After Discourse

Things, Affects, Ethics

Bjørnar Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, Þóra Pétursdóttir, Bjørnar Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, Þóra Pétursdóttir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429576096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

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.

1

After discourse

An introduction

Bjørnar J. OlsenMats BurströmCaitlin DeSilveyÞóra Pétursdóttir

Over the last half century, notions of posteriority and subsequence (most often expressed as ‘post’ and ‘after’) have conspicuously made their way into the academic nomenclature. The prefix ‘post’ has become especially prominent as a conceptual game-changer, radically redefining the well-established meanings of intellectual and political projects such as structuralism, processualism, modernism, colonialism, and humanism. Not surprisingly, one may add, as it epitomizes well the postmodern Zeitgeist, signifying ruptures, ends, and, more generally, a restless striving for difference and distance. The preposition ‘after’ cannot boast a similar popularity, and is mainly used more specifically for framing issues and debates (e.g. ‘after history,’ ‘after culture,’ ‘after interpretation,’ ‘after nature,’ etc.). This also relates to the subtle, but still effective, connotative difference between the two terms. Despite often considered semantically identical, a significant distinction emerges from the way these prepositions are used. The prefix ‘post’ often implies a state of opposition and, thus, inevitably, definition through negation. The notion of ‘after,’ on the other hand, is used in a less binary sense, and retains more of its purely chronological signification – as being subsequent to, representing an aftermath and, perhaps, a pause.

This distinction should be kept in mind when considering the title of this book. The label After Discourse originally named a research group at the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo (2016/17),¹ which gathered scholars from history, heritage studies, cultural geography, anthropology, and archaeology. It was itself an offspring of a larger research project, Object Matters, and this book is a combined outcome of these two closely affiliated research initiatives, focusing on things, heritage, and the archaeology of the recent past. Titles are crucial for scholarly branding and it is easy to read into these project names an opposition between language and things, and to assume that we are presenting ‘things’ as a kind of theoretical ‘post’ to text and language. This, however, is not the case, nor is the related assumption that we can claim to be entering a post-discursive phase. What After Discourse does refer to, and what it was intended to designate, is a concern with what happens after and in the wake of the heyday of linguistic and textual approaches, which came to significantly alter the ways things, heritage, and archaeology are understood.

During the last three decades of the 20th century, the works of poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida laid the foundation for what became known as the linguistic or textual turn.² The immense impact of this turn was based on the idea of the ‘limitless text,’ by which the meaning-constitutive qualities of the text (e.g. its multivocality, inter-textuality, and ‘play of difference’) was considered equally relevant for understanding non-discursive phenomena, including actions, space, landscapes, and things (e.g. Ricoeur 1973; Derrida 1978; Sturrock 1979; Tilley 1990; Olsen 2006). Nevertheless, when this turn faded and lost impact during the 1990s and early 2000s, it was probably due to precisely the realization of the limits of the text, especially as scholars started to redirect their attention to reality as tangibly experienced and manifested. However, rather than seeing this as a dismissal of the insights created by the textual turn, it is better understood as a new concern for that which fell outside, became othered, or simply could not be grasped through perspectives derived from language and writing alone (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1After discourse: collapsed hospital archive, Teriberka, Murmansk Oblast, Russia. Photo: Bjørnar J. Olsen

After Discourse, thus, refers to the new intellectual landscape that opened up in the aftermath of the textual turn and which involved a new curiosity and concern for things and natures, including what these beings are in their own constituency. In his 2009 paper on the future of history, Frank Trentmann captures well what was flourishing in this aftermath:

Things are back. After the turn to discourse and signs in the late twentieth century, there is a new fascination with the material stuff of life. Things have recaptured our imagination, from Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993), biographies of objects, and exhibitions in the Fifth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, ‘When Things Cast No Shadow’ (2008), all the way to public debates about the transformation of human flesh and mind in an age of nanotechnology, cloning, and cyborgs.

(Trentmann 2009, p. 283)

He proceeds by claiming the already radical outcome of this return: ‘Like words in the postmodern 1980s, things today are shaking our fundamental understandings of subjectivity, agency, emotions, and the relations between humans and nonhumans’ (ibid, p. 284).

Hence, for the last couple of decades, archaeology and heritage studies, and the humanities and social sciences at large, have been increasingly affected by what variously has been labelled the ‘material turn’ the ‘turn to things,’ or the ‘ontological turn.’ What initially seemed to be a fringe movement, confined primarily to science and technology studies, has taken the form of what might be characterized as an extensive paradigm shift, involving a radical rethinking of what things and natures are, and how we are affected by and relate to the non-human world. Prominent representatives of this turn include Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory, Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialism,’ Timothy Morton’s ‘new ecology,’ Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ and the object-oriented ontology/philosophy proposed by Ian Bogost, Levy Bryant, and Graham Harman. Though indeed a varied congregation of ideas, these approaches share a preoccupation with critiquing the anthropocentric constraints of modern thinking and, consequently, promote perspectives that reintroduce things and natures as co-producers and compatriots of the world. Crucial to this, moreover, has been the growing recognition of non-human agency and the calls for less hierarchical ontologies, tellingly labelled as ‘flat,’ ‘object-oriented,’ or ‘multiple.’ What furthermore characterizes this shift is not only the new significance assigned to things, natures, and human–non-human relations, but also that relations of interest are extended beyond those involving humans, to include interaction between other actors, such as plastic and sea currents, ruins and kittiwakes, snow geese, and toxic water.

A new scholarly engagement with the material world has also raised issues regarding how this involvement is experienced and brought to knowledge. This draws attention to the difference between emphasizing the world as primarily intellectually mediated – that is as something consciously “read” or interpreted - versus acknowledging the world as also bodily experienced and known through our tactile and lived engagement with it. The increased attention to the existential and aesthetic dimension of experience also brought a new concern for the ineffable impacts of things – the way they involuntarily affect us, and inflect the way we comprehend and engage with reality. The empowerment of the material world has also questioned the common modern understanding of things and natures as beings at our disposal, valued primarily for their use-value: that is, for what they have to offer us and our well-being. Consequently, yet another outcome has been a concern for ethics, and reflection on how an extension of agency to the non-human world may challenge and extend conventional ethical frameworks.

In tandem with Object Matters, After Discourse may be described as a research initiative aimed at scrutinizing the consequences of the material turn for traditionally thing-oriented disciplines – and, vice versa, an exploration of how the knowledge and skill acquired in these disciplines may advance a critical and more empirically-grounded awareness of things in the humanities and social sciences. While acknowledging and drawing on the profound contributions to thing theory made in philosophy, science, and technology studies and other fields, a grounding assertion of our shared work was a renewed trust in the material itself. We argue that a successful turn to things cannot be accomplished through theoretical and discursive reconfigurations alone, but must also be grounded in the tactile experiences that emerge from direct engagements with things – including broken and stranded things (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2Turning to things tactilely: moving through an abandoned research station in Dalnyie Zelentsy, Murmansk Oblast, Russia. Photo: Bjørnar J. Olsen

This book presents some outcomes of these research efforts. It offers a range of reflections on things, what they are, how we become affected by them, and the ethical concerns they give rise to. Combining theoretical mediations and concrete field studies, it focuses on three main themes:

•what things are; i.e., the ontology of things, and how their being impinges on what can be known and said about them

•what things do; i.e., how their presence involuntarily and ineffably affects us, and influences the way we comprehend and sense the world

•what things ask of us; i.e., how things draw us into relations of care, and challenge conventional ethical frameworks with their unintended afterlives

In this introduction we shall briefly provide a background to the book and research themes covered. However, rather than introducing and summarizing the chapters that follow, which is catered for in the thematic introductions, the current introduction should be read more as an independent contribution to the book. It contains the editors’ reflections on the themes as these have developed through research and numerous discussions in our projects, and thus also covers perspectives that extend beyond and hopefully bridge the scope of the individual chapters. However, it is not an attempt to bring them together in any overall whole – the contributions are, fortunately, all too unruly for such handling.

Turning to things

As mentioned, an initial focus of the After Discourse project was investigation of how theories and ideas associated with the material turn were affecting scholarship in disciplines traditionally devoted to things, especially archaeology and heritage studies. While their reception indeed is varied, there is no doubt that the ideas generated by the material turn have triggered theoretical and metaphysical reassessment, stirring new debates about thing agency, human–non-human relations, representation, interpretation, and affects. Still, talking about a material turn, or a turn to things, in this context may raise some reasonable concerns and suspicions. While identifying such a turn makes perfect sense in most social sciences, where things (with some notable exceptions) were largely ignored in much 20th century research, such a turn would appear to be utterly redundant for the disciplines of concern here. Why, for example, should archaeology, the discipline of things par excellence, be in any need of orienting itself towards what for nearly two centuries has consistently constituted its disciplinary foundation?

This seeming paradox, however, highlights what may be diagnosed as an unresolved tension within archaeology and the fields of material culture studies more generally. Despite the fact that archaeology has consistently and faithfully devoted itself to things, its engagement with the material record has been somewhat Janus-faced, leaving a genuine material orientation somewhat overshadowed by an anthropocentric metaphysics and a pretext of the social/human a priori. As tellingly heralded in popular disciplinary slogans, such as that archaeology is about ‘digging up people, not things’ (Wheeler 1954), or about reaching the ‘Indian behind the artefact’ (Braidwood 1958), this metaphysics did not welcome any sincere understanding of things as part of the human past, or of the subjects urged for. It rather assigned them an epiphenomenal and derivative status as more or less reliable sources through which humanity might be accessed. The same pretext applied to culture and societies, which were largely conceived of as assemblages of people held together by social and cultural relations that were equally non-materially understood. Yet another outcome was that meaning was seen as primarily humanly derived, leaving things, monuments, and landscape mostly drained of significance prior to their cultural construction or social embodiment.

Given this predominant metaphysics, the new materialist approaches in many ways came to represent a welcome theoretical emancipation. Archaeologists and others took notice of Latour’s message that people do not occupy positions behind things (through which they may be accessed), but actually become human by living with and mixing with things. Things and natures are not extra to society, but are part of the very fabric of intimate relations that link and associate people and non-humans in heterogenous collectives. Humans and things, in short, should no longer be defined by oppositions, dualities or negativities, but by their relations, collaboration, and coexistence (Latour 1993, 2005).

One perhaps less anticipated and acknowledged outcome of this exchange with the new materialism, however, was that it also helped reveal the difference grounding the archaeological project, herein archaeology’s other and uncompromised material side, the doing of archaeology. In its low-key empirical version, archaeology is a practice driven by a consistent devotio...