Thinking is amateur
Walking down the street, on what do I bestow my attention?
Where is money to be found? It drifts about like leaves, leaves the size of scurf in the mild squares of London.
Let me blow a tune on this piddling flute.
Aufmerksamkeit. Achtung!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have here items of daily necessity, items you should never be without. Let me demonstrate.
What holds the attention, what makes one pay attention, in effect is a form of debt. That sounds strange, in so far as saying this seems commonsensically wrong; and that one’s attention is bestowed on things, gifted. Granted. But the case is contrary to commonsense. Most of the time we give it only in the allowance of money in return: which is to say in the recognition that debt is involved … Granting attention is seen as a transaction in which others owe us - for that they should owe us money for this - seems the only fair outcome.
One stands in debt.
Talking into one’s mobile - looking at it, restlessly pressing the buttons, wiping its screen. Switching it on; off.
Watching tv, viewing a film, listening to an mp3.
Reading a book, scanning a newspaper. Seeing an ad.
The things that store it, like a battery stores electricity.
Like battery acid. Like the acid colour of plastic.
On a DVD I have the first three episodes of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Attention is stored up on it; value ….
Attention exists as a form of indebtedness.
Or, to the extent it can exist as that it is that.
Or it becomes that.
For instance, this writing is ‘free’ in that I pay no one to host it and no one pays me to write it.
It makes it nugatory. How can it have any value, being free - ?
Supposing that the following conditions obtained:
i) that this were part of a course
ii) that a charge were to be levied for services rendered
It would then be conceived as a form of debt: you would pay attention to it; you would owe it something - simply by the fact of having paid money for it and its being institutionally or formally conceived (which is to say conceived in terms that entail specific parcels of time). As it is, since it is free, since you pay it nothing, you pay it no attention; you owe it nothing.
Or at best it is a kind of black market writing. Surreptitious; clandestine, furtive. Time borrowed; or time stolen.
What makes money money?
The human attention.
The value of money is its dynamic as a living force.
Up to a point things have value because I say they do.
Up to a point, because others say they do.
(The dynamic of ‘finding things interesting’.)
But:
Money is a species of debt.
“If we all pull together.”
How about this:
Capitalism is based on an idea of us not all finding the same thing interesting, so that it is in our different ways that we find a common interest in it. Whereas Communism … there is only one thing of interest. Each doctrine contains a ‘common theory of interest’. And so some might argue that only one is actual or practicable, in so far as the idea of a single overarching shared interest that determines all the others is phantom.
But of course the same can be argued of Capitalism too.
“Advertising is Capitalism’s drill diamond.”
