Affordance marks the moment when readiness ceases to be abstract and begins to contour itself in relation.
It is where potential folds — not into form, but into direction; where inclination and ability meet as a differential of offering.
In classical ecological psychology, affordance was conceived as a property of the environment relative to an organism — what the world offers a perceiver capable of acting.
But in relational ontology, there is no environment and no organism prior to relation.
The offering is not between things; it is the thing — the relational event through which readiness differentiates itself.
1. From Potential to Relational Readiness
In The Topology of Readiness, we reframed potential as composed of two orthogonal gradients: inclination, the world’s vector of openness or tendency to become, and ability, the world’s configured capacity to sustain becoming.
These are not properties of things but modes of readiness.
Yet they remain abstract until they enter into mutual orientation — until readiness begins to shape itself as for something.
Affordance names precisely this orientation: readiness becoming relational.
It is not a quality that one side “has” for the other, but the differential of readiness itself — the field’s internal modulation into offer and uptake.
To afford is not to enable another; it is to configure oneself as offerable.
This makes affordance ontologically prior to perception, use, or function.
The world is not first made and then interpreted; it is interpretation — an ongoing differentiation of offering that constitutes both subject and object retroactively.
2. The Ontology of Offering
To afford is to offer, but “offering” here does not mean giving or granting.
It is the condition of being available to relation — the self-dispositional openness of the field.
Every actualisation is thus not a selection from an inventory of possibilities, but a moment in which the field takes up its own offer.
If inclination is the world’s will-to-become, and ability its competence for self-sustainment, then affordance is their point of mutual attunement — the moment when offering and uptake coincide.
It is the relational curvature of readiness: how the world leans into itself.
Traditional metaphysics speaks of law and cause.
Relational ontology speaks instead of offering: not command or compulsion, but configuration — the pattern through which possibility arranges its own availability.
To speak of the world as lawful is to mishear its resonance; the world is not ruled, it is offered.
3. The Field as Pre-Subjective Relation
Affordance does not occur within a field; it is what the field is — the local geometry of mutual readiness.
This reverses the ontological hierarchy: the field is not a background medium for interactions but the primary mode of existence itself.
Things are not contained in the field; they are cuts through it, stabilisations of ongoing offering.
Thus, to ask what something affords is to ask how the field inclines through it.
The “cup affords holding” not because of the cup’s form or the hand’s shape, but because both are local articulations of the same relational readiness: containment and grasp co-emerge as one pattern of offering.
In this view, agency dissolves into topology.
There are no actors, only local configurations of readiness — transient harmonies within the continuous differentiation of offering.
4. Toward Gradients of Offering
Affordance is therefore not a static relation but a field of continuous differentiation.
The next step is to trace how readiness varies across its own topology — how it generates gradients of offering that orient the evolution of coherence.
These gradients will let us see how the field itself learns to sustain becoming — how potential organises its own distribution.
Next: Gradients of Offering: Differentiation without Division
We will follow the topology of readiness as it folds into asymmetries of relation — the ontological origins of direction, curvature, and force.
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