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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 of
the world. It is said that one of Spinozas guilty pleasures was in capturing spiders and watching them fight, no doubt reinforcing
his sense that struggle is our natural condition. Henri Bergson based his theory of instinct on the insect, situating the six-legged
creature as an extra-linguistic, affective counterpoint to human intelligence. Jakob von Uexkulls tick illustrated his theory that an
organisms 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. And
Rosi Braidotti compounded their insight into a becoming woman/animal/insect, seeing queer affinities in the process of
metamorphosis 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 book
Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. It joins the deluge of recent works exploring the animality of human
life (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 its
relation to technology by recasting media theory through the most alien and other-worldly realm of animality, that of the insect. It
is no great insight that both organizational forms and discursive frames of the network societyi.e. the web or swarmshave
been borrowed from the insect world. Parikka, however, makes a much more theoretically ambitious proposal: we can better
understand our contemporary world of digital, distributed, mobile, ubiquitous connectivity by thinking about insects as media. Such
a claim may be initially perplexing, but becomes less so if you have ever watched foraging ants following pheromone trails or a
swarm 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). As
such, Parikka constructs his insect media by spinning together an assemblage of non/human bodies, forces, and potentials, in
conjunctions of becoming.
Insect Media can be situated in the broader movement of new materialism, insofar as it too embraces a more extensive
interpretation of the material, and related configurations of agency. That is, it takes a deeply non-anthropomorphic approach to
assemblages, to the forms of sociality, the kinds of agency, and communicative capacities engendered. Indeed, it contributes to
the debate around a politics of the human and non-human engaged by Jane Bennetts Vibrant Matter. Both works hold a strongly
non-anthropomorphic perspective, and make pertinent inquiries into the kinds of agency that are expressed in contemporary
assemblages. Bennett constructs a political ecology of things to foster more democratic relations therein; Parikka, on the other
hand, develops a media ecology of insects to foster a better understanding of the sensations, perceptions and ontologies of the
nonhuman milieus we inhabit.
He does so evincing a broad and sure interdisciplinary grasp, proceeding primarily on two fronts. First, he sustains a doggedly
historical focus, presenting a fascinating bestial media archaeology, particularly of the 19th century. This was a time of
wonderment, when insect biology, architecture, movement and rhythm modeled emerging machinic technology. Second, through
robust 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 our
mediated condition through the arthropods strange world of sensation and perception, and their powers of affect, motion, and
distributed agency. In short, the insect stands as Parikkas conceptual persona, tracing the plane of immanence on which our
increasingly distributed intelligence and affects interrelate in the nonhuman assemblages of our digitally networked world. The
suggestion is that we share this world in uncanny ways. How might you be like that swarm of bees when you, say, walk into a
crowded square, send TwitPics of the scene, and update your Facebook page with information about the movements of the
police and security forces? Both instances comprise a sensory, perceptual and communicative realm, and a kind of distributed
agency that exceed the bounds of the human at least as it is traditionally defined. Parikkas challenge is to demonstrate how the
artifice, or techne, that make up the mobile technology corresponds with the particular animality of insects. For the remainder, I
will outline how Insect Media addresses such questions and considering how insect media theory might be supplemented by

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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 as
machine-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 more
dynamic model of emergence and swarms that predominates today. In 1887, James penned What Is an Instinct? wherein he
brought 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 the
Jamesian instinct, which is a potentiality immanently actualized in its environment resonates deeply with Uexkull when decades
later he outlined the speed and slowness with which the tick intertwined with its environment. This is conceptually germane as it
complicates instinct as a kind of immanent response not categorically different from intelligence, but simply lacking the kind of
reflection memory would provide.
Bergson further nuanced this model of instinct in a manner foundational to Parikkas idea of insect media. He too posited an
insect body as relational, and more importantly, one wherein no distinction can be made between its tools and its body. Bergson
famously cites the example of a parasitoid wasp that strategically sting a caterpillar into submission, turning it into a living larder
for its larval offspring. Parikka brings Bergsons insight to a fine point: the way insects solve the problems of life is intimately tied
to the technics of their bodies immanent to their surroundings (128). In short, insect tools are the sensory capacities of its body
parts, and its technics are only ever immanently expressed. Thus it is a matter of instinct and immanence; respectively the
organisms response to its environment, and the profoundly recursive correlates between sensory capacity, bodily form, and
agency. In short, instinct is the relational bodys pre-intelligent response to its environment, a model equally applicable to ants and
wired 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 of
the human, for example, the natural-artificial binary, far less pressing. Instead, Parikkas insect media archaeology provides more
enriching connections between insects and machines, biology and technology, and the mechanical and environmental. Such new
coordinates are opportune for rethinking our relationship to technology, especially as Parikka positions insect media as a project
in support of what Deleuze called technics of nature. This entails a Spinozist approach wherein the plane of immanence is set by
the arrangement of affects and motion, and any difference between the parasitoid wasps fabricating caterpillars and cockroaches
into living larders, and humans which seem determined to use the whole of nature for fabrication is down to affective
capacitiesthat is, what related bodies can do. Nonetheless, a stubborn sense persists that unbreachable categorical
differences 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 could
more clearly position his insect media as nonhuman, as opposed to posthuman theory. The value in such a distinction is that his
entymological turn is not to show that the human is becoming insect after having been a stable, unified, rational being, but that
we never were that. The French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan supports this view that we never emerged naked, as it
were, 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, LeroiGourhan, whose worked has strongly marked that of other media theorists like Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B.N. Hansen, argues
that proto-humans were virtually no different than insects insofar as the most prehistoric tool use was, again using Parikkas
terms, 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 the
hand as if their brains and bodies had gradually exuded them (106). Leroi-Gourhan evokes insect media when he calls early
technicity a zoological fact as opposed to a product of the intellect. A case can be made, then, that the proto-human was as
much of a relational body as the insect, and, one whose technics were equally inseparable from their bodies. Space precludes
further discussion here, but rich opportunities remain regarding the roles of instinct and intelligence vis--vis technics, especially
contrasting 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 supporting
Parikkas project, ranging from Uexkull to Samuel Butler to Luciana Parisi to Keith Ansell Pearson. It is in an appropriately oblique
manner that Gilbert Simondon supports a heavy conceptual load in these pages. While Simondon is known for individuation and
transduction, the bulk of his work remains outside the ken of most English-language readers. Parikka helps to remedy this by
deftly deploying not only his concept of individuation, but by emphasizing the plasticity of the space in which it unfolds. He could
have made his kinship even clearer had he cited the Introduction to Simondons doctoral dissertation: Culture has become a
system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no
human reality. The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and
has no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality
that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man
and nature (11).

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Simondon, then, emphasizes the transformative and correlative nature of technical objects. Indeed, this takes us to the core of
Parikkas project: A primary characteristic of insects, metamorphosis, is transported to the heart of technics, and technics
becomes an issue of affects, relations, and transformations, not a particular substance (xxx). Here we see the overt political
potential 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 emerges
is beset by insect media.
Parikkas book, then, is also a work of media ethology, and he necessarily deploys diagrammatics for understanding insect
media affectivity, that is, for mapping what nonhuman assemblages can do. Given that insect media is a nonrepresentational
theory, intensities are key, and on the level of instinct, as discussed above, they are critical as they set thresholds for action. So if
you consider that our networked, distributed, mobile, digital world does, on a quotidian basis, what the conceptual persona of
insect media does, namely challenging the Kantian apperception of man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and
perception (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 Parikkas
project, it does not figure in practical detail. Adrian Mackenzies recent book Wirelessness, however, stands as a benchmark in
how this might be applied to such nonhuman assemblages. One small example might be that of the FNF Freedom Tower in
Zuccotti Park, constructed and used by the Occupy Wall Street movement. This specific instantiation of what Guattari once
quipped 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 thresholds
of 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 transpires
on levels of technical media. His inclusion, for example, of surrealist Roger Callois in his discussion of biopower is indicative of the
wide-ranging and impressively inclusive theoretical swathe the book cuts. However, the conceptual breadth and depth is not
always matched in applied detail. For example, there could have been greater clarity that life as an object of power, and as
processes of creative becoming were always a part of the biopower-biopolitical distinction made by Foucault and the latter
extensively expanded upon as the key political dimension by theorists such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato. As well, it is
regrettable that there was not greater application of insect media to particular nonhuman assemblages and their immersion in the
distributed networks of contemporary capitalism. Nonetheless, Parikka rightly concludes by emphasizing that what is at stake is
not 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 to
politics (xvi). At first glance, one would not necessarily expect that Parikkas conceptual insectariums would comprise such a vital
response to that lack. But indeed, it does, and the theoretical topology it reveals is robust enough to sustain a veritable infestation
of 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 research
project using mobile phones to do radical empiricism on mobility, location and information. Mark can be reached at mark.cote@vu.edu.au7

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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