Deleuze and Guattarri repeatedly refer to German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and particularly to the memorable portrait of the inner world of the tick with which he begins A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. At the end of this post, I'll look back at the precise contexts of these references. But I should begin by spelling out a little of Uexküll's philosophy, because it's clear to me in retrospect that D&G cannot have subscribed wholeheartedly to Uexküll's ideas. They would surely object to the way he extends Kant's schema of a priori subjectivity to the animals. And the notion of a harmonious music of nature scored by a transcendent divine composer is, at least as we usually understand this concept, totally foreign to their philosophy. There are of course things that they have learned from Uexküll. His attribution of a subjectivity to animals serves to deflate our human pretension to uniqueness. And his vision of Nature does at least highlight a 'musical' inter-connectedness of the natural world, one that seems ludicrous to attribute purely to chance encounter. All of this is to say that I didn't find quite what I was expecting in Uexküll -- or perhaps I should have expected D&G's idiosyncratic reinterpretation of his ideas. While A Foray ... and A Theory of Meaning (two separate monographs published together in this translation) certainly fit within the individuation project we've been working on, Uexküll's work will end up figuring more for historical interest than something which independently advances our understanding. In the end, he just applies Leibniz's ideas about the monad and pre-established harmony to the world of animal behavior.
Uexküll's core idea is that the subject creates its own world, which he calls its umwelt. The translator renders this into English as "environment" (except in the title), which runs the risk of making it sound passive and objective. An animal's umwelt is an entirely subjective construction that contains all the features of the world relevant to that animal. Features of what we would normally call the environment that are not relevant to the animal fall outside its umwelt, and literally cease to exist for that animal. Uxeküll's classic example is the world of the tick. For the tick, only three things in all of creation are relevant -- the odor of mammal which lures it to drop off its stalk of grass, the temperature of whatever it falls on as a result, and the feeling of skin as opposed to hair which guides its burrowing and blood sucking. These three "perception marks" are enough to sustain the life of a tick, and so this is all its world consists of. Since the tick doesn't differentiate between types of grass it climbs on or mammals it falls on or time of day or anything else, none of these factors enter into its simple world. From our perspective, we see this as a selection of the environment (or a particular folding of it, if we use Leibniz's metaphor), but for the tick, there is nothing to select from -- these three features are all that exist. Every environment is a horizon of being, so to speak.
The umwelt is an interesting idea that obviously has more than a grain of truth in it. It seems hard to see how we could deny a meaningful inner world to animals anymore than to, say, Helen Keller, just because their sensory organs are configured differently than ours. We also know that our own sensory organs only present to us a small slice of all the features of the world that can possibly be perceived. My cats hear sounds and see things that I can't, and these are the senses that really tie the room together, for me, before we even get to my impoverished sense of smell. So we too select our world from all the possible worlds in ways that we never become aware of. Through this selective and subjective construction, the world appears as meaningful, as filled with objects relevant to our purposes and not merely as a random chaos of sensory data. Thinking about this sort of subjective relativism makes palpable that we simply don't experience an 'objective' world without meaning or quality, and questions the centrality and 'normality' of human experience. This is a valuable contribution that drives home the critical part of Kant's philosophy in an intuitive way. We have no access to the thing-in-itself, or what Uexküll calls the indifferent "surroundings" -- instead we experience a subjective world. Just spending time around an animal can teach us this important point.
Unfortunately Uexküll seems content to also accept Kant's idea that this subjectivity is synthesized in an a priori manner. This schema is insufficient for a lot of reasons, but in this context it leaves us unable to explain how animals originate and evolve, and so has the paradoxical effect of reducing these subjects to static automata.
You can see the problem clearly if you consider Uexküll's theory of meaning. On the one hand, he clearly loves the beauty of nature and the cleverness of animals, and he wants to restore a romantic fascination with what his generation was busy reducing to a machine. So he doesn't just describe the structure of animal worlds, but tries to lure us into these, as if he would make us hear the subjective poetry at the heart of the tick's paean to delicious mammal blood. Biology, for Uexküll, cannot be reduced to the meaningless material interactions of physiology. On the other hand, he bases the meaning of an animal's world entirely on the functions it fulfills for the animal. To a tick, the meaning of the scent of mammal is "jump", the meaning of the warm body encountered is "hold on", and the meaning of the feeling of skin is "burrow". These successive perceptions and actions are linked in an overall cycle of life that moves inevitably from waiting to feeding to laying eggs and dying. Meaning is only created by the closure of a what Uexküll calls a "functional cycle", a perception-action loop that fulfills the purpose of the animal and allows it to reproduce. So from the perspective of the tick, we're not uncovering a world any more meaningful than the one we might attribute to my thermostat. Despite the vitalist and aesthetic point of departure, he has reduced the concept of meaning to the information processing algorithm needed to maintain equilibrium.
In short, for Uexküll, meaning is fixed and static. It consists in the a priori synthetic judgements of various animal subjects. Clearly, this perspective takes the form of the subject for granted and will not help us understand how it could have been created nor how it can change. Which also means that Nature's harmony remains a fundamentally mysterious thing we have no means of explaining. Uexküll waxes poetic about the harmony of nature. Given his presumptions however, none of this music can be heard from within Nature, but only from the perspective of someone following along with the score from the outside. Because each animal remains imprisoned in its own subjective bubble, a bubble instinctively set to maintain itself and exclude anything that doesn't contribute to that. The tick itself has no understanding of why it fits together so well with the mammal, and no mechanism is proposed for how this fit came into being (Uexküll is a scathing critic of Darwinism). Nor, as we've seen, is the human in a fundamentally different position. As Leibniz saw long ago, if the subject is a priori and eternal, then all its relations with other subjects must also be a priori and eternal. As Garfield pointed out, if you remove the subject from space and time, you imprison it in an a priori that makes its relationship to the world fundamentally problematic. I don't know how Kant handled the problem of other minds, or if indeed his universalist philosophy really has more than one Subject, properly speaking. But Uexküll at least takes the same direction as Leibniz -- the harmony of Nature can only be the product of divine composition. Subjects can only fit together as melody and counterpoint because of a pre-established harmony. There has to be a Plan.
Of course, somehow, Uexküll himself caught wind of this plan. He gives no explanation for how this might have happened. It was probably because he was a Nazi. Just kidding. It's obvious that we in the West have long dreamed of finding a perspective that encompasses all other perspectives, of uncovering a Rosetta Stone of meaning which translates all the other meanings. Call it the umwelt of the panopticon. Or call it scientism. Because, after all, isn't it science what has let us transcend our biological umwelt and discover the true objective "surroundings" at the root of every umwelt? And isn't that why they put us in change of the planet? Without a conception of how the umwelt is constructed and modifiable, every subject falls into the trap of thinking that its current world is all there is.
P.S. The references D&G make to Uexküll fall into two categories. First, they like the story of the tick. Not so much because it makes the tick's world subjectively meaningful, but because it shows the tick as a collection of active and passive affects. The tick is related to its environment by what can affect it and by how it can affect its environment. Indeed, for D&G, the tick is this relation. This is similar to how Deleuze always approaches Spinoza's conception of power. A thing is defined by all that it can do, and all that can be done to it, ie. by its capacities or power. So these references are a bit like turning Uexküll's tick subject inside out. Second, in the context of coding and territoriality, they like the idea of nature as a musical composition. Notably, they leave out the harmonious part. Instead, they talk about the way the spider "captures the code" of the fly, and composes its web in counterpoint to this code, and the way territory as a whole makes the environment expressive through a careful composition of marks. In the latter case, however, the marks cannot be exclusively subjective, as territorial animals are also (always?) social. My territory makes no sense without you hearing the music that composes its boundary. Uexküll's Plan then becomes a Plane of consistency -- more like an open space in which marks become available to affect others. But this plane is 'harmonious' only in the sense that anything can (in principle) affect anything else; we cannot know the connections in advance. So again, they've almost inverted Uexküll's image of a finished Plan, and turned his symphony into a sort of dissonant harmony. This is univocity or the disjunctive synthesis -- "crowned anarchy".
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