AbstractsAnthropology

“Heartbreak and Precipitation” confronts an affective position that in its articulation and representation defeats and defines the limits of its possibility. Performing a theoretical ethnographic position, voice, and imagination, the work/labour of the project is trying to navigate itself successfully (ethically) through the affective, class, and aesthetic registers it crosses in the cities its finds itself in as it makes sense of them as spaces and has them come to be as objects of knowledge. As cartographic method, it tries to find itself from the inside by marking out a range of texts – from Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project”, Marx’s “Capital”, to C. W. Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” – these knotted up with fields of artifacts such as Red Wing boots, Dial liquid hand soap, non-dairy coffee creamer, and a roomful of palm trees; together a speculative mapping of affective territories with well contained limits of potential and possibility.