Increasingly, that world is being constructed by business, and furthermore by
a business that uses theory as an instrumental method, as a source of expertiseand
as an affective registerto inform an everyday life that is increasingly built from
that theory.^33 Yet, still, too few social theorists seem willing to recognize that
fact or to consider what it might mean for the practice of social theory. They prefer
bracketing off business as an other which is to be deplored and then largely
ignored. This must surely be dangerous when it can be argued that theory, in its
attempt to be fast-moving and productive, is increasingly trying to mimic the very
forces that may endanger it.
This chapter argues, in contrast, that what is now going on in business is
intended to populate nearly every event with content that has some commercial
resonance and, understood in a broad sense, gain through a general redefinition
of what counts as value. Capitalism is carpeting expectation and capturing poten-
tial. Simple condemnation of this tendency, as if from some putative outside, or,
alternatively, embracing it as a part of some continuously fluid overarching vitalist
order, will not do. Rather, it seems to me to call for radically new imaginings of
exactly how things are, but under a new aspect that we can currently only glimpse;
‘a tune beyond us, yet ourselves’, as Wallace Stevens (1960: 133) put it.
Re-inventing invention 55