Money is time.

This inversion of the well-known phrase is really the original form of that phrase: not in form, but in content. “Time is money” is what we might call, with Nietzsche’s phrase, the “slave revaluation” of “Money is time”; but contrary to the context in which Nietzsche used it, in this case it is not a revaluation by slaves, but for slaves. When the master (e.g., the employer) tells his slave (e.g., his employee) that “time is money”, he seeks to urge him with that phrase to make more money in the same amount of time. But unless the employer is himself a slave, his version of the phrase is “Money is time”: he wants his employee to work harder so that he may spend more time on the things that really matter—to which money is only a means. Money is ultimately a means to the supreme pastimes of humanity.

Money is “condensed” time. Some people’s time is deemed as being worthy of more money than others. Hence the gaining of qualifications, experienece is in effect a means of envaluing any given [working] hour of your time. An hour of my time is worth, say, fifteen hours of some subsistence laborer in some godforsaken part of the world.

However money/time evaluations are meaningless unless contextualized by the cost of living, and more importantly perhaps the cost of successfully procreating, for any given locale.

Money is crystallized work. By giving someone a dollar, I have essentially given them the time it took me to earn that dollar, the work. I have in effect worked that time for them, save indirectly by the proxy of my profession.

Money is your congealed life.

The phrase “time is money” is indeed an injunction to a worker to work faster. If he works faster his company will outperform his competitors. Nietzsche states that today, virtue consists in how fast someone can produce something. This is a reversal of a truly noble bearing, an Aristocratic, unhurried pace. It is a reversal of the value of what virtue formerly meant, an eschewance of an ignoble haste. Slow people are not particularly prized today. Nietzsche also states that he is jealous of his poverty.

Damn the capitalists! Viva la flaneur!!..

*Google’s flanuer, fearing it has something to do with flannel.
Sounds good to me. Lol @ walking turtles down the street.

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. After the 1848 Revolution in France, after which the empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of “order” and “morals”, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “a botanist of the sidewalk”.[citation needed] David Harvey asserts that “Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flâneur and dandy, a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other” (Paris: Capital of Modernity 14).

Because he used the word to refer to Parisians, the “flâneur” (the one who strolls) and “flânerie” (the act of strolling) are associated with Paris. However, the critical stance of flânerie is now applied more generally to any pedestrian environment that accommodates leisurely exploration of city streets—in commercial avenues where inhabitants of different classes mix in particular. Indeed, diverse texts such as Baudrillard’s America, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road demonstrate the concept’s impact and flexible usage.

The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris.[1] Such acts exemplify a flâneur’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.

The concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity. While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open-up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel, began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a ‘blasé attitude’, and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:
“ The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. [size=150]Nietzsche[/size] sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”) ”

Money is only a moral form; that is: one we give meaning to and find meaningful… Time is life, and what does it tell you when some one will equate your life with his money??? Life, your life is the ultimate value to you, and only a relative value to another… Clearly, if the price were right, you would be dead… But if you are willing to trade labor to have your life, then you can live until you run out of labor power…

Turtles? I thought it was a lobster, that is if we’re both referring to the same event.

The observer-participant dialectic is evidenced in part by the dandy culture. Highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris.[1] Such acts exemplify a flâneur’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.

There was some artist once who did it using a lobster, maybe a surrealist or dadaist, I’m not sure. They must have been re-enacting the flaneur.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szhJzX0UgDM[/youtube]

-Imp

I was actually locked in a nightclub with her once, briefly.