In the mid-twentieth century, Japanese linguist Tokieda Motoki (1900–1967) proposed a process theory of language by critiquing Ferdinand Saussure's structuralist approach - the dominant linguistic theory at the time. His process theory posisted that language is not a system of signs but a living process, one that requires three simultaneous conditions to occur — a subject who speaks (shutai), the material being used for expression (sozai), and a situational field in which language as an activity takes place (bamen).
Around the same time, American psychologist James Gibson (1904–1979), working from a completely different tradition, argued that the perceivable environment is similarly structured: a medium that surrounds and enables life, substances that give the world its texture and resistance, and surfaces where the encounter between living beings and the world actually happens. Neither thinker knew of the other. Yet their frameworks are structurally homologous — the triadic architecture of one maps onto the triadic architecture of the other with striking precision.This homology is not a coincidence to be explained away. It suggests something about the deep relationship between language and environment: that a theory of language developed from careful attention to Japanese already contains, in its structure, a theory of how living beings are embedded in their world. Tokieda’s shutai is not a mind issuing commands to a passive environment — it is a mediating force that moves through and with its surroundings, working with material, shaping while being shaped by situation. Gibson’s environment is not a backdrop for human action — it is an ecological field that actively specifies what is possible, what can be perceived, what can be done. When their frameworks are read together, language and environment cease to be separate domains and reveal themselves as two articulations of the same ontological fabric.
The homology between Tokieda and Gibson has a consequence that reaches beyond linguistics and environmental psychology. What the Tokieda–Gibson homology makes possible is an appearance of a Möbius strip-like surface — co-constituted by the structural coupling of linguistically-mediated physical activity of shutai and ecological affordances — in which the MELD dimensions become not just theoretically assertable but realizable through practice. Linguistically-mediated physical activity, on this account, is not merely a tool for describing or experiencing the world; it is a medium of praxis through which human beings and their environments enter into a structural coupling.
The two systems — linguistic and ecological systems — perturb and reshape each other while retaining their distinct integrity. The surface of this strip appears with the shutai as (A) a movement into presence. Being co-present with the world is the precondition for (B) figuring the ground to be pesented as a presence. (C) The presence of what is, inevitably reveals an absence. What makes shutai also an agent is the (D) activity of absenting an absence. What agency means and how it looks is different for every person, every society, and for each historical epoch. This is why, for all of us everywhere, (E) we must return to the fold (or the fold catches up with us) and start all over again.