to glorify the capacities of the market to rule space, consumption, and government without any regard for democratic citizenship. Playing with virtual fields of violence literally as they execute the violent technologies of war, to advance the neoliberal projects of American neoconservative ideologues, soldiers claim that these combat games help them to escape the emotional trials of war. These gamers and their games teach us that neoliberalism is more than privatization of capital, but that it is a way of organizing experience through habits of bodily movement and affect