“Throwing a Bunch of Banana Peels All over Chicago” - on the Relationship of Affective Artifacts in Outrageous Yippie Tactics of Moving Protest from a Practice-Theoretical Perspective.

The intended talk highlights the question, how we can investigate the relationship between artifacts and emotions by introducing an ongoing research project on the relationship of affective discourses and practices of moving protest forms and will present first findings related to the affective dimension of artifacts. From the initial assumption, that not only terrorist destruction of restaurants, discos and airports seem to be activating the emotional carrier of artifacts but also the symbolic emergence of artifacts during different formations of protest cause emotions, enlarge protest and initiate social change, the unfinished discussion of the affective and respective emotion in sociological theory will be addressed. I argue for an active and positive connotation of the decentering of the subject, like in an discourse-analytically informed sociology of practice which borrows ontologically from Massumi, whose concept of the affective applies empirically in the tradition of Grossberg and Clough. That will be tested against a sociology of protest by borrowing from Stäheli’s concept of the collective. The Chicago Festival of Life 1968 gives the example how to do a practice-theoretical sequential filmanalysis with the methodological focus on artefacts and their careers from unimpressive to impassioning elements of protest practice. Transformations often occur when conflicting artefacts, with deviating symbolic content, are integrated into practices and transform the social sense or the logic of practice. With the recommended research design one needn’t with the subject in focus throw the affect and subsequently the emotion as such overboard as well, but could rather implement the affective turn in a way that it refers to the discontinuity of the subject and conceives physicalness and materiality in general as constituting moments of sociality.