What’s up with methodology? Faults, experimentations, and affective displacements in the reinventions of the common

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we discuss and elaborate on some of the results obtained in the collective project ‘Social Movements and Construction of the Common in Colombia Today’, particularly their methodological dimension. First of all we argue that the common is always an unfinished process that takes place in the work with and at the borders/boundaries that delimit and cut across cultural, economic, and social worlds and their conflictive interactions. Therefore, we show that processes of construction of the common involve opening up spacings, gaps, intervals, fractures, and reconfigurations in the languages, practices, and subjectivities established in communities of sense, as well as silent, sometimes imperceptible displacements in the less definable affects that circulate and have taken root in them. We claim that certain methodological operations become fundamental, especially a work of composition - with and at the borders/boundaries - displayed in processes assumed to be experimental, as well as forms of translation among different languages and experiences that tend to evince an irreducible yet tractable conflict.