Performing Cultures in the New Economy

Abstract

This paper provides a provisional diagram of modern capitalist business. I argue that modern business managers are under greater and greater pressures of time. They are expected to work to sterner, more extensive, and shorter-term measures of performance, and they must cope with a general speed-up in the conduct of business. These pressures are, in turn, forcing managers to be more innovative. In this paper, I argue that these imperatives are linked through attempts to interpellate ‘fast’ managerial subjects who are able to take the strain of permanent high performance. These subjects are being produced through three types of active and performative space which, taken together, constitute a new geographical machine, able to make new qualities and quantities visible and therefore available to be worked upon. I consider each of these spaces in turn: new spaces of visualization, represented here by the business magazine Fast Company; new spaces of embodiment, represented here by the use of performative ideas and techniques from the humanities; and new spaces of circulation, represented here by the phenomenon of increasingly mobile means of management. I conclude by arguing that these so-far hesitant and tentative spatialities may herald a new phase of ‘caring imperialism.’