Affordance

Abstract

Abstract As attunement is an aesthetic strategy, no less is it a political one. This chapter uses the category of affordance to elaborate attunement and describe why its aesthetic investments yield new political possibilities. Drawing on discourses around affordances starting in James Gibson together with the insights of those working in actor-network theory, this chapter pursues the connections among texts, transformations, aesthetics, and politics, first in the process of attuned reading and then in the process of attuned writing, speaking, and making, while acknowledging that the difference between the two is not a firm or stable one. In this work, affordances are helpful as a way of taking texts and artifacts seriously as texts and artifacts—as not, for example, reducible to politics—while insisting that the way texts and artifacts mean is inevitably caught up in myriad actants and forces of political significance.