bare life – to make it comprehensible and therefore able to be apprehended and
so made more of – across a range of different interests and arenas. And of these
interests and arenas the most powerful and, in many ways, the most advanced is
capitalist business: Agamben’s mass consumerism.
Capitalist firms are drawing on the various knowledges of bare life they are
producing to produce new products, products which animate – ‘turn on’ – the
body by producing an engaging and compelling ethology of the senses. This is
the rise of an ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999), a new genre of
economic output which can construct experiences in order to produce added value.
What have been the chief knowledges of bare life from which this experience
economy has grown? There are four. The first has been tourism. Since the 1960s
a new kind of tourism has emerged based upon the theming of spaces. Relying
on the experience of running museums, heritage centres, theme parks and certain
kinds of themed retailing (Gottdiener 199 7 ) it has gradualiy constructed know-
ledge of how to produce spaces which can grip the senses. Of late, the kinaesthetic
element of tourism has accordingly been amplified. For example, there are all the
postcolonial forms of adventure set out by Guttman: houseboating, portaging,
mountain-biking, cattle-driving, bob-sledding, tall-ship sailing, tornado-chasing,
canyon orienteering, wagon training, seal viewing, iceberg tracking, racing car
driving, hot-air ballooning, rock climbing, spelunking, white water rafting,
canoeing, heli-hiking, hut-to-hut hiking, whale kissing, llama trekking, barn-
storming, land yachting, historic battle re-enactments, iceboating, polar bearing
and dog-sledding. The second knowledge, one clearly linked to the former,
is sport and exercise. Sport and exercise have become key elements in modern
experience economies, through their ability to influence bodily comportment
(including specialized precision knowledges) through the specialized spaces that
are constructed to serve them, and through the connections to the mass media
(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998).
A third knowledge has been of performance. Since the 1960s again, knowledge
of performance – which is, after all, extensive – has moved out from the stage to
fill all manner of venues – from corporate presentations to the street. Buoyed up
by mass media which have, in all probability, made the population at large more
performative (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998), the art of performance has
become a general art which concentrates especially on the conduct of the now and
which can be appropriated. The fourth knowledge has been from education.
Pedagogy has become a more and more active affair. Bolstered by findings from
fields like cognition and consciousness, learning is now universally practised
as active, even sensuous.
Capitalist firms have taken these knowledges and produced a series of purchases
on the world. The first of these has been advertising. Advertising companies
have become alive to an approach that takes in all the senses. Companies like
the London advertising agency St Lukes have led the way towards advertising
which is meant to tug at bare life by emphasizing kinaesthetic qualities. Another
purchase is through sensorializing goods – producing goods that will richly engage
the senses.
Still life in nearly present time 71