The Currency of Paper Read online

  THE CURRENCY OF PAPER

  ALEX KOVACS

  “. . . labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification.”

  —The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx

  CONTENTS

  Observing the Progress of Time

  A Short Essay Written by the Protagonist

  I Promise to Pay the Bearer

  Details of Some Principal Coordinates

  Growth Towards the Ceiling

  Aspirations to a Complete Inventory

  Writings in the Mode of Realism

  General Advertisement to the Locality

  Possible Uses for Pockets

  Occurrences of an Afternoon of Leisure

  Beyond the Turquoise Door

  Concerning the Utmost Privacy

  The Faded Glamour of Certain Stairwells

  Views of a Forgotten Building

  On What Has Been Discarded

  Time Signatures Affect Desires

  An Unexpected Encounter with Trevor

  To Be Accepted As Truths

  Mobilizing the Labour Force

  Abandoned Projects of Minor Significance

  Brief Communications with the Populace

  Things He Made no Record of

  The Repository of Words

  On the Planet Everybody Calls Home

  Acts of Industrial Sabotage

  Window, Bicycle, Lamp Post

  Habitual Practices that Cannot be Ignored

  Notes on Inconsequential Occasions

  Broadcasts Received in the Outer Regions

  A Speech Delivered to a Small Audience Gathered Inside an Abandoned Ballroom

  The Rebuilding of Ickenham

  Rumours of the Neighbourhood

  Enactment of an Unknown Epic

  What Will Happen at this Juncture?

  It’s Never Impossible to do Something for the First Time (If You Haven’t Done It Before)

  Transcription of an Afternoon Walkie-Talkie Conversation

  Relations with the Absolute

  Instruction Booklet Discovered Inside a Large Box

  The Pleasures of Examining Ice

  Occasional Wardrobe Combinations Discovered

  The Invisible Expanding Galaxy Band

  Visual Responses to the Period in Question

  The Museum of Contemporary Life

  Thoughts Emerging from the Contemplation of Clouds

  The Ignoble Procession Backwards

  Interview Performed by a Computer

  How to Celebrate with Equanimity

  Reflection in a Darkened Window

  The Distribution of Resources

  Millions and Millions and Millions

  Observing the Progress of Time

  (1950)

  Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth wondered if he could dictate the entire course of his life on a single day. After some deliberation, a process lasting the length of a Wednesday morning, he concluded that it was possible. Suddenly, with no prior warning, it seemed to him a matter of some urgency to plan all of the details of his adulthood whilst he was still a young man. Brimming with optimism, he hoped that it was simply necessary to decide what he most wanted to do and in which order. Immediately he set to work upon the drafting of a plan.

  At noon he sat inside a public house in Bloomsbury. This was a place populated only by solitary male drinkers, isolated men wearing ruffled coats and smoking pipes emitting circles of smoke that hovered and drifted in an unfurling cloud above their heads. Grey sunlight dissolved into the dingy huddles of shadows thrown from the battered furnishings. In studied silence the barmaid washed empty glasses and placed them in long neat rows along the dark mahogany shelves. Maximilian sat at the left end of the bar, beside the thick length of rope that dangled from the mouth of the silent brass bell, drinking a succession of pints of bitter ale, his gaze directed out towards the street in the hope of discovering fresh inspirations. With the progress of his imbibing he felt the slowness of the afternoon unwinding down the length of his spine.

  No matter that his plan had to exclude innumerable torments and banalities which he was destined to encounter, that it could not possibly survive for years on end without mutations and excisions, that in many of its details it was probably lacking in all pragmatism, all that was significant was the necessity of forming a definitive set of strategies, a declaration of intention based upon his genuine desires, distillations of urges that he had possessed since he was a child. In all the foolishness and idealism of youth, he forged a series of eternal vows.

  Disappearing without leaving a single clue to his whereabouts, he would dedicate himself to the completion of numerous projects, living out a life crowded with impossible undertakings and miraculous pursuits, all incognito, with no one privy to his role until after his death. He would investigate arcane branches of knowledge, brand every neglected street and alleyway with his footsteps, consecrate secret temples to the gods of wisdom and delirium, serve as an unseen philanthropist to thousands of people.

  Ordinary ambitions did not interest him. He possessed no desire to excel within a regular field, to build any sort of successful career. Instead he would perform acts of a kind that had barely been encountered before, challenging the boundaries of what it was possible to do within the span of a lifetime. His projects would perhaps fall within the category, broadly speaking, of “art,” but would refuse to utilise the terms or follow the strictures of any artistic establishment or school. Primal experience, rather than formal aesthetic statements, would be his priority: experiencing it, guiding it, making a gift of it to others. All would be done in secret and no one else would be permitted to see his work for what it was until he had died. Only then would he reveal the extent of his labours to those who were prepared to listen.

  Having broken all contact with his aristocratic family and their milieu, Maximilian found himself employed for forty hours each week at a printing works in Dagenham. His time there was dominated by a series of awful mindless repetitions, cycles of tedium that almost succeeded in destroying him. Already he had been there for nearly two years and he was finding it difficult to see quite how he would escape. Entering the workplace each morning was so dispiriting that it felt like he was being repeatedly punched in the face. Headaches would soon settle in for the duration of the day. Exhaustion clung to his limbs, became engrained, a part of the mechanics governing his body motions.

  The little education that he had received was due to his own appetite for the reading of books. His attempts to build an intellect within the confines of his room became the great secret that he shielded from his colleagues. Passing his days at the printing works largely in silence, on the few occasions he was required to speak he would imitate a working-class accent with whichever monosyllables seemed necessary. He was a cipher to his colleagues; no one had any idea that when he returned home he was engaged in the furious processes of study. Towers of books, perennially in danger of collapsing, reached up towards his ceiling. Every night he
would read for hours on end, often until he could no longer adequately focus his eyes upon the words that lay before him.

  On that fateful Wednesday in Bloomsbury, time he had stolen for himself by feigning sickness, all of his energies were poured into the completion of his plan. In the space of three hours he weighed up the relative importance of each of his ambitions, estimating how long he would need to devote to them. He then placed them into a timetable that ran to exactly fifty years, with each individual year taken into account. Some of his schemes were grand enough to take up months or years at a time, whilst others were minor, relatively insignificant actions that might be performed in the space of a few minutes. As soon as the words had been declared upon the page, rendered elegantly in black ink with his fountain pen, it seemed certain to him that they spoke of the truth, that what they described would one day exist. Even before he had finished writing them, the plans began to possess a definitive hold on him, a mysterious authority that few other forces could lay claim to.

  He imagined the span of his entire life. How would it feel to wake up each year and discover that he was older? To observe his features in the mirror as time gnawed them away? Recently, as a consequence of thoughts like these, he had found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the era into which he had been born. He noted its conventions of form, observable in newspapers and advertisements and bus tickets. How long would it take for fashions to change? Which course would they take? Would he notice when they did?

  In one sense, the idea of learning how the future would alter such details caused him great excitement. Every year ahead would possess its own peculiar character, for him individually as well as on a much wider scale. He hoped that he would prove to be capable of noticing the changes as time moved on. A part of him was frightened of remaining fixed to his current mental co-ordinates, of never evolving in tandem with the shifts of history that everyone else acknowledged. He was determined to never fall into any sort of complacency.

  Looking up from the pages of his notebook, he registered the details of his surroundings for the first time in more than an hour. Many of the old men were still present, emptying their glasses of drink as slowly as they could manage. Despondently, the barmaid leafed through a newspaper. Maximilian smiled to himself. Whilst the rest of the world remained locked in perpetual stasis, he had shifted the course of his life. His plan was complete. Soon the bar would be closed for the duration of the afternoon.

  Emerging back out on the street, he came upon a burst of pigeons, scattering in profusion as they broke into flight. Strolling across Bedford Square he peered into the well-polished windows, encountering scenes presided upon by men wearing suits, framed within black brickwork and cream-white arches, figures moving with the authority of learning and money, enclosed by definitive partitions of black railing, their offices looking out onto a giant oval-shaped park that could only be entered by key holders.

  Visitors spilt out from the great doors of the British Museum, thronging the courtyard with footsteps and murmuring before walking away down Great Russell Street towards many separate destinies. A few streets away the beacon of Senate House appeared to him, the bulk of its body rising towards the skies with malevolent grandeur. Wandering amongst the university buildings, he gazed upon the rooms in which he imagined extraordinary conversations taking place, occasions that could leave indelible imprints upon those who had been present. Sensing the scale of the mass of rooms surrounding him, he considered the silences of the libraries, the academic offices holding bookcases and dishevelled piles of papers, the scientific laboratories and hospital wards and the residencies of eminent families. He wanted to be a part of this manic activity.

  Nearby, a pullulating cloud of wood smoke emerged from the back garden of a house, drifting over the brick walls, winding itself into the grey air hanging over the stretches of lawns and pavements, seeping into Maximilian’s nostrils, a scent which was destined to stay with him for the duration of his days.

  A Short Essay Written by the Protagonist

  (1951)

  1. The conditions are now in place for capitalism to flourish once more. Inevitably it will do so, escalating further and further, until we finally face collapse.

  2. The task now for anyone with any sensitivity and intellect should be to oppose this state of affairs in any way that they can.

  3. The consequence of a society that places money at its centre is that forms of mental and physical slavery come to dominate human life.

  4. Certain forms of expenditure are undoubtedly for the public good. Nevertheless, all that is moral in such cases is the intention that lies behind a given act of spending and the performance of that act. Sums of money cannot become moral in and of themselves.

  5. Finally, money is impossible to define. It appears in such a vast range of contexts, being utilised for so many different reasons, that any objective explanation of its ultimate character becomes elusive to those who seek it.

  6. The vast majority of ways in which money circulates have enormously destructive consequences. Human relationships inevitably suffer as a result, becoming insipid, superficial, mechanical reductions of what is possible. Tenderness is rarely achieved on the scale it could be because individuals are trapped within the structures of employment. In the current system most human beings have little knowledge of the full spectrum of the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that the species is capable of achieving.

  7. Paradoxically, the only way for anyone to overcome the punishing effects of a world dominated by money is for them to acquire a large amount of money for themselves. Otherwise, different forms of poverty and slavery will ensue.

  8. Money, considered from one perspective, can be seen as an enormous collection of numbers, somewhat arbitrarily selected by fate.

  9. The usual ways in which money circulates are routinely accepted by society as the proper state of affairs. Given such an absence of reason, certain acts usually condemned as immoral have the potential to become moral if performed for the right reasons. Certain forms of larceny and fraud fall into this category.

  10. Any free-thinking individual must do everything within their power to escape the obscene working conditions that prevail in the free-market system. This is equivalent to, and no less imperative than, for example, fleeing your country because it has descended into war.

  11. Certain acts of labour are necessary and society must acknowledge those who perform them. That this acknowledgment must be financial in nature is an assumption whose basis in reality has not yet been demonstrated to any satisfactory extent.

  12. When money is the sole objective of an action, a certain degree of idiocy is inevitable.

  13. Money shows its true face in the context of mass production. There, it becomes clear that money necessarily poisons all that it touches.

  14. Every advertisement could be replaced with a work of art.

  15. The state requires that an individual be in possession of a certain amount of the currency that it has itself created and controlled the distribution of. The only moral argument for such an arrangement is that it would seem to encourage an individual to contribute a certain amount of his or her labour to society. However, one may nonetheless obtain money through means no less legal but in no way related to the performance of labour as it has been thus far defined. No limits have been placed upon these means, or those who exploit them.

  16. If Members of Parliament wish to order millions of people to “participate in the national economy,” then it is surely only fair that they should themselves contribute a certain number of hours of labour to the “necessary” factories, offices, and kitchens that they have forced into existence.

  17. There is no good reason for governments not to introduce the concept of a “maximum wage” into law, with the parallel dictum of a “minimum wage” existing at a level not far underneath. The result would be societies of relative material equality in which both excessive wealth and poverty would have no place.

  18.
The horror of menial work as currently practised should not be underestimated. To spend forty hours a week or more engaged in unceasing cycles of senseless repetition, as do most human beings, is a destructive form of existence for anyone to have to endure.

  19. In a more just and sane society it would be compulsory to partake in forms of whichever necessary menial work existed, distributing the quotas of such work fairly, whilst simultaneously providing the opportunity for educational and creative pursuits on a no less equal basis.

  20. Throughout its history, money has been synonymous with anxiety, intolerance, selfishness, anger, mistrust, and, of course, greed. That these states of mind are considered necessary consequences of the economic system in which we live is simply unacceptable. No system predicated upon such emotions can be considered salutary or, indeed, rational.

  21. Money is the great patterning and organizing force in the world. It shapes the narratives within which most of us must live; it dictates the ways in which our bodies move and speak and think, thereby excluding an infinity of possible subjects and stances. We should attempt to challenge and overthrow these narratives.

  I Promise to Pay the Bearer

  (1952–1998)

  Merely setting foot in the Dagenham printing works each morning was an activity that soon became loathsome to Maximilian. The proprietor of the business, one Mr. Bradley, was a corpulent white-haired man who was often engaged in the act of wiping sweat away from his forehead with a handkerchief. Most working days would see him sitting in his little office, fiddling around with figures in his notebook, or, simply, doing as little as he possibly could. Occasionally he would emerge from hiding in order to attend to his workers, frequently shouting abuse at them with a booming, guttural voice that challenged the roar and whir of the machinery by which they all were dominated.