Becoming Modern

Where China moved from revolutionary intensity to the market, energy dissipation in the West took a different route. The flow of energy in the West is traced from Babel’s desire for a recovery of “the word” through to the desire for material objects and empire promoted in the Crystal Palace. Chapter 10 is designed to show that this other Western route forms the beginnings of what we call modernity. This opens on to the power of real subsumption; of the phantasmagorical in the commodity form; and of market desires that require a reduction in political tensions. From the Crystal Palace and on to the Eiffel Tower, monumental works of modernity are employed in this chapter, and the following chapters, to plot the development of this new world of market-based rationality, knowledge, and power.