ABSTRACT

After Discourse is an interdisciplinary response to the recent trend away from linguistic and textual approaches and towards things and their affects.

The new millennium brought about serious changes to the intellectual landscape. Favoured approaches associated with the linguistic and the textual turn lost some of their currency, and were followed by a new curiosity and concern for things and their natures. Gathering contributions from archaeology, heritage studies, history, geography, literature and philosophy, After Discourse offers a range of reflections on what things are, how we become affected by them, and the ethical concerns they give rise to. Through a varied constellation of case studies, it explores ways of dealing with matters which fall outside, become othered from, or simply cannot be grasped through perspectives derived solely from language and discourse.

After Discourse provides challenging new perspectives for scholars and students interested in other-than-textual encounters between people and the objects with which we share the world.

chapter 1|17 pages

After discourse

An introduction

part I|4 pages

Things: Writing, nearing, knowing

chapter 3|17 pages

Wild things

chapter 4|13 pages

In the presence of things

chapter 6|24 pages

On the face of things

Surficial encounters with the memory of architecture

part II|3 pages

Affects: Sensing things

chapter 7|16 pages

The view from somewhere

Liquid, geologic, and queer bodies

chapter 8|16 pages

Stranded stones and settled species

Affect and effects of ballast

chapter 9|17 pages

Out of the day, time and life

Phenomenology and cavescapes

chapter 10|25 pages

Ruins of ruins

The aura of archaeological remains

chapter 11|17 pages

What remains?

On material nostalgia

part III|2 pages

Ethics: Caring for things

chapter 12|12 pages

Touching tactfully

The impossible community

chapter 13|13 pages

Foundered

Other objects and the ethics of indifference

chapter 14|25 pages

Releasing the visual archive

On the ethics of destruction