The Birth of Sense. Don Beith

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СКАЧАТЬ of a meaningful relation of time in the organic horizon of a life. This transcendental constituting activity of life furnishes sense for the references “future,” “now,” “before,” or “origin.” There are

      animal essences—. . . walking toward a goal, taking, eating bait, jumping over or going around an obstacle—unities which reflexology did not succeed in engendering from elementary [physical] reactions, and which are therefore like an a priori of biological science. (SB, 157/170)

      An organism’s grasping at food is not simply a series of muscular contractions or reflex stimuli, but an internally ordered and intrinsically meaningful task. Merleau-Ponty writes that there can be no “universe of naturalism that is self-enclosed,” because “perception is not an event of nature” (SB, 145/157). To explain the synthetic unity of activity and passivity within time, an origin for this order must be transcendentally posited outside of chronological time and empirical nature.

      Yet the chronological and the transcendental temporal registers presuppose each other, such that the transcendental principle that is the orienting field of time must be born at a specific moment in time. While the insight that life projects its meaning into the past is valuable, this transcendental explanation of life precludes the birth and becoming of life in a natural past that is radically prior to the temporal horizon of the organism. There are powerful resources in The Structure of Behavior to conceptualize developmental structures of life, but there is not a full-fledged account of how the meaning of life becomes necessary, how its irreducible structure nevertheless begins as a moment of facticity.

      There is no way to describe, within this transcendental view, how or why a vital structure emerges—it remains an advent and epiphany, a mysterious and irreducible expression of the living body. Passivity remains genetic here, because organic development is itself an activity that constitutes a temporal field. The question of the origin of the meaning of life, then, remains unanswerable within transcendental philosophy or vitalism because of this temporal circularity:

      Since the physico-chemical actions of which the organism is the seat cannot be abstracted from those of the milieu, how can the act which creates an organic individual be circumscribed in this continuous whole and where should the zone of influence of the vital élan be limited? It will indeed be necessary to introduce an unintelligible break here. (SB, 158/171; my emphasis)

      This transcendental field is said to constitute the temporal sequence of a specific organism entirely, and yet it needs a specific, determinate birth. It is this fact of birth, the origination of activity from passivity, that the transcendental account cannot explain. This ontological break, I think, points to an origin of sense in nonsense and a more radical, unintelligible past.

      A second, more difficult reading of The Structure of Behavior is available to us, where we can posit that life both has an irreducible meaning and owes its origins to processes of emergence and development.⁴⁰ Here, life is originally incomplete and must temporally develop, where this development is oriented by a generative passivity that is temporally and ontologically the outside of life. Notably, Merleau-Ponty remarks that we can objectify these moments of becoming only in retrospect, after new orders of meaning developmentally emerge in life:

      In order to make a living organism reappear, starting from these reactions, one must trace lines of cleavage in them, choose points of view from which certain ensembles receive a common signification and appear, for example, as phenomena of “assimilation” or as components of a “function of reproduction”; one must choose points of view from which certain sequences of events, until then submerged in a continuous becoming, are distinguished for the observer as “phases”—growth, adulthood—of organic development. One must mentally detach certain partitive phenomena from their real context and subsume them under an idea which is not contained, but expressed, in them. (SB, 152/165)

      Vital structures are not preexisting forms but emerge genetically through development. In regarding life, we are prompted to notice (Merleau-Ponty problematically says “choose,” but then qualifies this by saying that we must choose according to the vital structure’s own expression) stages where a new meaning comes on the scene and transfigures the sense of the body: flexion, for example, becomes grasping, and at some point grasping becomes expressive gesture, which in turn becomes language, then art, and then more. Life exhibits an immanent signification that is not natural mechanism any more than it is the projective construct of living awareness, but exhibits, rather, a becoming-true, the institution of meaning.

      Against the transcendental or autopoietic view, I contend that the environment-engendering activity of the organism is not a pure self-making. The beaver does not simply react to a fixed world, nor does it create one de novo. The organism is not passive, because the environment it receives is always already transformed by its living activity. This living activity is in the first place a passive moment, a gathering of what is afforded by its environment. The organism is spontaneous insofar as it is a gathering of what was the environment into a new sense—but this “was” is only in retrospect, the past of a present, for there is no environment prior to the environment engendered by life. The environment is already a kind of ontological and temporal background, out of which organic activity figures as a meaningful sense; as biologist R. C. Lewontin explains:

      Are the stones and the grass in my garden part of the environment of a bird? The grass is certainly part of the environment of a phoebe that gathers dry grass to make a nest. But the stone around which the grass is growing means nothing to the phoebe. On the other hand, the stone is part of the environment of a thrush that may come along with a garden snail and break the shell of the snail against the stone. Neither the grass nor the stone are part of the environment of a woodpecker that is living in a hole in a tree. That is, bits and pieces of the world outside of these organisms are made relevant to them by their own life activities. (1993, 84)

      Behavior involves an activity of the organism engendering an environment, not out of nothing, but rather, as Lewontin has described it, as an interpretative activity.⁴¹ Thompson (2007, 122) thoughtfully draws upon James Lovelock’s idea of ecopoiesis here, to gesture beyond the organism as autoconstitutive. We can further understand this concept as a retropoiesis insofar as what counts as environmental relation is futural, in that it will only ever have been revealed by transformative developments that simultaneously recast organism and environment. The moment of passivity out of which activity emerges takes time, and so the ecological relation to the environment is situated in a “past” that was never present. Vital activity does not simply receive an already formed environment, nor does it spontaneously create one; it transforms what is previously nonsense, a potential for sense that is not the sense of life, into a vital, lived one, like the electrochemical gradients that become neural pathways, or the way sounds become gestures and gestures mutate into meanings.

      We cannot so sharply distinguish between poietic expresser and expressed, constitutor and constituted, except in retrospect. This ordering is reversible: it functions by a self-organizing principle, which, in shaping, is shaped by what it shapes. Body and world form an ambiguity irreducible to exact forms. The organic and the environment are terms established and put en route by a more basic phenomenon: the movement of organic development itself. This movement is not an exchange between creative power and material dependence, as Varela might have it, because here activity and passivity are ontologically, and not externally, related, what Merleau-Ponty will later describe as ineinander or entrelacement. The organism is an expression of the “physiognomy” of its environment, a new figure that arises out of an environmental background. This background is not made of determinate things, except in retrospect: “The truth is that there are no things, only physiognomies. . . . [Structures] are lived as realities, we have said, rather than known as true objects” (SB, 168/182). The organism is not in its environment as a thing in a container, but rather its living “action” and environmental “milieu” are internally related, the organism СКАЧАТЬ