Free commodities, Manila and Bryant

These are all objects worn by use, the same kind of use, the labor of containing. Suitcases contain a variety of things, and travel while doing so; pots and pans live a more domestic existence, and only “travel” to the stove from the cabinets or hooks or shelves where they live, and then back again—perhaps with a stop-off in the sink or refrigerator—but they, too, are defined by the things they carry, food, which is also destined to be contained, in the belly.* The different way a printer “contains” reminds me of what else pots and suitcases do, which is carry across change: if they contained motionlessly, or at a steady temperature, there would be no point in doing so. Containing is a necessary, but inadequate condition: like the paper within, as it is printed on, containing is itself contained within a longer process, starting when a thing is put inside and ending when it is taken out.

Here these three kinds of objects all are, together, and free.

Here is what that spot looked like without these objects, when it didn’t contain them, a couple of years ago, when, presumably, these objects were all still in use:

The pots are worn, and I wouldn’t cook with them if I were you—PFAs, you know, as we now know more than we did, no doubt, when these pots were new, before all that heat was put into all that food, in them, and did you know that “the arrow of time appears only where there is heat,” as Carlo Rovbelli puts it? That “the link between time and heat is therefore fundamental” and “every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved”—also these are not the most lovingly used suitcases. One does not tend to love containers, whose job is to absorb the damage of use, so that our hands and bodies need not. Do not cook with your hands.

I have said nothing of the cardboard box, as that is not a commodity being offered for use, exactly; it is in use, still, containing the pans.

The HP LaserJet 3050 can be purchased for between $99 and $278 on eBay, but this one is free to take, if you can. No paper is offered, And none is contained. Given that fact, given that its worth varies so widely—such that you might be gaining a thing that contains $99 worth of value within it, or perhaps as much as $278—one finds oneself struck by what a strange thing it is, how abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. One finds oneself reflecting that the value of a commodity is related to the value of every other commodity, as the labor time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labor time necessary for the production of the other, since all commodities, as values, are only particular masses of coagulated labor time.

If you’d like to purchase these commodities, send me an email and I will go and get them and bring them to you in exchange for money.

*and yet, therein, to be dissolved into energy, from whence they disappear, one might say, solid melted into air.