Re: <nettime> Suggestion for discussion: J.J. Gibson's Theory of Affordances

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Sawyer,

I appreciate and applaud your suggestion of a topic.  May we do well with it!  Internet discussion boards have changed a lot in some ways over the three decades they have existed, and not always for the better, as the song says, but in other ways not much at all.  :)

I'm not a professional academic and haven't heard of Gibson prior to your post.  However a quick review of "affordances" and your phrase "The Screen" reminded me right away of a favorite text, Calvino's short 1985 work, his last ever and furthermore unfinished, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium."

It states, in its second essay (memo), on "Quickness":

"Since in each of my lectures I have set myself the task of recommending to the next millennium a particular value close to my heart, the value I want to recommend today is precisely this:  In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language."

There is much to condemn in Calvino, his century, and the above passage, but "the flattening" is I think a meaningful insight honestly offered.  (I would also compare and contrast it to Tokarczuk's great 2022 essay "Ognosia.")  Everything has been swept aside by big data and their algorithms now turned up to 11.  Nothing else frankly exists much at all, or only feebly and fleetingly so.  The simulation/simulacrum way of looking at things is pretty OK with this; but it is perhaps only when voting is lost, the biosphere is lost, the freedom to speak without imminent targeting by the authorities is gone, and people's brains are blown out on the street for nothing in broad daylight by masked mercenaries with no investigation, despite fifty live video angles, not even an apology, that they don't seem like just another "simulation" among others.

I have never been a fan of French theory.  That's just being honest.  I have always preferred the Frankfurt School as the more measured, less stylish, and more responsible, e.g., Habermas calling Foucault "a young conservative."  Or in nettime-speak, the alt-right has fully adopted the post-truth, post-enlightenment, post-nature way of thinking, seeing, doing, and governing.  All this is helped by the big cheeses who run the giant mega-tech powers which the internet, and all of us so blithely using it for everything for three decades, have created.  They are the alt-right personified corporately one might say, and now their money and software buy presidencies and supreme court supermajorities.  These are real events, in my opinion, not just simulations, and whatever "theory" was in vogue since '95 didn't seem to do very well prophylactically.  I find that hard to dispute, but many will.  Consensus shall not be likely.

However, one hopes, perhaps in world academia maybe there is a willingness by some now to see how the "everything is fake" school of philosophy helped get us to the place we are now in.  Maybe there isn't of course.  It will differ person to person.  I wish the topic well, your topic of The Screen and affordances, because it does relate to the overall crisis as I see it.

As a gesture of hope however -- and you asked for sources -- I would recommend Martin Jay's two books "Songs of Experience" (2005) and "Magical Nominalism" (2025).  He gives French theory a very fair shake I'd say but points out its problems too.  Maybe his work can help things improve a bit.  In any case, he addresses the "encounter with the other" aspect of your premise.  In both works, knowledge and meaning are composed of a mix based on the relationship you suggest, between the "experiencer" and the "what is experienced" not just one or the other and not just the sum of the two.  This is frankly basic science and common sense, which maybe academic theory has too glibly garbaged.  (Jay talks about it re Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in "Downcast Eyes.")  We shall see I suppose.  I also tie it to Calvino's closing paragraph in memo 5, the last memo, "Multiplicity":  "what are we, what is each of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences...."

Vis-a-vis Jay, he wrote a great article about the current U.S. president called "the Age of Rackets," comparing Q1 21C  to Q1 20C.  It's well done and a bit alarming about how much devastation just your garden variety sleaze and organized crime ethics can wreak.  (I'd say it proves the insufficiency of conceptual rationality plus coercive authority, having ostracized experience categorically, to achieve peaceful or sustainable results.)  Jay has written a lot and unfortunately we may not have twenty years to read and digest it in time to push back against the technopartheid fantasies of those in charge of everything today.  It might be easier if those of us who have read his stuff could talk about it, and those who haven't could listen; or maybe a machine assistant could help us read faster.  I can't say, because I never use any chatbot or AI knowingly and never will knock on wood (hoping you're not one).  I will venture that whereas the first two millennia relied on Reason and Autho
 rity, and usually (but not always) united in their repression of Experience, the third will yield a sustainable planet if and only if Experience achieves the equality, autonomy, and yes even the primacy in some cases that it deserves.

I did do an interview recently with Jay about "experience," down through the ages, long-form written just under 8K words (looking for a publisher if you know any, perhaps should serialize it here on list).  You might see a connection between his views and Gibson's.  Jay also articulates two primary currents of modernization, going all the way back to Ockham, in the form of two chief strains of "nominalism."  One is conventional, control-based, domination-intensive, and frankly Machiavellian.  The other is "magical," in a turn of phrase that plays on "magical realism" in literature but with a difference.  The magical version gives agency and autonomy to the other as you mention in re Gibson.  I place Leonardo in the latter current, plus many others as well, and I hope they can be understood better and succeed more, sooner rather than later.  The techno regression we are in the midst of, that is tearing down all checks and balances to clear the way for the algorithms of the super-power
 ful, is Machiavellian for certain in my judgment.  One hopes it will be limited somehow at some point, but that may depend on world leaders agreeing to play nice (and where's the fun in that) or a change of public opinion in no small fashion on a scale resembling the sixties.  The big knock on Machiavelli, i.e. "might makes right," is that it imposes an eternal arms race dynamic, to the bottom, which drives inevitably the tragedy of the commons.  Apropos of today perhaps is fair to say.

Lastly I'd like to float the idea of  applying "affordances" interpretively re La Gioconda, Leonardo's untitled yet famous portrait of a smiling woman seated on a balcony.  This image too has been veiled, flattened, Screen-ified, and transformed through mystification (Berger) to the point of what Habermas called "a specific loss of experience."  It is an image meant for use, affordance, like a user's manual (in the sense used by Perec in 1978, much emphasized in Six Memos).  Yet to unlock its usefulness, as a personification and allegory of Experience ("Esperienza," the Italian word for both "experience" and "experiment," which Leonardo wrote of many times as his maestra, teacher, guide, and defender, unambiguously), and thus a functional map to understanding all of his work in art and science, we have to outwit the "veils" Leonardo placed on it (though not its literal one!) to protect it from the censor and inquisitor.  In this sense the oil-painted canvas or panel of poplar is also
  partly "the screen" and partly not, or susceptible to what is not.

Somewhat like the screen on which I am typing this, and those off of which it is (or isn't) being read.

Very best, thanks again, and again good luck!

Max

PS -- The Alberses, Anni and Josef, who had to flee the Bauhaus about a century ago due to regime change there, also talked and taught all the time about "experience" (i.e. "art is not an object / but experience," no "an" included or intended), and the use of the hands, and such, which might match "affordances" too.  If you want a whole nation to go insane, the Bauhaus-destroyers well they pretty much wrote the book.

+++






________________________________________
From: nettime-l <nettime-l-bounces@lists.nettime.org> on behalf of Sawyer Gracer via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2026 11:35 AM
To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
Cc: Sawyer Gracer <sg9728@bard.edu>
Subject: <nettime> Suggestion for discussion: J.J. Gibson's Theory of Affordances


Hi Nettime community,

I'm currently working on a research project exploring J.J. Gibson's theory
of affordances, which posists that an object's abilities / the abilities it
provides is something that is neither objectively in/part of the object nor
subjectively within us but emerges from the relationship between us and the
other. I am arguing that The Screen is a threat to our attunement for
affordances, making us able to see one another less.

So basically the project centers on The Screen but the real motivator for
my work is the threat digital and algorithmic technologies make for mutual
perception and embodied existence. I would love to hear back with
discussion, feedback, reflection, and/or recommendations to
artists/theorists, as this work will culminate in both a philosophy paper
and an art exhibition.

Thanks for your attention, SG
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# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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