Gibson was one of the first psychologists to acknowledge that perception is composed of variant and invariant structures – the invariant components being composed of rigid surfaces in the environment and the changing components being artifacts of locomotion – and that these structures are ‘concurrent.’ Both always exist in the environment if an animal is present. And each reveals different information. Invariant structures provide information about the environment. Locomotion and rest, on the other hand, “contain information about the potential observer, not information about the environment.”[i] Gibson’s approach avoids the errors in recent philosophical approaches to perceptual common knowledge, which tend to focus on the relation between observer and either the background or figures.[ii] Gibson’s approach can be understood as framing perception as triadic – an invariant environment, a varying scene, and a fiction-making animal who has different knowledge relations with each.
The invariant environment is the direct territory of architectural intervention in the world (occasional forays into moving architecture – Calatrava or revolving restaurants, notwithstanding). This fixed layout provides the stage against which communications of difference become possible. While ultimately important[iii] and central to our purpose, let’s set aside the invariant environment for the moment. The question at hand, instead, is the emergence of environmental experience as action, story, and narrative.
Changing as fiction-making animals move, the variant structures of perception are those components that imply action. Stated differently, changes in the perceptual environment let us know that either it or we are moving. These alterations, of course, do not convey narrative in isolation, or in or of themselves. Whether read or haptically experienced, narrative acquisition is a step beyond mere awareness of difference. Written and constructed narratives are similar in their demands. As Paul Ricoeur notes of the former: “there is nothing specifically narrative about an isolated action sentence.”[iv] It is in retrospect that a sequence of statements become a narrative – likewise with what I will call experiential narrative. Narrative emerges when we can tell, or retell, a sequence of events such that they appear as a story. That is, when experience fully becomes language.
This requirement raises the bar. Language, Marilynne Robinson said, “reflects a consensus of subjectivities.”[v]The elevation of experienced events to the level of language requires more than the solipsistic report of a lone individual or mystic of a world that may exist only in a hallucination. Narrative requires shared understanding of objects in motion or people in motion relative to objects.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 68.
[ii] For example, the “common factor” and “disjunctivist” theories. See Seeman, The Shared World, 68-70.
[iii] “[T]he function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them,” see Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 45.
[iv] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 58.
[v] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 78.
Architecture is Fiction 