On most Saturday mornings the area around Seoul’s City Hall is bustling with animated crowds of protesters. Whether traversing the musty summer heat or the bitter winter cold, countless demonstrators congregate there, dressed practically in brightly colored vests and wearing special hats to indicate their ideological affiliations. They show up in their free time to protest pressing issues of the day: corruption scandals, tax hikes, gender morals, and international politics, all blending into an auditory concoction of collective urban pandemonium. Drums, flags, television screens, flyers, and even musical performances produce a swarm of symbols in flux, a myriad of isms blending into a single, dense scene of moving bodies, all cordoned off on the side of roads or on sidewalks by the police. To any first-time visitor, these scenes of spontaneous yet repetitive sociality feel surreal and profoundly ritualistic, closer to religious ceremony than any form of organized political dissent. They evoke the teachings of Camille Paglia, who recognized that all contemporary cultural activity is fraught with symbols of a much older order: vanished realities that we act out ritualistically and compulsively with only a vague grasp of their structurally inherited nature.