Culture
Sonic Futurism
Pop music is everywhere. As capital’s sonic handmaiden, pop obliterates particularist traditions, cordoning off their pasts and futures. Different cultures produce their own pop, but the gaudy sets, aesthetic palettes, sexual magnetism, and rhythmic hypnotics are all the same.
Theater of Cruelty
Mass society is able to abstract and mysticize the costs of pain. In a sense, deathmatch wrestling inverts this paradigm. Rather than being civilised barbarity it is barbarically civilised. The appearance of primal, sadistic aggression obscures efforts not to cause long-term injury and death.
