making their way into this workaday world and refiguring it, so that capitalism can
play much closer to the skin, so to speak. But it is also that these practices, like
many others, contain within them contradictory impulses which provide the
ground for new forms of political formation, a point I will return to briefly in the
concluding section of the chapter.
Second, it may be objected that these are arguments without much in the way
of empirical foundation. It is true that this chapter is in part speculative, both in
its object and in how it proceeds, but that is not to say that it has no evidence
base. Spotting a process of the ‘redistribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 1999), of
the production of a new form of consumer divination and appropriation, involves
some concentrated gleaning, which depends upon being able to pull together
diverse sources and indicators. The chapter is therefore based on three main
stimuli. One is ‘observant participant’ fieldwork in business and in bioscience over
a two year period. Another is the mining of a very large range of secondary sources
that have proved appropriate. The sheer range of sources able to be drawn on
reflects the difficulty of tracking an inchoate ambition that is being constructed
in its making, and a consequent tendency to bricolage which is at the heart of new
forms of capitalism. The third is an Economic and Social Research Council grant
on e-commerce carried out jointly with Andrew Leyshon, Louise Crewe, Shaun
French and Peter Webb which pointed to many of the developments I will discuss.
Finally, then, this chapter is a work of synthesis, but it is one based on close
observation of some particular key arenas of practice.
The chapter is therefore in three parts. In the first part, I will describe three
closely related conceptual-cum-practical developments that, though they have been
present in embryonic form for varying amounts of time, came together at the end
of the twentieth century. They are now being taken on, in lock step, as new ways
to squeeze value by amplifying the rate of innovation through a general exterior-
ization of intelligence out from the corporation, in turn redefining what counts
as value. These developments should not be seen as extending everywhere but
they are, I think, indicative.
Taken together, this ‘second round’ of concept-practices describe a new
distribution of the sensible. The first of these developments has been an obsession
with knowledge and creativity and especially an obsession with fostering tacit
knowledge and aptitudes through devices like the community of practice and meta-
phors like performance. However, this stream of thought and practice has now
transmuted into a more general redefinition of intellectual labour arising out of
the mobilization of the resource of forethought, or rather the possibilities
of plumbing the non-cognitive realm and ‘fast’ thinking in general, a search typified
by a book like Malcolm Gladwell’s recent business bestseller, Blink(2003). Then,
second, there was a desire to rework consumption so as to draw consumers much
more fully into the process, leaching out their knowledge of commodities and
adding it back into the system as an added performative edge through an
‘experience economy’(Pine and Gilmore 1999). This stream of thought and
practice has now blossomed into a set of fully fledged models of ‘co-creation’
which are changing corporate perceptions of what constitutes ‘production’,
32 Part I