2 Re-inventing invention
New tendencies in capitalist
commodification
The functioning of the economy of qualities involves the establishment of forms
of organization that facilitate the intensification of collaboration of supply and
demand in a way that enables consumers to participate actively in the qualification
of products. The establishment of distributed cognition devices, intended to
organize real life experiments as preferences, tends to blur habitual distinctions
between production, distribution and consumption. Design, as an activity that
crosses through the entire organization, becomes central: the firm organizes itself
to make the dynamic process of qualification and requalification of products possible
and manageable.
(Callon et al. 2002: 19 7 )In the long procession of history, capitalism is the late-comer. It arrives when
everything is ready.
(Braudel 19 77 : 7 5)Introduction
It is always difficult to tell where capitalism will go next as it continues to seek out
new sources of profit. After all, capitalism is not a fixed and unforgiving force.
Rather, it is a heterogeneous and continually dynamic process of increasingly
global connection – often made through awkward and makeshift links – and those
links can be surprising, not least because they often produce unexpected spatial
formations which can themselves have force (Amin 200 4 ; Bayart 2001; Moore
2004 ; Tsing 2005). In this chapter, I therefore want to take some really quite
specific links in an increasingly globally connected capitalism, links to do with what
might still be considered to be its beating heart – the system of production of
commodities and the process of commodification – and to attempt to weave them
into a general story about what might be happening currently at its leading edge.
Conforming to the premise that there is an urgent necessity to anticipate the
transformation and command strategies of capital,^1 I want to argue that it is
possible to detect a series of novel practices emerging which are likely to have