Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology by Jussi Parikka (review)

In his 2007 book Digital Contagions: A Media Archeology of Computer Viruses, Finnish media theorist Jussi Parikka argued that biological concepts can be applied to natural and technological systems—such as biological and computer viruses—because these systems are both based on interactions between bodies and environments that “resonate together” and “infect each other” [1]. Indeed, according to Spinozan-Deleuzian philosophy, there is no difference between nature and technology, as both of these terms refer to the same basic interaction between bodies and environments. The same premise also informs Parikka’s 2010 book Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology, which similarly argues that biological concepts can be applied to animals and technologies because both of these entities consist of forces that interact with their environment. In short, Insect Media outlines a posthuman media theory that blurs the boundaries between the natural and the technological, the human and the non-human, and the living and the non-living.

The notion that insects and media are similar is certainly not new. In his 1941 essay “On Popular Music,” for example, German sociologist Theodor Adorno famously employed insects as a metaphor to describe the passivity of popular music listeners who “are deprived of any residues of free will … and tend to produce passive reactions to what is given them and to become mere centers of socially conditioned reflexes.” Adorno was particularly interested in a popular dance known as the “jitterbug” because he believed that this entomological term referred to “an insect who has the jitters, who is attracted passively by some given stimulus,” and therefore “the comparison of men with insects betokens the recognition that they have been deprived of autonomous will” [2]. More recent critics, like Kevin Kelly (past editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and Wired), have also used insects as a positive metaphor to describe the sense of connectedness provided by modern media networks: “Networked computers will be the main shaper of humans in the future. … Global opinion polling in real-time 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ubiquitous telephones, asynchronous e-mail, 500 TV channels, video on demand: all these add up to the matrix for a glorious network culture, a remarkable hivelike being” [3]. Media theorists have thus deployed insect metaphors in many different ways, yet Parikka explicitly rejects the notion of “insect media” as a metaphor. Instead, he is primarily concerned with how insects can be understood as technologies and how technologies can be understood as living, non-human entities.

The first half of the book focuses on the notion of insects as media by reexamining the discourses of entomology and ethology as histories of technology. Through close readings of works by William Kirby and William Spence, Etienne-Jules Marey, Jakob von Uexküll and Roger Caillois, Parikka explores the concept of “insect technics” or “the becoming technical of the insect” (xxvi). In order to explain how insects can be considered technical, Parikka primarily focuses on three concepts: instinct, swarming and metamorphosis. First, he employs Henri Bergson’s theory of instinct as a “non-reflexive, continuous folding with the world” (17) to show that a body is a “natural tool,” which blurs the distinction between an instrument and its user (20). Insects vividly illustrate this idea, as their bodies function as “instinctual machines” rather than prosthetic extensions of a controlling consciousness (24). Second, Parikka explores the concept of swarming as an assemblage of “affects” or “intensities” that “organize the multiple into a relational whole” (47). In other words, each unit in a swarm exists only in terms of its relations to the whole and it is thus “co-created at the same time as [its] environmental relations” (xiv). Third, Parikka examines the concept of metamorphosis or the temporality of insects, which are “continuously on the verge of becoming … but also dissolving” (59). By describing insects as assemblages...