Knowing Capitalism

Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781412900591, 9781412900584
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology, distinct contemporary business cultures and practices?
- Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents

?Nigel Thrift offers us the sort of cultural analysis of global capitalism that has long been needed - one that emphasizes the innovative energy of global capitalism. The book avoids stale denouncements and offers instead a view of capitalism as a form of practice?
- Karin Knorr Cetina, Professor of Sociology, University of Konstanz, Germany

Capitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where `everything solid melts into air?. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain?

These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls ?the cultural circuit of capitalism?, the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations?

Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in geography, social theory, anthropology and cultural economics.

1

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Adventures of Capitalism

Business art is the step that comes after Art … Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. (Andy Warhol, cited in Taylor, 2001, p. 233)

There are no bad ideas. (Rasiel, 1999, p. 97)

Alas, it is fast, it is digital: still one is bored. (Ciborra, 2002, p. 172)

Introduction

This is a book about what happened when capitalism began to consider its own practices on a continuous basis. This is a book about what happened when capitalism began to use its fear of uncertainty as a resource. This is a book about what happened when capitalism began to circulate new ideas of the world as if they were its own. This is a book about what happened when capitalism began to intervene in, and make a business out of, thinking the everyday. This is a book about capitalism at (serious) play.

I can hear the complaints now. Surely, capitalism is a system of oppression whose only purpose is to grind out mass commodities? And surely its Dionysian side is just one more symptom of its wrong-headedness?

But it is precisely these kinds of automatic responses that I want to take issue with in this book. For quite a few people, capitalism is not just hard graft. It is also fun. People get stuff from it – and not just more commodities. Capitalism has a kind of crazy vitality. It doesn’t just line its pockets. It also appeals to gut feelings. It gets involved in all kinds of extravagant symbioses. It adds into the world as well as subtracts.¹

And it follows that I do not want to see capitalism as a kind of metaphysical entity, a grid of power relations rather like interconnected ley lines which lie under the social landscape and dictate much of what it is about. I take seriously the idea that capitalism is ‘instantiated’ in particular practices and that it is therefore better thought of as rather like a Foucauldian diagram, an impulse without determinate goals, a functioning which stamps particular forms of conduct on human multiplicity through ‘distributing in space, laying out and serializing in time, composing in space–time, and so on’ (Deleuze, 1986, p. 35). An unstable and fluid affair which constantly evolves, the diagram is ‘almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak’ (1986, p. 35).

So what, more specifically, is my theoretical stance to capitalism? I take capitalism to be a series of relations of relation instituted over time through different organizations of time–space. These relations are rolled out as the world in three ways. One is via the kind of stance to the world adapted at each moment by actors of all kinds which assumes that that is how the world is. This stance is mainly pre-reflexive, written into the body and other spatial layouts through repetition. But since all repetitions include openings too, nothing can be permanently fixed. If every performance repeats itself, then every repetition also consists of an interval in which risk and excess can potentially disrupt the unproblematic bridges between events that is our anticipation of how the world is (Butler, 1991). The second is through the interventions of objects, from delivery schedules to barcodes to office layouts to charts to spreadsheets, that assume the world is actively mediated in particular ways and directs bodies and other objects along those ways. Then, the third way is as organizational templates that, instituted as practices, roll over particular ways of doing people and things, lighting up and sustaining particular territories, from subject positions to corporate cultures.

Such a stance in turn depends on a series of assumptions. One is that the world does not consist of unities or totalities. The unified field is a dream. Every system is overcoded and proliferates in only relatively stable and relatively predictable ways. There are all kinds of gaps and hesitations, excesses and remainders, which arise from the fact that all kinds of things other than capitalism are constantly going on which constitute lines of interference which can never totally be tuned out. Opacity, division and wildness result. Second, the world always comes loaded with ethical content. It certainly contains multiple spaces of oppression and lockdown, but it also contains little spaces of joy and generosity which cannot be locked out. There can never be a pure morality of law derived from a supersensible realm (Connolly, 1999). This is a world that is hybrid and must negotiate. Third, the world is still enchanted (Thrift, 1997a). I have no truck with accounts of capitalism that insist that capitalism has disenchanted the world. The world of capitalism is best seen, I think, as one closer to the imaginary of the medieval world of dark superstitions and religious bliss than we fondly choose to believe (Miyazaki, 2003). I just do not accept that history has rolled as far forward as the theorists of modernity would like to tell us. I am not at all convinced that the managers of capitalist firms – jointly or severally – know what they are doing for quite a lot of the time. And I am sure that commodities retain their ability to animate us in ways which are not just extensions of commodification, and which can still catch us up in minor pleasures and inspirations that reflect affective-cum-ethical concerns (Bennett, 2001) as well as slavish compliance.

Which brings me to the four methodological rules that I insist on when analysing contemporary capitalism. One is that it is important to deploy what I have called elsewhere a ‘backward gaze’. That means thinking rather as a historian from the future might, looking back at our present time and seeing vast numbers of unresolved issues, differences of interpretation and general confusions, exactly as historians see the past now. This is in contrast to many social theorists who too often let their historical imagination atrophy in order that they can make large claims about ‘modernity’, which are meant to set the seal on history, to wrap everything up.

Another is that I take it that most historical events have a good deal of contingency built into them. Capitalism could have (and has) gone in a number of different ways and many of the ways that it has proceeded on are the cumulative result of ‘small’ events that, at the time, no doubt, seemed to have little significance:

to follow the complex course of descent of accidents is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to these things that continue to exist and have value for us. (Foucault, 1970, p. 146)

This is hardly news – after all, many economists now recognize (albeit partially) this phenomenon in their emphasis on increasing returns to scale, path dependence, and the like – but it is important because it has seemingly suggested to many corporate strategists that the spoils go to those able to take advantage of events as they unfold, able to be prepared for surprise, able to become skilled at harnessing the ‘power of now’ (Ranadive, 1999).

Thus, and this is a further rule, capitalism is performative: it is always engaged in experiment, as the project is perpetually unfinished. Capitalism is therefore a highly adaptive and constantly mutating formation; it is a set of poised systems (DeLanda, 2002). The whole point of capitalism, then, is precisely its ability to change its practices constantly, and those who run corporations must be able to surf the right side of the constant change that results, or risk being washed up on the reefs of irrelevance – and thrown into bankruptcy. (It is always worth remembering just how few capitalist firms survive over the long term; surely Schumpeter was right to argue that capitalism is a flawed leviathan arising out of creative destruction.)

But, there is one more rule: always look for the routine, even boring, as well as the sexy. It is all too easy to get carried away and depict capitalism as a kind of big dipper, all thrills and spills. But capitalism can be performative only because of the many means of producing stable repetition which are now available to it and which constitute its routine base (Miyazaki and Riles, 2004).² Chief amongst these means of producing the everyday life of capitalism – apart from the sheer unremitting hard work of so many labour forces – are two apparatuses which are particularly crucial. One is the whole apparatus of installation, maintenance and repair.³ The other is the apparatus of order and delivery. For some reason, perhaps to do with their extreme everydayness, these apparatuses are constantly ignored in the literature and yet it could be argued that they constitute the bedrock of modern capitalism. As importantly, they have recently gone through their own revolution, born out of the progressive application of logistical knowledges of various kinds by large, specialized firms which now constitute a vital component of the knowledge economy.

To summarize, I regard capitalism as a set of networks which, though they may link in many ways, form not a total system but rather a project that is permanently ‘under construction’.⁴ Capitalist firms may be able to mobilize power and enrol allies but they are as uncertain about the future as we all are because the future unfolds as a virtuality – it is continually creating temporary actualizations out of new questions – not a known quantity, or at least a distinct possibility. So capitalist firms may sit on the bridge of the world, able at their best attempts to steer it in certain directions, but they still cannot know what is around the corner, whether it be an emerging energy crisis, a financial downturn, a set of protests that threaten a brand’s image, or something more mundane like a cashflow crisis. This essentially performative notion of capitalism, conceiving of it as a continually renewed set of responses to new drivers, means that I see capitalism, to repeat, as a constantly mutating entity, made up of fields or networks which are only ever partly in its control. No matter how many assets are engaged, it must constantly face the pressure of unexpected events.

Such a Latourian-cum-Deleuzean notion of political economy as composed of a series of modulations is not without its ironies, of course. For it increasingly resembles capitalism’s description of itself. As Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) have noted, there are clear homologies between the current Anglo-Saxon ideologies of capitalism and the writings of Derrida, Deleuze and Serres. They both set out a new moral plan based, in part, on the affective and the ludic, they both produce new figures of immanence (for example, the network⁵), and they both attempt to produce new practices which are resolutely inauthentic. What is clear is that we have reached a point in which the kind of divides that kept capitalists and anti-capitalists apart are not easily separated linguistically and, in some cases, even practically. Part of the reason for this is because the language of economics has become common linguistic currency, making it increasingly difficult to conceive of the world in any terms except those of a calculus of supply and demand. Then, it is a fact that capitalists and anti-capitalists alike often share many of the same tropes, of speed, flow, network, and so on. They both want to dance change and create community. An emphasis on pure Nietzschean action, in particular, is one that can be found equally in currency markets and on anti-road protests (Barry, 2001). Then, finally, capitalist firms have taken on some of the language and practices of the opposition, moving from an emphasis on an overall strategy to something more closely approximating de Certeau’s tactical interventions, as in how they enact decisions (cf. Weick, 2001), how they create innovative ‘communities’ (Wenger, 1999; Wenger et al., 2002), and how they market commodities (as in recent attempts to engineer ‘smart mobs’ and the rise of ‘viral’ or ‘buzz’ marketing: e.g. Rheingold, 2002; Barabasi, 2002; Buchanan, 2002). In other words, capitalist firms are increasingly utilizing the weapons of the weak – contextual fleeting practices – to make themselves strong (Wenger, 1999; Clippinger, 1999).

Elements of a new political economy

One of the chief aims of this book is to rework certain elements of political economy for these uncertain times. Not all elements, note. But some. This is not a book which is trying to wrap up what is going on in some enormous theoretical infrastructure, not least because I think there are good theoretical reasons for suggesting that this kind of slab thinking is trying to complete an impossible task. But I do think it is possible to shine some light on the current situation, particularly by listening hard.6 Straightaway, however, I want to argue against taking three particular routes as the be-all and end-all of a contemporary political economy, not because I think they are unimportant, but because I do not think that they lie at the heart of what is new about contemporary capitalism. One is to lay an undue emphasis on money and finance. Even in continental Europe, the ‘financialization’ of the economy is now a fact of life, as are its effects – rampant speculation, asset price bubbles, and so on. Though an event like the ‘new economy’ was in large part an asset price bubble, driven by the demands of new and extreme kinds of financial ‘discipline’ (such as shareholder value), aided by the advent of new kinds of financial instrument, fuelled by the spread of pension funds, mutual funds, and middle class financial literacy, and buttressed by all-too-familiar forms of greed and avarice, it constituted, I believe, not a new development but rather a more extreme version of past developments. The second is to lay an undue emphasis on information technology. Though one could hardly argue against the view that the rise of information technology (and especially software) is an important development which is a necessary background to much of what is going on in contemporary capitalist economies – as I will show below – I believe that it should be seen as having differential effects on numerous circuits of practice, rather than as having a uniquely determining effect of its own. In other words, information technology is both more and less important than it is often depicted to be. The third is to argue that there has been a major shift in the regulation of the rules of possession. It is surely the case that new prescriptive and normative frameworks have been coming on apace arising out of new legal orthodoxies, the proliferation of global actors and the assembly of different kinds of commodity. In turn, it may be that these frameworks presage new bundles of rights of ownership and even new commodity forms (for example, in the realm of bioscience). But I am not convinced that, so far at least, this process has been more than an incremental evolution of past practice, impressive though that evolution undoubtedly is (cf. Dezalay and Garth, 2002b).

What is most interesting about contemporary capitalism is how these juggernauts of finance and information technology and regulation have interwoven with new developments to produce new possibilities for profit. It is to these new developments that I now want to turn.

So how has contemporary capitalism produced the goods? I want to suggest an account which I will amplify in this book, which concentrates on three particular arenas: the discursive power of what I call the ‘cultural circuit’ of capitalism, the changing form of the commodity, and the pivotal role of space and time as not merely metrics but resources.

So one development I will consider in detail is the extraordinary discursive apparatus which has been perhaps the chief creation of the capitalism of the post-1960s period, and which I call the ‘cultural circuit’ of capitalism – business schools, management consultants, management gurus and the media. This has produced a process of continual critique of capitalism, a feedback loop which is intended to keep capitalism surfing along the edge of its own contradictions. The development of this circuit is, I am sure, of pivotal importance for at least four reasons. To begin with, it has made capitalism into a theoretical enterprise in which various essentially virtual notions (network, the knowledge economy, the new economy, community of practice) are able to take on flesh as, increasingly, the world is made in these notions’ likeness through the power of consulting solutions – what Miller (1998) and others call the rise of ‘virtualism’. Then, there is the emphasis that the cultural circuit has placed on the body. Much of modern capitalism is concerned, in a touchy-feely replay of Taylorism, with producing new kinds of managerial and worker bodies that are constantly attentive, constantly attuned to the vagaries of the event, through an emphasis on the ludic and affective. Again, there is the important fact that the cultural circuit itself constitutes a new and vibrant set of markets for capitalism. Its thirst for information technology, expertise, and all kinds of infrastructure is self-reinforcing. Then, last, the cultural circuit can be seen as a means of vacuuming up all those knowledges which have evaded capitalism until now: for example, knowledges which are transmitted through gossip and small talk which often prove surprisingly important are able to be captured and made into opportunities for profit via artefacts like new kinds of office space and tightly knit teams.

Another way of interpreting the rise of this cultural circuit is as the latest permutation of a knowledge economy which has been growing since at least the latter part of the eighteenth century (Mokyr, 2001). In particular, Mokyr (2001) identifies the main boost to early industrialization as arising out of the conglomeration of a vast array of social networks which conveyed not just theoretical or what he calls propositional knowledge but also all manner of ‘useful knowledge’ of practice and technique, what he calls prescriptive knowledge. The combination of these networks and various technological advances (in transport, metrology, visualization, and the like) radically reduced costs of access to information, most especially to ‘how to’ prescriptive knowledge, producing a ‘knowledge revolution’. What the cultural circuit represents is the latest phase of this process, the dissemination of what had hitherto been high-flying management theories on a mass scale in the guise of all manner of small-scale ‘how to’ practices through a new conglomeration of social networks, in a mass sharing of management expertise (e.g. Ackerman et al., 2003). A good proportion of these management theories were directly or indirectly concerned with creativity and innovation, and one way of looking at the knowledge revolution inspired by the cultural circuit of capital is as the routinization of innovation, or even the bureaucratization of innovation, as what had been exceptional practices carried out by only a few firms or consultancies (such as project organization) became routine means of attempting to manage change fruitfully, organize continuous innovation, and, in general, raise productivity.⁷ It is, of course, debatable whether any of these goals were actually reached but, in a sense, it is also irrelevant: these practices had become a key part of the everyday life of so many firms that they had sunk...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Adventures of Capitalism
• Part I The Cultural Circuit of Capitalism
• Part II The New Economy
• Bibliography
• Index