notes.husk.org/likes images.

Left, page from the book Color problems: A practical manual for the lay student of color, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, 1902. Via. Right, Milena Büsch, Auto Motor Sport, 2022, Oil on magazine pages mounted on cardboard, artist’s frame, 142,8 × 110,8 cm. Via.

–

Looting, as Debord knew, “instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army.” And sooner or later the tanks will always come. […] If the armored divisions of the National Guard fell upon Minneapolis in 2020, it was because of looting, the immediate abolition of the commodity-form. To loot means to fill a commodity with something it cannot communicate as a commodity: being free. All that a commodity can communicate is exchange-value. It’s thus the entire religious system of the commodity-form that looting collapses. Looting — immediate communization — shares no common ground with the world of the commodity. And yet, it expresses something abyssal within that world: the possibility that everything could be free. It is precisely owing to the danger represented by this sudden opening of an outside that the State sends in the National Guard. One doesn’t send the army to shut down the DSA, and that’s all anyone needs to know about it. It is not a threat to capital. The gesture that vandalizes subjectivity necessarily strikes at commodity-fetishism too, and vice versa. To make oneself incommunicable — to become as one becomes — is an act of desertion that also limits the extension of the desert into our lives.

Ulysse Carrière, from Vandalizing the Subject, for ILL WILL, March 9, 2022. Via.