Speculative mattering: Affect and the stone that becomes valuable in deep time

Drawing upon the critical scholarship on affect, this chapter proposes a framework that I call “speculative mattering” to expound how value is generated out of jadeite, a geologically formed item unique in Myanmar that does not acquire as much value from production as from the affective attachments it generates and retains with human beings. Rather than take the binaristic framework of organic and inorganic, natural and cultural as a departure point, I take a feminist approach and investigate human-stone entanglement as a naturecultural event replete with emergent profiteering potentialities. My analysis engages a cluster of practices that disassemble and reassemble boundaries of human and non-human, living and non-living, and unravels how these practices foster new potentialities and turn them into affective attachments through gender to facilitate capital’s profit-making circulation. I call these practices “speculative mattering.” Focusing on the case study of transnational jadeite trade as an example, this chapter delineates how speculative mattering works across nation-state borders and reorders gender difference as a register of affective tethering to fuel capital’s profit-making.