back to each other. On the one hand, there is this activity that is also passivity, because the organism’s first activity is to render itself sensible to the environment. On the other hand, the reception of the environment is not a passive matter of impression: “The excitation itself is already a response, not an effect imported from outside the organism; it is the first act of its proper functioning” (SB, 31/31). The organism undergoes the environment, yet this passivity is always a function of the vital activity of its own organism:
When the eye and the ear follow an animal in flight, it is impossible to say, “which started first” in the exchange of stimuli and responses. Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have in turn been possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to the external influences, one could also say that the behavior is the first cause of the stimulations. (SB, 13/10)
The Structure of Behavior presents this movement out of which active and passive, individual and environment, are dialectical moments. Consciousness can reflectively isolate active and passive moments, but only after these aspects are achieved and can be objectified, rather than in their coming-to-be and developmental structuration. Organic behavior, including human consciousness, does not begin as a moment of synthetic activity, but as the birth of a blend of receptivity and activity in a decisive “now,” which, both irreducibly creating and continuing, inaugurates behavior.
We encounter this blend of activity and passivity when we discover other organic bodies within their sense “instituting” life and the very environments that organisms responsibly fashion. Kelly Oliver sees the melodic becoming of animal life as sharing in many of our forms of sense-making:
Already in behavior we find futural projections, responsivity, interrogative gestures, imitation, imagination, interpretation, expression, pleasure, and ultimately even logos and culture. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of behavior also points to a transformation in what we might consider access to world and world formation. (2010, 212)
Just as I might get to know my friend by seeing her at home with family, at work on a painting, or in discussion, so, too, the beaver is much more than a mute set of rodent actions to study in a laboratory: I find it in the sharp ends of chewed aspen and birch rampikes, in the dam of tree and plastered mud that it repairs with its yearlings (if I come too close to it, it will express itself aggressively, slapping its tail on the water, upsetting the whole pond to warn me off and alert the others of my presence), or by how this dam forms a ford in a stream and causes a low-lying area to fill with water, transforming it into a wetland for other organisms to inhabit. The point is not that the beaver has an experience of shaping a world akin to my self-consciousness, so caution is needed in using terms like “poiesis,” “culture,” or “logos” here, nor is it that I have conscious access to organic life directly, but rather that our organic bodies encounter each other within the cocreative, communicative institution of nature. Nature is not a cold order of things, but a living nexus of mutually developing and overlapping transformations within and between institutions.
Organic behavior partakes in this natural potential to unfold new meanings, but these meanings are not purely creative acts by the organism, as Varela would have it, because they hinge upon timing and place. We can infer this from Merleau-Ponty’s analogy to the organism as a melody, because here the organism’s potential for expression depends on the sense of its environment, just as the melody hangs on the timbre and rhythm of the notes in the opening bar:
Thus we are led to a type of coordination very different from that [of a machine]. Here the coordinated elements are not only coupled with each other, they constitute together, by their very union, a whole which has its proper law and which manifests it as soon as the first elements of excitation are given, just as the first notes of a melody assign a certain mode of resolution to the whole. While the notes taken separately have an equivocal signification, being capable of entering into an infinity of possible ensembles, in the melody each one is demanded by the context and contributes its part in expressing something which is not contained in any one of them and which binds them together internally. . . . Coordination is now the creation of a unity of meaning which is expressed in the juxtaposed parts, the creation of certain relations which owe nothing to the materiality of the terms which they unite. (SB, 87/96)
The first “notes” or environmental meanings do not deterministically give what will come next, because here these meanings are already correlates of the organism’s vital activity, but they do anticipate and call for (what will become) distinctive modes of expression. The first bars, or the head, of an improvised jazz tune, for example, give an orientation (sens) for what follows without rigidly determining it, allowing for improvisation and collaboration.
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