Affordances in a Multispecies Entanglement

Abstract

As plastics circulate the oceans and animals lose their place in the world, the fragile and indeterminate aspects of the shared world become palpable. The concept of affordances, central to ecological psychology, means to capture the possibilities for action that the world offers. It suggests a pragmatic conceptualization of the world for human and non-human animals alike. As such it is perfectly positioned to foreground the fragility of a “multispecies entanglement,” a world shared with multiple species across generations. These indeterminate aspects of the world have so far however received little attention. By bringing together evolutionary thinking in ecological psychology and ethnographical work on animal extinction, this article explores one way for affordances to bring out the messy aspects of the shared world. On this view affordances help to achieve and maintain our shared world by inviting animals to participate in that world. Affordances are unfinished, perpetually in a process of co-becoming as world and animals take shape across multiple timescales. The article ends with two concrete examples that show the fragility that this view of affordances highlights, and the responsibility it requires of human life in a multispecies entanglement.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Jelle Bruineberg, Erik Rietveld, Julian Kiverstein, Erik Myin and Victor Loughlin for their helpful suggestions and discussions. I’m also grateful to Harry Heft for sharing his thoughts on an earlier version of this paper. I thank two reviewers for their constructive comments.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Dynamicism can but need not imply temporality. To get a sense of the distinction that this paper seeks to draw consider a “taller-than” relation (e.g. Chemero, 2003). This relation can be dynamic: while I’m now taller-than Sylvia, as I grow old and grey quickly Sylvia may at some point be taller-than I am. The “taller-than” relation is a logical consequence of the dynamics of the two relata, which may be independent, as in the “taller-than” case, or they may “interact.” Crucially, at any point in time the relation is in a determinate state: take a picture and I turn out to still be so and so much taller-than Sylvia.

Now let’s say Sylvia and I are in a loving relationship. We’ve been together for years and our love is there for everyone to see. This “love” relation is temporal: our activities of care and cooperation are not independent of each other nor, crucially, of the relation we already have. You should probably not act out on your second date, but if Sylvia snaps at me over dinner it matters little: the loving-relationship is sustained over a larger timescale than a single bad evening. On the other hand, if Sylvia acts out often, I may wonder what I did wrong, if our relationship is still strong – if it ever was strong. A “love” relation then gets determined over time. Asking for the status of our relationship may thus not give a single clear-cut answer at every instance. Indeed, because what one does matters to the relation, asking Sylvia about our relation may improve it but can also put it on the line (as does writing a footnote about it).

I’m suggesting we try modeling affordances on love not logic, thinking of affordances as temporal rather than merely dynamic relations. This approach is concretized in Section 4 and exemplified in Section 5.

2 Notice that shifting the discussion to “information,” to fix the afforded facts, would not help: it begs the question that the current discussion asks. This paper explores what information is for (i.e. an affordance; see Gibson, 1979, p. 140). A different view of affordances, one that foregrounds everyday indeterminacy and precariousness, suggests re-thinking what we require of information (for work on information along the lines of the current proposal see Van Dijk et al., 2015; Van Dijk & Kiverstein, 2020; Vaz, 2015; Withagen & Van der Kamp, 2010).

3 This section elaborates on an analysis in Van Dijk (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, project “Thinking in practice: a unified ecological-enactive account” [12V2318N]).