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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 95! Affordances: Summarizing an Alternative Approach to Creativity...
Good morning surprising becomings,
We hope that you managed to catch the full moon this week. Astonishing.
And that you also survived the hottest day recorded (July 3rd) – not good at all.
This week we have been busy with classes on Urban Change Making and a workshop on creativity and worldmaking – a busy and very rewarding week.
Some newsletters ago we promised you a way out of the solution-driven and problem-solving model of human creativity and innovation.
We spent a few of newsletters diagnosing what this logic is and why we have it as a default for innovation and creativity (Volume 85, Volume 86, Volume 87).
Then we introduced an alternative approach. We began with an analogy to biking… and how understanding one practice really well will help put us on a path toward developing an alternative framework to creative practices and innovation. And this one practice is affordances.
Over the last four newsletters (Volume 91, Volume 92, Volume 93, and Volume 94), we have focused on affordances as a critical part of the way to get to a different and better framework. In those four newsletters, we connected affordances to everything from enactive cognition to worldmaking to exaptations and more. This week we want to offer a synthetic review that can tie what we have introduced over the last ten newsletters together in a clear step-by-step manner:
Let's start with a definition we really like:
“An Affordance is a relation between aspects of the soci-material environment and the embodied abilities of an agent that in the context of a form of life, that give rise to a set of possible actions.” ~ (Reitved, Denys, and Van Westen)
You can see this mapped out in the diagram below (we will be really taking advantage of this diagram over the course of the newsletter – please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it):
The affordance (#0) is the relation between the environment on the left (#1) and the agent on the right (#2).
And this relation “affords” specific possibilities for action (#3) – these are shown below, rising up from the affordance relation (#0).
All of this is happening within the context of a specific way of being alive (#4) – shown by the blue circle that wraps the diagram.
Affordances are what we sense, perceive, and interact with – it is the world around us – both the physical stuff of rocks, streets, and tools, as well as our bodies – our hands, feet, and back, and all of the immaterial conceptual things – words, images, thoughts, etc.
We sense and engage with the world around us as “potential opportunities for action” based upon our specific type of bodies (#2) and skills that are part of a specific way of life (culture/history/place) (#4).
What is critical in this definition is that action is at the center of life. We are always already underway doing meaningful things and part of larger collaborative actions. We are never some kind of separate passive being surveying reality from a distance and forming representations of this odd thing that is happening outside of ourselves (as models like the computation model of cognition suggest):
Yes and no. Everything is experienced as an affordance. Which means we experience the world in the flow of our actions as meaningful opportunities for action.
We never just experience reality as “raw” sensations – strange colors pressing against our eyes that we have no idea about what they are, for example. We always experience reality as already meaningful. Things show up as things – carpet, chair, table, rock, foot… And what “meaningful” ultimately entails is that they are affordances – things show up as affordances.
But every thing is also more than what it affords us….
Imagine another creature with a different body and very different skills in the same physical environment as us – they would experience a very different world that would afford them very different possibilities for action.
Take water as an example – when you jump in to swim, it acts as a liquid and parts enveloping and slowing you down and coming up to the surface and floating. But if you were a creature the size of a small virus, you would experience water almost like marbles that bounce you around in a very random motion.
No – that would mean that all experience is in your head. What makes this approach so different is that experience is a relation between you doing something and the environment.
If all experiences were subjective, then it would be the case that anything you imagined to be real would be real.
For example, I could just “decide” that when I stand on the George Washington Bridge the water below will gently stop my fall.
But if I were to jump, no matter what I subjectively imagine, I would experience a surface as hard as concrete. Now if I had jumped into the same water from twenty feet, it would have gently slowed my fall. So the same water, my same body, similar activity but a different environmental relation, and the water is objectively experienced as a solid in one case and a liquid in another. Nothing about the physical reality of water or my body has changed, but the relation has changed, and it objectively affords me different potentials for action (experience).
Now if we take this further and we had a dwarf spider (Erigone atra) which is a type of airborne spider that lets out a length of silk strands and drifts on the air gaining lift from both the electricity in the air and the wind (by what is called ballooning – this video is worth watching) – what would it experience? For it, even the “air” – never mind the water, is different.
In each of these cases, the difference in what is afforded is co-created, “perspectival,” and very real – but it is neither subjective nor objective in the standard meaning of these terms.
That’s right, the phrase can sound very odd and overly prescriptive in terms of what can be done – and that this kind of action comes after perception. But, hopefully, with these examples, we can see that the world is perceived and sensed in a perspectival manner because of what kinds of embodied beings we are in a specific environment in the midst of ongoing activity. And it is the three together that give rise to what is afforded us.
The first and perhaps most important thing is that: Simply being alive is a profoundly creative activity.
The active relation between our bodies + our actions + our environment creates our lived perspectival reality. We are en-acting what we experience, we are en-acting what is afforded us.
To talk of creativity, perspectivalism, and action is to ultimately talk about enaction. The prefix “en” signifies a “belonging to” – thus, en-action is a belonging to, a being created by the activity. And we “belong” to it in the way it is co-creating us.
Our bodies + action + environment are enactive – they are creatively coming from these things, and they are also creatively making them. The now classical example of this is from the poet Antonio Machado, who explains it as a “laying down a path in walking.” And what is being enacted is a landscape of affordances. The “path” of Machado’s poem is the landscape of affordances.
Thus, when we say “simply being alive is a profoundly creative act,” it is because “we” are enactively laying down a path in walking…
This is a very important point for creativity – nothing can be reduced to its identity – to some secret deep true identity. Everything “is” what it can do. And ultimately, all of “what it can do” cannot be known in advance – it is objectively non-knowable. What it can do is because of who is using it, how they are using it, and in what environment.
For example, an acorn is not a seed for an oak tree, it is squirrel food, an ink, a source of flour, and, and, and…
Most definitely!
We can really see this by taking a moment to consider the “subject” of enaction – the “we” or the “i” is not the assumed internal subjective personal “I.”
The subject is the outcome and an agent in a larger process that it can never be separated from. Enactive creativity shifts creativity from being focused on the human mind. With this logic of affordances, we have a creativity that is not simply subjective, nor is it reducible to our intentions. It is a creativity that is always there because of who we are + what we are doing + the environment we find ourselves in.
And in the context of action, we can never fully predetermine what aspects of the environment will potentially become relevant or how they will become relevant, and because of this, we can never objectively define in advance what possibilities for action are possible. This means creativity is fundamentally an embodied, environmentally situated, experimentally open activity.
Ultimately the creativity enacted by the spider is not radically different from that of the human diver or the virus…
And consequently, this means that all our other forms of intentional creativity and innovation build out from this always-present and ongoing creativity of simply being alive.
Yes, our reality is constructed by our embodied forms. We just need to think of one aspect of this – our size in contrast to the dwarf spider or the virus, to see how our bodies creatively give rise to very different realities.
Much of our language, concepts, and metaphors arise from our bodies in action: think of the metaphorical meaning that comes from embodied practices like grasping, or that we look or walk forward into the future and the past falls behind us, we are pulled down and rise up, we get in touch, smooth things out, fall into things… All coming from the specificities of our body form in action.
Unique embodied activity gives rise to new language, concepts, and metaphors.
What is important is that these words neither represent nor act as perfect metaphors (using one thing to explain another). Rather they uniquely and freely select relational aspects of one thing, for what they afford. Words are deliberate affordances.
It is never just about embodiment – our bodies are always in action, and this means that they are always necessarily embedded in an environmental context (the other side of the affordance relation). Bodies and environments are creatively co-constructing our realities – our potential for action/experience.
The environmental context is also not generic: only specific aspects show up as relevant to our embodiment. And this assemblage or integrated system of environmental aspects is critical to what is afforded us. Take the example of rock climbing, if you have a specifically trained body, the right shoes, and certain types of gear, a unique world opens up to you. Aspects of the environment – tiny edges and pockets in the rock solicit your hands and feet – pulling you into a posture that affects what new aspects of the environment can solicit you to maintain an upward dynamic balance. If you had different shoes – say big stiff mountaineering boots a very different world would open up for you with differing aspects of the environment and bodily postures emerging…
Yes, it deliberately and directly challenges our highly dualistic approach to creativity, where creativity is situated firmly in the mind in opposition to the body and the outside world. Most of our definitions of creativity focus on novel ideas and minds.
Here the “basic unit” is not the mind or even an individual – it is a relational network of an active body + context-relevant aspects of the environment + the habits, practices, tools, and infrastructure that give rise to a way of life.
Yes, this is why the enactive approach is sometimes called “4EA” – because we are Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive, and Affective. You can think of this “basic unit,” even at the level of a single individual, as “ecosystemic” or networked or as an assemblage…
Yes, absolutely, we need to work and live across an active assemblage.
But, putting it this way can sound very abstract or like there is no self – just a bunch of nodes. What is helpful for creativity is to focus less on identities and hard boundaries and more on the activity – the process. In this case, it is the process of living. Living is the active, creative process of “sense-making.” And we experience it as such when we act, play, experiment, and putter. Much like our example of the diver – we can creatively literally make new senses – new affordances, emerge in how we do things. We can sense new possibilities when we change how we connect to aspects of the environment via new skills, tools, and connections – sense-making is the co-creative activity of affordance-making.
We feel, sense, perceive and experience what is afforded as reality immediately and directly. This is experienced as a general ineffable embodied sense of potential. The term for this is “affect.” It is more general and vague than our emotions. But long before we can clearly conceptualize something that is different, we can sense it – be affected by it as a vague hunch or feel of difference – oddness…
If our initial diagram (see below) simply laid out the affordance relation and showed how we sense, perceive, and experience affordances:
Now we can develop the nature of the relation between agent and environment more precisely:
It would not be entirely wrong to do this. But, the issue is that we have already culturally loaded the term intuition with so much baggage and specific values in relation to innovation and creativity. It is also far too “mental”. Affect and our sensing of novel possibilities happens in the midst of activity. It is embodied and embedded.
Think of the development of a new move in a sport – in the midst of action, one responds to the pull of the moment – e.g., one is affected by the event and drawn towards new possibilities for action. The evolution of the Fosbury flop is a good example of this.
He does, and it has deeply influenced our approach. In a wonderful short book titled “Bergsonism,” Deleuze offers an “Intuition as Method” approach to a creative practice that can deal effectively with qualitative change and difference. His argument is that if something is both genuinely new and qualitatively different, we cannot recognize it with the concepts that we have.
These forms of radical novelty exceed in every way the known and, as such need to be engaged with via a very differing method. This is the method of “intuition.” But, this method is an experimental method focused on new forms of doing and sensing qualitative difference in its emergence. It is not in any way a “go with your feelings”.
Because our habits, practices, tools, environments, and forms of embodiment all work in a holistic manner to give rise to our current ways of sensing, feeling, knowing, and doing. Our habitual intuitions will always pull us back into what is well-established. Novelty is far more likely to elicit the feelings of perplexity, horror, befuddlement, or, most often, non-recognition or misrecognition.
Deleuze’s method involves a deliberate refusal of skills, habits, tools, and environments (what he terms quite nicely “deterritorialization”) and developing new skills, habits, tools, environments, and embodiments – a type of deliberate becoming other via a novel “reterritorialization”.
As an aside, this is what we would call “de-worlding” and “re-worlding” – and however we call it, these are critical practices for creativity.
They are fundamental. It just might be possible to jump off the George Washington Bridge and experience water acting as a liquid slowing your fall – if you have developed the skills via learning and training, as well as the use of the right tools (ones that you might need to invent).
This is a core tenant of this approach to creativity: Change your skills and tools (extensions of our bodies/skills), and what aspects of the environment offer us will change. This is also something we saw clearly with the rock climbing example. And, as humans, we are never not to be found without tools – we are always of our tools.
We are always skilled beings in action. And our skilled actions involve ways we are extended transformatively via physical and conceptual tools into our environments. These extensions (tools) constructively mediate what is afforded to us. A change in skills and/or tools and their use will enact very different realities – which is to say that they will afford us a very different and new set of possibilities for action.
Falling off the George Washington Bridge will enact/afford a very specific set of possible actions (bone breaking, organ squishing, etc.). But skillfully jumping off with the right training and tools will enact/afford a different set of possible actions. In both cases, the ‘system” or “assemblage” is creatively enacting/affording and constraining what is both real and possible.
Yes, no living creature just lives in an environment. How it lives and what it does changes its environment, and this is, in turn, changing what is afforded to the creature – and ultimately changing the creature. (See the strong red arrows in the above diagram).
This creative looping process, in evolutionary theory, is called Niche Construction. The classic example is of beaver evolution: protobeavers, a land creature, ate certain semi-aquatic plants and escaped predators by going into streams. For them, eating and felling trees were the same thing. The trees that were fallen were along the edge of waterways. The fallen trees dammed rivers making swamps and larger bodies of water. Swamps offered more protection to more aquatic proto-beavers. Protobeavers became more adapted (constructed) to swimming in the environment they co-constructed. Felling more trees and making more swamps. Swamps became ponds, and wetlands and protobeavers became beavers.
Here creativity is in the mutually co-constructing nature of the event.
You are right, niche construction can and does keep things pretty stable by iteratively constructing the same. In this, the system is reinforcing some of the possibilities for action that are afforded. And it is actively suppressing/ignoring others.
But, the co-constructive logic of niche construction always affords more possibilities for action than are used. Any number of negative processes could lead to this. By following this excess of possibilities, changes are made to both the environment and the embodied skilled creature. This excess of possibilities for action that lead in non-normal directions is what can be called exaptations.
Precisely – everything we do, make, and have potentially affords far more than we ever utilize.
It is important to realize that these potentials do not pre-exist in actions. It is not like there is a special realm out there stockpiling preordained novel potential actions. The potentials are immanent in an abstract sense of being logically possible that something different could happen to the situated actions. Novel potentials must be enacted.
Yes. Nothing pre-exists some form of engagement and experimentation.
For example, water is either a liquid or a solid for us until we change the affordance process via experimental niche construction such that a novel affordance landscape emerges.
If we look at Penguins who can no longer “fly” in the air, and are using their feathered wings to fly in the water instead: Some aspect of their dense feathers connect with some aspects of air as they dive to trap vast amounts of air bubbles that then surround their surface as they swim. When it is time to get out of the water, this relation that produces millions of micro-bubbles allows the penguin to break through the surface tension of the water in a novel and far more effectively than other creatures (say, a chasing orca). This specific novel affordance could not have been predefined by considering the possibilities of flightless birds in general.
No. Exaptations are not things in that false, universally objective sense. They are immanent aspects of an affordance process.
Whatever the experiment is – we are doing something experimental that changes our bodies + our skills + our environments such that there are novel emergent affordances. And in the doing, new possibilities and new concepts co-emerge.
We like to say in regards to creativity: “no ideas but in doing.”
Absolutely. Novel affordances do not exist until we find a way to access and activate a novel aspect of the environment via the development of novel tools, habits, and forms of skilled embodiment – and this will allow novel affordances to emerge and this allows for new forms of sensing to emerge alongside new possible practices.
And because of this, all forms of ideation either point towards the past – and have a conservative bias – or they will emerge in the later stages of the process.
Concepts emerge from and subsist of a network of existing embodied and environmentally enacted practices. As such, to sit in a room and conceptually reflect on reality and its potentials, makes it far more likely that you are just engaging with what is well established.
Of course not. Working with concepts – Thinking – is, in general, always to some degree present in our activities.
There are three important aspects of thinking to reconsider and resituate from this affordance perspective:
Yes. This is a critical point: Most of our knowing is embodied and embedded – and not directly accessible to clear representational forms of ideation. This is what we term “affect,” but this could just as well be called “know-how.” In specific contexts, we just know how to do things. And if one is asked “how do we know how to do this?” – it is hard and, in many cases impossible to say anything. Know-how most often is a property of the system – it is something enacted, and as we enact it it cues us as to what to do next.
Creative practices that are working with qualitatively new potentials always begin with know-how. And this is because it is a non-conceptual activity at this stage in the process. We are involved in a direct immanent process of making what does not as yet exist (how could it be conceptualized in advance?). And as something that does not exist, it is best understood as “non-existent unknowable but theoretically possible newness”.
Well, it always inherently exceeds the state of things. Doing – living – sense-making is always excessive.
And knowledge in the sense of “knowing-what” – being able to conceptualize something as clear and distinct (ideation), is a set of skilled practices that rests upon and rises out of embodied and environmental know-how.
Novel forms of ideation (“know-what”) arise out of novel forms of “know-how.” (see center of diagram below):
Going back to Niche Construction and Affordances – It feels like we never really notice any of this creative construction of lived reality in our daily lives – don’t we just take what is enacted as our stable, fixed, neutral, and universal reality?
That is very true. We take what the creative enactive process has achieved as what pre-existed the enactive process. We take the reality of the active creativity/construction out of reality. Alfred North Whitehead called this “misplaced concreteness” – where we make the outcomes of processes the concrete conditions of the process.
This error is a profound error in regards to creativity because we do not see how “deep” our creativity reaches, how far it extends, and how much more relational, intra-dependant and “non-human” it is.
Yes, it most certainly does.
First, creativity and innovation does not begin with us – and most certainly not with our ideas. Creativity is a fundamental quality of all reality.
Secondly, our own creativity is a fundamental fact of our being alive. We, as active, inherently social beings, are co-creating the very “givens” of our reality simply by actively living our mundane lives. Creativity is not the exclusive domain of experts or uniquely gifted individuals.
Thirdly, all creativity and innovation – even that which is of the most intentional kind requires and develops out of a more than human process of distributed emergent niche construction.
A big part of this is because we do share very similar bodies, practices, tools, concepts, and environments with all humans – such that we can misrecognize others as if they are doing/being what we perceive to be the same as ourselves.
It is possible, because of this, that we could talk of a “species specific landscape of affordances.” But, while we might have many aspects of our lives that are general to our species because of how it is creatively enacted in the context of a specific way of life, there is a very different affordance landscape to differing cultures. And because of our differing historical habits, practices, tools, concepts, skills, and built environments we do have distinct worlds.
Just like a spider and a person can share the same generic material situation but live in and experience very different environments, humans cultures live in and of distinct worlds. Worlds that afford very different possibilities for action.
Absolutely, but it is important to qualify this: we are part of the enacting of a world. Cultures are historically situated practices of extended niche construction that give rise to a way of being.
In doing this, they are making a real world that affords unique possibilities – with novel practices, habits, tools, concepts, ways of relating, and environments, etc.
They are (1) making a unique world, (2) making actual things that are unique to that world, and in doing this, they are (3) actually expanding the content of the total reality that we all potentially share, and finally (4) they are making a world in a creative dialog with multiple other worlds – it is not like they are in some pure bubble of uniqueness and difference.
Their world is not just their “take” on a universal objective reality – “The World” so to speak….
The first thing to note is that “mindsets” perpetuate a number of less than helpful dualities: mind-body, immaterial-material – where the mental and the immaterial precedes and are more significant than the embodied and the material. These already have a profoundly negative effect on creativity and innovation.
The power of an affordance approach is that it refuses to divorce the mind and way of sensing from the practices, environments embodied logics. And it is an approach where no part is more foundational than another.
Yes, while there is no perfect spot to stop this discussion and summary of an alternative affordance-based approach, this feels like a good place to pause for the week.
Starting with affordances gives us a clear way into reconfiguring our approach to creative processes. And from this one thing (affordances), we can connect the dots to so many other critical concepts, parts of the framework, practices, and tools.
Until next week – enjoy experimenting in the light of affordances!
Till Volume 96,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
Keep Your difference Alive!
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