As Levi posted quite a while back, Uexküll gives you a vivid (who cares if somewhat distorted and fanciful) picture of what it's like to be on the inside of an object: what it's like, in other words, to be any object whatsoever. To be an object is to inhabit a world that is hermetically sealed from other worlds. Evidence of other worlds, and other entities, shows up in distortions of the world in question, such as the vibrating web of a spider.
Although the spider and the fly may not directly know one another, the spider's web is attuned to the fly. Remember, beauty is death...it's the same for the tick. When she eats her fill, she lays her eggs and dies. She tunes to her world through butyric acid.
Interpreting Ueküll's insight, Agamben writes:
There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way.
OOO adds: yes, but let's not forget the forest-for-the-spider, the forest-for-the-spider-web, the forest-for-the-tree, and last but not least, the forest-for-the-forest.
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There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way.
Too true, according to Erik Swyngedouw, who maintains nature is simply an empty signifier into which meaning is poured by humans. (see "Trouble with Nature: 'Ecology as the New Opium for the Masses'" in The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory; Conceptual Challenges in Spatial Planning).
I've been mulling on the idea of a discursive nature. It's quite plain to me, however, others can't see it. OOO helps me eludicate it. Thanks.
I must add, however, Christopher, this crucial nuance: nature is discursive, but trees are real.
True enough, in the same way we are real. We weave a discursive 'unseen' net over our worlds - what's to say that that forest across the way (literally sitting here in my office) casts a discursive 'unseen' net as well over *our* worlds?
Enjoying the thinking this winter Saturday afternoon...
Err - sorry - just re-reading my comment - I expressed myself badly - I meant to say I've been mulling on the idea that nature that engages in a discourse as much as we do, i.e. nature 'talks'.
This conception stumbled (badly) on anthropogenic criticisms. Reading Jane Bennett's "Vibrant Matter" re-awoke the idea though.
This morning I've been puzzling over some research related to emergent, distributed computation in the leaves of trees.
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full
The astonishing resemblance of measurements of gas exchange in early photosynthesis to cellular automata makes me wonder about self-organization.
Not that the trees themselves don't withdraw.
I'm wondering if withdrawal is considered a process, or if it's kind of an always-already-withdrawn existence.
If it's always-already, does it have a beginning, a formative phase, a developmental capacity for withdrawal?
Or is it withdrawal all the way down, before and after, during, for ever and ever?
oh my goodness....
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