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Historical preamble
Descartes's illustration has two noteworthy aspects. First, the eye is sta-
tionary and passive, like a mirror or a camera. Second, the sensory data
projected upon a static two-dimensional surface are so sparse that it
requires elaboration by the exercise of reason to account for the rich
complexity of experience. Reason, therefore, appfied consciously or
unconsciously (through the application of a conceptual scheme) con-
trols the articulation of experience. But where does reason come from?
Descartes himself thought God was the answer, and others have
thought nature, but most have agreed until recently that reason is a
human universal, giving self-evident truths.
In this essay we accept much of what Foucault says about power and
knowledge (especially as interpreted by Deleuze 9) but argue that nei-
ther pessimism nor a retreat to subjectivity is a necessary consequence.
One or the other only seems inevitable if we persist in thinking from
the Cartesian metaphor, persist, in particular, in thinking of sensory
data as static and disorganised, and so being forced to call upon reason
to mold it into coherent experience. For by doing this we shut off the
possibility of escaping from control, by exploring the unwritten possi-
bilities open to us through an awareness of what Husserl called the
"surrounding world of life." 10 By appealing to the work of thinkers who
have rejected this aspect of the Cartesian metaphor, including Husserl,
but especially the psychologist James Gibson who has developed an
alternative biological metaphor, we hope to show that access to the sur-
rounding world of life can become a source of resistance to control by
power/knowledge.
871
Gibson and Foucault have this in common for us. Each attempted with
unique success to undermine an aspect of the Cartesian metaphor. This
is all-important to our argument, but the French Historian of Systems
of Thought and the American Experimental Psychologist share little
else that will help us to include them in a common discourse. We there-
fore have recourse to a bridging metaphor, that of flow, which is acted
upon by processes that stem it through freezing, and release it again
through liquefaction. Flow was another key image in the reaction
against the Cartesian metaphor, 19 and it became central to anti-Carte-
sian philosophers of consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century
- most famously William James and Henri Bergson, precursors of
American and French attempts to find ways of unfreezing the pigeon-
holed, bureaucratic mind of atomic psychology.2 Parallel to this pro-
cess at a deeper level has been the undermining of "The Metaphysics of
Presence" and if poststructuralism has a coherent philosophical basis it
lies in its attempt to deconstruct this supposed presupposition of West-
ern thought, 21 as well as to undermine once and for all the search for
incorrigible and universal foundations for knowledge. 22
873
So the two central figures in our project are Michel Foucault (power-
knowledge) and James Gibson (kinesthesis and affordance). In their
respective appropriation of history and perception they both confront
the Cartesian "unknowability" of the object and uncover the practical
underpinnings of knowledge. In different ways, both struggled against
the tradition of Cartesian subjectivity, which for Foucault had become
the source of an essential freedom in the writings of his existentialist
precursors. Struggling to obliterate this subjectivity as a construct of
social conditions, he arrived at an inescapable power-knowledge in
which, ironically, in his later genealogical writings, resistance seemed to
devolve onto subjectivity.
to overrun the limits set by discipline, and it holds out the possibility of
transgression.
As Anthony Wilden 39 has made clear, there is no simple line that can
be drawn between organism and environment. Any such line or inter-
face is a reflection of the theorist's own methodological position. Af-
fordance is not an interface but an attempt to articulate the play of
activity from which frozen worlds and their inhabitants come into
being. By restoring the primacy of affordance and kinesthesis to indi-
vidual perception, we can return to this play and become aware again
of possibilities that are closed by disciplinary freezing. This theorizing
leads to an articulation of constraints in which the biological limits and
potentialities of the animal and the physical limits and potentialities of
the environment become one and the same.
The eye has become a human eye, just as the object has become a human,
social object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theo-
reticians in their immediate praxis. They relate the thing for its own sake, but
the thing in itself is objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice
versa. Need or enjoyment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature
has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human u s e . 41
We have already noted that Foucault has been accused of placing too
much emphasis on subjectivity as the root of resistance. In comparison,
de Certeau, has attempted to formulate resistance in relation to the
unpredictability of behavior. Where Foucault has theorized the freezing
of the person and of the environment, de Certeau argues that there is a
subversive lay undercurrent that liquefies the freezing by particular
power-knowledge. For de Certeau, people produce behaviors that obey
their own logic, a logic that criss-crosses technocratic and functional-
ized space. Despite drawing on established vocabularies, these actions
trace counter-interests. They are embodied in bricolage, in artisan-like
inventiveness. Accordingly, alongside the monolithic homogeneity of
disciplined practices lie heterogeneous, scattered practices, "multiform
practices that elude yet reside with discipline." 51
Objects and places in the environment, say a city, afford certain be-
haviors that are usually proscribed. A lampost is not for climbing up,
and yet it affords climbing up and a better vantage point. There is thus
present in the environment a resource for resistance (just as there is
also a resource for discipline - a lampost can serve panoptical ends).
All around in the physical environment of surfaces are affordances that
have been touched by disciplinary power, but which also reflect the
ecological forces that relate organism to environment. Disciplinary
power tells us that a chair is for sitting on, but ecological perception
permits us to see that it affords standing upon, throwing, lying over,
scratching against, and so on. There is a latitude, a collection of afford-
ances, that inheres in the ecology of the situation and that outstrips the
more or less meagre possibilities demarcated by power-knowledge. Of
882
course there are places that are utterly inhospitable (e.g. a reactor core)
and where it is hard to envisage any affordances. Other environments
are deliberately designed to crush affordance - these practice extreme
discipline (e.g., strait jackets). But at this point, they are no longer
disciplines in the Foucauldian sense. The power-knowledge embodied
in them is of the grossest sort, devoid of the subtlety and fine tuning
that is the essence of modern subjection. But in the disciplined envi-
ronment of the street the body is never completely governed - always
there is lurking an organismic body ready to make use of affordances
invisible to its disciplined counterpart. This is the corporeal seat of
resistance - a corporeality that is, we have argued, ecologically
fashioned. So, rather than positing a subjective source of resistance, we
seek one in the ecological-corporeal constitution of the individual.
But how are the latent affordances of the environment explored and
the range of organism-environment relations extended beyond power-
knowledge? One promising answer is through play. Against (or in addi-
tion to) the play of language and the metonymic and metaphoric flow of
signifiers that make up the subjectivity that de Certeau considers the
source of transgression (even in idle walking), there is play that is root-
ed in the ecological body. If play is a process in which ordered
sequences of behavior are disrupted, repeated, exaggerated, and reas-
sembled, s3 then it is also the exploration of affordances as they emerge
from the environment, constrained only by the logic of the play itself.
As such it can serve as a model by which the species body-environment
complex that is disciplined by power-knowledge is subverted. In other
words, the processes of disciplinary freezing are undermined by an
ecological variability that is directly in opposition to the straight and
narrow path laid down by discipline. To be made to sit at a desk and
face the teacher without fidgetting cannot take into account all forms of
fidgetting that are possible. The scouring of the desk with fingernails,
the squeaking of the chair frame as the body makes its subtlest moves,
the marks left on the lino by the deft turn of the heel: these scurrilous
activities utilize minute affordances that are some of the most danger-
ous enemies of power-knowledge.
directly analyzed in the present article. This is not to say that the bio-
logical resource for resistance is culture-free, since we are not using
"biology" and "culture" as polarized, mutually exclusive concepts. Like
speaking, ways of looking, sitting, etc. are bound up with cultural prac-
tices, and the corresponding affordances are not culture-free. Likewise,
modes of play vary between cultures; but in all cases, we argue, play is
an ecologically (and hence biologically) based source of variation that
reveals resources for resistance.
Thus, the collision of the disciplined and ecological relations can result
in the liquefaction of social categories. In this respect, the ecological is
always threatening to disrupt the imperatives of power-knowledge - for
good or ill, since affordances are morally neutral. They determine con-
straints and possibilities, but not action itself. Affordances provide a
r e s o u r c e , not an inevitable s o u r c e of resistance, and the old dichotomy
of causal determination and freedom is replaced by one of power-
knowledge and resources for resistance. This change is made possible
by the transition with which we started - from the Cartesian metaphor
for vision to a more fluid, non-dualist structure taken from James
Gibson's Ecological Psychology. The Cartesian metaphor demands
what Tighe and Tighe 55 called an additive or enrichment theory (as
opposed to a subtractive or differentiation theory), meaning that sparse
information has to be enriched by cognitive processes in order
to account for the fullness of experience. These modern "cognitive
884
Notes
1. In Ch. Adam and P. Tannery, editors, Oeuvres de Descartes (revised edition, Paris:
Vron/C.N.R.S., 1964-1976). In the English translation the illustration appears
once only, and the bearded observer is left out; see P.J. Olscamp, translator,
Descartes: Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meterology (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
2. For psychology the persistence of its ramification has been traced by Edward S.
Reed, "Descartes' corporeal ideas hypothesis and the origin of scientific psychol-
ogy," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1980): 731-752. But its influence extends much
further; see, for instance, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1978).
4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
27-28.
5. Especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979) and History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981).
6. For example, M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984) and K. Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (London:
Hutchinson, 1986).
7. S.F. Schneck, "Michel Foucault on Power/Discourse, Theory and Practice,"
Human Studies 10 (1987): 15-33.
8. Michel Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power," in H. L. Dreyfus and P.
Rabinow, editors, Foucauh: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton:
Harvester, 1982), 222.
9. Deleuze, Foucault.
10. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-
enology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). "Surrounding world of
life" is the translator's rendering of Husserl's "Lebensumwelt." More familiar is
"life-world" for "Lebenswelt."
11. This development in attitudes toward vision has seemed of more interest to
English-speaking historians of literature than of psychology or philosophy. See
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1953). Another
development has been the somewhat ambivalent reaction against Cartesian
"oculocentrism" amongst twentieth-century French thinkers; Foucault's position
vis-/t-vis this movement is carefully traced by Martin Jay, "In the empire of the gaze:
Foucault and the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought" in
David C. Hoy, editor, Foucault:A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
12. Paul Ricouer, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1967), 61.
13. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment (London: Roufledge, 1973), 84.
!4. "[K]inesthetic holding-still is [also] a mode of the 'I do'." (Husserl, The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 106).
15. For a recent intellectual biography, see Edward Reed, James J. Gibson and the
Psychology of Perception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
16. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1966), 200-201 and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
886
53. C. Loizos, "Play in Mammals" Symposium of the Zoological Society of London 18,
(1966), 1-9. The relationship between knowledge and play has been a central
preoccupation of several major theorists who have tried to break away from tradi-
tional accounts of knowledge and its development. For instance, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975); Jean Piaget, Play,
Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (London: Heineman, 1951); Lev Vygotsky,
Mind in Society: The Development of the Higher Psychological Processes (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978); D. W. Winnicott, Playing
and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971).
54. P. Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977).
55. L. S. Tighe and T. J. Tighe, "Discrimination learning: Two views in historical per-
spective," Psychological Bulletin 66 (1966): 353-370.
56. See Edward S. Reed, "James Gibson's ecological approach to cognition," in Arthur
Still and Alan Costall, editors, Against Cognitivism, 171-197.
57. The best-known theorist of this process is G. H. Mead. See, for instance, G. H.
Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1934). The rela-
tion between the thought of Mead and Gibson has been explored by William
Noble, "Gibsonian theory and the pragmatist perspective," Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour 11 (1981): 65-85.