Sensory Meaning in the Expanding World(s)

When I took my first look at Jakob von Uexküll on Wikipedia prior to reading A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans, I wondered why on earth we would be reading a work by an Estonian biologist who specialized in the field of muscular biology.  However, as I became more familiar with Uexküll’s notion of umwelt—his idea that even though we share the same environment, every organism lives in its own self-centered world—I realized how much new media plays into each of our own little “self-centered” worlds.  Usually we find it difficult to liken ourselves to the “lesser” creatures of the earth, like the ticks, bees, flies, birds, and urchins that Uexküll discusses, but he studies them as subjects, like us, rather than as machines or mechanisms.  Beginning with the simple life of the tick, Uexküll shows his reader through careful observations how we can come to understand how a particular animal experiences the world.  Most importantly, he details a new way of looking at the world, worlds actually, through the one “environment” and the many overlapping points of view that occur within it.

I have very often been within the same room or space as a bee (and other insects, but of course I am hyperaware of that bee), and the bee is almost always banging herself against the window or walking across the glass.  While I always knew the bee was just trying to get back outside, Uexküll’s short account of the bee makes this scenario clearer than ever.  The bee in my house does not know my world, she does not experience it as I do, and she most certainly does not see it as I do.  In the world of bees, “[r]elations of meaning are…the only certain guides in the investigation of environments” (84), and when those meaningful things (the shape of a bloom, its color, the temperature of the outdoors, the smell) are closed off from her, say, in my living room, she becomes an object in my world rather than the subject of her own.  All the things that gave her life any type of meaning are gone, and she is desperately (please excuse my anthropomorphizing here) trying to return to the world she knows.

A subject’s world is made up of sensory objects, right?  The tick responds to a smell, a touch, and a temperature, while a human would respond to the whole meadow.  The sea urchin responds to the darkening horizon, while a human would respond to the cloud, the boat, or the fish that might be causing the darkness.  I am beginning to wonder about objects that are not sensory and how those play into our worlds.  For example, someone with a hallucinogenic disorder like schizophrenia may imagine an entire person—appearance, personality, speech, everything—and that imagined person would not be part of our unified environment like the sun or a boat would be, but rather a unique part of that someone’s world.  The disordered person would perceive and react to this “outer perception-sign” as if it were real.  I’m not sure what to make of that.  Even further, what do we make of human emotional feelings? Of the Internet as a vast collection of perception-signs?  Of a book that exists but that only one person has read?  I am beginning to see the importance of Uexküll’s Foray to our class, as new media has added a level of abundant richness to our lives, expanding each of our individual worlds in a way that has the potential to tie them closer together or drive them further apart.