coté mark-technological infestation-2012-human becoming insect_ parikka’s insect media

Technological InfestationHuman Becoming Insect:Parikkas Insect Media

Mark Cot (bio)Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 281 pp.US $25 (Paper). ISBN: 9780816667406

Insects have long comprised a minoritarian but important strand for thinking about the human condition and our perception ofthe world. It is said that one of Spinozas guilty pleasures was in capturing spiders and watching them fight, no doubt reinforcinghis sense that struggle is our natural condition. Henri Bergson based his theory of instinct on the insect, situating the six-leggedcreature as an extra-linguistic, affective counterpoint to human intelligence. Jakob von Uexkulls tick illustrated his theory that anorganisms perception of the world depended upon the recursive relations between its sensory capacities and its environment.Deleuze and Guattari, in part inspired by this, wrote enthusiastically of the wasp-orchid assemblage and of becoming insect. AndRosi Braidotti compounded their insight into a becoming woman/animal/insect, seeing queer affinities in the process ofmetamorphosis which, in turn, modeled an anti-essentialist feminist bodily materialism.

All of these strands, along with innumerable others, are deftly woven together by Jussi Parikka in his deeply scholarly bookInsect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. It joins the deluge of recent works exploring the animality of humanlife (cf. Vanessa Lemms Nietzsches Animal Philosophy) and is the 11th entry in the Posthumanities series edited by Cary Wolfe.Parikkas book is remarkable for its uncommon taxonomic turn, as it seeks to transmutate our understanding of the human and itsrelation to technology by recasting media theory through the most alien and other-worldly realm of animality, that of the insect. Itis no great insight that both organizational forms and discursive frames of the network societyi.e. the web or swarmshavebeen borrowed from the insect world. Parikka, however, makes a much more theoretically ambitious proposal: we can betterunderstand our contemporary world of digital, distributed, mobile, ubiquitous connectivity by thinking about insects as media. Sucha claim may be initially perplexing, but becomes less so if you have ever watched foraging ants following pheromone trails or aswarm of bees in search of a new hive and think of the complex, multi-directional and distributed flow of information unfolding.This is an expansive understanding of media as an ecology, as the contracting of sensations into a field of consistency (xxi). Assuch, Parikka constructs his insect media by spinning together an assemblage of non/human bodies, forces, and potentials, inconjunctions of becoming.

Insect Media can be situated in the broader movement of new materialism, insofar as it too embraces a more extensiveinterpretation of the material, and related configurations of agency. That is, it takes a deeply non-anthropomorphic approach toassemblages, to the forms of sociality, the kinds of agency, and communicative capacities engendered. Indeed, it contributes tothe debate around a politics of the human and non-human engaged by Jane Bennetts Vibrant Matter. Both works hold a stronglynon-anthropomorphic perspective, and make pertinent inquiries into the kinds of agency that are expressed in contemporaryassemblages. Bennett constructs a political ecology of things to foster more democratic relations therein; Parikka, on the otherhand, develops a media ecology of insects to foster a better understanding of the sensations, perceptions and ontologies of thenonhuman milieus we inhabit.

He does so evincing a broad and sure interdisciplinary grasp, proceeding primarily on two fronts. First, he sustains a doggedlyhistorical focus, presenting a fascinating bestial media archaeology, particularly of the 19th century. This was a time ofwonderment, when insect biology, architecture, movement and rhythm modeled emerging machinic technology. Second, throughrobust encounters with the aforementioned strand of insect logic, and a diverse group of media and cultural theorists, artists,scientists and cyberneticians, he explicates how we can consider an insect as a medium; specifically, that we can learn about ourmediated condition through the arthropods strange world of sensation and perception, and their powers of affect, motion, anddistributed agency. In short, the insect stands as Parikkas conceptual persona, tracing the plane of immanence on which ourincreasingly distributed intelligence and affects interrelate in the nonhuman assemblages of our digitally networked world. Thesuggestion is that we share this world in uncanny ways. How might you be like that swarm of bees when you, say, walk into acrowded square, send TwitPics of the scene, and update your Facebook page with information about the movements of thepolice and security forces? Both instances comprise a sensory, perceptual and communicative realm, and a kind of distributedagency that exceed the bounds of the human at least as it is traditionally defined. Parikkas challenge is to demonstrate how theartifice, or techne, that make up the mobile technology corresponds with the particular animality of insects. For the remainder, Iwill outline how Insect Media addresses such questions and considering how insect media theory might be supplemented by

Browse > Philosophy > Political Philosophy > Theory & Event > Volume 15, Issue 1, 2012

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insect political theory.

As noted, in the 19th century, while insects were avidly studied because of their amazing biology, they were seen asmachine-like, automated organisms, and hence apposite for thinking about technology. Parikkas insect media archaeology,however, uncovers the key roles played by both William James and Bergson in shifting perceptions of insect life toward the moredynamic model of emergence and swarms that predominates today. In 1887, James penned What Is an Instinct? wherein hebrought a more nuanced understanding of reflexivity as it relates to instincts. For both humans and non-humans, argued James,instincts are functional correlates of a structure (23) as opposed to simple, automated feedback loops. So we can see how theJamesian instinct, which is a potentiality immanently actualized in its environment resonates deeply with Uexkull when decadeslater he outlined the speed and slowness with which the tick intertwined with its environment. This is conceptually germane as itcomplicates instinct as a kind of immanent response not categorically different from intelligence, but simply lacking the kind ofreflection memory would provide.

Bergson further nuanced this model of instinct in a manner foundational to Parikkas idea of insect media. He too posited aninsect body as relational, and more importantly, one wherein no distinction can be made between its tools and its body. Bergsonfamously cites the example of a parasitoid wasp that strategically sting a caterpillar into submission, turning it into a living larderfor its larval offspring. Parikka brings Bergsons insight to a fine point: the way insects solve the problems of life is intimately tiedto the technics of their bodies immanent to their surroundings (128). In short, insect tools are the sensory capacities of its bodyparts, and its technics are only ever immanently expressed. Thus it is a matter of instinct and immanence; respectively theorganisms response to its environment, and the profoundly recursive correlates between sensory capacity, bodily form, andagency. In short, instinct is the relational bodys pre-intelligent response to its environment, a model equally applicable to ants andwired humans.

This manifests the benefits of giving media a nonhuman orientation. The deeper awareness it provides of our animality,particularly the strange and often unsettling realm of the insect, makes long-standing debates over the precious particularity ofthe human, for example, the natural-artificial binary, far less pressing. Instead, Parikkas insect media archaeology provides moreenriching connections between insects and machines, biology and technology, and the mechanical and environmental. Such newcoordinates are opportune for rethinking our relationship to technology, especially as Parikka positions insect media as a projectin support of what Deleuze called technics of nature. This entails a Spinozist approach wherein the plane of immanence is set bythe arrangement of affects and motion, and any difference between the parasitoid wasps fabricating caterpillars and cockroachesinto living larders, and humans which seem determined to use the whole of nature for fabrication is down to affectivecapacitiesthat is, what related bodies can do. Nonetheless, a stubborn sense persists that unbreachable categoricaldifferences separate our natural selves from technology.

Here, Parikka misses an opportunity to even more thoroughly imbricate the human into the technics of nature. Further, he couldmore clearly position his insect media as nonhuman, as opposed to posthuman theory. The value in such a distinction is that hisentymological turn is not to show that the human is becoming insect after having been a stable, unified, rational being, but thatwe never were that. The French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan supports this view that we never emerged naked, as itwere, from a primeval forest, our body in natural state of purity, free of the contaminates of technology, technics and media.Instead, using the parlance of Parikka, even our most primeval nature was always already crawling with insects. To clarify, Leroi-Gourhan, whose worked has strongly marked that of other media theorists like Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B.N. Hansen, arguesthat proto-humans were virtually no different than insects insofar as the most prehistoric tool use was, again using Parikkasterms, a matter of instinct and immanence. Leroi-Gourhan propounds that our ancestral bipedal turn set off a cascade of events,mostly morphological, which created conditions for the emergence of technics for the human. Its earliest instantiations, however,were more insect-like than human, as some 2.5 MYA, proto-humans began using sharp-edged stones as an extension of thehand as if their brains and bodies had gradually exuded them (106). Leroi-Gourhan evokes insect media when he calls earlytechnicity a zoological fact as opposed to a product of the intellect. A case can be made, then, that the proto-human was asmuch of a relational body as the insect, and, one whose technics were equally inseparable from their bodies. Space precludesfurther discussion here, but rich opportunities remain regarding the roles of instinct and intelligence vis--vis technics, especiallycontrasting the Bergsonian key of spatializing forms of knowledge to Leroi-Gourhans claim for technical exteriorization, that is,the tool as inorganic repository of memory.

Regardless, the originary technicity of Leroi-Gourhan remains highly symmetric with the rather catholic spandrels supportingParikkas project, ranging from Uexkull to Samuel Butler to Luciana Parisi to Keith Ansell Pearson. It is in an appropriately obliquemanner that Gilbert Simondon supports a heavy conceptual load in these pages. While Simondon is known for individuation andtransduction, the bulk of his work remains outside the ken of most English-language readers. Parikka helps to remedy this bydeftly deploying not only his concept of individuation, but by emphasizing the plasticity of the space in which it unfolds. He couldhave made his kinship even clearer had he cited the Introduction to Simondons doctoral dissertation: Culture has become asystem of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain nohuman reality. The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong andhas no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a realitythat is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between manand nature (11).


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Simondon, then, emphasizes the transformative and correlative nature of technical objects. Indeed, this takes us to the core ofParikkas project: A primary characteristic of insects, metamorphosis, is transported to the heart of technics, and technicsbecomes an issue of affects, relations, and transformations, not a particular substance (xxx). Here we see the overt politicalpotential in Parikkas project. The becoming, constitutive of any metamorphosis, is not only definitive of many insect life cycles,but constitutive to the process of individuation, and to myriad politics. Furthermore, technics is equally constitutive to this process.This space, which Parikka calls unfolding individuation (201) is an insect medium, in that it is a pre-intelligent realm of instinct.So it is not just that the human is not natural, in its purportedly unified and natural state, but that the ground from which it emergesis beset by insect media.

Parikkas book, then, is also a work of media ethology, and he necessarily deploys diagrammatics for understanding insectmedia affectivity, that is, for mapping what nonhuman assemblages can do. Given that insect media is a nonrepresentationaltheory, intensities are key, and on the level of instinct, as discussed above, they are critical as they set thresholds for action. So ifyou consider that our networked, distributed, mobile, digital world does, on a quotidian basis, what the conceptual persona ofinsect media does, namely challenging the Kantian apperception of man as the historically constant basis of knowledge andperception (9), then the political importance of mapping and unpacking those assemblages becomes clear.

Radical empiricism, so richly developed by Brian Massumi, is one way to do this. While this approach deeply informs Parikkasproject, it does not figure in practical detail. Adrian Mackenzies recent book Wirelessness, however, stands as a benchmark inhow this might be applied to such nonhuman assemblages. One small example might be that of the FNF Freedom Tower inZuccotti Park, constructed and used by the Occupy Wall Street movement. This specific instantiation of what Guattari oncequipped was how machines talk to machines before they talk to humans opens important perspectives on nonhuman actors,especially in distributed organization. In turn, it gives us insight into how the coordinates of such assemblages create thresholdsof readiness for action.

One final political dimension to insect media theory is biopower, which Parikka stresses as a key theme of his book. Indeed,one of its singular achievements is the unique perspective it offers for rethinking just how the intensive creation of life transpireson levels of technical media. His inclusion, for example, of surrealist Roger Callois in his discussion of biopower is indicative of thewide-ranging and impressively inclusive theoretical swathe the book cuts. However, the conceptual breadth and depth is notalways matched in applied detail. For example, there could have been greater clarity that life as an object of power, and asprocesses of creative becoming were always a part of the biopower-biopolitical distinction made by Foucault and the latterextensively expanded upon as the key political dimension by theorists such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato. As well, it isregrettable that there was not greater application of insect media to particular nonhuman assemblages and their immersion in thedistributed networks of contemporary capitalism. Nonetheless, Parikka rightly concludes by emphasizing that what is at stake isnot merely the merciless capture by capital but the creative and intensive potentialities of becoming.

I will conclude by recalling a lament expressed by Bennett over the lack of robust debate over how materiality matters topolitics (xvi). At first glance, one would not necessarily expect that Parikkas conceptual insectariums would comprise such a vitalresponse to that lack. But indeed, it does, and the theoretical topology it reveals is robust enough to sustain a veritable infestationof future political inquiry and application.

Mark Cot Mark Cot is a Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. He is currently undertaking a new researchproject using mobile phones to do radical empiricism on mobility, location and information. Mark can be reached at [email protected]

Works Cited

Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press: 2010.

Andre Leroi-Gourhan. Gesture and Speech. MIT Press: 1993.

Adrian Mackenzie. Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Culture. MIT Press: 2010.

Gilbert Simondon (trans. Ninian Mellamphy). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Western Ontario: 1980

Copyright 2012 Mark Cot and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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