Jussi Parikka: Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010)

“Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an insect theory of media, one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien lifeworlds of insects.

Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for exploring the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Posthumanities Series 11
ISBN 0816667403, 9780816667406
320 pages

Review: Jennifer Gabrys (Mute).

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Ann Weinstone: Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism (2004)

“An ethically-based approach to human relations for the media age.

Otherness, alterity, the alien—over the course of the past fifty years many of us have based our hopes for more ethical relationships on concepts of difference. Combining philosophy, literary criticism, fiction, autobiography, and real and imagined correspondence, Ann Weinstone proposes that only when we stop ordering the other to be other—whether technological, animal, or simply inanimate—will we truly become posthuman.

Posthumanism has thus far focused nearly exclusively on human–technology relations. Avatar Bodies develops a posthumanist vocabulary for human-to-human relationships that turns our capacities for devotion, personality, and pleasure. Drawing on both the philosophies and practices of Indian Tantra, Weinstone argues for the impossibility of absolute otherness; we are all avatar bodies, consisting of undecidably shared gestures, skills, memories, sensations, beliefs, and affects.

Weinstone calls her book a “tantra”—by which she means a set of instructions for practices aimed at sensitizing the reader to the inherent permeability of self to other, self to world. This tantra for posthumanism elaborates devotional gestures that will expose us to more unfettered contacts and the transformative touch.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Electronic Mediations series, 10
ISBN 0816641463, 9780816641468
227 pages

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PDF (updated on 2018-6-6)

Timothy Morton: The Ecological Thought (2010)

“In this book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought.

In three chapters, Morton investigates the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of interconnected life forms—intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2010
ISBN 0674049209, 9780674049208
178 pages

Reviews: Gratton (Speculations, response), Coupe (Times Higher Education, response by Bryant), Hengstebeck (specs, 2011), Holmes (Journal of Ecocriticism, 2012), Watson (Interstitial, 2013), Muecke (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014).

Author’s blog
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PDF (updated on 2012-10-31)