THE DOORS Of PERCEPTION: A mutualist account of entrances and exits.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,
Everything would appear to man as it is….”

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Entrance

‘Each generation,’ says Leontiev, ‘begins its life in a world of objects and phenomena created by previous generations.’*1 This fact is perhaps so obvious that it is overlooked. Even archaeologists, whose entire domain is the study of material culture, tend to take it for granted, whilst psychologists, concerned with humans, their perceptions and relationships, often neglect the world of objects altogether (Costall, 1993; Joerges, 1988; Olsen 2010). Ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979) should have set matters straight. But, as Costall (1993) points out, the fear of slipping into the relativities of different cultural gestalts has prevented the ecological method from confronting our highly artificial environment.

In this paper I propose to open up one of the most ubiquitous of human artefacts, the door. Drawing inspiration from the resources of prehistory, personal experience, and a provoking but in no way explanatory book by Donald Norman (1988), I suggest that there are a number of interconnected functional, perceptual, social and mythical/metaphorical levels which constitute our relationship with doors. But this should not lead one to assume that there is an unresolvable cultural relativity surrounding them. From a mutualist perspective, which combines the insights of Gibsonian ecological psychology with the social constructive theories of Vygotskii (see Costall & Still, 1991), there is no need to appeal to mental representations of artefacts. Rather, we should examine how doors are presented as ecological and social affordances in the joint construction of activity.

The perception of doors.

 

Doors and doorways are, of course, a subset of the apertures which any organism will encounter in its environment. Clearly, at this basic level, the affordance of such apertures is specified by the optic array; the flow of perceived space alerts the perceiver to the fact of a break in any barrier through which locomotion can proceed (Fig.1a). Structural invariants in perception also indicate whether an aperture is large enough to afford progress, although we sometimes fail to take enough account of this and consequently bang our heads on the lintel.

Straight away then, the ecology of perception takes on a species specific, social and developmental Umwelt. The hole in the skirting is an affordance for mice (at least in cartoons) but not for cats, whilst our perception of affording apertures depends upon our developmental stage. In toy houses and playgrounds the apertures which afford entrance to children almost seem to exclude adults; the doors of old houses are low, perhaps because people were shorter in the past as a consequence of poor nutrition, or, more likely, because low doors were easier to construct. For Alice in Wonderland too, some apertures were elusive until she could shrink to the right size (Fig. 2). A metaphor, as Empson (1935) points out, for the difference between child and adult, but also for that first entrance (or exit) when we pass through the aperture of the cervix.

From an historical perspective, we may assume that the first doorways, as such, were either the natural entrances to caves, or openings in the relatively simple structures recorded in the later Palaeolithic (see e.g. Farizy, 1990; Gladkih et al 1984). Here, in the case of caves, the aperture is a purely ‘natural,’ found object. But one which, nonetheless, may have had mysterious significance for our ancestors; the extraordinary paintings in inaccessible caves perhaps suggesting a religious fascination with dark, secluded (perhaps womblike?) spaces. In the case of shelters, one may suppose, the construction of an entrance is implicit in the constellation of knowledge required to make a shelter in the first place. Unless, of course, our ancestors built the shelter and then realised they needed a door (to get in or out we may never know?!).

By the Bronze age, if not before, it would seem that any flimsy predecessor of the door itself (like the flap of a tent or wigwam) was being replaced by a more substantial and recognisable door. If we think for a moment of the chambered tombs of the later Neolithic, the entrance has hardened into a recognisable doorway with posts and a lintel, and possessing a variety of blocking stones which, to judge from sites such as Newgrange, may well have symbolised a portal at the other end of life to that which Empson’s Alice experienced (but an entrance or an exit?). From standing structures (e.g. Skara Brae or Mycenae or even Stonehenge) and the excavated evidence of post built structures, we must assume that by the Neolithic and Bronze age the door had become a reality, both as a practical, functional object, keeping things in or out, and as a symbolic barrier; the threshold. And the rest is history….

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Looking back over this brief account, then, one may delineate a basic socio-historical transition from natural apertures, to apertures in structures, to the point where humanity finally “put wood i’th’ole.” A sequence which illustrates, I suggest, Elias (1982) point that no one set out to invent the civilising process; the door, as a civilised barrier, emerges explicitly as the unintended consequence of a series of events.

Put more systematically, the natural aperture, often irregular in form, is regularised by the carpentered (or chiselled) environment of buildings into a frame (posts and lintel) in both a structural and social sense (c.f.Goffman, 1974) *2.But the main point, from a perceptual point of view, is that the aperture is transformed from a purely ‘natural’ affordance to a constructed sociocultural device. The door frame frames the entrance or exit (Fig. 1b), scaffolds ingress or egress, in a ‘symbolic’ as well as a practical sense. It serves to alert our attention to the existence of a doorway, not in any abstract semiotic sense, but as a fusion of ecological, functional, historical and cultural components.

Just to emphasise this point it may be worth recounting the following experience. I once arranged to meet my partner from the train at Milton Keynes railway station, a large, rectangular mirror glass building. Arriving in haste, believing I was late, I could not find the door! I walked all the way round the station, crossing and recrossing the track, but did not see any entrance. Eventually, I am pleased to say, I did find the door; a featureless, mirror glass automatic door in a featureless mirror glass wall. I leave the reader to reflect upon this frameless experience.

Given the aperture, then, the door is a plane object which fills it, as a barrier to heat, light, unwanted guests or whatever. Once the door exists, there must be some means of closing it, a latch, and mutatis mutandis, there must be some indication of how it is to be opened. Having closed the ‘ecological’ aperture, it must be framed to indicate its presence and structured to indicate how it may be opened. At this point the cultural variety of doors becomes extremely large, and I will discuss only a limited typology of doors (Fig. 3) which has no more than heuristic significance.

Turning first to doors which have handles to open them (Fig 3a-e), a species which is surely the most common, one may observe several important phenomena. Firstly, of course, the handle is a genuinely designed affordance. It not only functions as a graspable appendage to the relatively featureless plane of the door, but is also designed to be seen to be graspable, and in some sense to indicate its mode of operation or ‘mode d’emploi’ (see Akrich & Boullier, 1991). For example, the lever type handle (Fig. 3d) implicitly suggests that it must be turned, or more exactly rotated downwards to be opened. Indeed, unless one is very short, the act of grasping a handle naturally leads to a downward motion which opens the latch. This is somewhat superior to a round knob (Fig 3a) which, in virtue of the fact that we can turn it either way, can be confusing (see below). Contrasting with such mechanical devices one also has the straight handle, in a variety of forms (Fig. 3b). This is a relatively pure graspable object, which not only invites the actor to pull, but also implicitly signals which side of the door to pull. Similarly, the handles on sliding doors (Fig. 3e) are often recessed in such a way as to indicate in which direction the door should slide. The companion of the handle is often a simple finger plate (Fig. 3c) on the opposite side of the door which indicates that one should push.

Of course, as we all know to our cost, such apparent affordances often turn out to be false friends (see Norman, 1988). The handle appears on the push as well as the pull side; the handle is in the middle of the door, giving no hint of which way the door opens (Fig 3i); there are two doors and we pull and push every combination before finding the right one (Fig. 3j). This presents a difficulty in terms of ecological affordances; for the door handle is not some optical trick, it is something perceived, indeed acted upon as the focus of all our senses, but it still doesn’t open the door.

Although many doors appear to invite opening, in some cases this invitation is entirely misleading. My front door has a knob which (as far as I can see) serves no purpose whatsoever. Similarly, the handle on the door of No.10 Downing Street serves no purpose either; for the door is always opened from within as government ministers trudge in and out. Moreover, in some cases the means of egress is not intended as a consciously perceived control. Firedoor ‘crash bars’ (Fig. 3g) which can be opened deliberately, are designed to open doors by being ‘crashed’ into. Indeed experience shows that in the panic elicited by fires people are relatively unconscious of where they are going, rushing down stairwells to be trapped in basements unless these stairs are blocked by some barrier. Are such ‘idiot proof’ mechanisms affordances? In a way we would want to say that they are, but that the intentional agency has been taken away from the user.

On the other hand, there are doors which are entirely featureless, e.g. the automatic doors of supermarkets (Fig. 3h), or the doors of a fortified building. Here the actor is not intended to open the door him or herself; this is either done automatically (by human or electronic agent) or not at all. Not only is it obvious that a featureless door signals to the actor that ingress is not in his or her control, but the door also signifies that outsiders are either barred (in the case of a fortification) or to be welcomed in to spend their money (at the supermarket).

Throughout, then, doors are concerned with access and the control of access. If one considers doors which, whilst having no graspable handle, display a simple keyhole (Fig. 3f), or (as is common in many Parisian Immeuble) a keypad or entry device, the relatively featureless door signifies a limited, selective entrance, only permitted to those that have the key (see also Latour 2000). In other cases, control of access is not so tangible. As Goffman (1959) describes, doors such as the ‘kickdoor’ between kitchen and dining room in a restaurant act as a barrier between the onstage performance of the waiters and the more down to earth backstage activities. Here he quotes Orwell (1940: 69);

‘Words failing him he opened the door; and as he opened it he delivered a final insult in the manner of Squire Western in Tom Jones. Then he entered the dining room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan’

Such social obstacles can take many forms. As Goffman also points out, the doors used by caretakers and maintenance engineers are hardly ever noticed by the casual observer, but open on a private world of backstage activities. At times, such social barriers can be oppressive; as noted above doors can exclude by their very nature; private activities go on ‘behind closed doors;’ membership of a certain social class or group (such as the Freemasons) is said to ‘open doors’.

By deliberate or careless design, doors can make us feel uncomfortable; they can preclude space for social interaction. The Archaeology department at Southampton University, as in many modern office and apartment blocks, consists of a corridor of (usually) closed doors, with no obvious space for social interaction. Yet in a very real sense there is a social need for a vestibule or court which, like the ‘front office’ which we must pass through to see the boss, acts as an introductory space where access is negotiated. Such a concept may have a very long history; many late Neolithic tombs have a courtyard in front of their entrance; a place, we assume, where the rituals of access to the dead were played out. The concept also crosses cultures, as Cresswell (1983: 159) describes in the case of North African houses;

‘The entrance of the houses opens on a lobby, where the master of the house receives his guests. The form of this lobby protects the interior of the house – the courtyard and surrounding bedrooms – and the intimate family life which goes on there, from the indiscreet view of strangers.’ (my translation)

Unfortunately, here as in Western countries, new building techniques and increasing pressure on space often dispose of such socially neutral foyers and lobbys.

I could go on; doors not only let us into buildings and rooms; there are doors on cupboards, cars, trains. Safe doors, lift doors (see Costall, 1993), watertight doors, manholes, French windows (in French Portes-fentres), conventional windows and as Keats said

‘Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’

(VIII, Ode to a Nightingale)

Each has its contextual peculiarities. Its functional, perceptual, social, cultural and magical level.

The doors of perception

If I have been not altogether serious and solemn, and have in places traded on the frustrations that every reader will have encountered, I ask your indulgence. It seems to me that whilst Norman’s (1988) book also trades upon the everyday frustrations of the built environment discussed here, he does not reward the reader with any serious attempt to explain. I hope to go a little further than this.

Clearly, as we have seen, apertures are affordances in a purely ecological sense. Here the aperture constitutes an affordance through action in relation to environment alone.

The ‘niche’ arises as the product of a mutuality between an organism and its environment (Ingold, 1989; Costall, 1993) which has only physico-chemical and organic components. The cave is a product of purely geological forces and becomes an affordance in relation to an organism of a given size, in need of shelter (be it human, bear, hyena). Sometimes the actions of organisms are such that they create their own apertures (e.g. beavers, ants, weaver birds) and some might argue, as Ingold (1983) has done, that these creatures are not truly the authors of their doors. Naturally the question of animal culture is very difficult and I will only say that I think Ingold’s analysis is only part of the story. In other cases, where one species makes use of apertures created by another (e.g. hermit crabs, foxes in badger sets; the cat-flap), there is a complex situation in which, one might say, the affordance is entirely natural from the point of view of its user.

By contrast, as we have seen, the intentional creation of shelter (perhaps including the intentions of bees and badgers) implies of necessity an entrance, and in turn that entrance implies the framing of that entrance and the blocking there of. Thus, as Leontiev (1981) says, each generation takes its life in a world already created by others. The socially designed affordances of access and control of access, then, give rise to the potential relativity which Gibson was cautious of (Costall, 1993; 1995; 1997; fotthcoming); for clearly one man’s door into Milton Keynes station is another man (or woman’s) blank wall of mirror glass. The key, in my view, lies with what Gibson (1979) himself called the education of attention.

Such is the variety of objects, and their short history in evolutionary terms, that the comprehension of their use must be learned rather than inherited. In quoting Vygotskii’s (1986[1934]: 168) maxim that ‘In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it.’ I am struck by the fact that such functions need not inhere in persons; such functions are also those artefacts which others have created.

As Leudar (1991) points out, the correct focus for the study of social life is that of joint action; in our everyday lives, the conversation of word and gesture, each action creates or withholds an affordance for another. Hence, for example, the complex process of turn taking in conversation, where both speaker and hearers structure each others ‘turn’ through their words and gestures. Extending this principle to the world of objects we may say that artefacts too are gestures in joint action; they are put there by other people to scaffold our interactions with them. Thus the door of my appartement or your office is part of the structure of our social interaction; I knock on your door and you let me in, or don’t; our choices structure and control our mutual relationship.

Yet, clearly, like the techniques of the body, this process of joint action is not something that is simply given in the object itself. We must learn the proper use of artefacts, in the same way that we deal with other conventions of social life. The proper function of a door (or more exactly its functioning – see Preston 2000) is not always apparent from its structure, because, in Sigaut’s (1991) terms, a door is not used for opening but by opening. Of course, we can simply co-opt what affordances we already appreciate to complete some task; the chisel can be used as a screwdriver (Costall, 1993); but this improper use of artefacts can have unwanted social and physical consequences. Climbing in a window can lead one to end up in court (Costall, 1993); forcing open a lift door can lead us to fall down a lift shaft; entering without knocking can lead to embarrassment. Moreover, in many cases, not understanding a proper function can lead us to fail to gain admission. To recount another brief anecdote, the street door to the Town Council offices near where I used to live had a round knob. Many members of the public arrived, turned the knob, found the door apparently locked and went away assuming the office was closed. Unfortunately for them the knob turned anti-clockwise and hence against social convention.

Returning to Gibson’s dilemma over relativism, we may say that the problem lies in treating the environment as something given, and the actor as someone that represents that given environment. The environment is given, to the extent that it is real, but it only affords us anything to the extent that it is congruent with our actions; it is an affordance by acting rather than for acting. Our problem as the users of doors is that from time to time the cultural environment is not congruent with our actions. However well designed, the door must assume some understanding within us, but as actors we have only a partial understanding of the affordances of the world (Graves, 1991). We not only directly pick up information, we also pick out information or have it picked out, made salient, for us. Where there is a lack of congruence between what we already know and what is presented, we are unable to pick out what we should attend to.

The relativity, then, resides not in the subjectivity of our experience of the world, but in the particularity of our relationship with the world. And the truth of this can be seen in the fact that others, through joint action, can lead us to re-frame, as it were, our Unwelt. Simply by marking a counter clockwise arrow on the Town council door, the Unwelt of the frustrated citizen is extended to include the fact that he or she must turn the knob anti-clockwise. The arrow creates a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotskii, 1986[1934]), linking what he or she already knows about arrows as indicators of direction, with the instantiation of a door knob which turns the (culturally) wrong way. But again this arrow is not simply an ecological marker; it is part of the world which one has already, as Leontiev (1981) says, been introduced to by others. The council could, in its infinite wisdom, have used a written notice, but again this would exclude foreigners and the illiterate; artefacts require not only joint action at an instant (council <=> door <=> user) but also a history of joint action which extends in each of us back to the moment of our emergence into the world, and in each culture back through generations.

But more than this, coherence also plays a part; there is an element of good and bad design. Putting the handle in the middle of a door, or having a double door, one of which is locked, is not so much a matter of convention as of incoherent affordance *3. Similarly, putting a pull, graspable handle on the push side of the door is a matter of the incoherent arrangement of affordances, in that a graspable object is clearly such to anyone, with no convention to indicate when pull handles are to be pushed. There is also a sense in which the purely social control of access is scaffolded by coherent environmental design; the lobby or reception area facilitates the negotiation of access.

To sum up then we may say that objects, in our joint actions, have a greater or lesser degree of shareability (Freyd, 1983). We can use a door if it has been designed to be congruent with our expectations. But if it is in some way novel it can be made usable by introducing features that are already congruent with our experience, thereby creating a zone of proximal development in which we accommodate anti- clockwise door knobs, or the recessed handle which alerts us to the sliding door. Equally, there is a level at which the affordance of a door also needs to be coherent, in the sense that each new door we encounter must operate coherently in itself if we are to divine its function. Yet at each level the expectations of the actor, the affordances of the door and the intentions of its maker must interlock, must form a mutuality, for joint action to occur. Or for joint action to be prevented in the sense that the lock on my door prevents you from sharing my possessions.

The Magic Theatre

Our perception of material culture, then, is not simply a matter of representation. We understand it not simply by perceiving it visually as some given entity, but as an embodied experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1964); the door is not for anything, but something by which we enter and exit. But, you may ask, the door as a magical or mythical symbol, as a metaphor, is surely only a representation? It bears no direct relation to our experience?

This exclusive, controlled aspect of doors is often taken up in folk tales and literature, where doors of a magical kind can only be found in the right circumstances, in which case the ‘key’ is more a state of mind than a physical object or code. In Hesse’s Steppenwolf Harry Haller initially catches fleeting glimpses of a mysterious door;

‘I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether it had always been there or whether it had just been made….

‘now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright sign, on which it seemed to me, something was written….
‘at last I succeeded in catching several words on the end.
They were: MAGIC THEATRE-NOT FOR EVERYBODY
I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir.’

(Hesse, 1965[1927]: 40-41)

Similarly, in H.G. Wells (1956[1905]) story The Door in the Wall, the protagonist searches endlessly for a green door that leads into a magical garden. Eventually, he meets what appears to be an unfortunate end, mistakenly stepping through a door in a hoarding and falling to his death in a deep pit;

‘something- I know not what- that in the guise of a wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it? There you touch on the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standards he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death.
But did he see like that?’

(Wells, 1958[1906]: 122)

Here, you may argue, there is no direct perception involved.

Yet the concept of mystery is not simply a mental event, but something that arises from a visceral experience; it is the counterpart of vision (see Cornu, 1991). That doors signify exclusion, seclusion, fear, change, is something which derives from the direct experience of life. To know that doors can have mysterious properties is to have experienced the actual sense of foreboding or expectation that agglomerates from the school door on one’s first day, the door of one’s parents bedroom, the door that opens on a job interview, vistas glimpsed through half open doors.

That doors do have a significance in so many stories, myths, and religions; the gates of heaven and hell, the door to Hesse’s Magic Theatre, the magic door of Aladdin’s cave; emanates from an embedded experience which we share with the authors’s of those stories. Their experience is congruent with ours, such that reading Steppenwolf means something more than reading the telephone directory. And the sense that what we see is not all there is, that there are aspects of reality that exclude or elude us, is at the root of the mystery.

Exit

Doors are more cunning than they look. Sometimes they can be mysterious, magical and threatening, like the door to Orwell’s room 101 (1948). But, as Wells implies, it all depends upon how you see it. The way we perceive the world is not simply a matter of what is ‘there,’ nor indeed what is in the mind. For the human world is a construct, literally; it has been made, and likewise the way we perceive that world must also be constructed by the guidance of our interlocutors. There is then, a mutuality between us and our world, for both are constructed in relation to each other; the entirely ‘natural’ affordance (Gibson) or function (Vygotskii), the raw stuff of ourselves and our environment is scaffolded and moulded to mesh together in joint action.

Unfortunately, this mutuality can tend towards a constricting closure. On the one hand the designers of entrances and exits can forget the need to make their functions, their affordances, fit the perceptions of people. They can fail to give us affordances which are congruent with our cultural experience and likewise they can design ‘affordances’ which do not afford in virtue of their incoherence. On the other hand, as both Blake and Huxley (1955) saw, the eyes are the doors of perception. Obscured by prejudice they exclude us from what really is, namely, to complete the quotation, infinity. Social convention and practice can narrow our perception, such that, in order to survive, the doors of perception must be cleansed.

Written 1993, references updated somewhat, 2013.

Acknowledgements

In a sense this article has written itself, which is just as well because every time I have spoken to anyone about it they have given me a funny look. But I would like to thank Sin for understanding what I was on about, and the Fondation Fyssen for financial support whilst writing the piece. Of course the blame is all mine.

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*1 I translate, here, from the (1976) French edition of Leontiev’s Problems of the Development of Mind (1981), since the English translation is somewhat elusive.

*2 Here it is perhaps worth noting as an aside that the French word ‘charpente’ actually means frame or framework.

*3 Although, of course, one must be aware that difficulty of opening might itself be a feature of coherent design (e.g. so-called ‘child’ proof locks on car doors).