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)

Miklós Ligeti
Csók
1902

Laura Gilpin
Tying a Chongo
1954

When we look at a landscape, we certainly see the open and contemplate the world, with all the elements that make it up (the ancient sources list among these the woods, the hills, the lakes, the villas, the headlands, springs, streams, canals, flocks and shepherds, people on foot or in a boat, those hunting or harvesting…); but these things, which are already no longer parts of an animal environment, are now, so to speak, deactivated one by one on the level of being and perceived as a whole in a new dimension. We see them perfectly and clearly as ever, and yet we already do not see them, lost-happily, immemorially lost -in the landscape.

The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben

Monument of Metamorphosis
Tetsumi Kudo
1970