Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
Invites you to CSSS Colloquium
on
Affective economies and the atmospheric politics of lively capital
by
Maan Barua
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
September 26, 2019 (Thursday), 11am
CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the affective economies of lively capital. Its central argument is that nonhuman life itself has become a locus of accumulation, marked by an atmospheric politics of capital: the incorporation of entire lifeworlds into regimes of generating value and an intensification of relations between life and productivity. Focusing on the Giant panda – a spectacular "charismatic" icon raising millions of dollars globally – the paper first examines junctures at which their alluring affects emerge and are manipulated to produce value. Turning to panda lifeworlds in zoos, it then shows how such value production is contingent upon affective labours nonhumans perform in captivity. Nonhuman labour, as a component of atmospheric politics, enables understanding how lively capital is produced and reproduced, a theme interrogated through a critical analysis of the commercial global circulation of pandas. The paper develops the concept of atmospheric politics – an intervention in an animal’s milieu and its affective intensities – as a means for analyzing the dynamics of lively capital. Atmospheric politics retrieves a critical political economy obscured by the concept of nonhuman charisma, and restages biopower as an apparatus and political technology of capital.
Bio : Maan is a cultural and environmental geographer whose work focuses on the spaces, economies and politics of the living and material world. Conceptually, this work brings posthumanist thought into conversation with strands of critical political economy to interrogate questions about nature, culture and capital. Themes of research include urban ecology, more-than-human geographies, biodiversity conservation and the politics of lively capital. Maan joined the University of Cambridge as a University Lecturer in Human Geography in 2018. Prior to that he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he also read for a DPhil in Geography. Maan is currently working on capital and metabolic life, as part of his wider European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant on Urban Ecologies.