Transpacific Affective Circuits: Mapping Speculative Valuation of Life, Afterlife, and No-Life (RPA Pilot/ Seed Project)

This project explores transpacific capitalistic exchanges that create and exploit people’s affective attachments for profit making, including China’s burgeoning pet industry, cross-border jadeite trade in Myanmar, Thailand’s foreigner-serving intro vivo fertilization (IVF) business, and entrepreneurial initiatives by transnational internet influencers. Unlike traditional business models that produce commodities to satisfy concrete needs and generate profits, these transactional relationships are driven by affect affinities and emotive responses, refueling people’s unending quest for qualitative “surplus value” of life. These transactional relationships are engineered through a mechanism that I call “speculative mattering”—a naturalcultural process that disarticulates and rearticulates boundaries between metabolic and biomediated bodies, human and non-human creatures, organic and inorganic beings to foster new patterns of desiring for a better and different life to bolster capital’s pursuit of profit. By cultivating aspirational desires and translating them into enduring attachments to specific objects, services, people, or relationships, “speculative mattering” epitomizes the defining feature of financialization, a mechanism that relies on capital’s profiteering circulation rather than the production of tangible goods to open up lucrative opportunities. Sustained by fluxes of desires, this speculative mechanism minimizes capital’s direct contact with laborers, rendering it increasingly difficult to trace its exploitative reproductive trajectory. This project draws upon feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, affect theory, media and cultural studies, cultural anthropology, posthumanism, and new materialism to discern various speculative practices and deepen our understanding of the affective nature of capitalistic economies in the age of global neoliberalism. Through engagement with subjects often overlooked in this devastating process—such as Myanmarese jadeite miners, companion animals offering affective labor, and workers making items on demand from across the internet—this project also unravels how these practices give rise to new ethno-racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed platforms of subjugation to identify means of intervention.