The Primacy of Semiosis An Ontology of Relations by Paul Bains (Excerpt)

Why is there a fly there when the frog sticks out its tongue? This question is answered by Maturana and Varela in accordance with their theory of structural coupling. The frog and the fly belong to the same history of congruent changes through millions of years, and become one eating the other in the process of becoming frog and fly. For Maturana and Varela the nervous system does not compute information from an environment; rather, it performs internal correlations that are triggered by perturbations from its external milieu, or by its own changes of state. The nervous system is therefore operationally closed its current affective ability is determined by a history of interactions.

"Maturana and Varela": Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela; Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela

**The frog example**:

For example, an observer notes that a frog shoots out its tongue in the direction of a fly, and can make the anthropomorphic presumption that the frog is looking and aiming at that a fly. It is possible to rotate the eye of a tadpole 180 degrees (keeping intact the optic nerve) and allow the animal to complete its development. Subsequently, if the rotated eye is covered and the frog is shown a fly, its tongue goes out and captures it.

However, when the normal eye is covered and the prey is shown to the rotated eye, the frog shoots out its tongue with a deviation of 180 degrees. That is, if the prey is below and in front of the animal, the frog will now shoot out its tongue backwards and up. This deviation is never corrected by the animal.

This experiment24 demonstrates that for the frog there is no up, down, front, or back in reference to an outside world as it exists for the observer. There is only an internal sensory motor correlation between a perturbation to the retina and the muscular contractions that move the frog's body. This is an example of the operational closure of the nervous system. Maturana argues that such experiments rotate the world of the observer with respect to the operated animal and that the animal is not committing a mistake even if it starves to death as a result of never catching another fly

. . .

For a living system not operating in language (e.g., a tick), there is no inside or outside. Such a distinction arises in language as a particular consensual coordination of actions in which the participants are recursively brought forth as distinctions of systems of distinctions. It follows from this argument that the individual (observing, the observer, self-consciousness) arises in language: 'Furthermore, it also follows from this that since language as a domain of consensual coordination of actions is a social phenomenon, self-consciousness is a social phenomenon, and as such it does not take place within the anatomical confines of the bodyhood of the living systems that generate it; on the contrary, it is external to them and pertains to their domain of interactions as a manner of co-existence' (ibid., 39).


Animals that do not live in language cannot be conscious or aware in the same manner in which we are conscious or aware when we speak of our consciousness or awareness as languaging animals. If we speak of body awareness as we refer to the operation of handling their bodies performed by non-languaging animals (as the self-cleaning of a wasp), then we also exhibit a comparable body awareness when we accommodate our position and movements to the circumstances of our interactions and relations, when we are not attending (in language) to our doings and we say afterwards that we acted unconsciously. I claim that animals that do not live in language do all that they do as we do what we do unconsciously. And I claim that this is so because they do not have the operationality of language which makes self-consciousness possible. (1995, 166-7)25

This claim is remarkably close to Heidegger and Deely's approach to language and 'animality.' The non-languaging animal lives in Umwelt but does not distinguish it as an Umwelt. The Umwelt is ready to hand but never present to hand. What is specific to human animal language, as opposed to animal communication, is the awareness of the external or ontological relation, as such, 'between' a sign-vehicle and an object signified. Deely does not go as far as Maturana in denying animals a world of objects; he does however, argue that they do not grasp the relation of signification as such that allows for the infinite recursivity, or unlimited semiosis, that is distinctive of human animal language. The non-languaging animal is using relations but is not aware of them as relations.

Bergson calls this habitual recognition 'sensory-motor determinism'; but insofar as there is a brain, and depending on the 'complexity' of that brain, there is an increasing interval between the perceptual stimulation and the motor response. In human animals the affects and memory or recollection images operate in this gap and alter the response in undetermined ways. Deleuze gives an account of Bergson's theory in Cinema I: The Movement Image (1996).

From an observer's perspective, the action of the fly may not appear as adequate in conserving its autopoiesis; but if the fly and the frog are coupled with the biosphere, conceived of as an organism (Gaia) or second-order, metacellular, autopoietic system, this apparent paradox is resolved. That is, as observers, we can distinguish the substantial multiplicity of which the components (organisms or cells) are a part. When we isolate things in themselves - such as flies - we obscure the multiplicity they constitute with other components in their interactions. As Bateson insisted, the unit of evolution is the organism-and-its-environment.

All living bodies can be viewed in terms of their capacity to be affected and the affects of which they are capable. In the case of human animals, these affective capacities are not known in advance. We do not know what a body is capable of (Spinoza). This perspective avoids the notion of the organism as a set of preordained functions and opens bodies up to be understood as the multiplicities they in fact are. What needs to be investigated are the consistencies or assemblages or relational domains such bodies can enter.

**Links**:

**Source**: The Primacy of Semiosis An Ontology of Relations by Paul Bains

https://www.academia.edu/268805/The_Primacy_of_Semiosis_an_ontology_of_relations

**Among Theorists invoked**:

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a central figure in the development of twentieth-century European Philosophy.

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher.

Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis_and_Cognition:_The_Realization_of_the_Living

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/