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').
[A small semantic aside. 'Hammering nails' is a single semanteme,
more specific in meaning than 'hammering' or 'nails', which have
broad meaning-potentials from their distribution of uses as words
across many contexts. Combining them into a 'phrasal verb' limits
that distribution and creates a narrower meaning potential, a
more specific meaning item, corresponding to a more specific
activity than just 'hammering'. This one doesn't happen to be
recognized as such in our linguistic folk theory, but others,
like 'playing piano' or 'getting drunk' make the point more
obvious by cases where one term's isolated range of use is much
broader, and in the last case, broad enough to count as more
'grammatical' than lexical, cf. 'be'.]
Now the extreme case of this, which Eugene evidently proposed to
Bill, has the semiotics 'overcome' the material ground of
affordance, as when a hammer gets used playfully as a horse, and
we discover/create its affordances for riding (a back), neighing
(a head), etc. This case may still be just irrealis imagination,
as the use of the hammer as a weapon (claw end first) may
foreground material affordances. In the middle somewhere might be
using the claw end for the opposite of hammering in nails:
pulling them out (where material affordance fits with semiotic
imagination of use, thanks to design, or technical evolution).
Overcoming can perhaps also be taken to include some of the
apparent reversals of material affordances in emergent systems-
of-practices (when water's usual affordance for softening and
dissolving solids is reversed to make forged metal harder and
stronger by quenching: steel hammer-heads; or when toxic
substances in small doses or synergistic combinations have
medicinal effects). Wholes are often much more than the sum of
their parts, and in activity-wholes, meaning is an aspect of both
the material parts and their relations -- an aspect that
determines how we configure wholes, and therefore what
'affordances' of the parts may emerge.
JAY.
PS. As Bill Penuel suggested in response to Rogers Hall, semiotic
representations, genres, calculational methods, etc. also do not
have inherent affordances; rather these emerge in the activity,
including the meanings of the activity for participants. We must
be careful not to turn relations into inherent attributes by
assuming a uniformity of meaning-stances in activity. We can
share a tool, or a representational means, in the sense of joint
use, but without its having the same fully specific immediate or
extended meanings for us. This is in fact the basis for the
Latourian notion of 'boundary objects' recently put to
interesting use by Chuck Bazerman in considering how texts and
genres articulate the practices of different subcommunities.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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