umwelt

from the open: man and animal by giorgio agamben (translated by kevin attell)

"if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man - and of "humanism" - that must be posed in a new way.  in our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.  we must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.  what is man, if he is always the place - and, at the same time, the result - of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?"

"too often, [jakob von uexkull] affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world.  this illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated.  uexxkull shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist.  the fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us - or with each other - the same time and the same space."

"there does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which little red riding hood loses her way."

"every environment is a closed unity in itself, which results from the selective sampling of a series of elements or 'marks' in the umgebung, which, in turn, is nothing other than man's environment.  these are not, however, objectively and factically isolated, but rather constitute a close functional - or, as uexkull prefers to say, musical - unit with the animal's receptive organs that are assigned to perceive the mark (merkorgan) and to react to it (wirkorgan).  everything happens as if the external carrier of significance and its receiver in the animal's body constituted two elements in a single musical score, almost like two notes of the 'keyboard on which nature performs the supratemporal and extraspatial symphony of signification,' though it is impossible to say how two such heterogenous elements could ever have been so intimately connected."

"the two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as 'fly-like'.  though the spider can in no way see the umwelt of the fly (uexkull affirms - and thus formulates a principle that would have some success - that 'no animal can enter into relation with an object as such,' but only with its own carriers of significance), the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness."

"uexkull informs us that in the laboratory in rostock, a tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is, in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment.  he gives no explanation of this peculiar fact, and limits himself to supposing that in that 'period of waiting' the tick lies in 'a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience every night.'  he then draws the sole conclusion that 'without a living subject, time cannot exist.'  but what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years?  how is is possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment?  and what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?"