Historicizing affordance theory: A rendezvous between ecological psychology and cultural-historical activity theory

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss how mutually enriching points from both affordance theory and cultural-historical activity theory can promote theoretical ideas which may prove useful as analytical tools for the study of human life and human development. There are two issues that need to be overcome in order to explore the potentials of James Gibson’s affordance theory: it does not sufficiently theorize (a) development and (b) society. We claim that Gibson’s affordance theory still needs to be brought beyond “the axiom of immediacy.” Ambivalences in Gibson’s affordance theory will be discussed, and we will argue for certain revisions. The strong ideas of direct perceiving and of perception–action mutuality remain intact while synthesized with ideas of societal human life. We propose the concept of the affording of societal standards to be a meaningful term in order to grasp the specific societal character of affordance theory.

Keywords

activity theory affordance ecological psychology James J. Gibson standards

James J. Gibson’s (1986) concept of affordance holds a prominent theoretical position in the research literature in regard to understanding the mutual and functional interrelationship between the organism and its environment. In this paper we argue that affordance remains a core concept also in relation to humans and to human societal life. However, what is not sufficiently explored—either empirically or theoretically— is how to understand affordance in terms of what characterizes human life compared to, say, an “organism” in general. Human societies are historical in nature (Leontjev, 1977) and humans develop and co-create their individual lives in relation to specific historical constraints. In our own research on human developmental processes, we have become increasingly aware of the need to construct an understanding of development which includes both affordance theory and theory which grasps the historical nature of human societal life. For example, the study and understanding of the development of young people¹ has a long tradition of treating developmental processes as lying on a continuum ranging from social (or societal) determinism to biological individualism (Erikson, 1971; Hall, 1904; Lesko, 2001; Poulsen, 2010; Willis, 1977; Ziehe, 1983; Ziehe, Fornäs, & Nielsen, 1989).

Against this general background, ecological perspectives on developmental processes are much needed, in which development is considered with reference to the societal realities of the developing person. For example, in the transition process of a young person into high school life, a variety of new standards are met by the young person and require new ways of relating to the environment. Being young (and, e.g., starting high school) is not merely a matter of biological maturation or adaptation to societal values, rather, it is about navigation through—and negotiation of—myriad invitations and possible self-understanding and self-realization options in concrete practices. Standards² as such are, however, not one-dimensional determinant conditions; they are created and recreated by people participating in practice and they come to work as standardization processes, by which they stabilize, generalize, and sanction subjectivity across contexts and practices (for an elaboration of standards and subjectification, see Pedersen & Bang, 2016). In other words, the interrelationship between the young person and the specific environment becomes a dynamic unity with developmental potentialities.

In a brief formulation, the ambition of this article is that of historicizing affordance theory. More specifically, we will do so by setting up a theoretical meeting between affordance theory and cultural-historical theory. We think of this meeting in positive and potentially productive terms, of course; therefore the subtitle of the paper: a rendezvous between ecological theory and cultural-historical activity theory. The core idea being explored in the present paper is this: that affordance theory needs cultural-historical theory in order to understand the societal nature of the individual–environment relationship.

Gibson’s affordance theory

With the notion of affordances Gibson (1986) introduced the reciprocity between organism and environment which we find vitalizing for a general theorizing of developmental processes. Although Gibson introduced reciprocity and mutuality as central to his theory (through the notion of affordances), we find him falling short in accounting for the societal and historical dimensions of human life. Therefore, we aim at arguing for a reinstating of historicity in (this) psychological theory.

In the history of psychology, James Gibson’s theory of direct perception has been acknowledged as an important articulated challenge to Cartesian dualism. He belonged to a generation of psychologists who “rejected mentalism of any kind and embraced the goal of establishing predictable functional relations between environmental conditions and behavior” (Heft, 2001, pp. 106–107). Gibson’s concept of affordance is inspired by Gestalt psychology and the idea that things have meaning in themselves. Thus, Koffka talked about the “demand character” of the thing, and Lewin created the term “Aufforderungscharaktere.” Other concepts with a similar idea occurred, such as the “invitation character” or “valence” of things. Lewin used the term valence as equivalent with Aufforderungscharaktere and defined it in the following manner: “By valences, positive or negative, we refer to the meanings of objects by virtue of which we move towards some of them and away from others” (Lewin, as cited in Jones, 2003, p. 108). By using this term, Lewin suggested that objects are not neutral to a person, but that they have an immediate psychological effect on a person’s behavior. Moreover, these early ecological terms also imply the person and the person’s perspective as an integral part of the environment. Lewin suggested that exactly the same physical object could have quite different psychological existences for different persons and for the same person in different situations (Lewin, 1935, p. 76). This indicates that a valence is connected to the need of the person. Gibson refers to this idea by saying that “the valence of an object was bestowed upon it in experience, and bestowed by a need of the observer. Thus Koffka argued that the postbox has a demand character only when the observer needs to mail a letter” (1986, p. 138). In other words, the concept of valences holds the same key idea that the concept of affordance does: meaning is placed in the environment, in terms of objects containing qualities that invite persons to act and behave in certain ways.

In the process of developing the concept of affordances (he departed from the concept of valence in his 1947 writings, according to Jones, 2003), Gibson tried to understand the “immediate awareness of the possibilities afforded by environmental objects” (Jones, 2003, p. 110). In his understanding, affordance does not change according to the need of the perceiver. The affordance is invariant and thus exists regardless of the perceiver’s intentionality (Gibson, 1986). As he says: “The object offers what it does because it is what it is” (Gibson, 1986, p. 139). However, this should not be read in a mechanistic way.

In his work Gibson stressed that organisms come to know their environment through their own exploratory activities. These activities are a necessity in order to gain access to the relevant informative structures, to the affordances, which support perception. Rather than viewing the surroundings as shapes, colors, and layouts, to him they are “the meaning of things for action” (Costall, 1995, p. 470). In Gibson’s later writings he came to stress the understanding of organisms as active in the world (not only in the head). His whole interest lay in how an animal could gain information about the environment through perception. He developed the concept of affordances in order to explain the relation between organism and environment and famously said:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson, 1986, p. 127)

Following this line of thought, “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. This implies that values and meanings are external to the perceiver. He suggested that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances and not their qualities (Gibson, 1986). This implies that the interesting thing is not the qualities that an object is composed of but what it affords relative to a perceiver. As Heft says:

The concept of affordances most basically highlights the congruence between structural features of the environment and the functional possibilities of the perceiver. When an individual perceives this congruence, there is awareness of a fit. Environmental features are experienced as having a functional meaning for the individual. The features afford some action or extend some potential functional consequence. (Heft, 2001, p. 287)

The point that the environmental features are experienced as having a functional meaning makes affordance a very important concept, also when the term “environment” means more than physical objects, places, etc. In our quest to understand development in ecological terms, affordance theory offers a view of the variation in standards and expectations that persons encounter in their everyday lives. However, affordance, as Gibson presents it, seems not quite suited to deal with complex human life, social relations, and developmental transactions. Some work needs to be done to see how affordance theory can be helpful in these respects. Some fruitful attempts have been made in this direction, but, in our view, the societal character as being non-identical with the social character is not really addressed. The concept of standard is an example of a hybrid between societally negotiated values and individual activity. It is socially shared and negotiated and social in the way that humans are social, namely in produced institutionalized, organized, and negotiated manners. The produced character of human life is both a great challenge for affordance theory but also a possible way for it to expand. Affordance theory needs to be further explored and clarified for direct realism to be able to take the step into the realm of human life.

In the next section, we will address some of the challenges that we see for Gibson’s theory to take such a step. In this way we intend to take one of the steps toward a productive connection between affordance theory and the societal character of human life expressed in cultural-historical theory. Basically, there are two issues that need to be overcome in order to explore the potentials of affordance theory for human life. These issues concerning affordance theory are: (a) it does not sufficiently theorize about development and (b) it does not sufficiently theorize about society. In the following sections, we will try to trace ambivalences as well as openings in affordance theory in order to resolve these issues.

First ambivalence: Action versus perception

One can identify an inner struggle in Gibson’s theorizing and some ambivalence between action-based insights on the one hand and his theory of perception as a theory of cognition and knowledge on the other. Students of Gibson have found that he attempted to establish a theory of perception and cognition. For example, Alan Costall (1995) suggests that Gibson attempted to establish “the existence of a universal, asocial mode of perception” (Costall, 1995, p. 470). According to another student of Gibson’s work, Edward Reed (1991), Gibson thought of his theory as a cognitive psychology and of perception as a cognitive function. According to this view, the interesting thing is to understand perceptual processes and learning. Learning means perceptual learning, that is, a process through which an organism becomes able to differentiate more and more kinds of information. However, perception, learning, and knowing do not stand alone in his theory. Organisms come to know their environment by being actively involved in it through explorative, perception–action activities.

In Gibson’s theory, the mutuality of organism (animal) and environment is the cornerstone along with his other idea that psychology should begin with perception. He defines the “environment” as “the surroundings [emphasis added] of animals” (Gibson, 1986, p. 7) and these surroundings count other organisms (animals) and plants as well as nonliving things. The animal and the environment imply each other and hence make an inseparable pair. Therefore, the environment should be thought of in ecological, rather than in physical terms. Perceiving and behaving are the ways for an animal to mutually interact with the environment in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, some ambivalence and unresolved issues can be identified. For example, Costall suggests that other challenges occur when trying to overcome the dualism of organism and environment, as Gibson tried. Costall identifies the dualism between the natural and the social and the dualism of the neutral world of surfaces and a meaningful world of things (Costall, 1995, p. 470). In other words, he seems to find a limitation in Gibson’s solutions to the dualism problems when the theory is confined to what Costall thinks of as a privatized conception of meaning (Costall, 1995, p. 468).

We agree with Costall’s criticism and find that Gibson’s suggested change from physical to ecological environment is an important but also a challenging step toward overcoming dualism. It is a beginning out of which new challenges grow. The concept of “mutuality,” for example, constitutes a challenge. On the one hand, “mutuality” might open up for a dialectical interpretation if Gibson’s theory is thought of as a way to describe the world in dynamic-historical terms, that is in terms of how the ecological environment is an environment of change (and non-change as a variation held up by the organisms). On the other hand, we also find that “mutuality” is not necessarily interpreted in this manner in his theory. Rather, he seems to struggle with the organism–environment mutuality as a fit (for a general discussion of mutuality as a “fit,” see Bang, 2009b), which per se makes it almost counter-intuitive to think of his theory as one that embraces development and change.

Second ambivalence: Developmental change versus adaptation

Another theoretical ambivalence grows out of a “fit” interpretation of “mutuality”: the ambivalence between development and change, on the one hand, and adaptation, on the other hand. Vygotsky (1978) stresses developmental change as being the very heart of psychology when he says that human mental processes can be understood only by considering how and where they occur in growth (see also Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 64–65). He contrasted his genetic approach with approaches that attempt to analyze psychological phenomena without regard for their place in development. Such research provides descriptions rather than explanations (Wertsch, 1985).

Unfortunately, we find that affordance theory falls short with regard to including developmental changes, which extrapolates a second ambivalence concerning the direction in which to take the organism–environment mutuality (change/dialectics or fit/plan). If one thinks along the lines of a fit between the organism and the environment, there is no way in which (a) direct realism becomes developmental (that is, genetic, in Vygotsky’s term), and no way in which (b) direct perception can transcend cognition/knowing. Obviously, this issue concerning developmental change is not in itself resolved by insisting on the individual–environment mutuality. Still, environment can be what “surrounds” (rather than what is produced and negotiated) and still, the individual may adapt (rather than contribute productively) by changing the environment and thereby him/herself. In other words, affordance theory is challenged by a choice: (a) to accept mutuality to mean a fit of organism and environment and, as a consequence, to remain a non-developmental theory, or (b) theorize the non-fit of human productivity, which is also the source of developmental change at an individual, as well as at a societal, level. This latter possibility is the way that we suggest for affordance theory and the way in which affordance theory actually can add productively to understanding development.

The background discussion for the developmental change versus adaptation ambivalence may be identified as a matter of what a theorist regards as the ground on which psychology stands: what is its “starting point”? To Gibson, it is perception. Psychology in this view begins with the individual meeting the surrounding environment, that is, it is a realism of material things interacting with bodies. Engelsted (1983), who writes within the activity theoretical approach to psychology, considers that, basically, psychology begins with the phenomenon of reference to the future. He suggests the term autokinesis to grasp this idea. Even very simple organisms are characterized by self-initiated action when searching for food which is not yet present and available to that organism, and therefore search activity (somewhat similar to Gibson’s explorative activity) becomes a crucial starting point for psychology. Engelsted tries to explain how the primary kind of activity must be a behavioral relating to the world (autokinesis) rather than a behavioral responding to the world (servo-kinesis). This is especially interesting in cases where important stimuli are not present in the situation or, put differently, in the absence of (sensorial) perceivable objects. Activity in such a situation is present despite the absence of external stimuli (Bang, 2009a, 2009b). We find that affordance theory will become enriched by absorbing such ideas and revise the axiom that perception is the first principle for psychology.

Third ambivalence: The environment as naturally occurring versus the environment as humanly produced

Human life seems to present a challenge to Gibson’s theory. As a consequence of him opposing Cartesianism, he argues that there is only one world (rather than a physical and a mental one—but also rather than a natural and a cultural one), and we find that perhaps it is because of this very important point that he becomes too theoretically unaware of what constitutes the specific characters of human life. Furthermore, he (Gibson, 1986) continuously thinks along the lines of bodily and environmental features. Apparently, Gibson believes that humans do change their environment; however, he does so from the somewhat limited perspective of the near-the-body affordance qualities and for hedonistic purposes. He views the human environment as a mere modification of the (old) natural environment and in no way separated from it. His argument for this non-separation is that the fundamentals are the same for all animals, including humans. He is aware that we as humans are created by the world we live in, but seems unaware that the essential character of humans (according to the cultural-historical theory) is that we create, purposely produce, and construct our own conditions of life, that is, our own environment. He says:

Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment? To change what it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him. In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harder for most of the animals. Over the millennia, he has made it easier for himself to get food, easier to keep warm, easier to see at night, easier to get about, and easier to train his offspring. This is not a new environment—an artificial environment distinct from the natural environment—but the same old environment modified by man. It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial as if there were two environments; artifacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. It is also a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. … The fundamentals of the environment—the substances, the medium, and the surfaces—are the same for all animals. … We are created by the world we live in. (Gibson, 1986, p. 130)

The quote reveals an interesting inconsistency: on the one hand he acknowledges that humans alter the environment to change what it affords them (a dialectical take on the human/environment relation) but on the other hand he states that we are created by the world we live in (more in line with ecological determinism). Gibson’s non-distinction between the natural and the cultural seems to create new problems for affordance theory when trying to extend it into the human domain—it becomes impossible to discriminate between what is merely used and what is produced. To return to an earlier point in the article, we propose that some of these challenges to affordance theory are due to the fact that Gibson starts with “perception,” that is, with an understanding of environment as the immediate perceivable features; this offers a somewhat flat and ahistorical understanding of both environment and of the individual–environment relationship. Affordance theory limits itself to deal with what is immediately perceivable to a present observer, whereas what is needed from the perspective of human life is a theory that can deal with the historical (i.e., produced) character of human life. Not all that is produced can be reduced to object features and therefore Gibson is, we feel, in error by taking that route. A few object examples from Gibson (1986) serve to illustrate our argumentation.

A shelter

According to Gibson, shelters are generally hollow objects and human animals build huts: a hut has a site on the ground, and it is an attached object from the outside, but it also has an inside. Its usual features are, first, a roof that is “get-underneath-able” and thus affords protection from rain and snow and direct sunlight; second, walls, which afford protection from wind and prevent the escape of heat; and, third, a doorway, to afford entry and exit, an opening. In this example a shelter is described only on the basis of foundations of the environment (as Gibson suggests). By doing so, he establishes a non-distinction between the natural and the cultural and a shelter becomes an object just like any other object with perceivable features. However, it also becomes an object without history; it is not part of the story of why it was made (beyond the simplest idea that it is to hide inside).

A tool

The same non-differentiation is seen in Gibson’s ideas about tools. According to Gibson, tools are

detached objects of a very special sort. They are graspable, portable, manipulable, and usually rigid. The purposive use of such objects is not entirely confined to the human animal, for other animals and other primates take advantage of thorns and rocks and sticks in their behavior, but humans are probably the only animals who make tools and are surely the only animals who walk on two feet in order to keep their hands free. … An elongated object, especially if weighted at one end and graspable at the other, affords hitting or hammering. … A graspable object with a rigid sharp edge affords cutting and scraping. … A pointed object affords piercing. … These tools may be combined in various ways to make other tools. (Gibson, 1986, pp. 40–41)

As we can see from the example, Gibson is very well aware of the produced nature of tools and of buildings. However, he does not take any theoretical consequences of this insight and limits his analysis of tools to (a) non-differentiated character of animal and human tools with regard to (b) practical-functional affordances. In fact, both affordance and tools are reduced to fit with his functional theory of perception. The theoretical determination of huts and tools remains at the level of immediate use and only addresses the functional aspects. Hence, he still thinks along the lines of material properties relative to human bodily properties and does not get beyond that level of analysis.

The self-constraining ideas in affordance theory

The fact that humans produce their own conditions of life by altering their environment (adding to, changing, removing from) implies that new needs and new motives for action are created, and so far affordance theory falls short in theorizing about these processes. Gibson limits his theorizing about human life mostly to basic needs (food, shelter, etc.) and he views the environment as that with which the human (body) is in direct eco-physical contact. This analysis implies that a major challenge to affordance theory is how to transcend immediacy and how to make an affordance theory more meaningful and usable in relation to human societal conditions. Gibson’s idea of taking perception as the starting point for psychology adds to the impression that affordance theory is theoretically unprepared for moving beyond immediacy. Affordance seems to refer to what an organism can do, and how it can act, given the relational features of the world. No distinction is made when it comes to human life. Gibson’s “solution” to the problem of culture and artifacts is to invent “indirect” knowledge. This, in our view, is an unsatisfactory and misguiding path.

We find that the non-distinction between the natural world and the cultural world constitutes a theoretical obstacle which makes it difficult to approach human life without ending up with either limited determinations of human life, or with a reduction of cultural objects to their natural and perceivable functional properties. But artifacts (humanly produced objects of any sort, some of which are physical while others are not) are reifications of complex, layered, and even contradictory sets of human needs. Furthermore, some humans may have needs that contradict other human needs; and some humans may carry out institutional needs which are materialized into organized and institutionalized sets of action. To return to Gibson’s examples, an analysis of the hut along these theoretical lines might reveal the generalized and cultural character of the human needs embedded into its construction. It is always-already a materialization of human culture at a certain point in history and for certain purposes. Standards are examples of societal reifications, though not “material.” Humans live by, and contribute to altering, such standards thereby becoming individual persons. We do find it frustrating that the very core idea of recent affordance theory (which contributes so productively to anti-dualism in psychology) also seems—and for the very same reason as it is productive—to be a hindrance to understanding both subjectivity and artifacts. Gibson’s theory captures neither.

In some sense, Gibson’s solution to the problematic dichotomy between the individual and the environment lies in his idea of mutuality. Ironically, Gibson’s idea of mutuality of organism and environment expressed in his affordance theory blurs the possibility of understanding individuals as more than organisms interacting with always immediate surroundings with which they are sensuously in touch; so far, affordance theory thus falls short in understanding individuals as societal beings, with societal and individual histories of becoming. Similarly, and so far, affordance theory cannot understand artifacts as more than immediately available objects which are sources of stimulation for an organism; and it cannot understand the historical nature of artifacts. Those are two serious limitations to affordance theory.

Behavior affords behavior – The beginning of a social turn in affordance theory

Of course, Gibson’s affordance theory is not at all blind to the social realities of other persons. However, his approach to persons is somewhat similar to his approach to objects and one may articulate similar limitations to this view. He almost describes persons as if they are natural objects, thus, ignoring both the subjectivity of the person and the person as a cultural object. He says: “The richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are provided by other animals and, for us, other people” (Gibson, 1986, p. 135). Even though Gibson does not elaborate too much on the social dimensions of affordances, he does offer it some attention and describes the mutuality among humans:

When touched they touch back, when struck they strike back; in short, they interact with the observer and with one another. Behavior affords behavior, and the whole subject matter of psychology and of the social sciences can be thought of as an elaboration of this basic fact. (Gibson, 1986, p. 135)

As with the perception of the environment in general, the perception of other people as affordances depends on the perception of light, touch, sound, odor, taste; the use of the sensory organs (Gibson, 1986), and thus maintains Gibson’s primary focus on the perceptual capabilities:

The other animals afford, above all, a rich and complex set of interactions, sexual, predatory, nurturing, fighting, playing, cooperating, and communicating. What other persons afford, comprises the whole realm of social significance for human beings. (Gibson, 1986, p. 128)

Again, we realize the theoretical limitations of affordance theory when it is not able to move beyond the momentary perception approach to persons. Social complexity mainly consists of bodies moving in space and interacting with one another, altering the physical environment to better fit their needs. Neither historical nor societal aspects of affordances are being addressed.

Inspired by Gibson, as well as the possible limitations of affordance theory, social psychologists within an ecological framework have worked productively to extend his theory with regards to the social (note—not the societal) reality of human life. Up until the 1980s, ecologists only studied the dependence of the organism on the environment, as Ghilarov notes (1983, as cited in Costall, 2001). According to Good (2007), attempts to extend Gibson’s theory primarily arose in the early 1980s, first in the US and soon after in Europe. The main focus was on social perception and cognition (e.g., Baron & Harvey, 1980; Berry & McArthur, 1986; McArthur & Baron, 1983), and subsequently there has been considerable criticism³ of the failure of the ecological approach to develop research designs that involve active perceivers of interaction (Good, 2007). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, papers have been published focusing mainly on the potential overlaps and mutually enriching aspects of ecological and social psychology, for example, Runeson and Frykholm’s (1983) attempt to show that not only social cognition, but also social perception, is possible. Central to all of it were the sociality and materiality of situations and actions (Hodges & Baron, 2007). Contemporary social psychologists within the ecological field of psychology have taken up Gibson’s notions and in various ways have attempted to develop them further in order to make social psychology more ecological and vice versa. Baron (2007) proposes that ecological psychology and social psychology share a commitment to the same ordering principle, namely that of reciprocity. Baron and Hodges represent a number of ecological psychologists working within the field of social psychology, making major contributions to the continuous expansion of the social aspects of ecological theory. However, as we see it, they still struggle to move beyond a traditional and rather narrow account of the “social” (keeping in mind of course, that this may not have been their intention either).

Others, such as Schmidt (2007), Good (2007), and Kono (2009), work in the same line of thought but seem to apply a broader understanding of the “social.” Schmidt (2007) tries to determine whether or not an ecological theory of meaning could be applied to opportunities for social action and so suggests how social knowing could better be understood in terms of ecological psychology. The ecological theory of meaning is based upon the theory of affordances and is thus relational. The meaning of an object exists as part of an eco-niche and emerges from the perceiver’s relationship to the environment, and hence does not exist inside the head of the perceiver.

According to Schmidt (2007), there is a tendency to treat meaning for perception separately from meaning for cognition, which he considers the largest impediment against moving beyond this very problem. The social and physical environments are often nested, meaning that their meanings exist side by side in natural perception. However, the social environment is made up by more than people; inanimate objects as well may have social meanings, thus adding a social dimension to material objects. Schmidt uses the example of his coffee cup: from an ecological perspective it affords grasping, because of its shape and the fit between the shape of the cup and the size of his hand. However, as it is his cup that he got as a present from his daughter, and that he uses every morning, it does not only afford graspability, but also carries additional meanings, such as his affection for his daughter—the meanings tied to the cup relate to more than its physical properties and to fully understand these, we must include the temporally extended and historical fashion in which the social properties of the object (the cup) exist: as inherently intersubjective. Social affordances emerge from the way people behave and they are properties that “arise as a consequence of behavior and are relational and higher order than mere physical properties” (Schmidt, 2007, p. 143). We fully agree with Schmidt that the ontology of the social world needs to be taken seriously and this includes both social others as well as artifacts; objects afford particular social uses and therefore also have social affordance qualities. Kono (2009) proposes the study of affordances as a relevant contribution to the study of social reality; with an emphasis on how it is detected, and how it regulates human action.

Historicizing affordances

Ecological psychology has evolved around perception and action and one might sum up that the main interest regarding the social has been in the shape of social perception. However, theorists are also aware of the historical character of affordances, which is not identical with its social character. For instance, Good (2007) finds that “social affordances must be seen as partially determined and thus constrained, and partially indeterminate and thereby emergent” (Good, 2007, p. 280). He emphasizes the concurrent historically constituted and individually dependent aspect of affordances and he argues that a fully ecological or mutualist social psychology has yet to be developed: “A successful adoption of an ecological approach will require a thoroughgoing conceptual retooling and not just an acceptance of the utility of the notion of affordance or of direct perception” (Good, 2007, p. 280).

Heft (2007) also wrestles with the social perception approach to the “social.” He finds that it tends to put limitations on the conceptualization of the social within ecological psychology. To him, the social constitutes “part of the background conditions from which ecological psychology itself operates” (Heft, 2007, p. 86). Even though Heft uses the term “social,” he does so in an extended and historicized manner in which “social” refers to the history of both the person and the environment. Thus, he argues that both the environment and the individual are saturated with sociality. Heft historicizes the perception–action processes by arguing that they need to be seen as permeated with the social. He considers that skills develop in relation to socially constructed features of the environment, which implies that eco-niches have already been created and shaped by generations past; and therefore, cannot be conceptualized as a natural environment per se. Furthermore, perceiving is an act of selection that stems in part from the developmental history which implies collaboration with other individuals. Following Heft, perception (and perceptual skills) should be understood not only in relation to ontogenetic development, but also in relation to socio-genetic development:

Indeed, to a considerable degree once an individual’s ontogenetic history is taken into consideration, perception–action processes need to be viewed as socially mediated processes, even when what is perceived might be conventionally regarded as a nonsocial feature of the environment. Social influences are at work from the earliest points of ontogenetic development. (Heft, 2007, p. 92)

Along the same lines of historicizing the “social,” both Costall (1995) and Heft (1989) hold the view that not only objects, but also human activity, are socially and culturally developed and transformed. According to Costall (1995), nature is inherently social and as humans we grow up surrounded by artifacts that are shaped by human interventions through time. He emphasizes that “things, surfaces, even animals and plants, have been shaped by human intervention, either deliberately, as in design of implements, or else unconsciously: paths, for example, are created as incidental products of the very activity of walking” (Costall, 1995, p. 471), and he concludes with a reference to Leontjev that “We thus inhabit, as do many other animals, a world already ‘transformed by the activity of generations’” (as cited in Costall, 1995, p. 471). The cultural-historical perspective becomes even more prominent when Costall stresses how objects are experienced in relation to the practice in which they have meaning. This implies that our activity with a given object is channeled, not only by the form of the object and its practical functional properties relative to a perceiver, but also by its socially (historically) structured setting. Affordances do not “appear out of nowhere”; rather, they are learned through other people—with or without explicit instructions. In Costall’s argumentation, we see a highlight of the historical character of affordances both in relation to social life and artifacts, and, in particular, to individual learning and appropriation. As he says: “learning about affordances does not simply concern the uses an object happens to afford, but what it is meant to afford” (Costall, 1995, p. 472). And further: “objects do not simply exist, they are ‘maintained’” (p. 473).

With Costall’s expanded understanding of objects to include the reproductive side, we are approximating cultural-historical psychology (for a more thorough account of Costall’s discussion of Gibson’s affordance theory, see, e.g., Costall, 1995). We are approaching the question of how to move affordance theory in the direction of the development and the history of persons as well as to how the development and the history of persons are interrelated with the history and the specific historical character of human society, human standards, ideological realities, etc. With regard to Gibson’s attempt to create a relational ontology, Costall concludes that “the social” remains somewhat suspicious and in this sense Gibson fails:

To suppose that the social is unreal is either to confound these two different senses of the natural [the natural as lawful order versus the natural by exclusion—untouched by humans], or to assume that the social is weird. Moreover, the appeal to things-in-themselves (or worse still, affordances-in-themselves) as they exist beyond animals, beyond society, beyond culture, is hardly a defense of ecological realism, but its very negation. (Costall, 1995, p. 478)

According to Costall, an ecological psychology must encompass the mutually transformative relations between livings beings and their material conditions. Both Heft and Costall allow us to expand our comprehension of the social in line with more precisely addressing it as “societal.”

Affordance theory and the “axiom of immediacy”

To sum up, socializing and historicizing affordances are important steps towards bringing affordance theory into resonance with cultural-historical theory. This resonance will make it possible to understand how persons live with and live by human standards, how they relate to them and how they develop through the character of their relationship with them. Standards (we presume) often appear as a “natural order of things” to individuals—even when they reflect about them, they may also at the same time just perceive them. The direct perceiving of that which is culturally constructed and even complex and contradictory in character is one of the reasons why cultural-historical theory needs affordance theory. On the other hand, affordance theory needs cultural-historical theory in order to make sense in relation to the societal nature of the individual–environment relationship.

Often, a confusing distinction is made between that which is “immediate” and that which is “mediated.” We believe that affordance theory and cultural-historical theory agree that there is a riddle here to be solved. As we have tried to outline earlier in this paper, Gibson is only partly successful in his attempt to solve it. He is successful in the sense that he rejects a behavioristic understanding of immediacy as “stimulus” and replaces it with an ecological mutualist account. But still, he tends to retain immediacy in his theorizing of mutuality. Furthermore, he does not offer any good theoretical account of the historical and societal nature of human life as being different from animal life. The riddle of the “mediated” nature of human life, in his theory becomes “indirect” perception, which is not a very useful term. We claim that affordance theory still needs to be brought beyond “the axiom of immediacy,” as Leontjev terms it (likewise with a reference to behaviorism), since this move is only half done. In this manner, the strong ideas of direct perceiving and of perception–action mutuality remain intact while synthesized with ideas of societal human life.

In order to reach this point in our analysis, we will next go a bit further into the “immediacy” issues as they are viewed from the perspective of Leontjev’s cultural-historical activity theory. Writing from the perspective of activity theory, A. N. Leontjev (1975/2002) considers that a main problem in psychology is the pervasive “stimulus-response” thinking, behind which sits the axiom of immediacy. Despite numerous attempts to dissolve it, it remains a challenge to psychology. As Leontjev suggests, the solution may be found in instating activity as a connecting mediating “point” in between individual and environment, however as a reciprocal process, not as unidirectional and causal. His view is that “The activity is … not a reaction and a collection of reactions, but a system with a structure, with its inner transitions and transformations and with its own development” (Leontjev, 1975/2002, p. 54, own translation from Danish version).

Differentiating the notion of activity

Bærentsen and Trettvik (2002) argued that Gibson employs an undifferentiated notion of affordances, because he does not account for the internal dynamic structure of activity, as suggested in Leontjev’s (1975/2002) activity theory. According to Leontjev, an activity is understood as a hierarchical three-level system of control consisting of operations, actions, and (life) activities. Leontjev introduces the concept of activity to account for the dialectical relationship between the subject and society—to account for the life activities of the subject in a societal world; comprising of more than the mere situated actions and operations of the subject. Activities can be broken down into actions that can be further divided into operations; a top-down organization from activities to operations and bottom-up constitution from operations to activities, the most conscious level being that of actions, whereas both the operational level and the activity level can be made conscious depending on the situation. Bærentsen and Trettvik describe it in the following manner:

Activities consist of actions that are realized by operations. Concrete activities are always motivated, goal directed and adapted to the conditions of action. The three constituents of activity are not separate entities, but rather systematic relationships relating it to needs, intentions and conditions. (2002, p. 53)

They review Gibson’s work overall (including his affordance theory) from these conceptual interrelationships and find that Gibson’s theory is limited to what Leontjev thinks of as the operational side of activities:

When looked at from this perspective, it seems to us that Gibson’s focus was on the operational side of activity, in his treatment of “behavior.” His focus was on the perceptual requirements of the operational realization of activity, the information that is available in the environment that lets the organism control locomotion and simple forms of object related activities. (p. 54)

In Gibson’s account of affordances, his focus is on the “fit” between the perceiver and the environment and his examples mostly point to functional aspects such as graspable, cut-able, etc., thus mostly relating to functional or partial aspects of human life. Bærentsen and Trettvik (2002) and Trettvik (2001) suggest that much of the confusion with regard to the analytical use of the concept of affordances is related to the incapability of the ecological framework to account for the inherent foundation of affordances in activity. They find that, even though affordances are described by Gibson as existing independently of the observer (in the environment), as potentialities of the environment,

these objective features only become affordances when some organisms relate to them in their activity. Affordances are therefore features of “activity systems” that include both the physical environment and the organismic prerequisites of phylogenetic origin that is genetically transmitted from generation to generation as species-specific adaptations to existing ecological niches. In the case of humans, affordances are also provided by external objects—e.g. tools—that are designed for use in specific forms of societal praxis. (Bærentsen & Trettvik, 2002, p. 54)

In their central criticism, Bærentsen and Trettvik productively focus on the theoretical need to overcome an undifferentiated notion of activity so as to bring affordance theory forward in relation to not only the operational level of activities but to human activity as such. Taking Bærentsen and Trettvik’s points seriously, the project of integrating affordance theory with central accounts of cultural-historical activity theory can readily be further elaborated and enriched. For that purpose, we will take a closer look at “activity” from Leontjev’s theoretical perspective. Leontjev explicitly theorizes activity as an integral part of the societal character of human life—and this is what we are heading for with affordance theory, since it is the key to understanding the affordances of specific societal (historical) standards in the everyday life of persons. Leontjev repeatedly returns to the point that:

it (activity) cannot be regarded as something extracted from social relations, from the life of society. Despite all its diversity, all its special features the activity of the human individual is a system that obeys the system of relations of society. Outside these relations human activity does not exist. (Leontjev, 1977, p. 182)

Further, with regard to the individual, he finds that the societal conditions “carry in themselves the motives and aims of his activity, the ways and means of its realization; in a word, that society produces human activity” (1977, p. 182). This view implies that human activity can only be understood as intertwined with societal conditions; further, that actions and operations carried out by the individual are dialectically interrelated with those societal conditions, and hence contribute in complex manners to upholding and transforming those conditions. The way in which different kinds of objects are being used cannot be thought of as following a fixed pattern. Rather, transformations and inventions of cultural standards are likely to occur over time and their affordances may change and/or be contradictory. In other words, the affordance of a societal standard may be conflictual; however, it also may be transformative, since the way in which a person relates to the standard can change over time, just as the standard may change and the person may change.

As Leontjev (1977) states, the activity of the subject is in the environment. Indeed, this is a very ecological point taken to a new level in that he strongly underlines how the quality and diversity of activities have influenced the development of persons. When looking at human societies and the specific character of the individual–environment relationship, affordances are not only properties of the environment acting as stimuli for the subject. They are interwoven with ongoing societal standards and transformations into which individual subjects collectively engage themselves and to which they contribute continuously. Following Leontjev’s account, persons develop through their own activities in a societal world. The societal world cannot be deducted from the psyche so to speak; nor can it be reduced to the social world. Hence it follows that what the person perceives as affordances will be inextricably connected to—and dependent on—the specific and particular societal environment, which constitutes the environmental ground for the activities of that person.

To sum up, we believe that affordance theory can vitalize itself and gain new theoretical influence within new areas of psychology (such as developmental theory) by transcending a functional approach bound to an individual organism’s operations in an immediate (perceiving and acting) relationship with the immediate environment. Affordance theory can make itself more useable by theorizing itself in relation to a societal form of activity. Thereby affordance theory becomes essential to a (human) ecological theory of development. Still, there may be pick-up of information quite similar to Gibson’s original point. But the pick-up of information is also a production of information; hence, it becomes important also to understand how the subject relates to the environment and co-creates affordances through the activity, that is, through societal reality and needs. The human eco-niche is an open, future-oriented, and transformative one and affordance theory must be able to theoretically deal with this fact. Humans participate in ongoing societal practices. Therefore, Gibson’s idea of direct perception requires a societal dimension in order to reveal its potentialities for human life. Employing the term “social affordances” will not suffice because it does not sufficiently capture (a) the societal character of human life, (b) the historical character of society, and finally, it does not allow us to (c) move beyond the level of immediacy in a coherent theoretical way.

The affording of standards

In our view, the theoretical task is to conceive affordance so as to explain how human activities are always simultaneously mediated and immediate. By that we mean that in the activities, a person always relates to the historical character of human life (here: standards) which implies that the activity is mediated; at the same time, the person meets a given standard as an environmental feature (if negotiable) which implies that the activity is immediate and the standard presents itself as an immediate object. When dealing with standards as immediate objects, the person enacts the perceiving–acting circle in a manner similar to the basic explorative activities suggested by Gibson and similar to how he conceived of affordances. The difference is that even though standards in human life do present themselves to the active and perceiving person, they also have an historical character, which does not appear as an “object” in itself; rather through the form of material objects or social and societal structures. What the person meets is thus the “naturalizations” of historical processes creating the strength and the power of standards.

To better grasp the process and negotiated character of societal standards, we suggest thinking along the lines of affording (rather than affordance). In other words, we suggest the affording of societal standards to be a meaningful way to grasp the specific societal character of affordance theory. Costall and Richards (2013) already proposed the verb “affording” to replace “affordances” in cases where one wishes to emphasize the negotiation process by which something acquires affordance quality: “Affordances are not simply discovered, but nor are they mentally projected upon inherently meaningless things. They are negotiated” (p. 91). We do believe this new term to be important in order to stress the point that affordance has meaning relative to the person in an open-ended and non-fit manner, as suggested earlier. It brings about the active subject that negotiates the meaning of specific standards in relation to society. In other words, by employing the term of affording, we aim at keeping the invitational character of the environment in focus while underlining that it can only be properly understood with regard to the societal practices and standards in relation to which it occurs. Bærentsen and Trettvik point out that, “In artifacts the affordances are produced intentionally and are specifically designed for the inclusion in cultural-historical forms of practice” (2002, p. 57).

In our view, the concept of “affording of societal standards” embraces Gibson’s cultural examples like the hut as a shelter and the tool. Those are not merely objects with physical qualities; they are the “up until now” outcome of historical creativity, which overall characterizes human beings. One might say that the process of creating human societal life with its artifacts as standards takes place through the continuous co-creation of affordances (therefore affording) at a collective level (through artifacts, language, morals, expectations, behavioral demands, control, etc.), on the one hand, and at a personal level (through personal sense-making processes with regard to all this), on the other hand.

Our claim is that affording in relation to societal standards subsumes affordance viewed as a perceiving–acting system of exploring the specific environment and its specific object qualities. The totality of this synthesis turns affording into a complex system of societal meaning of standards and their object qualities. As a consequence, the perceiving–acting system (which Bærentsen & Trettvik, 2002, thought of as similar to Leontjev’s operations) is always-already synthetic with societal processes of meaning. Therefore, being actively involved with human perceiving–acting circles implies that not only practical usability but also (ideologically and politically loaded) meaning systems are at work relative to the person (young people in a high school setting, for example). Culture, in this view, is not an additional level that makes perceiving “indirect” in opposition to “direct” perceiving of physical things. Rather, the immediate human environments are the reifications (materially and ideally) of historically developed practices and value systems, which constitute the grounds on which individuals with a personal history act meaningfully in close connection with the actualities of ordinary everyday life. To understand the role of affordance in human life, one needs to conceive how the perceiving–acting circle is still at work while at the same time transcended due to the fact that humans continuously change, create, and produce their own conditions of life. The standards in human life both are and do. They “are” the reifications of human societal practices in a contradictory mix of expectations; and they “do” in the sense that they present themselves as inescapable.

On a final note, we argue that affordance theory and cultural-historical theory in combination open new doors for understanding and analyzing human life; specifically, we find a revised concept of affordance to have significant potential for an ecological theory of development. From an ecological perspective, development should be understood in relation to the individual–environment reciprocity. In this way, the idea of individual–environment reciprocity opens up for understanding the subtle, complex, contradictory, and layered reciprocity of persons and their specific societal environments.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was partly funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research.

Notes

Author biographies

Sofie Pedersen, MA. Psych., PhD, is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, and a consultant in social psychiatry. Her main research interests cover youth development, developmental processes in general, and developmental work in the frame of social psychiatry; from a perspective of ecological psychology, cultural-historical psychology, and critical psychology. She has an interest in the transaction of individual and environment, with a focus on the built and the social environment—and specifically the developmental possibilities and constraints that are offered and/or created (e.g., in various institutional settings).

Jytte Bang, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. In her research she is concerned with developmental psychology and foundational issues in psychology related to subject–object dualism. Theoretically, she mostly works within the frame of ecological psychology and cultural-historical activity theory. More specifically, she is occupied with studying the child’s reciprocal and developing relationship with his/her environment and with the theoretical issues that it raises, such as how can emergence of “newness” be studied in microgenesis, and how can the concept of “self” make sense within ecological developmental theory. She is an editorial board member of Culture & Psychology, Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, Journal of Anthropological Psychology, and Psyke & Logos.

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