'Presensing' the intensities of entrepreneuring: tracing relational affect in embodied research of art entrepreneurship

The role that the corporeal plays in organizing and moving social realities has become an increasingly hot topic in qualitative research over the past twenty years, informing theoretical and methodological debates in various fields such as human geography, cultural studies or feminist theory. Affect theory in particular is a stream of research that has been pushing to explore the visceral quality of social life. It has called for researchers to decenter the term “emotion” and instead investigate relational affect – how bodies are moved through the complex socio-material practices they are engaged in. In such a ‘more-than-representational’ research mode, ‘feeling the field’ obtains a new meaning. It requires the researcher to attune herself to various somatic forces shaping her research object and redirect her attention to how social action emerges within a field of bodily intensities. Many methodological challenges and questions are implied in such a form of affective research. While scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds have made important efforts to discuss these issues, there is still a lack of methodological approaches and empirical inquiries in the field of affect research. In my presentation, I contribute to this ongoing conversation by discussing how relational affect can be traced in ethnographic field material. Looking at field data/material which I have been collecting following the entrepreneurial project of two artists over the course of more than a year, I show that a researcher’s embodied attunement to the research object is crucial in order to sense, create, analyze and presence ‘intensive’ data. Furthermore, I illustrate how conceptual resources drawn from practice theory and ANT can help to trace and carve out the relational quality of those bodily intensities – uncovering how they are entangled in and at the same time shape the social field in which the artists’ entrepreneurial endeavor emerges and endures.