At Work, At Play

Money: it represents a specialised aspect of the human attention: a kind of inertial pragmatism whereby things have to work.  Nothing can work without it.  If he isn’t paid the bus driver wont drive the bus.  The bus too, it would be without petrol, it would remain unbuilt, if it didn’t exist as the money that it is.  There would be no transformation.  So what is it?

Well, it is the bus; and it is the bus-driver.  It is the supermarket; and it is the road; it’s the shop and the t-shirt, the shoes and the socks; the arrangement of the flowers in a public garden; the water and the salt; the book; the sound.

You can tell, in the gloss of aging pop stars, let’s suppose from their confidence and how they look how their lives are folded into it like berries in jam.  Money.  They look expensive.  Like aging racehorses; physically impressive if in a dead situation.

This is where money’s value comes from: it is that aspect of the human attention in which we owe or others owe us.

In money life is acknowledged as a medium of debt.

(Its value hangs always on what is owed; on indebtedness.)

“But isn’t the value of money a consequence of the world of work, which generates its objects?”

In so far as work is only a form of the human attention, no.

In Fassbinder you can see that there is conflict about this.  He knows he wont succeed in making this equation, in which the value of money is understood to be the consequence of manufacturing and therefore of working class activity, even though everything in him seems obliged to argue that the equation is all and to show its inevitability as the truth.

Remittance.  Remuneration.  Revenue. 

Insurance.  Investment.  Interest.

Tax.  Invoice.  Receipt.  Bill.  Tab.  Item.  Merchandise.  Goods. 

Work = Play.  Pay.  Cash.  Cheque.  Card.  Plastic.  ATM.  Pin. 

Money.

Tags: Tax