50 See, in particular, work on the spaces of sound and especially the efforts to reconstruct
historical soundscapes (e.g. B.R. Smith 1999; Rath 2003; Sterne 2003).
51 For example, I believe that Deleuze and Guattari’s work suffers from a residual
structuralism (see Schatzki 2002) and too great an emphasis on an unalloyed ‘bliss of
action’ (Deleuze 1988b: 28).
52 Indeed, I am highly sceptical that the history of Western thought could ever be written
as if it were simply the history of a set of philosophical excursions.
53 ‘In fact, a philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and nothing else;
by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration, to the
very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question’ (Deleuze 1991: 116)
54 I should add that I think this manuscript is amongst the last that will take on such a
dreary form. It seems clear to me that to do justice to the ambitions of much of what
I am writing about requires a new cursive register, one that mixes all manner of media
and presentational styles in order to achieve its goals, that can roll out at different speeds,
and that, as a result, can really perform.
55 Conceived of as if by Malebranche, as the natural prayer of the soul, an attentiveness
to all living creatures.
56 It is, of course, possible to take the theoretical technology wielded in this book too
seriously. As Gombrowicz put it with reference to existentialism:
It seems impossible to meet the demands of Dasein and simultaneously have coffee
and croissants for an evening snack. To fear nothingness but to fear the dentist
more. To be consciousness, which walks around in pants and talks on the telephone.
To be responsibility, which runs little shopping errands downtown. To bear the
weight of significant being, to install the world with meaning and then return
the change from ten pesos.
(cited in Simic 2006: 22)57 Eagleton (2006: 26) puts it nicely in describing Jameson’s style: ‘it rolls its way across
an intellectual landscape which it levels beneath it, emulsifying everything until
connections become more insistent than conflicts’.
58 The evolution of new protocols carries on apace. Thus, since I wrote the first chapter,
co-production with the consumer has become a new orthodoxy, signalled by its arrival
in the pages of Harvard Business Review.
59 The reference to atmospheres consciously summons up the work of Peter Sloterdijk,
whose work on spaces is, I think, the closest to what I am trying to achieve (see Sloterdijk
2005a, 2005b).
2 Re-inventing invention
1 Importantly, this is not meant to function as a vanguardism of the kind found in, for
example, some variants of Italian Marxism (Wright 2002). It is imperative to understand
that the economy is a radical heterogeneity that is always diverse, and cannot therefore
be captured in precisely this way, as though everything will eventually follow on.
2 However, as I will make clear, this is not just a case of opening up new ‘fishing grounds’,
to use market research parlance. It is a change in how the commodity itself is conceived.
3 The speed of this onset is almost certainly the result of the cultural circuit of capital
which is able to circulate theories at an accelerated rate showing, once again, that theory
has increasingly transmuted into method, a method of producing maximum connectivity
with the minimum of material. What we see is theory becoming a second nature but
that theory is of an attenuated, instrumental kind.
4 It is important to note that I am trying to provide a diagram of a new set of tendencies
that are now infesting the business of innovation and which together form a functioning
process. This does not, of course, preclude all kinds of other models of innovation from258 Notes