Making Air Breathable: Fictitious Assets and Forms of Consciousness in 21st Century Capitalism

My dissertation project, Making Air Breathable, is an ethnography of 21^st-century capitalism grounded in the unbreathable atmosphere of neoliberal India. Thirty-five out of the fifty most polluted cities in the world are in India, making it one of the most polluted ecologies on the planet. Over the last decade, the country’s polluted atmosphere has become a site for national-level policy interventions directed towards the creation of green energy and ‘clean’ capital markets. These efforts include expanded support for startups, large-scale solar energy corporations, and R&D facilities working on air pollution monitoring and mitigation technologies. In my dissertation, I examine this interconnected ensemble of technologies, industries and financial instruments, which I theorize as, “the clean-air tech industrial complex,” arguing that it constitutes new logics of capitalist ecology-making and future-making.

 Through my ethnography of the clean-air tech industrial complex, I show that techno-entrepreneurs, atmospheric scientists, rentier capitalists, and industrial workers engage in projects of producing breathable air that create new conceptions of economic personhood, futurity, and ecology. I foreground that clean air is distinct from both a traditional commodity and a conventional asset. Unlike a commodity, breathable air is not and cannot be produced in a factory through human labor for the purpose of being sold in the market; unlike an asset, it also cannot be enclosed as a private property which can then be directly leased for temporary periods of access against a monetary rent. Yet, clean air becomes a key source of value-extraction in neoliberal India.

My project argues that this is made possible through reconstitution of air as, what I call, a fictitious asset: an entity that, while not being a tangible or intangible asset, is nonetheless incorporated into circuits of capital extraction as though it could be owned, leased, and sold for generating rent-like benefits. Air pollution too transforms in this process from a particular historical event of the planetary atmosphere, in the situated reality of neoliberal India, to an engineerable resource that provides an opportunity to examine how the capitalist mode of production forges itself in the 21^st century. My project foregrounds that clean-air tech does not produce a breathable atmosphere in India, but it does the breathwork for capitalism as it attempts to re-implant and dis-embed itself from nature.

My research challenges social theoretical and anthropological accounts that presuppose that capitalism operates primarily through processes of commodification and profit-formation. Instead, I show that clean-air tech’s production in India is dominated by processes of assetiziation and rent-extraction. This has transformative consequences for understanding the emergent social ontology of capitalism in conditions of ecological degradation, as these very conditions become the means for appropriating incomes of people just so they can breathe. In doing so, my project builds on and contributes to the fields of economic anthropology, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and social theories of capitalism. It intervenes in interdisciplinary debates on the forms of revenue generation in capitalism, the geopolitics of expert knowledge production, and the historical transformation of natural resource enclosures in postcolonial contexts which, I argue, are critical to examining contemporary ecology-making and ecology-destroying projects.