open-ended proliferation of developing expression, communication, and environmental sensitivity, Merleau-Ponty discloses an arena of generative passivity that precedes and passively mediates structures of vital and conscious activity. And, while Merleau-Ponty does not develop the terms to adequately characterize this institution of meaning as more than the sedimentation of activities, or what I have termed “genetic passivity,” until his later work, we can draw from some of his later terms in lectures on institution and nature in order to work out the logic of this generative passivity latent in The Structure of Behavior. This early development furnishes the conceptual kernel of the later critique of the self-sufficiency of consciousness and constituting activity.5 Vital structures of awareness, including perception, can be understood according to a logic of institution, such that our symbolic, reflective self-consciousness, that prima facie appears to exhibit a logic of constitution, is in fact a transformative institution of this affective, intercorporeal vital sense. Living form, including consciousness, is not constituted in advance, nor is it self-constituting—it will always have developed by taking up but transforming a latent sense in its natural past, and so is fundamentally an expressive and open-ended phenomenon—a “melodic” temporal structure. This early text largely privileges the genetic meaning-making structures in vital development, yet it unearths the question of a more radical past, a past that is ontologically prior to these already grounded activities of the living body and consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC FORM
If living bodies are not just physical things, but appear as original forms of meaning, does this presuppose a consciousness to apprehend them? In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues that organisms are not parts of a physical world, but that putative “parts” of the organic body derive from the organism as a total form, a principle of self-organization. The organic body is not a static anatomy or a set of physiological mechanisms, but a dynamic and vital structure that appears, via this self-coordination, as a self-originating form. Merleau-Ponty uses these terms, “structure” and “form,” interchangeably to describe self-organizing systems that are indecomposable into component parts or preexisting, external causes. Form is defined as a self-regulating system in which the whole precedes the parts, in the sense that parts of the organism function globally rather than in isolation: “We will say that there is form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves” (SB, 47/49–50). The notion of an independently functioning part is an abstraction, because form is a circuit in which all parts interrelate. A living form can persist even when all of the parts are discernibly changed. The organism as a whole is prior to its parts, both in the ontological sense of a structure that holistically orchestrates the parts, and in the perceptual sense of form as the appearance of this structure as a meaningful figure that stands out through and against the changing organization of the parts. Yet does this very apprehension of structure as figure point back to its condition of possibility in an act of consciousness?
A living structure of behavior is irreducible to separate causes working on discrete parts because it appears as an original principle, as an expressive self-manifestation of vital meaning. Despite the terms being used interchangeably, “structure” connotes a living, immanent activity, but “form” has the idealistic connotation of a perceived figure. The notion of form, explains Merleau-Ponty, originates in Gestalt psychology as a “criticism of the ‘anatomical’ spirit in physiology” (SB, 47/50). This discovery of intrinsically meaningful structures of organization within “anatomy” leads Merleau-Ponty to assert that even the most ostensibly “physical” structures are immanent to the ontological register of conscious perception, rather than existing in an order of material things that exist in extended space partes extra partes:
But the very fact that we had to borrow the terms “figure” and “ground” from the phenomenal or perceived world in order to describe these “physiological forms”—just as above with the metaphor of melody—leads us to wonder if these are still physiological phenomena, if we can in principle conceive of processes which are still physiological and which would adequately symbolize the relations inherent in what is ordinarily called “consciousness.” (SB, 92/101)
On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to recognize structures of meaning that are irreducible to a physical world or the mechanics of anatomy, and therefore moves to cede a meaning-making, intentional activity to the living body. But this move is cut short, on the other hand, because the explanation of vital structures in the terms of consciousness amounts to only an expansion of the field of consciousness to encompass the structure of organic sense-making. The language of “form” constitutes the living body within the synthetic terms of consciousness. “Form,” which is a term uniquely proper to “symbolic,” human consciousness, seems to elide the vital structure of self-effectuating organization in the living body itself.6 The difficulty lies in explaining the organic body as a dynamic structure that is reducible neither to causal explanation, nor to an abstract form constituted by consciousness.
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty articulates three forms of structure: physical, vital, and symbolic. The first and most basic structure is that of a “physical” thing, the form of a self-ordering whole, where “each local change in a form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality” (137/147). The formation of an oil drop, for example, is the manifestation of an “internal whole” or intrinsic principle of organization, because the oil forms a convex shape that is preserved as a whole when its specific parts are manipulated (91/100). In one sense, starting from the term “structure,” Merleau-Ponty identifies physical “structures” as genuinely spontaneous, self-regulating systems. Yet insofar as structure is defined according to the perceptual logic of form, this seems to reduce the world to a structure of consciousness, namely, to the perceptual form of a whole, a figure that stands out against a background of changing perceptual adumbrations: “Thus, far from the ‘physical form’ being able to be the real foundation of the structure of behavior and in particular of its perceptual structure, it is itself conceivable only as an object of perception” (144/156). Apprehending the physical form as a unity across its different manifestations is an act of perceptual synthesis. Describing these phenomena simultaneously as both structure and form generates a dualistic tension between form as self-constituting and form as constituted by consciousness. This concern holds only so long as we explain perception as a logic of constitution. Instead, as we will later see, we can also conceive of perception and the existence of the thing as an intertwined logic of institution. Though the focus of our study here is not on physical things, Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter has brought the physical world to life and phenomenologically explored the hidden life of things, revealing the animate character of physical structures of behavior with a thinking reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of natural substance as self-moving, self-revealing physis.
Organic bodies, the second structure of behavior, are more complicated in their self-organization than things in the physical order. “Vital” structures appear as meaningful wholes that both reflect and expressively shape their environments. Where a physical structure enacts a whole only with respect to itself, through preserving relations among its parts, the organic body manifests itself as an open whole that is vitally responsive to the world. We see the environment expressed inwardly in the organism, through the sensitive behaviors of its body, like a dog that pants in heat, sheds fur in summer, and growls when threatened. Correspondingly, we find in the world a site of the organic body’s outward expression, its incorporation of the world into its bodily space of behavior, in the changes the organism renders in its environment, such as the bird’s nest, the ant’s hill, or humanity’s roads, words, and laws (SB, 148/161). Perceptually, the organism can be the figure, as its sensitive behaviors reflect its environmental situation; or, conversely, the environment can serve as the figure in which the organism’s transformative behavior is manifest. There is what I call a static passivity in the organism, insofar as its activity is mediated and contextualized by environmental passivity. This passivity is not a