Contact,Complicity,Conspiracy: Affective Communities and Economies of Affect in Naples

Abstract

This paper tracks how difficult material conditions are lived on the level of affect among ordinary underemployed families engaged in the locally named practice “the art of making do” in the contact zone where the informal and illicit economies meet. This zone is where tens of thousands of ordinary underemployed Neapolitans and the camorra, Naples' powerful and diffuse organized crime networks participate in a shared, albeit volatile, affective community. Affect is a pre-personal experience of intensity, the ability to affect or be affected. Affective community in Naples is less an identity or organization than it is a synergy, event or practice. It is experienced as a blend of fear, recognition and tolerance through the phenomena of contact, complicity and conspiracy.