Canonical affordances and the multitemporal depth of sociomateriality

Abstract How do the temporal horizons of human experience shape what our social, cultural, and material environments afford? This question has become crucial as affordance research increasingly explores the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of perception and action. Recent approaches in radical embodied cognitive science have built on Costall’s notion of canonical affordances to clarify how possibilities for action are disclosed in socially normative ways and in relation to shared practices. However, despite these advancements, the temporal organization of canonical affordances remains underdeveloped. Existing accounts generally emphasize the phenomenological time of everyday experience, the situated time of practices, or the developmental trajectories of learning, leaving unexplored the longer horizons through which sociality and materiality are formed, sustained, and adapted. Consequently, the multitemporal and diachronic depth under which canonical affordances persist or change risks being flattened. Supported by anthropology and archaeology, this article addresses this limitation by introducing two largely neglected temporal scales: intergenerational and transgenerational time. Intergenerational time captures the lived temporal rhythms emerging from habitual sociomaterial practices across a few generations. Transgenerational time concerns the persistence and transformation of canonical affordances linked to the natural and anthropic processes by which material culture endures, accumulates, and changes across deep time. We formalize these horizons within a broader multitemporal and diachronic framework, situating them alongside existing phenomenological, situated, developmental, and phylogenetic timescales to specify the causal relations that hold between them.