Umwelt as Leibhaften Bewusstheiten.

Umwelt as Leibhaften Bewusstheiten.

 What is consciousness? What is metaphor?   

What is consciousness? What is metaphor? What is life? Who are we, whence do we come, and whither do we go? What is the view of the world held by the person who looks upon the world? Is this the complexity of the anthropic principle and fine-tuning—the causa causans, the cause of causes? If you look at the world, and I am a photographer whose research apparatus is vision, an omnivision, you look at the world as the generating unknowable—then both the unknowable and the world are looking at you. The great Jakob von Uexküll proposed the concept of Umwelt: the surrounding world, the phenomenological bubble in which each organism dwells. But I am interested in the gaze—in all possible meanings and notations of the gaze—of the world upon the person in response. The gaze of the landscape upon the one who photographs the landscape, encapsulated by this analytical mystery into a single unique Umwelt, in its dissipative embrace and waves of adaptation and exaptation, the enactive choreography of metaphor. And metaphor, here, is not mere rhetorical flourish; it is an epistemic and ontological principle of action-as-cognition.

I call this recursive view—this principle of co-action, conjugation, structural coupling upon the world and upon oneself—the “landscape of the portrait” and the “portrait of the landscape.” Or simply Umwelt, in which the obvious connectivity of man and nature, culture and nature, is defined not at the level of words—that soft knowledge, that gossamer of language—but rather at the level of biochemistry, of extended evolutionary synthesis, of synergetics. This is hard science, the granular grammar of the real.

I have always wanted to shoot a portrait “as a landscape” and a landscape “as a portrait, » revealing those subtle holistic threads of non-reducible interrelationship and fine-tuning: subject and object, animate and inanimate, complexly defined as animate and precisely defined as animate, analyst and analyzer, interior and exterior, implicit and explicit, the observed and the observed-in-response. In my frame space there is no background. There is only the scene of the action of the living—the complexly organizing dissipative world of Gaia, the universal body-conscious and causal movement upon the surprising attractor.

The boundaries dissolve. The boundaries of body, of world, of nature, of culture. The boundaries between uniqueness and universality, order (κόσμος) and chaos—that Joycean chaosmos, that non-equilibrium system which is the sum of chaos and cosmos, comprehensibility and incomprehensibility, intelligibility and its other, consciousness and body, inner and outer. Meriological, phenomenological, systemic boundaries of part and whole. Or rather: what, in general, is the mode and telos of the givenness of all of the above?

The question is not posed to be answered. It is posed to be inhabited. For the photographer, the frame is not a window but a membrane—a living interface through which the world and the self exchange their vital signatures. And in that exchange, the portrait becomes landscape, the landscape becomes portrait, and the Umwelt becomes not a prison of perception but a field of infinite reciprocity, wherein every glance is answered, every exposure is an embrace, and every image is a conversation between the seer and the seen, each shaping the other in the long, luminous duration of the gaze.