on the money.

i was looking at a twenty dollar bill just now and noticed something. the new canadian 20 has a quote by gabrielle roy which says "nous connaîtrions nous seulement un peu nous-mêmes sans les arts?" which is translated as "could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?"

now, anybody who's more knowledgeable in french than me correct me here but isn't that a mistranslation? shouldn't it be "wouldn't we only know ourselves a little without the arts?"

now, nitpicky that might be, but that's a totally different meaning.

and holding that piece of paper in my hand reading that little text really reminded me of what fictions we base our lives upon. i mean, i've got this little piece of paper in my hand. to get it, i pushed a few buttons on a machine. conceivably it has some connection to the job that i work frequently, but it's sure not a very obvious connection when you think about it. i mean i go into a building, sit in a chair, talk to people and click buttons alot and then every friday the little website that shows me my 'account balance' spits a higher number at me. then i go around doing my thing by pushing series of buttons on atms around the city and painting the town red. all because of these little pieces of paper, with no real meaning. and half the time i don't even see the papers, i just walk around with a little plastic card and push buttons on smaller little machines and suddenly i am the owner of some products!

money is the basic simulacrum of the capitalist state. it means nothing, yet it is everything. everything that surrounds us, even we ourselves are keyed to a specific money value, whether we want to be or not. yet money is nothing in and of itself, but exists only with reference to those things. you can't walk into a bank anywhere and say, hey, here's my piece of paper, now give me twenty bucks worth of gold! and even if you did get the gold, what the fuck is gold but metal out of the ground that for some reason is valuable cos there's not much of it.

the sheer nothingness of the capitalist mode leaves me feeling like a fish on top of a sand dune in the middle of the sahara.

which leads rather nicely into cam's post....