Monuments and Affordance

Abstract

The “#Rhodes Must Fall” campaign initiated by students at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 sparked a wave of statue defacements across South Africa and gave fresh impetus to the national debate about monuments of the colonial and apartheid era. Far less attention is paid to the pervasive neglect and defacement of post-apartheid commemorative markers and contestation over their meaning. This study advocates a shift from semiotic and discursive approaches to psychoanalytical approaches that foreground the individual and his/her multisensory physical engagement with monuments. James J. Gibson’s theory of affordance is drawn upon to examine how people in South Africa and beyond interact with monuments and especially statues—not as cultural symbols laden with meaning, but as material objects in space that afford opportunities for physical interaction—in affirmative, utilitarian and destructive ways. It is argued that such bodily engagements and the traces they sometimes leave on the commemorative marker can feed back into the process of signification and potentially produce new affordance effects.