Why do most things seem to come loaded with meaning or value? More curious yet, how do so many things that appear pre-disposed to particular meanings still fade into the background on occasion? Early German psychologist Kurt Koffka explained these curious facts by arguing that all things exist as both ‘behavioral’ and ‘geographical’ objects. Geographical objects just lie there, accessible to the senses and methods of measurement, but relatively neutral in our perception until we have a need for them. At that moment of need, the behavioral object comes forth and takes on meaning.[i]
I suspect that description elicits some nods, or at least the mental variant of a nod often vocalized as ‘uh-huh.’ The dualism manifest in Koffka schema is inherent in European and American acculturation in general and education in particular – so it should be very comfortable for the European or American reader. In some sense, however, the behavior/geography duality is little more than a reassertion of the essentialist distinction between subjective and objective qualities of things that the preceding meditations have gone to some lengths to dispute.
J.J. Gibson read Koffka. Gibson was uncomfortable with the idea that the value or meaning of a thing shifts with the needs of an observer. He, instead, turned to his notion of affordances as a foundation for value or meaning. “The affordance does not change as the need of the observer changes. The observer may or may not perceive or attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be perceived.”[ii] That is to say, the value that any given thing supports or affords – whether symbolic or functional – does not waver with the whims of its user of the moment. It always affords certain things; some people notice, and some don’t.
This brings us back to the difficult, and now seemingly contradictory, notion that settings are affordances that work against pre-interpretation, or affordances of vagueness and beauty framing volition by careful manipulation of order, duration, and frequency. That’s a bit pithy and needs unpacking, to put it mildly.
For the purpose of this week’s meditation, let’s start by breaking this pithy description into a few fundamental components. Settings presuppose a point of view (POV) and a narrative voice. According to Paul Ricoeur, POV and voice are critical to “fictive experiences of time.” Settings then are places in which narrators and characters come to the fore. But settings and their characters exist in relation. The former makes affordances for the latter so that the ecosystem or narrative whole is symbiotic if it is to be successful. In Ricoeur’s own pithy prose, “a narrative cannot be a mimesis of action without being at the same time a mimesis of acting beings.”[iii] In my own retelling, places cannot be understood as settings without being mimetic of characters and human volition.
“Touch a limit to your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery.”[iv] Marilynne Robinson’s words evoke the magic of human experience (Jean-Paul Sartre would say the nature of Being-For-Itself) through which vagueness and beauty enter the world.[v] From this perspective, when we say that settings are affordances that work against pre-interpretation, we are advocating for settings that seem to have the human attributes of mystery or volition or of calling identities into question. How does this make sense? We are dealing with affordances, constructed of concrete or drywall – hard, physical objects/instances of Being-In-Itself – that have purpose(s) and are organized in some way? How are we to understand design processes capable of casting objects as meaningful?
For those hard materialists who believe we have unfettered access to the world of our senses, there is no answer. In fact, if you believe in simple or direct perception of whatever stripe, the question is nonsensical. But perception engages in make-believe. It speculates. We see things not how they are but how we expect them. Our visual system, for instance, leaps ahead of the world in order to make up for the lag time of our nervous system. We remember moving objects farther along their trajectory than they were when we saw them.[vi] Similar types of perceptual leaps (of faith) are hardwired in the brain for all the senses, and these are the basis for numerous illusions as well as the world we think of as ‘real.’ From this perspective, the design of settings that seem to have human attributes becomes meaningful.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 130.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 88.
[iv] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 119.
[v] Here, I must acknowledge my own philosophical upbringing via Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology in which to be human means, among many other things, to be the type of being that calls the identity of the world into question. A glossy overview of these ideas is available in my essay, “Facing Up to the Realities,” in Jimi Hendrix and Philosophy: experience required, edited by Theodore Ammon (Chicago: Open Court, 2018), 101-108.
[vi] This has been termed “representational momentum.” J.J. Freyd and R.A. Finke, “Representational Momentum,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 10, no. 1 (January 1984): 126-132.
Architecture is Fiction 