Reading for Affordance

Reading for Affordance

Affordance is a concept from ecological psychology widely taken up across fields from psychology to philosophy to pedagogy to design. Coined by James Gibson in the late 70’s, an affordance names a feature of an environment that makes an opportunity for a participant to act, whether for good or ill. A river, for example, affords floating and fishing, but also drowning. 

Affordances are not static objects; they are perceptions of an interaction that can happen. They exist at the meeting place of the participant and the environment, pointing toward what’s possible. (If an affordance goes forever unperceived, it is not an affordance.) Affordances are perceptions; they are embodied, enacted thought that lead to something. Affordances are elementally relational. They are not the mentality of the actor projected onto the world; they are the spontaneous possibility that presents itself as two things come into combination. Another way to think of affordance (what a thing affords) is what unfolding future it makes possible. Thought of in the aggregate (at a species more than individual scale), affordances yield capabilities. A new affordance can change the trajectory of the entire ecology in which it occurs. Think of giant affordances that structure our lives as humans, like writing, make it possible for humans lives to take a different form than they would take if there was no way to hold onto and recirculate information beyond the capacity of a single mind. 

I first ran into the concept of affordance in this short visual essay by the Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell. Kingwell’s essay draws an expansive line from floor to table to chair as engine of thinking; he gives affordance a valence of trajectory, evolution, motor power for deep change within an ecology or a world. As I was thinking about this word, it started to come to mind when I would read in-progress writing and mark certain appearances or events that seemed like points of inflection, ripe with possibility for a new growth, a new aspect in the writing’s liveliness, to evolve. I got especially interested in looking for affordances as a way to track a narrative into non(narratively)traditional spaces. 

reading your draft for affordances

Reading for affordance can prime you to look for ways that significant further change can happen to your story’s trajectory. In one ecstatic essay I found about affordance (applied to concepts of managerial philosophy, natch!), the authors write, “Affordances point toward opportunities and actions—affordances give direction to the potentially unlimited space(s) of (proximate) development. Affordances facilitate the human movement towards world and action. Affordances are what points to the adjacent possible.”

Affordance happens in the interaction between an environment and a participant. In design, between an object and a user. I think it’s worth taking at least two passes through your draft, first thinking of the user/participant as a character within the story world — how might a character perceive and follow a possibility that some already existing feature of the world you’ve written affords? A feature here might be an object, an appearance, an event, an architectural feature, a system encountered, a location… 

The second pass features you, the storyteller, as the user/participant. What features of the telling (the narration, the syntax, the opening and closing of scenes, the leaps and cuts or conjunctions you engage, the spill or tautness of the prose, the mood of the voice, the way time or space is treated…) afford a trajectory? If somewhere in your writing, for example, you embrace a long parenthetical aside, what does this parentheses afford as a capability or possibility for the rest of the writing? What is the “adjacent possible” that can be accessed if you don’t just use this parenthesis once and then drop it?

As you read, tune in especially to the minor detail that may have just seemed supportive, that was just helping you get to where you thought you had to go according to your outline or intention or the rules you embraced (whether consciously or no) for storytelling. 

Look too, at what you already made use of. What -ability did it license in the draft; that is, what did it make possible for this draft of the story to do? Perhaps you want to feed that ability, to embrace it all the more.

In all this reading, stay tuned to the relational aspect of affordance. Affordances are not imposed; they are perceived, entertained, followed.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?