Deep Architecture
An Ecology of Hetero-Affection
A. Radman (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
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Abstract
In this chapter I explore the legacy of the American psychologist James Jerome Gibson, whose concept of affordance continues to stir controversy even among the scholars of the Ecological School of Perception. Gibson was well aware of the difficulties in challenging the orthodoxies that he himself admitted to have contributed to. His neologism, akin to Deleuzian affect, is a key element in the ecological theory of immediate perception that constitutes an alternative to the digital information-processing paradigm. It is not merely a new term. It is a new way of organising the logos which forces one to think and act politically. What it signifies is that a mode of existence never pre-exists an event and that not all potentiality is an accrued value. This is a bitter pill to swallow for all those suffering from the ‘Occidental disease of transcendence’, aka ‘interpretosis’, which manifests itself in the relentless search for a beyond that will ground and found or otherwise justify what there is. Truth and falsity cannot be considered values that exist outside of the constitutive problematic field that endows them with sense. The unproductive way to relate to bodies by way of interpretation has to give way to the hands-on intervention into the (quasi)causal fabric of reality.