Even before 'economic precarity' became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and materiality more generally. This shift is evident across disciplines, from the expanding field of 'critical economics, ' to the popularity of 'capitalism studies, ' the emergence of 'neomaterialism, ' and the revived interest in Frankfurt school thinkers and even Karl Marx himself, to the push back against the so-called 'linguistic turn' and Foucauldian analyses of power. Despite this renewed attention, the question remains: 'the economy' in what sense? The idea that capitalism is more than an economic system, and instead, as Marx first framed it, a 'definite mode of life' that shapes our relationships with others, our sense of ourselves and our capacities, practices, and actions in the material world, should be rather obvious. Yet efforts-whether through criticism or policy remedies-to redress the vast inequalities, inherent exploitation, reification and alienation, to say nothing of the manifold destructive effects of capitalism on the environment, typically proceed without grappling fully with the entwinement of the economic with the social and cultural, much less the political, ethical, ontological, and phenomenological. It seems, therefore, that we require new heuristics to comprehend capitalism broadly and deeply, to investigate and further define the work of capital on these multiple registers simultaneously. In this special issue of the Journal of Culture Research, we propose 'form of life' as a possible heuristic. Rather than replace one emphasis (e.g. the discursive) with another (e.g. the material), the concept of a 'form of life' presumes all facets of life are inherently interwoven, bypassing distinctions between discourse, bodies, language, and materiality. It thus enables scholars to incorporate the diverse aspects of life in their analysis, to investigate the effects of capitalism holistically and at a range of scales. While the contributions in this volume vary in their focus and align with different theoretical approaches and methodologies, all provide meditations on the scope, contours, and content of capitalism as a form of life. The concept 'form of life' comes from the German 'Lebensform. ' In the German language, there is another semantically similar word that conjures a rather different meaning, 'Lebensweise, ' often translated as a 'way of life' or a 'lifestyle. ' Unlike a lifestyle (Lebensweise), about which we presume we make purposeful choices, a 'form of life' (Lebensform), as Ludwig Wittgenstein clarifies, is part of 'natural history … which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes' (1968, p. 415). Hanna