A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory

Abstract

Dorion Sagan observes that pioneering ethologist Jakob von Uexküll tends to be read in contrasting ways, as a “humble naturalist” pre-empting current research in biosemiotics, animal perception and agency; and as a “biologist-shaman,” gesturing to a transcendental realm where the life-worlds of animals interconnect in a vast symphony of nature. In both cases the tools of the laboratory are thought to generate complete pictures of the invertebrates that Uexküll studies, in unity with their environments. As Giorgio Agamben points out, these experiments form part of an abstract mechanism that produces the human, by isolating instinctual life as an object for study and management from social and ethical modes of existence. What these readings neglect to consider is that Uexküll imagines his experiments through a Picture Book frame. We argue that for Uexküll there is always something fabulous and child-like about the enterprise of reconstructing the subjective environments of the small animals he works with. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, we propose the Picture Book as a particular technics, or tertiary memory, that cultivates modes of attention that are associated with childhood and are open to the emergence of partial objects and relations. Considered through the Picture Book frame, the Umwelten of insects and other small animals are no longer fixed but are drawn and redrawn in partial expressive ways, through the uncanny picturing – or what Brian Massumi would call “semblances” – of different configurations of animal, technology, human relations. By considering the Picture Book as a technic for ecological thought and imagination, our paper will explore how the small creatures that Uexküll describes might enable the emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations.

Keywords:

• Uexküll
• insects
• animality
• technics
• Picture Books
• ecological thinking

Notes

The figures reproduced in this paper are from Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O'Neil (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010); copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally published in Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen; copyright 1934 Verlag von Julius Springer.

Agamben observes that the animal figures representing humanity in the miniature correspond allegorically to different parts of the human body: bones, nerves, veins, flesh and skin (The Open 2).

Both the laboratory and the table are key contested sites for animal studies. As Peter Singer and others have argued, when we bring other animals to our table as food we disregard the terrible suffering incurred through factory farming and its environmental impacts. In this context, it is a provocation to consider whether, by bringing insects to the table, we are in fact including them in some way in our ethical consideration.

While we are cognizant that the animal worlds of Jakob von Uexküll are thoroughly opened up by the field of contemporary biosemiotics, in this paper we are concerned with the technical ontology rather than a semiotic one of scientific experimentation when it meets the children's Picture Book, and how this may provide a re-reading of Uexküll's animal perceptual worlds, and the relationship of humans with these worlds. We would like to thank our anonymous reviewer, who reminds us that the kind of aesthetic “knowing” which the Picture Book exhibits can be read through semiotics as a recognition on Uexküll's part of the importance of iconic and indexical signs for both animals and humans.

The figure of the child and the picture storybook are also devices that Agamben uses to imagine new relations opening between human and animal that do not serve the project of human self-definition. But what Agamben does not consider is that Uexküll's laboratory also draws on the imaginative realm of childhood, through its Picture Book frame.

For example, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and more recently Marc Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals.

For example, Cary Wolfe's Zoontologies.

The Open 45. Here, Uexküll aligns with the artistic avant-garde of his day, and with recent post-humanist work on non-human agencies. But as Geoffrey Winthrop-Young warns in his “Afterword” to A Foray and Theory of Meaning:

The always present danger, of course, is that this may entail a reification of other Umwelten. The question How can we in our world see how animals see their world? may easily turn into the more self-interested inquiry How can we see how animals see their world in such a way that it will change and enrich the way in which we see ours? (235)

Biosemioticians would call these “markers of significance” signs.

It is important to remember, however, that Uexküll understands these markers to be indications of what matters to the animal, rather than the human being. It is precisely because the animal decodes its environment according to a series of markers (or signs in biosemiotics) that he likens the animal to a “machine operator” but not a “machine,” which reacts to stimuli from the outside world without selectively interpreting them (“A Stroll” 7–9).

Agamben argues in The Open that Uexküll may end up re-articulating the anthropological machine in a new way that lends itself to two disturbing alternatives. Either the hierarchical division between human and animal is re-established – Heidegger, for example, uses Uexküll too in order to contrast the instinctive captivation he believes is proper to all animal behaviour, with a human openness to the world – or the divide between human and animal collapses entirely, in a way that aligns with Friedrich Ratzel's politically frightening notion of Lebensraum, whereby “all people are intimately linked to their vital space as their essential dimension” (42).

If we attend more carefully to the Picture Book frame then both the previous readings of Uexküll we have outlined are affected: Uexküll the post-humanist uses a very human, child-like technique to evoke non-human worlds. But for Uexküll the ecologist who researches the limits of the animal, his task is imagined or performed in ways that suggest that its precise outcome is open.

“The Grasshopper Cabaret” was performed as a children's book reading as part of the symposium presentation “Ecological Thinking through the Picture Book of Jakob von Uexküll's Laboratory” in Rethinking Behaviour and Conservation: The History, and Philosophy and Future of Ethology II, Centre for Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Sydney, 26–28 November 2011; and as a short performance at the Architecture-Writing: Experimental Approaches symposium, Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Stockholm, 24–25 May 2012.

Stiegler, in Technics and Time, 1, in an effort to postulate the origins of the human, explains the originary “default” in the constitution of the human through the myth of Epimetheus who “forgot” to confer upon humans any special gifts, and that the current power of the human being and its ability to know, think and exteriorize is the “fire” stolen from the gods by Prometheus.

Although, as Nathan van Camp has pointed out, by recognizing the tertiary memories of human life deposited in externalities, the human is de-centred in ways that may disrupt the anthropological machine, we have also argued that tertiary memories deposited in the tools of the laboratory tend back towards a picture of the centrality of the human which covers over this destabilizing effect.

Of all the animals, insects appear to have the highest technicity, so one way to adapt the conventional reading of Stiegler to human animal relations is to say that these small creatures also operate, like the tools of the laboratory, as tertiary memories of the human being. Along these lines, Jussi Parikka's recent book Insect Media investigates how insect modes of organization – swarms, webs and distributed agencies – provide new ways of understanding media technology and its relationship to biology, which do not rest on the notion of individual agents or a deterministic account of technology. By reading insects via media formations, his book opens up a new and rich account of the ways in which digital culture helps to form and de-centre human beings. This is a productive approach to pursue. However, we would like to avoid a reading that reduces insects to externalizations of the human, because this potentially misses the otherness of insect life that Uexküll emphasizes, and the difficult question of their place in our ethical thought and consideration.

For Stiegler, the capturing and formation of attention in the young by technical and media industries threatens processes of what he calls human “maturity,” and global social and cultural development (see Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth 7–8). By contrast, we are suggesting that the Picture Book is part of the formation of nascent attention as imagination. For Stiegler, the partial or “transitional objects” opened through childhood play are the first forms of tertiary retention that can only appear in “transitional spaces”; spaces that “form the basis of all systems of care and nurturance: a transitional space is first and foremost a system of caring” (ibid. 15). So we might also say here that the Picture Book augurs human attention that proceeds from a performativity that involves transitional objects and spaces whereby humans are struck by the infancy of inherited technics.

It is important to note that the Picture Book relies on the concerted use of the mode of “picturing” that significantly pre-dates writing.

Building on this, we can see that what is expressed in the Picture Book, in its content, structure and framing, is organized by a unique grammatization related to infancy. Here, infancy is not a nascent version of the rules of language that “matures” into adulthood, or a pre-linguistic ineffable state. Rather, according to Agamben, “infancy” marks the threshold between wordlessness and speech: “where language stops is not where the unsayable occurs, but the other where the matter of words begins” (Idea of Prose 27). At this threshold, which we are arguing can be found in children's Picture Books, humans are struck and overwhelmed by language. This affect stems from the fact that the Real of language – its grammar, words, and image-objects – are there at their limits of sense and existence.

Theory of Meaning 188–89. Deleuze, Parikka and Agamben have developed different readings of Uexküll's musical metaphors.

Making a similar point, in more general terms about animal Umwelt, Elizabeth Grosz has argued that the bubble world is the projection of an animal's bodily capacities (183).

Massumi defines semblance as “the experience of a virtual reality,” the manner in which the virtual actually appears (Semblance and Event 15–16).

As Whitehead says, prehensions “define the real individual facts of relatedness, a kind of transportable perception or cognition extracted from other actual occasions, or prehensions are transported by perception or cognition” (18).

This “process of ‘individuation’” as metastable comes from Gilbert Simondon (300).

As Grosz says, the limit space of the Umwelt is always in construction: “Space is built up, sense by sense, perceptual organs upon organs, forming the soap bubble, its limits, its contents” (180).

We appropriate here a description of the line drawn by the anthropological machine which is also metonymic of the stretched boundaries of Uexküll's bubble Umwelts:

What I have really drawn there is an oval line, for this white chalk mark is not a line, it is a plane figure, in Euclid's-sense a surface, and the only line that is there is the line which forms the limit between the black surface and the white surface. This discontinuity can only be produced upon that blackboard by the reaction between two continuous surfaces into which it is separated, the white surface and the black surface. (Massumi, Semblance and Event 89)

Massumi, Semblance and Event 15. Massumi derives “lived abstraction” from a Deleuzian concept, where abstraction is nothing more or less than the performative/lived dimension of that abstraction. The act of abstraction configures the potential in that abstraction, and that potential is relayed from one abstraction to another.

The theoretical argumentation on the implications of this paradox for Stiegler's contention with Simondon that the process of individuation is ontologically technical as the process of psychic individuation is already a collective one (Stiegler, “Theatre of Individuation”), warrants another paper.

The chirping sounds – for Deleuze, the exterior territory – of the animal are related to its morphology; for example, the evolution of the development of sound-making techniques is related to the distance of mates.

To perform the foreign subjectivity of insects and other small animals through the Picture Book frame opens up the radical possibility of insect exteriorizations – not just insects as human exteriorizations but insects with their own tools, insects reconfiguring human tools and insects displaced by tools and techniques (human and animal) that surround them.