ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores that things do not derive their ontology from either their physical materiality alone or solely from the meanings and values ascribed to them, and that any reflective causal explanation for how things work and their material effects will be of limited value in understanding processes of transformation and the multiple ways in which things acquire and manifest 'agentic capacities'. It addresses the limitations of a form of materialist essentialism, and also explores what Karen Barad calls the 'geometrical optics' of representationalism, in which things are never encountered on their own terms but always through the lens of a reflective, representational epistemology. The book considers the affective dimension of the monumental thing through two examples of monumental destruction. It argues that how the past is deployed is as much about the political present as it is about the historical past.
