‘consumption’, ‘commodity’, ‘the market’ and indeed ‘innovation’. The third
development has involved the active engineering of the space of innovation, the
result especially of an emphasis on communities of knowledge. Informed by the
profusion of information technology and by attempts to construct more
intellectually productive environments, especially through the construction of built
forms that would hasten and concentrate interaction, this stream of thought and
practice has transmuted into a more general concern with social engineering of
groups, thereby learning how to combine information technology, built form and
group formation in ways that really will deliver the goods. Taken together, these
three developments have also foregrounded the absolute importance of design.
Throughout the chapter, the reader will notice the difficulty that I have with
keeping production and consumption separate: producers try to put themselves
in the place of consumers, consumers contribute their intellectual labour and
all kinds of work to production in the cause of making better goods, in a kind of
generalized outsourcing, migrations regularly occur between production and con-
sumption, and vice versa. Innovation can turn up anywhere and is no longer
necessarily restricted to particular niches in the division of labour.^4 It has, of course,
been a standard component of a number of recent new left accounts that con-
sumption has become, in some sense or another, productive: consumption is
no longer a passive terminus but a complicit and creative relay in the production
of capitalism. But it seems to me that these accounts, which were almost certainly
premature and which were allowed much too great a generality, are now starting
to take on real weight.
But what is this weight? In the second part of the chapter, I will argue that these
new sets of practices foretell a reworking of valueas a new form of efficacy, one
that will change the background of the western world by producing new interactive
senses of causality which are, I suspect, likely to be more effective than the scientific
and literary metaphors which are usually assumed to be at the root of changes in
perception of causality (e.g. Kern 200 4 ). ‘Efficacy’ may not seem to be an obvious
phrase to use in a discussion of globalized capitalism – it sounds a bit old-fashioned
perhaps, a word that has seen better days. But I hope to be able to convince the
reader that it is not only relevant but has genuine analytical grip.
I want to argue that some notion of efficacy is crucial to any understanding
of modern economies for which innovation is such a crucial engine and value, for
what I want to broach is what counts as our understanding of the operativity of
the economy – including how it goes about the business of innovation – and I
want to argue that increasingly this is dependent upon representing and tapping
in to a certain kind of value, one that is different from what has come before.
Notice here that I am not using keywords like ‘knowledge’ or ‘creativity’ to signal
this change. They do not seem quite right to me in that they imply a kind of
trawling for the new rather than the continuous process of interaction that now
seems to be becoming characteristic. At least in the forums that I will want to
examine, words like these seem to me to conceal as much as they reveal and, in
any case, they are artefacts of a first round of thinking about the issues, now being
superseded.
Re-inventing invention 33