The Cultural Life of Money (eBook)

Samuel Weber

Money is Time:
Thoughts on Credit and Crisis

1

Although the precise origin of the phrase “Time is Money” is difficult to determine, it was Benjamin Franklin who popularized the phrase in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (21 July 1748).14 What has been less well remembered than the phrase itself, however, is the word he used in introducing it: the advice that this “old” Tradesman gave to his “young” interlocutor began with an admonition to “remember”– indeed, with a series of such admonitions. The first was to “Remember that Time is Money.” Both the title of his essay, defining it as “advice” given by an “old” tradesman to a “young” one, and the admonition to remember – repeated six times at the start of the essay – suggest that a certain experience of “time” was already informing Franklin’s letter even before it began with its famous formulation, equating it with money. For time is already at work in Franklin’s title, distinguishing the “Young Tradesman” from the “Old One.” And a certain experience of time already shaped the manner in which Benjamin Franklin introduces each of the bits of advice he gives to the Young Tradesman. He begins each admonition by urging his reader to “remember” what he is about to say – a gesture that qualifies his advice as something that was perhaps once known, but that with the passage of time could easily have been forgotten.

Even before he begins by identifying time with money, time is, at it were, lurking in the background and calling the shots, both as the condition of the experience that the older man is about to share with the younger one – as the condition of knowledge – but also as that which brings with it the possibility of such experience and knowledge being forgotten or ignored.

Franklin’s manner of giving advice thus suggests that time has a double face and a contradictory function. It can be both productive and destructive; it can both take away and bring back. It is the dual, and indeed contradictory (if not dialectical) potential of time that sets the scene for the advice that Franklin will give to the young Tradesman. Its essence or upshot will consist in the admonition, made explicit at the end of the letter, not to allow time to go to “waste.” Time, which in a certain sense itself establishes the possibility of waste, should not itself be wasted. For to waste time is to waste money, and, as Franklin concludes, “The Way to Wealth, if you so desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market […] waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both.” (Franklin 1748)

To not waste time, to diminish its destructive character and to augment its productive potential, is here equated with the accumulation of wealth: to be wealthy is thus in a certain sense to overcome the destructiveness of time. But if the “way to wealth […] is as plain as the way to market,” then the adage for which this essay of Franklin’s will be remembered, “Time is Money,” tells only half the story. For if wealth is acquired through the way to the market, it is not only time that is money, but money, as that which opens the way to the market, which is also and necessarily time. More precisely, money, like the market itself, presupposes a temporal process. Money, like buying and selling, takes time. For the exchange of goods is never simply instantaneous. Exchange is a process that takes time, even where money is not yet involved, as with the bartering of goods. Once, however, money has entered the picture, the temporality of the process of exchange grows ever more manifest. And since the exchange of goods for money is part of a process of circulation that at some point entails the reconversion of money into goods, money also takes time, is involved in time and indeed, can also be converted into time. But it is not just the fact that money takes time, or that it can buy time – for instance, time free from work or the time of an extended life span – that justifies the inversion of Franklin’s adage.

Rather, it is the fact that money, which, as a medium of circulation, is already oriented toward the future, necessarily entails some sort of credit, in regard to which the temporal dimension is constitutive and irreducible. Money necessarily entails credit because its “value” is never simply intrinsic to its simple being, to the fact of its mere possession; its value realizes itself in the future, when it will be put to use as a means or medium of exchange. It is thus no accident that Franklin’s second “reminder” to the Young Tradesman concerns credit and its relation to money: “Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me the interest, or as much I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum, where a man has good and large credit […].” (Franklin 1748)

Time is money not just in the sense of being the medium of circulation and the measure of value, but also because of a very peculiar quality of money, which allows it to mimic a characteristic otherwise associated with living beings: that of self-production and reproduction. This constitutes Franklin’s third reminder to the young tradesman:

Remember, that money is of a prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three-pence, and so on till it become an hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker […]. (Franklin 1748)

I interrupt Ben Franklin’s portrayal of money in mid-sentence, at a crucial, indeed as we shall see below, at a critical turning point. But before we proceed, let us just take note of how money is portrayed here as a special kind of living entity: one capable of reproducing and augmenting itself apparently without end or limit: “The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker…” Sounds familiar? Well, the continuation and completion of the sentence my citation has interrupted sounds not just familiar, but uncannily so. This is how Franklin concludes his encomium to money and thereby completes what Grammarians might call a run-on sentence: “[…] so that profits rise quicker and quicker, he that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced.” (Franklin 1748)

Money, thus described, appears as an uncanny double not just of living beings but of the deity: with living beings it shares their reproducibility, but with the deity it shares the lack of limit – i. e. a certain immortality. However, this is not the way Franklin expresses the idea. Rather, in a single, long, run-on sentence, he “turns” from the unlimited self-reproduction as the growth of “profits” to death as the result of willful killing: “He that kills a breeding sow” robs her forever of the ability to reproduce, and the same with anyone who “murders a crown […].” (Franklin 1748) The “crown” in question is of course, not the monarch but the designation of a currency unit. However, the naming of currency units after the symbol of political sovereignty suggests an analogy between the survival of the monarchy and the ability of money to reproduce and multiply. This analogy distinguishes both money and monarchy from the limited life span of individual living beings.

Thus, Franklin’s identification of time with money, of money with profit, and of profit with wealth, assumes a very particular connotation: the possibility of overcoming the finitude and mortality that otherwise limits the time of living beings qua individuals, through the unlimited reproducibility associated with profit-producing wealth. What proves important here is the fact that reproducibility, as Franklin describes it with respect to money, entails not just reproduction but expanded reproduction. The circulation of money as credit yields interest: it returns not just the same but rather more of the same, the same as more of itself.

When Franklin therefore asserts – reasserts, since he did not invent the proverb, but merely recalled it – that “time is money,” he turns time into a sub-species of the Self; he transforms it from a medium of alterability into a medium of self-fulfillment and self-aggrandizement, a medium through which the self-same – the private individual – reproduces and expands itself as “profit”: as that which “moves forward” – a major buzzword today, whether in political, commercial or ethical discourses – in the effort to maximize itself. Credit, as the generator of profit, is thus situated squarely within what might be called an “economy of the self” understood as both private and as individual, which is to say: ultimately in-divisible and homogeneous.

Nevertheless, if time is money, it is only because money, in its turn, is also time – and this poses a problem for interpretations such as that of Franklin. For time is ambiguous. It appears as the condition of an Economy of...