The second of our plenary speakers is Dr. Niall Heffernan.
Dr. Heffernan’s paper argues that the municipal institutions in The Wire’s Baltimore, as is most vividly depicted in its portrayal of the police and school systems, are run according to the statistical means of Game Theory. Game theory is a mathematical approach to strategy that factors an opponent’s actions into its formulae in order to calculate the best course of action. It was originally formulated by the famous Hungarian-American mathematician, Jon von Neumann, who possessed an avowed hatred of Soviet Russia, as well as its ideological adjunct, absolute faith in capitalist rationalism and rationality. The United States waged the Cold War by deploying its world-destroying weapons through means of threats and incentives (to convince the Russians not to attack), according to game theory’s essentially capitalist rationale.
The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s was quickly mythologised as the final victory for liberal democratic capitalism, most famously in Fukayama’s “The End of History” essay. The title and logic of Fukayama’s tract reveal how the Cold War was perceived in terms of America’s narrative of utopia through apocalypse, a core narrative of American mythology since its inception with the Puritans and pilgrims. The Greek origins of the word ‘apocalypse’ pertain to an event that will draw back the veil of the world to reveal a perfect heaven on earth. The apocalyptic revelation in America’s formative creation, therefore, was the removal of the ‘savage’ other from the land. The godliness of the chosen ones was proved by their possession of commerce, technology, the rational means to transform the wilderness. The ‘naked heathen,’ then, was to be removed by coercion or force to make way for progress and the eventual dawning of heaven on earth.
In the mythologising of America’s Cold War ‘victory,’ the narrative is such that the Soviet ‘other;’ unbelievers, in possession of unnatural collectivist ideas, had given way to superior technology, rationality and ideology. Thus, also, the (radically capitalist) game theoretical methods of strategy were also ‘proven’ to be apodictically correct, seeing as, according to the logic of the Cold War, capitalism and communism were binary opposites. The atomic bomb merely symbolised the apocalypse, (no utopia can dawn from a war that destroys the world) whereas the game theoretical methods were the real apocalyptic weapons, revealing again that the path to utopia at the ‘end of history’ comes through America’s techno-economic rationality. The secular (man-made) quasi-apocalypse of the Cold War reified neoliberal ideology and its institutional underpinning, game theory.
In The Wire’s depiction of the so-called War on Drugs is the attempt to solve a social or public health problem by waging a war, like the Cold War, with game theoretical statistical models. The result is the othering of the growing numbers of poor, in inner city America, who find themselves a part of the illegitimate narcotics trade—the ‘war’ creating entrenched enmity between the institutions (the police and the drugs trade)—seeing the unravelling of the myths of liberty, justice and equal opportunity that bind the American nation.
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