Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) Read Online Free PDF

against the soul-deadening ethos of the salaryman. His dream of expanding his hip-hop empire into China can be put into the context of how a late starter such as Taiwan can see itself as more progressive than the mainland in terms of pop-cultural temporalities of the latest thing. The production of culture is where the future of accumulation lies for an economy hollowed out by the flight of industrial jobs to the very place where he plans to build his empire. At the same time, in Hsu’s account of the efforts of New Kujiang planners to create a dreamscape that evokes other places (for example, the streets of Austria) to attract Chinese tourism as a strategy of accumulation, we see a triangulation of where precisely these subjects locate Taiwan in a global mapping of the hierarchy of places worth going to. As Hsu concludes, for these planners and consumers there is a “double distancing.” Both the mainland of China and the streets of Austria are brought into the visual field of New Kujiang as a way of situating it within a global frame. The world is both near and far at the same time.
    In Chapter Three , Trang X. Ta looks at urban space from the perspective of the weaker groups in Chinese society. In the heart of Beijing’s own “Silicon Valley,” where high rises gleam, the parents of a terminally ill child come from the countryside to engage unsuccessfully in the production of affects that will move people to donate money. However, in following the script of what makes a story moving, the family risks becoming misrecognized as merely a facsimile of tragedy rather than the real thing, enabling passersby to dismiss the disquiet that the family enacts on the street. This disquiet is the knowledge that China’s economic miracle is not bought without incalculable cost in the growing chasm between the country and the city. The fact that these desperate parents have no access to adequate health care for their son is a story that is utterly banal, but it is this very banality that is the most shocking thing of all. The failure to recognize what is truly shocking in their condition is what the author wants us to recognize. If this is a form of affective labor enacted by subjects disadvantaged from the biopolitical effects of the economic reforms, it is a failure in its inability to produce the desired affects in others. However, the ethnographer wishes to reanimate the potential of the disquiet implicit in the practice of these parents to move her readers to critical reflection. This suggests the possibility of scholarship itself as a form of affective labor from below that works at cross-purposes to logics of capital accumulation.
    Affective Economies
    Many of the chapters in this volume focus on the production of affects in the formation of new kinds of embodied labor and citizen subjects. Whereas
emotion
refers to a mental state,
affect
expresses “a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108). Hence, affective labor works to produce certain kinds of affect (that is, “service with a smile”), in which a focus on social skills becomes predominant. 12 In this respect, these chapters develop ethnographically the ways in which forms of affective production have been incorporated into the global capitalist economy as one of the “highest value-producing forms of labor” (Hardt 1999). The concept of “affective economies” provides a frame for tracking transformations of value that take place in the realm of affective production. Most of the chapters in this section of the volume focus on education and training in the formation of new labor subjectivities: “A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker adept at affective labor” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108). The workers trained to do affective labor are themselves the product of another form of affective labor, called training, that is intended to produce an alignment between their