Thesis part 2: Umwelts

This is the second part of my thesis. To read the first part, keep scrolling down.

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2. Umwelts

Shed Your Husk (2009) watercolor on paper, 12”x 7”

In 1934, the writer and biologist Jacob Von Uexkull wrote a small monograph entitled A Stroll Through The World of Animals and Men. In it, Uexkull develops a simple and poetic way of conceiving how humans can best understand the way that an animal perceives and interacts with its world. The subjective “soap bubble” world of an animal’s conscious or unconscious zone of interaction is what Uexkull calls the Umwelt. Critical theorist Giorgio Agamben describes Uexkull’s Umwelt as such:

Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexkull instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score. (Agamben 40)

The Umwelt cannot be synonymous with the animal’s life in an exterior environment. Conceiving of the animal within this exterior world would only be another way of describing a human’s conception of an animal within a human’s conception of the animal’s place. Uexkull’s Umwelt is different from this in that the way that the animal’s world looks is determined by the limits of the animal’s perceptions and range of action in response to it. Uexkull writes:
The Umwelt only acquires its admirable surety for animals if we include the functional tones in our contemplation of it. We may say that the number of objects which an animal can distinguish in its own world equals the number of functions it can carry out. If, along with few functions, it possesses few functional images, its world, too, will consist of few objects. As a result its world is indeed poorer, but all the more secure. For orientation is much easier among few objects than among many.” (49)

There is no objective reality in Uexkull’s science. We can draw conclusions regarding the borders of an animal’s Umwelt by analyzing how an animal is physiologically adapted or built to receive and respond to stimuli. Many anthropomorphic perils lie in the way of us honestly and accurately engaging an animal on its own terms. We cannot take even the most rudimentary aspects of our own world (depth or motor perception, for example) as fulfilling the same exact purpose within an animal who may see things very differently.

Jacob Von Uexkull (Belgian), two illustrations for A Stroll Through The Worlds of Animals and Men (58)

One of the most compelling questions which pops up in the study of the animal Umwelt is the relationship of an animal to other beings. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben relates Uexkull’s Umwelt to existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “poverty in world.” “Poverty in world” refers to an animal’s inability to conceive of other beings due to a complete captivation by its set of relations (Agamben 52). In trying to understand this concept, we should remember Uexkull’s description of the boundaries of an Umwelt, the number of objects which appear in an animal’s world is closely related to the range of functions that animal is able to perform (Uexkull 49). An animal which lacks a basic self-awareness (being unable to recognize its own reflection in a mirror, for example) thus also lacks the capacity to recognize the potential for selfhood in any of the objects which could drift into its Umwelt. Different animals only interact with each other through channels built to fulfill certain selfish needs for the individual animal. Agamben describes it in this fashion:

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. (42)

With similar implications, Heidegger describes “poverty in world” as a kind of captivation or enthrallment-- an inability to conceive of an object as something beyond the need or needs it may fulfill. He writes, for example, that, “It is precisely being taken by its food that prevents the animal from taking up a position over and against this food” (Agamben 53). It is then perhaps, in considering both Uexkull and Heidegger, that the self-awareness animal perceives other objects in the world as subjects in and of themselves. “Investigations of a dog”, a short story by early 20th century German author Franz Kafka could be read as a story in which the primary conflict pivots around the main character’s “poverty in world”. Though conveyed with the voice of a human man, Kafka strains to tell the story of a hybrid being-- one who, for our purposes could be describes as being caught between Umwelts. The investigating dog is both aware of a broader horizon beyond what he sees and is also still very much ensnared by it. The protagonist becomes unsatisfied with his ‘dogness’ after witnessing an inexplicable event which the reader could only surmise to be a performance of circus dogs. Afterwards, the investigating dog tries to find meaning in the select stimuli that come to make up its environment. Unaware of the existence of humans, the investigator tries to gain understanding through a science that is very much based on a world defined by function. Kafka writes,

My personal observation tells me that the earth, when it is watered and scratched according to the rules of science, extrudes nourishment, and moreover in such quality, in such abundance, in such ways, in such places, at such hours as the laws partially or completely established by science demand. I accept all this; my question, however, is the following: ’Whence does the earth procure this food?’ A question which people in general pretend not to understand, and to which the best answer they can give is: ‘If you haven’t enough to eat we’ll give you some of ours’.” (288)

In both the science which the investigating dog accepts and the way his question is received, the limitations of the dog’s Umwelt become painfully clear. “Dog science” is not based on objective, observable phenomena. Rather, it focuses on the development of a more efficient satisfaction of the need for food. Similarly, despite how much the investigating dog longs to see an answer in the eyes of his comrades, their response to his questions are either inconceivable or ludicrous. The culminating scientific trial, which the investigating dog uses to test the limitations of his worldview, is a hunger strike. The dog says that, “The highest, if it is attainable, is attainable only by the highest effort, and the highest effort among us is voluntary fasting” (Kafka 309). This trial, though, does not result in a widening of the horizon, or any kind of eureka moment of understanding. Instead, it reveals the investigating dog’s inability to transcend its Umwelt. Kafka writes,

Here and now was the hour of deadly earnest, here my inquiries should have shown their value, but where had they vanished? Only a dog lay here helplessly snapping at the empty air, a dog who, though he still watered the ground with convulsive haste at short intervals and without being aware of it, could not remember even the shortest of the countless incantations stored in his memory. ( 31)

Ultimately, the dog fails in his mission to transcend his own limited perceptual state. What the dog can know and what the dog can make of its world is necessarily limited by what it has the capacity to perceive.

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I like to imagine the viewer of one of my own paintings as taking an “excursion into an unknowable world”, suspending whatever limitation there are for a brief moment and venturing into another animal’s perceived Umwelt (Agamben 41). Any subjects that materialize within this field of vision would then lack the sense of cohesion or definition that the human brain may ascribe it. Like the jackdaw and the bathing trunks, what matters in the eyes of an animal may not be the definition of another living being, but instead the impression of one.
The formal pairing which was this essays point of departure-- a living presence alongside evident, material paint -- is compelling as a part of this framework because of the way that the former is drawn into question by the later. Unlike the results of our first inquiry in which the material mark and the illusion of presence were both defined by movement, material paint and the illusion of presence are in this case antagonistic. Evident paint obscures any attempt at definition and therefore relating to a unified subject within these paintings. The painted objects, both illusionistic and material, take on a hidden significance-- a meaning which can never be entirely known to us. It may instead only be available in fragments.