earlier. It would also be possible to argue that they have been prefigured in a number
of places, by authors who want to give up on the kind of remorselessly monopolist
accounts of capitalism that act as a kind of intellectual and political bulldozer (Amin
and Thrift 2005).^57 I think of Michel Callon’s work on an economy of qualities,
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s work on new forms of economic justification,
Edward Lipuma and Benjamin Lee’s work on circulating capitalism, Celia Lury’s
work on brands, Lev Manovich’s work on new media, the work of Paolo Virno
and Maurizio Lazzarato on intellectual labour and ‘immaterial’ capitalism, the
allied work of Moulier Boutang and others on cognitive capitalism, or even, to
travel farther back in time, Alvin Toffler’s coining of the term ‘prosumerism’. Put
baldly, I want to point to three formative tendencies that now structure – and rule
- experience in capitalist economic formations: prospecting across the whole of
bodily experience, but most especially in the ‘anteconscious’, thus reworking what
is regarded as labour, class, invention and, indeed, much of what was traditionally
regarded as political economy; attempting to produce instant communities, worlds
gathered around products and production processes which themselves become a
vital part of what is regarded as product and production process;^58 reworking space
and time so that they fit this new kind of life, most especially by producing new
prostheses which are also additions to cognition and precognition.
Most importantly I want to zero in on this latter process. It is possible to argue
that the most important reworking of experience that is currently taking place
is the production of new kinds of not just attentive and responsive but formative
spaces which act as a generalized form of writing on to and in to the world,
working especially at the level of bare life. This mass ‘production of worlds’, as
Lazzarato (200 4 ) would put it, consists not just of a multiplication of saleable
ways of living, but also the symbolic indexing of these spaces so that they can
continually generate what would have been thought of as ‘decisive moments’ with
the result that these spaces can be constantly refreshed and so remain absorbing
(see Thrift 2006b). If one of the most important cognitive leaps of the last few
hundred years was the growth of writing in its many forms, now, or so I argue, a
similar change in the structure of cognition is occurring but as a general process
of the purposeful production of semiosis, in which space is both template and font.
This is, in other words, the age of the inhabitable map (Fawcett-Tang 2005;
Abrams and Hall 2006), an age intent on producing various new kinds of captiva-
tion through the cultivation of atmosphereor presenceor touch(see Sloterdik 2005a,
2005b; Zumthor 2006).^59 So, for example, when Wheeler (2006) points to a
world perfused with signs, privileges emergence, and underlines the importance
of responsiveness, I take this stance to be not just an outline of the lineaments of
a new kind of political project but also a symptomatic observation concerning a
world in which spaces are taking on many of the characteristics of life. The trick,
or so it seems to me, is to work with this emerging spatial grain, in the full under-
standing that it is both a part of a series of means of opening up new opportunities
for the exercise of power and profit anda new palette of possibilities.
The three subsequent chapters fill out how the background of experience is
changing in response to these three insistent imperatives. In essence, they are an
Life, but not as we know it 23