In 1934 biologist Jacob von Uexkuell (1864-1944) published A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Its central idea, which was very much against the grain at the time, and perhaps even now, was that animals are subjects with ‘first-person’ perspectives, not merely squashy automata, blindly reacting to stimuli. Of course, this subject-hood has nothing to do with being human-like…
Each species of animal, humans included, has what von Uexkuell called its Umwelt, its own species-centric lived environment. The environments of each species and, by extension, each individual of that species, are defined by the perceptual strengths and limitations of the animal in question, its physiology, and its needs.
In the forward to the book von Uexkuell invites us to take a stroll with him…
“We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into such a bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colourful meadow vanish completely, others loose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble.”
Von Uexkuell’s ideas were clearly contrary to behaviourist theories which really took hold in the early to mid 20th century. (This was the paradigm that almost brought us pigeon-guided missiles and succeeded in making Little Albert scared of furry objects). He proposed that animal worlds are not based around stimuli as such, but around signs, the difference being that signs are things that have meaning for a perceiving subject. This idea is not meant to reveal a hidden animal intelligence (which is always assessed on the basis of similarity to humans) or bridging the ontological gap between humans and non-humans. The idea is not that animals were more like us than we realised. Instead von Uexkuell’s theory leads us to realise how radically different the lives of other animals are. If we consider the vast sphere of knowledge and seemingly infinite range of experiences that define the human condition, this is merely one Umwelt among countless millions of others. Because an Umwelt represents totalised reality for a subject, it is indeed an entire world. Animals are otherworldly in a literal sense, and the Umwelt of a stork or an octopus is equally as rich as that of a human.
But how exactly does a silk worm experience meaningful percepts? The meaningful experiences involved in the life-world of ticks or starfish are unimaginably different to what we as humans (die-hard logo-centrics that we are) conceive of as ‘meaning’. And this opens up a whole weird vista of speculative possibility. We tend to conflate the concept of meaning with coherency, which is tied up with translatability and verifiability. But what of untranslatable meanings, or meanings that are direct and self-evident, or pre- or trans-logical? It seems to me that meaning that is conveyed without the mediating agency of language, whose roots taper down to the very core of the human experience, would be something similar to the aesthetic import found in abstract, non-narrative forms of art. Some examples would be Morton Feldman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Samuel Beckett, Franz Klein, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Merzbow, Elaine Radigue, La Monte Young, Horatiu Radulescu, Kubrick, Finnegan’s Wake…
It has something to do with an intoxication and incomprehension and a mood of sensorial affirmation. The bubbles that define each individual animal’s Umwelt are, from the inside (and the inside is all there is…) boundary-less. It’s zoosolipsism where, without an external frame of reference, all meaning that arises within an Umwelt is ultimately self-referential. Self-referential (self-sustaining) meaning is aesthetic meaning, direct and untranslatable. Meaning in this form is revealed or shown, not deduced. This would obviously hold for human Umwelten too (Is rational scientific discourse aesthetic? Is empirical truth a stylistic mode?) The borders that mark the limits of our Umwelten are always positioned just over the horizon of the total expanse of what there is. So if we want to get a deeper understanding of the selfhood of the animal Other, we may have to content ourselves with engaging merely with radically unfamiliar modes of human experience, at least to begin with. Hence the psychedelic undertones to my own project.
Perhaps animal selfhood is defined by what we could call a lived or embodied psychedelia. This would infuse the entirety of the animal’s Umwelt and ground it in an abstract multi-sensory aesthetics. As a self-contained world, such a psychedelic existence would have its own weird coherency that allows the animal to function more or less perfectly within that world. We might begin to understand animal experience on the basis of onto-aesthetics, and assume a kaleido-mystic quality to the life-worlds of non-humans. This obviously raises the question of how all this relates to human subjectivity. Are we estranged from such uncanny fecundity, or already living it; does naming bar the way to what is named, or open a path towards it?