ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 18 number 1 march 2013

the banquet

n the opening chapter of his book The Open,

Giorgio Agamben describes a thirteenthcentury miniature depicting the messianic
banquet where the members of humanity who
remain are illustrated with animal heads.
Agamben reads the image to suggest that on
the last days of the world, human and animal
natures will be transformed, in the sense that
humans will become (like) animals, reconciled
with their animal natures so to speak.
In the miniature, the guests are just about to
eat together. For Agamben, this is an image of a
coming community the animal-headed creatures
at the table represent different parts of the animal
kingdom the eagle, the ox, the lion, the ass and
the leopard bounded by the act of eating. Two
musicians, also with animal heads, entertain the
guests; one plays a ddle and has the face of a
monkey. In coming together to enjoy music and
food, new sets of relations emerge between
animals and humans, and, Agamben speculates,
between animals themselves.
[T]he idea that animal nature will also be
transgured in the messianic kingdom is
implicitly in the messianic prophecy of
Isaiah 11:6 [] where we read that the
wolf shall live with the sheep, / and the
leopard lie down with the kid; / the calf
and the young lion shall grow up together,
/ and a little child shall lead them. (The
Open 3)

The little child is a reminder that the messianic

banquet is a Bible story presented to us in the
form of a Picture Book. If we attend to this
frame, the scene may be read as an invitation
to imagine, with the child, how the guests
might be rearranged through the act of feasting

stephen loo
undine sellbach
A PICTURE BOOK OF
INVISIBLE WORLDS
semblances of insects and
humans in jakob von
uexklls laboratory
together. In particular, one might begin to
wonder about those members of the animal
kingdom not included in the picture. There
are no insects, for example, or other invertebrates recorded at the banquet. Yet once one
reects on this absence it begins to feel as
though these small creatures might already be
there under the table, in the food perhaps
and certainly in the guts of the guests. It is
also imaginable that in anticipation of salvation,
the stomachs of the righteous ll with butteries, their thoughts buzz and their skin crawls.
This suggests that new sets of humananimal
relations are not merely cognitive ones they
are felt and imagined by different parts of the
body.1

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/13/010045-20 2013 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.783441

45

invisible worlds
Agamben does not ask whether there might
also be insects attending the banquet. Nevertheless, the main scenes of eating he goes on to
describe in The Open all involve insects and
other invertebrates in a laboratory setting.2
This shift is striking. If, as Agamben imagines,
the table is the place where the relations
between humanity and animality could one
day be recongured, then the laboratory seems
to be the place where the distinction between
human subject and animal behaviour is most
powerfully drawn. In one laboratory experiment
in The Open, a bee is placed in front of a cup of
honey. As the bee begins to drink, its abdomen
is cut away, but yet it is observed to keep
sucking as the honey ows out of its open
stomach (52). As Agamben points out, this
experiment is used by Heidegger to distinguish
the instinctive captivation he believes is typical
of animal behaviour, from the openness particular to human existence.
Yet by placing these two scenes of eating side
by side, Agamben may be doing more than
drawing a contrast between the division of
human from animal as enacted in the laboratory,
and the new conjunctions he imagines at the
messianic table. The experiments that
Agamben describes in The Open belong to the
unconventional biologist Jakob von Uexkull,
who broke with the scientic paradigm of the
time by refusing to study animals as a series of
isolated behavioural traits. Drawing on careful
observations of animals interacting with their
environments, Uexkull set out to intuit the
lived worlds of the small creatures he worked
with. For Uexku ll, genuine biological investigation entails a certain willingness, on the part
of the scientist, to evoke in the minds eye
what is forever inaccessible to our physical
senses the radically different spatial, perceptual, temporal and affective worlds of other
animals. Uexku ll, as we will argue, can be understood as a pioneer of ecological thinking,
because the observational and imaginative techniques he develops in the laboratory for attending to insects and other invertebrates have the
potential to recongure traditional hierarchical
divisions towards new conjunctions between
animals, humans and environments.

Dorion Sagan, in his introduction to the new

translation of Uexkulls A Foray into the
Worlds of Animals and Humans and A
Theory of Meaning observes: at one and the
same time Uexkull is a kind of biologistshaman attempting to cross the Rubicon to nonhuman minds, and a humble naturalist closely
observing and recording his fellow living
beings (Uexku ll, A Foray 20). Here, Uexkull
is understood in two contrasting ways. On the
one hand, we see the humble naturalist preempting current research into animal perception and emotion, biosemiotics,3 and the
agency of self-regulating systems. On the
other, the biologist-shaman gestures to a
transcendental realm, where the complex web
of relations lived by different organisms plays
out in a vast symphony of Nature (ibid. 189).
What neither of these readings adequately
recognizes is that for Uexkull there is always
something fabulous, fabricated and child-like
about the whole enterprise of reconstructing
the subjective environments of the small
animals he works with. Indeed, the subtitle to
the original German Streifzuge durch die
Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (retained
in Claire Schillers original translation A
Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and
Men, but missing in Joseph D. ONeils
newer translation A Foray into the Worlds of
Animals and Humans) is Ein Bilderbuch
unsichtbarer Welten [A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds].4 In so doing, Uexkull imagines
the co-effecting relations between different
animal environments in ways that are not fully
captured by the two conventional readings. By
attending to the Picture Book as a technic for
ecological thought and imagination, we intend
to revisit the conjunctions between humans,
animals, the laboratory experiment and the festivities of music and eating, and consider
whether the small creatures that Uexkull
describes may in some way enable the emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations.

the laboratory experiment

The eld of animal studies has critiqued the laboratory experiment for its reductive picture of

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the animal. Through the tools, techniques and
spaces of the laboratory the scientist is established as distant, dispassionate observer; the
animal is separated from its environment for
the purposes of isolating its behavioural traits,
instincts or physiology, and the suffering
inicted by these experiments is ignored or
deemed secondary to human-centred outcomes.
Most research in animal ethics has focused on
human obligations to the larger animals via
shared attributes such as the capacity to suffer
and feel pleasure, self-awareness, the face-toface encounter, or the social bonds such as
love or care.5 These studies challenge the
reduction of varied animal behaviours to xed
mechanical drives and afrm a complex web of
differences and afnities between humans and
other animals.6 On this basis, ethical codes
have been gradually devised to regulate the
ways in which mammals and other larger
animals are used in laboratory experiments.
Insects, however, are not included. Tiny, multitudinous and almost machine-like, seemingly
with limited recognizable emotion or self-consciousness, they do not register easily as
objects of moral consideration or agents of
ethical change. In his landmark anthology
Insect Poetics, Eric C. Brown argues that the
insect has become a kind of Other, not only
for human beings but for [] animals studies
as well, best left underfoot or in footnotes (6).
What happens when we consider that insects
are also present in the laboratory? In The Open,
Agamben uses experiments on invertebrates to
identify a general conceptual apparatus he
calls the anthropological machine, which isolates biological life as an object of management
and study within and outside the human (33).
According to Agamben, the development of
modern science was made possible, in part,
because of the creation of a strategic divide
between biological life life conceived as
blind instinctual acts of assimilation and
excretion, and relational life life capable of
perceiving and acting out the relation between
self and other, interior and exterior, incorporation and exclusion. The mechanism for this
divide is a tendency to presuppose the human
every time biological life is dened. Agamben

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names this the anthropological machine,

because in the absence of any clear trait
capable of dening human beings it continuously enacts the distinction, with the animal
produced as the excluded by-product of
human self-denition. In order to oppose
man to other living things, Agamben thinks
that the divide must rst pass within the
human, isolating the animal in the human
being, so to speak (15). His aim in The Open
is to better understand how this mechanism
works, in the hope of countering the damaging
effects of its continuously shifting decision
between life that matters and life outside all
ethical consideration.
Reecting on this, it is possible to see why
insects and other invertebrates are so productive
for Agamben in his analysis of the anthropological machine. The double otherness of insects in
the laboratory animals are other than human,
insects are other than animals draws attention
to the mobility of the mechanism by which we
dene the human, and the fact that this is a strategic rather than a natural divide. Insects are simultaneously distant and proximate to us we use
their external behaviours to identify the base
animal instincts inside us and in this way a
line is drawn inside and outside the human
being. Building on Agamben, we can say that
when qualities pertinent to human ethics, such
as self-awareness or sentience, are extended
to other animals, the anthropological machine
may not necessarily be disenabled; rather, the
divide between ethical and instinctual life is
redrawn in a new way. As Agamben observes,
often in the case of higher mammals as with
human beings, we imagine that two modes of
existence seem to inhabit the one body an
organic life and a life that consciously negotiates
its relation to an outside. The lower animals,
on the other hand, seem to exhibit only a set of
blind instinctual traits (14).

uexklls laboratory
In this context, Uexkulls unconventional laboratory is of particular interest. He does not
extend subjective concepts and feelings from a
human-centred world to these small creatures,

invisible worlds
but nor does he interpret them in terms of xed
drives and external traits. Instead, he posits that
every small animal has an Umwelt a unique
foreign subjectivity of its own. By provoking
his readers to consider the lived worlds of
simple instinctual organisms the grasshopper,
the tick, the hermit crab, the jellysh, the
housey and the snail Uexkull confounds the
divide between subjective relational life and
blind organic existence that is drawn by the
anthropological machine. As Sagan writes in
his Introduction to A Foray into the Worlds
of Animals and Humans,
the phenomenon might be described as the
return of the scientically repressed: what is
excluded for the sake of experimental simplicity eventually shows itself to be relevant
after all [] With Uexkull the inner real
comes back in the realization that not only do
we sense and feel, but so do other sentient
organisms; and that our interactions and signalling perceptions have consequences beyond the
deterministic oversimplications of a modern
science that has bracketed off all causes that
are not immediate and mechanical. (8)

For Uexkull, not only do different animals

experience the world in different ways but sometimes there are even multiple subjectivities in
the one animal. So, for example, the sea
urchin has no central organization, and on this
basis Uexkull speculates that skin, spines, legs
and claws must each possess their own perceptual universe (Foray 77).
As Agamben points out, Uexkulls re-creations
of the different worlds inhabited by non-human
animals have a deeply disorienting effect on the
world of the reader, who is suddenly obliged
to look at the most familiar places with nonhuman eyes.7 But Uexkull goes a step further,
insisting that in the subjective environments of
other animals the whole milieu of the laboratory
experiment is recongured. Although he uses
many of the classic devices of his time
clamps, wheels, bell jars, trolleys, partitioned
spaces, recording devices, diagrams, articial
membranes, grafts and dissections he insists
that no laboratory tool can ever function as a constant in animal experiments. Matter changes its

form, composition and meaning, depending on

how it is perceived, used or ignored by each
animal. In this human environment, matter is
the rocher de bronze on which the universe
seems to rest, yet this very matter volatizes
from one [animal] environment to another
(Theory of Meaning 198).
In spite of the potentially volatizing effects
of the radically different subjective worlds of
the small animals in his experiments, we also
see that the conception of Umwelt is affected
back by the tools that are used in its laboratory
re-creations. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
observes in his Afterword to A Foray into
the Worlds of Animals and Humans, the role
of tools in the evocation of animal Umwelt is
often a blind spot for Uexkull. Uexkull constantly denounces machines but then resorts to
a Helmholtz world of cycles, coupling and feedback routines to describe the subjects Umwelt
wiring (238). Here, the observational techniques, categorizations, and metricization of
the laboratory are so powerful in their tending
towards a complete and measured picture of
the animal that they seem to foreclose what
humans can observe and think.
So, for example, reecting on his re-creations
of the life-worlds of the invertebrates he works
with, Uexkull concludes that it is a general
characteristic of the concept Umwelt that
every animal exhibits a close functional unity
with its environment (A Stroll 6). In his
most famous re-creation, the subjective environment of the tick is reduced to three carriers of
signicance, which are highly selective
samples taken from our more complex human
environment: butyric acid the odour of
sweat common to all mammals, hairy skin
covered in blood vessels and liquid at the temperature of 37 degrees.8 The job of the researcher
is to identify these markers.9 As Agamben
writes:
Everything happens as if the external carrier
of signicance and its receiver in the animals
body constituted two elements in a single
musical score, almost like two notes on the
keyboard on which nature performs the
supratemporal and extraspatial symphony

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loo & sellbach

of signication, though it is impossible to
say how two such heterogeneous elements
could ever have been so intimately connected. (The Open 41)

Again, the humble naturalist is also the biologist-shaman. As Agamben speculates, if we

re-imagine the world with the tick at its
centre, then it must be
immediately united to these three elements
in an intense and passionate relationship the
like of which we might never nd in the
relations that bind man to his apparently
much richer world. The tick is this relationship; she lives only in it and for it. (Ibid.
4647)10

At once dedicated naturalist and biologistsharman, Uexkull identies the task of the
ecologist to reach the limits of animal worlds.
But what techniques does he use to attend to
these limits? In the preface to A Stroll
through the Worlds of Animals and Men,
Uexkull describes his method: This little monograph does not claim to point the way to a new
science. Perhaps it should be called a stroll into
unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but
known to other creatures, manifold and varied
as the animals themselves (5). His investigations
of the limits of the dwelling-worlds of other
animals will take the form of a collection of imaginative forays, a reading that is afrmed by the
original subtitle of his book: A Picture Book of
Invisible Worlds.

Now if we look closely at A Stroll through

the Worlds of Animals and Men and Joseph
D. ONeils more recent translation, we can
see that both versions of Uexkulls essay are
quite literally Picture Books, with illustrations
(in black and white and colour) and chapters
titles that invite the reader to experiment with
shape, colour, form, space, counting, time and
movement. In the drier titled A Theory of
Meaning, the devices of the Picture Book are
equally present: there is a spider that is
likened to a blind tailor (158), household
knives and forks are made strange through
the eyes of a dog (142), and a carnivorous
triton that receives a great surprise when
sinking its sharp teeth into its writhing
prey, only to discover that it has grown vegetarian gums (153).
The Picture Book quality of Uexku lls
writing is perhaps what helps it sustain so
many contrary possibilities the de-centring
Umwelt and the closed Umwelt,11 the humble
naturalist and the biologist-shaman.
Uexku ll invites his readers to give over to a set
of self-evident instructions about animals and
their relationship to the natural world, in a
manner suggestive of the childs passage from
a fairytale world into an unfolding science.
But at the same time, like any good storyteller,
he diverges from the idyll, only to enter more
strangely and deeply into it. What happens,
then, if we consider the technique of Uexku lls
Picture Book more carefully by imaginatively
engaging with it?

THE GRASSHOPPER CABARET

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51

invisible worlds
technics in the laboratory told
through a picture book
The Grasshopper Cabaret is a story we made
up as part of a series of childrens writing experiments based on Uexkulls laboratory.12 The
story is a response to a picture of an experiment
that Uexkull conducted on grasshoppers (illustrated by G. Kriszat) in order to demonstrate
how the actions of these small animals are not
goal oriented but follow the plan of nature
inherent in their Umwelt (Foray 88).
Read as a conventional experiment one might
say that here Uexku ll is demonstrating, in a pictorial manner, the closed loop of relations
between animal and environment. In order to
investigate the limits of the grasshoppers
world, he uses the tools of his laboratory to
break their functional cycles. By retelling this
as a story in a Picture Book, we notice the presence of tools and technologies in the scene,
which were there all along as techniques of
seeing, but which need to remain in the background in order for the effect of the closed
loop to be demonstrated.
In this context, Bernard Stiegler has provided us with a way to look upon the actual
strategies and technologies of the laboratory
that is not merely reductive. To Stiegler it is difcult, if not impossible, to fathom the evolution
of what is the human from the evolution of
technics, which he denes as the exterior
organized realm of inorganic matter (Technics
and Time, 1 17). In Stieglerian terms, both
the anthropological machine as a conceptual
mechanism and the scientic laboratory as an
actual one, upon which human self-denition
rely, would be two technics amongst many in
a larger technical consciousness at the origin
of the human being.13
Technics allows us to see how external
realms of scientic experimentation tools,
diagrams, equipment, data, languages, codes,
epistemologies are folded into the internal
denition of the human. Stiegler posits that
these externalities or articial technical apparatus make possible, or in fact are, the retention
of human experience and memory. It follows,
for Stiegler, that variations in the evolution of

technical objects become records of transformations in human experience. Technics is the

process of the exteriorization of human
beings, whose experience is preserved in external technical objects in what Stiegler calls tertiary memory. Understood in Stieglerian terms
as an exteriorized technics, the human being is
at once the centre in humantool relationships,
but also always already de-centred, where something like a scientic laboratory becomes, as
Nathan van Camp would argue, living
memory grafted onto non-living matter. Van
Camp continues by saying that by focusing on
co-evolution of humans and exterior organized
matter such as tools, Stiegler does not address
the complications posed by the presence of
other animals in the laboratory setting.14 Nevertheless, his concept of technics provides us with
a way to begin to see how Uexkulls unorthodox
methodology eschews the complete and
measured picture of the animal that forecloses
what humans can observe and think about,
and with, animals.15
Let us now consider how technics, as a way of
understanding the laboratory, can be related to
the Picture Book technique that Uexku ll uses
to make these tools visible. The Picture Book
for children is a literary genre with specic histories and audiences that differs between cultures and social contexts, which entails highly
specic imaginative devices for organizing the
uid relationships between image and text,
narrative and instruction, ction and reality.
If we see the Picture Book as part of an assemblage of techniques and technologies, including
image making, written language and the printing press, then it becomes possible to place it
alongside the scientic laboratory, and the
anthropological machine which we outlined
above, within a Stieglerian framework, as
a technical means by which social and
psychic expressions are inherited through
externalizations.
According to Stieglers argument on tertiary
memory, technical externalities retain not only
human experiences but also regimes of attention. The internalization of attention is not
something that is lived in a naturalistic sense
but an intergenerational inheritance that

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arrives from the outside (Taking Care of
Youth 8). In the case of the Picture Book,
the modes of attention and imagination it
enables require the concentration of adult
attention on the juvenility of the child, something that can either be actively cultivated or
discouraged.16
Reecting on this, we can say that the Picture
Book is a distinctive technics in that, as a mode
of tertiary memory, it tends to be doubly
forgotten in the world of adults. On the one
hand, like other tertiary memory, it retains
experiences which are inherited and not directly
lived; but on the other, the experiences retained,
and the kind of attention it requires, are not
taken seriously by the dominant paradigms of
scientic and philosophical thinking. Filled
with aporias, mythologies, and hybrid objects,
the childhood Picture Book is not rational in
cognition but is constantly expanding with a
sense of its horizons (Taking Care of Youth
108).
Understanding, in biology and in other elds
that proceed from a techno-scientic paradigm,
arrives from the construction of a knowable and
whole object or individual. As we have seen,
the laboratory retains experiences that are
replete with the desire for reaching the complete
object or individual. The Picture Book,
however, is arguably one of the most powerful
practices since the advent of writing that
resists whole-object relations.17 In fact, the
Picture Book, in its requisite attentiveness,
exploits the dissonance between celebrating
the incompleteness or the gap between knowledge at hand and objects that are yet-to-come;
and over-determining the ideal of whole object
based on familiar forms and knowledge.18
For us, this suggests that the Picture Book
can enable a thinking that feels (for) the type
of grammar that produces partial images,
rather than complete objects. This attentiveness
is corporeal and affectual, for it is only through
the performance and re-performance of the
Picture Book that the illusions of the partial
objects it creates become real and concrete
instantiations. If the Picture Book is understood as a technics that tends towards incomplete imaginings, what new relations emerge

53

between humans, animals and the tools of the

laboratory?
In Claire Schillers 1957 translation of
Uexku lls A Stroll through the Worlds of
Animals and Men the picture of the grasshopper experiment is accompanied by a lyrical
description in which the scientic milieu of
the laboratory becomes overwhelmed by
another fantastical reading. The year is 1934,
and we can imagine Uexkulls laboratory transformed into a grand inter-war cabaret club. In
a closed booth, in front of a majestic radio
microphone, a diva grasshopper is lost in the
revelry of her own performance. In a neighbouring concert hall, well-comported suitors gather,
their wings glistening multi-coloured, captivated in the acoustic world of female song emanating from a large loudspeaker. Behind them is
another singer, caught in an actual glass bubble,
forlorn that her cries remain unheard.
The combination of singular image with lyrical
narration is a classic Picture Book technique. The
use of everyday human objects and tools in an
unfamiliar setting is another. And the exacerbated anthropomorphism is a third.
In this strange musical concert, sound and
image have fallen out of sync. The grasshopper
that sings into a microphone is heard but not
seen by her suitors, the grasshopper that sings
under a glass bell is unheard and invisible. The
words and pictures that convey the scene to a
human audience are also at odds. In the written
accompaniment Uexkull provides, the two grasshopper singers are female, while the grasshoppers listening at the speaker are male. But as
Joseph ONeil, points out in his 2010 English
translation, female grasshoppers do not chirp
(88). It seems that in the process of telling, the
story of the concert overrides scientic accuracy.
ONeils attempt to correct this error by reversing the sex of the grasshoppers is further confounded by the fact that all the grasshoppers
appear to be illustrated as anatomically male.
Here we see at once the weakness and the
power of the Picture Book as a strategy for
thinking about animals in the laboratory. On
the one hand the narrative logic of the scene
is at risk of eclipsing the scientists commitment to empirical observation. On the other

invisible worlds
the stories that biology is capable of telling us
can turn out to be even stranger than fairytales.
By entering the world of the scientic experiment through the Picture Book frame we are
invited to imagine the unknowable worlds of
the grasshoppers through over-determined
anthropomorphic frameworks that collapse
logical sense to perform an alternative logic of
sensation and affect. This technique decentres the human being in the laboratory,
allowing other kinds of relations to become
visible. Here, we no longer see a complete
picture of the animal Umwelt; instead, the
Picture Book frame assembles, in partially realized ways, different grasshopper life-worlds,
each effected in its own way by the presence
of human tools and out of phase with one
another. These imaginings take the form of
expressions, which are speculative and incomplete, because one folds into the next.
Performed through the Picture Book, we can
see that the limits of the Umwelt are not xed
but drawn and redrawn in these partial expressive ways, through the uncanny picturing of
different congurations of insect, technology,
human relations. Here, the tools of the laboratory are also volatized, opening up the speculation that small laboratory animals may also in
some way be de-centred by their comportment
to human technologies.

picturing the technique of nature

Not only does Uexkull use the Picture Book as a
technic for imagining animal Umwelts in his laboratory, he also believes that nature has picturing strategies of its own. Uexkull calls these
techniques of nature, where animals enter contrapuntally into a web of co-affectual relations
with each other and with inorganic elements of
their environments. Uexkulls favourite metaphor for expressing this is a vast symphony
of nature, where the perceptual worlds of different animals interact in a way that is absolutely
unknowing but perfectly in tune, like two
notes harmonizing in a musical score.19
What is less remarked upon is that Uexkull
believes that ecologists can attempt to write
the score of Nature only because animals are
already making pictures of their affectual
relations with each other (Theory of Meaning
186). In order to consider this technique of copicturing further, we have invented another
story. It combines two ies described by
Uexkull the y in a village street, from A
Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and
Men, and the y and the spider in A
Theory of Meaning. Our story puts the y and
the spider, which Uexkull takes as exemplary
of the technique of nature in A Theory of
Meaning, directly into the Picture Book frame.

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THE SPIDER & THE FLY

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invisible worlds
A Conversation Arising from the Story of
The Spider & the Fly
The nal picture still needs to be made. What to draw?
Uexku ll says that spiders are good at making pictures of ies. The
threads of a spider web are perfectly measured to t the ying y.
But the spider in the story is young and has never met a y before.
So how does the picture of the y appear?
The spider is so affected by the missing y, that its web becomes
y-like. Imagine! The young spider is making a picture of
something it feels but has not yet lived.
What happens next?
Imagine the y ying down the village street.
Does it see the web?
The web is so ne the y cannot make it out.
It is indeed a rened picture of the y which the spider produces
in its web, says Uexkull. (158)
But what does the spiders invisible picture show?
The y of course!
It is so not (like) the y even the y cannot see it.
It shows the limits of the ys world.
But it is also a picture of the y at the limits of its world.
The y ies into the web.
And gets caught in its own picture?

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loo & sellbach

To begin with, the scientist Uexkull tries to
reconstruct the ys Umwelt with the aid of a
camera, an enlarger and a screen combined
with careful laboratory observations about the
ys compound eye and the markers of
signicance in its environment. Unfortunately,
these classic scientic devices result in a
picture that is disturbing to the human eye,
so he decides to retouch the scene with
watercolours (A Stroll 21). With the help of
Stiegler we can say that, by explicitly making
the Picture Book his technic, Uexkull allows
for an intensication of tertiary memories of
childhood aesthetic experience, which differ
from the technics of the lab.
Entering the world of the Picture Book more
fully does two things. First, a different type of
comportment or attention towards nature is
called for: a performance of the Picture Book,
rather than distanced scientic observation of
the animals. Second, inside the book, humans
are placed out of the frame (even their tools
are gone and they are no longer making the pictures). Instead, there are two others the
spider and the y co-picturing.
Like the tool in hand for humans, the web may
be considered an exteriorization of the spider a
technique that co-evolves with the spider.20 For
Stiegler, human tools and techniques are repositories of experiences that have not been lived. In
the Picture Book story the young spider remembers the y that it has not yet met in its web. So
the web is co-evolving with the y as well as the
spider. Affected by the y, the spider intuits a
picture of the y at the limits of its world. And
the y then inherits the picture in the spiders
web, an image that it does not see, but
suffers (Theory of Meaning 182).

semblances of animality in the

picture book
Picture this. In the Picture Book there is a
spider, whose web is an extension of its body.
The web is a negative picture of the y, a counterpoint to the ys bodily capacities, dimensions and movements. The y cannot see
itself in the web, but it enters into a relation

57

with the spiders web at the limits of its

Umwelt. It is with the aid of the Picture Book
that we as humans can imagine the life-world
of the spider through the externality of its
web, and the life-world of the y through the
spider via what its web is not.
The Picture Book does not show us the complete picture of the spider or the y but provides
us with what Brian Massumi would call semblances21 (as opposed to re-semblances) of the
y and spider. That is, the Picture Book
makes a virtual y and a virtual spider appear.
Furthermore, the Picture Book frame swerves
the scopic regime away from the thinking
human eye to the respective life-worlds of the
spider and the y, to give us a feeling for a
spider that knows from birth a y it has not
yet met; and for a y that meets its counterpoint
in the web only at its death.
On the occasion of entering the Picture Book,
the spider, the web and the y assume abstract
forms, which have real effects on one another.
Likewise, the grasshoppers, the chirps coming
through the loudspeaker, the radio microphone
and the glass bell can all be viewed as abstracted
pictures of animals and technologies that nevertheless enter into actual relations.
These abstract forms are something not
fully determinate; they are not sensed in the conventional sense, they are non-sensed perception, almost like a passing thought that is felt
rather than understood.
In the Picture Book frame, it seems that all entities, whether human, animal or technical, reach
over to another to build relations in partial but
concrete ways, as if they were, to use Alfred
North Whiteheads concept, prehending
(rather than apprehending) each other. Prehension is not completely a human category; it concerns relations of casual connectedness between
actual entities not determined by human teleology. It is a feeling that emerges when connecting
perceptions and cognitions are transported from
one actual occasion to another (18).22 The feeling
of transport imposes limits on or enables potential
in the apparatus of actualization (Massumi,
Autonomy of Affect 43). As Whitehead says,
this movement of prehension from one occasion
to another is life itself: a living person [or any

invisible worlds
organic life] is some denite type of prehension
transmitted from occasion to occasion of its existence (18). As Uexkulls animal, human and
environmental entities differentially prehend
each other, we can imagine the stretching and
deforming of the limits of their life-worlds,
towards overlapping and involuting Umwelts.
So, the Picture Book is a Whiteheadean
occasion whereby individual entities, whether
human, animal or technical, partially concretize
as their life-worlds enmesh. The becoming of
individuals is never stable but metastable,23
as resultant forms of the individual ontologically
contain the tendency to recongure themselves,
based on a constantly shifting conjunction of
actual and affectual internal forces struck by
external forces as organized technics. In the
case of our argument, the technicity of the
Picture Book, in performing the foreign subjectivities of other animals as abstractions, enables
a form of thought and feeling where animality
and humanity take on partially concrete shapes
that are not xed. Each time the Picture Book
is performed, the individuation of entities also
shifts.24 Herein lies the great difference in comportment between the distanced scientic observer of animals, and the ecologist imaginatively
engaging with Picture Books! As Uexkull
writes, from the conventional viewpoint of
science, there is no mammal in itself as intuitable object, only as a notional abstraction, as a
concept which we use as a means of analysis
but never encounter in life. With the tick, this
is completely different (Theory of Meaning
179). The tick encounters the mammal as a
living abstraction, and we the readers of the
Picture Book, Uexkull goes on to imply, may
also use our concepts in ways that think-feel
(Massumi, Semblance and Event 39) the
strange partial concretization of our human
being that the ticks intuition entails.
The shifting lines drawn between animal and
human mediated by the technicity of the Picture
Book may seem to re-engage the anthropological
machine as a mobile mechanism (as Agamben
has pointed out) in ways that are not so different
from the scientic laboratory. But as the process
of individuation is only always partial, Umwelts
brillate between being open and closed: open

as foreign subjectivities of animals and their

mutual prehendings are imagined away from
human technologies; closed by the inherited tertiary memory in the technicity of the tools of the
lab tending towards the whole or complete
entity; and reopened through the performative
dimension of the Picture Book with its infantile
technics of language and image. In the anthropological machine, if it continues in some
form, the drawn lines themselves are partial,
perforated.25
The Picture Book dramatizes the grey area
between the seemingly closed functional cycles of
animals. It pictorially abstracts the interstices of
closed functional cycles, where the edges of the
Umwelt are given expression as semblances.
Because we can only think-feel these grey areas
through the performance of the Picture Book
frame, the animal cannot completely be the
excluded
by-product
of
human
selfdenition because it is always already caught up
in co-effectual relations of co-picturing. This
abstraction of the foreign subjectivities of
animals in the Picture Book laboratory is actual
experience a performance of life a lived
abstraction.26
A paradox appears between Stieglers idea of
tertiary memory in human technics as inherited
and therefore not lived, and the Picture
Book technic which invites the expression of
tertiary retentions as lived abstractions in
the unique forms of pictures, words, and
imaginings that are phenomenologically performed.27 By living the not lived tertiary
memories through abstracting exteriorizations,
which to Stiegler are ontological to the process
of individuation of the human, we suggest that
the Picture Book enables a radically different
comportment to animal and technical others
and the human-self. It increases a feeling for
and between one another that reaches over to
congure new ecological relations in partially
concrete ways.

the picture book as a technic for

ecological thinking
Uexku lls contribution to ecology is traditionally read in two contrasting ways. On the one

58

loo & sellbach

hand, Uexkull the humble naturalist refuses
to bracket off for the sake of experimental convenience the ways in which other animals also
sense, feel and interpret the world. On the
other, Uexkull the biologist-shaman conjures
forth the radically different worlds of these
animals to reveal a web of co-effectual relations
between animals and their environments that
he likens to the harmonies of a musical
score. As we have shown, these possibilities
co-exist in post-humanist readings of Uexku ll,
which emphasize the de-centring effects of
animal Umwelten, and in conventional scientic readings where the animal Umwelt is a
closed functional loop.
What might the Picture Book do to an
ecology that oscillates between the careful observations of a naturalist and a vast symphony of
nature? At the end of A Theory of Meaning,
Uexku ll reects on the analogy he has drawn
between the co-effecting relations that the biologist observes between organisms and environments, and the natural score played by the
instruments of an orchestra.
If we take a glance at an orchestra, we see in
each individual rostrum in musical notation
the voice leading, for the instrument to
which it belongs, while the whole score is
on the conductors rostrum. But we also see
the instruments themselves and wonder if
these are possibly adapted to each other not
just in their respective tonalities, but in
their entire structure, i.e., if they form a
unit not just musically but also technically.
Since most instruments in the orchestra are
capable of producing music by themselves,
this question cannot be answered in the afrmative as simply as that.
Whoever has listened to the production
of musical clowns, who work with instruments that otherwise serve for making
noise, such as hair combs, cow bells, and
other such things, will have been convinced
that one can very well play a cacophony, but
not a symphony, with such an orchestra.
Upon closer examination, the instruments

59

of a real orchestra demonstrate a contrapuntal behaviour already in their structure.

(189)

It seems that we have made the symphony

Uexku ll hears in his laboratory into a cacophony, an assemblage of makeshift instruments
played by a Picture Book clown. But we must
not forget that the grasshoppers are also
making music. For Uexku ll, the grasshoppers chirps are techniques of nature, exteriorizations of its capacity to form contrapuntal
relations between its organs of perception and
its environment.28 To conduct this experiment,
Uexku ll uses recording and amplication technology and this causes the grasshoppers song
to be at once enhanced and displaced via the
loudspeaker. If we imagine the concert that is
performed by the grasshopper in the laboratory, then there may no longer be a preordained melody but a discordant harmony
interrupted by a strange silence. By living
through the Picture Books performance, the
not lived tertiary memories retained in the
laboratory in its abstractions, we may speculate
a memorization and further extension of the
Umwelt of small animals through technical
means.29

epilogue
One way of imagining the coming community
that Agamben anticipates in The Open would
be that in the end human beings learn to
accept their (base) animality, and animals
come to be accepted for their human-like
qualities (their intelligence, emotions, selfawareness). But if through the Picture Book
we attend to the invertebrates that are with
us in the laboratory and at the table, then it
no longer seems to be a matter of transposing
existing qualities between human and animal
but of creating an aesthetic medium in
which new and unforeseen sensibilities might
emerge.

invisible worlds
THE STARLING & THE FLY
The following story is told by the scientist Uexku ll.
A researcher who is a friend [] raised a young starling in a room,
and the bird had no opportunity ever to see a y, much less to catch
one. Then he observed that the bird suddenly started after an
unseen object, snapped it up in midair, brought it back to its perch
and began to hack away at it with its beak, as all the starlings do
with the ies they catch, and then swallowed the unseen thing.
(Foray 12021)

For Uexkull it is obvious the starling is so overcome by a feeding

mood that it magically conjures up a y, even though there is no y
in the room.
How remarkable, a room without ies!
And more too, the starling eats an invisible y! Magical and invisible, the y must be in a Picture Book.
Of course, the Picture Book belongs to Uexkull, but wasnt it the
starling that rst made up the y?
Imagine the Picture Book y.
What becomes of the invisible y as it is being swallowed? What
picture might it make?

notes
The figures reproduced in this paper are from Jakob
von Uexkll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and

Humans with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph

D. ONeil (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010);
copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of
Minnesota. Originally published in Streifzge durch

60

loo & sellbach

die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen; copyright
1934 Verlag von Julius Springer.
1 Agamben observes that the animal figures
representing humanity in the miniature correspond
allegorically to different parts of the human body:
bones, nerves, veins, flesh and skin (The Open 2).
2 Both the laboratory and the table are key
contested sites for animal studies. As Peter
Singer and others have argued, when we bring
other animals to our table as food we disregard
the terrible suffering incurred through factory
farming and its environmental impacts. In this
context, it is a provocation to consider
whether, by bringing insects to the table, we
are in fact including them in some way in our
ethical consideration.
3 While we are cognizant that the animal worlds
of Jakob von Uexkll are thoroughly opened up
by the field of contemporary biosemiotics, in this
paper we are concerned with the technical
ontology rather than a semiotic one of scientific
experimentation when it meets the childrens
Picture Book, and how this may provide a rereading of Uexklls animal perceptual worlds,
and the relationship of humans with these
worlds. We would like to thank our anonymous
reviewer, who reminds us that the kind of
aesthetic knowing which the Picture Book
exhibits can be read through semiotics as a recognition on Uexklls part of the importance of
iconic and indexical signs for both animals and
humans.
4 The figure of the child and the picture storybook
are also devices that Agamben uses to imagine new
relations opening between human and animal that
do not serve the project of human self-definition.
But what Agamben does not consider is that
Uexklls laboratory also draws on the imaginative
realm of childhood, through its Picture Book
frame.
5 For example, Peter Singers Animal Liberation and
more recently Marc Bekoffs The Emotional Lives of
Animals.
6 For example, Cary Wolfes Zoontologies.
7 The Open 45. Here, Uexkll aligns with the artistic avant-garde of his day, and with recent posthumanist work on non-human agencies. But as
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young warns in his Afterword to A Foray and Theory of Meaning:

61

The always present danger, of course, is that

this may entail a reification of other Umwelten. The question How can we in our world
see how animals see their world? may easily
turn into the more self-interested inquiry
How can we see how animals see their world
in such a way that it will change and enrich the
way in which we see ours? (235)
8 Biosemioticians would call these markers of significance signs.
9 It is important to remember, however, that
Uexkll understands these markers to be indications of what matters to the animal, rather
than the human being. It is precisely because the
animal decodes its environment according to a
series of markers (or signs in biosemiotics) that
he likens the animal to a machine operator but
not a machine, which reacts to stimuli from the
outside world without selectively interpreting
them (A Stroll 79).
10 Agamben argues in The Open that Uexkll may
end up re-articulating the anthropological machine
in a new way that lends itself to two disturbing alternatives. Either the hierarchical division between human
and animal is re-established Heidegger, for example,
uses Uexkll too in order to contrast the instinctive
captivation he believes is proper to all animal behaviour, with a human openness to the world or the
divide between human and animal collapses entirely,
in a way that aligns with Friedrich Ratzels politically
frightening notion of Lebensraum, whereby all
people are intimately linked to their vital space as
their essential dimension (42).
11 If we attend more carefully to the Picture Book
frame then both the previous readings of Uexkll
we have outlined are affected: Uexkll the posthumanist uses a very human, child-like technique
to evoke non-human worlds. But for Uexkll the
ecologist who researches the limits of the animal,
his task is imagined or performed in ways that
suggest that its precise outcome is open.
12 The Grasshopper Cabaret was performed as a
childrens book reading as part of the symposium
presentation Ecological Thinking through the
Picture Book of Jakob von Uexklls Laboratory in
Rethinking Behaviour and Conservation: The
History, and Philosophy and Future of Ethology II,
Centre for Social Inclusion, Macquarie University,
Sydney, 2628 November 2011; and as a short performance at the Architecture-Writing: Experimental

invisible worlds
Approaches symposium, Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Stockholm, 2425 May 2012.
13 Stiegler, in Technics and Time, 1, in an effort to
postulate the origins of the human, explains the
originary default in the constitution of the
human through the myth of Epimetheus who
forgot to confer upon humans any special gifts,
and that the current power of the human being
and its ability to know, think and exteriorize is
the fire stolen from the gods by Prometheus.
14 Although, as Nathan van Camp has pointed out,
by recognizing the tertiary memories of human
life deposited in externalities, the human is decentred in ways that may disrupt the anthropological machine, we have also argued that tertiary memories deposited in the tools of the laboratory tend
back towards a picture of the centrality of the
human which covers over this destabilizing effect.
15 Of all the animals, insects appear to have the
highest technicity, so one way to adapt the conventional reading of Stiegler to human animal relations is
to say that these small creatures also operate, like
the tools of the laboratory, as tertiary memories
of the human being. Along these lines, Jussi Parikkas
recent book Insect Media investigates how insect
modes of organization swarms, webs and distributed agencies provide new ways of understanding
media technology and its relationship to biology,
which do not rest on the notion of individual
agents or a deterministic account of technology.
By reading insects via media formations, his book
opens up a new and rich account of the ways in
which digital culture helps to form and de-centre
human beings. This is a productive approach to
pursue. However, we would like to avoid a
reading that reduces insects to externalizations of
the human, because this potentially misses the
otherness of insect life that Uexkll emphasizes,
and the difficult question of their place in our
ethical thought and consideration.
16 For Stiegler, the capturing and formation of
attention in the young by technical and media industries threatens processes of what he calls human
maturity, and global social and cultural development (see Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth 78). By
contrast, we are suggesting that the Picture Book
is part of the formation of nascent attention as
imagination. For Stiegler, the partial or transitional
objects opened through childhood play are the first
forms of tertiary retention that can only appear in

transitional spaces; spaces that form the basis

of all systems of care and nurturance: a transitional
space is first and foremost a system of caring (ibid.
15). So we might also say here that the Picture Book
augurs human attention that proceeds from a performativity that involves transitional objects and
spaces whereby humans are struck by the infancy
of inherited technics.
17 It is important to note that the Picture Book
relies on the concerted use of the mode of picturing that significantly pre-dates writing.
18 Building on this, we can see that what is
expressed in the Picture Book, in its content, structure and framing, is organized by a unique grammatization related to infancy. Here, infancy is not a
nascent version of the rules of language that
matures into adulthood, or a pre-linguistic ineffable state. Rather, according to Agamben, infancy
marks the threshold between wordlessness and
speech: where language stops is not where the
unsayable occurs, but the other where the
matter of words begins (Idea of Prose 27). At
this threshold, which we are arguing can be
found in childrens Picture Books, humans are
struck and overwhelmed by language. This affect
stems from the fact that the Real of language its
grammar, words, and image-objects are there
at their limits of sense and existence.
19 Theory of Meaning 18889. Deleuze, Parikka
and Agamben have developed different readings
of Uexklls musical metaphors.
20 Making a similar point, in more general terms
about animal Umwelt, Elizabeth Grosz has argued
that the bubble world is the projection of an
animals bodily capacities (183).
21 Massumi defines semblance as the
experience of a virtual reality, the manner in
which the virtual actually appears (Semblance and
Event 1516).
22 As Whitehead says, prehensions define the
real individual facts of relatedness, a kind of transportable perception or cognition extracted from
other actual occasions, or prehensions are transported by perception or cognition (18).
23 This process of individuation as metastable
comes from Gilbert Simondon (300).
24 As Grosz says, the limit space of the Umwelt is
always in construction: Space is built up, sense by

62

loo & sellbach

sense, perceptual organs upon organs, forming the
soap bubble, its limits, its contents (180).
25 We appropriate here a description of the line
drawn by the anthropological machine which is
also metonymic of the stretched boundaries of
Uexklls bubble Umwelts:
What I have really drawn there is an oval line,
for this white chalk mark is not a line, it is a
plane figure, in Euclids-sense a surface, and
the only line that is there is the line which
forms the limit between the black surface
and the white surface. This discontinuity can
only be produced upon that blackboard by
the reaction between two continuous surfaces into which it is separated, the white
surface and the black surface. (Massumi, Semblance and Event 89)
26 Massumi, Semblance and Event 15. Massumi
derives lived abstraction from a Deleuzian
concept, where abstraction is nothing more or
less than the performative/lived dimension of that
abstraction. The act of abstraction configures the
potential in that abstraction, and that potential is
relayed from one abstraction to another.
27 The theoretical argumentation on the implications of this paradox for Stieglers contention
with Simondon that the process of individuation is
ontologically technical as the process of psychic individuation is already a collective one (Stiegler,
Theatre of Individuation), warrants another paper.
28 The chirping sounds for Deleuze, the
exterior territory of the animal are related to
its morphology; for example, the evolution of the
development of sound-making techniques is
related to the distance of mates.
29 To perform the foreign subjectivity of insects and
other small animals through the Picture Book frame
opens up the radical possibility of insect exteriorizations not just insects as human exteriorizations
but insects with their own tools, insects reconfiguring
human tools and insects displaced by tools and techniques (human and animal) that surround them.

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Stephen Loo
School of Architecture & Design
University of Tasmania
Locked Bag 1323
Launceston 7250
Tasmania
Australia
E-mail: stephen.loo@utas.edu.au
Undine Sellbach
School of Philosophy and School of
Architecture & Design
University of Tasmania
Locked Bag 1323
Launceston 7250
Tasmania
Australia
E-mail: undine.sellbach@utas.edu.au