Since James Gibson's inaugural definition (1979), “affordances” are being understood as the

possible ways of appropriation the environment offers to any living being (the environment offers,
provides, or in English: affords). Each species identifies in the available matter some possibilities
of appropriation according to their needs and interests, dealing with the environment not just as a
space that dictates its characteristics but also as an open field open to action, to appropriation, to
adaptation. Its is worth noting the opening element component to the concept: all the material
element may have some potential appropriation, it is enough that a living being gets interested for it
- spiders have evolved to weave their webs into stones and plants, but have adapted well to metal
profiles, waterproofing wooden beams and PVC pipes, which allow (afford) them to improve the
conditions for their evolutionary needs. Everything varies according to the context and the
opportunities it offers, which means that an element will be perceived as “affordance” in the course
of the action of the organism on the environment, in its reaction to the environment: action and
reaction complement each other, for it is reacting to the environment that the body follows its
alternatives; the possibilities that the environment offers are necessarily limited, but there is no
imposition or restriction here: in each context the set of material elements will be decisive to allow
a certain type of appropriation, with a definite purpose. It goes for the spider, it goes for us too:
when we choose a place to set up the tent in the camp, we observe a variety of elements - the heat,
the brightness, the proximity to the water - present in a place in the forest that, of course, was not
conceived for this appropriation. That place just afforded us with material characteristics that would
meet our circumstantial needs, what it is noted when we make our choice - nothing much different
when the Red ovenbird chooses the point of the roof beam on which he will build his house.
The formulator of the concept of “affordance” did not take into account an idea that would
be interesting to design and art, as it does today. Gibson did not mention intentionally-created facts
fitted for human appropriation, such as a household appliance, a piece of furniture, or an
architectural work - all of them could be subject to appropriations of any kind, predicted and
unforeseen. A good example are Oscar Niemeyer's canopies, such as the ones at Ibirapuera Park or
at the Curitiba's Museum named after him: they were designed to offer any use that visitors wanted
to make of them, since the architect could never have foreseen, by the time of the project, its
appropriation by the skaters of São Paulo and the street-dancers of Curitiba. Space allows
appropriations but does not predict what they should be: it is a kind of an intentionally produced
“affordance” for human appropriation, oriented to our perceptual and physical cognition, and our
culturalized reason (in its instrumental and deliberative components), offering possibilities of use to
be decided by the imagination, the desires and capacities of the inhabitant of the big city. In short,
they are what Terence Cave (2016) would call “cognitive affordances”, produced to raise
culturalized possibilities of individual or collective appropriation, by engaging our tendencies and
cognitive abilities.
In this sense, language itself can be understood as a kind of “affordance”, which offers a
variety of material elements - spoken or written words - that can be appropriated to a multitude of
uses. The writer or speaker himself determines the sense of his appropriation of language, one of the
"affordances" that structure our sensory-motor perceptions and restrict our ways of re-imagining
these perceptions "(CAVE, 2016, p. ). What matters in a real situation of communication is that this
appropriation of the writer or speaker can be possessed by the reader or listener. We can appropriate
language as we see fit, but not all appropriation is beforehand shareable: it must be able, by the very
materiality of sound or text, to guide the speaker towards the intended meaning. Let us remember
what was said earlier: “affordance” is the material item available in the environment, not the
appropriation that is made of it; all appropriation is guided by the material possibilities offered by
the affordance, which may allows an unpredictable amount of appropriations, but does not allow
each and every appropriation - it is impossible digging the ground or practicing hand-gliding in
Ibirapuera’s marquee, just as it is impossible to read Aluísio Azevedo’s “The Slum”, as a
psychological drama narrated in the first-person: it is something that the materiality of the text does
not allow. This literary example is still trivial, but would it be possible, from this general plan, to
identify something peculiar in the affordances provided by the materiality of the literary text?
Cave suggests that any textual conventions may function as literary “affordances”. Genders,
for example, would be a kind of cognitive shortcut that allows "specific elements to be described or
mentiones as part of a group that has some characteristics in common." (CAVE, 2016, p 56, our
translation). The genre provides a frame, a framework intuitively recognizable by the skilled reader,
guiding his/her organization of the content. When everything works - i.e. if authorial management
of the genre actually directs the reader to the type of frame sought - the appropriation of the text by
the reader will be the one predicted and intended by the author. Of course we can not expect this to
happen everytime, but what matters at this point is that the intuitive identification of the genre can
allow the reader his/her immersion in the narrated story more easily, by guiding his/her
appropriation: a reader not cognitively oriented can be confused, as reported by so many readers of
“Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow”. By contrast, the intuitive identification of the genre allows the
reader to fit the narrated actions into models of action similar to those of works pertaining to the
identified genre. Such conventions may be relevant even when they are mobilized in an original
way: often innovation in the literature is linked to the unforeseen management of existing
conventions, which will continue to act as “affordances” by stimulating a certain type of
appropriation by the reader, but focusing on surprising functions. Nothing is prescriptive in this
process, for any intent to produce appropriation may fail: unlike the natural “affordance”, whose
presence in the atmosphere did not intend the received appropriation, cultural “affordances” are an
author’s bet in the future of his appropriation - and may fail.

This openness to contingency allows the relation between readers and texts to preserve the
complementarity between agent and environment in Gibson's theory: from the perspective of the
appropriation’s agent, it always mixes up action and reaction. In Norman's words (1988) this is what
makes us relate to new objects we find out there: the action-reaction complementarity leads us to sit
in a chair of weird design, when we realize that it “affords” us to sit on it - and also allows us to use
it as a ladder, or that a child uses it in a game, or any other use that its materiality allows us to
imagine. This suggests that in the field of visual perception the concept of Gibson sheds lights on
the reader’s relation with fiction: before we open a book, its cover may indicate us that the text
belongs to a specific genre, culturalized visual “affordance” that allows, in a very first moment, to
sense the proper mode of relation with a subject still to be read. This ability for intuition may seem
ordinary, but nobody is born knowing that science-fiction books have covers of a certain kind, a
notion that assumes an apprenticeship that can be intuitively activated as a preamble to reading. A
culturalized “affordance” allows one to look at the cover of the book and to presuppose the type of
reader and reader is targeted by the author: an apparent commonplace action bears a dense layer of
cultural learning. Only with the background of a broad audience, trained to take possession of
“affordances” of a certain kind, can the publishing market exploit the cover as the first material
element that, through visual stimulation, will allow the attribution of fictionality to the text,
triggering the “make-believe” as the standard reading.
And then, text opened, other types of “affordance” will sustain the fluidity of reading: the
conventions of gender, above any others. For fluency to occur, it is important that the guidance
provided by the use of the convention is easily processed. The trained reader must be able to be
guided by its framework without major difficulties; if he even gets to identify that framework in
action, his orientation will have passed unconsciously. It is unlikely, for example, that the passage
below draw the attention of the reader trained to the sudden crossing of Laub’s narrator to the
reminiscence:

The first time I fell in love was when I was seven. I know the age because she was the teacher who
taught me to read. This teacher followed her life, but for me she died at some point in the weeks or
months in which the obsession ended: at the age of seven I made plans to marry in a fraque and
bring that lady to live in my family's house. (LAUB, 2016, p.50)

Nothing is more traditional, at this point in the history of the genre, than this enunciation of the
character's biography, made in the mimesis of the reminiscence oralized in first person: the narrator
behaves like a speaker that tells, for the reader-listener, a fact of his personal story. In the condition
of a (probably) internalized convention by the reader, it is possible that this Strategy Narrative is
processed without becoming an object of conscious attention, orienting the reader in a subliminal
way to a certain mode of relationship and expectation regarding that segment of text: in other
words, this direction will have passed infraconsciously.
More surprising is another strategy used by Laub to mimic the typical forms and contents of
postings on the internet:

Sender: Me. Recipient: Walter. Date: 10/2/2016. Excerpt from the message: Proper discipline begins
with a good belt beating. (LAUB, 2016, p.125)

Laub develops a technical solution to inscribe in a continuous text the fragmented

information of a web page; the result is that the "sender", "recipient" and "date" fields leave their
separate tables in the layout in order to follow a short paragraph. Being anticipated by the narrator
(who had announced that he would approach those e-mail exchanges), mimesis is likely to work and
the reader will easily decode the text, which obeys a common pattern in messages exchanged
between friends (a telegraphic style, brief and encrypted, reasonably understood only by their
correspondents). But even if decoding occurs easily, we are dealing with a recent non-fictional
convention, still uncommon in fiction, which will probably make its processing a little more costly
than in the previous case, which dealt with an already traditional convention in the history of the
novel. Nevertheless the process is the same: textual conventions are “affordances” that guide the
reader in appropriating the read material, suggesting the posture - tone, mode - to be adopted in
reading that segment. This appropriation will occur intuitively when the convention is easily
processed, or it will involve more conscious mediation when processing is slower. This suggestion
of modes to appropriate information takes particular importance when content is permeated by
moral judgment and doxastic knowledge - as in the excerpts below, in which the mimesis of
postings comments on the web informs the reader on the opinions of Internet users about the
homoerotic content of leaked emails:

Author of the post: anonymous. Excerpt: In the past, people were concerned about values,
especially those of the community without even talking about the education of children [...]. There
was no violence and this thievery of politicians. There is only a thief deputy [...]. Formerly the older
ones were "respected" in the streets. I have no prejudice, but there is a question of "respect"
involved in this, I do not know why people deny [...]. I say and I'm not scared nowadays it's this
"filth" you see.
Author of the comment: anonymous. Excerpt: The inflammation of sensuality and the awkwardness
that receives in itself the reward that suited its error - Romans 1:27 [...]. The accusations and the
sending of the messengers to destroy the city - Genesis, 19:13 [...]. The chastisement of the sword,
of the famine, of the pestilence set in Your presence - Chronicles 20: 9 [...]. The abomination that
turns the defendants into the defendants of death - Leviticus 18:22.
Author of the comment: anonymous. Excerpt: A burglar is proud to go around passing disease to
others the other hijacked encourages this behavior [...]. I'm not prejudiced or anything I do not care
what each one does for the tail, but everything has limits after they do not know why they are
persecuted [...]. The TV is rotten only shows disgrace after they do not know why the people are
ignorant and have so much gossip out there so much depravation [...]. Then they do not know why
they pick someone go and kill those broken-down shit. (LAUB, 2016, p.69)

In this case, mimicked conventions involve a curious "uneducated writing pattern" that is not
there only to fit statements under a certain valuation, but also to guide the reader's stance in the face
of his/her exposition – a detached posture, potentially critical, especially because the diversity of the
reasons invoked in the answers subtracts the pretensions of each of them to the truth.
The concept of “affordance” does not summarize the ways in which the text self-expose its
fictional condition, nor the ways in which it supports immersion in reading. The concept does not
summarize the ways by which a text can make its own homeostatic function effective in the reader
as an infraconscious way. But with it a step was taken: textual “affordances” guide the reader in
assigning a certain tone to the reading of the text. They suggest the tone, mode, and stance before
the textual information: in often subtle and localized ways, they indicate to the reader the
expectations anticipated by manipulated conventions, referring to the emotional tonality that the
stories of that genre usually involve and the type of content they usually address. “Affordances”
guide the posture, the interpretative activity, the emotional tone by which the story will be read:
metaphorically, they constitute the environment that will guide the reader in their appropriation of
relevant information.
This last point already puts us into the field of semantics: in it we will continue the
discussion on the conditions of infraconscious realization of the homeostatic functions of literature.