Affordance in environmental history

Nina Toudal Jessen

Related terms: agency, materiality, material semiotics, more-than-human, non-human

I was first presented with the concept of affordance at a doctoral seminar at the Rachel Carson Centre in Munich in October 2018.[1] I remember hearing the word, thinking the concept would be worth looking into, and then, in the process of writing my doctoral work, forgetting all about it. Two years later, when presenting my thesis on relational landscapes changes over time, I was again presented with the concept. At this point, it resonated with me and became a key approach to my further work on land uses and landscape understandings in 20th-century Denmark.

Affordance refers to the effect an inanimate and non-human object can have. What actions does it spur in an actor that can act, whether deliberately or by instinct? The American psychologist James Gibson developed affordance as the concept and introduced it in a seminal piece in 1979. Affordance should be understood as an inherent property, and in Gibson’s understanding, it refers to the possibility embedded within a physical object in its meeting with a subject, be it human or non-human (Gibson 1979). One should therefore understand inherent properties as always being present as potential. The stone that a human throws into the water might only exist at that moment as an object for that person, while the same stone has served as a hiding place for sand fleas that understood it as a protective object. However, the stone always holds all these possibilities within it.

Affordance has most prominently been taken up by the cognitive scientist and design theorist Don Norman, who, most notably, turned the concept towards a human-computer interface (HCI) discussion (Norman 1999). For Norman and the interaction design community, this perceived virtual or HCI notion of affordance caught on, while the physical properties of the world slipped out of the concept.

The role and the impact of the physical world on human and non-human decision-making, however, was what intrigued me about the concept. I thus focus on how the anthropologist Tim Ingold activates it. To him, examining the physical world through inherent properties and their relations allows us to move away from the idea that our surroundings are either shaped by nature or by culture. Moreover, it allows a redirection from the widespread belief that the human relationship with things and the environment is always governed and mediated by an embedded culture. Instead, the relational aspect allows for the idea that surroundings both shape and are shaped even without a necessary cultural superstructure (Ingold 2007, 5).

To explore what the material does in the shaping of landscapes, one must examine the possibilities and capacities of the material. What does the stone do for its surroundings, and what does a bay do for the environment? It is therefore necessary to consider what properties the physical world has and how these properties initiate change. In my research, I link an understanding of the environment as something that actively influences what can and does happen with the actions of humans, focusing on the relational over time.

Within actor-network theory, actors only gain agency – and thus influence – within relations and networks. Thinking with affordances allows one to incorporate inherent properties to emphasise that not all actors can assume all roles within a network. Gravel cannot dig itself up. In that sense, the gravel and the soil do not have agency beyond the fact that their presence gives rise to certain desires. This approach has been criticised by the geographer Alf Hornborg and the human ecologist Andreas Malm (Hornborg 2017a; Malm and Hornborg 2014). The two have critiqued actor-network theorists and the so-called new materialism for suggesting that material entities could influence human decisions, such as extracting gravel or coal. According to them, it is not the presence of coal or gravel – i.e., the place’s inherent properties – that influences owners to extract it, but rather systemic structures and the logic of capital, which make coal extraction appear rational. Malm and Hornborg are particularly critical of actor-network theorists and new materialism advocates, arguing that attributing agency to non-human actors removes responsibility from humanity, especially from the global North, for climate change (Hornborg 2017b, 2017a; Malm 2018).

I do not see giving voice to the material as the same as uncritically granting all non-human and voiceless beings the same actor status as humans (see also Ejsing 2024). Rather, the Marxist explanatory model becomes too one-sided and deterministic when one, as I do, analyses change and preservation over time. Instead, it is worth recalling the “heterogeneous social construction” of geographer David Demeritt, who argues that physical entities exist outside of the human realm, but human interaction with the physical world is historically shaped and contingent (Fritzbøger 2022; Demeritt 2002).

Coming back to the seminar in the fall of 2018, I presented a case study on a farmer’s decision-making in 1950s rural Denmark. In this work, I was interested in questions of subtle and seemingly everyday changes of landscapes that had long-term repercussions. In other words, the spatial connections between law, landscape, and people. Why did something happen to a place, while nothing happens to others?

In 1955, a farmer chose to allow gravel extraction from a plot of land on a hill. This piece of land had once been part of the village common, but after the land reforms of the late 18^th century, the commons were parcelled and individualised, making it individual property of the village farmers (Jessen 2019, 2021, 2024). In this process, I argued that the land changed for the farmers and villagers. For the property owner in the 1950s, it was his right to allow extraction, as the land was his property, and no regulations prevented him from doing this. The neighbour, however, did not extract gravel from his plot, although it shared geology, and hence both plots had the possibility to support the farm income from farming with that of selling off gravel for road and housing construction. Why this farmer chose to do so, we cannot know; he did not leave any memoirs or other kinds of documentation.

Since then, the plot of land changed its surroundings several times, without it having a will or agency, but simply offering possibilities to owners, neighbours, and municipal administrators. Gravel extraction left a large unused cavity on the hillside, which coincided with a municipal waste management problem. The hole in the hill offered a solution to this: a landfill was proposed. As environmental activists from the local branch of Friends of the Earth (in Danish NOAH) stated when the landfill was planned in 1977: “The municipality doesn’t consider other solutions [other waste management possibilities] because it thinks of what it already has: a hole in the ground and a digger.” (NOAH 1977, translation NTJ).

At this point, the way civil servants at the municipal administration and the physical possibilities intersected at this place, along with a growing interest in technical waste management. Environmental law and its administration lent themselves to thinking that using this place, this void, would be the best practice. Again, with Ingold, it is about focusing on the moment of affordance “to carry out almost any kind of livelihood on land or at sea, it is necessary to attune your movements, and the timing of your activities, to catch the moment when the forces that conspire to the success of your enterprise are in favorable alignment. The world is not always ready and waiting; you also have to be ready and waiting for the world.” (Ingold 2018, 43).

However, how do you analyse past affordances? How do you consider the world that comes into presence when its presence is channelled and mediated through newspapers, minutes from meetings, or contracts from the 1950s? For historical research, I believe one way is to follow the processes of negotiations and the imaginations that the material world instils upon the people surrounding the place.

For environmental humanities (or historians), understanding the environment or our surroundings through affordance allows us to analyse the material and physical world, without ascribing to it an agency that it does not or cannot have. The gravel did not ask to be dug up, but by simply being present underground, it offered the opportunity to the changing owners of the land. Hence, stories of matter and stories of how matter comes to mean something over time, in my view, benefit from thinking with affordance theory, because it asks for precision when locating and ascribing affordance. It cannot be any non-human agent; it must be named.

References

Demeritt, David. 2002. “What Is the ‘Social Construction of Nature’? A Typology and Sympathetic Critique.” Progress in Human Geography 26 (6): 767-90.

Ejsing, Mads. 2024. “Why the Turn to Matter Matters: A Response to Post-Marxist Critiques of New Materialism.” Thesis Eleven 181 (1): 56-71. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241240086.

Fritzbøger, Bo. 2022. Sustainable Development of Denmark in the World, 1970–2020: A Critical Introduction. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98293-5.

Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boca Raton, FL: Psychology Press.

Hornborg, Alf. 2017a. “Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History.” European Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431016640536.

Hornborg, Alf. 2017b. “Dithering While the Planet Burns: Anthropologists’ Approaches to the Anthropocene.” Reviews in Anthropology 46 (2-3): 61-77.

Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1-16.

Ingold, Tim. 2018. “Back to the Future with the Theory of Affordances.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1-2): 39-44.

Jessen, Nina Toudal. 2019. “‘Lossepladsen Formodes at Være under Afvikling.’ Om Affaldshåndtering Og Vidensindsamling i 1970erne.” Kulturstudier 10 (2): 12-37. https://doi.org/10.7146/ks.v10i2.118015.

Jessen, Nina Toudal. 2021. “Jord Og Landskab: Relationelle Landskabsforandringer i Det 20. Århundrede.” Copenhagen: Københavns Universitet, Saxo-Instituttet.

Jessen, Nina Toudal. 2024. “At the Intersection of Expertise and Landscaping: How Technical Advisors Created New Nature.” In HøghøjEnvironment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750. Technonatures in the Global North, edited by Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle, 195–216. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_9.

Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso.

Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. 2014. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1 (1): 62-69. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613516291.

NOAH, Kalundborg. 1977. ‘Vedr. Lokalplan Nr. 70, Ny Losseplads i Tømmerup, 4 October 1977’. Kalundborg Kommune. 831. Ubberup Losseplads. B. nr. 1.

Norman, Donald A. 1999. “Affordance, Conventions, and Design.” Interactions 6 (3): 38-43. https://doi.org/10.1145/301153.301168.

 [1] Jonathan Palmblad was the one who mentioned it, for which I owe him my gratitude.