Malcolm James is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at University of Sussex.
In this paper, Malcolm James discusses the transformation of sound system culture in relationship to the cultural technologies of war. Complicating a Benjaminian analysis of such phenomena it discusses how mechanical and then digital reproduction produce the over aestheticisation of life and human detachments, in ways consistent with the militarily corollaries of their moments – the bomb, the missile and the drone. Beyond this, it also shows how these moments have appeared alongside shifting anti-capitalist, decolonial and intimate human-artistic relations.