Uexküll & Uli's Umwelt

Watching Uli in the classroom reminded me of zoologist Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of umwelt, which has had profound importance in the development of environmental studies. In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben notes that “Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment are contemporary with both quantum physics and the artistic avant-gardes" (39). He describes umwelt as follows:

Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score. (40)

“Too often,” Agamben notes, “we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist" (40).

Uexküll’s notion of perceptual worlds as “uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive” would seem to categorically dismiss any attempt at interspecies communication as simply anthropomorphism, which doesn’t hold up to contemporary cognitive studies of nonhuman animals and interspecies relations, let alone common observation. Nonetheless, Uexküll’s umwelt does at least three things that are significant to our studies of human-animal relations: it introduces the idea of many environment-worlds versus a single, objective world; it replaces that hoary notion of a “great chain of being” (with humans, of course, at the top) with a diverse and dynamic vision of multiple “perceptual worlds”; and it challenges anthropocentric notions about reality.

Umwelt, as Agamben goes on to explain, is “the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that [Uexküll] calls ‘carriers of significance’ or of ‘marks,’ which are the only things that interest the animal" (40).

In the umwelt of the human animal classroom, the information Nicole shared with us was a primary “carrier of significance.” Although Nicole’s voice and body language were “carriers of significance” for Uli, in the umwelt of Uli’s classroom, information about the Pennsylvania SPCA held no significance. Instead, the carriers of significance in Uli’s umwelt seemed to include the human animals in the classroom (greeting and gathering information), the space under the door (where smells of a buffet wafted in, as well as sounds of other people talking), the perimeters of the classroom (walls), the open space at the front of the room, and a candy wrapper (unseen/insignificant to the human animals in the room, but something Uli discovered right away). I also noticed that Uli gravitated toward particular human animals who seemed more interesting to her based on what were “carriers of significance” (scent? sight? movement? facial expressions?).

“There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment,” Agamben writes in relation to the theory of umwelt. “There exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover . . .” (41). And so on. Likewise, there does not exist a classroom as an objectively fixed environment. Most of us realize this from an intraspecies, human-animal perspective: there is a classroom-for-the-professor, a classroom-for-one-student, a classroom-for-another-student, a classroom-for-maintenance-staff, and so on. But it seems that we seldom consider the nonhuman animal’s umwelt: not only in environments where nonhuman animals are common, like a campus, a city, or a countryside, but especially in environments like classrooms that are designed with only human animals in mind.

And so it was a pleasure to watch Uli in the classroom environment: to see, or at least imagine to see, what carries significance in the umwelt of a dog’s classroom.