ceases to be an invisible activity and becomes something exterior, ‘public’, as
it breaks into the productive process.
(Virno 200 4 : 6 4 )These sets of practices of intensification/extensification have not existed before
as coherent and systematic entities and they are currently in the middle of things,
so they may work – or they may not. But they have at least the potential to redefine
what count as the horizons of capitalism by changing how encounterwith the
commodity is thought of and practised by the consumer (by trying to not so much
control as to modulate vicissitude by boosting what is brought to the encounter),
especially by incorporating the collective agency of the intellectual labour of the
consumer into the business of innovation (Berardi 2005). In other words, value
increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially
become, that is from the pull of the future, and from the new distributions of the
sensible that can arise from that change. This is hardly a novel stance. After all,
labour-power incorporates potential, that which is not current, not present, and
this has a pragmatic dimension:
Where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not
separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker
is the substratum of that labour-power which, in itself, has no independent
existence. ‘Life’, pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as
much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential.
(Virno 200 4 : 82)What, I think, is startling currently is the rate of onset of these different but
related tendencies and the way that they are now bearing out many of what may
have considered to have been premature general theoretical claims and prognos-
tications. In particular, what I will be presenting could be interpreted as
historicizing Tarde’s account of an animated economy in which the entities being
dealt with are not people but innovations that are constantly trying to multiply
themselves, ‘quanta of change with a life of their own’ (Latour 2005: 15).^3 Thus,
what seems to be being produced is a world dependent upon and activated by
germs of talent, which are driven by sentiments and knowledge and are able to
circulate easily through a semiconscious process of imitation which generates differ-
ence from within itself (Leys 1993). The world becomes a continuous and
inexhaustible process of emergence of inventions which goes beyond slavish
accumulation. In other words, Tarde’s analysis in Psychologie Économiqueis
becoming true.
In ending this extended introduction, I want to make two main points. First,
it can be objected that I am caught up in practices instituted in the corporate aeries
of the world by the cultural circuit of capital which ignore the vast bulk of global
capitalism and most especially the workaday world. They are the practices of
ideologues and visionaries which are, in many cases, not far removed from simple
hucksterism. My response is that what the new capitalist practices are about are
Re-inventing invention 31