Re: affordances

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Mon, 1 Apr 1996 00:12:49 -0600

Jay, I like your whole posting, but I'm particularly interested in the
joint, emergent, and holistic properties of these affordances that you're
pointing to. Bogen noted something like this when he talked about the way
the hammer becomes hammer in a particular world, a site full of nails,
plywood boards, people with projects of construction, etc. One of the
things I found interesting about the novice hammerers at this Habitat site
was that they were so novice (one apparently had never swung a hammer
before), that they were working with a "trainer", and that they were
hammering plywood boards for a tool shed (as opposed to a bedroom wall).

I've also been thinking about hammers lately as part of thinking about the
nature of tool-mediated activity, about the ways that hammers can become
other things (not only weapons, but also history museum displays or
post-modern works of art), and about how hammers are situated in histories
of technology. I wonder, for instance, if cultures that have relied on
adobe construction developed hammer-like implements. I've also wondered if
we lived in a world of harder surfaces if hammers would have developed as
collective tools, like battering rams and the two-person saw.

>Taking affordance as indeed relational, and so 'systemic' (I
>would say here 'emergent', i.e. a property at the level of the
>joint system, which is what I take MikeC to have meant), we have
>to allow for the reconformation of the potential dynamics of a
>whole system (e.g. organism-material artifact-surround) as an
>ecosocial microsystem (i.e. a system at once semiotically
>mediated and materially embodied). This is not just the typical
>'semiotic doubling' of the imagined or hypothetical overlaid on
>the perceptually construed, but something more interesting.
>
>The wood piece with the metal fitting _becomes_ emergently a
>'hammer' only in the act/process/practice of hammering (the
>Bogen-Heidegger example), and 'hammering' is a socially
>constructed activity, one that exists and has its dynamic
>potential (what can happen in it) by virtue of what it _means_ to
>people, as well as by virtue of what is materially possible
>in/through it. Not only can one not 'hammer-nails' without nails
>as well as hammer, but it might never occur to you, given the
>objects in themselves, to entrain them, and yourself, into the
>'hammering nails' practice we are used to. The hammer does not
>have the affordance of participating in 'hammering nails' outside
>of a whole eco-social-semiotic (i.e. cultural-material) system
>(both at the minimal-scale and community-scale levels) or dynamic
>practice, in which people use the hammer for this purpose (in a
>particular way that is, and counts as, 'hammering nails').

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign