The insubstantial pageant: producing an untoward land

Introduction

Over the last 10 years, in a good part of the social sciences concerned with what we might loosely call the economy, the spotlight has tended to focus on finance. Indeed, there was a moment not so long ago when there was even a kind of love affair with finance, especially by those who belonged to the social studies of finance school (which had transported the protocols of science studies into finance). Finance seemed to be something almost scientific in its attention to models and data. It was complex and intricate, something you could really get your teeth into. But the bust has revealed finance for what it was and is: some very clever people doing some not particularly clever things in a smokestack industry that has a lethal capacity to pollute its surrounds and that has produced a banking system that is very likely more dangerous now than before the financial crisis began in 2008. ⁶

Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that finance is anything other than a vital source of economic governance but, in this moment of disillusionment, perhaps it would be interesting to step back and think about what some other parts of the economy have been doing and, in particular, to consider again the production of commodities by means of commodities. For, I will argue that, in its latest incarnation, capitalism is not just busily manufacturing commodities (already understood for some time as no longer simply discrete goods but as shapers of and solutions to experience). Rather, it is attempting to manufacture rolling worlds within which ‘communities of sense’ ⁷ can be catalysed, which can act to furnish the world anew through a process that might be understood as a reinvention of the commodity itself. That is, or so I will argue, industry is trying, through a continual process of world-making, to commodify the push of will ⁸ with the aim of producing enhanced ‘invention-power’. Of course, such a project can only ever work imperfectly and patchily, but to be able to see such a process of creating process in the throes of what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘explicitation’ ⁹ is surely not only worthwhile, but crucial if it is to be modulated or, indeed, opposed.

I therefore want to ask a question: ‘where does the leading edge of capitalism want to go next?’ Of course, I am aware that ‘capitalism’ does not have well-formed and articulated wants or goals, but that is the point. ¹⁰ By speculating about what those wants or goals might be, perhaps it is possible to get a clearer picture of what is, so to speak, in store, as capitalism aims to make the whole world not just into a continually evolving and involving store – through increasing not simply what is saleable but what is appropriable to be sold in the world ¹¹ – but also into a means of continually generating ideas that can, in turn, continually restock this re-store: this is all about knowledge oriented toward the future. It is world as laboratory, feasting on space. ¹²

I want to argue that it is a peculiarly appropriate time to try to answer this question because capitalism’s need for an answer has become more and more pressing. I think it is possible to argue that capitalism has reached a technological plateau in that it is finding it increasingly difficult to squeeze value out of innovation – which no doubt explains why innovation has become such a watchword, even an obsession. At least in the developed countries, capitalism has picked off the ‘low-hanging fruit’, ¹³ the most apparent opportunities for rapid development – like free land or immigrant labour or educational gains or the most productive new technological ideas – and is often simply skimming the past.

To escape this technological plateau, and to produce a new round of accelerated productivity and profitability born out of gains from knowledge and innovation, therefore requires a fundamental reorganization of how the world is. I argue in this paper that to achieve this reorganization means redefining the commodity world such that this reorganization produces new possibilities for what a commodity and commodification might be – as complex collective goods – in a kind of baroque transformation ¹⁴ brought about by two different tendencies: one the production of a new infrastructural project, the formation of an expressive infrastructure; the other the formation of a continuously migratory land out of this project, land that can run and run, and in doing so act as a new source of value as it is tenanted and tilled.

In other words, capitalism has embarked on a huge experiment. As we shall see, the outcome is fundamentally uncertain in the sense that it is not clear that it will produce elevated levels of invention and hence profit, but without it capitalism can only fall back on what are now tired solutions that are likely to lead to stagnation.

Thus, I want to go back to the commodity. Commodities have always come with extension in space and time. So far as spatial extent is concerned, commodities have been systematically wrapped and packaged in various forms since the 19th century. Gradually, they attained more grip on the world as they became linked in to experience in multiple ways, most notably through a panoply of consumer spaces like shops, arcades, supermarkets, malls and shopping villages. Commodities had to have affective purchase, which initially meant the growth of advertising through which publics could be formed, but since the 1980s has come to mean associating the commodity with all manner of experiences: indeed, the commodity is increasingly understood as a part of a more generalized experience of a world.

So far as temporal extension is concerned, commodities equally have been extending their range. Where once they were associated simply with the point of sale and their subsequent consumption, increasingly, driven by financial and marketing innovations, commodities are understood as personalized processes – as a flow of services of which the commodity, understood as a physical object for sale, is but one part of a wider experience. The commodity becomes a kind of tenancy, in other words, which is rented out. Equally, inhabitation comes to mean valuing habitat as a time-limited experience – on the model of a franchise or a lease or a subscription. ‘Like victory, the terrain changes hands with each match and every half-time. It is paid in rent.’ ¹⁵ Increasingly, consumers no longer keep what they buy but rent it out for a defined period as a cluster of possessions that have shorter or longer temporal signatures. ¹⁶

As spatial and temporal extension have both grown, so commodities have taken the next step. They have started to package the world so that they can nestle more deeply within it. The world is wrapped up in the cellophane of commodity worlds as complex collectivities, which flicker into and out of being as different cues are formed, in a filmic process of movement and engagement, which is part of why this process can be compelling: ‘perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of a moving body or the development of a form’. ¹⁷ To achieve this state, not only perceptions of space (and especially what we understand as framing) but also of time have altered in lockstep with the development of the commodity. Our habits of viewing the world mutate. For example, time has become increasingly cut up and breathless as a result of the techniques of fast art found in recent film and video, games and music, which redefine what is meant by a lasting experience. ¹⁸ But this process of producing a new land, as I will call it, is not a process of alienation. It requires buy-in, literally and metaphorically, and the reason for the battery of methods that have been invented recently can be seen as marshalling the means to produce precisely this sense of grip. In turn, it produces a new form of ground rent in that the proportion of property value attributable to location is redefined by continually reworking what counts as location, thus producing a world that allows new claims to be made on future profits arising out of the ability to put investment together with labour (for the new location demands labour by consumers at all points) by relying on moving, relative location.

So the answer to my question is that the leading edge of capitalism is involved in a process of engineering worlds such that every moment becomes an opportunity to both make a sale and explore the subsequent moment: capitalism wants to run at the rate of life itself.

This is a project that both seeks out intelligence on consumers in a kind of renovation of bookkeeping and tries to tap consumer intelligence in a way that can be thought of as the modern equivalent of the novel. ¹⁹ It requires the formation of a long-term infrastructural project, which has required the construction of what we might term an expressive infrastructure in that it is meant to act as a pipeline for affect and imagination. But the project of channelling and damming affect and imagination through the laying down of technology and the practices associated with it demands much more than a simple concentration and acceleration of what already exists. It requires, instead, capitalism reworking the substance of what we regard as the world down to the smallest grain of interaction, through an architecture of intimacy ²⁰ that enables a company or companies to focus on one consumer interaction from among the millions taking place at any time as though this were the only interaction that mattered. To explain this ambition means calling not just on the obvious sources of inspiration like Michel Foucault but also, as we shall see, on luminaries like William James and Andy Warhol. James allows us to understand the construction of this moment of interaction as an intensification of his likening of life to a frontier of flame making its way rapidly through the stubble in a cornfield as the field is burnt off, while Warhol allows us to understand that commerce is increasingly taking on many of the attributes of art: art does not simulate commerce so much as commerce simulates art.

In other papers, I have tried to show that the way in which the world turns up is changing as firms begin this process of redefining process. ²¹ This paper follows on from them in that it looks at and summarizes the broader issues that result from this thesis. In particular, it considers the way in which a certain kind of stance to the world, an environmental stance, has changed the terms of trade. In making this claim, I am in the company of a number of other authors who want to show how modern cultures are moving from a closed off and circumscribed to an atmospheric means of understanding what is in the world and how to control it.

I will make my case in three parts. In the first part of the paper, I will examine the main changes that have been taking place in the economy as they relate to innovation. I will argue that these changes might be thought of as a second industrial revolution based around the growth of an expressive infrastructure. Then, in the second part of the paper, I will consider how these changes are producing a different kind of production – of worlds premised upon a different way of combining capital and labour, worlds that attempt to direct populations in ways that simultaneously call on all of their qualities and try to pre-empt them, a naturalistic process akin to Foucault’s idea of ‘normation’. ²²

The Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the first break in human history with the natural economy. But what if the natural economy was now being recovered – but by other means – as a redefinition of what constitutes land? But if a new land is coming into existence the problem still exists of how to extract surplus from it. In the final part of the paper, I will therefore turn to a series of halting experiments in how to extract surplus from this new land by surveying the imprint that these changes are making upon cities as part of an ecology of innovation and a corresponding form of consciousness in motion.

One important word of warning is in order. I do not take the new ecology of practices I want to outline as simply taking over from a previous order, as if there was some kind of historical queue with older forms simply dropping away and newer forms unambiguously regnant, an impression often given by extant theoretical accounts, which, while assiduously denying it, often produce a succession of ideal types. As Gibson-Graham has pointed out so brilliantly, economies are variegated beasts, which at any point in time will consist of many different kinds of economic practice, sometimes replacing other practices but as often co-existing with them and not infrequently producing new economic forms out of this co-existence. ²³ Like all things, new orders should not be overdone. Everything matters but everything does not connect. For example, much manufacturing industry remains of a very different kind from what I will describe and will continue to do so. In the region I come from, for example, 18 per cent of small firms still have no internet site. ²⁴ This is not the economy I will be describing here, but we should not forget the salutary lesson it serves up. Beware of exaggeration. There are and always will be other modes of production entangled and still potent. The economy I want to describe continues to exist more prominently in some industries than others, in some places than others, among some populations rather than others.

A new industrial revolution

The Industrial Revolution remains something of an enigma, with all kinds of explanations and interpretations of its genesis and evolution still in play. Nevertheless, we know that it crucially depended upon the invention of productivity-raising machinery and the coterminous invention of the railroad and steam-powered ships, which created a global economy and an international division of labour that could support the boost it provided by producing the first hints of truly global industry, all set against a background of cheap energy and capital but comparatively expensive labour. More generally, arising out of better communication between those who knew things and those who made things, it arose out of the insertion of a process of continuous invention into invention itself. ²⁵

One thing we also know about the Industrial Revolution is that it involved new levels of pooling of information. Costs to access knowledge plummeted. Producers, in turn, spent more time seeking access to the best knowledge available at the time. It is important to note that invention here is not considered as bolts from the blue. Rather than these Eureka moments, it ‘takes the form of analogies to and combinations of existing techniques, or combined knowledge from diverse fields in what we might call technical hybrids or recombinations’. ²⁶ That might involve systematic processes or plain and simple tinkering. ²⁷

At the same time, the Industrial Revolution was always coupled with growing consumer demand. As De Vries and others have shown, the entanglement of supply and demand had already produced sophisticated markets for commodities by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution along with equally sophisticated consumers ‘actively engaged in a process of discovery’, ²⁸ which involved taking risks on new products and new combinations of products. Consumers were consequential from early on in the history of capitalism and not least because they drove invention through a growing insistence on novelty (which drove innovation), status and other ‘tangible intangibles’ (which drove quality), and which become more important as a result of the growth of advertising coupled with a more general effect, namely that a rise in material affluence produced less individual self-control. ²⁹

Since the Industrial Revolution, the process of continuous invention of invention – invention power – has therefore become such a staple of life that we tend to forget its wider historical significance. For example, ‘innovation’ has become a defining characteristic of what firms are meant to do. Indeed, for some, it has become their core value, part of what, to outsiders, can look like a large, suitably updated cargo cult. Yet, what is termed innovation only rarely includes the initial one per cent of innovation, as it is known, the breakthrough ideas that change the nature of what is on offer. It is precisely the continuous invention of invention that is most important, and most firms at least implicitly acknowledge this. For example, starting in the 1980s, firms began to experiment with ways of working that might produce enhanced invention of invention, all the way from learning organizations, to communities of practice, to what became known as open innovation. ³⁰ At around the same time as these developments, there was a vogue in business (and all kinds of other arenas) for the construction of inventive spaces at each and every scale. All around the world, spaces were assembled, which, it was hoped, would boost inventiveness by increasing the number of creative interactions and general ‘buzz’, and, by implication, the number of innovations: a kind of turbocharged inventiveness. Hence the simultaneous vogue for clusters that could maximize the circulation of ideas and promote so-called absorptive capacity. ³¹ Equally, and from about the same date, many firms started to run down their corporate research-and-development facilities, outsourcing these capacities to other agents like universities or research facilities held jointly with other companies. ³²

While all this was happening, firms were being restructured in other ways, so that they could bring innovations to market more quickly, redefining what could count as a market in the process. For example, the distinction between production and consumption became even less marked, as old ‘push’ models, in which disembedded factories churned out commodities with only limited regard to whether anyone wanted them, have been replaced by ‘pull’ models, which use a mixture of new customized manufacturing processes, precise inventory control, large subcontracting networks, extensive logistical networks that also act as means of gaining market intelligence, cloud computing, and new forms of finding and relating to the consumer. Indeed, a number of commentators have begun to refuse the distinction between production and consumption entirely, substituting the idea of firms as ‘network orchestrators’ ³³ that manage variegated webs of circulation and continually prepare the ground for exchange. ³⁴

So, the halcyon days when, in order to stimulate the exchange of ideas, we painted things in primary colours, chucked some bean bags around and, for the first time, had easy access to computers, have gone. Firms have been through this phase and have incorporated its lessons. ³⁵ Their ambition is now much greater. With the advent of more and more information and communications technology – a generation brought up knowing the internet with all the consequences that are becoming apparent, ³⁶ such as the growth of social networking as a fount of social knowledge, and the parallel advent of mobile capabilities that index location and ‘ground’ these networks in new ways – it has become possible to think about extending the world of innovation out from the spaces of the corporation to the spaces of the consumer, by producing both an individual relationship with each consumer and the possibility of exchanging more than goods through the development of what I call an expressive infrastructure. ³⁷

Thus, we reach the age of what we might call knowing or cognitive capitalism in which the essential point is no longer the expenditure of human labour power but what Lazzarato ³⁸ calls intention power, collective, living know-how able to be captured by networked computation. In cognitive capitalism, harvesting the gains from knowledge and invention becomes the central issue for accumulation. Capitalism has to, needs to, intervene in the imagination. Thus, its main interest becomes what Moulier-Boutang calls ‘pollination’, ³⁹ the systematic production and management of various kinds of publics and their opinions and affects through all kinds of imitative cascade that act as both supply and demand. ⁴⁰ As James put it: ‘Some of us are in more favourable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.’ ⁴¹

The result is that companies now explicitly espouse the goal of creating a kind of performative ontology that consists of laying down a series of ‘natural’ experiences by drawing on the extensive psychocultural knowledge that business now has, a bank of knowledge that dates from as far back as 1930, and Paul Lazarsfeld’s clever though ethically distinctly problematic idea of boosting the business of laundries by sending letters to all those in an area who had suffered bereavements and needed emergency support. ⁴² The result is that the old lines between production, consumption, and distribution no longer apply. There is fluidity in what companies do and how they do it, which means that they are likely, directly or indirectly, to operate in each of these domains, naturally mixing and matching them and often moving domains. ⁴³

It has become clear that this coupling of production and consumption and distribution in networks of circulation produced via the growth of information technology, the intricate complexities of supply chains, bodies of movement knowledge like logistics and movement analysis, and so-called smart customization have begun to produce a new kind of settlement (if that is the right word), which allows the genesis of small differences to be tracked and traced and continually both sold into and used as a resource in their own right.

Thus, capitalism and academe have alighted on the same issue. For whereas, at one time, most academic interest was invested in outlining social structure, a good deal of interest nowadays is also being given to the genesis of small differences, stimulated by an interest in the work of Leibniz, Tarde, Deleuze, and Jullien but also by advances in our understanding of complexity. Deleuze, for example, following Tarde, argues that imitation, understood as a deeply creative process of gradual variation and slippage brought about through small acts of mimicry, ‘belongs to a flow or a wave but not to the individual. Imitation is the extension of a flow’. ⁴⁴ Jullien, similarly argues, using the inspiration of classical Chinese philosophy, that a failure to notice the effects of small but cumulative changes over time is due to western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the ‘silent transformations’ that are constantly taking place. ⁴⁵

A similar concern with small differences motivates much of the thinking currently taking place in business about markets and consumers that are inevitably concerned with currents of imitation and movements of invention. The intention is clear: to make involvement visible and thereby operable by building an expressive infrastructure that continually tracks these differences and is able to operate on them as they unfold. Behind all the technology – the server farms, the vast energy requirements, the endless texts and emails and other communicative acts, the general reshaping of space that arises therefrom – this infrastructure is founded on four different but linked projects, each of which can be seen as founded on the reincarnation of a much earlier historical project. One arose out of early history of economics and statistics and what was often called, after Francis Ysidro Edgworth’s notoriously opaque book, Mathematical Psychics. ⁴⁶ What is being aimed for is the ability to meter ⁴⁷ and analyse feeling through what Edgworth called ‘speculative and active instruments’ ⁴⁸ – to ‘remotely sense and quantify emotional levels, either post hoc or in real time’ ⁴⁹ – so as to be able to increase involvement to order. The hunt is on, in other words, for the hair-triggers of invention in a highly connected world and it has produced a whole new set of economic-cum-social knowledges about what and how to constitute markets and property based on new data and new techniques that can track so-called networked behaviour, which is based on the assumption that actions do not exist in isolation but with the expectation that they will react to what others are doing. ⁵⁰

The second is the revival of aesthetics, understood in Baumgarten’s original formulation as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect, with such a judgement of taste being based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure but filtered through James’ later formulation of motion as sensation. That revival has produced a new era of representation that is able to re-present the myriad data that has been produced by various meters in inspiring forms that can, in many cases, be returned to sender as stimuli to further action. In turn, aided by software, this has meant a return to drawing and diagramming as both collaborative summaries of system states and tools for intervention, which is bent on redefining what is meant by ‘ground’. ⁵¹ Drawing and diagramming is neither medium nor message, but something in between, always pointing somewhere else: ‘to a chain of serial development, another condition, another state, even when, as a gestural flourish, it appears to have said everything in the most economical manner’. ⁵²

Third, it requires a re-examination of the notion of the environment. This is a word in such common coinage that it has become debased since its inception in the 19th century. But that is why it is worth recalling one particular strand of meaning as a part of the movement to re-enchant science found most prominently in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, a movement that intended to nourish the heart as well as the head. ⁵³ This movement required a vocabulary of surrounding, which could act as both operator and operand in producing the kind of purposefulness and meaningfulness that could only be known through immediate experience, intuition, and felt imperative. It has been resurrected in various forms of late as a renewed interest in landscape, fieldwork and ‘hauntology’, at least in the sense that what is at issue is ‘cooking’ space by paying attention to the somatic qualities of the body as a means of partnering the environment. ⁵⁴

Talk of ‘hauntology’ leads to the last current of thought. One of the first proponents of performative ontology, William James, expressed it well in his own actions. For this most rational of the new ‘psychologists’ also had an allegiance to a psychic, Leonora Piper, who he considered to be in touch with his beloved dead son. ⁵⁵ But though we might no longer necessarily be seized of the idea of speaking to the dead we do want to speak to and enliven dead space through a knowledge of absences and gaps. That knowledge is based on a pluralistic understanding of the ways in which space is activated and de-activated, which can key into many different kinds of experience, ‘ghosts and all’ as James would have had it. ⁵⁶ That, in turn, requires a better understanding of how to translate different time signatures – clocks that allow different kinds of seeing, so to speak, ⁵⁷ a correspondingly better understanding of gaps in perception that allow perception itself to be switched on and off, and a better understanding of what might be called strategic simplification, that is the ability to characterize and sum up a space through just a few cues of one kind or another. In turn, this knowledge is able to be used to treat the world, producing new means of interference with our sense of what there is and what there must be, and correspondingly new senses of place.

So how has a new kind of industrial settlement come about that lays down and both literally and metaphorically draws on an expressive infrastructure using these four projects? We can point to at least four principles of enhanced productivity of expression that underlie it. The first of these is that capitalism has taken a micro-sociological turn. If we look to the work of Goffmann and Garfinkel, or even an earlier micro-‘sociologist’ like Tarde, what we can see is text, blog, Facebook and Twitter becoming not just a garland to the event but a part of the event in their own right in that they form part of the evolving expressive infrastructure, ⁵⁸ a means of embedding certain kinds of dramaturgy in everyday life as an explicit technology of response and counter-response that extends or at least augments what we might think of as talk. Indeed, we might well see symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology and general conversational (and gestural) analysis as one means of understanding how one might produce this aspect of the modern world avant la lettre in their close attention to response, signification and the vagaries and inflections of the situation, and the crucial importance of next turns. In particular, in a world in which all goods become creative goods, ⁵⁹ they became a way to understand not just how to knowingly link talk to the commodity but how to make talk about the commodity into an explicit part of the design of the commodity. In turn, this ambition has been extended to the other somatic registers of communication with the ambition of folding them equally in to the envelope of commodities. Thus, commodities become ever more complex collective goods.

It might be objected that the development of these means of understanding of being in touch as expressive artfulness has often been subject to quite severe forms of reductionism, but equally these forms of reductionism have themselves become constitutive of interaction as ‘we bind ourselves together through acts of communication’. ⁶⁰ By concentrating relentlessly on the simple mechanics of individual interactions and, indeed, making them as attractive as possible so as to make susceptible and draw in new members, the idea is to produce something akin to a subjectless field of limitless and perpetual activity. ‘Logistical’ subjects ⁶¹ are subjects flattened out by being reduced to the sum of their potential for connectivity and then hyper-linked in such a way that they become nodes in a vast speculative web. ⁶² Flattened but hyper-connected, subjects are unique, personalized – and multiply positioned as a matter of course. Being in touch becomes serious business made possible by technologies that add in registers of feeling and speed up reaction times in ways that were not hitherto extant and are able to gauge the feel of an audience at a distance.

Continuing with the pragmatist theme, the second principle recognizes diversity and difference as vital. To understand this principle, we can return to William James journeying to the town of Lilydale in western New York State in 1896. Lilydale was a utopian community founded in 1874 in the belief that everyone ‘has a right to be all that he can be – to know all that he can know’. At first, James found the community close to perfection with its excellent health facilities, numerous educational institutions, and a love of learning itself. But he quickly tired of it. He began to find Lilydale disappointing, even enervating. Why? ‘Instead of elevating the human psyche, he determined, the embodiment of perfection deadens it, primarily because such an existence leaves no place for the dissension and friction that ultimately gives life significance.’ ⁶³ In other words, in James’ depiction of life, difference and disagreement are central to existence. Any project needs to ‘keep the doors and windows open’. It cannot stay fixed or it will become like utopia, a passive expression of principle without the essential element of invention that arises out of difference and disagreement. ⁶⁴

This pragmatist orientation has become a mark of modern economic thinking. Raising the innovation stakes means not being snooty about where new knowledge comes from. Narrow information channels choke off innovation. Diversity of background and view is crucial. Authors like Page and Stark have pointed out the way in which diversity has become a corporate watchword as companies have moved away from homogenous hierarchies towards teamwork on the presumption that cognitive diversity improves performance. ⁶⁵ The idea is straightforward: to build collective intelligence by widening diversity as well as individual ability. Systematic heterogenesis, in other words.

Third, and following on, relevant knowledge can be gleaned from anywhere. Collective intelligence depends not just on workers existing within the firm’s boundary but can extend to all kinds of populations that may have an interest in a product or service. The idea and practice of open innovation might be regarded as the original template, which was intended to draw in populations as an inventive resource intent on co-creation. The idea has become so familiar that it has already led to articles proclaiming ‘the next step in open innovation’ ⁶⁶ and inevitably it is now being argued that more is being claimed than has been delivered, notably because of a lack of emphasis on implementation. ⁶⁷ That said, open innovation is starting to produce a significant increment of profit for some firms in some sectors. Most particularly, knowledge is being pooled in ways heretofore unconsidered based around the idea of creative spaces that take in large but diffuse scales of activity. These spaces are knowledge ecosystems that not only work within or between formal organizational boundaries but also outside them, so that they are able to reach a more diverse group of participants. And, because of their scale, they are able to sponsor permanently active knowledge flows, much like the permanent flow of foreign currency around the world, not least because they continually prepare the ground by setting up new encounters.

But to achieve these qualities, these spaces still need to be made attractive and sometimes surprising so that they draw in encounters. This requires a mixture of aesthetics, the presence of other like minds, and the ability to attract what Hagel et al. call ‘edge players’, ⁶⁸ that is people whose ways of perceiving the world and solving problems may be very different but, as a result, may provide new innovative fuel by better capturing the unexpected and aleatory. In this way, organizations can be open to unknowns and catch nonlinear multiplier effects.

Fourth, raising the innovation stakes means that, at the same time, people have to be given knowledge in the form of what people think is expected of them: social knowledge, if you like. They need to be able to read signals, decipher the signs, know how to follow a lead. That means promoting ‘inter-visibility’. ⁶⁹ Spaces need to be constructed in such a way that everyone can keep an eye on everyone else, and so pick up cues, signals, insights, and experiences and identify the moments when a creative rush takes place. Designing spaces that allow that kind of open interchange is again important – and difficult to do. It means promoting what is often called, in football argot, the quality of ‘bouncebackability’. ⁷⁰ Spaces need to be designed so that they will attract the kind of verve and drive that builds practical solutions to technical-cum-social problems. Then, spaces need to allow for negotiation and diplomacy, since so much social knowledge is manifested in this way. In the current situation, this is probably the factor that is most lacking: institutions that allow this kind of activity to take place are still relatively thin on the ground.

Producing organizations that can work to these four principles is obviously difficult and progress has been halting. ⁷¹ But the overall goal is clear, at least: a system of production without end, of production spurring on production, where ‘everything is mobilized’, to use the phrase of Ernst Junger, in the cause of invention of more and more commodities pulled into frames that are themselves commodities. The system becomes continuous and continuously inventive. Everything is consumed for production and everything is produced for consumption. The outside edge is folded into the centre through multiple ‘environmentations’.

The maximization of production through these networks of circulation includes ultimately the production of not only replaceable objects but objects that are already en route to replacement. To exist within these networks is to be diffused along their paths, to be everywhere at once and nowhere wholly. What is present here is likewise present in a storeroom awaiting the call for delivery, already on its way to delivery, surging along the circuitry. ⁷²

Such an analysis of an economy of spontaneous synthesis might be seen as simply the logical conclusion of a Heideggerian analysis in which:

the will has no other goal than to create conditions that will allow it to will further, ultimately to will only itself insofar as what it wills is the appropriation of what is other (to will that it become stronger). As such, its activity is ‘aimless’, striving for nothing outside or apart from itself. ⁷³

But this is both too Olympian and too seamless. Numerous ethnographic studies have shown that production is beset by error and braced by all manner of improvisations, and consists, as I have already pointed out, of many different forms of production, which can gather together as sometimes unlikely hybrids. Meanwhile the motives that underlie practices of consumption are many and various and can by no means be sheeted home to simple explanations like commodity fetishism or status. ⁷⁴ But if there is no perfection of the will, the will still persists, however patchily and imperfectly that may be, as James pointed out so frequently. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Rank become important points of reference as guides to the creative power of willing will but they must be leavened by authors like Montaigne or James who remain crucial correctives as reminders of how prosaic wilful action can often be. ⁷⁵

Herewith, then, a basic description of the new industrial system, which will be familiar to many in one form or another. But what can we see as the spatial correlate of this new system?

The construction of naturalism

In this section, I want to argue that a second industrial revolution depends upon making not just people but environments maximally productive. Of course, designing environments that are more productive has always been a part of capitalism’s beat – whether it has been the organization of factories or homes – but the argument of this paper is that the attempt now being made is to fold all environments, at least potentially, into part of a system of production and consumption and thereby in to fit (because carefully outfitted) surroundings – by enveloping them in a kind of informational fog that boosts their capacity to integrate and feed back on itself, and so generate new knowledge.

Like the first industrial revolution, this new revolution depends upon the pooling of knowledge. But the means of pooling are both more powerful and more extensive, sufficient to suggest a step change in inventive capacity, what Prahalad and Krishnan describe as a ‘new house of innovation’. ⁷⁶ This new house of innovation is more concentrated in its ability to generate innovation because it calls to many more actors, human and nonhuman. It is an ecology of practices sufficiently extensive that it can be called environmental, or as Massumi might term it, proto-environmental, in that it owns no territory of its own for any length of time. ⁷⁷ Rather, it exists in a perpetual time of emergence and onflow ‘at the leading edge of an incoming event’, always multiplying but never transcendent. ⁷⁸

This is a new medium, then, which is neither time nor space nor timespace but something else, something closer to movement moving ⁷⁹ – James’ cornfield fire – which itself constantly squeezes value out of the world and which can also be worked on so as to squeeze value from itself, on an ‘on-all-the-time, everywhere-at-the-ready’ basis. ⁸⁰ It is a medium that consists of a series of worlds flashing into and out of existence, which are able to carry invention to a new level by harnessing the power of what Stengers calls reciprocal capture. ⁸¹ It is rolling composition in which life is always a line pointing forward, never a circle. It is becoming put to work.

What is being built here are ecologies of commodities and ideas and feelings all mixed together, and these ecologies gain their value from making the most of new interactions, from pre-empting these interactions and steering them on to new, more advantageous courses. This is an art of building attachments, of continually restarting the work of association. ⁸² The overall goal is to produce, often for only the briefest of moments, a kind of secular magic by forming collectives, temporary gestalts to use Merleau-Ponty’s filmic description, which have pull through their ‘whatever singularity’, an internally plural collectivity understood as that which has an ‘inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence’. ⁸³

That, in turn, requires what we might call a thickening of space in which these brief and contingent unities can then be brewed up. If one was looking for an analogy one might find it in the Chinese notion of qi, the breath of energy, which sometimes disperses itself, so that things become dormant and invisible, and sometimes gathers itself, making things awaken and so visible. In particular, the kind of thickening of space that brings things into visibility – optimal space to summon optimal life – requires five concurrent skills in order to produce a cognitive and affective current, made up out of the props provided by current technology, informed by a wealth of tacit and explicit knowledge.

The first skill is aesthetic. The skill required is to produce a new information landscape. The essential skill required to build this landscape is, as pointed out above, diagrammatic. Thought takes place in diagrams as much as text. Indeed, the text often accompanies the diagram rather than the other way round since standard alphabets cannot convey the richness of the information landscape by themselves. That requires a new lexicon, a stock of diagrammatic terms that will compress and interpret information by spatializing it. The terms are descriptive rather than axiomatic, not so much based on a decision or ontological commitment to found the world as they are intent on redescribing the world so that it is friendly to large flows of information. ⁸⁴ These are descriptive regimes, which generate working descriptions for living and for a living. They are ‘working objects’, which constitute a territory of enquiry, a collage of disparate data and processes of data-gathering, sampling, calculation and correlation, ‘working objects that emerged from contingent systems of knowledge [that] came increasingly to assume material form, and to be accepted as inventions rooted in multiple realms of experience’. ⁸⁵

The second and related skill I have also mentioned already. It is the ability to create inter-visibility through this logic of appearance. ⁸⁶ It is important to be able to see other members of a community and observe their response. The premium is not just on reaching large numbers of consumers but on reaching large numbers of consumers, each of whom knows that the other consumers are receiving the same message at the same time and each of whom knows that the others know the same things. The web, for example, is getting better at creating this kind of inter-visibility founded in common knowledge, chiefly through cues that are also means of feedback on what others are doing. Social networks, new forms of crowd, even some kinds of advertisement all display this capacity.

The third skill is the corresponding ability to create resonance. As the theoretical line through Tarde and Lazzarato has shown, it is possible to brew up affective storms that push ideas. But that skill requires aggregation and alignment in order to produce pathways that these storms can travel down. In other words it is possible to engineer situations in which feelings that are weak at first can gradually rise to prominence, prompting others as they do so. This is an attempt to select for particular kinds of feeling over others.

The fourth skill is the bringing into visibility and consideration of nonhuman actors that have become smart if not awake. In this sense, this is more than a micro-sociological enterprise since objects are allowed into the conversation. How might we describe such a venture? Perhaps the best description might be as the bringing into being of ‘nonobjects’. This term has been used by a number of luminaries to describe the way in which the search for form with clear and distinct contours is being displaced by an attempt to grasp the way in which things pass continually from one state to another, producing different combinations of attachments as they go: ‘burying and unearthing – catching and letting go – occur in tandem . . .’. ⁸⁷ One version of this story of opening things onto their absence considers the model provided by classical Chinese culture in which much more attention was given to cumulative changes over time in contradistinction to western thought with its foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being. ⁸⁸ For Jullien, what we can see in this civilization is a very different way of thinking about representation. ⁸⁹ In classical China, art was not used to mirror the world around and about but to evoke unfathomable experience. Art lies on a continuum of existence and is therefore not distinct from reality in contradistinction to the western idea that art remains separate from the world it supposedly represents. Thus, objects are isolated and apprehended in very different ways and the nonobject is:

[that which] is too hazy-indistinct-diffuse-evanescent-confused to keep still and isolated. This nonobject sinks into the undifferentiated and, as a result, cannot be composed of ‘being’. It cannot be sharply delineated as a Gegenstand that ‘stands before’ the Eye or Mind. It is [something] we constantly experience, leading us back to the indefiniteness of the foundational, but which science and philosophy left behind early on in their haste to treat things logically, to constitute a ‘this’ that could be manipulated by thought, with the aim of replying to the question: ‘What is it?’. ⁹⁰

Another version of this story comes from the world of design. It is not, I think, coincidental that at this point in history ideas of things discarded by one civilization are being reinvented by another. This reworking draws a distinction between three approaches: one a human-centred approach, which sees in objects human needs and desires, the second an object-centred approach, which sees in objects form and function, and a third nonobject-centred approach, which wants to work in the space in-between the previous two as an ‘ergonomics of the mind’. ⁹¹ This latter approach wants to concentrate on the emotional space between subject and object by bringing strangeness back into the realm of the artefact, echoing Marx’s famous dictum. It uses a series of techniques – humour, and especially parody, disruption of the form of a familiar artefact in order to cast it in a different light, and radical extrapolation – to question the space between commodity and consumer, thus bringing into the light of practice Marx’s observation that the commodity ‘is a very strange thing’. ⁹² Putting these two views of the nonobject together, we are able to see a new stamping ground emerging in which objects have a say, which arises out of lapidary processes that include them as ‘citizens’. In other words, Latour and Harman’s calls to take more note of objects are already being heeded, although perhaps not in the way that they envisaged, ⁹³ not just through the fact that objects are becoming nonobjects but also because objects are communicating directly with each other without going through human intermediaries. Indeed, their thoughts seem a little old-fashioned in that what we can start to see is objects and environments becoming minded, able to think in thought-like ways about how the world works and means, through what might be called a doubled phenomenology: our perception and the object’s perception, which, through the advance of technology, is producing other views of a similar world, new forms of witnessing.

The fifth skill is the most obvious one: the cultivation of an ability to track presence and absence. What arises out of this skill is an ability to rapidly conjure up sufficient locational cues so as to induce in any situation a feeling of reality. In turn, this ability requires constant mapping and re-mapping. It is no coincidence that there has been a renaissance of mapping. ⁹⁴ Being able to constantly locate and re-present activity – each practice being a side of the same coin – is an important part of making things appear vital in this new kind of performance art. ⁹⁵

To summarize, these changes require skills of what might be called de-piction, which write at the rate of life in a world in which simulation is no longer necessarily second best. ⁹⁶ As I have noted in other papers, the orthographic traditions of the past are not adequate when the intention is to write worlds through these overlapping skills. ⁹⁷ Text cannot just be supplemented, however. It has to be reinvented. The practices of worlding demand the use of a much greater sensory palette in order to produce ambience as well as message. Background and foreground become an increasingly inseparable part of an art-science of momentary impression and pre-emption. The intention is to produce atmospheres – tropic or frozen, cramped or spacious, busy or still – but atmospheres all the same. Thus, all manner of sensory registers are pressed into service, which can serve as the walls and furniture of these worlds, so producing from moment to moment a whole, indistinct, animated, chaotic even, but a whole nonetheless. Form gives way to something auratic. Let us consider two of these registers – sound and colour (these out of many others such as smell, touch, temperature, humidity) – for what they can tell us about this process of reinventing sound and vision.

So far as sound is concerned, the need is to create an aether. In the manner of early 18th century tafelmusik or Satie’s ‘furniture music’, so-called ambient music has become general. Sound is chopped up, shuffled and laminated on to events in order to produce specific kinds of ‘mood music’. ⁹⁸ The intention is no longer to produce coherent musical narrative but instead to use sound to create the body of new worlds. Music increasingly takes on all kinds of sounds as legitimate. Indeed, it is becoming ‘voracious in its openness’. ⁹⁹ What is equally interesting is the way that sound is being carefully designed into space as the dynamics of sound have increasingly become understood, with the aim of leaving a ‘soft imprint’ on consciousness: ‘you’d realize its absence should it not be there but at a level that you are not fully conscious of’. ¹⁰⁰ In other words, acoustic channels are coming to be fully used. ¹⁰¹

Colour has always been a stalwart of the creation of new worlds but now it is being used in new ways in order to construct convincing images and as that happens so our colour vocabulary is changing, as it did in the classical world. ¹⁰² For example, while remembering that light is made of colour rather than the other way round, precisely those qualities of colour that the Ancients supposedly favoured – luminosity and hue ¹⁰³ – become more important than formerly since they can be used to heighten and extend colour discrimination. Equally, bold and bright colours have overcome traditional western chromophobic tendencies and much expanded colour ranges in the process. ¹⁰⁴ What has been produced is what might be called a spirited sense of colour, which goes beyond colour as such in that it incorporates tactile movement – wheelings and pivotings and splicings – into its effect: ¹⁰⁵ a new art of illumination.

In the case of each register, what is privileged is, in Deleuze’s terms, not so much the action-image as the perception-image, which makes the affective inside into an actual outside like the face and what is called by Deleuze ¹⁰⁶ the crystal-image, the ability to split and to hold the dimensions of an event several times at once, like the facets of a crystal. In thinking about this shift to a new medium of de-picting, which not so much captures movement as is movement, we inevitably have to think analogically, since we are trying to name something that is only just coming into existence. The result is that all kinds of symptomatic names for this proto-environment in which rolling composition is the norm are being articulated. Classically, there are Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on ‘landscapization’. ¹⁰⁷ Equally, Sloterdijk’s spheres come to mind too as a ‘psychotopical’ historical anthropology, which may be better thought of as symptomatic of the present day. ¹⁰⁸ Again, it is possible to consider accounts from art or film as precursors of what is coming about, such as Grusin’s account of premediation or Krauss’s thoughts on perpetual inventory, or Frampton’s account of film’s ‘minded’ affective thinking. ¹⁰⁹ Or we could even move on to Sebald’s thoughts on transfiguration of landscape. ¹¹⁰ In each case, something is struggling to be named, a new kind of way of building communities of sense based on the power provided by ‘myriad tiny architects’, to use Darwin’s description of a coral reef. ¹¹¹

But I also want to think about this process of re-placement of a fixed environment by a proto-environment in another way, as the invention of a new factor of production that has most affinity to land. Land was, of course, one of the classical factors of production, the source of wealth in all early societies because of the rents that arose from it as the payment for land use and the received income of a land owner. It consists of both site and the natural resources within that site: naturally-occurring goods such as water, air, soil, minerals, flora and fauna that are used in the creation of products. Land can be continually re-used because of the rise of arts of cultivation.

In the new land, site, organic and inorganic bodies, and information are mixed up in an an-organic mass that is continuously cultivated – but with a much greater turnover time. The new land, as I have pointed out, has no territory of its own. It is a proto-territory in which space is continually being temporarily captured for specific purposes, rather like the kind of military order promoted by insurgent groups, ¹¹² or the use of personal computers as distributed computational networks in their down time, or the attitudes towards risk typical of the classical Chinese culture, which entail a gradual convergence on an event (Jullien). ¹¹³ It is a zone of continual emergence, which is ‘equally produced and presupposed’. ¹¹⁴ Its power is chiefly preemptive: ‘preemptive power is environmental power. It alters the life environment’s conditions of emergence’ via incursive charges that alter the potential of a situation, pointing it in a new direction. ¹¹⁵

We can see this land as the attempt to construct new low-hanging fruit that can be continuously cultivated so as to produce new kinds of surplus based on momentum and the new opportunities it provides to generate invention power. The new practices of cultivation run alongside older ideas of how to cultivate land so as to make it more productive, but the cultivation time may only be in seconds rather than the seasonal turnover of the past. It is important to prepare the ground in order that the ground can be prepared for chance encounters so that they can be shaped. This is therefore a constantly moving land that has taken on some of the characteristics of weather.

I want to use two old agricultural terms in new ways to understand what cultivating this new land means, namely ‘broadcasting’ and ‘enclosure’. In this incarnation, the act of scattering seeds that is akin to Moulier-Boutang’s ‘pollination’ – ‘to cast or scatter abroad over an area, as seed in sowing’ ¹¹⁶ – becomes an act of transmission of ideas and practices in order to produce germination, thus making the land progressively more fertile. But the modern sense of broadcasting as a medium that disseminates ideas and practices via telecommunications is now changing again, to a method of transferring a data message to all recipients simultaneously. At the same time, the new land also depends upon acts of enclosure. What we can see, in effect, is a new round of enclosures. But this is a more open form of enclosure: it is enclosure without fences or hedges or walls. Whereas the first agricultural revolution was based on a combination of productivity-raising machinery and enclosure, putting an end to traditional rights over land by closing land off and asserting ownership, so the second aims not so much to close off as to continuously colonize a moving field, asserting ownership over the process itself. The aim is to cultivate this new land more intensively and in a way that can raise productivity. But, by using the form of tenancy known as syndication to both broadcast and enclose, it is possible to provide a high degree of mass-produced individuation. ¹¹⁷ In other words, site is composed through a process of syndication, which means that the same content can be used simultaneously in many locations in different ways in order to individuate. ¹¹⁸

This new kind of massed and yet also individuated land will feel with us through its ability to pre-empt and nudge our thoughts via four art-sciences of placing consciousness everywhere, which can reveal new means of extracting surplus and thereby turning a profit. ¹¹⁹ First, to reprise points made earlier, the art-science of resonance. Think of an extreme example like a concentration camp and the ability to walk around its strangely manicured grounds. It feels as though every plant and stone ought to shout out what has gone on there but does not. But what if ‘inanimate’ objects could shout or indeed could nestle meaningfully. What if money really did have a character, a soul, as in Marx? What if it were witty or despairing or hopeful or frivolous? I think that is what the new land is aiming for. What if, in turn, human subjects took on the qualities of the inorganic, not as an analogy but as an explicit project of subjectification? As if in affirmation of this point, We Feel Fine. An Almanac of Human Emotion takes the data gathered from blogs collected over three years and trawls them for the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’. ¹²⁰ The execution is off – the book is a strange mix of all kinds of things. But the ambition is interesting – which is to map out human feeling on the web as a kind of disinhibited weather system. ¹²¹

The second art-science is amplification. This land grows crops – but of ideas and affects. Taking the large amount of knowledge that has now been generated in this domain, from advertising, from politics, from film, from performance, from architecture and design, from dance and logistics and other movement arts, it has become possible to produce ways of amplifying ideas and affect in a more controlled way with more predictable outcomes, which allow sales to be made off the back of them, and which allow them to become saleable in their own right.

The third art-science is personification in the sense that all things can be represented as having a degree of agency, insofar as they are extensions or embodiments of persons, or can be understood as having person-like qualities. ¹²² In turn, these things can undo or subvert the identities of those who seek to control them, producing untoward effects that mix and mingle identities in all kinds of ways. Things are no longer ‘flat’, as Serres would have it, ¹²³ but are able to call and respond.

The fourth art-science is government. The intention is no longer to exert absolute control but to set parameters. Parameterization is the process of deciding and defining the parameters necessary for a complete or relevant specification of a model or geometric object, thus allowing any point to be uniquely identified. Parameters are not unique. They can be parameterized equally efficiently with different coordinate systems. Thus, the land can be described coherently using a variety of coordinate systems, which might vary from group to group. These coordinate systems act as a part of a new art of surveying, which is a means of registering both desire and ownership. According to Massumi, ¹²⁴ what we can see occurring in the contemporary art-science of government is a gradual unfolding of Foucault’s thoughts on a new form of biopower, in the sense of the management of populations, leading to what Foucault called ‘normation’, rather than normalization, a series of punctuated equilibria in which control is exerted through modulation. Foucault identified a shift in the arts of government from discipline of man-as-species to regularization. As societies have come to be predicated on innovation, understood as ‘the discovery of new techniques, sources, and forms of productivity, and also the discovery of new markets or new resources of manpower’, ¹²⁵ so the norms tended by disciplinary power have to be loosened to admit a wider arc of variation and a quicker turnover of conformities. Normal no longer coincides with fixed norms but becomes punctuated, moving from one state of equilibrium to another, often in short order. ¹²⁶ The environment becomes permanently nonstandard. And the gradual answer is a new concept of nature itself:

a base redefinition of nature is required outside any categorical opposition to the cultural, social or artificial. The overall environment of life now appears as a complex, systemic threat environment, composed of subsystems that are not only complex in their own right but are complexly interconnected. They are all susceptible to self-amplifying irruptive disruption. Given the interconnections, a disruption in one subsystem may propagate into others, and even cascade across them all, reaching higher and wider levels of amplification, up to and including the planetary scale. ¹²⁷

One might challenge whether this way of viewing the economy is actually that new: it bears a striking resemblance to the classical Chinese model of going on but one which applies an art of harvesting the moment to exchange (Jullien). ¹²⁸ And it has been explicated many times in different ways, as a Deleuzian model of ambulatory control, as an operaismo model of immaterial labour, and so on. But, whether it is original or not, the point is made, it lifts what was formerly considered a go-between function into an actor in its own right. What is required is not so much a skill as an art of balance, which takes in states of off-balance as valuable strategic information that can contribute to new balances. The goal is captivation in order to capture.

To summarize this section, what I am suggesting is that a new land is now being invented out of what Massumi calls ‘ontopower’. ¹²⁹ What is beginning to be produced by firms is a space based on a supercharged naturalism of ideas and affects that is in the business of reloading/recoding on a constant basis, a space of continual composition that has grip through the different textures it produces in the world, a never-ending sequence of singular events that must be prepared for. ¹³⁰ Since uncertainty is everywhere, the main solution is to produce a space that can work one small step in front of the moment in order to be able to charge the moment up with favourable ideas and affects, ¹³¹ a space that can be thickened, gathered together, knotted in new ways, flowing through us, buoying us along, drawing us out and relating us back in new ways, changing our bearings. Such a thickening of space represents a dissolving of human individuality into a new kind of earthliness that wants to eat the knowledge people have in the way that people eat bread. ¹³²

In turn, this new land produces new forms of rent. New forms of land provide new forms of extraction of surplus based on relative location. Classically, rent could take on three forms. But now we can see rent being able to be applied in a new way – as a revenue stream arising out of temporary but continuous encampment. Just as commodities are increasingly thought of as extending in time – think of an aircraft engine that is rented out as a service, for example, with all the ancillary operations and maintenance included in the price, or the myriad forms of leasing that produce a time-limited right to a commodity, so this is the ability to derive an income stream from a resource. But whereas this resource is usually thought of as fixed, now it comes unfixed and fixed simultaneously since the land is in constant movement.

The chief stamping ground of the process of continuous composition and decomposition is the city joined to the web. The city is the chief arena in which a ‘supercharged proto-territory of emergence’ can be nurtured. ¹³³ The city becomes an accessory before the fact. But the city has no less a variegated geography because of this. Indeed, the footprint of the new territory is often stronger in cities because they provide a means of aggregation that has positive effects, and most noticeably the phenomenon of so-called superlinear scaling: as cities get larger they generate ideas at a faster rate. Indeed, they seem to conform to a quarter power law such that ‘a city that was ten times larger than its neighbour wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative’. ¹³⁴

The unburdened city

Early in 1962, Dance Magazine commissioned a young and still relatively unknown artist called Andy Warhol to illustrate an article on movement analysis by Warren Lamb (one of the founders of movement analysis), with sketches of Laban’s eight basic efforts. ¹³⁵ The idea was to provide a cartography of movement. It can and should, I think, be argued, that these illustrations indicate not so much a new way of capturing and promoting movement – after all, dance notation dates from at least the 17th century – as a way in which this notation could be applied in the economic realm. Warhol’s sketches accompanied an application of Labanotation to the economic realm, which would provide one of the impetuses for new forms of thinking about work process in the 1980s. Perhaps this early experience of linking art and the economic realm in a functional moving loop is where Warhol’s subsequent imperatives stemmed from: later, in 1962, his hugely successful show at the Stable Gallery in New York included not only his serial works of consumer objects but also Dance Diagram. ¹³⁶ And by 1964 he was exhibiting a real-life supermarket at the Bianchini Gallery in New York where the goods on display – all for sale – were simultaneously works of art and consumer icons and moments in a kind of choreography of art and business; ‘tins of Campbell’s soup signed by Warhol (18 dollars each), plastic steaks by Mary Inman (27 dollars), chromium-plated melons by Robert Watts (125 dollars) and, if short of money . . . at least one of Watts’s eggs could be purchased for 2 dollars’. ¹³⁷

Seen in retrospect, the 1950s and 1960s constituted the first round of a new series of spatio-temporal practices that produced new ways of thinking about what constituted a manufactory. New technologies like the sea container, first used in 1956, started to have their effects in making it easier to make commodity connections around the globe ¹³⁸ while advertising was beginning to glimpse what it understood as the connections between motivation and acquisition of commodities in the hemispheres of the brain, typified by Ernest Dichter’s research in the 1950s into how we value the things around us. ¹³⁹ At the same time, the founders of logistics were finally making a serious imprint on the economic world, which would come to fruition in the notion of the supply chain in the 1980s, while mass advertising campaigns were swinging into action that would come to an equal fruition as the unofficial government of television produced a new kind of connected citizen. ¹⁴⁰ Haltingly, in the background, computers were also being used to connect up spaces and represent space anew in a way that would lead to the exponential growth of GIS in the 1980s; ¹⁴¹ and they were also being used to speed up time in a way that led to the first experiments with concerted financial trading in the 1960s, which, in turn, led on to the informational markets of the 1980s and so, seemingly inexorably, on to developments like high-frequency trading in which the advantages of microseconds can be creamed off by robots.

Not surprisingly, new apprehensions of space and time became common, building on Warhol’s insights into what the world was about, which had ‘changed the meaning of the recognizable’. ¹⁴² For example, the network became a standard cultural trope ‘as the abstract topological figure which stands for all concrete assemblages of protocols and rules that allow a milieu to be stabilized in such a way that it becomes productive’. ¹⁴³ Equally, this round of socio-technical practice demanded and produced the recomposition of the urban realm into an urban geography of linked cities, a connected global urban entity where it is impossible to consider any city as separate from any other, and each city can pollinate the others. ¹⁴⁴

Now a new round of spatio-temporal practices is under way ¹⁴⁵ in which the manufactory is again being re-apprehended and re-recognized, but this time as if dressed out for a permanent party, which has equally been echoed in and indeed produced by art – most especially an art in which systematic connections are made between art and space and a kind of blabbermouth talk, which was another of Andy Warhol’s characteristics. ¹⁴⁶ No wonder that a new generation of artists has now appeared intent on capturing and extending these practices. Take the example of the artist who has most often been dubbed as the new Warhol, Cory Arcangel. Arcangel works across the whole range of visual information technologies, including obsolete ones, to construct mashups that are intended to impinge on and even heighten the state of partial awareness and constant distraction he sees as typical of the modern world: ¹⁴⁷

Why increase the likelihood of distraction? ‘To heighten the flow,’ he said. ‘I want the environment to be just like it would be anywhere else in the outside world. I’m envisioning a visitor [to an exhibition] who’s just a little too preoccupied with modern communication to entirely invest their time where they’re standing. It’s almost as if people just aren’t physically wired for it anymore. I’m not encouraging it. I’m just making it silently possible.’ ¹⁴⁸

This new round of spatio-temporal practices is based on systematically growing ‘crops’ in the new land made possible by the expressive infrastructure. But the construction of these new kinds of complex collective goods is easier said than done. It is very unclear what a crop is or, indeed, how it can be cultivated in order to yield a profit. Thus, it requires new means of calculation. It requires new business models. It requires means of aggregating and locating information. It requires new means of pricing, often based around models of auctions. ¹⁴⁹ And it requires new aesthetics, which are precisely what Arcangel and his ilk are supplying.

So what might these complex collective goods – crops, if you like – be? I will argue that they are of at least three kinds. First, there is the cultivation of identity. These developments must be instilled into the subject itself, just as happened in earlier times; for example, in the ways in which movement produced new demands for settled identities that could be tracked. ¹⁵⁰ But now the demand is the other way around. It is for mobile and flattened identities that can be folded into the landscape, whose tracking and tracing is an integral part of who they are, and that can be sold on for profit. It is not surprising that Harney has argued that what we can now see is the forging of a ‘logistical’ subject that can continually move on. ¹⁵¹ As newer generations are born so old models of subjectivity fade away to be replaced by a model in which subjects continually dip into the flow.

In other words, this round of identity formation depends upon the installation of an excessive subject that can inhabit many subject positions as a matter of course and that, therefore, can generate many more valences. The generation of this excessive meanderer is what capitalism is now trying to get at. If it succeeds, it will have opened up a land of opportunity where not only do extra opportunities to sell lie dormant and ready to be tapped (e.g. through individually tailored advertising) but also means of picking up and boosting invention. The frontier of economic opportunity moves on to integrate physical and psychic infrastructure in the great psychophysical venture of building an expressive infrastructure.

But getting at and generating an excessive subject is difficult. It is easy to get people to connect with each other, much harder to get them to connect meaningfully. For example, much interaction on the internet is as blinkered as ever before in its outlook. It does not constitute excess in any form but rather a series of closed networks that are unlikely to generate fresh insight. ¹⁵² People use the internet to hide from each other, even as they are connected to more and more people. Getting at the excessive subject is hard work, in other words, which requires the generation of not only identitarian but also so-called nonidentitarian community in which ‘how one thinks of oneself without identity politics, or without individualist politics’ becomes relevant. ¹⁵³ The idea is to produce forms of collective belonging that go beyond those based on common characteristics such as social, ethnic or religious categories, and that do not presuppose identity. This task demands that location becomes not just a simple identifier but a means of threading these collectives together. There is ‘a solidarity of positioning and configurations in space’, ¹⁵⁴ of spatial disseminations.

Second, there is inhabitation. Cities cultivate a new kind of inhabitant who can don the city like a cloak. These inhabitants can follow the city’s moods, tapping into and amplifying particular emotional keys or tones, and sensing the direction of constant expressive/information flows. That capacity is itself produced by both revealing and cloaking each inhabitant in a selective signature that is a new form of clothing made up out of the textures of information and communications technology. ¹⁵⁵ Inhabitants start to resemble avatars, at least in the sense that the persona they don can be expressed in more dimensions.

These signatures are expressive in nature. If being in touch is a serious business, then it requires a lot of expressive work, which new technologies both aid and constitute as they blur the lines between the living and the non-living through new forms of talk. The result is that mimicry becomes an even more crucial process, understood as an immensely fertile, creative process of gradual variation brought about by attempts at copying that turn into something else. Such processes are much more likely to bite in cities where all kinds of means of comparison and contrast are available all the time than in locations where a thinner information-cum-physical landscape still pertains. City landscapes start to respond, producing spaces that conform to lifestyle in the manner so well documented by Savage and his co-workers. ¹⁵⁶

Third, there are memories. The city becomes a kind of memory palace. More and more of the memories of individuals, their mental images, are being captured and stored, at least as a kind of shorthand, via the machinery of cameras and blogs and social networking sites. The rights to these images are becoming a new kind of property with certain of them endowed with ‘a comparatively high degree of lyrical force/value because their form or content is especially significant’. ¹⁵⁷ In turn, these images start to become an essential adjunct to what it is to be human and how it can be mapped. A parallel to the human genome project starts to hove into view that maps all of the traces that people leave.

The city now has to deal with the results of these and other developments as both an expressive motor and medium in which increased environmental stimulus becomes a norm. As land has been redefined such that a new layer of territory has been inserted that consists of spaces which can exist at many points in many different combinations, in continual genesis, and that can vary on quite short timescales, so the game changes from brokering one city to brokering many. Cities can sing many songs. Although Macdonald’s description of a not-so-far-in-the-future Istanbul is figurative, it provides a window into this new world in which cities are explicitly rather than implicitly designed as multiplicities that can allow all kinds of complex collective goods to be collated and constructed:

The one small window, guarded by a pierced wooden screen, allows glimpses of Adem Dede Square and its stooping apartment buildings. In the white room, the windows open on to other Istanbuls where the streets and buildings are drawn by their inhabitants’ supermarket spending or their diseases and medical interventions or the subtle interactions of their geographical, social and religious affilations. There are the restless Istanbuls of traffics and tracks and tunnels. There are wiry Istanbuls, nervous as a skinned man, of gas and power and data. There are Istanbuls built entirely out of football gossip. For every commodity, for every activity that can be analyzed and modelled, there is a city. ¹⁵⁸

Thus, the expressive infrastructure of cities builds and intensifies producing something that seems like a second nature, both in the way in which it wraps itself around events and the way in which it operates like a natural system of flows and balances. There is, of course, a classic Foucauldian point to be made here: the history of the city can be seen as the successive ‘smoothing’ of barriers to circulation, by ‘organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a distinction between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’. ¹⁵⁹ But there is more to it than this.

First off, the city now becomes something akin to nature in the way that it is apprehended. The dominant urban metaphors move to waves and fields and atmospheres that are natural but anorganic. These metaphors aim to mix what were once considered different entities or orders or oppositions: the natural and the cultural or social, for example, or body and culture. The city is hybrid, governed by a logic of self-organizing complexity, of difference and feedback, rather than generic-specific classificatory difference and it is apprehended through subsystems of different elements that mean that things can continually emerge and fade. The task of the subsystems is to track and intervene at opportune points, producing niches in which particular tendencies can thrive, often at the expense of others. Thus, the underlying ethos of the new capitalism and the city it spawns is environmental. It is based on making reciprocal environments and so locating a new frontier of and for invention.

Second, the city starts to become ‘minded’. The city now contains all kinds of things that think in some way, each wrapped up in their own form of spatial intelligence: human beings and animals, of course, but also software, which, in turn, is producing animate things as well as an ‘informed’ infrastructure that is gradually being linked up with itself as well as humans. Just as it has been argued that film has a mind of its own – through its function as part of something moving it can think ‘in its own affective way’ for itself, so long as we do not assume that all forms of thinking have to be identical to, or consequent on, human thought. ¹⁶⁰ The sentient city starts to become a reality. ¹⁶¹

Third, the city starts to accumulate what might be called ‘undergrowth’. All kinds of events occur that are outside the mainstream and can wander off in directions that are not a part of the overall capitalist project. They may be drawn into it, of course. But, equally, they may exist as a permanently juxtaeconomic/juxtapolitical zone, ¹⁶² orphaned from conventional depictions of the political and the economic but periodically able to define what is regarded as political and economic in the first place. ¹⁶³ After all, the capitalist project I have outlined is, by its very nature, open-ended and unable to be exactly controlled. Open really does mean open.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have tried to answer the question ‘where is capitalism trying to go next?’ Such exercises are inevitably fraught with danger since they often present the world as perfectible when it is always a mess. But one might argue that the fact that the world turns up messily is currently to capitalism’s advantage in that it provides a sandpit for the kinds of practices I have been trying to describe here, using the fuel of diversity and difference, of competing passions and of clashing ideas and prejudices.

What I have particularly tried to suggest is that the underlying model of what constitutes ‘economy’ is changing to what might be termed a ‘natural’ model. This is not a natural economy from which money has been banished. Rather, it is a natural economy because it resembles the process of terraforming in that it drives practices of worlding that are concerned with producing environments (or rather, as I have tried to make clear, proto-environments), which do not just provide support for a way of life in the way of infrastructure, but are a way of life: infrastructure cannot be separated out since it too has become expressive. In these worlds, every fibre of being is bent to producing landscapes that confirm each and every moment as what will happen. This is an economy that has gone beyond ideology or hegemony in their stricter senses in that it is pre-emptive and makes its moves before the event has completely unfolded.

The main point is that, as we more knowingly constructed these worlds, so it became clear that a model of total control can no longer apply. The model changes to a model more like a kind of weather forecasting, which itself creates the weather, the aim of which is to harvest the best out of situations. But constructing these kinds of worlds actually produces new kinds of instability. Three come to mind. One is the environmental costs. Vast injections of electrical power are needed. Another is that, although the model is partially self-organizing, this does not mean that it will just carry right on along. For example, stripping out certain kinds of large bureaucratic control (the big predators, so to speak) might mean producing unbalanced ecosystems. Indeed, part of the strength of the system is that it is continually unbalanced. But that is also its weakness. Equilibrium states can only be local. Variation does not always improve robustness. Systems with too much diversity may just create chaos or randomness. ¹⁶⁴ One more kind of instability is that this system is devoid of any explicit ideology save its own process of willing itself into being. If it stops delivering the goods, there is nothing there. The analogy that perhaps best fits what I mean is what the Italians called ‘trasformismo’, an ethos of accommodation without any unity of purpose, without any creed. All procedural activity is a bargain and without the fulfilment of the bargain, either the system grinds to a halt or something goes missing. Support for a regime based on ‘trasformismo’ vanishes the moment it can no longer satisfy the demands of its clients.

In other words, there is a political moment here, if only it can be seized. But that is the subject of a forthcoming book. ¹⁶⁵