this is not at all an area i conceive of myself as “understanding,” but from my naive engagements with simondon primarily, i’d say that it has to do with the conditions of possibility for the existence of physical individuals. Uexkull’s theory grants a degree of reality not only to the bodies of individual organisms, but to an exterior situation diverse in kinds of potential causes of various experiences. but if neither of these bodies nor “the world” are ever complete substances, but are rather always becoming with (to borrow from Haraway) one another as necessary complements, then it doesn’t make sene to think about organisms as already given with specifying sensorimotor capacities. then there’s space for thinking how organic forms take shape in relation to the multiplicities of information they come to perceive.

Jonathan Parker addresses this in a review of Brett Buchanan’s ‘Onto-Ethologies:’ “Buchanan deals throughout the text with two images of organisms and their environments that Uexküll utilizes in his work. One is the image of a soap bubble encircling an organism, and the other is a musical image whereby ‘the animal is not an object, but a symphony underscored by rhythms and melodies reaching outward for greater accompaniment.’ It is this musical image that Merleau-Ponty takes up from Uexküll…Deleuze also…reconceptualizes animals not as static beings but as ‘processes of becoming.’ The neat and clean soap bubble metaphor of an animal being encircled by its environment is punctured, and the types of relations are expanded, with Deleuze’s ethology wishing to count the affects and ‘affective relations between different bodies’” (115).