Monday, October 31, 2005
(4:00 PM) | Anonymous:
The Open: Uexküll
I agree with Adam when he calls the sections on Uexküll among the coolest parts of The Open (but then, I would), but I also think that they're fairly straightforward. So, I'll limit myself to making one point that I don't think comes through quite clearly in the Agamben, asking a question about Agamben, and quibbling with him.
The first point is that Uexküll, unlike, say, Cassirer, who disagreed with him on precisely this point, thinks that the same sort of thing happens in all living things (or so it would seem; he gives an example describing the Umwelt of a paramecium but never mentions vegetation explicitly, though it would be easy enough to fit movement in response to the sun, for example, into his framework), up to and including humans [1]. The difference is one of degree alone. This is even a little obscured by Agamben's focus on the tick in explicating the framework; it's easy to think, based on that example, and statements like "the tick is this relationship; she lives only in and for it", both that there's no place in Uexküll for individuals, as opposed to instances of the species, and that his model of the tick is purely functionalistic: tick as complicated state machine.
I believe this would be wrong in two ways, though: first, even though the tick's actions are completely constrained by its receptors and effectors, Uexküll believes it still has an inner world; it must do something like perceiving the stimulus, which has a particular kind of "tonality". (Why exactly he thinks this is not clear to me based on what I've read so far.) For instance, to a dog who has been taught to sit on a (human's) chair, objects similar to the chair acquire a "sitting tone", and will be sat upon in response to the command that was used to train the dog to sit on the original chair. Second, if one abstracted from the description of the tick to a framework for all animals, a fairly static picture of an Umwelt develops, for ticks seem fairly fungible. However, Uexküll writes in A Stroll through the World of Animals and Men that "as the number of an animal's performances grows, the number of objects that populate its Umwelt increases. It grows within the individual life span of every animal that is able to gather experiences" (p 49), where such animals include not only humans (Uexküll has a rather unfortunate example here) but also dogs and birds. In Theoretical Biology, he gives a not very helpful diagram and explanation of the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen, but it remains unclear where the cutoff between "the highest animals", which can gather experiences and in some cases even use implements, and other animals is drawn, and how the difference is grounded. At some point in the ascent from less to more complicated Umwelten, this new capacity appears, but it is not, on his account, unique to humans, nor does it in any important way free those animals which have it from the basic receptor/effector system.
My question about Agamben: at the end of §11, he refers to the experiment in Rostock in which a tick was kept alive for eighteen years, and, saying that Uexküll gives "no explanation for this peculiar fact", and goes on to ask a series of questions unanswerered in the text. I take it that those questions are motivated by interests and thoughts of his own, and if anyone wants to discuss them, that'd be peachy.
This is also the area in which I quibble. I'm not sure to what extent Agamben's quite correct that Uexküll gives no explanation; there is a footnote at that point in the text in which he states
The tick is built for a long period of starvation … The perfect fitting of the tick to her prey-object, which she finally seizes, contrasts strikingly with the extremely low probability that this will actually ensue … An optimal Umwelt, that is, one as favorable as possible, and a pessimal environment may be considered the general rule. (A Stroll through the World of Animals and Men, p 12)That is, the "absolute isolation from its environment" is not taken to be the relevant factor in the tick's survival, so much as it is merely how it is that the duration of its survival was ascertained: this long isolation from any Merkmalträger is something that happens in the wild as well, but (and this may not be justified) it seems to me that there's a definite emphasis on the laboratory conditions, the artificial removal of the tick from any possible encounter with butyric acid. Further, his question "what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?" seems to rely on an equivocation. "Umwelt" is not the animal's subjective world, which we can never know, but merely what we can observe the animal to interact with. This is made explicit in Theoretical Biology:
Since we are not in a position to investigate the appearance-world [Erscheinungswelt] of another subject, but only that part of our appearance-world surrounding it, we had better speak of the surrounding-world [Umwelt] of the animal … The observer's chief task consists in determing the number and nature of his own qualities appearing in the surrounding-world of the other subject … We can divide up the surrounding-world of every other subject into two halves, as will be explained fully later on. The one contains those of the observer's indications [Merkmale] that affect the animal as such; … (Theoretical Biology, p 79–80)The divisions here don't matter as much as the construction of the Umwelt out of the observer's own experience. In the laboratory the tick was no more deprived of its world, then, than it is when a day passes without a mammal passing under it, something which, apparently, has a rather high probability.
There's an introduction to Uexküll, with a prodigious bibliography, here; it's from an issue of Semiotica devoted to him, but I don't think that issue is available online.
[1] I suppose this might actually be a somewhat contentious thing to say, given the contrast Uexküll attempts to make between "goal" (which humans are at least accustomed to thinking that they have) and "plan" (which determines animals). But since he does actually give examples involving people in explicating principles for animals, it seems justifiable.
