Vital affordances, occupying niches: an ecological approach to disability and performance

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a new conceptual approach to disability and performance through a contribution that comes entirely from outside the disciplines; a re-theorisation of Gibson’s [1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates] theory of affordances. Drawing on three visual ethnographies with differently disabled individuals, and building upon my previous consideration of performance as ‘affordance creation’ in itself [Dokumaci, A. 2013. “On Falling Ill.” Performance Research 18 (4): 107–115], the article conceptualises affordances as a form of micro-activism – one that can allow us to unpack the entanglements of disability, performance, and matter. Putting Gibson’s theory in conversation with Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, it proposes the concept ‘vital affordances’ as a new way to think through this micro-activism, and the way disabled individuals might transform the world and its very materiality through the most mundane of their performances.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• disability
• performance
• everyday life
• new materialisms
• ecology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Arseli Dokumaci is a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on disability, everyday performances, theory of affordances, visual ethnography, and quality of life measurements.

Notes

1. Even if new materialism cannot possibly be reduced to single argument, it is often associated with Baradian agentialism, non-anthropocentric, and multispecies ontologies. While these approaches have opened up fascinating intellectual possibilities, they are not necessarily the framework of my paper. What I seek to do instead is to take the openings provided by new materialisms as a point of departure, and move towards an ecological approach to disability that is built specifically upon Gibson's theories, and Canghuilhem's vitalism.

2. It was during my dissertation that I collaborated with participants who lived with the ‘same’ illness as mine, and drawing from field encounters, that I came to develop an original application of affordances within the context of disability and performance. This initial re-theorisation has taken new directions over the course of years as I worked with differently disabled individuals in various geographical contexts.

3. This is where Gibson parts ways with the phenomenology of Gestalt psychologists who have offered similar terms prior to his coinage (see 138).

4. This, of course, does not mean that such tools are redundant; it just means that their affordances can still somehow be invented even we, due to social and economic circumstances, do not readily have them at our disposal.

5. For further information, visit http://engineeringathome.org/about

6. I put ‘adaptation’ in quotes because it is the term Herdren and Lynch chose to use. I have reservations about using this term, which implies a passive fitting to what already exists.

7. Garland-Thomson writes that a fit occurs, ‘when a harmonious … interaction occurs between a particularly shaped and functioning body and an environment that sustains that body’ (594) and misfit happens, ‘when world fails flesh in the environment one encounters’ (600).

8. Particularly because, I would add, it enables us to take impairment into account, without adhering to a medicalised point of view at the same time.

9. It is important to clarify what Canguilhem means by ‘normative’. In philosophy, normative means ‘every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm’; but in the way Canguilhem uses it, normative means ‘that which establishes norms’, implying change and possibility rather than stability (126–127).

10. Kevin Gotkin raises a similar point: ‘That it is only one “kind of life” where a trait is considered normative opens the door on the other worlds disability studies has tried to imagine in academic and activist circles for decades’ (2016).

11. ‘The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making’ is a collaborative ethnography project undertaken at the University of Copenhagen (PI, Ayo Wahlberg). For further information, visit http://vital.ku.dk/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Research Council Grant [grant number ERC-2014-STG-639275] (PI, Prof. Ayo Wahlberg).