IngaPollmann_InvisibleWorlds

Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexkll's Umwelt , Film, and Film TheoryAuthor(s): Inga PollmannSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Summer 2013), pp. 777-816Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671356 .Accessed: 29/09/2013 10:30

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Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexkulls Umwelt,Film, and Film Theory

Inga Pollmann

The deadening of the emotions, and the ebbing away of the waves of life which arethe source of these emotions in the body, can increase the distance between the selfand the surrounding world [Umwelt] to the point of alienation from the body.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama1

Like a chameleon, the human mind disguises itself by camouflaging the globe. . . .The cinema has given man an eye more marvelous than the multifaceted eye of thefly.

Blaise Cendrars, The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema2

In 1934, German biologist Jakob von Uexkull published his second bookintended for general audiences. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals andHumans: Picture Book of Invisible Worlds promised its readers worlds[that] are not only unknown; they are also invisible.3 At the same time, itinvited its reader to change drastically her or his very way of seeing and stepinto a new world:

We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow inwhich insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubblearound each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble repre-sents each animals environment [Umwelt] and contains all the fea-tures accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one such

Unless otherwise noted translations are by the author.1. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York,

1998), p. 140; hereafter abbreviated O.2. Blaise Cendrars, The Modern: A New Art, the Cinema, trans. Richard Abel, in French

Film Theory and Criticism, trans. Abel et al., ed. Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 1:182.3. Jakob von Uexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, in A Foray into the

Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. ONeil(Minneapolis, 2010), p. 41; hereafter abbreviated as FW.

Critical Inquiry 39 (Summer 2013)

2013 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/13/3904-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely re-configured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely,others lose their coherence with one another, and new connectionsare created. A new world arises in each bubble. [FW, p. 43]

Uexkulls romantic, pastoral image of the leisurely stroll through a sum-mer meadow may initially suggest a familiar scene to the casual readeranoutdoor enthusiast or occasional birdwatcher, perhaps, convinced of thebenefits of fresh air, constitutionals, physical exercise, and a general senseof the beautiful and at times sublime nature surrounding her. The secondhalf of the sentence, though, transforms this image and its correspondingmood into a fantastic scenario by means of fanciful soap bubbles wemake around each creature. Yet even this stepfrom the pastoral to thefantasticis simply a precondition for an even more radical transforma-tion of perception, one that promises the reader the possibility of steppinginto a completely alien and unfamiliar world, much in the way that LewisCarrolls Alice entered Wonderlandor, for that matter, the way that thecity stroller entered the movie theater.

Imagining this step into the soap bubbles surrounding other creaturesnot only enabled a radically different vision but it also depended on adifferent paradigm of visiona different dispositifthan that premisedon the belief in a unified, objective world that can be known by an ob-server. Uexkulls introduction playfully introduces a modified Kantianisminto his theory of biology. For Uexkull, there is no common ground, thereis no common world, for every species (and, potentially, every individual)perceives the world differently and, as a result, lives in a world that isdifferent from that of other living beings. Uexkull contends that each spe-cies or individual is surrounded by a subjective world dependent upon therespective organisms capacities for action and perception, a subjectiveworld he terms Umwelt (environment, but more literally surroundingworld).4 These individual Umwelt-bubbles envelop every plant, animal,and human like an outer shell or extended body, while simultaneouslyisolating and separating each entity existentially into quasi-monadic units.

4. While in his biological texts, Uexkull generally ascribes a specific Umwelt to each species,in his less rigorously scientific work such as A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans heindividualizes human beings and distinguishes between the Umwelten of different individuals(the hunter, the astronomer, and other figures).

I N G A P O L L M A N N is assistant professor of German in the Department ofGermanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of NorthCarolina, Chapel Hill.

778 Inga Pollmann / Uexkulls Umwelt


The cheerful stroller has himself or herself evoked and painted this pictureand, following a familiar trope of the fantastic, is able to step inside, butonce there, she or he becomes captivated and loses control.

This scenario bears more than just a superficial resemblance to theexperience that often takes place in a movie theater. The surface of thebubble that Uexkull invokes surrounds us and shows us a world we hardlyrecognize. We know that this is our world, yet everything looks different; ifwe imagine this scenario as a film scene, the genre would be a sciencefiction rather than a Heimat film. Uexkulls reference to new and unfamil-iar worlds brings to mind Charles Urbans film series The Unseen World,which in 1903 marked the beginnings of the popular science film with aprogram consisting of comical or dramatic animal scenes and microcine-matographic films. The latter presented viewers with everyday objects andcreatures they had never seen before, or at least not seen at such closequarters, and these scenes evoked strong responses of amazement, awe,and disgust in the contemporary press. One of the most popular films, forexample, used microcinematography to transform the image of a maneating cheese into the horrifying scenario of countless giant spiderlikecheese mites crawling over his food.5 By employing the technical capacityof film to change the scale of vision, microcinematographic films estab-lished a technical analogue of the soap bubble that Uexkull asked his read-ers to create imaginatively.

This resonance between Uexkulls theory of Umwelt and the experienceof film is by no means arbitrary, for, as I establish in this essay, film andchronophotography played a key role in Uexkulls development of histheory of Umwelt. The concept of Umwelt had its more distant origins inUexkulls dissatisfaction with two different biological paradigms. On theone hand, Uexkull was unhappy with Darwinian concepts of milieu andadaptation, which he felt placed too much emphasis on the determiningpower of external forces, to which organisms reacted rather than activelyengaging with, and shaping, their surroundings; such a theoretical ap-proach, he felt, prevented researchers from understanding the subjectivemeans through which each organism related itself to those external forces.6

5. On Urbans films and for a discussion of Cheese Mites, see Oliver Gaycken, Devices ofCuriosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (forthcoming).

6. Adaptation is a concept that predates Charles Darwinit was central to Jean-BaptisteLamarcks theory of the law of use and disuse of organs, for examplebut in the earlytwentieth century the term was firmly associated with the definition given to it by Darwin inThe Origin of Species. Following his mentor Karl Ernst von Baer, Uexkull denounced adaptationand especially the idea of natural selection, which ran counter to von Baers teleologicalconception of biology. The German word used to translate adaptation was Anpassung.Anpassung had come to denote a progressive fitting of animal to environment and assumed that

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2013 779


On the other hand, he was also dissatisfied with attempts to understandthese subjective worlds by theorizing about the psychology of nonhumananimals; such a project, he believed, was doomed to failure in advance,because it always meant importing human psychology into the study ofnonhuman animals. It was when Uexkull turned to visual technologicalmedia that he was able to overcome this theoretical impasse between ex-ternal determination and internal subjective autonomy. Uexkull discov-ered in experiments with starfish that chronophotography could provide akind of third eyethat is, both an automatic recording of the surfacebehavior of the starfish and a manipulation of time, and thus of the ways inwhich this nonhuman living being organized its behavior in relationshipto its surroundingsthat corresponded neither to what the starfish itselfsaw nor to what humans, in the absence of the camera, could see. Film thusestablished within the human Umweltor, more specifically, within theUmwelt of the scientific researcheran opening that allowed Uexkull togenerate the concept of Umwelt, a concept that in turn, he believed, wouldallow researchers to begin to explore a variety of nonhuman Umwelten.

While the first half of this essay traces the genesis of the concept of Umweltin Uexkulls own writingsdocumenting how this theory emerged at the in-tersection of Uexkulls physiological studies, his reading of Kant, his interest inaesthetic theories of empathy, and his work in chronophotographythe sec-ond half of the essay outlines the reception of Uexkulls theory by philos-ophers, social theorists, and theorists of film. Though Uexkulls theory ofUmwelt was also important for biologists, psychophysiologists, and otherscientific researchers, I am interested here in its reception by nonscientists,for it was in these latter paths of reception that the full implications ofUexkulls early engagement with film were most fully worked out. Uexkullengaged film primarily as an experimental tool, yet the fact that he believedthat such a tool could allow researchers to understand the Umwelten ofother kinds of living beings emphasized a potential aporia at the heart of

not only were there more or less well-fitted relationships but also that the process of fitting tooka significant amount of time. In keeping with the shift of his emphasis from a neutral or hostilemilieu to a subjective Umwelt, Uexkull, by contrast, champions the use of the word Einpassung(fitting-into) instead of Anpassung; every living being is perfectly fitted into (eingepasst in) itsUmwelt. See Uexkull, Theoretische Biologie (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 31724. On the history anddefinition of adaptation, see, for example, Richard M. Burian, Adaptation: HistoricalPerspectives, in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 712, and Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, Sex and Death: AnIntroduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago, 1999), pp. 21776. On Karl Ernst von Baersstruggle with Darwinism, see Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics inNineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago, 1982), pp. 24675.



his theory: if, as Uexkull claimed, every kind of living being, including ahuman being, is surrounded by its own Umwelt bubble, by what meanscould any living being ever come to know the Umwelt of another being?Uexkull himself did not so much answer as exacerbate the problem, con-tending in texts such as A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humansthat there was in fact not a single human Umwelt but many different Um-welten: the Umwelt of the child, which differed from the Umwelt of theadult; the Umwelt of the hunter, who inhabited a completely different forestthan the nonhunter; and so on. How was such a change of Umweltenthat is, achange of physiological properties and/or sensorial capacities that resultedin a different subjective worldpossible, and what sorts of environments,means, or technologies facilitated such shifts?

I trace two quite different paths pursued by theorists and artists in theirefforts to answer this question. The first trail, which we might call the pathof man, was developed in German philosophical texts of the 1910s and1920s. The authors who took this path were less interested in theorizing thetechnical means by which one altered ones Umwelt than in appropriatingthe power of Umwelt transformation for humans, in the sense that suchopennessin the work of authors such as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler,Helmuth Plessner, and Martin Heideggerfunctioned as a means for dis-tinguishing between humans and animals. Travelers on the second trail,which we might call the path of alienation (or the path of the animal), werewilling to abandonto varying degreesthe terrain of the human. Thesetravelers were mostly film theorists and artists rather than philosophers.Some, such as art critic Adolf Behne and artist Franz Marc, were inspiredby Uexkulls colorful theories, images, and imaginings, which providedthem with a model for breaking up habitual perceptions and conceptionsof both things and living beings, thus, in their eyes, opening up the sensesto enable a new unity with the cosmos.7 Film theorists including Blaise

7. In 1918, Behne developed the most comprehensive account to date of the ways in whichUexkulls work underpinned the interests of contemporary art, including the work of PaulScheerbart, Bruno Taut, Wassilij Kandinsky, and Marc. See Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr derKunst (Nendeln, 1973), pp. 57, 10911. In his animal paintings, Marc tried to depict a harmonicunity of animal and its Umwelt: What does a deer have to do with the worldview we have? . . .Who says that a deer senses the world cubistically; it senses it as deer, the landscape thereforehas to be deer (Franz Marc, Aufzeichnungen auf Blttern in Quart ohne Titel uber dasTierbild und uber das Groteske [Winter 1911/12], in Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit [Kln, 1978],pp. 99100). For an overview of Uexkulls influence on artists and painters, including Theo vanDoesburg, Raoul Haussmann, Gottfried Benn, and Thomas Mann, see Malte Herwig, TheUnwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexkulls Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature,Semiotica 134 (Mar. 2001): 55392, and Oliver A. I. Botar, Notes towards a Study of Jakob vonUexkulls Reception in Early Twentieth-Century Artistic and Architectural Circles, Semiotica134 (Mar. 2001): 59397.



Cendrars and Jean Epstein went a step further, for they gave in to thetemptationand aesthetic and political potentialto cross-breed hu-man, animal, and technological perceptions. Their texts express the idea ofqueered perception that Uexkulls own references to film inspire, describ-ing the alien and alienating worlds and worldviews that film offers as wellas films (re)integration of the human being into a leveled playfield (or, inUexkulls words, a grand symphony of interweaving melodies) of animals,plants, and inanimate objects.

In mapping out this second path, I take Walter Benjamin as my guide,for his work provides a comprehensive framework for understanding Um-welt theory in the context of the playful experimentation with a new physis.Benjamin is central to this essay not only because he was familiar withUexkull and integrated the concept of Umwelt into his writings on film andmodernity but also because, in doing so, he developed the concept ofUmwelt in a way that gave it a much more urgent and critical valence thanappears in Uexkulls own writings. Though Benjamin was likely unawareof the important role that film played in Uexkulls development of theconcept of Umwelt, he recognized, more than Uexkull himself did, thatcinema was an especially important part of the modern environment and,thus, an especially important means by which to understand the nature ofenvironment itself. Cinema could play this privileged role in part because,as Benjamin noted, cinema not only epitomized the conditions found inthe modern world at large but also brought these conditions into what hecalled the optical unconscious. Benjamin recognized that what cinemapresents is simultaneously of this world and a world; what we see is anotherUmwelt within our Umwelt. This doubling is not simply a function offilms photographic representation of the world, which is then perceived asa visual-acoustic or narrative cosmos of its own; such an interpretationwould rely too much on conventional cinema, that is, photographic, real-istic, narrative films. Rather, every film, including abstract filmsfilmsproduced without camera, and animationsengage the spectator with allher or his senses such that in this spatiotemporal engagement an environ-ment emerges, however virtual it may be. Against the background of sucha broad understanding of cinematic worlding, photographic film presentssimply a specialand, to be sure, an especially convincingcase: cine-matic images that are recorded by a camera, whose mechanism of captur-ing the world (or, more precisely, light) is not dependent on humanperception and action and, as such, does not present a human Umwelt butonly the Umwelt of the camera.8 Cinematic projection, then, is a procedure

8. This is another way of putting a point classical film theorists such as Jean Epstein, Bela



that makes visible to us the Umwelt of a camera. This visibility, in turn,forces us as film spectators to incorporate the film into our human Um-welt. Or, to put this another way, we perceive film images as embodiedspectators, yet these images themselves present a perception of the worldthat is not dependent upon our body (which latter perceives the worldwithin physiological limits determined by our intentions and radius ofaction). We see, instead, the perception of a film body, to use VivianSobchacks expression, that the screen relays to us.9 We thus perceive an-other perception, the perception of an apparatus. In doing so, we canintegrate, and innervate, the way the world appears to us in these images.10

These properties of cinema allocate it a central role in reflecting, changing,and reformulating the natural environment and our relationship to itand with that relationship, our sense of our bodies (and, indeed, our bod-ies senses themselves). In contrast to the much more pervasive notion ofmilieu, then, Uexkulls concept of Umwelt is of particular interest for me-dia studies since it goes beyond the conditioning aspects of the relationshipbetween organism and environment and encompasses the effects on per-ception of specific bodily comportments, the translation of stimuli intosigns, and the capacity to inhabit new Umwelten.

Tracing out this second path of reception also allows us to reevaluatethe question of Uexkulls modernity. Uexkull, a biologist from an old,German-speaking Estonian aristocratic background may initially seemlike an unlikely protagonist for a project concerned with the cinema. His

Balazs, Andre Bazin, and others have made, namely, that photographic images, since they areproduced mechanically, rather than filtered through human subjectivity, are able to show ana-human world to us. See, for example, Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the PhotographicImage, What Is Cinema? trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 2005), 1:916; Benjamin,Little History of Photography, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, SelectedWritings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and GarySmith, 4 vols. (1931; Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 2:50730; Jean Epstein, Magnification (1921),trans. Stuart Liebman, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1: 23540; Siegfried Kracauer,Photography, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 4763; and Bela Balazs, Visible Man and Spirit of Film, BelaBalazs: Early Film Theory, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Erica Carter (New York, 2010).

9. On the phenomenological notion of the films body, see Vivian Sobchack, The Address ofthe Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J., 1992). Christiane Voss hasrecently developed further the relationship between body and cinematic illusion for aphenomenology of film in Christine Voss, Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: TheSpectator as Surrogate Body for the Cinema, Cinema Journal 50 (Summer 2011): 13650.

10. Innervation is a concept important to both Uexkulls and Benjamins understanding ofthe relationship between mind and body. See Uexkull, Die Lebenslehre (Potsdam, 1930), pp.10911. For an account of the role of innervation in Benjamin, see Miriam Bratu Hansen,Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street, Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 30643, esp.31520.



sociopolitical texts betray a staunch conservatism, and he later applied hisnotion of Umwelt to questions of the German family and state.11 In addi-tion, Uexkulls scientific theories were themselves perceived as untimelyfor most of his career; he was seen as old-fashioned and conservative byleading Darwinist, mechanist, and behaviorist biologists, but at the sametime he was seen as too subjectivistand as suspiciously close to socialistmilieu theoryby National Socialist ideologues. And, finally, his closefriendships with Nazi ideologue Houston Stewart Chamberlain and theconservative philosopher Ludwig Klages emphasize that while Uexkullmight not have agreed with Third Reich political practices such as geno-cide, the ideological gap between his positions and those of National So-cialism was marginal when it came to other elements of blood-and-soilideology.12 Yet, at the same time, Uexkulls scientific work betrays an as-tonishing modernity and aesthetic sensibility that was recognized by bothartists and film theorists. While Uexkulls own cultural and political viewsmight have been conservative, his biological work produced theories, con-cepts, and images that were dislodged from conservative ideology in orderto serve other, more progressive purposes.

The Agony of the Starfish: FromMilieu toUmweltvia ChronophotographyUexkull had first become familiar with the work of the anti-Darwinian

biologist Karl Ernst von Baer during his studies in Dorpat, Estonia wherevon Baer had taught. However, it was while working at Anton Dohrnszoological station in Naples in the late 1890s and early 1900sat the sametime, as it turned out, that neovitalist Hans Driesch was also workingtherethat Uexkull began to turn away from Darwinism and pure phys-iology and sought to integrate his earlier studies of Kant with theorganicist-vitalist approaches of von Baer.13 This was not, however, a turnthat had purely intellectual origins, and the crucial role of photography,

11. See Uexkull, Theoretische Biologie, pp. 13034 and Staatsbiologie: Anatomie-Physiologie-Pathologie des Staates (Hamburg, 1933). See also Florian Mildenberger, Umwelt als Vision: Lebenund Werk Jakob von Uexkulls (18641944) (Stuttgart, 2007), 15667, and Roberto Esposito, Bos:Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, 2008), pp. 1618.

12. See Anne Harringtons comprehensive, though reductive, description of Uexkullssocial and political views; Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culturefrom Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 3471. By focusing primarily on his latersociopolitical texts, Harrington does not always do justice to the complexity of Uexkullsbiological work, which she sees as simply one of several holistic approaches that emerged inearly twentieth-century Germany.

13. On Uexkulls time in Naples and his indebtedness to von Baer, see Mildenberger,Umwelt als Vision, pp. 1641. Tim Lenoir provides the most thorough discussion of von Baersembryology as a form of vital materialism; see Lenoir, The Strategy of Life, esp. 7295.



especially chronophotography, in helping Uexkull to redefine the task ofbiology and his notion of organicity is evident in his early work.

Uexkull began to reconceive the relationship between organism andenvironment by developing a new theory of organic form around a Kan-tian biology. In his In the Battle over the Soul of the Animal (Im Kampf umdie Tierseele) (1902), Uexkull elaborated on Kants theory of apperceptionin order to criticize the premise that psychology was able to make anyclaims about the psyches of nonhumans.14 He reminded his readers ofKants claim that apperception is the process by means of which sensationsare transformed into intuition (Anschauung), and he stressed that, in ad-dition to this ability to synthesize and recollect sense perception, appercep-tion also included a process of Gestaltung (creation, design, construction,formation). This so-called Gestaltungsprozess for Uexkull emphasized the roleof the brain in perception, for the brain is not only the organ in whichsensory data is collected but is also the location where this data is informedby previous perceptions and where concepts are formed (and it is only bymeans of these latter that we can grasp percepts). Uexkull thus claimedthat, in this sense, apperception is completely subjective, for it is the indi-vidual as subject that provides unity to all percepts. Taking his lead fromHelmholtz, Uexkull described the relationship between thought and ex-tensive matterthe fact that movement in the brain seems to stand in alawful relationship to the external world, even though mediated by man-ifold sensations that give incoherent inputas one of signs; the sen-suous qualities of consciousness are signs of the movements in the brainand, as mediated by the latter, of the external world (IK, p. 17). The rela-tionship between objects in the world and consciousness of them (quasensations) can therefore be traced physiologically and is indeed indexical,but nevertheless nondeductible; that is, the nature of objects in the worldcannot be determined by looking at processes in the brain.

Uexkull would not develop the concept of Umwelt until a few yearslater, but we can already discern the first elements of this concept in theimplications of the essay. First, since we have no access to the signs thatother living beings employ, and we are, moreover, unable even to imaginesensations different from our own, we cannot make any claims about thepsyche of nonhuman subjects (in other words, animals). Yet, second,by understanding biological processes as signsthat is, in terms of abiosemioticswe can substitute for a psychological approach to animalsa model that captures the subjectivity and diversity of human and animal

14. See Uexkull, Im Kampf um die Tierseele (Wiesbaden, 1902), p. 17; hereafter abbreviatedIK.



perception. In this early essay, Uexkull attempts to draw out the implica-tions of these positions by making recourse to the concept of milieu. Thatis, Uexkull at this point believes that the project of a biosemiotics can bepursued by considering that which creates diverse arrangements and func-tions of animal tissues and organs (and, thus, diverse perceptions)namely, the diversity of milieux in interaction with which the animalbodies develop and exist. A study of the milieu, the essay concludes, istherefore an integral yet, to date, severely neglected part of biology.

Though these three elements may initially appear to limit themselves tobiological and philosophical issues, Uexkulls attempt to reformulate theconcerns of biology as a science of life was closely related to questions withwhich contemporary aesthetic theory was also grappling. The importanceof aesthetic theory for Uexkull is underscored by his reference in In theBattle over the Soul of the Animal to Adolf Hildebrands The Problem ofForm in the Fine Arts (1893).15 This text was among the most populartheories of art at the time, and Uexkulls reference to it in his discussion ofGestaltung emphasizes the extent to which he was creating a new biologicaltheory by bridging the concerns of multiple disciplines.16 In part, this con-vergence of German aesthetic theory and German theoretical biology canbe explained by the common Kantian heritage of both disciplines. Likethose turn-of-the-century aesthetic theories that have been grouped underthe rubric of empathy (Einfuhlung, literally feeling-into), Uexkulls theo-retical perspective was based on Kants understanding of the dependencyof our conception of the world on our perception. And like these same arttheorists, Uexkull was interested in the organization of matter in form.Kant had defined the form of an appearance as that which so determinesthe manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain rela-tions, and he distinguished between pure forms of intuition (space andtime) and forms of thought (concepts and categorizations that mediateintuition).17 Rather than being an inherent property of objects, form is asubjective and necessary element of apperceptiona mode, as HarryMallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou put it, under which we arrange the

15. See Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, andSpace: Problems in German Aesthetics, 18731893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and EleftheriosIkonomou, ed. Lynne Kostman and Benedicte Gilman (Santa Monica, Calif., 1994), pp. 22779.

16. In their comprehensive introduction, the translators describe how the publication ofThe Problem of Form coincided with Hildebrands artistic success as a sculptor and quickly wentinto seven editions; see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Introduction, in Empathy, Form, andSpace, p. 36.

17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York,1965), p. 66.



objects of perception, a transcendental ideality.18 According to Kant, theform of an object and the cognitive faculties of the perceiver are correlated,such that pleasure in certain forms, whether natural or artistic, is based ona harmonious relation of the external form with our cognitive faculties. Arttheorists such as Robert Vischer (who coined the term Einfuhlung), Con-rad Fiedler, and Adolf Hildebrand (and, a few years later, philosopherTheodor Lipps) developed Kants suggestions further by expanding theirunderstanding of apperception to include not only cognition but the ac-tive and constitutive participation of the body in perception. For thesetheorists of art, the ground for the apperception of form and for aestheticappreciation was provided by the organic structure of our own body, in-cluding its spatial arrangements (symmetry of body parts or horizontaland vertical axes), its temporalities (the rhythm of heartbeat, circulation,muscle tension), and also by kinesthetic perception (such as eye move-ment) in particular and bodily movement more generally. Additionally,the organic connection of body parts meant that the senses were inter-related and supplemented each others input, resulting in synaestheticperception.

In striving to incorporate this interdependence of the perception ofform and perceiving body into the new discipline of biology, Uexkull fo-cused on the question of how a subject constitutes an object and what thisallows us to say about the subject itself.19 First, he notes that in the processof Gestaltung, an object is formed on the basis of lawful relations to anI (that is, an apperceiving beholder) (IK, p. 9). More specifically, thearbitrary and momentary sensations this I receives only gain coherencebecause the I itself is coherent; the I gathers the sensations in apperceptionin order to form a definite object on the grounds of the objects relation-ship to the I itself. The structure of the object as perceived corresponds tothe structure of the I, the subject. Yet what can we know about the percep-tion of form in beings completely different from ourselves, such as ani-mals? Since Uexkull insists that we cannot make any claims about theirpsyches and processes of apperception, the application of psychologicalmethods to animals is ill-conceived, which means that we have no idea ofhow animals constitute objects, at least if we restrict ourselves to psychol-

18. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Introduction, p. 5.19. Ernst Haeckel was another scientist whose work on form influenced aesthetic theories.

His book Art Forms in Nature, with its beautiful, stylized illustrations, became an especiallyimportant source for Jugendstil artists. Uexkull, however, was the first to bring the perception ofform as a concern to biology. See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel andthe Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2008), and Stacy Hand, EmbodiedAbstraction: Biomorphic Fantasy and Empathy Aesthetics in the Work of Hermann Obrist,August Endell, and Their Followers (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008).



ogy. And this, in turn, brings up the question of how to proceed wheninvestigating other species.

It was by turning to chronophotography that Uexkull found a wayaround the recourse to an inaccessible inner life of animals. Photographynot only restricted its information to the surface, the externally visible,with hardly any interpretive work (from which even scientific drawingswere not completely free), but it also supposedly depicted its object inde-pendently of human perception. In his early work, Uexkull focused on therelationship between nerve stimulation and muscle tension in lower ani-mals such as starfish and sea urchins, and he turned to photography be-cause he saw the need for a medium able to record changes over time.Chronophotography had just become more widely known through thepublications and traveling lectures of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, with Muybridge focusing on chronophotographys aestheticpotential and Marey using it as a scientific-analytic tool. Having becomefrustrated with the limited possibilities for analyzing and representingmovement of the whole animal, Uexkull traveled to Paris to study chro-nophotography with Marey for two months.20 For his second paper onmuscle tone, Uexkull prepared a number of chronophotographs that func-tioned as the backbone for his conclusions about the starfish Ophioglyphasability to walk, turn, feed, and perform defensive movements. By focusingclosely on his chronophotographs, we can see how Uexkull was able tomake the shift from a criticism of animal psychology and a denial of itsmethodology to the development of a new approach to animals, one thatfocused on the relationship of animals to their environment.

Uexkull distinguished between two different kinds of photographictime-writing: chronophotography with a static plate and chronophotog-raphy with a running film. If an animal moved swiftly past the camera, theresult was a recording of separate phases of movement, or what Uexkullcalls a record of coordinates (Koordinatenschreibung), no matter whichmethod of chronophotography is employed. Such a record of coordinates

20. Gudrun von Uexkull, Jakob von Uexkullseine Welt und seine Umwelt (Hamburg,1964), p. 39. And see Uexkull, Studien uber den Tonus II: Die Bewegungen derSchlangensterne, Zeitschrift fur Biologie 46 (1905): 5. Since Marey used to spend part of the yearin Naples, he and Uexkull most likely met there. A number of scientists at the ZoologicalStation in Naples had begun to work with chronophotography and soon, cinematography,most notably Julius Ries and Osvaldo Polimanti. But, also elsewhere, scientists turned tochronophotography to support their work on temporal phenomena, for example WilhelmBraune and Otto Fischers work The Human Gait, trans. Paul Maquet and Ronald Furlong(London, 1987). See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (18301904)(Chicago, 1992); Scott Curtis, Managing Modernity: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany(forthcoming); and Hannah Landecker, Cellular Features: Microcinematography and FilmTheory, Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 90337.



consisted of segments in time and allowed for an analysis of the progres-sion of the coordinated movement. However, if an animal was fixed to aspecific position in front of the camera, chronophotography with a staticplate allowed for a record of amplitudes (Amplitudenschreibung) of theanimals movement.21 The record of amplitudes is a form of stacked timeand gives us segments in space. Such a record tells the researcher nothingabout the order and temporal dimension of movement, but rather visual-izes the intensity and extension of the movement (of, for example, a star-fish pinned on a black surface).22 This recording method allowed Uexkullto represent graphically the distinction between two different kinds offorward movement: on the one hand, a form of walking with the inactive,unpaired fifth leg being dragged behind the four paired, active legs; on theother hand, a form of walking in which the fifth leg was positioned in frontof the other four (fig. 1).

Though Uexkull had learned chronophotography from Marey, his useof this technique pointed to a conception of the living body entirely dif-ferent from Mareys. Mareys chronophotography was based upon aHelmholtzian notion of the body as energetic machine, and the measure-ments that his recordings yielded allowed him to analyze the distinct com-ponents of different processes of movements, such as walking, running,jumping, flying, crawling, or fighting, whether the subjects of these move-ments were human or animal. His chronophotography has for this reasonbecome synonymous with the modern spatialization of time, the analysis

21. Uexkull, Studien uber den Tonus II, p. 5; hereafter abbreviated ST.22. There is a sad irony in the fact that this type of chronophotography is unable to make

visible the passage of time, for in order to obtain the image the starfish was pierced and heldfast to a piece of cork. Uexkull assures us that the dying starfishs arms movements are thesame as under normal circumstances, only faster (ST, p. 6). While these images may thusgive us a correct sense of the movement, they erase the agony of the animal.

F I G U R E 1 . Record of amplitudes of Ophioglypha. Uexkull-Archiv, Hamburg.



and decomposition of perception, and the scientific rationalization andmechanization of the body and its performancein a trajectory that leads,both historically and ideologically, to the cinema.23 Uexkulls chronopho-tography provides not only a different use and analysis of the medium butalso points toward an alternative legacy of chronophotography for thecinema. He was not simply interested in analyzing the movements of thestarfish with respect to their function and efficiency but rather exploredthe animals ability to organize and reorganize its use of its legs dependingupon the circumstances in which it found itself, in the face of the stimu-lations that the animal received from the environment. Uexkulls quitedifferent focus is especially evident in his record of coordinates of thestarfish (fig. 2). This chronophotography consists of filmstrips two to fourmeters in length, which Uexkull claimed to have shot by means of a newapparatus (ST, p. 5). These strips show not only that the legs changetheir pairings and mutual coordination in response to stimuli but, in ad-dition, that the starfish, which is prone to shed its legs at the slightestresistance, instantly adapts its walk to the new constellation of limbs, prov-

23. See, for example, Braun, Picturing Time; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy,Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1992); and Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence ofCinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

F I G U R E 2 . Record of coordinates of Ophioglypha (excerpt). First row: side view (unpairedarm behind); second row: walk with five arms; third row: walk with two arms (unpaired armbehind); fourth row: walk with one arm; fifth row: intelligence experiment. Uexkull-Archiv,Hamburg.



ing that there is an intricate collaboration between the different body parts(ST, p. 13). Any given local change, whether internal or external, thusprompts the entire organism to adapt and change systemically. Thegraphic serial images of the starfishs stark silhouette illustrate this qualityalmost symbolically; the distinct, coordinated, and regular arm move-ments are the result of impulses travelling from the periphery of the star-fish body to its center, where they are organized and travel back into thelimbs.

In interpreting the results of his photographs and experiments, Uexkullstressed that there must be a center, a differentiated mechanical appara-tus of a quality different from that of the regular nerve pathways (ST,p. 37). In contrast to Mareys motion studies, which simply analyzed bodilymovements, Uexkulls photographs positioned movement as an organizedreaction to stimuli, with the consequence that the bodily surface or exter-nal gestalt of the animal became an integral part of the observation. Thesedifferences between Uexkulls and Mareys approaches to chronophotog-raphy were in large part disciplinary. Physiology (Marey) sought to tracebiological processes back to physical or chemical processes and, in thissense, ground life in the anorganic world. Biologyat least according toUexkulls definitionbegan with living tissues and sought to deduce fromthe properties of those tissues the functions of the organs and the life of theorganism as a whole (see IK, p 20). What was at stake in Uexkulls photo-graphs, in short, was a concept of organic form rather than simply ananalysis of the components of bodily movement.

Uexkulls work with chronophotography and aesthetic theory is thuson the cusp of a new understanding of biologyor, more precisely, a newconception of the relationship between an organism and its environment,between life and worldwithout yet being fully able to draw its own con-sequences. Uexkulls initial solution to the problem of animal perceptionwas to investigate an organisms physical reactions to the environment, asthat sole aspect of the interaction of an animal with its world that is avail-able to us. Chronophotography was the medium of this investigation, forit allowed Uexkull to focus solely on the visible bodythat is, the responseof nervous tissue to outside stimuli and the resulting bodily movementand make observations about the organisms interaction with its milieu.But there is a conflict inherent in this answer, a stumbling block, and thatis the conventional understanding of environment as milieu from whichUexkull was still working at this point. If we focus solely on the way inwhich the milieu influences the organism, and we understand milieu asthat part of the external world [Auenwelt] that is impacting [a particu-lar] animal, then all we have on the part of the living being is passive



reaction (ST, p. 21 n. 1). The only formation (Gestaltung) that occurs isthat of the organism by the milieu. Yet this view is incommensurable withUexkulls aestheticempathicunderstanding of Formgestaltung in per-ception as the active, creative, and willing capacity of the body to relate toits surroundings.

This traditional notion of milieu with which Uexkull was working, butagainst which he was also struggling, had a long lineage in the study ofbiology and sociology. While Lamarck introduced the term milieu intobiology, Auguste Comte redefined it more specifically in 1838 as the sumtotal of outside circumstances necessary to the existence of each organ-ism.24 Milieu became a strictly mechanistic term; for example, JacquesLoeb, a mechanist biologist greatly admired by Uexkull, proclaimed thatall movement of the organism was forced upon it by the milieu. HyppoliteTaine extended the forces of the milieu to the social sphere; according toTaine, humans are conditioned by race (collective cultural conditions),milieu (specific circumstances of living), and time (accumulated experi-ences). Milieu was thus firmly established over the course of the nineteenthcentury as an all-powerful force, mindless of man, who is its finishedproduct, its creature.25

Recognizing this tension between the determinism inherent in milieutheory, on the one hand, and his account of the activity essential to anorganisms perceptual abilities, on the other, Uexkull introduced the termUmwelt into biology and philosophy. Where milieu is an objective set ofdetermining conditions, Umwelt is a subjective environment that envelopsevery living being like a soap bubble produced by the living being itself.Uexkulls theory thus opposed the centripetal architecture of inorganicthings, which are formed by outside forces, to the centrifugal plan of or-ganic life that develops from the inside out in a self-regulating fashion (amodel that Bazin would apply to the cinematic image itself some fifty yearslater).26 Since we are creatures of the world ourselves, we are restrained to

24. Quoted in Georges Canguilhem, The Living and Its Milieu, trans. John Savage, GreyRoom 3 (Spring 2001): 10.

25. Leo Spitzer, Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics, Philosophy andPhenomenological Research 3 (Dec. 1942): 177. While my focus here is on film, it is worthstressing that debates about the virtues of using the term milieu also emerged in discussionsabout literature, in part because Emile Zoladrawing on Claude Bernards use of the termproposed that the naturalist novel should focus its experimental technique on the milieux thatdetermine social action. Georg Lukacss 1936 attack on Zola and his conception of milieushould thus be seen as part of the same dynamic that I outline for the case of film; see EmileZola, The Experimental Novel, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York, 1964),pp. 2021, and Georg Lukacs, Narrate or Describe? Writer and Critic, and Other Essays,trans. and ed. Arthur D. Kahn (New York, 1971), pp. 11048.

26. The screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only a part of



our individual human soap bubble. Even in our attempts at objective sci-entific knowledge, we will inevitably project the elements of our Umweltits phenomenal objects and its temporal and spatial paradigmsontoother creatures. Uexkulls biology is therefore an attempt to create a meth-odology that does not aim at getting behind appearances (the goal, forexample, of Uexkulls contemporary Helmholtz) but rather accepts thatthere is only appearance. Yet this appearance in turn reveals somethingabout the living body to which things appear. Since all reality [Wirklich-keit] is subjective appearance, investigating different organic interactionswith the environment will mark the manifold of subjective worlds, whichultimately give us a richer sense of the world itself.27 Such marking oftendepends upon technologies, such as chronophotography and film, thatmediate between these other Umwelten and our human Umwelt by en-abling our senses to grasp phenomena that they could not have registeredin the absence of such technologies. These technologies thus alter andexpand our all too human gaze, enabling relationships to the world that,even if still necessarily human relationships, were nevertheless not possibleprior to a sustained encounter with nonhuman Umwelten.

Of Ticks and HumansOne of the most famous and dramatic examples that Uexkull used to

illustrate Umwelt theory is his evocation of the world of a tick. This littleparasiteUexkull compares her to a blind and deaf highway womanwith her limited Umwelt has been taken up lovingly by a now long lineageof philosophers and historians of biology, including Georges Canguilhem,Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and GiorgioAgamben.28 According to Uexkull, the ticks capability for perception and

the action to be seen. . . . There are no wings to the screen. There could not be withoutdestroying its specific illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a face the very center of theuniverse. In contrast to the stage, the space of the screen is centrifugal (Bazin, Theater andCinema, What Is Cinema? 1:106). There is a teleological, vitalist-organicist conception of themoving image in Bazins work, which bears a close resemblance to Uexkulls conception of life.For further reference on vitalist ideas in Bazin, see Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism:Theories of Life and the Moving Image (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2011).

27. Uexkull, Theoretische Biologie, p. 9.28. See Uexkull, Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of

Invisible Worlds, trans. Claire H. Schiller, Semiotica 89, no. 4 (1992): 321; Canguilhem, TheLiving and Its Milieu, pp. 2021; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from theColle`ge de France, trans. Robert Vallier, ed. Dominique Seglard (Evanston, Ill., 2003), pp. 17375;Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. 51, 257; and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Manand Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif., 2004), pp. 4547.



reaction is limited to three stimuli, which he calls effect signs[Wirkzeichen] (FW, p. 47): the sun on its skin, the smell of butyric acid thatissues from the skin of mammals, and the temperature of blood in a mam-malian body. The photosensitivity of the ticks skin compels it to climb uptrees or bushes; when it smells butyric acid, it lets itself fall; if it senseswarmth, it will move to find a hairless spot on the skin and begin to burrowinto the skin and start sucking. (Uexkull focused on the female tick for hisexample, which after having filled her stomach, drops to the ground, laysher eggs, and dies.) Nothing aside from these three elements can beperceived by the tick; nothing else, consequently, exists in its Umwelt.

Though Uexkulls restriction of the female ticks Umwelt to three fac-tors may seem analogous to contemporary biological concepts, such astropism, that pointed to the role of specific external influences in trigger-ing automatic biological responses, the concept of Umwelt was, by con-trast, intended to underscore the autonomy of the living beings subjectiveworld. Loebs concept of tropismfor example, the heliotropism of sun-flowers or mothsplaced its emphasis on external factors that determineplant and animal movement and positioned these movements as simplyphysico-chemical reactions.29 Uexkull, by contrastand much morein line with teleological and vitalist colleagues such as von Baer andDrieschunderstands these external factors as an extension of the ani-mals Bauplan, its blueprint or body plan. The difference between Umwelttheory and Loebs tropism (as well as similar concepts conceiving of theorganism as physico-chemical and the environment as milieu) was thusthe directionality of the relationship between external and internal factors.The organism determines how its Umwelt is constituted, not the other wayaround. The milieu does not determine the organism. By means of what hecalled a functional cycle, Uexkull explains how the subject and theobject are dovetailed into one another, to constitute a systematic whole(fig. 3). 30

Thedouble linkofreceptorandeffectorsigns,ofperceptualandmotoractivity,by means of which the subject graspsand thus also constitutestheobject, illustrates how those aspects of external objects that function asbearers of perceptual and functional cues (the striped part of the object in

29. See, for example, Jacques Loeb, Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct(Philadelphia, 1918), and Arnold E. S. Gussin, Jacques Loeb: The Man and His Tropism Theoryof Animal Conduct, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 18 (Oct. 1963): 32136.On Uexkulls rejection of Loeb, see Uexkull, Biologie in der Mausefalle, Zeitschrift fur diegesamte Naturwissenschaft 2 (193637): 21322; Die Lebenslehre (Potsdam, 1930), pp. 13233; andTheoretische Biologie, pp. 32629.

30. Uexkull, A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men, p. 324.



figure 3) become interwoven with the subjects capacities. Consequently,in a flys world, everything, including the spiders net, is flylike.

This image of subject and object dovetailing into one another has anambivalent emotional valence. On the one hand, the perfect correspon-dences between subjects and objects seem to point to a miraculous, over-arching plan of nature. How else to explain the fact, Uexkull asked, that aspiders web is woven with threads just beyond the threshold of a flysvision in a pattern ideal for capturing flies?31 On the other hand, the reduc-tion of subjective worlds to perceptual and functional cue bearers pro-duces a feeling of claustrophobia; each animal is enclosed in its own circle.Contemporary philosophers who engaged Uexkulls texts grappled espe-cially with this latter aspect and either sought to create more room foragency in the notion of Umwelt or sought to restrict the functional circle toanimals, thereby excluding humans from its enclosure.

Phenomenologists and philosophical anthropologists were especiallyinterested in probing the consequences of the relationship between animaland Umwelt, so clearly illustrated by the functional circle, for the relation-ship of the human being to the world.32 In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phe-

31. Darwin, of course, had a different answer, namely, natural selection.32. In most of the cases mentioned here, the authors directly, and often extensively,

reference Uexkull. However, it is likely that Uexkull was often present virtually even in texts inwhich he was not mentioned by name, for though the term Umwelt was rarely used before thepublication of Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, it became a central category in Germanphilosophy after 1909, suggesting the extent and importance of Uexkulls work. See Muller,

F I G U R E 3 . Functional circle. Uexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans.



nomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, for example, Husserlintroduced consciousness and intentionality into the notion of Umwelt,thereby adding historical variability and freedom to the subject-object re-lationship. Umwelt, for Husserl, is

the world that is perceived by the person in his acts, is remembered,grasped in thought, surmised or revealed as such and such; it is theworld of which this personal Ego is conscious, the world which isthere for it, to which it relates in this or that way, e.g. by way of the-matically experiencing and theorizing as regards the appearing thingsor by way of feeling, evaluating, acting, shaping technically, etc.33

Umwelt, he continues, is the physical reality a person knows about; it is thatof which the person has consciousness. Speaking quite universally, Hus-serl summarizes, the surrounding world [Umwelt] is not a world in itselfbut is rather a world for me, precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject or grasped consciously in someother way and posited by the subject in his intentional lived experienceswith the sense-content of the moment. As a consequence, Husserl asserts,the Umwelt is always in the process of becoming, constantly producingitself by means of transformations of sense. Husserl distinguished betweena natural relationship between body and environmentthe physico-chemical reaction of the body to stimuli that can be explained by causal(scientific) lawsand an intentional relationship that constitutes ourUmwelt. This intentional relationship is governed by motivation, andthings exist not in themselves but rather as experienced (or thought)things.34 Husserl thus takes over from Uexkull the notion of Umwelt as anindividual or personal world, but, by introducing intention and experi-ence, our relationship to things and thus to our Umwelt as a whole be-comes historical and subject to constant change.

ForphilosophicalanthropologistsScheler,Plessner,andArnoldGehlen,aswellas for Heidegger, Umwelt theory functioned as a starting point for making anontological differentiation between human and animal, and the functionalcircle came to illustrate the closed nature of the nonhuman animals inter-

Umwelt, Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Grunder, andGottfried Gabriel, 17 vols. (Basel, 1971), 11:99105.

33. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a PhenomenologicalPhilosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer, vol. 2 of Studies in the Phenomenologyof Constitution, vol. 3 of Collected Works, trans. F. Kersten et al. (Boston, 2000), p. 195.

34. Ibid. pp. 196, 199.



action with the world, its boundedness.35 On the basis of the claim thatevery animal is bound to and unable to transcend its particular Umwelt,each of these authors worked out ontologies that fundamentally distin-guished between humans and animals. Scheler, for example, introducedthe notion of openness to the world (Weltoffenheit) as the definition ofthe human beings active capacity to engage and shape its world and con-trasted this capacity with the animals closedness; as a being havingspirit, the human being is existentially released from the laws governingorganic matter and is not tied anymore to its drives and Umwelt, but isfree-from-Umwelt [umweltfrei] or, as I wish to put it, world-open [welt-offen]: such a being has world.36 In similar fashion, Heidegger turned toUexkulls biology in order to make a distinction between beings that sim-ply live and those that have what he called existence (Dasein). Heascribed to humans the capacity for world-forming, while animals arepoor in world (weltarm), and nonorganic things, such as stones, areworldless (weltlos). Heidegger contended that animals are captivatedby what they can perceivethey cannot relate to objects as such, butrather relate only in the sense that perceptual cues selectively disinhibitthe animals relationship to the worldand as a consequence they have noaccess to Dasein.37

Yet Uexkulls work was not solely the starting point for a lineage ofthought that sought to establish a division between humans andanimalsa lineage of which Agambens The Open: Man and Animal is oneof the latest and most prominent examplesand thus arrive at a definitionof human being, essence, or existence. There was, in addition, anotherpath of reception, one that took up the creative potential of Uexkullswork, its thrust against anthropocentrism, and its interest in the visualmediation of difference.38 If we take another look at Uexkulls image of the

35. See Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred S. Frings (Evanston,Ill., 2009); Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in diephilosophische Anthropologie, ed. Gunter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Strker, vol. 4 ofGesammelte Schriften, ed. Dux et al. (Frankfurt, 19801985); Arnold Gehlen, Man, His Natureand Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York, 1988); and MartinHeidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. WilliamMcNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, Ind., 1995).

36. Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, p. 27; trans. mod.37. See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, esp. pp. 23870. The

somewhat reductive treatment Uexkull received from Heideggerand, by extension,Agambenis, of course, mostly due to the interest of these latter in linking a human/animaldifference to a (differently perceived and defined) crisis of humanity.

38. Amongst the recent publications on Uexkull, the following have been particularlyuseful for me in thinking about this lineage: Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Bubbles and Webs: ABackdoor Stroll through the Readings of Uexkull, in FW, pp. 20943; Jussi Parikka, InsectMedia: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, 2010); and Brett Buchanan,



functional circle, for example, we see that there is a blank center of theobject, indicating those aspects of the object that escape the subject.39 Thiselusive part of the object differs from subject to subject. In Uexkulls at-tempt to reconstruct and depict other Umwelten, new views of the objectcan emerge because with the change of perception and possible action theblank centerthe invisible, imperceptible, untouchable part of theobjectis also transformed, opening up nonhuman vistas. And openingup these nonhuman vistas was, as we shall see in the next section, aninterest that Uexkull shared with many early film theorists.

Against Anthropocentrism:Umwelt and CinemaAs I noted above, Uexkulls descriptions of Umwelten evoke feelings of

estrangement and encourage an uncanny fascination with creatures wethought we knew; despite occasional lapses into comparisons with ourfamiliar human world (for example, the tick as highway woman),Uexkulls descriptions and the scientific implications that he drew outfrom these descriptions derive their strength from the attempt to tear theveil off human perceptionnot in an idealist attempt to show us objects inthe world as they really are but rather as an attempt to reveal the pluralityof perceptual worlds (the world as it is to a tick, or a dog, or a fly). Byopening up every object to a manifold of creaturely perceptions, we havethe impression of a multitude of veils, all of which provide differentglimpses of objects, without there ever being an object-in-itself or one veilthat would reveal everything as it is, if only it could be lifted.

In the technical mediation of film, Uexkull found not only a surfacenessthat, like chronophotography, revealed the organized interaction of livingbeing and environment but also a technical method for producing anestranging veil. He introduced the cinema in his writings as a privilegedapparatus that was able to mediate between species perceptions because itwas able to alter time and space. Uexkulls biological inflection of Kant

Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze(Albany, N.Y., 2008).

39. This is a trope we can already find in Henri Bergsons Matter and Memory. Theimagesmatters halfway stage between thing and representationact and react upon oneanother in all their elementary parts, yet subjective perception displays images only withrespect to the eventual or possible actions of my body (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory,trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer [New York, 1991], pp. 17, 22). Uexkull follows Bergson inconceiving of objects as entwined with the perceiving body; because the bodys possible actionsare reflected by the external images as in a mirror, this realm of possibility is located exactlybetween body and image, such that it seems to be dependent upon the bodys recognition ofitself in the image-as-mirror.



encouraged him to treat time and space as dependent upon the body of theliving being: without a living subject, there can be neither space nor time(FW, p. 52). He defined the space of a given living subject as a composite ofoperational, tactile, and visual space. Operational space is produced by thekinesthetic sensations of our own bodily movement, as well as by the three-dimensional bodily coordinate system that issues from the semicircularcanals in higher animals and humans. Tactile space is produced by theability of living beings to localize touch on their bodies, while visual spacecan be thought of as a place-mosaic that the visual elements on the retinaspread over the environment.40 The spatial paradigms of a given Umweltare thus completely dependent upon the body of the subject and its capa-bilities for sensing.

While Uexkull sometimes employed references to the cinematograph asa metaphor for his understanding of the biological nature of time, this doesnot exhaust the role that film plays in his work. Much more fundamentally,his conception of the relationship between biological time and perceptionis based on the way in which film functions as a technology for manipu-lating time. The paradigmatic status of film for Uexkull is especially clearin his description of an experiment on the time perception of a snail:

A snail [Helix pomatia] is placed on a rubber ball which, because it isfloating on water, can slide freely past beneath the snail. The snailsshell is held in place by a clamp. The snail is thereby free to crawl andalso stays in the same place. If one places a small stick at the foot of

40. This sense of kinesthetic orientation in space as enabled by a moving body, as well assimilarities in the conception of tactile and visual space, between the roving eye and the feelinghand, underscore Uexkulls indebtedness to theories of empathy and recall Hildebrands andAugust Schmarsows theories of perception; see Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the FineArts, and August Schmarsow, The Essence of Architectural Creation, in Empathy, Form, andSpace, pp. 28197. Schmarsows interest in bodily comportment in space in the perception ofarchitecture has especially strong resonances with Uexkulls notion of bodily space and makes itparticularly interesting for thinking about film perception; see Curtis, Managing Modernity. Atthe same time, Uexkulls conception of space as produced by, and dependent upon, the bodypoints toward theories of orientation in cinematic space, such as the work of perceptualpsychologist James Gibson, who coined the term ecological psychology, as well as to recentapplications of theories of empathy and embodied perception by Robin Curtis, Laura Marks,and others. Despite many parallels with Uexkulls work, though, Gibsons influence seems to berestricted to the American context, for example, William Jamess pragmatism. See James J.Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950) and The Ecological Approach to VisualPerception (Boston, 1979); Robin Curtis, Einfuhrung in die Einfuhlung, in Einfuhlung ZuGeschichte und Gegenwart eines sthetischen Konzepts, ed. Curtis and Gertrud Koch (Munich,2008) and Expanded Empathy: Movement, Mirror Neurons, and Einfuhlung, in Narrationand Spectatorship in Moving Images, ed. Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson(Newcastle, 2007); Antonia Lant, Haptical Cinema, October, no. 74 (Fall 1995): 4573; andLaura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses(Durham, N.C., 2000).



the snail, it will crawl up on it. But if one strikes the snail from one tothree times a second with it, the snail will turn away. However, if theblows are repeated four or more times a second, the snail begins tocrawl onto the stick. In the snails environment, a stick that movesback and forth four or more times a second must be at rest. We canconclude from this that the perception time of the snail takes place ata speed of between three and four movements a second. This has as aresult that all processes of motion take place much more quickly inthe snails environment than they do in our own. Even the snails ownmovements do not seem slower to it than ours do to us. [FW, p. 72]

The experiment is conceived so as to create the illusion of movement forthe snail. Instead of the snail moving itself across space, however, a rubberball moves underneath the snail (fig. 4). If a stick is positioned underneathits foot, the snail takes it for a continuation of its path. As the experimenterbegins to wiggle the stick, the snail will refuse to climb onto it, presumablybecause the stick seems unstable. However, as soon as the stick oscillatesfaster than one third of a second, the snail will continue to climb as thoughthe stick was stable. The conclusion that Uexkull draws from the experi-ment is based on von Baers notion of the moment as the basic time unit of

F I G U R E 4 . Experiment on the time perception of a snail. Uexkull, A Foray into the Worldsof Animals and Humans.



apperception; that is, a moment is the shortest time span during which aliving being can distinctly perceive different qualities. For the duration ofits moment unit, everything in a living beings perceptual world is immo-bile since change has become imperceptible. (In contrast to Bergsons con-cept of duree, which is an organic-vitalist temporality, von Baers momenttime is a psychophysical temporality). Just as space for Uexkull is a sub-jective variable dependent upon the body, time is similarly subjectivized bythe moment, and he derides the idea, encouraged by the prevalence ofobjective time measuring, that time itself is in any way objective. Appar-ently, the snail cannot perceive anything shorter than a fourth of a second;a snail moment, he concludes, is thus somewhere between a third and afourth of a second long, such that all processes of motion take place muchmore quickly in the snails environment than they do in our own.41

The snail in the experiment cited above is in many ways reminiscent ofan immersed film spectator. The snail is held in place while various objects(rubber ball, rod) move around it. The flicker of the rod marks its thresh-old of perception, just as the discrete images on the filmstrip replace oneanother at a speed that marks the human receptor-time (which Uexkulldetermined to be an eighteenth of a second). And, indeed, in all of hisreferences to time perception, Uexkull mentions the cinema: The cinemaalternatingly presents an image and darkness to our eyes. If both occurduring the same [human time] moment, the darkness is not perceived.Only when the time-units last longer than one [human] moment doesflicker set in, which for so long has been part of imperfect cinemas.42 Onecould even imagine devising a cinematographic apparatus for snails, hop-ing their visual capacities would be up to the task; films would only need tobe filmed and projected at four frames per second in order for a gastropo-dian audience to enjoy a spectacle of smooth, lifelike movement.

Of course, a species cinema sounds like a crazy idea because, in the caseof cinematic representations of living beings, time manipulation is notnormally used to mimic the time perception of the creature being repre-sented but simply to visualize an animal movement for the curious or

41. Clearly, there are flaws in this interpretation of the experiment. First, this interpretationassumes that the snail behaves in the lab setting just as it would in nature, in other words, thatthe snail is duped by the set-up. And, second, this interpretation assumes that the snailsdecision to get onto the rod is necessitated by its perception of movement; in makingperception and action equivalent, the experimenter does not leave any room for a decision onthe part of the snail (This is wobbly, but I might still dare to climb onto it!). Finally, for thesake of his argument, Uexkull does not distinguish between different sensory receptor times.This experiment is based on skin contact, yet other senses such as vision or hearing might workaccording to differing intervals.

42. Uexkull, Die Lebenslehre, p. 141.



scientific human eye. In such uses, cinema functions as an anthropomor-phizing machine, one that translates nonhuman registers of movementinto a human scale, taking into account the human perceptual apparatusand its attention span. Uexkull emphasizes this anthropomorphizing ca-pacity of cinema, noting that in slow-motion photography a great num-ber of images are recorded per second in order then to show them at anormal speed. Thereby we stretch the processes of movement over a longerspan of time and gain the possibility of making visible processes that aretoo quick for our human time-speed, such as the beating of a birds or aninsects wings. Similarly, time-lapse photography speeds up motor pro-cesses so that processes that are too slow for our speed, such as the bloom-ing of a flower, can be brought within the range of our perception (FW, p.71). As a translation machine from plant and animal temporality to humantemporality, cinema serves both a scientific interest (making visible tem-poral processes that were previously invisible or obscure) and a popularinterest in seeing that which is curious and spectacular.

Yet the implications of Uexkulls snail experiment are in fact more rad-ical than this anthropomorphizing interpretation suggests. Even in casesin which the cinema anthropomorphizes time or space (in the sense oftranslating into human standards spatiotemporal events that would oth-erwise be too fast, slow, big, or small for human perception), cinema nev-ertheless bends the spatiotemporality of the world as we know it andbreaks with the conditions of our Umwelt; if we change either the time ofrecording or of projecting, we are manipulating the duration of the mo-ment as a basic time unit of perception. By watching something in slowmotion or fast motion, we either stretch or shorten the moment and arethus able to form an image, within our perceptive frame, of the temporalityof a living being of a different kind. A time-lapse shot of a snail shows us itsmovement not as it naturally appears to us in our Umwelt but as it ismediated by an apparatus with different perceptual-actual capacities thanour own, namely, those of camera, film, and projection. Thus, followingUexkulls conclusions and calculations above, if we filmed a snails move-ment using a camera that recorded at a speed of four images a second andthe film was then projected at the regular speed of an eighteenth of asecond, we would see a snail that no longer appeared to be crawlingthatis, no longer appeared to move at a slow pace relative to our own bodilysense of normal speedbut would instead appear to move at close to ournormal walking speed. Such an image is uncanny because it stretches anddeforms our habitual sense of the relationships among slow, normal, and fastmovement, in part by reminding us that the snail likely has its own sense ofnormal speed that differs significantly from our own and, in part, by making



the snail move too fastfour-and-a-half times too fast, to be preciseincomparison with our habitual understanding of snail speed. This film ofspeedy snails thus provides us with a template for reorganizing, in the wake ofthe snail, our sense of what constitutes normal temporality.

Researchers such as Henri Fabre, Charles Otis Whitman, and JulianHuxley had already conducted similar experiments to obtain data con-cerning natural animal behavior. Yet, for Uexkull, the result of an ex-periment such as the one described above, despite its use of objectiveinstruments and calculations, does not provide us with an objective result,if, by objective, we understand that view from nowhere later made fa-mous by Thomas Nagel.43 Rather, the experiment provides us with anindicationan imageof the subjective perception of a snail by destabi-lizing our pregiven conceptions of what constitutes normal (or fast orslow) movement. The theoretical paradigm of Umwelt research thus putsUexkull somewhat at odds with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century research agenda Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe asmechanical objectivity, according to which images that are mechanicallyproducedsuch as photographs or drawings made by an uninformed,nonjudgmental individualreveal the truth, even though they might bemore difficult to decipher.44 While Uexkull employed photography andsimilar technical instruments to obtain data, he rejected the idea of objectivityper se, including the idea of objective time and space, as a construction orillusion. Precisely for this reason, however, illustrations and colorful descrip-tions in his work are now used to take on a new valence, to provide alternatepaths for creating images of animal Umweltenillustrations become intu-itions (Anschauungen) of Umwelten.45 Even though Uexkull seldom says soexplicitly, he is aware of the fact that the (human) image of the Umwelt ofa sea urchin will always project human Umwelt values and percepts intothe image and can, for this reason, never be more than an image or anintuition. The technological production and alteration of images thusmakes possible a view that is not objective but rather other or alien. Film

43. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986); see also Nagel, What IsIt Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83 (Oct. 1974): 43550.

44. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Mechanical Objectivity, Objectivity (NewYork, 2007), pp. 11590.

45. Uexkull says of images produced by taking a photograph of a village street and alteringit by means of a rougher and rougher grid that they offer the chance to gain an intuition of ananimals environment if one knows the number of visual elements in its eye (FW, p. 63).Similarly, already in In the Battle over the Soul of the Animal, Uexkull grants literaryimaginationhe mentions Maeterlincks book on beesits own epistemological value. Sincewe are not able to criticize or exclude the colorful possibilities of what life is like from theperspective of various animals, real or not, creative fantasy can provide us with gracefulproblems with respect to animals perception (IK, p. 18).



can alter temporality, as I have discussed with respect to the snail; similarly,photographs shot with specific lenses or otherwise enlarged and repro-duced can alter space and make anschaulich animals spatial perception.46

Rather than remaining immanent and transparent, technological mediabecome tools that allow Uexkull to create images of species soap bubblesmore effectively than experiments and conceptual tools such as the notionof the moment could.

The cinema presents a particularly valuable technological medium, be-cause it is able, as the earliest film theorists noted, to evoke a world of itsown that has the capacity to question or tear at the seams of our naturalworld. By bringing previously imperceptible details and movements intoour field of vision, close-up, slow motion, and time lapse queer our an-thropocentric perspective by providing us with images that do not coin-cide with our regular embodied vision of the world.47 In queering ourperceptual relationship to thingsin breaking with the functionality ofthe functional circle, in other wordscinema creates new relationshipsbetween bodies and things. This operation, however, requires technologyon all levels. It occurs in the filmic construction of time and space: thedecision to film at a certain speed (by employing specific Baerian mo-ments) and with specific lenses positioned at a specific distance. Thisqueering also occurs in the visualization of the cinematic recording: thedecision to project at a certain speed, through a particular system of lensesand mirrors, onto a screen of a certain size. Consider, for example, a rep-resentation of a flower that grows and blossoms in extreme time-lapse, sothat we can translate its striving toward the light, its search for space, itsstretching, wriggling, and unfolding into our bodies and connect thesemovements to those sensations produced by the movements of our ownmuscular and nervous tissues; such a flower, as Benjamin has taught us, is

46. Another way of putting this would be to say that in Uexkulls use of images objectivityis revealed to be an illusion. Mechanically produced images such as photographs thus do notreveal nature as it really is, unfiltered by an informed, opinionated, and selective humanobserver, as those committed to what Daston and Galison descrcibe as the paradigm of Truth-to-Nature would have it, but rather reveal a space-time alien to our human bodies being-in-the-world that might be closer to the space-time of other beings, real or not; see Daston andGalison, Objectivity, pp. 55114.

47. My notion of queering here bears similarities to Sara Ahmeds use of the term in QueerPhenomenology, where she pays attention to the issue of orientation. A queer phenomenology,Ahmed suggests, is one that redirects attention toward different objects, those that are lessproximate or even those that deviate or are deviant (Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:Orientations, Objects, Others [Durham, N.C., 2006], p. 3). I suggest here that film queers ourperception of everyday objects.



(whatever its actual color) romantic blue and has its roots in the land oftechnology.48

Uexkulls theory of Umwelt thus pointed to the ways in which the cin-ema provided an apparatus that offered a new vision, and many writers,critics, and artists embraced this potential, indeed finding in the cinema amechanical eye that confronted them with Umweltenand with an imageof themselvesto which their bodies and minds were unaccustomed. Theworld in the cinema often seemed threatening since its vision was notgrounded in a coherent subject, in an interiority that provided depth andcohesion. During the Kinoreform debates in Germany in the 1910s aboutthe moral and aesthetic value of cinema, a number of progressive voices(among them Hermann Hfker, Lukacs, and Herbert Tannenbaum) dis-cussed the cinema as purveyor of not just a new aesthetic but also a newexperience of body and world that was expressive of modernity.49 In thelate 1910s in France, a progressive film movement spearheaded by LouisDelluc and Jean Epstein began to formulate their thoughts on the specificaesthetic of cinemawhat they called photogenie (Epstein) or the SeventhArt (Ricciotto Canudo)and developed further the thoughts that wereonly implicit in Uexkulls use of cinema.50 Authors such as Cendrars, Ep-stein, Emile Vuillermoz, and Colette euphorically described the film expe-rience as a symphony that might initially sound strange and unusual butwould ultimately result in a new techno-organic harmony.51 In responding

48. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: SecondVersion, trans. Jephcott and Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, 3:115. In the film studio theapparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreignbody of equipment, is the result of a special procedurenamely, the shooting by the speciallyadjusted photographic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the same kind. Theequipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision ofimmediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology (ibid.).

49. See, for example, Hermann Hfker, Kino und Kunst (Munich, 1913); Hfker,Kinematographie und echte Kunst, Bild und Film 2 (191213): 58; Herbert Tannenbaum,Probleme des Kinodramas, in Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken uber ein neues Medium,19091914, ed. Jrg Schweinitz (Leipzig, 1992), pp. 31219; and Lukacs, Thoughts on anAesthetics of Cinema, in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and AlisonGuenther-Pal (New York, 2004), pp. 1116. On the Kinoreform debates, see also Anton Kaes,The Debate about Cinema: Charting a Controversy (19091929), trans. David J. Levin, NewGerman Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 733, and Heide Schlupmann, The Uncanny Gaze: TheDrama of Early German Cinema, trans. Pollmann (Urbana, Ill., 2010).

50. See the essays by these authors in vol. 1 of Richard Abels French Film Theory andCriticism.

51. The parallel between Vuillermozs theory of film, which describes the medium inmusical terms as new symphonic harmony, and Uexkulls symphony of Umwelten that arelinked harmonically is striking. Both authors attempt to dissolve fragmentation (montage andthe static image on the filmstrip, in Vuillermozs case, and the individual, closed soap bubble, inUexkulls case) into a harmonic unity. See, for example, Emile Vuillermoz, Before the Screen:Hermes and Silence, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:15559.



to this cinematic challenge, these authors found that they had to train theirperception and innervate the n

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