Eric Rietveld on Affordances
“Situated Normativity: The Normative Aspect of Embodied Cognition in Unreflective Action”
by Erik Rietveld
Mind 117 (468): 973-1001.
Like Richard Sennett, Eric Rietveld (who is a landscape architect as well as a philosopher), is interested in the individual embodiment of the craftsman and his or her “concerns” (f. Latour of “matters of concern vs. matters of fact”). He is after “the normativity of the craftsman’s actions” (p. 977) He is interested in the act of “being moved to improve,” which concerns “object-oriented responsiveness, context sensitivity, emotion, and normative instinct,” all “characteristic of skillful unreflective action” (p. 996). Unlike Gibson, Rietveld’s emphasis is not on optics, but rather on how the skilled artisan interacts with the tools of his craft. All of this strikes me as eminently relevant to a study of the life of objects in the world of the theater.
“Expertise and skill are acquired through a history of training and
experience in a socio-cultural practice. Once a skill is acquired, the relationship between body and world is modified. The individual is now attuned to a familiar environment. At that moment the level of ability rises to the point where the individual is able to perceive and respond unreflectively, yet adequately, to what Gibson called ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979, p. 127; Michaels 2003). Affordances are in this paper understood as an organism’s possibilities for action in some situation.5 I focus on the phenomenology of affordances.6 Or better, on the phenomenological description and analysis of an individual’s responsiveness to affordances.” p(p. 976-77)
“I will suggest that the skillful individual’s responsiveness to relevant affordances forms the core of the normative aspect of unreflective action. I will refer to such responsiveness as ‘being moved to improve’ by a relevant affordance or object.7 I am aware that this technical notion will sound odd to most philosophers. Still I want to use it here, because it helps me to do justice to the facets of emotion and normativity in the phenomenology of this responsiveness.” (p. 977)
CONCLUSION:
“To conclude, skills and concerns get their shape within a socio-cultural practice. Once they are acquired the relationship between body and world is modified. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of skillful action in context; of embodied cognition in unreflective action. ... Responsiveness to relevant affordances forms the core of the normative aspect of unreflective action. The phenomenology of this can be characterized as being moved to improve by relevant affordances.” (p. 996)
Rietveld discusses these issues in the context of Merleau-Ponty:
“The Skillful Body as a Concernful System of Possible Actions
Phenomena and Neurodynamics,” Theory and Psychology 18(3): 341-363.
ABSTRACT: “For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness in skillful coping is a matter of prereflective ‘I can’ and not explicit ‘I think that.’ The body unifies many domain-specific capacities. There exists a direct link between the perceived possibilities for action in the situation (‘affordances’) and the organism’s
capacities. From Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions it is clear that in a flow of skillful actions, the leading ‘I can’ may change from moment to moment without explicit deliberation. How these transitions occur, however, is less clear. Given that Merleau-Ponty suggested that a better understanding of the
self-organization of brain and behavior is important, I will re-read his descriptions of skillful coping in the light of recent ideas on neurodynamics. Affective processes play a crucial role in evaluating the motivational significance of objects and contribute to the individual’s prereflective responsiveness
to relevant affordances.” p. 341
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