Interspecific Temporalities: Crafting Common Rhythms

Abstract

Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt – the subjective world of an animal – is fundamental for contemporary biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. One of the essential elements of Umwelt is time. For Uexküll, all species perceive time differently due to the differing length of their moment – a ‘slice of time’ within which an organism can perceive no distinctions. However, Uexküll’s perspective limits explorations of nonhuman temporalities to species-specific, determined, and unchangeable time, hindering the analysis of interspecific and individual, changeable, and dynamic temporalities. In this chapter, I work with the concept of ‘E-series timing’ developed by Nomura et al. (Biosemiotics 13:347–367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-020-09398-5, 2020), referring to the intersubjective time dynamically created by living organisms through joint semiosis. First, using the insights from E-series timing theory, I propose a synthetic notion of ‘moment’ that integrates Uexküll’s original definition and Kull’s (Prog Biophys Mol Biol 119(3):616–621, 2015) concept of ‘specious present’ so as to arrive at the idea of a moment with flexible length, which consists of two fundamental decisions made by the organism. Secondly, I highlight the semiotic pertinence of the notion ‘time window’ – a gap or pause between turns – by comparing the concept of E-series timing with research on turn-taking in nonhuman animal communication. Flexibilizing the length of the time window leads to a multispecies temporality via analyzable joint separation of moments. Finally, I propose E-series timing as the best analytical tool to explain temporal synchronicity, which, as Tønnessen (Semiotica 2014(198):159–180, 2014) argues, is the core of Umwelt alignment.