Michel Foucault's genealogy of the entry of life into politics provides an incisive account of the manner in which life came to be governed on the basis of its understood biological capacities and requirements. Foucault problematises biopolitics as a mode of governance through which life's potentialities are both produced and immobilised via the continuous (re)production of circulations, or the constitution of the milieu. The question is whether governance can be (dis)ordered such that this problem of biopolitical foreclosure is overcome. This problematique will be broached in this article by staging an encounter between Foucault's problematisation of biopolitical life and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's biophilosophy, which offers the promise of an ontological movement to think political life anew. Engaging Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the milieu, the article explores whether a shift of focus to an understanding of political life in terms of its potentialities of mobile and relational becoming within a wider play of forces can offer a viable strategy to counter the problematic foreclosure of politics to which Foucault draws attention.
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Elusive Fungus?
Forms of Attraction in Multispecies World Making
Michael J. Hathaway
This article explores how attraction, a companion term to elusiveness, reveals insights into multispecies worlds by showing how different organisms such as the matsutake mushroom interpret the world and interact with each other, whether or not humans are involved. Building on scholarly interest in the ‘animal turn’ (explorations of the human-animal relationship), this article moves beyond human-centered scholarship by using, but also modifying, the concept of umwelt introduced by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Employing a critical social scientific reading of the biological literature that analyzes its findings, as well as challenges its animal-centric models of agency and behavior, I argue that this perspective helps us better understand ourselves as humans in a world that is much more than human.
Unsettling the Land
Indigeneity, Ontology, and Hybridity in Settler Colonialism
Paul Berne Burow, Samara Brock, and Michael R. Dove
overcoming the ontological hurdles of Eurocentric imaginings of post-humanism that these authors critique. Perspectivism Many of today’s studies of nonhuman others cite the canonical work of Jakob von Uexküll (2010 [1934]) on the concept of the umwelt
In Environment and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 57–74 (18 total)
Making an Ecological Trap
Capturing the Potentiality of iPS Cells in Japan
Wakana Suzuki
it differently and borrowing a concept from the biologist Jakob von Uexküll ([1934] 2010) , Gell (1996: 27) states: “Traps are lethal parodies of the animal's Umwelt .” In other words, according to Gell, traps are created to mimic and encompass
Unhinged
On Ethnographic Games of Doubt and Certainty
Stephan Palmié
‘what it is like’ to inhabit an entirely different perceptual apparatus (or conceptual scheme). Jakob von Uexküll's (2001) reflections (dating from the 1930s) on how the perceptual physiology of animals not just accommodates given environments but
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 74–90 (17 total)
Moving Beyond the Frame
Flows and Relations in Hybrid Body–Screen Lifeworlds
Carolyn Deby
developed by Jakob von Uexküll in the early 20th century to describe, respectively, the inner and outer subjective world of an organism. … 19 Developing Uexküll's concept, biosemiotics theorist Jesper Hoffmeyer recognized that separating an individual
Hesitant Recognition
Toward a Crop Ontology among Sugar Beet Farmers in Western Poland
Dong Ju Kim
actions. As Jakob von Uexküll, the father of biosemiotics, wrote long ago, “Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence” ( [1934] 2010: 53
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 299–314 (16 total)
Being Screens, Making Screens
Functions and Technical Objects
Mauro Carbone, Graziano Lingua, and Sarah De Sanctis
Jakob von Uexküll and Marcel Proust, Merleau-Ponty combines the biological and musical meanings of the term “theme” and thus comes to see in the different manifestations of zoological behavior “a variable thematism that the animal does not seek to
Maryamossadat Mousavi and Pyeaam Abbasi
of sich will be set aside for ‘the social aspect of the subject’. 123 In terms of Jakob von Uexküll's (1940) principle of the Ich-Ton , which determines the identity and individuality of an organism, two aspects can be distinguished: ‘me’ ( Moi