I’ve been working with the hypothesis that we find, in late 17th century England, the near simultaneous emergence of capitalism as the Bank of England is established and becomes the creditor of the government itself, on the one hand, and that of the two-party system, the embryo of post-revolutionary constitutional orders, on the other. The connection is in the demolition of the sacrality of the occupied center, i.e., the overthrow of monarchy as the fount of government. But this “economic”-“political” conjunction needs another suture, both to include the massive technological developments that we can trace, at least intellectually to this same period, and to properly account for how valuing by discounting against expected future earnings and the ritualized rotation (overthrow and installation) of figures at the center are tethered to each other. This suture is the assumption than any “thing” is composed of parts that can be broken down into other parts, ad infinitum, with the composition of that thing being governed not by any defining integrity constitutive of the thing but through “laws” which would apply to all things, while operating differently in each case. Any scientific inquiry or engineering project is predicated upon this assumption of compositionality, and this assumption is in turn impossible with thoroughgoing desacralization. Anything can be taken apart and put together again, much like, say a clock, that quintessential technology of the early modern age and inaugural metaphor for Thomas Hobbes’s
Breakdown
Breakdown
Breakdown
I’ve been working with the hypothesis that we find, in late 17th century England, the near simultaneous emergence of capitalism as the Bank of England is established and becomes the creditor of the government itself, on the one hand, and that of the two-party system, the embryo of post-revolutionary constitutional orders, on the other. The connection is in the demolition of the sacrality of the occupied center, i.e., the overthrow of monarchy as the fount of government. But this “economic”-“political” conjunction needs another suture, both to include the massive technological developments that we can trace, at least intellectually to this same period, and to properly account for how valuing by discounting against expected future earnings and the ritualized rotation (overthrow and installation) of figures at the center are tethered to each other. This suture is the assumption than any “thing” is composed of parts that can be broken down into other parts, ad infinitum, with the composition of that thing being governed not by any defining integrity constitutive of the thing but through “laws” which would apply to all things, while operating differently in each case. Any scientific inquiry or engineering project is predicated upon this assumption of compositionality, and this assumption is in turn impossible with thoroughgoing desacralization. Anything can be taken apart and put together again, much like, say a clock, that quintessential technology of the early modern age and inaugural metaphor for Thomas Hobbes’s