OxyCOntin and other prescription painkillers were widely prescribed by army doctors for the same reason that they were prescribed to athletes, financiers, surgeons, and traveling musicians on the home front: they allowed for the continued extraction of skilled and specialized labor time beyond the body's conventional limits, working through the pain. [...]

[...] the rise of industrial capitalism was defined not only by new aesthetics in the field of mechanically reproduced culture, but also by the proliferation of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical anesthetics: methods by which proletarians could dull their torqued sensing bodies to survive the accelerating mediatic and haptic violences of capitalism. These include the use of narcotics, but also the narcotizing qualities of mass culture: cheap sentimentality, Manichean narrative closure, bombastic aesthetics, reckless melodrama, and the like. [...] the complicity of the middle classes in Germany, ENgland and France was purchased with the hallucinogenic temptations of consumerism in the arcades and later department stores of the growing metropolis: secured spaces of capitalist pleasure walled in from the grime, smoke, poverty, and strife that produced them.