Special Issue: We have never been human: from techne to
animality
ISSN 0969-725X (Print), 1469-2899 (Online, link HERE)
Of special interest, perhaps, to After Nature readers...
A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects
and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory.
Stephen Loo, Undine Sellbach. Angelaki
Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2013: 45-64.
INSECTS AND CANARIES: medianatures and aesthetics of the
invisible. Jussi Parikka. Angelaki Vol.
18, Iss. 1, 2013: 107-19.
Jussi Parikka. INSECTS AND CANARIES: medianatures and aesthetics of the invisible
Abstract
This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of
disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its
starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to
start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The
aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological
questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological
question is unravelled, furthermore, with examples concerning the mass extinction
of bees, also discussed in Lenore Malen's video installation The Animal That I
Am (2009–10). In this way, it argues for a media theoretical understanding of
the visual culture of ecocrisis as well as the complex question of epistemology
of such a visibility/invisibility.
Stephen Loo, Undine Sellbach. A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory
Abstract
Dorion Sagan observes that pioneering ethologist Jakob von
Uexküll tends to be read in contrasting ways, as a “humble naturalist”
pre-empting current research in biosemiotics, animal perception and agency; and
as a “biologist-shaman,” gesturing to a transcendental realm where the
life-worlds of animals interconnect in a vast symphony of nature. In both cases
the tools of the laboratory are thought to generate complete pictures of the
invertebrates that Uexküll studies, in unity with their environments. As
Giorgio Agamben points out, these experiments form part of an abstract
mechanism that produces the human, by isolating instinctual life as an object
for study and management from social and ethical modes of existence. What these
readings neglect to consider is that Uexküll imagines his experiments through a
Picture Book frame. We argue that for Uexküll there is always something
fabulous and child-like about the enterprise of reconstructing the subjective
environments of the small animals he works with. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler,
we propose the Picture Book as a particular technics, or tertiary memory, that
cultivates modes of attention that are associated with childhood and are open
to the emergence of partial objects and relations. Considered through the
Picture Book frame, the Umwelten of insects and other small animals are no
longer fixed but are drawn and redrawn in partial expressive ways, through the
uncanny picturing – or what Brian Massumi would call “semblances” – of
different configurations of animal, technology, human relations. By considering
the Picture Book as a technic for ecological thought and imagination, our paper
will explore how the small creatures that Uexküll describes might enable the
emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations.
