Color Painting (Non-Objective Composition), 1917, Olga Rozanova

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak). What Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it.

Mark Fisher for The Occupied Times, Good For Nothing / shorturl.at/aBDNW

George Rickey, Constructivism. Origins and Evolution, George Braziller, New York, NY, 1967

We have nothing to say because commodities do all the talking, and machines do all the creating. Techno-capital has engulfed the entire fabric of the conceptual world and created a situation in which everything is pre-determined and pre-fabricated by the economy. The peculiar fetish of the rules of this society is to scrutinize and manage every second of our time and transform them into machines to make money. It is critical, then, for each of us to be simultaneously isolated for production analysis, and considered in our productive capacities in aggregate. Docility, passivity, and silence help too. Some of us are slated to disappear and some to manage the cogs of the machine, but living as a human animal in group is simply out of the question.

— Your Loneliness Is A Public Health Problem (Black Seed #8)

Birth of Flowers, 1911

Dawson City Film Archive restoration

Felicia Honkasalo, Grey Cobalt, 2019

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, Volume 4