They Are There to Be Perceived: Affordances and Atmospheres

Abstract

The paper shows the crucial role of affordance theory within an aesthetic phenomenology of atmospheres (atmospherology). This explains atmospheric feelings as qualities supervening on expressive but not necessarily pragmatic affordances. As feeling possibilities, they express what it affords a person to do but, above all, to feel. This approach aims at enriching the phenomenological tradition of emotional realism according to which external affective qualities (atmospheres and affordances) are conditions of the possibility of any relationship between the subject and the world and thus represent an essential part of our emotional life. They do not result from a simple projection from the inside to the outside, nor are they completely dependent on the perceiver, whose relatively different resonance is actually due just to a different corporeal filtering of the same affordance-based and atmospheric first impression. Both affordance theory and atmospherology are clearly opposed to the constructivist approach, advocate for the thesis of direct perception, and focus on the affective meanings of our lived environment involves perceivers felt-bodily.