The authors, building on prior collaborative experiments, decided to engage in a practice of object exchange: for a given period of time, we gave up and gave over, problematic objects from field inquiry – a field inquiry about the political and affective economy and relations between Romanian pimps and sex workers, and a field inquiry into assisted suicide in Switzerland. We use the term “object” in John Dewey’s sense of worked over subject matter from inquiry.
Creating an environment in which objects from field inquiry could be handed over to, and held by, another person, afforded moments of both relief and disquiet in our collaborative space, as well as new analytic openings and new relationships to our objects and inquiries. In the text we describe what this practice of selecting and sending, holding, and receiving objects consisted in. The protocol that we engaged in is not a method, but rather a simple form (exchange) and a mode (holding) for a practice of thinking. The result of such exchange, we think, is clarification of the relation between objects and objectives in inquiry, for the inquirer.