An Enactive and Ecological Psychology Reading of the January 6, 2021, Invasion of the US Capitol Building.

John Protevi

Louisiana State University

Feb. 8, 2024, 4 p.m. UTC // Feb. 8, 2024, 4 p.m. in UTC

Something happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021: an event, a drama, a haecceity, a case. Many others have interpreted the meaning of the actions – among them, fighting, shitting, praying – so rather than simply repeat their efforts, I want to contextualize the meanings of the event by looking at the “political affordances” of the Capitol building. Think of this as a case study in ecological psychology, a Gibsonism (Gibson 1986; Radman 2012), of political actions, bodily affects and architectural affordances in a politically charged built environment (Harrison 2020). In looking for the conditions of the event, I’ll first tackle the methodology of case studies, I’ll follow that with a recap of current work on the convergence of enactivism with Gibsonian ecological psychology. I’ll end with a look at how features of the building solicited actions that are ordinarily mundane but were spectacularly out-of-place when performed by those people that day at the Capitol. In particular, I’ll look at how the dais in the Senate Chamber solicited prayers by Jacob Chansley, the “Q Shaman.” Chansley declaimed in the simultaneously grandiose and paranoid “Trumpian ecumenical” style (Jenkins 2021b); the contrast case to his speech is that many prayers in the American civil religion style have been offered in the Senate chamber by the Senate Chaplain.

Insurrection photo image credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Link to join/watch the seminar: https://youtube.com/live/Cq5ekTGN67I