George Rigakos: Nightclub. Bouncers, Risk, and the Spectacle of Consumption

George Rigakos (Credit: Ashley Fraser/Ottawa Citizen)

George Rigakos:  Well, I think a Marxist orientation necessitates empirically mapping the commodification process in its historical and social context.  I have been interested in parapolicing and other non-state policing provision for some time.  By parapolicing I mean aggressive contract private security firms that are, in practice, private law enforcement agencies.  But I am also interested in what we call “paid duty” policing in Canada which is the state renting out public police officers to private clients.  Such clients are multiple, including Business Improvement Areas (or Districts) and nightclubs, both of which have been sites for my current research projects.  The nighttime economy, within which the nightclub is a central institution, is part of this late capitalist compulsion to commodify security provision.  Bouncers are an integral part of a general tendency to colonize all aspects of human interaction with a commodity logic.  Being a scholar, not just a Marxist one, also means using theoretical concepts that elucidate your subject of analysis.  In this way, my analysis is also indebted to Baudrillard and Foucault on consumption and surveillance.

CrowdControl: One of the most famous bouncers in history might have been Al Capone who, while later becoming famous in Chicago, worked in a Brooklyn dive, the Harvard Inn, as a bouncer and bartender until 1919. While working there, he received his infamous facial scars and the resulting nickname ›Scarface‹. What kinds of guys are running the bouncer business in 21st century Canada?

George Rigakos: There are still a few Capone-like characters out there but many more are looking not toward law breaking but rather law enforcement.  I was surprised at how many bouncers are training to become correctional workers or police officers.  I think the corporatization of nightclubs has had a risk effect on bouncing in that training and procedures have been set up to minimize corporate liability.  So, yes, you do have underground clubs that host nefarious clients and are staffed by nefarious bouncers but you have many more massive entertainment complexes opening up that sometimes employ up to two-dozen bouncers working in four or five connected, thematized nightclub settings.  A true spectacle of security, risk and consumption.

CrowdControl: You claim that »the urban night is being redefined by club culture, violence and the bouncers who police it«. What kind of redefinition is it that you have identified?

George Rigakos:  I should start by saying that I have grown quite suspicious of cultural radicalism while researching this book but that’s not exactly what you’re asking.  This cultural redefinition is actually nothing more than the material effect of nightclub proliferation and nightclubs’ qualitative re-organization.  This is a two-fold process.  First, nightclubs, and more generally a vibrant nighttime culture, are being intentionally cultivated by urban planners across the globe as essential aspects for creating a so-called “international city”, or a “24-hour city,” as playgrounds for an aspiring jet-set bou.rgeoisie.  We have seen this taking place in post-industrial cityscapes from Manchester to Philadelphia.  Nightclub licenses are being handed out by the bushel and cities have even used tax abatements as incentives.  Of course, it is a deliberate process.  City planners want to bolster the “tourist gaze,” to advertise their city’s “entertainment district.”  It’s perhaps the most obvious or crass example of the deliberate transition (or default) to a service sector economy with all of its associated social costs.  Second, the nightclubs themselves are much larger.  We are talking here about massive entertainment complexes, oftentimes multi-level nightclub settings that necessitate a high concentration of security labourers (among others).  I think that in the same way as Marx described how industrial workers develop a class consciousness based on their aggregation by capital into even more and more centralized production, so are both service staff and patrons scooped up into these large post-industrial pleasure factories.  They are all increasingly scrutinized by voyeurism and surveillance with increasing intensity; what I call a “synoptic frenzy.”  Nightclubs produce alienation and lonely crowds.  They amplify divisions based on race, class and gender.  In this social context, I say that violence is not only predictable but natural.