#Jacob von Uexküll

[deunmundoraro-blog]

al compás del corazón

Como en todas las experiencias, en la experiencia temporal debemos preguntarnos por tres factores: el físico, el fisiológico y el psicológico.

En el mundo exterior no existe una fuente eterna que envíe estímulos al sujeto en intervalos iguales a lo largo de toda una vida. Sin embargo, todos los estímulos del mundo exterior vienen acompañados de signos rítmicos de momento. Por eso, debemos ir en busca de una fuente interna de estímulos dentro del cuerpo que sea capaz de latir durante toda la vida como nuestro corazón. Esta fuente representaría entonces el factor fisiológico. No podemos pensar en un péndulo mecánico, pero sí en un proceso químico que sea capaz de fortalecer todo estímulo interior y exterior de tal modo que envíe ondas de excitación rítmica a la persona nerviosa que haga resonar el momento. Los momentos como sensaciones se colocan en serie sin ninguna otra organización que la de su serie temporal. Por medio de un aparato rítmico semejante, el sujeto sería capaz de imponer todos los sucesos internos y externos a su propio compás. El compás de este péndulo químico interno podría medirse en los sucesos rítmicos del mundo exterior.

Karl Ernst von Baer fue el primero en lograr medir la longi­tud del momento para los hombres. Es decir, logró establecer la velocidad de los movimientos que se producen en el mundo exterior y que sentimos como momentáneos. Cada movimiento por debajo de la décima de segundo no es percibido. De ello se puede deducir que en cada décima de segundo el órgano sen­sorial para el tiempo emite una excitación a la persona nerviosa para que sienta un momento. Esas cifras solo se aplican a la vida normal. Si el sujeto se encuentra en estado de gran excitación, los estímulos temporales se apiñan unos a otros y "los minutos se nos hacen eternos".

Tales vivencias dicen mucho sobre la existencia de un órga­no sensorial para el tiempo que se activa en forma potenciada, mientras la organización anímica permanece inmutable. En cada caso, la cantidad de momentos sucesivos repite la duración de la vivencia. Medido de acuerdo con los sucesos del mundo exterior, dicha duración puede ser más corta en un caso o más larga, en otro.

Estos hechos le sirvieron a Karl Ernst von Baer para pensar una tesis muy ingeniosa. Este supone que la vida de diferentes seres vivos contiene la misma cantidad de momentos pero de distinta duración, de modo que algunas veces duran centésimas de segundos y otras veces horas. Ahora bien, hay animales que viven solo un año y otros apenas unos días. ¿Cómo se trans­forma la imagen del mundo si ellos alojan en su vida la misma cantidad de momentos que nosotros? Si estos animales tuvieran el entendimiento humano, los viejos padres de un año, al morir en otoño, les dirían a sus hijos que ahora les queda por delante un largo período en sus vidas en el que deberán atravesar los horrores del frío y la nieve. Y también les dirían que no deben perder las esperanzas porque en la juventud ellos tuvieron que atravesar los mismos horrores y luego llegaron tiempos mejores. Los animales que viven solo un día les hablarían a sus hijos de ese tiempo horroroso como una vieja leyenda. Para algunos, día y noche serían un mes; para otros, media vida.

A estos seres vivos, todos los sucesos en el mundo les deberían parecer extraordinariamente largos. Así, la bala que sale volando de la pistola parecería estar suspendida en el aire. Desconocerían también el crecimiento de los árboles, al igual que nosotros el de las montañas.

Por otro lado, podemos pensar en seres vivos que extienden su cantidad de momentos durante un mayor número de años. Para ellos, las estaciones cambian como para nosotros los días. Todo ocurriría en un tiempo más acelerado. Las hierbas brotarían de la tierra como de una fuente y desaparecerían. Los bosques reverdecerían, crecerían y morirían como las praderas. No se vería el sol, solo un haz centelleante aparecería brevemente en el cielo para darle lugar a una corta oscuridad.

Baer señala que el tiempo en el que percibimos los movimien­tos del mundo exterior coincide con el resto de nuestras capa­cidades. Esto se explicaría aceptando la suposición de que hay un órgano sensorial para el tiempo construido según el mismo plan que el resto de nuestros órganos.

La experiencia temporal tiene un carácter subjetivo marca­do, al igual que el resto de las experiencias, dado que, para la sensación del tiempo externo, no existe un órgano que se excite rítmicamente por estímulos externos. Por el contrario, el ritmo es creado por el órgano interno que enmarca los estímulos del propio cuerpo. Pese a esto, siempre se considera el tiempo como una propiedad objetiva del mundo exterior y se le atribuye una duración eterna.

'Cartas biológicas a una dama', Jacob von Uexküll

#jacob von uexküll #orbital #tilda swinton #tiempo al tiemp #Youtube

[philippequeau]

L’étoffe des rêves

“Jacob von Uexküll”. En 1904, William James a formellement exprimé ses doutes quant à la notion de conscience telle qu’elle est habituellement présentée dans les traités de psychologie.i La conscience y est regardée comme possédant une essence propre, distincte de l’essence des choses qui en sont dépourvues. Ces dernières « existent », en tant que telles, mais elles ne possèdent qu’une existence…

View On WordPress

#Dualisme #Jacob von Uexküll #Monisme #Positivisme #Réalité augmentée #William James

[duino-elegies]

Rainer Maria Rilke at Friedelhausen Castle (Hessen, 1905).

In 1905, while taking a rest cure at the Weisser Hirsch near Dresden, Rilke became acquainted with the Countess Luise von Schwerin and her son-in-law, the Baron Jacob von Uexküll, a natural scientist and philosopher. The Countess invited Rilke and his wife Clara to Friedelhausen Castle. It resulted in further visits to other family's places, such as Villa Discopoli on the island of Capri. Rilke's time at Friedelhausen Castle remained dear to the artist's memory. In one of his letters, he wrote: "In the Land of Hessen, I tell myself every morning, everything is certainly full of splendor and colourful; picture-book joyful, as if there were a verse under every flower and as if every bird was saying a little sympathetic rhyme…"

#Rainer Maria Rilke

[coffeenuts]

« Tout organisme est une mélodie qui se chante elle-même. » Jacob von Uexküll, Mondes animaux et monde humain by Eric Bénier-Bürckel https://flic.kr/p/2nnoTys

#IFTTT #Flickr

[astranemus]

The final observation about sylvan thinking is that it involves generality. Thanks to all the katydids that were not noticed there is now more ‘leafiness’ in this world. Not only are leaves that leafy but so too are some insects. Generality is a real property of the world — one that grows in the realm of life. Life proliferates generals. Through a process of constrained confusion living dynamics create kinds. Think of Jacob von Uexküll’s tick, the one that is ‘world poor’ because it doesn’t do a lot of differentiation. By not discriminating between humans and deer, indiscriminately parasitizing both, confusing them, it creates a kind — the kind of being through which, for example, Lyme disease might pass. The world, then, is not just a continuum waiting to be categorized by human minds and cultures.

This logic extends to biological concepts such as the distinction between individual and lineage. It may be that only the individual exists, but the lineage is the reality that makes that existence possible. Any individual katydid is only what it is by virtue of a lineage that temporally exceeds it. This is true also of the species. It too has this kind of general reality. In this regard, the species is not unlike the Amerindian concept of the masters of animals. A master of animals is a being that is the protector and general instantiation of the species in question. All hunting passes through this generality. Hunters dream with or about this domain of the general in order to connect with the individual that will become meat. This generality is real even if its existence is only instantiated in the forest encounter.

The reality of forest spirits, then, is on par with the reality of a species or lineage. Out of an ecology of selves there emerges an ecology of spirits — or gods — as well. And this reality is not reducible to ‘the social’. It is to this emergent spirit-life that we must also learn to attend. For these gods, or others like them, will be the ones who can orient us in the way that a kind orients an individual, and a dream orients the hunter. An ethical orientation for the Anthropocene must thus necessarily also involve a spiritual re-orientation. Spirits, gods, and souls are part and parcel of the sylvan thinking we need to inhabit once again.

Eduardo Kohn, "Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for Times of Environmental Fragmentation" in Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing

#quote #Eduardo Kohn #Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy #anthropology #animism #kinds #ontology #spirits #ecology #ethics #environmentalism #Living Earth Community #epistemology #Jacob von Uexküll #biology #Anthropocene

[ericbenierburckel]

Photo by Eric Bénier-Bürckel

"Trop souvent nous nous imaginons que les relations qu’un sujet d’un autre milieu entretient avec les choses de son milieu prennent place dans le même espace et dans le même temps que ceux qui nous relient aux choses de notre monde humain. Cette illusion repose sur la croyance en un monde unique dans lequel s’emboîteraient tous les êtres vivants." Jacob Von Uexküll

https://www.facebook.com/ebburckel/

#picoftheday #photography #photomanipulation #black and white photography #black and white portrait #portrait #surrealphotography #loeildelaphotography #conceptual photography #Conceptual Portrait #bnwphotography #bw photography #fish #water #underworld

[goatwatching]

Goat Umwelt

Goats’ senses differ from ours in range and sensitivity. Their minds are evolved to deal with a very different lifestyle from ours. Not surprisingly, they perceive life differently to how we do and misunderstandings can arise. Biologist, Jacob von Uexküll defined an animal’s perceptual world as Umwelt, and realised that each species’ experience would be different and often hard for us to imagine.

Here I will try to imagine what it is like to be a goat, judging by what we know, or suspect of their senses and adaptions.

Goats have good vision, hearing and sense of smell. They are ruminant herbivores that are constantly vigilant for predators. They eat quickly to avoid predation and competition, then rest out in a safe place to ruminate and digest their fibrous diet. Having evolved in dry, mountainous climates, they are selective in their diet and highly competitive. Difficult terrain has favoured learning individually through trial and error. They move matrilineal family groups with a strict hierarchy, which involves communication and complex social strategies. Breeding season is during autumn and winter, when a dominant male joins the herd. Kids are born 5 months later during the warmer months of spring vegetation. Males disperse after weaning at approx. 6 months old.

Vision: goats have 320--340 degree excellent vision due to their lateral horizontal pupils. This enables them to have a wide panoramic view with good focus. As they tilt their heads, the pupils remain horizontal. This helps them to remain vigilant while browsing. They have 63 degrees of binocular vision to the front of their head to allow depth perception and detail of the direction they are travelling in, which enables them to jump and climb with skill in the rocky terrain in which they evolved.

Goats see colours from purple/blue to orange (but not red), however may have be prone to colour-blind errors. They also see well in the dark. They cannot see clearly close up, and this is where their excellent sense of smell takes over. Close up items are sniffed and sensed by touch using their sensitive lip whiskers, which guide their agile lips to grasp tasty morsels.

Olfaction: goats map a sensory world hard for us to imagine with their sensitivity to odours. Not only can they gauge what is good to eat, but they identify other animals by their smell. Mothers bond with their young by recognizing their unique scent.

Goats’ social world is governed by pheromones that provide information about the identity, sex, status and emotion of other animals. They have glands by their horns that emit pheromones, their saliva and urine also contains social signals. They may even have scent glands between their toes like some wild ungulates. Goats sniff each other’s mouths on introduction to learn identity and possibly sense status signals. Urine contains messages about sexual status. Oestrus does urinate frequently to leave messages of their fertility and they wag their tails to spread their scent through the air. I’ve often seen goats sniff each other’s mouths and heads during social contacts, perhaps for an update on emotion or status.

Flehmen is a lip-curling action goats use to further analyze heavy molecules with a vomeronasal organ. This is particularly used by bucks examining the scent of females, but also seen in females investigating scents of other animals, including unfamiliar humans.

Hearing: Goats can hear a wider range of frequencies than humans (70Hz--40KHz; humans: 31Hz--17KHz). Like dogs, goats can hear much higher pitched sounds. They often become alert to sounds we cannot hear. They may even be disturbed or stressed by sounds (e.g., machinery) that we are not aware of. Their sensitive spot is at 2KHz (a high-pitched musical note), whereas ours is at 8KHz (an earsplitting squeak!). Goats appear to be disturbed by loud, high pitched voices, such as children’s chatter and laughter. This would make sense, as goats emit loud, high-pitched, shaky bleats when they are in trouble. Kids’ bleats are also high-pitched to attract the attention of their mother. When goats call each other (or their humans) to maintain contact, without urgency or alarm, their bleats are low-pitched, steady, quiet and closed-mouthed. Mother goats mutter to their kids in this way. Using similar tones when handling your goats ensures they keep calm.

Combining modalities: Odours give detailed information close up and persist after an animal has left, so can give information about recent as well as current events. A mother recognizes her kid initially by its scent. However, this information doesn’t travel far, so visual and auditory cues are also needed. Mothers quickly learn to recognize kids by sight and voice. It is useful for goats to have several ways to recognize each other. Sound may assist where vision is obscured. 

I have noticed one of my goats loosing sight of me in the yard and looking all around. However, when I called she came running immediately. It is possible she did not recognize me at a distance or could not distinguish me from a stranger. The fact we humans change our clothes may confuse visual recognition (lambs have been found to experience difficulty recognizing their mothers after colour change or shearing).

Bleat expectations: Goats appear to be more settled and relaxed in a steady and predictable routine. They anticipate the routine by their movements. If I do something unusual, they stand alert and bleat at me. They won’t follow if I go somewhere they don’t want to go. They probably don’t understand if we do something they would not. If you pick things up, this looks probably looks like foraging, and they will inspect your hands if they are used to you hand feeding them. They have a good idea of how our head relates to our perception, and realize when our head faces them we are paying them attention. However, I think they caprinomorphize: they appear to expect us to be able to see better to the side of our vision, like they do.

#goats #animal behavior #umwelt

[hipertexto]

"(Con una referencia biológica del barón Jacob von Uexküll) Al rayo del sol, la sarna es insoportable. Me quedaré aquí en la sombra, al pie de este muro que amenaza derrumbarse. Como a un buen romántico, la vida se me fue detrás de una perra. La seguí con celo entrañable. A ella, la que tejió laberintos que no llevaron a ninguna parte. Ni siquiera al callejón sin salida donde soñaba atraparla. Todavía hoy, con la nariz carcomida, reconstruí uno de esos itinerarios absurdos en los que ella iba dejando, aquí y allá, sus perfumadas tarjetas de visita. No he vuelto a verla. Estoy casi ciego por la pitaña. Pero de vez en cuando vienen los malintencionados a decirme que en este o en aquel arrabal anda volcando embelesada los tachos de la basura, pegándose con perros grandes, desproporcionados. Siento entonces la ilusión de una rabia y quiero morder al primero que pase y entregarme a las brigadas sanitarias. O arrojarme en mitad de una calle a cualquier fuerza aplastante. (Algunas noches, por cumplir, ladro a la luna). Y me quedo siempre aquí, roñoso. Con mi lomo de lija. Al pie de este muro cuya frescura socavo lentamente. Rascándome, rascándome..."

- Homenaje a Otto Weininger, Arreola

[ogxref]

ON MEDIUM THINKING / Keller Easterling

Media → vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible

Media theorists → John Durham Peters, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Regis Debray, Nikolas Luhmann, Vilem Flusser join an array of thinkers in the arts and sciences including Herman Melville, Jacob von Uexküll, George Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, Gregory Bateson, Bruno Latour and Arjun Appadurai among many others

McLuhan → “what the medium is saying sometimes prevents us from seeing what the medium is doing”

Foucault → dispositif is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid.

Agamben → dispositif as literally everything that has in some way the capacity of capturing, determining, orienting, intercepting, shaping, guiding, securing or controlling, the behaviors, the gestures, the opinions, the discourses of living beings or substances...

Ryle → disposition as the latent agency or potential immanent in arrangement, a property or propensity within a context that unfolds over time

Ryle also describes the difference between “knowing that vs. knowing how” → the difference between knowing the right answer and knowing how to do something like telling a joke. Knowing how is dispositional and essentially indeterminate because it requires the deployment of practical skills unfolding over time and the ability to react to a changing sequence of cues

Stephen Mumford → describes the ways that this immanent disposition may exist as, not event, but “promise” or “threat”

Bruno Latour foregrounds an indeterminate matrix of human and non-human activity in the sociotechnical networks of the medium → he argues that we often observe active phenomena until we think we can declare “what it is”—its stabilized, essential “competence.” But “what it is” can never be separated from “what it does.”

Walter Benjamin → conjured a “medium of perception” in which culture is both made and received, a medium inflected by atmospheres as well as the apparate (apparatus) for making a reproducing it.

Notion that Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education could inspire political actions that were never expressed in the texts... Characters act within their staged context even as they also act on meta-narrative forms. Bovary, is an agent within the novel as well as a reagent in culture. Her actions ricochet against conditions in culture to inspire liberatory behaviors she never enacted herself. Narrative forms and cultural forms in plural overlapping networks have capacities or affordances that are inherently political, that alter the ways in which power is organized.

“While the authority of the determinate somehow sidelines medium thinking as soft, magical, or ephemeral, it is not somehow unmoored, invisible, unknowable, or magic.” → ultimately practical, does this knowledge constitute most of what we know and more of what we might know?

Gregory Bateson analyzed potentials in human and non-human arrangements and exchanges as if they were information systems → he observed that a man, a tree and an ax is an information system...

Notion that “Information is the difference that makes a difference.”

Wwhile culture may be more comfortable focusing forms for which they have some familiar markers (objects and things in a steady state) → perhaps those markers deliver their information or measure difference when forms combine or bounce in the chemistries of medium...

#keller #easterling #medium #thinking #newnormal

[gegensmith]

Jacob von Uexküll (1930)

#jacob von uexküll #von uexküll #biosemiotics #umwelt #ethology #biology #biologists #biologist #semiotics #1930s #photographic portrait #photograph

[rattyeurope]

Synthesis, Part Four.

16-Jul, 2012 Broglio, Ron. Surface Encounters : Thinking with Animals and Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print. • we can only know the animal through surfaces • art calls to us to consider and negotiate the space of this animal other • we are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world, and no unified space or time; instead, time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently While much of the history of philosophy has been about mastery of thought over and against the stuff of the world, fragility allows us to think otherwise, to think differently. (Broglio xxii) Becoming considers infectious transformation between human and animal states that are activated by an encounter. (Broglio xxxi) This is transduction We can know what it is like for a human to imagine being a bat, but not know what it means for a bat to be a bat. (Broglio 62) Doris Mackinnon, and Jakob von Uexküll. Theoretical Biology. Nabu Press, 2011. Print. • all things that play a part in the function-circle of an animal we consider only from the point of view of function • movement as an indicator of individuality • why do we have distinctions? (animalistic/humanistic) … again with the comparison ...every impression an animal experiences is both fundamentally like and fundamentally unllike all other impressions. (Mackinnon 137) Perfection is not omnipotence, but merely means the correct and complete exercise of all the means available. (Mackinnon 164) 19-Jul, 2012 Hallé, Francis. In Praise of Plants. Portland: Timber Press, 2002. Print. 21-Jul, 2012 Gosnell, Mariana. Ice : the nature, the history, and the uses of an astonishing substance. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print. • Ice is the ultimate enemy • The ethics of freezing yourself Ice, in its own terms, is hot. (Gosnell 5) Although ice prolongs the dying process, it does not stop it. Breakdown is inevitable.For a major organ outside a human body, time will eventually run out. (Gosnell 333)

#Doris Mackinnon #Jacob von Uexküll #Ron Broglio #Surface Encounters #Theoretical Biology #becoming #rat79 #rattyeurope #Francis Hallé #In Praise of Plants #Mariana Gosnell #Ice

[gegensmith]

Through these features, the progression of the tick's actions is so strictly prescribed that the tick can only produce very determinate effect marks.

Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934, 51)

#action #behaviour #determinism #jacob von uexküll #a foray into the world of animals and humans #von uexküll

[gegensmith]

The simple animal has a simple environment; the multiform animal has an environment just as richly articulated as it is.

Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934, 50)

#umwelt #environment #ethology #jacob von uexküll #a foray into the world of animals and humans #von uexküll #biosemiotics #affect