agency

All research aims to find, challenge, investigate or push limits within a given field of knowledge. But what happens if, rather than viewing limits as inherent premises or side-effects of a research process, one activates them as tools? This chapter exemplifies a conceptual experiment with the methodological affordances of limits, through the classical Spinozian approach to affect. After introducing some relationships between limits and affects, it explores how one may actively use these types of affective occurrences within the specifics of an ethnography of Danish gangs.

Many formulations of economy, even those that substantially challenge the narrow confines of market-centered economism, tend to assume a discrete human subject at the center of the action. Whether maximizing, optimizing, making ethical decisions, or just “getting by,” rational or quasi-rational humans enact the economy through their work of making a living—laboring, producing, transacting, saving, investing, and negotiating various forms of care and access. Recent developments in posthumanist and radical ecological thought, however, challenge this image.