6. Word and Object¶
Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Introduction: Umwelt¶
What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them? To be sure, we don't know the world's language, or rather we know only the various animistic, religious or mathematical versions of it. In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions, and that's enough to make a contract.
That's how the French philosopher Michel Serres sees the interaction between the human and the non-human – a division that, according to Dorothee Kimmich, is relevant "only for modern, adult human beings". According to her, "Children, people from 'premodern' cultures, and the insane have no problem with living things".
We humans are unable to transcend our human point of view, just as our cat is unable to transcend ours. We can study as much as we want about the perceptive system of any animal, but what is it like to be a bat will forever remain closed to us.
Every animal that has ever lived, every species that has ever existed, has come into being as a result of a particular and specific fine-tuned relationship with a particular and fine-tuned environment. As Louise Barrett has pointed out, "[In] order for an individual to produce species-typical behavior, it must also inherit an environment similar to that of previous generations as well as similar genes, and it must not undergo a similar developmental process."
In order to describe this particular relationship between an organism and environment, the Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt. Uexküll argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (which can be translated as surrounding-world, phenomenal world, self-world, environment, ...).
All this is relevant for Time Based design and art, as it calls into question the way we perceive the works that we create. Actually, can we make art for non-human animals...? Can we create a world without words?