Abstract
It is often asserted that the existence of human language sets us apart from non-humans, and makes us incomparably special. And indeed human language does make our Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll), our lifeworld, uniquely open-ended. However, by committing what I term the anthropocentric mistake, i.e. falsely assuming that all true reality is linguistic, we close in on ourselves and our language-derived practices, and as a result we lose sight of much that truly matters (including a proper understanding of our human nature). Like Sebeok and Hoffmeyer I hold that language is a modeling system, but unlike them I argue that language is not external to the Umwelt, but internal to it. Language changes the human Umwelt not by escaping or sidelining it, but by fundamentally transforming it. In consequence supra-linguistic phenomena as well are modeled as internal to the human Umwelt. The Umwelt model presented is termed the tripartite Umwelt model, and includes three aspects of Umwelt: the core Umwelt, the mediated Umwelt and the conceptual Umwelt. Linguistic practices are placed within the latter, but it is furthermore claimed that a number of animals too have conceptual Umwelten, which are said to be characterized by predicative reasoning, the habitual, mental attribution of specific features to someone or something. The activity of languaging is presented as more-than-linguistic, with reference to the distributed language perspective. Given all the dark matter underpinning and surrounding verbal practices, a foray into the hinterland of language is called for. A section on the genesis and modalities of language addresses the origin and evolution of language, acquisition of language in childhood and a simple typology of the various linguistic modalities of the human Umwelt. The concluding section treats Ivar Puura’s notion semiocide, and the question: how can we language as if nature mattered?
[Man] knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest [...] Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
(Chesterton 1904, p. 88)
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Notes
- 1.
Barbieri 2012b, p. 450.
- 2.
Heidegger 1977, p. 213.
- 3.
Hoffmeyer 1993 [1996, p. 102].
- 4.
Sebeok 1987, p. 347.
- 5.
Husserl 1936–1939 [1970, p. 358].
- 6.
Abram 1997, p. 73.
- 7.
Marcel 1962.
- 8.
Chang 2009, p. 170.
- 9.
Ibid., referring to Uexküll 1981 [1987, p. 176].
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
- 12.
Cf. Uexküll 1917, pp. 219–220.
- 13.
Cf. also the passage corresponding to ibid., p. 236, where Uexküll addresses the difference, in his eyes, between English language and German language with regard to propagation of influence: “Every English word comes from an English heart”.
- 14.
Barbieri 2012b, p. 449.
- 15.
Or more specifically, as Barbieri points out: “The primary modelling system consists […] of two types of models, one that represents the environment [the Umwelt] and one that carries information about the body [the Innenwelt]” (Barbieri 2012a, p. 40).
- 16.
- 17.
Lotman 1991.
- 18.
Augustyn 2013, p. 98.
- 19.
Sebeok and Danesi 2000, p. 108.
- 20.
Augustyn 2015, p. 180.
- 21.
Sebeok 1991, p. 334.
- 22.
A precursor to this model, which is the invention of the author, is the notions conceptual world and conceptualized Umwelt experience (cf. Tønnessen 2003, p. 290), representing two of seven distinctive human features. “The conceptual world”, it is stated, “has its roots in sensory perception, and its concepts are meaningful only by reference – direct or indirect – to concrete objects of perception (cf. Uexküll 1928, pp. 334–340)” (lbid.).
- 23.
Cf. Uexküll 1928, p. 101.
- 24.
However, in all normal instances, i.e. whenever the perceiver is capable of having memories or at least is capable of anticipating events, our actual encounters with others involve mediation, and thus the mediated Umwelt, as well. Only in exceptional cases, in consequence, are “face-to-face” encounters solely located within the core Umwelt.
- 25.
Cf. Uexküll 2010, pp. 113–118. In the human context, the mediated aspect of Umwelt arguably dominates in modern culture, as reflected in cultural practices including day-long interaction with screens.
- 26.
Note that by attributing a conceptual Umwelt to an animal one does not attribute language to it. The question “Do animals have language?” is as controversial as the related question “Is Man an animal, yes or no?” The answers given often appear to be derived from emotion and identity rather than fact. At any rate the disputed terms (animal, language) have to be precisely defined, and a definition agreed on by all discussants, before such discourses take on the character of being meaningful. This is no small task, since the “ayes” and the “nays” both tend to operate with tailormade definitions that make their stands highly meaningful.
- 27.
Westling 2014, pp. 49–50.
- 28.
Cowley 2013.
- 29.
Cowley 2006.
- 30.
Sapir 1949, p. 162.
- 31.
Abram 1997, p. 255.
- 32.
Hodges 2007, p. 601.
- 33.
Skinner 1953.
- 34.
An implication of this claim is that the core Umwelt is generally code-based, and that the mediated Umwelt and the conceptual Umwelt are interpretation-based. If this is correct, the interpretive threshold is not located where animals with a nervous system meet creatures without a nervous system, as Barbieri holds, nor where the biotic meets the abiotic, as Hoffmeyer holds. Instead, it is, at least in our context, located where core experience meets mediated experience (and since these aspects often intermingle, the dividing line is not in plain sight).
- 35.
Maturana 1970.
- 36.
Thibault 2011, p. 215.
- 37.
Cowley 2014.
- 38.
Cowley 2011a, p. 4.
- 39.
Ibid., p. 2.
- 40.
Love 2004.
- 41.
According to Paul Thibault (personal correspondence), the origin is really Love 1990.
- 42.
Neumann and Cowley 2013.
- 43.
Thibault 2011, p. 214.
- 44.
Ibid..
- 45.
Ibid., p. 215.
- 46.
Steffensen et al. 2010, p. 210.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Cowley 2011a, p. 2.
- 49.
Thibault 2000, p. 294.
- 50.
Steffensen 2013.
- 51.
Stuart 2010, pp. 308–309. Indirect touch, writes Stuart, “can be achieved [e.g.] through a look where one becomes the object of someone else’s subjective attention and experience” (ibid., p. 309).
- 52.
Given that enkinaesthesia is, in a way, felt togetherness and thus implicitly social and potentially emphatic, it can even be said to be part of the groundwork of morality. In this sense the phenomenon of enkinaesthesia does not lack a normative dimension.
- 53.
In Tønnessen 2010 language, which is claimed to have the appearance though not substance of a total system, is described as one of three grand systems – “Nature, Language , the Economy – all of which apparently in quest of hegemony over our lives, as natural beings – linguistic creatures – economic stakeholders” (p. 383).
- 54.
For similar presentations of the notion of the anthropocentric mistake, cf. ibid., p. 377 and Tønnessen 2011, pp. 325–326.
- 55.
Thomas and Thomas 1928, pp. 571–572.
- 56.
Abram 1997, p. 27.
- 57.
Cowley 2011b.
- 58.
Cowley 2012a.
- 59.
- 60.
Uexküll 1934–1940 [1956, p. 109].
- 61.
Everett 2012.
- 62.
- 63.
Cowley 2012b, p. 285.
- 64.
Tønnessen 2014.
- 65.
Johansson 2013, p. 35.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 68.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 69.
Chomsky 2010.
- 70.
Abram 1997, p. 82.
- 71.
Abram 2010, pp. 197–198.
- 72.
Barbieri 2012b, p. 458.
- 73.
But Chomsky , of course, takes language to be a language faculty, and his view is therefore, in this respect, fundamentally different from that which follows from an Uexküllian Umwelt perspective, or from the DL perspective.
- 74.
Bateson 1972.
- 75.
Hoffmeyer 1993 [1996, p. 101]. Hoffmeyer further asserts that “[t]hrough speech, human beings broke out of their own subjectivity because it enabled them to share one large, common umwelt. While pre-lingual creatures had recourse only to their own finite umwelts, speech had the benefit that it could turn the world into a mystically produced common dwelling place” (ibid., p. 112).
- 76.
Tønnessen 2009.
- 77.
Barbieri 2012b, p. 457.
- 78.
Ibid., p. 460.
- 79.
Tønnessen 2010.
- 80.
- 81.
Puura 2013, p. 152.
- 82.
Maran 2013, p. 148.
- 83.
Stibbe 2012, p. 16.
- 84.
Daston and Mitman (eds.), 2005.
- 85.
Stuart 2010.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Nelly Mäekivi for pointing me to the quotes reiterated in the mottos of this article (Chesterton) and of section “I Language , Therefore I Model” (Coetzee). Thanks also to Paul Thibault and Stephen Cowley, for very stimulating discussions on the nature of language, cognition, human interactivity, agency, modern pitfalls etc. This work has been carried out thanks to the support of the research project Animals in Changing Environments: Cultural Mediation and Semiotic Analysis (EEA Norway Grants/Norway Financial Mechanism).
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Tønnessen, M. (2015). Umwelt and Language. In: Velmezova, E., Kull, K., Cowley, S. (eds) Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. Biosemiotics, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20663-9_5
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