CfP AAG 2019: The ‘work’ of nature – Towards a political economy of lively capital

Session organisers:

James Palmer, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol ([log in to unmask])

Marion Ernwein, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford ([log in to unmask])

Maan Barua, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge ([log in to unmask])

Questions regarding the roles played by non-human life within value production, commodification and accumulation have emerged as important concerns within critical scholarship on capitalism. Across a range of contexts, animals and plants—whether as individuals, groups, or multi-species assemblages—are increasingly being reappraised as active constituents of the economic, and not merely as passive or inert ‘inputs’ to capitalist processes (Braun, 2008). This is indexed by contributions examining the role of non-human growth in contributing to the rejuvenation of human labour power (Perkins, 2007), of the bearings animate potentials have on processes of commodification (Collard and Dempsey, 2013), and of the ‘non-human labour’ of charismatic non-human species within regimes of spectacular accumulation (Barua, 2017, Battistoni 2017). Collectively, this scholarship unsettles many of the taken-for-granted categories of conventional political economic analysis, including (1) labour, (2) the distinction between production and reproduction, (3) the relationships between intelligence, creativity and visceral bodily capacities in realising use-, exchange- ‘encounter’- (Haraway, 2008), or indeed surplus-value (Walker 2017), and (4) the distinctions between constant and variable capital (Wadiwel 2018).

Against this backdrop, this session aims to examine the ways in which capitalist production processes presuppose, apprehend and ultimately seek to extract value from non-human ‘vital forces’ and capacities, whether directly or via their imitation (e.g. ‘biomimicry’). Moving beyond post-humanist interpretations of Marx’s labour theory of value (Haraway, 2008), and debates on whether this is tenable (Kallis and Swyngedouw 2017), we invite contributions from papers which ask how the more careful consideration of non-human ‘vital forces’ in capitalism might contribute to the reorientation and indeed reinvigoration of both scholarly critique and political resistance to capitalist excess.

  1. How is ‘nature’ preconceived, mapped and put to work by capital in different contexts? What knowledges are used to identify and isolate non-human capacities and vital forces, put them to work, and/or to imitate or enhance them? What roles do the life sciences play in ‘naturalising work’?
  2. How has non-human liveliness itself been generative or constitutive of particular modalities of capitalist accumulation in ways that go beyond mere resistance or recalcitrance? For instance, how might we examine the ways in which animals, plants, or other forms of non-human life shape and reconfigure existing capitalist industries, from health and medicine, through energy and agriculture, to architecture and urbanism?
  3. What ideological or moral work is performed by claims about the ‘work’ nature can do, and its importance to particular kinds of industries? What bearings does the ‘work’ of nature, both discursively and practically, have on human work and labour relations?
  4. Conversely, how do capitalist productions of nature—in material and semiotic forms—generate asymmetries in which forms of life are allowed to flourish and which lose out? How does this enable us to tell different stories of capitalist bio- and anatomo-politics than those already on record in contemporary geographical work?
  5. What might a different analytical starting point, such as those above, means for conventional understandings of the political economic categories with which we analyse ‘the economic’? We welcome papers which engage which these questions across any empirical field or geographical context.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to the three session co-organisers—James Palmer ([log in to unmask]), Marion Ernwein ([log in to unmask]) and Maan Barua ([log in to unmask])—by Monday October 22nd.

Citations

Barua, M. 2017. ‘Nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation: the geographies of a lively commodity.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42: 274–288.

Battistoni, A. (2017) Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor. Political Theory, 45, 5-31.

Braun, B. 2008. ‘Environmental Issues: Inventive Life.’ Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 667¬–679.

Collard, R-C. and Dempsey, J. 2013. ‘Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities.’ Environment and Planning A 45: 2682–2699.

Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Kallis, G. & E. Swyngedouw (2017) Do Bees Produce Value? A Conversation Between an Ecological Economist and a Marxist Geographer. Capitalism Nature Socialism, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2017.1315830.

Perkins, H. 2007. ‘Ecologies of actor-networks and (non)social labour within the urban political economies of nature.’ Geoforum 38: 1152-1162.

Wadiwel, D. (2018) Chicken Harvesting Machine: Animal Labor, Resistance, and the Time of Production. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 527-549.

Walker, R. (2017) Value and Nature: Rethinking Capitalist Exploitation and Expansion. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 28, 53-61.


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