According to Berzinsh, the performance is a metaphor for consumer society consuming itself. The burying of children’s toys at the beginning of the ritual by the two performers is meant to show them stepping back from a condition of “supreme creativity” and “entering into the territory of what existential philosophy calls ‘das Man,’” explains Berzinsh in a comment he made to the video on Youtube. The notion of das Man (loosely translated as the anonymous ‘One’) comes from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and refers to someone who, rather than truly being in the world, lives an inauthentic life characterized by conformity.

¶ 10:21 AM