The human mind is not a functional unit

What I am thinking of here is the idea of what matters.  Different people have utterly different ideas of what matters.  Totally different concepts of wisdom, of what it is to be alive or what have you.  Just read any set of opinions on any topic.  No one agrees about anything.  Or small cliques form – but given enough time, they eventually don’t, they fall out with each other.  Contrast these sorts of views with the views of engineers or scientists about engineering or science.  There are broad, stable areas of agreement.  Things work.

Let’s say: The value that the thing in existing in itself has – how this actually works is against common sense; for how it actually works is as an ’impossibility: since for common sense it doesn’t exist really (in truth), it exists only as an imagination.  For example, a song that one likes: its value exists in its own terms.  Its value exists in itself.  So.  But yet – that sense appears to be merely imputed.  But then, by implication, what isn’t imputed, what isn’t an imagination?  Since even for instrumental logic the same reasoning applies: the imagination of a purpose is required.  It wouldn’t exist, the distance between A and B, if measurement yielded no sense.  It exists only within that possibility.  So there is nothing besides the sense by which its existence can be understood.  The human mind proves itself not a functional unit in this degree in so far we overlook this.  The mind proves itself dysfunctional, because we think that the instrumental value or thing ‘exists in itself’ whereas the non-instrumental value or thing exists only ’subjectively’ – real – present as a kind of negative of the objectively understood instrumental reality actually existing.

Cash on the barrelhead

An impractical ’something’: it haunts the human imagination like wildfire: it is certainly impractical; nothing value-based works very well; and everything, all, is like nothing.

The Theme

Originality.  Talent.  Walk hand in hand.  ‘Talent’ meant originally ‘money’ .  And so originality, being its shadow: for money originates the actual: in which we duly live as dark animals, its very substance the minatory.  So ’something from nothing’ (that is, money).  Infinity.  The finite.  Sweeping the finite table clear of finite objects.  Nothing but infinity remains.  The tablecloth.  The granular striations shade into white.

Ordinary

Sitting on a bus staring out blank boom it came to me: the word ordinary.  Ordinary.  Ordinary!  As though it were an insight.  How ordinary  … Nothing here is special, nothing is unique, nothing individual – This is just a bus journey – everyone takes it … The feeling of used-ness that the seats seemed soaked in, of life obliterated by the anonymity of sharing space with people who (frankly) one would never want to share space with, repetitive, quotidian, the cheapness of it, the human attention in these circumstances at its lowest ebb.  I felt like a chicken in a coop.  (If only I were rich!)

Get out your broom – sweep away those beans.

Money is a finitude

Debt (money being a species of debt).

*

Where we must begin from is the idea that debt – money – is not perceived as debt, identified with that finititude, but on the contrary is identified with life – infinity – itself.

… in the circumstance that one lives “in the world as it is”.

In this circumstance one lives a kind of illusion.

A kind of bi-polarity is understood of the world in which one lives: that is to say, where either one is free in that world in which one lives in having money, or (for example) in the world in which one lives, is a wage slave: the world becoming, being this singularity.  What I mean is that since as value money is a finitude – purely instrumental – but yet seems otherwise …

Or what I mean is that this is what everything becomes; or this is what everything is, regardless of one’s ostensible attitudes or feelings about money or values in general.

In other words, a condition is inherited whereby the world, and the things in it, are known only instrumentally; but in the form that this entails, which consists in the admixture of daily life, it is next to unrealisable how this case works; since it all connects with life either directly or indirectly and so the virtue of money as an idea of limit tends to be lost sight of, ‘money as being’ becoming what things are without limit: infinite finite.

(Becoming the whole horizon.)

What occurs as ‘knowing the world’, the things in it, or being in the world, is instrumentally understood and – in spite of ourselves – not otherwise understood.

… The ideal, which is the living moment, that will be got by money.  The thing wanted we will be freed into accomplishing – by money.  Whatever it is.  The thing adequate to itself; the thing that exists as enough in itself.  That is, this is supposed even if the supposition, the view about this thing that can be enough in itself is quite fantastic.  It stands before us like a line between two points: what prevents us from making the straightforward journey between them – is money, we think.  By contrast the infinite, the end in itself, actuality, is random.

All that the actuality of the ideal amounts to is possession.  The concept of infinity which we are discussing which is embodied by the concept of things standing as ends in themselves, is misidentified and with the idea of ends that exist only instrumentally.  This sense of possession therefore that the ideal demands just confirming the existence of money rather than any actuality: the thing that obtains the ideal.

Namely, so the idealism that we seem to have which is the idealism of being alive becomes a finitude: and so a kind of deadness ensues since nothing is sufficient to itself.

*

An end in itself is an infinity.

A concept delimited but fathomless.

Now, it is possible to construe this …

*

To what extent ought money to be identified with power?

Someone unfathomably rich is possessed of that.

– But so, then the wealthy are unfathomably in debt.

“The world of the wealthy man is finite un-fathomably.”

I see so you mean that the world of a poor person is finite fathomably – in contrast?

“At least the poor person knows he lives in a world of debt, and what that means.”

“A wealthy person has the power not to acknowledge the limited nature of his life.”

I see, so money frees you into the illusion. It does not free you.  It frees you into a kind of refinement of being where certain sorts of attention become possible that are not otherwise possible, a certain kind of time or a certain sort of space is available along with different new accessories …

*

In other words, what I suppose is a platitude: this is not an argument against money; but its perception as something that can be identified with life whereas …

… for this is the great question of course, the scale of this as a problem is illustrated by the seeming inevitability of human poverty in the world (which is a kind of off-shoot or side-effect of human greed ie is not a money problem).  That human power should be power instrumentalised –  is our issue.

At Work, At Play

Money: a specialised aspect of the human attention is represented: a kind of 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, the shirt, the shoes, the socks; the arrangement of the garden flowers; the fish in the bowl; the water; the salt; the book; the sound.

Aging pop stars, their lives are folded into it like berries in jam.  Money.  They look expensive.  This is where money’s value comes from: that aspect of the human attention where we owe others or they owe us in the flux of push and pull.

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 actively generates the objects that it buys?”

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. 

Remittance.  Remuneration.  Revenue. 

Insurance.  Investment.  Interest.

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

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

Money.

Don’t look down

Think of instances of where your attention fails.

Of where you get bored.  And even bore yourself.

“I’ve got no money and I’ve got no hair.”

Fear of Debt

The way Turgenev blithely ‘loans’ someone ten thousand rubles in the knowledge that it will never be repaid.  Were I as rich could I be as indifferent?  Example.  N.N. owes nothing to anyone.  No one owes him anything.  He owns six houses.  He is rich.  But he lives off bread and beer.  Never holidays.  Example.  Up to her ears in debt.  Owns nothing.  No clear idea of how her finances stand.  On perpetual holiday.

The need to merge unnoticably with the background.  (Like snipe on a muddy bank they are next to impossible to see.)

Van Gogh-isms

Imagine an egg white china bowl of boiled rice and pitta .  It has been left out, standing for weeks, congealing.  The rice is edged with black.  The pitta shows a patina.  Brown.  Green.  Dead.  How could this be worth money?  

But this painting, imagine: it is the most famous art work in the Western world and by far its most costly. 

There is a kind of time table for the world in this painting, look this bowl of rice illustrates its major intervals.

…

The Mild Squares of London

We who graze the mild squares of London

Like leaves the size of scurf …

“This patch of land is worth millions.”  I look at it.  Some old iron railings.  Broken paving.  Weeds grow.

Real estate.  This locus of attention. 

Real inwardly; outwardly – real.  Neither.

Down this street where people walk: these millions.

Tear the cloth off the mullioned windows.  Wipe away the soot.

My gaze is directed inward, an outward show: my words say,

They say pay me.