Encounters Materialities Confrontations, Archaeologies of Social Space and Interaction
For reading a book, Please sign in to your account.
loginThe social encounter is a particular sort of concept, focusing on confusion, tension, trauma, and possibly social change that may emerge in contact with people and things. A social encounter is, however, not only about negotiation or contemplating existence, but is rather about what happens when people interact actively, when they involve themselves with people and materialities, when they move around, fetch things, use things, leave things etc. To speak about mutual negotiation in such situations is not always constructive. As Slavoj Žižek puts it: “.../the/ encounter cannot be reduced to symbolic exchange: what resonates in it, over and above the symbolic exchange, is the echo of a traumatic impact. While dialogues are commonplace, encounters are rare” (2004:xi).
