----- Original Message -----
From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Let's take a neater science, geology. I believe either Kuhn or someone
> else called the discovery of plate tectonics a "new paradigm." But in
> the 17th century the early "geologists" were trying to understand the
> circulation of water in the earth in terms of Harvey's discovery of
the
> circulation of the blood.
=====================
Mmmmmmmm, you mean they were trying to turn metaphors into algebras and geometries................?
"Now, a specific distinction does enter between a commodity in circulation and money in circulation. The commodity is thrown out of circulation at a certain point and fulfills its definitive function only when it is definitively withdrawn from circulation, consumed, whether in the act of production or in consumption proper. The function of money, by contrast, is to remain in circulation as its vehicle, to resume its circular course always anew like a perpetuum mobile."
"The simultaneity of the process of capital in different phases of the process is possible only through its division and break-up into parts, each. of which is capital, but capital in a different aspect. *This change of form and matter is like that in the organic body.* If one says e.g. the body reproduces itself in 24 hours, this does not mean it does it all at once, but rather the shedding in one form and renewal in the other is distributed, takes place simultaneously. Incidentally, *in the body the skeleton is the fixed capital; it does not renew itself in the same period of time as flesh, blood.* There are different degrees of speed of consumption (self-consumption) and hence of reproduction. (Here, then, already transition to many capitals.) The important thing here above all is to examine capital as such for itself first of all; since the aspects being developed here are those which make value in general into capital; which constitute the specific distinguishing characteristics of capital as such.
"The circulation between dealers and consumers, identical with the retail trade, is a second circle which does not fall within the immediate circulation sphere of capital. An orbit which it describes after the first is described, and simultaneously alongside it. The simultaneity of the different orbits of capital, like that of its different aspects, becomes clear only after many capitals are presupposed. Likewise, the course of human life consists of passing through different ages. But at the same time all ages exist side by side, distributed among different individuals."
>That is, they thought of the earth as an
> _animal_ -- an organism, and for them analogy was still the primary
mode
> of discovery. The shift away from _that_ set of premises, again, was a
> serious "paradigm shift," in comparison to which the shifts of the
last
> 100 years, no matter how eath-shaking, are not remotely a paradigm
> shift.
====================
And somebody else wanted to see the political economy as something akin to fluid circuits, planetary orbits and the human body and was trying to work out a language to deal with simultaneity and temporal ordering[s] for the sake of causal analysis of business cycles and the extent to which acyclicality was manifested in social *reproduction*.............
Ian
[all quotes from the Grundrisse]