The Birth of Sense - Don Beith Series in Continental Thought

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relation between organism and environment, self and world, but it cannot explain the genesis of this structure.

      In order to explain how the organism-environment relation is not self-constituting, a further concept of genetic passivity is required.3 This concept explains how vital and conscious activities emerge out of processes that are not yet fully formed modes of activity. Where the static concept of passivity situates the organism and environment as continuously temporally related, the idea of genetic passivity is premised upon a conception of this relationship as developmental and therefore punctuated by discontinuous temporal events (SB, 125/136). This notion hinges on decisive events that inaugurate new meaning structures, such as pivotal developments in the organism-environment relationship, or formative moments in the emergence of personhood. The key insight of The Structure of Behavior, and the conceptual linchpin of the Phenomenology of Perception, is the concept of a “decisive now,” a moment that becomes the formative “true present” for all events that follow (PP, 87/114). The “decisive now” does not simply elapse, but remains active as the structural dimension according to which present modes of activity and awareness have a sense. The sediment of the past in the present does not simply repeat the past but serves to open new fields as possibility, such as the infant learning to move his body, then gesture, and later speak. Each new sedimentation folds a new possibility of movement into the body, while potentially serving as a scaffold for more differentiated movements, such as grasping, waving, writing, sculpting, caressing, and so many more. We catch the work of this genetic passivity only retrospectively, just as we can change habits only through the slow and uncertain work of forming new habits, rather than through transparent self-awareness or purely active self-control.

      Despite the developmental character of genetic passivity, it remains conceived of as a vestigial constituting activity in much of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Specifically, there is some ambiguity about whether the sedimenting power is a capacity (pouvoir) of the living body or of human consciousness. According to this view, the organism would be both self-enacting and yet emergent. This is circular reasoning, because to hold this position we must simultaneously posit the organism as both possessing and being preceded by this power of temporal synthesis. Even if we cede this synthetic power to an ancestor, the embryo, the parent, the seed, et cetera, we arrive at a regress of genetic acts. The notion of development as a constituting activity, therefore, falls into a regress that presupposes a constituting act of a more basic order, ad infinitum. To overcome these issues of a problematic logic of constitution, a final notion of radical or generative passivity is required.

      This generative concept of passivity, drawn from the later lectures Child Psychology, Institution and Passivity, and Nature, points at the emergence of sense from nonsense and activity from nonactivity, and thus names a potency or possibility (puissance) of being. To understand the logic of this emergence, Merleau-Ponty rejects the classical alternative of constituting activity and constituted reality in favor of understanding the emergence of form in life and experience as a movement from nonsense to sense. Initially, the passive generativity is not a meaning-constituting activity of the body or of consciousness, but a sedimenting movement that these activities will come to have inherited as their own activity. This notion rejects the principle that meaning emerges from a determinate moment in the past, whether a locus of preexisting meaning or a meaning-making power, thus undermining the fundamental premises of mechanist, vitalist, and idealist accounts. Admittedly, there is a fine distinction between genetic and generative passivity, but while both concepts explain forms of living existence according to a logic of developmental becoming, the notion of generative passivity can uniquely account for how these developments are not originally activities of the body or consciousness.

      Generative passivity is an aporetic structure, not merely an epistemological blind spot that limits our finite consciousness, but—connecting to central insights of Bergson, Deleuze, and Derrida—a metaphysically incomplete, open, and ungraspable origin to movement and activity, what Merleau-Ponty calls an absolute past or a time before time, a radical source of all possibility. The true “past” of life and consciousness, says Merleau-Ponty, is not a chronological past, but an ontological past of “nature,” a “past that has never been present” (PP, 252/289), a “retrograde becoming of the true.”4 This ontological past is not a “retrospective illusion” or mere projection of consciousness.5 This paradoxical “time before time” is, as I will demonstrate, understood as “dimensions,” which are not fully formed structures or given moments but a more radical becoming beyond and between structures that enables and shapes possibilities of meaningful events and activities within structured or “instituted” space and time.6

      Overcoming the dualism of fact and essence, Merleau-Ponty deems this movement of instituting-instituted an “experimental Platonism,” akin to what Deleuze sometimes calls transcendental empiricism. Like developmental passivity, it is possible to catch a glimpse of this “nature” at work retrospectively, particularly in the emergence of life from nonlife, or in the emergence of personal significance out of vital significance, or in the birth of new cultural and political movements. Learning is a moment of generative passivity par excellence, because the event of insight is a happening that first of all structures a new field of possibilities, such as when the child learns to move upright and thus begins to enter into the space of the adult world, when a new skill of articulation becomes an organ of communication, or when a new concept destabilizes and restructures a field of inquiry. Learning is an experience where confusion, a furtive beckoning, or nonsense portentously explodes into a new domain of sense, transforming the very field from which it emerges, taking up recasting previous indeterminacy into new determinate meaningful dimensions, like the body finding a new balance in a new vehicle or regaining and reshaping a previous balance through the incorporation of a prosthesis. We experience this striving and its accomplishment of new activities as a power (puissance) that exceeds and grounds us, announcing itself to us, inviting us to assume and inhabit it, to take it on as one of our active capacities (pouvoir). According to this concept of generative passivity, we cannot say that the past now harbors the future in utero. We can say, however, that the past will have become the structural basis of the present, albeit in an unfinishable way, so that the future remains radically open to the evolution of new forms of life because of this very latency or potency of the past. Our true nature is difficult to name conceptually, because this passive origination of sense obscures itself in its own temporal becoming.

      This work comprises four chapters, two on life followed by two on personhood. Chapter 1 is a discussion of how life points to deeper dimensions of genetic and generative passivity, and chapter 3 similarly sounds out these institutions of personhood in habit. Chapter 2 develops the logical core of our study: the concept of generative passivity, investigating the radical becoming of meaning in life and challenging the methods of mechanism as well as vitalism and autopoiesis. Chapter 4 similarly develops a radical notion of intercorporeal possibility with respect to our ethical and political lives, raising specific challenges to social constructivist and liberal models of social personhood. In a brief conclusion, resources for rethinking naturalizing consciousness and also for grounding ethics in intercorporeal life are put forward.

      In chapter 1, “Consciousness and Animality: The Problem of Constituting Activity in The Structure of Behavior,” I present Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy not only as a critique of consciousness as constituting activity, but also as a critique of any attempt to defer constituting synthesis to the vital activity of living organisms. Contrasting my reading of Merleau-Ponty with the autopoietic notion of Francicso Varela and Evan Thompson, I argue that a “vital structure of behavior” in the organism cannot be a self-sufficient source of meaning. Such an account, I argue, serves only to defer a constituting activity of consciousness to life. I argue that this move to understand consciousness as a living structure must incorporate a concept

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