GoKawiilWalk down any street and look around. The buildings you see will vary in their construction: one, two, or many stories; made of wood, brick, concrete, and steel; heated with oil or gas, cooled with fans and air conditioners; with doors, windows, flat, or peaked roofs. You can give a physical description of them— casual for most of us, more detailed if you’re trained as an architect or engineer. If you could disassemble them, you could put numerical values on the buildings’ differences—so many bricks, that much length of wire and pipe, different quantities of tiles and glass.
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The construction and maintenance of these buildings requires the coordinated activity of an enormous number of people, spread over space and time. Different people dug up the clay, shaped and fired it into bricks, carted them to the site, and mortared them in place. Human beings laid the wires and pipes, and others kept watch in the power plants and sewage treatment plants to ensure that the electricity and water kept flowing.
Part of the identity of the thing is what it means in terms of money.
All of these activities, linking people who will never meet or even be aware of each other, have to take place in sync. If you watched long enough, from enough vantage points, you could see all this activity take place just as you see the buildings today. Perhaps, if you have small children,you have stood by a construction site and watched and watched it. Each of us often has, with our own children.
But these same buildings have another set of qualities, which are not visible to the senses. Every building has an owner, a party with exclusive rights to it. Each building has a price, reflected in some past or prospective sale and recorded on a balance sheet. All of these buildings generate a stream of money payments— some to the owner, including from tenants to whom some of the owner’s rights are delegated as well as to mortgage lenders and tax authorities, whose need for payments keep people laboring so they can afford to live in the building.
Like the bricks in the building’s walls or the water flowing through its pipes, these qualities are quantitative: they can be expressed as numbers. But unlike the differences in those physical quantities, all of these can be expressed in the same way: as dollars or other units of currency. Part of the identity of the thing is what it means in terms of money.
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It is impossible to observe this second set of qualities in the physical building, no matter how microscopically you examine it. These qualities are invisible, immaterial—no physical examination of the building will ever tell you who owns it or how much it cost. But these invisible qualities shape our relationship to the building as much as any of its physical properties. Where you carry out your daily activities of life and work depends entirely on who owns which buildings, which in turn depends on the invisible price tags they carry. And the collective activity of creating new buildings, and improving and maintaining existing ones, is guided by beliefs about the flow of money payments the buildings will generate.
These invisible qualities also involve coordinated human activities, including our collective capacities for coercion and violence. (This part becomes clear if you try to ignore the property rights attached to a building and someone calls the police.)
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