‘More-Than’ Human Senses and Sensations in a Time of Climate Change

The classic 1934 essay ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’ by Jakob Von Uexküll remains fresh and is continually in print. Why do we return to it? First, it opens out the consideration of the senses beyond our anthropocentric limitations. The perceptual world of other species, based on different arrangements of senses, is endlessly fascinating. Second, it reveals not just the perceptual differences, but what is shared between humans and nonhumans, that is, ‘interanimality’. As Merleau-Ponty remarks: “We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in the ineinander (intertwining) with the animal ...” (2003, 214). What happens if we consider a larger ecology of sensing beyond the individual human subject, then, one which accommodates both human and nonhuman perceptual worlds? This is also what cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others consider a “more-than human world”, and what Donna Haraway (2007) conceives as “multispecies entanglements”. Meanwhile, there are intriguing artistic experiments that seek to escape the replication of human sensing through digital technologies, looking to nonhuman bodies and experiences for inspiration. Are such experiments a productive strategy for grasping the effects of climate change on nonhuman species?