ABSTRACT
Of course, this kind of magic is hardly new: it derives from a long and involved economic-cum-cultural history of the construction of passionate economic bodies. To begin with, there is the business of constructing knowledge of consumption, starting with the mundanities of shop signs and new kinds of shop layout, moving on through the early history of the cultivation of a consumer consciousness (as in fledgling advertisements and trade cards) and ending up with the installation of mass advertising and comprehensive consumer databases. Threaded through all these means of producing commerce are corresponding forms of conduct and subjectivity which give rise to various highly complex forms of imagination, forms which are sometimes converted into new kinds of consumer or organization or market but which oftentimes remain at the level of dreams or longings or desires, haunting the undergrowth of capitalism and seeding its unconscious.
