Hans Hollein
Mobile Office
1969

Diane Arbus
Susan Sontag Alone on a Bed
New York, 1965

Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, Paris 1924 

It’s just as erroneous for us to describe the world in terms of masses of cells or subatomic particles as it is to wax poetic about a forlorn autumn sky or the melancholy of a forest. Even in the most hardened of the sciences there is an occult form of personification, and the best that literature can do is to yearn for a poetics of the impersonal. The more I write, the more I feel an overwhelming urge to accept the obvious, which is that we are forever cut off from a world we neither have access to nor whose existence we can affirm or deny. The resignation provides a bit of motivation…

Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

Film About A Woman Who… (Yvonne Rainer, 1974)

Because capitalist production is commodity production, the statement that the goal of the process is the satisfaction of human needs is false; it is a rationalization and an apology. The “satisfaction of human needs” is not the goal of the capitalist or of the worker engaged in production, nor is it a result of the process. The worker sells his labor in order to get a wage. The specific content of the labor is indifferent to him. He does not alienate his labor to a capitalist who does not give him a wage in exchange for it, no matter how many human needs this capitalist’s products may satisfy. The capitalist buys labor and engages it in production in order to emerge with commodities which can be sold. He is indifferent to the specific properties of the product, just as he is indifferent to people’s needs. All that interests him about the product is how much it will sell for, and all that interests him about people’s needs is how much they “need” to buy and how they can be coerced, through propaganda and psychological conditioning, to “need” more. The capitalist’s goal is to satisfy his need to reproduce and enlarge Capital, and the result of the process is the expanded reproduction of wage labor and Capital (which are not “human needs”).”

Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life (1969)