Giorgio Agamben on Jakob von Uexküll

From Giorgio Agamben “The Open: Man and Animal” Chapter 10, “Umwelt”

It is fortunate that the baron Jakob von Uexküll, today considered one of the greatest zoologists of the twentieth century and among the founders of ecology, was ruined in the First World War… Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment are contemporary with both quantum physics and the artistic avant-garde. And, like them, they express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature (and so it should come as no surprise that they strongly influenced both Heidegger…and Gilles Deleuze…Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to higher organisms, Uexküll 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…Thus, Uexküll calls his reconstructions of the environments of the sea urchin, the amoeba, the jellyfish the sea worm and the tick…”excursions into unknowable worlds.”

Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and the same time as those which bind us to the objects in the human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as space and 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.

Uexküll begins by carefully distinguishing the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” or of “marks” which are the only things that interest the animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular privilege and which, as such, can also very according to the point of view from which we observe it….

(The tick) this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint with the help of only skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.

…(for the tick), the Umwelt is reduced to only three carriers of significance (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The (hairy typology of mammals)…

The tick IS this relationship with its environment…

…A tick was kept alive for 18 years without nourishment, in isolation from its natural environment….What sense does it make to speak of “waiting” without time and without world?