Against All Logic

Gold bars and SD cards and being wrong at the right place.

imagine you win the lottery but lose your ticket

Everything begins with a story and the more you hear one, the more trivial it gets, the longer it stays with you. Once upon a time there was a man, his name long forgotten. And being in desperate need for shoes, he went and searched for somebody who could satisfy his need. He finally stumbled upon another man, a shoe owner, himself looking for potatoes. And being the first one not in possession of any, they went and looked for someone else again. A potato farmer came, who was himself looking for a new coat. But since none of them could provide for it, they went and looked for someone else again. And being all of them unable to satisfy each other’s desire through a reciprocal exchange, they had to invent something, to find a way to mediate between their own individual desires and needs and to get to each what they needed the most.

“A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as a means of subsistence, or indirectly as a means of production.” (Marx 1906: 41-42)

I see a coin. It lies unnoticed on the sidewalk, in the grimy interstice between the cobblestones, covered by a veil of dust and cigarette ash and crusts of dirt and smog and crumbles. I pick it up and wipe it clean against the surface of my pants. I hold it between my point finger and thumb. It probably just fell out of a pocket, a purse, an envelope, a wallet or a bare hand. It rolled and got clutched in a crack. Countless shoes and boots step on it and bicycle or stroller tires too. Whether its previous owner acknowledged the fall and didn’t care to pick it up, out of disinterest or hurry? Or maybe they didn’t even notice, failing to feel the metallic clink tingling, hitting the stones. Nobody came to pick it up before I did. Has it been hiding there for days or weeks or months, unnoticeable, unseen? Has it been discovered by someone else already, maybe a curious child scanning the floor for tiny treasures and being pulled away by the hand of an attentive mother? Has it been lost before? Has it never belonged to anybody? Is it for me? And where is it from? And what is it for? Is it for me?

I let it slide into my pocket and carry it close against the warmth of my body, almost forgotten, for days. I have no use for it. Copper coins or crown seals or used subway tickets or paper clips or bobby pins or clumps of fuzz or dead skin and clipped nails. Worthless objects, objects left behind. In my room: a jar full of coins, one and two eurocents, collecting dust like a magnet. A place to empty my pockets barely taking up space. On a bracelet hanging from my arm, a coin’s an amulet and sign of fate and luck and chance or a dear. Or a valuable collectible. Or the price for a piece of candy. A coin’s worth nothing nowadays.

imagine you go to the store to buy a loaf of bread and come home with a box of milk instead

I throw loose change into my bag or reach with protruded fingers (scraping the bottom) to pay for something to eat or drink. Coins belong to the realm of livelihood, to the day to day lives of the poor and of the modest, of those who must pay in cash, scraping at the bottom of their pockets, holding a piece of metal tightly in their bare hands. Far away from big expenses and transactions, numbers going up and down, dancing around a display, some people cling to a piece of metal found on the streets. Coins are barely exchanged and exchangeable, barely enough for the most basic of all basic needs: food, drinks, toilets, drugs, cigarettes. Vending machines or cigarette dispensers or public toilets. A beggar, covered in lumps, his open palms facing up the sky, asking. A tiny basket quietly going around, from hand to hand, from bank to bank in church. Or a thousand wishes thrown into the waters of a fountain or a well. Begging, offering, giving. A coin is still the purest form of money and one of the oldest ones too. Metal, solid, cold and useless, circulating from hand to hand, being scraped and cleaned, thrown and collected, rolling on the ground. Tangible, material money, the symbol of money. A curious, archaic relict of older times and a companion to everyday life. A tiniest bit that managed to insert itself within a slit in the mesh of history, surviving beyond its due time. Now worthless, unless for those who have nothing at all. Who needs coins but numismatics, beggars and children? Who needs coins but underpaid bartenders hoping for meager tips on weeknights? Or what are coins for but a measure of how much a banknote is transformed and left behind after a transaction? In some countries, I heard, change is always rounded up, so there is never something left to count. Coins are being withdrawn from circulation; they are no longer needed. They disappear.

Yet I stopped and stumbled by it, I’ve seen it, I picked it, I put it in my pocket. I heard it, startled, clicking, rolling, like a slot machine or a cash desk, and as the wheel starts turning, I keep it, I keep it safe. What’s a coin worth?

A face, a number. Heads: the bust of a man wearing a hoodie on his head - a peasant, an alpine herdsman. Tails: a cross, the number five, a measure. Between heads and tails: the Lord will provide. For what? In the book of Genesis, a herdsman is asked by the Lord himself to sacrifice his own son. As they walk upon a hill, bringing the logs for the fire and the altar, the son asks about the object to sacrifice, it’s missing (he is unaware what shall become his fate) and the father answers that the Lord will provide. Soon enough he’s about to be slaughtered, when the sacrifice is interrupted by the call, the voice of an angel. A ram is left behind, a new victim for the sacrifice that gets killed and burnt. A victim for a victim, an object for another. A strange exchange.

imagine you sit in church and listen to this story for the thousandth time and wonder why a god would ask a father to kill his own son and then replace it with a ram

Anthropologists like André Orléan (1992: 134) studied the development of the sacrificial object that evolves as it gets substituted: human body, animal body, image of a body (like the agalma), coin. These objects create a community through the channeling of violence on a single object, within the sacrificial ritual, rather than letting it diffuse and spread across human relations. Therefore, money originates as the byproduct of a deal with the gods and the value of things can be estimated and expressed in relation to the value of the sacrificial offering. In a transcendental system, value is defined, negatively, through the comparison to human life.

Yet, as David Graeber observes, even in so-called human economies (where currency is used to establish and define relationships between people, rather than for commerce - as in market economy) human life cannot really be exchanged for money. (Graeber 2022 [2011]: 135-172). Instead, money is used as the reminder for something that cannot possibly be replaced, it’s a sign, a token. Every human life is a singularity within a complex web of relations, there is no possibility for substitution. Anything it gets replaced for is but a reminder of the fact that the equation is simply impossible. The substitution is not complete, a sign of lack, a negative, is left behind. The exchange is always asymmetrical, never fully complete.

imagine you open a can of beans from the store, and they are all moldy

My eBay knows me better than my mother. My eBay suggests me things I might want to buy or need: a gold bar, an SD card. I get struck by the similarity of these two things, two squares small enough to fit inside my closed fist, sleek, hard and concrete. The gold bar can collect and store some value, say to prevent inflation or for the future. The SD card can store documents and pictures and sound files, and access them in the near or remote future whenever I need them. These tiny objects are, on their own, completely useless. They can only be used within a system that can make sense out of them – the gold bar as a widely accepted rare metal, the SD card as readable hardware that can be deciphered by computers and other devices.

imagine you are left on a deserted island with nothing but a gold bar and a SD card

When it comes to needs and desires, we are all certainly to some degree similar, and at the same time singular. The fewest of us would give up shoes for potatoes, potatoes for coats. Our desires are huge. The realm of endless commodities is the place where every desire is satisfied – every thing I want, every thing I need, I got it. I love eBay and eBay loves me, every color and form and thing I can imagine, I got it. A gold bar, an SD card. Because my algorithm had proposed these two objects to me, standing side by side, I was looking for a hidden connection, for a secret code that would made the two into perfectly interchangeable. I was daydreaming of a long chain. The singularity of a fragment of reality with the power to encrypt something bigger, way bigger and yet to be defined and the possibilities to define it every time anew. A token of desire. Yet there was something I could not see, something I didn’t get. The connection, the bond between those things, so similar, so interchangeable, was not right, it was not complete. Deep down I knew, something was terribly wrong. And when I found out, it just struck me right in the face.

The chain broke.

imagine you are sitting at dinner with your friends and at once they all are conversing in a language you don’t know, and although you cannot speak, you understand every single word they say

“In the first place, the relative expression of value is incomplete because the series representing it is interminable. The chain of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be lengthened by each new kind of commodity that comes into existence and furnishes the material for a fresh expression of value. And lastly, if, as must be the case, the relative value of each commodity in turn, becomes expressed in this expanded form, we get for each of them a relative value-form, different in every case, and consisting of an interminable series of expressions of value. (…) Since the bodily form of each single commodity is one particular equivalent form amongst numberless others, we have, on the whole, nothing but fragmentary equivalent forms, each excluding the others.” (Marx 1906: 74)

Marx describes the Tauschwert of commodities in a system of relations and equations, where a thing can be compared to another, in a chain of associations that goes on and on and on. The worth of things is singular and connected to the desire for a specific commodity, but the value of commodities is relative, only determined within a system of exchanges which eventually ends in gold or Geld, a mirror and means of worth that can assuage the desire for money and everything else as well. Since Marx, there has been a lot of trying to define the value of value, for there must be something, a general principle behind everything, a hidden quality that renders it possible to say what’s a thing actually worth. But there is not. In “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value – The False Coin of Our Own Dreams” David Graeber points out at structuralism as a set of theories that successfully describes what Marx already discovered: a negative definition of value, in commodities like in language, where the endless interchangeability of an object within a fixed position in the system is rendered possible. (Graeber, 2001: 13-22) The value of things is determined through an interminable chain of comparisons, of virtual and potential exchanges. In a mind game, we substitute one object for another again and again, mirroring one thing and the next. But no actual exchange is taking place, everything stays where it lays, everything remains the same. Things are just things when taken for themselves. Nobody’s exchanging potatoes for shoes, linen for coats. The system begins to crumble where it collapses. The chain can go on and on…until it’s broken. At once, everything stops making sense. A tiniest bit, a grain of dust in the engine, a missing letter, a fiber of beef meat stuck between the teeth, a drop of oil in the sea, an alien body on a wound on the surface of the skin, a particle of produce that drips from the eyelid into the eye, slips through the lashes and burns, a tear falls. Everything stocks, for a second, everything stops. At once, something is very, very wrong.

imagine you stand at the ATM patiently waiting for your banknotes to be dispensed and instead of Euros you get monopoly cash

The trouble with the gold bar and SD card is that, in their presence, logic collapses and stops making sense. An artificial intelligent system of algorithms has randomly brought this image to my attention, tailored for my own desire, delight and pleasure. One thing seemingly being the image of the other, a seamless analogy, Verwechslungsgefahr. The reminiscence of everything that is not and that could maybe be. Two objects that could be one another, one or the other, one for the other. Or not? The trouble with the gold bar and SD card is that the analogy does not make any sense at all. On the place of a cohesive metaphor, I am left in front of objects that stand next to each other and yet are never meant to be. A faulty corner of reality where I stand. For an instant I feel like all this time I’ve been under a magic spell, then go back to sleep.

The wheel keeps turning, unless there is no wheel. But probably still.

imagine a parcel that gets delivered to your door, although you didn’t order anything from the internet. it’s coming from Singapore, Beijing or Melbourne, with several stamps and your correct name and address on it. you go on and open it to find inside three paper clips and a clump of lint

imagine you board a train to go home and visit your family and friends. your sister’s texting you she’ll pick you up at the station at noon, but there are no railways in the region you come from, and you have no siblings at all

imagine you’re sitting at your desk, working on the computer, sipping coffee from a paper cup. you feel a stinging bitter taste in your mouth and some flakey ashes ooze down your throat. you find a cigarette butt on your tongue 

imagine you go to the bar and order a beer. as you take the first sip of its beautiful foam, you realize that you’re drinking a latte macchiato

imagine you travel to italy but everyone speaks french

imagine you take your prescriptions religiously, day after day. after twenty years you find out all this time you’ve been swallowing (instead of pills) sugar candies. you feel fine anyway

imagine you’re missing your glasses, but they sit on your nose

imagine you go to the store to buy bread. as you pull out your wallet to pay, you find it’s filled with collectible stamps and plastic beads

imagine you go to the bank to receive your retirement pension. the cashier behind the desk starts telling a story about their last vacation. you get acquainted and become good friends and now you come back every day

imagine you found a winning lottery ticket on the subway. then you lose it on your way home

imagine someone rings at your door to tell you that you are about to

imagine you’re standing by the window of your sleeping room and staring outside at the full moon smoking a cigarette. a tram drives by, but there has never been no tram in your town

imagine everything would go terribly wrong

imagine everything would go absolutely right

imagine something you can’t think of

imagine something you don’t get

References

Orléan, André. 1992. The Origin of Money, in Understanding Origins – Contemporary Views on the Origin of Life, Mind and Society. Edited by Francisco J. Varela and Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Paris, France, CREA, École Polytechnique. Springer-Science+Business Media.

Marx, Karl. 1906. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. New York. Random House, inc.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value - The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York. Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2022 [2011]. Schulden. Die Ersten 5.000 Jahre. Stuttgart. Klett-Cotta.