Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archeology of

Animals and Technology

Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
281 pages

Beatrice Marovich
Drew University

he particular genius of insects

has long been a point of fascination and awe (perhaps, at times,
even envy) for the human animal. In his early 20th century
meditation on the life of bees, novelist Maurice Maeterlink
found himself bedazzled by the calculating brilliance of these
instinctually mathematical creatures. They act, he wrote, as
if acquainted with [the] principles of solid geometry and,
thus, follow them most accurately.1 How could, he seems
to ask, these little brutes have figured these mind tricks out?
How could they so effectively actualize, and concretize (in
the form, say, of a honeycomb), an abstract problematic over
which our agile human brains might agonize?
If the latent humanism of this rumination offends the
sensibilities of 21st century readers, Jussi Parikkas Insect
Mediaan entomologically attuned bestialization of media
theorymight be aimed, more directly, to please. Most recent in the University of Minnesotas Posthumanities Series
(which includes Donna Haraways When Species Meet, Robert
Espositos Bios, and Isabelle Stengers Cosmopolitics I & II among
1
Maeterlinks The Life of the Bee (1901) as quoted in Jussi Parikka, Insect
Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010), 46.

340

Beatrice Marovich Review of Insect Media

a host of others) it is a text similarly undone by, and absorbed
with, the capacious activity of insects. But it is not, to be sure,
a romantic or anthropocentric account of insect life. It is,
instead, a rather even-handed assessment of the ambivalent
deployment of what Parikka (a Reader in Media Theory and
History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge) calls
insect affect in (and as) the digital technology that swarms
within, and around, our corporeal life.
The capacity of insects to act in concert as packs, collectives, multiplicities, has made them appear paradigmatic of
the distributed intelligence of our digital era. The ethological
figure of the swarm is a ubiquitous analogue of the shape, and
configuration, of the networked social. The American military
has been keen to, for example, develop cyborg insects that
might work like miniscule spies in swarm configurationideal
agents for a world in which alleged enemies congeal into
incomprehensible, shifting forms that escape the capture of
traditional intelligence. Theorists like Eugene Thacker and
Alexander Galloway have already explored the biodigitization of swarm structure in contemporary technoscience,2
but Parikka is attempting to build on, and complicate, this
work in order to develop a media archaeology of insect life.
Digging through intellectual and entomological relics dating
back to the 19th century, Parikka charges that the coupling of
insects and technology is not new. It is not, simply, a meeting
of forms that dates back to post-1980s cybernetics. Instead,
he argues, a kind of insect logic has been configuring and
dehumanizing our relations with technology for more than
a century.
Parikkas project seeks to establish this insect logic within a
blended and entangled ecology where the boundaries between
insect and media are difficult to discern. Here he builds on
his earlier media ecological theory in Digital Contagions: A
Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Peter Lang, 2007)a
similar entwining of the biological and technological. Me2
See, for example: Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit:
A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

341

Speculations II
dia, Parikka argues now, is most basically a contraction of
forces of the world into specific resonating milieus.3 Media
works, in his method, as a contraction and intensification
of the environment. Both animals and more conventional
media forms, he argues, can serve as such intensifications.
Thus, animals can suggestively broaden our sense of what
media actually is, and how it functions. A digital network is
not, perhaps, a media form that mimics the natural world.
Instead, a digital network and a collective of insects might be
two forms of media that illuminate the work and function of
technology. Insectsas contractions of an environmentare
media. This is the crucial speculative wager on which Parikkas
insect logic rests.
His theoretical influences are numerous and varied but
the project rests heavily on the intensities, assemblages, and
diagrammatics of Deleuze and Guattari, and their readings
of figures such as Bergson, Spinoza, Whitehead, and the early
20th century German ethologist Jakob von Uexkll. Feminist
theorists Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti make frequent
appearances, especially toward the latter half of the book, as
does the work of Gilbert Simondon. Parikkas recovery of 19th
century entomological sources (such as the theology-heavy
work of pre-Darwinian naturalists like William Kirby and
William Spence) give off, from time to time, a weird baroque
aroma.
The chapters of the books amount to a series of case studies
in which Parikka seeks to substantiate the effect and function of this insect logic. The first half of the book is dense
in the historical, genealogical, archaeological work. Chapter
One dwells in the 19th century, with theologically inspired
entomologists who liken insects to angels, and early pioneers
of insect media such as chronophotographer Etienne-Jules
Marey whose La Machine Animale (1873) tracked his attempts
to package insect movement into practical machines. Technology was making insects more visible, to human eyes, than
3
Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.

342

Beatrice Marovich Review of Insect Media

ever before and their efficient bodies were, in turn, already
serving as technological models and molds. Chapter Two
looks at early discourses of insects as natures non-Euclidean
geometersenviable builders, architects, engineers of form.
The hive and swarm-like shape of media questions the assumption that the digital is fundamentally algorithmic, Parikka
intimates that insect habit underscores the ways in which
algorithms and sensual form are mutually immanent. Chapter
Three, an extended meditation on Jakob von Uexklls work
in animal perception, is something of a departurea bit of
a deep theoretical distraction from the genealogical project.
While this work on perception becomes crucial for the following chapter, the complex web of theory and history that
Parikka weaves seems to strain a bit at this point under the
pressure. In Chapter Four hes thinking alongside early 20th
century surrealists who were using new film technology to
visually amplify insect (and, more generally, animal) affect
into human perceptual worlds. The work of Roger Callois is
particularly influential, here, as it impacted the surrealists
(and Lacan) as well as contemporary game theory. These early
attempts to illuminate and expand the work of technology
seem to suggestively set the ground for the late 20th century
digitization of insect affect.
The second half of the book leaps forward into the postwwii context, exploring the (perhaps) more historically
familiar boom in cybernetic and digital discourses and the
subsequent intensification of relations between biological
and technological forms of life. This is where, it might be easy
to assume, interest in the technological potential of swarms
first began to develop. But in Chapter Five Parikka reminds
us that pioneers of cybernetics, such as Norbert Wiener, were
also initially quite interested in early entomological research
and the cybernetic potential of insect life. Parikka also spends
time looking at Karl von Frischs research into bee dancing as
a form of communication (in the early 1950s) as a discursive
expansion of the embodied social lives of insects, and the
initial attempts to deploy animal affect in robotic technologies (such as, especially, the work of W. Grey Walter and his
343

Speculations II
robotic tortoise). Chapter Six explores more recent and explicit couplings of biology and technology. Beginning with a
discussion of neo-Darwinian discourses on insects in digital
culture (such as Richard Dawkins biomorphs) Parikka ends
with an expressed preference for the collective shape of Craig
Reynolds boids and swarm algorithms. In Chapter Seven,
the potentially frightening inhumanism of insect media is
more explicitly inhabited and plugged transgressively into
forms of desire and sexual selection. Parikka offers a reading of Lynn Hershman-Leesons film Teknolust (2002)the
fictional quest of a female scientist and her self-replicating
automatons (all played by Tilda Swinton) for a little TLC. Pulling
from the work of cyberfeminists and thinkers of corporeality
beyond the human (such as Luciana Parisi and Rosi Braidotti)
Parikka seems to want to derail the heavy militarization of
insect media, suggestively pairing his bestialization of media
with cyberfeminist propositions that software also needs a
bit of intimacy and cuddling.4 The figures and forms of an
insect media are not always and already the front of a new
and incomprehensible battleperhaps they need love, too.
The nonhuman nature of media does not, necessarily, present us with a terrifying anti-humanism.
While this last chapter might be the most seductive, I
think it also exposes what I find the most crucial weakness
of Insect Media. In spite of the sometimes awkward and
challenging pairing of history and theory, the insect logic
Parikka advances seems to hang together and present itself
wellthroughout the textin the evocative abstract. Insects
offer a useful method through which to bestialize media, to
make its animal functions more apparent. But in Parikkas
reading of Teknolust the actual bodies of insects disappear
from the text. The wings, the hives, the hairy legs, the actual
sound of a swarm of mosquitoes out for a bit of blood disappear behind the more appealing form of Tilda Swinton and
her fictional automatons. To charge, through the mediation
of her form and figure, that software needs love too is easy.
Parikka, Insect Media, 191.

344

Beatrice Marovich Review of Insect Media

But intimacy with insect life will, I think, always be a more
difficult proposition. We might eat their sweet, sweet honey
or recognize their awesome mathematical executions. But
insects are more than figures, they work beyond logic too,
and the undeniable revolt of mammal flesh against the
incisive cut of an insect isalsoan important fact to take
into consideration. Parikka, generally, shows a willingness
to blend the affects of particular insects together, and the
affective potency of insects into that of animals. He creates
a brilliant set of figures through which to read media. But I
would only hope that the figures dont threaten to overshadow
the actual insects.
What Parikka ultimately does, however, is to pose an interpretive challenge. And I think he does this well. Additional,
perhaps tantalizing, speculative questionsthat he may not
ask outrightemerge from his research. If insects are indeed
media, for example, how much might the hive-live, swarmlike nature of our digital technology reflect their enterprising
colonization of human actors?

345