Mona Caron

RESEARCH AND THOUGHTS ON MONA CARON FROM DRAWING WORKSHOP

A Foray Into the Worlds of Humans and Animals - Jakob von Uexkull

Uexkull's postulation of a human-like consciouscness orchestrating natural purposes from a vantage point outside time and space will seem bizarrely Kantian or too creationistic for most modern readers. Worse still, Uexkulls, talk of a 'master plan' may sound outright Nazi - although this may be partly the result of translation. If the real world of human toes, parasitic wasps and penguin wings suggests more a cosmic hack than an all powerful creator, the history of Faustian eugenics at the time Uexkull was writing renews the question of whre Uexkull, in his view of life as a unified entity, thought purposeful life was going. And yet Uexkulls exposition of purpose and perception, of cycles and signalling, of the relationship of part to whole attends to precisely those subjects who have been neglected in the development of biology after Darwin. Perception and functionality pervade living things, and ignoring them, while convenient, is not scientific. Thus Uexkull's careful inventory of such phenomena is to our lasting benefit. Uexkull's examples remain fresh and interesting to modern theorists coming back to construct a broader, more evidence-based biology - a biology that embraces the reality of purpose and perception without jumping to creationist conclusion.

All animals subjects, from the simplest to the most complex, are inserted into their environment to the same degree of perfection. The simple animal has a simple environment; the multiform animal has an environment just as richly articulated as it is. 50

At the Zoological Institute in Rostock, they kept ticks alive that had gone hungry for eighteen years. The tick can wait eighteen years; we humans cannot. Our human time consists of a series of moments, i.e the shortest segments of time in which the world exhibits no changes. For a moment's duration, the world stands still. A human moment last one-eighteenth of a second. We shall see later that the duration of a moment is different in different animals, but, no matter what number we assign to the tick, it is simply impossible for an animal to endure an unchanging environment for eighteen years. We shall there therefore assume that the tick is, during it's waiting period, in a state similar to sleep, which also interrupts our human time for hours. 52

Territory is purely a problem of the environment because it represents an exclusively subjective product, the presence of which even the most detailed knowledge of the surroundings offers no explanation at all. One might now ask, 'Which animals have a territory, and which do not?' A housefly whose repeated back and forth flight marks a certain segment of space around a chandelier does not have, by that right, a territory. On the other hand, a spider who builds a nest in which it is permanently active has a home which is also it's territory. 103

Concepts of territory began to interest me in this instance, not only because of the intangible and innately personal and interpretive nature of territory, but also because of how this aligns with my own work in the streets. Whose territory am I encroaching on when putting work up publically? Does this 'territory' belong to Norwich city council, or the unnemerable shoppers who will pass through from one day to the next, or even perhaps the pidgeons who literally call these urban environments home? And by putting work out, is it truly an encroachment on territory, or instead the expression of human passage through an urban no-mans land? Wherin everything else is corporate or sponsored, the evidence of human markmaking without these vested interests in the functional domain of a city centre is refreshing, and does something to claim back humanity and emotional connection in these manufactured and carefully constructed zones.

The ability with which the mole, a blind animal, can orient itself without fail is astounding. If it is trained to get its food at a certain spot, it can find this spot again even after all the passages leading to it are completely destroyed. This excludes the possibility that it can be guided by olfactory perception signs. Its space is purely an effect space. One must assume that the mole is able to find again a path it has been over once already by reproducing directional steps. 105

One of the things I found particularly interesting in this book was the indepth case studies and analysis of characteristics in specific species which Uexkull uses to support his hypothesis. Much like my own work highlights induvidual cases to illustrate wider reaching issues,

As a third example, let an object serve which consists of two long poles and multiple short poles which connect the two long poles to each other at regular intervals. I can confer the 'climbing tone' of a ladder on this object if I lean the long poles diagonally against a wall. But I can also confer upon it the function [Leistung] tone of a fence if I attach one of the long poles horizontally to the ground. It soon becomes apparent that the distance of the cross poles from each other only plays an incidental role for the fence, but that they must be one step apart in the case of the ladder. In the case of the carrier of meaning in the case of the ladder. In the case of the carrier of meaning 'ladder', a simple spatial structure plan is already recognizable that enables the function of climbing.
 In an imprecise manner of expression,  we designate all our useful things (even though they are one and all carriers of human meaning), simply as objects, as if they were simple, relationless objects. Indeed, we treat a house along with all the things found in it as objectively existent, whereby we leave human beings as dwellers in the house and users of the things completely out of the picture. 141

How perverse this way of seeing things is becomes apparent immediately if we insert a dog instead of a human being as the dweller in the house and envisage its relation to the things in the house. If we insert a dog instead of human beings as the dweller in the house and envisage it's relation to the things in the house. [...] ,we will therefore be able to observe a lot of things which are given a sitting tone. Likewise, a lot of things will be present which exhibits a dog feeding tone or a dog drinking tone. The steps surely have a sort of climbing tone. But most furniture only has an obstacle tone for the dog- above all the doors and closets, whether these hold books or clothing. All small household effects such as spoons, forks, matches, and so on, seem to the dog to be only junk.
No one would doubt that the impression left by the house with its only dog-related things is highly inadequate and hardly corresponds to its real meaning.  142

Should we not learn from the lesson that, for example, the woods, which poets praise as the human being's loveliest abode, is hardly grasped in it's true meaning if we relate it only to ourselves? 142

Let us examine, for instance, the stem of a blooming meadow flower and ask ourselves which roles are assigned to it in the following four environments: (1) in the environment of a flower-picking girl who is making a bouquet of colourful flowers and sticking it as decoration on her bodice; (2) in the environment of the ant, which uses the regular pattern of the surface of the stem as the ideal paving to get to it's feeding area in the flower's leaves; (3) in the environment of a spittle-bug larva, which bores into the vascular system of the stem and uses it as a tap in order to build the liquid walls in it's airy house; (4) in the environment of a cow, which grabs both the stem and flower in order to shove them into her wide mouth and consume them as feed. The same flower stem plays the role of an ornament, a path, a spigot and a clump of food. 143

Plucking the flower transforms the flower into a decoration in the girl-world. Running along the stem transforms the stem into a path in the ant-world, and the spittle-bug larva's sticking it transforms the stem into a source of building material. Being grazed by the cow transforms the flower stem into agreeable cattle feed. In this way, every action impresses it's meaning on a meaningless object and thereby into a subject-related carrier of meaning in each respective environment. 145

What was true of the wind is also true of the rest of the meaning factors of the plant. The rain is trapped in the drip grooves of leafy foliage and conducted toward the fine tips of the roots underground. Sunlight is captured by the plant cells containing chlorophyll and applied in the excecution of a complex chemical process. Chlorophyll is as little synthesized by the sun as the grooves of the foliage are by the rain. All the organs of the plants as well as of animals owe their form and their distribution of materials to their meaning as utilizers of the measuring factors which come to them from outside. 151

Until now, we had no occasion to conclude that, in addition to the form development order, there was also a meaning order. But, through experiments of [Hans] Spemann and his students, we now know better. These experiments were carried out according to the grafting method developed by Spemann, which consists in taking a bit of the body wall from an embryo in the first gastrula stage and implanting in it's place a piece of body wall of the same 152

Can we speak of  human Umwelt? Three possible answers are put forward.

1. Yes there is a human Umwelt. It may be more complex and differentiated because unlike ticks we don't spen our lives hanging on twigs waiting for something warm and wooly to come lumbering by, but at rock bottom we are just as enclosed in our bubble. This is essentially Uexkull's position.

2. Yes, humans have an Umwelt but we can escape or transcend it. The philosopher Theodor Litt, for instance, posited that the difference between the animal and the human Umwelt is that the former encloses the organism while the latter also acts as a summons to exit:

Compared to the human Umwelt the animal Umwelt appears to be of such fixed immobility primarly because it does not in any way refer to beyond itself. It is closed and hardened into self-sufficiency that does not suggest, let alone permit any movement beyond. The human Umwelt, however, is not only that which it contains, it is also open to the direction toward that which it not yet is.

3. No, humans do not have an Umwelt. On the contrary, what characterises us is the absence of a stabilizing, species-enclosure bubble. [...] Gehlen, in turn, invoked man's status as a Mangelwesen, a deficient being no longer secured by instincts and neatly interlocking functional cycles, the absence of which requires the creation of a functionally equivalent guiding edifice in the shape of culture. Man is by nature a cultural being. 219-220

No matter how sophisticated and self-critical, humanism (so the argument goes) is ultimately based on speciesism, in turn, is based on the assumption that humans are alone thinkers and makers of culture and nature, which implies that we are autonomous subjects operating at a certain remove from that which we contemplate and/or engineer. Animals too, may make and think but they do not do so as subects, that is, as self-reflexive agents. It is precisely this suppression of nonhuman subjectivity that, in turn, is denied by Uexkull, who instead furnishes a notion of a human subject as always already enmeshed in it's environment in it's environment on the basis of operating principles that are similar to those animals. Animals are promoted by virtue of their human-like ability to construct their own environment; humans are demoted by virtue of our animal-like inability to transcend our Umwelt. 222

In the dog world there are only dog things, in the dragonfly world there are only dragonfly things, and in the human world there are only human things. Even more so, Mr. Schulz will only encounter Schulz things and never Meyer things, just as Mr. Meyer will not encounter Schulz things. 222

 He then goes on to catagorise human Umwelt into 4 differentiating factors which allow the Umwelt to be limited or transcended. The first being Nation, or international placement, followed by Region, an invaluable distinction as anyone from up North will tell you of Southerners haha! Next is Gender, a classification which is perhaps less obvious in modern day westernised cultures as gender roles and stereotypes are becoming increasingly less polarized. "The crucial difference is that women are far more aware of the fact that people live in their respective bubbles." It reintroduces traditional gender roles and likens their 'relegation to home and hearth' to increased homebound awareness. Finally we have Professions, suggesting differences in carriers of significance and functional cycles which are developed due to vocational need.

Henri Rousseau Jungles in Paris

 QUOTES AND ANALYSIS FROM JUNGLES IN PARIS BY TATE