Affective economies, pandas, and the atmospheric politics of lively capital
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Authors
Publication Date
2020-09-01Journal Title
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
ISSN
0020-2754
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
Volume
45
Issue
3
Pages
678-692
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Barua, M. (2020). Affective economies, pandas, and the atmospheric politics of lively capital. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (3), 678-692. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12361
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 intensification of relations between life and productivity by incorporating entire lifeworlds into regimes of generating value. Focusing on the Giant panda – a spectacular icon raising millions of dollars globally – the paper first examines junctures at which their charismatic 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.
Sponsorship
Parts of the research conducted for this paper was enabled by a British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (Award No. pf140038).
Embargo Lift Date
2021-11-27
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12361
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/299297
Rights
All rights reserved