Though we share our homes and lives with them, and have substantially altered their genetics to suit our sense of ‘what an animal should be like’, the power relationships between us aren’t completely one-sided, which any pet owner can verify. The minds of our pets are frequent objects of our narcissistic conjecture: What do they think of us? Do they love us? Do they miss us when we are away? and so on. We wonder what it might be like to be an eagle, soaring over mountain peaks, its eyes far superior to ours, scanning the barren wastelands for a glimpse of the scurrying marmot? Or to put ourselves just for moment, inside the head of our trusted dog, for whom the air we breath is redolent of convoluted odour narratives and invisible signifiers. Depictions of becomings animal, of interstitial states, of hybridity, have appeared throughout human culture, from the falcon-headed Egyptian god Horus, to the Minotaur, to the shape-shifting Japanese tanuki, to the vampires, werewolves, the princes disguised as frogs, Batman, Spiderman – you name it! In it, Von Uexküll challenges us to reconsider the universe from the non-human point of view, which is after all something people have been obsessed with since our very beginnings. Even in the earliest cave paintings, we see a longing to inhabit, to become the animal at once the object and the subject of our desire much more than simply an aesthetic preoccupation. This seminal text, a combination of astute scientific observation and self-described ‘ramblings’, influenced everyone from Deleuze to contemporary UX designers. Von Uexküll goes on to visualize what the world might look like from the point of view of a host of creatures – ticks, sea urchins, jackdaws, flies, dogs, chickens – each living within its Umwelt the German translating literally as ‘surrounding world’, of a given subject, perceived and interacted with through its own organs. This we call the phenomenal world or the self world of the animal. Through the bubble we see the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. Many of its colourful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. He begins his (1934) ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Man’ with an entreaty to participate in a thought experiment, to imagine ourselves wandering through a flower-strewn meadow, blowing:Ī soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with it perceptions that it alone knows. The bio-semiotician Jakob von Uexküll made great strides in such imaginings, laying out a detailed framework on how we might perceive the perceptual worlds of the animal other. I am not, nor ever will I be – a turtle, though I would very much like to understand something of a turtle’s subjectivity. In his own reptilian way, he is telling me that this will not do!Īfter the very many years of our relationship, I have learned to recognize that look.īut what would it be like to be him? To look out at the world through those baleful, red eyes? To truly experience it all from his point of view, without the baggage of anthropomorphism so drilled into us through too many childhood Disney films? Having lived with him for than 48 years, I know this particular expression means something: very likely that he has noticed his dinner bowl is empty or that the leftover food therein has dried out. To be, just for a moment, in the mind of another is a worthy ambition – all the more so if the being whose head you want to get inside is a non-human being.Īs I type these words, my box turtle Marmaduke is staring up at me from the floor beneath my desk.
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