MIKE MICHAEL AND ARTHUR STILL

University of Lancaster; University of Durham

A resource for resistance: Power-knowledge

and affordance

Historical preamble

In an illustration that appeared no less than 7 times in Descartes's

Optics of 1637, a bearded gentleman gazes at the back of a cross-sec-
tion of a large, schematic eye, watching shapes mirrored upon the reti-
na from the brightly lit world outside. 1 Exercising reason, so we are
invited to assume by the text, he works out from the sparse data of the
senses what must be the nature of the surrounding reality. This is a pic-
torial metaphor for scientific man, the detached observer seeking truth
by classifying and calculating. It is also subjective man, certain only of
internal sensations and reasoning, cut off from direct knowledge of the
external world, and seeking, at best, sure foundations for indirect
knowledge. Together these make it a biological metaphor for every-
man's contact with nature that has proved hard to shake off.2

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.

But what if the source of self-evidence is neither God- nor Nature-

given, but is our cultural setting, through a habitus 3 that generates and
at the same time is consolidated by our activities? What if self-evidence
is merely the presuppositions of the tribe masquerading as universal

Theory and Society 21: 869-888, 1992.

1992 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
870

truths? Then whoever controls these sources of self-evidence has

power over our very being. If it is an institution, like the church or the
dominant class, then escape may be possible through political revolu-
tion or consciousness raising. But what if power is a more subtle pro-
cess, not an attribute that some possess more than others, but a net-
work of relations whereby "power invests [the dominated], passes
through them and with the help of them, relying on them just as they, in
their struggle against power, rely on the hold it exerts on them?" 4 And
what if the institutionalized search for knowledge, instead of being a
source of liberation, is precisely the means by which power becomes
diffused instead of focussed, and therefore more insidiously control-
ling? It is not surprising that Michel Foucault, by raising such questions
about the nature of power and knowledge, should be accused of en-
couraging political pessimism, by apparently closing off all possibility
of resistance to power.

In his genealogical work, 5 Foucault described the one-sided shaping of

the individual by the disciplines of penology, psychoanalysis, etc., as
well as by the micropowers of regimentation and measurement prac-
ticed in more or less peripheral institutions. These are powers that fix
the capacities and limits of the person. Too thoroughly, perhaps, since
criticisms have been levelled at this work 6 for eschewing a coherent
theorization of resistance, and in particular, for neglecting the subjec-
tive or humanist component in resistance. But, as Schneck 7 has recent-
ly pointed out, Foucault did assert that disciplinary power is resisted,
and by a core subjectivity; or in Foucault's words, by "the recalcitrance
of the will and the intransigence of freedom." s

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

There has always been opposition to the Cartesian metaphor. As Hegel

recognized, we do not come to know ourselves and the world just by
watching, but by acting upon it, and around the turn of the nineteenth
century the passive mirror was joined by the actively illuminating lamp
as a metaphor for the mind. xl Since then, the importance of activity has
been widely recognized, especially in Marxist and pragmatist thinking.
More recently, existential phenomenologists, following Heidegger and
the later Husserl, have laid stress on the primacy of the living body and
being-in-the-world. But their motivation, as Ricouer has pointed out in
the cases of Merleau-Ponty and Marcel, has not been to find an alter-
native scientific or biological metaphor for contact with the world.
Instead, they have attempted to establish the subjectively experienced
body as the source of an individual freedom that exists in a world prior
to science. Hence, they would find an alternative to the scientific atti-
tude itself, "to render the sense of the owned body in opposition to
objective, scientific, or biological knowledge of the body. There is thus,
when phenomenology is joined to existentialism in the work of
Merleau-Ponty, a contrast of existence and objectivity foreign to
Husserl." 12 Our argument is that the Cartesian metaphor is a bad start
for the biology of experience, and this is shown precisely by its failure
to do justice to the "sense of the owned body" With a better biology
there will be no need for opposition to biological knowledge in the
name of life and freedom. As a starting point we turn, like Merleau-
Ponty, to the later writings of Husserl.

Husserl was concerned with how experience is "consituted," and it did

not worry him if his concepts turned out to mesh with science (or if
they did not). When he came to consider the constitution of the life-
world he used the notion of kinesthesis, which, though not strictly bio-
logical in Husserl's terms, was certainly suggestive, with its connota-
tions of movement and knowledge of movement, of a clear biological
alternative to Cartesian vision. Kinesthesis was treated as belonging to
the essence ofperception2 3 It involves knowledge of self-movement and
of self-orientation, and it is connected necessarily, like the other side of
a coin, with the perspective views that constitute physical objects. The
corollary of this is that our contact with the life-world is founded upon
movement, not upon the static observation of the Cartesian metaphor.
Static observation occurs, but is no paradigm for everyday experience.
Instead it is a limiting case, 14which is of special interest to the scientific
attitude but not to the constitution of the life-world.

Of course Husserl was not a scientist, and he felt no need to speculate

 872

how kinesthesis might operate in the way he believed it must. But we

now know, through the work of James Gibson (1904-1979), a plau-
sible story about its functioning. Gibson was an academic psychologist
who spent most of his working life at CorneU. 15 Through an interest in
the perception of motion he developed his Ecological Psychology,
which starts with the new insight that optical information about the
world is not (pace Descartes and almost everybody else concerned
with vision) conveyed through static projections upon the retina.
Instead it is contained in the light itself, whose structure is rich in infor-
marion that specifies both the reflecting surfaces that surround the
observer and the orientation and movements of the observer in relation
to the surroundings - hence "visual kinesthesis." 16 But this information,
like the information for active touch, 17 is contained in the transforma-
tions that occur on a moving retina. In his later work, Gibson conjec-
tured that such information specifies directly the possible actions in a
particular setting; it specifies what an object or surface affords an actor,
and what is perceived is therefore an "affordance." Like visual kines-
thesis, "affordances point both ways, to the environment and to the ob-
server," and therefore "to perceive the world is to coperceive oneself." 18

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

Freezing and liquefaction

Correspondingly, if the multiple strands of poststructuralism have a

common theme, it lies in their sensibility to the dynamics of the two
processes, freezing and liquefaction - the ways that categories of
various sorts are delineated and stabilized, and de-delineated and de-
stabilized. For Foucault, the process of delineation is mediated by
power-knowledge that freezes unruly objects through the exercise of
discipline. He shows how the processes of freezing, or fixing, as Heath
puts it, 23 that occur in academe and through the microtechnological
practices of institutions such as prisons and schools, are intertwined.
The practical, institutional freezing of the person finds its justification
in the theoretical, academic freezing of categories. The academic's ivo-
ry tower is less remote than it seems; it may be a convenient place of
concealment, but it has windows onto the world, and its "knowledge"
comes to freeze the reality of the psychiatric hospital, of the courtroom,
of the bedchamber. Power-knowledge is everywhere - there is not
power in one place, knowledge in another. Foucault's great geneal-
ogies 24 can thus be seen as histories of freezing that teased out the
many discursive and practical forces that came together and froze the
person as "mad" or "delinquent" or "homosexual" and so on.

Freezing proceeds through the imposition of categories, but these are

never final. For resistance is possible, leading to a process of liquefac-
tion, in which categories and the relationships between categories are
loosened and the hard-won objects begin to lose clarity as they melt
away. The processes of freezing and liquefaction thus move in unison,
tumbling over one another as the object is grasped, then escapes.
Deleuze and Guattari 2s have theorized this process through a spec-
tacular array of metaphors. Their "body-without-organs" is a concep-
tion of the person-object; a featureless object over whose surface lines
of demarcation are drawn and frozen just long enough to give it identity
before liquefying to make the boundaries blur and the object strange
once more. The political power and productivity of this strangeness is
celebrated in Guattari's Molecular Revolution. 26

If Foucault has traced the minute mechanisms of the freezing of the

person, and Deleuze and Guattari have theorized the transition from
freezing to liquefaction, Derrida has focussed on one source of this
transition, the everyday liquidity of meaning that underlies the frozen
word of official dictionary definitions. Derrida's contribution has been
to show how the identity of the frozen present (represented by appar-
874

ently clearcut meaning and intention), instead of being grasped on

close examination, melts shapeless into "difference" and "deferral" into
what he calls diff&ance. 27 His strategy for liquefaction is deconstruc-
tion, an intervention by which the analyst exposes the flow of power
between signifying terms within and across texts. In a conventional
reading of a text, certain terms dominate the process of signification.
But this static dominance turns out to be established upon a flow that
can be stemmed and redirected. As a result of this analytical process,
suppressed signifiers are brought into the open and begin to usurp
power; the primacy of the previously dominant terms begins to found-
er. If the hierarchy of terms is overturned, the process of overturning is
the practice of liquefaction. The eventual emergence of new dominant
terms is the process of re-freezing.

Finally, for some writers on postmodernism the interaction between

liquefaction and freezing begins to take on a historical dimension. They
detect an acceleration in the turnover and the transgression of catego-
ries. In the past, subjects were furnished with texts as tools to construct
socially more or less coherent identities. But in the postmodern era,
such texts, by virtue of their instability - they are subject to transgres-
sion (by other texts) and accelerated turnover (substitution by other
texts) - can no longer sustain the integrity of the subject. According to
Lash and Urry, this has come about because of such factors as: the frag-
mantation of working class communities and the occupationally-struc-
tured experience of sections of the middle class; the influence of elec-
tronic mass media; and the disruption in our perception of space and
time in everyday life. 28 While some commentators have celebrated this
shift as a process through which people are empowered, 29 others are
less optimistic. 3

This same ambivalence appears in the analytical procedures them-

selves, and Peter Dews has brilliantly unpacked the politically double-
edged character of deconstruction. 31 In a similar vein, Anderson
laments what he calls the "megalomania of the signifier" with its cele-
bration of play and its relativist ramifications. 32 For Anderson, what is
now necessary is a return to the exploration of the relation between
nature and history. The present exercise is an attempt to take account
of these criticisms, while holding on to what is most valuable in post-
structuralism. We identify a source of liquefaction that constitutes a re-
source for resistance - a re/source that is in nature but one that flows
outside the bounds of the Cartesian metaphor, unheeded among the fro-
zen lines of power-knowledge. It is through James Gibson's Ecological
 875

Psychology and his concepts of visual kinesthesis and affordance that

we grasp the character of this resource.

Freedom and resistance

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.

The philosophers of Gibson's more complacent transatlantic society,

where everyday freedoms were not considered under threat, felt no
urgency to defend a metaphysical freedom, and its psychologists were
content to base their institution upon a blatantly mechanistic deter-
minism. Gibson was a materialist, but he preferred the flexibility of
biology (or ecology) to the rigidity of mechanism. He provides us with a
theory for locating a resource for resistance that is not reliant upon
subjectivity and which looks towards the interface of physical environ-
ment and biological body: that is, resistance is grounded in the ecologi-
cal relationship of organism to environment. The poles of subjectivity
and objectivity, organism and environment, freedom and constraint, far
from being essential categories of human life, are frozen constructions
from an undifferentiated flux that is neither and both at the same time.

It is by "governmental" practices that power-knowledge freezes objects.

Our argument is that the regimes of control are always in danger of dis-
ruption by a perceptual ecological repertoire of practices that reflects
the corporeality of the organism in its environment. Disciplinary freez-
ing reassures by anchoring the individual to his/her world through the,
albeit temporary, cognitive certainty of knowing what one is, the nature
of an object, the essence of an event and so on. Ecological activity pro-
vides an alternative; a practical, corporeal anchoring that does not
depend upon disciplinary freezing. At this subtle physical level the
repertoire of ecological behavioral options is enormous, it threatens
876

to overrun the limits set by discipline, and it holds out the possibility of
transgression.

In summary then, this article provides a preliminary outline of the way

that resistance may be rooted in the natural world, that is, in the eco-
logical relationship between the human being and its physical sur-
roundings. What Gibson has to offer Foucault is a resistivity that lurks
in ecological psychological structure. This by-passes the resort to a
transcendental subjectivity as the sole root of resistance, and places the
emphasis on activity that takes place in a realm of possibilities whose
vast range is blurred by the disciplinary freezing of power-knowledge.
This argument is developed against the backdrop of de Certeau's work
on idle transgression and the "polemology" of everyday practice, 33 as
well as Deleuze's 34 outstanding commentary on Foucault's work (a
major contribution in its own right), particularly, his analysis of the
nondiscursive domain, or what he calls "visibilities."

Power-knowledge and affordance

In Gibson's elaboration of ecological psychology, the concept of afford-

ance plays the central role by theorizing the organism's perceptions of
objects in terms of its actual bodily capacities and their limits. 35 These
capacities are evolutionarily constrained and constructed. But evolu-
tion is not a process of increasingly refined adaptation to a fixed
environment. It is a system that evolves, a system that includes organ-
ism and evironment inseparably, each acting upon the other. 36 The
result is that "the possibilities of the environment and the way of life of
the animal go together inseparably;' and although the human animal
alters the affordances of the environment he or she "is still a creature
of his or her environment." 37 For example, a flat horizontal surface at
an appropriate height affords sitting upon, but only because the
organism is physically constituted to sit upon such a surface. An object
or a surface may afford many things to an organism. Thus a flat hori-
zontal surface also affords writing on, chopping vegetables, laying out
maps, etc, and these possibilities do not have to be inferred from visual
clues - there is information in the "optic array" that amply specifies the
possibilities for the perceiverY How it is actually perceived will depend
upon the current desires or interests of the organism. Implicit within
any such perception are the various trajectories of any action, with the
kinestheses that are involved. If a surface affords a seat, it does so
because it can be the goal of a group of possible movements, with
 877

their kinesthesis and their corresponding perceptions, that constitute

sitting down.

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.

In summary, for Gibson, knowability, which begins with kinesthesis and

affordance, is ecologically/evolutionarily contingent. What is afforded
is constrained by the physical limits of organism and environment, by
the potential kinesthesis. For Foucault, the historical takes precedence:
he teases out the disciplines that freeze their objects as they have
emerged historically. There are two levels of analysis of the individual
here: Foucault's is historical and supra-individual, Gibson's is biologi-
cal and supra-organismic. Nevertheless, the common theme remains:
both authors address the question "What is it to move in a world that in
some way forms the mover who in turn formulates the world?"
Foucault's answer is in terms of discursive practices and power-knowl-
edge, Gibson's refers to information underlying a being-in-the-world
which surrounds articulated consciousness. Bridges that help connect
these apparently disparate formulations are to be found in the early
texts of Marx, 4 where historicizing calls out for an adequate biology;
and the recent work of a follower of Gibson, Edward Reed, where per-
ceptual biology stands in need of a fuller theory of history.

Marx's early work in the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts

traces the rootedness of the social in the biological. The transition to
humanity is not conceived as a change in the biology of the human spe-
cies; rather it is shown to be bound up with changes in the relations of
humans to one another and the objects around them. This is an intrinsi-
cally praxical affair and is associated with the necessary alienation (or
estrangement) that is undergone in the supersession of private proper-
ty. Alienation, accordingly, estranges us from reality as we appropriate
it - this appropriation is peculiarly human. As Marx writes:
878

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

What is captured by Marx is the peculiarly human in perception and its

fundamentally historical determinants. With the rise of private prop-
erty there is a qualitative change in the relation of humans to both their
social and natural environment. This change is something that Foucault
goes on to detail; he brings out the historicity of perception. Where
Gibson provides a long-term (and therefore comparatively static) evo-
lutionary view of the relationship between environment and organism,
for Marx and Foucault this is rendered historically dynamic. Humanity
is constantly being re-shaped by material and discursive conditions,
which are themselves a product of humanity. Where Marx outlines the
transition from the static to the dynamic, Foucault analyzes the prac-
tices by which the senses are daily educated and governed. In other
words, in Foucault there is a detailed unravelling of the practical and
disciplinary minutae by which social affordances are forged. That is,
through this sensual education, what can and cannot be done in the
social world is determined by the flow of power-knowledge.

Reed's 42 broad brush outline of an ecological history of perception

may also help to clarify our aim in bringing together Foucault and
Gibson. His projected program is an attempt to show "how modes of
daily life are embedded in modes of awareness (and)... to explore the
changes that have occurred in our shared awarenesses in a population
environment.''43 Thus it is the changes in the connections between
awareness and its objects, how the perceptual processes have been
altered by the use of special tools and habits, that will constitute such a
history. But, as Reed remarks, some objects in the world do not change
very much, such as the human body. Moreover, the constancy of "the
laws of ecological optics" as Reed puts it,44 ensures that even the
changes wrought by technological invention cannot transcend the basic
links between perceptual process, body, and environment. However,
Reed's history remains apolitical in ignoring the changes in perceptual
process that the spread of innovative technology might engender. It is
these that some theorists who follow in Foucault's footsteps 45 are at
pains to trace. Conversely, and this is our point, the ecological has its
own peculiar political contribution to make. In this way the two per-
spectives mutually supplement each other.
 879

Affordances and visibilities

Foucault describes how the technologies of meaning (the human sci-

ences and their constitutive disciplines), through their meaningful
arrangement of the environment, inscribe meanings upon the body of
the person. Drawing on the systems theory distinction between energy
and information, 46 we may say that this causal link proceeds from
information to energy: meaning is used to marshal and constrain the
unkempt energies of the body. Gibson likewise posits a model of infor-
mation-energy interaction. In reaction against the cognitivist treatment
of this interaction (in which the physical processes of light and the eye
are magicked into information distilled as cognitive representation),
Gibson developed a theory where meaning - practical meaning embo-
died in affordances - is specified by the play of light as it is structured
by the reflectances, the opacities, and the transparancies of the envi-
ronment. This play constitutes meaning, which is thus not added by an
intentional or cognitive ego: the logical implication of this is that "no
line can be drawn between the subjective and the objective.''47 With the
collapse of this contrast, the polarities "subjective" and "objective" lose
their meaning.

So, Gibson's theory is an account of the determination of an individual

that cannot, even as an effect, be separated from its environment: the
two together constitute the unit of analysis - not only has the environ-
ment shaped the individual (as an exemplar of its species) but that
species-individual has also partly fashioned (or maintained) its own
environment. Our principal point is that this co-determination of
species-individual and environment lies, in part, beyond the reach of
power-knowledge, in a region described by Gibson's ecological theory
of perception. Thus the theory constitutes a resource for resistance.

In this respect, Deleuze's account suggests that Gibson's picture is

already mirrored to some extent in Foucault. Deleuze's commentary on
Foucault elaborates on the fundamental distinction between the discur-
sive and the non-discursive. The former is articulable, constituted by
statements, and it is determining; the latter is visible, constituted by
visibilities, and it is determinable. For Deleuze, these visibilities are
"not the forms of objects ... but rather luminosities which are created
by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash,
sparkle or shimmer." 48 "They are complexes of action and passions,
actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge into the
light of day. ''49 These visibilities - self-evidences - are what are extract-
880

ed from objects, qualities, and things by their concomitant subject-posi-

tions. But there is no guarantee that they are articulable, and Deleuze
argues that there will always be a rift between the visible and the articu-
lable - between what we see and what we speak - even though the two
are tied to one another historically. For Deleuze (or Deleuze's
Foucault) visibilities - what we see - are historically contingent; the
visibilities of one age "become hazy and blurred to the point where
'self-evident' phenomena cannot be grapsed by another age...." 5o

The notion of "visibilities" echoes Gibson's concept of affordances by

evoking a conjunction of individual and environment, the perceiver
and the perceived. In Deleuze/Foucault these conjunctions are histori-
cally localizable, but in Gibsonian theory they are also biological and
evolutionary. Deleuze/Foucault are aware that there is something of
these visibilities that is liable to escape the government of power-
knowledge - they are determinable but not determined by discourse.
Our argument has been that one such source of slippage is biological,
and it is this that serves as a resource for resistance.

Resources for resistance: Idle walking and play

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

De Certeau illustrates this with a number of examples. Most relevant in

the present context in his treatment of idle walking in the city. Idle
walking is (we would say) a play of kinesthesis and affordance, as the
walker is actively creating from the fragments of places, routes, or
byways. Affirmation, hunches, trying out, and transgression constitute
the trajectory that the walker "speaks" These cannot be reduced to a
 881

trail; in de Certeau's view these movements imply a symbolic order of

the unconscious and the typical processes of subjectivity that are mani-
fested in discourse. There is a dreaminess to the drifting, and yet it is, in
ecological terms, firmly anchored to the world through kinesthesis.

De Certeau has described a process of randomization that is inherent

to the individual. The movement of these transgressive acts is attrib-
uted to the resilience of the unconscious. This would serve to place
outside discipline a residual maverick individuality that appropriates
the world on a linguistically un/structured whim, in the style of the
Lacanian unconscious. 52 In contrast, Gibson's theory applied to similar
examples leads to a model of resources for resistance that encompasses
both the individual (as a member of the human species) and the
environment (as a configuration of surfaces, reflectances, opacities,
and transparancies). Gibson's proposal is that the practical meaning of
the environment is specified by information structured by the events
and surfaces of the environment - and we have argued that this
informational manifold is largely outside the sway of power-knowledge.
As such, there is a resource for resistance that stems from the con-
stitutive interlocking of physical environment and organism, and the
transgressive act is grounded in the affordances that are intrinsic to the
relation of organism and environment. Resistance is thus drawn from
beyond the symbolic: it balances on the dynamic border of subject and
object, in the affordances that are rooted in ecology. Where discipline
imparts a sort of tunnel vision and delineates an impoverished reper-
toire of practices, affordance opens up the horizon to draw upon the
full potential combinations of physical organism and physical environ-
ment.

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.

It is necessary to distinguish these forms of transgression from the

conflict displayed in school by the "lads" documented by Willis. 54 His
participants orchestrated their transgression, taunting teachers and dis-
rupting the smooth running of classes, drawing upon a common
cultural background in the process. This orchestration obviously in-
volved communication, which entails a mediated affordance that is not
 883

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.

Possibilities for ecological resistance can be much enhanced by gross

changes in the environment. At snowfall, for example, the obliteration
of boundaries and lines opens up a vista of affordances that relate body
to "pure" surface, and which have lain hidden beneath the signification
embodied in those boundaries and lines. \~lerever such an obliteration
occurs, suppressed affordances become available, even though the pos-
sibilities will depend upon individual and cultural skills - skiing, for
instance, or the use of snow shoes improvised from old tennis rackets.
Of course, there is also a counter-movement by power-knowledge,
which invests the process of obliteration with symbolic power, thereby
limiting affordance again. For example, a snowfall signifies, in some
contexts, more or less policed fun and games. Yet, there will always be
an increased chance of seeing possibilities that are normally unnoticed
- for instance, of walking in snow that lies on someone else's property.

Limits and futures

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

processes" are the heirs of Cartesian reason, and it is therefore through

them and their norms and rules that power-knowledge can establish
itself disguised as self-evidence and practical necessity. There seems no
resistance to it except through an alternative subjectivity.

James Gibson's, on the other hand, is a subtractive or differentiation

theory, in which experience is the result of selection from a field that
transcends the subject. Power-knowledge may establish itself through
the processes of selection (ways of looking, listening, moving, naming,
etc.), but it cannot stem the flow of ecological activity. This is because,
on the ecological view, the process of selection is an essential part of
the active information pickup that constitutes experienced reality. The
result is that although freezing occurs and its practical impact may
seem effective and even stultifying, it can only occur against the back-
ground of an ecological flow that offers, in principle, transgression and
the possilibility of liquefaction.

In identifying an ecological resource for resistance, we have left out the

social. No apologies are offered for this. Our aim has been to describe a
resource of resistance that is biological and (species) individual, where
both these qualities are conceived as inseparable from their physical,
ecological environment. As we have seen, this does n o t mean that there
are affordances that are free of all cultural taint. Nevertheless, we have
tried in this article to concentrate upon affordances which concern pri-
marily individual physical capacities. We have therefore ignored afford-
ances that vary in accordance with the people present and the commu-
nication and cooperation that is possible between them.

Such cases involve "mediated" affordances, 56 which expand the capa-

bilities of the human body, though they can also diminish capabilities
by restraining the body. Clearly some form of communication is neces-
sary in socially mediated affordances, both to mobilize and to coordi-
nate interactive exploration and utilization of the environment. But the
process of communication also reflects an affordance relation between
the individual body as a signalling machine (using visual, vocal, tactile,
etc. modalities) and the environment composed of responsive others,
conspecifics or otherwise. 5v A future project would need to ask
whether socially mediated affordance holds out the same resources for
resistance that we have identified for physical affordances and their
associated kinestheses.
 885

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

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 126. Another self-styled "ecological psycholo-

gist" is Roger Barker, Ecological Psychology (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1968), but his detailed analyses of the "stream of behavior" and its settings seem to
have been pursued independently of Gibson's experimental and perceptual
approach. Gibson refers to Barker's work, but only to distance himself from it (The
Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 3). Both, perhaps, are part of a broader
empirical tradition of "mutualism," to include all those who treat people's activities,
and their physical and social settings as inseparable - see Alan Costall and Arthur
Still, editors, Cognitive Psychology in Question (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 5-6.
Amongst other research in this general tradition is that on face-to-face interaction
by E. T. Hall, ethnomethodology and the work of Erving Goffman, the analysis of
mother-infant interactions from film and video recordings, and also some ethologi-
cal work on social activity. Kendon reviews this interactional work, and wonders at
the occasional lack of mutual acknowledgement - Adam Kendon, "The organiza-
tion of behavior in face-to-face interaction: observations on the development of a
methodology" in Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman, editors, Handbood of Methods
in Nonverbal Behavior Research (Cambridge: Camibridge University Press, 1982).
More recently, there has been a proliferation of work on social cognition in the tra-
dition of Vygotsky - see Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988). Gibson's peculiarity lies in the potential scope of his
mutualism (to include physical and social settings), combined with the fine detail of
his experimental and descriptive analyses.
17. James. J. Gibson, "Observation on active touch," Psychological Review 69 (1962):
477-491. In this paper Gibson suggests that the process of vision is more like
active touch than taking photographs.
18. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 129.
19. See, for instance, John Beer, "Coleridge and Wordsworth: Influence and Conflu-
ence" in D. Fontana, editor, New Approaches to Coleridge (London: Vision Press,
1981), 192-211.
20. William James, Principles of Psychology Vol. 1 (New York: Holt, 1990), 224-290;
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), especially 50-51.
21. W.W. Fuchs, Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).
22. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
23. Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982).
24. See references in note 8. Also Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (London:
Tavistock, 1967).
25. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(London: Athlone Press, 1983), and On the Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
26. Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984).
27. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1974); Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978); Positions (London: Athlone Press, 1982). See also M. Ryan, Marxism and
Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
28. S. Lash and J. Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1987); S. Lash, "Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a 'Regime of Significa-
tion,'" Theory, Culture andSociety 5 (1988): 311-336.
29. For example J. Baudrillard, "The ecstasy of communication" in H. Foster, editor,
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press,
1983).
 887

30. For example, J. Habermas ",Modernity - an Incomplete Project" in Foster, The

Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture; Lash and Urry, The End of Organ-
ized Capitalism.
31. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987).
32. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Eondon: Verso, 1983),
45.
33. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
34. Deleuze, Foucault.
35. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127-143.
36. For a biological account of this process, see R. C. Lewontin, "Organism and en-
vironment" in H. C. Plotkin, editor, Learning, Development, and Culture (Chiches-
ter: Wiley, 1982).
37. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 143. This mutually deter-
mining relationship is important in sociology as well as biology; as Anthony
Giddens has written in New Rules of Sociological Methods (London: Heinemann,
1976), 121: "Social structures are both constituted 'by' human agency, and yet at
the same time are the very 'medium' of human agency." Cf. note 16.
38. See H.L. Dreyfus and S.E. Dreyfus, "The mistaken psychological assumptions
underlying the belief in expert systems" in Alan Costall and Arthur Still, editors,
Cognitive Psychology in Question; and Don Mixon, "On not-doing and on trying
and failing" in Arthur Still and Alan Costal], editors, Against Cognitivism (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
39. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1980).
40. We use the bridge to bring out our argument, rather than to suggest a common
influence in Marx. Gibson was a Marxist during the 1930s and Marx seems to have
reinforced his preference for a more theoretical approach than was favored in
psychology at the time. But there is no evidence that the details of his theories owe
anything directly to his reading of Marx. See Gibson's autobiographical essay,
"James J. Gibson" in E. G. Boring and G. Lindzey, editors, A History of Psychology
in Autobiography, Vol. 5 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967).
41. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)" in R. Livingstone
and G. Benton, editors, Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975), 352.
42. Edward S. Reed, "Seeing through History," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16
(1986): 239-247.
43. Reed, "Seeing through history," 247.
44. Reed, "Seeing through history," 245.
45. For example, M. Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1984).
46. Wilden, System and Structure.
47. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 120.
48. Deleuze, Foucault, 52.
49. Deleuze, Foucault, 59.
50. Deleuze, Foucault, 57.
51. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 48.
52. As is well known, according to Jacques Lacan the unconscious is structured like a
language, but Lacan has his own theory of language. There is a useful account of
this in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
See especially p. 45 for "the autonomy of the signifying chain from ~he signified, the
incessant sliding of the signifying chain over the waves of the signified."
888

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.