Performing cultures in the new economy

This paper provides a provisional diagram of modem capitalist business. I a rgue that modem business managers are under greater and greater pressures o f time. They are expected to work to sterner, more extensive, and shorter-t erm measures of performance, and they must cope with a general speed-up in the conduct of business. These pressures are, in rum, forcing managers to b e more innovative. In this paper, I argue that these imperatives are linked through attempts to interpellate "fast" managerial subjects who are able t o take the strain of permanent high performance. These subjects are being p roduced through three types of active and performative space which, taken t ogether, constitute a new geographical machine, able to make new qualities and quantities visible and therefore available to be worked upon. I conside r each of these spaces in turn: new spaces of visualization, represented he re by the business magazine Fast Company; new spaces of embodiment, represe nted here by the use of performative ideas and techniques from the humaniti es; and new spaces of circulation, represented here by the phenomenon of in creasingly mobile means of management. I conclude by arguing that these so- far hesitant and tentative spatialities may herald a new phase of "caring i mperialism."