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Insect Media
Ca ry Wolfe, Ser ies Editor

11 Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology

Jussi Parikka
10 Cosmopolitics II
Isabelle Stengers
9 Cosmopolitics I
Isabelle Stengers
8 What Is Posthumanism?
Cary Wolfe
7 Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic
John Protevi
6 Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times
Nicole Shukin
5 Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics
David Wills
4 Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy
Roberto Esposito
3 When Species Meet
Donna J. Haraway
2 The Poetics of DNA
Judith Roof
1 The Parasite
Michel Serres
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Insect Technics: Intensities of
Animal Bodies,” in An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/
Guattari, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2008), 339–62; reprinted with permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Parts
of chapter 2 were previously published in “Politics of Swarms: Translations between
Entomology and Biopolitics,” Parallax 14, no. 3 (2008): 112–24; permission to reprint
is granted by Taylor and Francis, Ltd. Chapter 7 is a revision of “Insects, Sex, and
Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Teknolust,” Postmodern Culture 17, no. 2
(January 2007).

Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parikka, Jussi, 1976–
Insect media : an archaeology of animals and technology / Jussi Parikka.
p. cm. — (Posthumanities ; v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6739-0 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-6740-6
(pb : alk. paper)
1. Swarm intelligence. 2. Insects—Behavior—mathematical models.
3. Bionics. I. Title.
Q337.3.P36 2010
595.709—dc22
2010035074

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION Insects in the Age of Technology ix

1 NINETEENTH- CENTURY INSECT TECHNICS 1

The Uncanny Affects of Insects
2 GENESIS OF FORM 27
Insect Architecture and Swarms
3 TECHNICS OF NATURE AND TEMPORALITY 57
Uexküll’s Ethology
4 METAMORPHOSIS, INTENSITY, AND DEVOURING SPACE 85
Elements for an Insect Game Theory
Intermezzo 113

5 ANIMAL ENSEMBLES, ROBOTIC AFFECTS 121

Bees, Milieus, and Individuation
6 BIOMORPHS AND BOIDS 145
Swarming Algorithms
7 SEXUAL SELECTION IN THE BIODIGITAL 169
Teknolust and the Weird Life of SRAs

EPILOGUE Insect Media as an Art of Transmutation 195

Notes 207
Index 271
This page intentionally left blank
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Even if I do not particularly enjoy insects, working with this book was a
joy. I had already had the chance to work with the underbelly of media
theory with my earlier virus-related project and my more recent book on
“spam cultures,” but Insect Media gave me the opportunity to elaborate
and continue theoretical and media archaeological ideas that were giv-
ing glimpses of their insectoid faces.
Nothing is possible without creative surroundings and a network of
people with both intelligence and instinct who generously offer advice
and support. Institutionally, this book started while I was finishing my
Ph.D. thesis for the Department of Cultural History at the University
of Turku in Finland, and my background in the department is still very
much visible in this book. I have an obsession to “historicize,” although
I never felt like being a proper historian. I thank warmly many former
colleagues and the excellent e-library collections that allowed me to
find quirky sources from the nineteenth century (and earlier) and that
supported me in my academic perversions. Via the Department of
Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, I moved to Anglia Ruskin
University in Cambridge, where innovative colleagues ensured a good
working atmosphere while I adjusted to the peculiarities of the British
higher education system. A warm thank you to all of you who made me
feel welcome and offered support with this project.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

While Anglia Ruskin’s Department of English, Communication, Film,

and Media was my primary everyday context, through a range of other
people and institutions I was able to obtain important feedback and tips
that (in)formed my budding ideas into a book. In no particular order, I
thank Milla Tiainen, Pasi Väliaho, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Ilona Hongisto,
Teemu Taira, Olli Pyyhtinen, Matthew Fuller, Michael Goddard, Joss
Hands, Sean Campbell, Eric Kluitenberg, Charlie Gere, Seb Franklin,
Thomas Elsaesser, Jukka Sihvonen, Trond Lundemo, Juri Nummelin,
Erkki Huhtamo, Alan Winfield, Craig Reynolds, Steven Shaviro, Tony
D. Sampson, Floris Paalman, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Garnet Hertz,
Gary Genosko, Tina Kendall, Tanya Horeck, and Sarah Barrow. I hope I
did not forget too many; as always, there is a swarm.
Without the supportive feedback of Douglas Armato at the University
of Minnesota Press and Cary Wolfe’s supportive and perceptive role as
the series editor for Posthumanities, I would have been lost. Thanks
also to Danielle Kasprzak for responding to my endless questions so
promptly. I also thank the anonymous referees for critical but affirmative
and encouraging comments.
Financially, I thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for a six-month
research grant during the early phases of research.
A special and warm thank you goes as always to Milla: we hate insects
and spiders together but love things material, not least cultural theory.
 INTRODUCTION
Insects in the Age of Technology

. . . cultural and technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for
the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The industrial
age defined as the age of insects. . . .
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

There is an entire genealogy to be written from the point of view of the

challenge posed by insect coordination, by “swarm intelligence.” Again and
again, poetic, philosophical, and biological studies ask the same question:
how does this “intelligent,” global organization emerge from a myriad of
local, “dumb” interactions?
—Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit

FROM CYBORGS TO INSECTS

First, a practical exercise. Pick up an entomology book; something such

as Thomas Eisner’s For the Love of Insects from a couple of years back
will do fine, or an older book from the nineteenth century, like John
Lubbock’s On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special
Reference to Insects (1888) suits the purpose as well. However, do not read
the book as a description of the biology of those tiny insects or solely as
an excavation of the microcosmic worlds of entomology. Instead, if you
approach it as media theory, it reveals a whole new world of sensations,
perceptions, movements, stratagems, and patterns of organization that
work much beyond the confines of the human world.
Of course, in a way this has already been done. Some years ago the

ix
x Introduction

American research agency DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency), in the past responsible for various high-tech army
gadgets, revealed information about its aspirations to fabricate cyborg
insects. DARPA was criticized and ridiculed quite soon because of this
imaginative, to say the least, plan of harnessing these simple forms of
life as part of the most developed military machine the world has ever
seen. The idea was to insert electronic devices into insect pupae. The so-
called MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) system was designed
to smoothen as part of the body structure of the animal during later
metamorphoses. The cyborg insect could be then controlled and used as
a spy tool for army covert operations. Who would suspect a lone moth
or a bumblebee?1
The connection between insects and high-tech war was not altogether
new. Some years earlier, in the midst of fears of terrorists and cyber-
hackers, swarms were identified as future models of conflict: “from ants
and bees and wolf packs, to ancient Parthians and medieval Mongols.”2
Insect organization was creeping into the most high-tech area of the con-
temporary world, the U.S. military, which was making use of ideas of
nonlinearity, small tactical units, and network-oriented models of action.
Not only the military was picking up entomology books; insects were
being discussed in various other fields of media, communication, and
digital design and theory as well. In visual systems, insects’ compound
eyes represented a powerful example of biologically inspired computa-
tion. Biomimetics was opening up a new field in engineering naturelike
behavior such as locomotion, navigation, and vision. 3 Insects’ wide field
of view was attracting a great deal of research interest from players de-
veloping medical, industrial, and military applications.4 Artists such as
Garnet Hertz (designer of a cockroach-controlled robot), Toshio Iwai
(“Music Insects”), and Mira Calix (a composer working with insect
sounds) were engaging with similar questions as well, using insects to
think through high-tech creation. Experimental video works such as
the bizarre narrative of David Blair’s online film Wax, or The Discovery
of Television among the Bees (1991) ties together military development,
insects, and high-tech telecommunications media. 5
Suddenly the cyborg as imagined since the 1980s in theory and fic-
tion seemed quite old-fashioned. This shift was not altogether dismiss-
ing the human being and its perceptive and cognitive capabilities: the
 Introduction xi

two-handed and -legged brainy animal was seen to demonstrate distinct

powers in visual (recognizing edges, seeing contrasts, differentiating be-
tween dimensional entities) and tactile (the hand) faculties. Yet a much
less brainy entity, the insect, was a powerful new kind of model for de-
signing artificial agents that expressed complex behavior, not through
pre-programming and centralization but through autonomy, emergence,
and distributed functioning.6 Since the 1980s, such terms as swarms, dis-
tributed intelligence, and insect models of organization have infiltrated
both the design of digital technologies and cultural theoretical analysis
of such media systems. Yet, as researchers commented, “The most tal-
ented roboticist in the world is not going to come close to what a cock-
roach can do.” 7
One of the most discussed contexts for such a cultural and scientific
reorientation in terms of design practices and plans was artificial intel-
ligence (AI) research. New ideas in cognitive science seemed to offer the
most convincing explanations of the potential for tapping into the simple
architectures already developed by nature. “Intelligence is overrated,”
such research paradigms seemed implicitly to suggest. The approach,
which focused on the redundancy of numerous “dumb” machines, em-
phasized that

1. there is no need for planning;

2. no need for central representation;
3. our traditional ways of modeling the world for the actors are impractical
and unnecessary;
4. we should pay more close attention to biology and evolution;
5. One should focus on building real, concrete solutions, not merely theo-
retical models. 8

In robotics, MIT professor Rodney Brooks noted in the late 1980s that
artificial agents do not have to resemble or act like humans; there are
much more efficient ways of doing complex tasks than by modeling intel-
ligent machines. Brooks designed insectlike robots, and in his 1989 paper
“Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” coauthored by Anita Flynn, he in-
troduced the idea of using insectlike mobots as space exploration agents
instead of large “intelligent” ones.9 Douglas Hofstadter had already used
xii Introduction

the notion of the ant colony to pave the way for a rethinking of cognition
as distributed “mass communication” between miniagents,10 but Brooks
deployed a similar insect metaphor: no central command but massive
parallelism and cooperation.
Such research in “new AI” had many parallels in the emerging arti-
ficial life sciences, which, however, dealt mostly with software. The ap-
proaches were kicked off by researchers such as Christopher Langton.
In that context, and in the midst of the emerging digital software culture
of the 1980s, the field of programming also gained much from the scien-
tific theories of artificial life. In software and network processes, simple
but interconnected agents had been planned since the 1960s. Nowadays
everybody knows viruses and worms by name, but the fact that we are
thinking them in terms of parallel processing and artificial life is often less
emphasized. Yet such program types, which span computer boundaries
as “parasite computing,” are exemplary of software that acts in a manner
reminiscent of insect colonies: individually dumb, but highly efficient
when coupled with their environment. The ideas of distributing artificial
actors into insectlike colonies of part functions and parallel processing
represented a move toward situatedness but also embodiment: robots
are in the world, and their actions are enabled and controlled by the very
present environment. This could be seen as signaling a kind of ethologi-
cal turn in creating artificial agents, because such ideas were reminiscent
of those of animal ethologists such as Jakob von Uexküll’s in work from
the 1920s: artificial actors are embedded in a perceptual world, which
implies that what we perceive is what we are, and animals and artificial
agents are defined by the capabilities of perception, sensation, and orien-
tation in their environment.11
The ethological and ecological interests spread quickly to cultural
and media theory as well, with writers embracing swarms and termites
as relevant to leftist politics (Hardt and Negri), insects as figures impor-
tant for material feminism (Braidotti), and notions such as packs and
“nonanthropomorphic intelligence” as key terms for a biophilosophy of
the contemporary network culture (Thacker).12

Strange Sensations of Insect Media

The aim of Insect Media is to dig into this field of insects and media and
cultural theory that seems to have emerged during recent decades. Yet,
 Introduction xiii

because I am infected with a historical obsession, my aim is to dig deeper.

It might be more coherent to offer an analysis of the interconnections
of such models, concepts, and diagrams of insects, viroids, and media
since the 1980s, but my contention is that it proves fruitful to stretch
this analysis on a wider temporal scale and begin with an analysis of ani-
mal worlds of the nineteenth century. In other words, the fascination
with simple forms of life such as insects, viruses, and the like has been
interfaced with media design and theory for years now, but nineteenth-
century entomology, and various other cultural discourses and practices
since then, have hailed the powers of insects as media in themselves, ca-
pable of weird affect worlds, strange sensations, and uncanny potentials
that cannot immediately be pinpointed in terms of a register of known
possibilities. Hence the task of the book is twofold: first, to look at media
as insects and see what kinds of theoretical modulations we can come up
with if we extend further the recent decades of obsession with insectlike
models of media, and second, to analyze the archaeology of the recent
figurations in terms of “insects as media,” a cultural historical theme that
can be catalyzed into media theoretical implications as well.
My aim is not to write a linear history of insects and media but to offer
some key case studies, all of which address a transposition between insects
(and other simple forms of life) and media technologies. The translations
among different modern sciences (biology, entomology, technology) are
coupled with a philosophically tuned cultural analysis that offers new
ways to think of the bestiality of media technologies as intensive poten-
tials. So when I refer to a work of “translation,” it is not to awaken ideas of
the metaphoricity of technology but to point to how specific figures such
as “insects” are continuously distributed across a social field not merely as
denotations of a special class of icky animals but as carriers of intensities
(potentials) and modes of aesthetic, political, economic, and technologi-
cal thought. Translation, then, is not a linguistic operation without resi-
due but a transposition,13 and a much more active operation on levels of
nondiscursive media production, as becomes especially evident when ap-
proaching the end of the twentieth century and the use of insect models
of organization in computer science and digital culture.
In a parallel move, the book implicitly questions the definition of
media in itself. In fact, the notion of media is broadened from technolo-
gies and uses of mass communication to various processes that are often
xiv Introduction

not even mentioned in media studies textbooks. Yet faculties of trans-

mission, recording, and connecting can be found in various places. Stones
and geological formations are recordings of the slow passing of time and
the turbulence of matter-energy. Plants and animals constitute their
being through various modes of transmission and coupling with their
environment. They contract the forces of the cosmos into environmental
relations, couplings, which is perhaps not a reflective (human) relation
but is still a lived one of relations actual and virtual (potential).14 Media,
then, in this book, are not only a technology, a political agenda, or an
exclusively human theme. Media are a contraction of forces of the world
into specific resonating milieus: internal milieus with their resonation,
external milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation. An
animal has to find a common tune with its environment, and a technol-
ogy has to work through rhythmic relations with other force fields such
as politics and economics. In this context, sensations, percepts, and af-
fects become the primary vectors through which entities are co-created
at the same time as their environmental relations.
In other words, there is a whole cosmology of media technologies that
spans much more of time than the human historical approach suggests.
In this sense, insects and animals provide an interesting case of how to
widen the possibilities to think media and technological culture. They
are contractions of the world and organizations into environmental rela-
tions and milieus. This is not meant to be read as a sociobiological cele-
bration of the superiority of nature as a deterministic machine to which
we should adapt. Nature is not a model to be followed but a toolbox or a
storehouse of invention, as has been voiced since the nineteenth century
in the context of biology but also that of experimental work in techno-
logical discourses.

A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGICAL TWIST

This idea of focusing on the joint history of media and nature can be
seen as a kind of twisted media archaeology.15 It does not try to exca-
vate lost histories of present technologies but rather, by its temporal
realigning, looks for conceptual cuts through which to open up new
agendas of research and analysis. In my take, this methodological clue
leads to a rethinking of the various senses and rationalities inherent in
 Introduction xv

techno-logy and bio-logy. Bestial media archaeology, as addressed in this

book, is a means by which to look at the immanent conditions of possibility of
the current insect theme in media design and theory; to question the supposed
newness of the coupling of (seemingly) simple animal behavior with media
technologies; to look for the longer duration of this phenomenon; to present
important case studies of this history of insect media that do not merely repre-
sent the past of this specific “idea” but offer important philosophical interven-
tions into how we habitually think about media, technology, and the conjoin-
ing and differences of animal and nonorganic life. The chapters that follow
demonstrate how insects have been short-circuited as part of philosophi-
cal, engineering, and scientific concerns regarding media systems since
the nineteenth century.
Examples from nineteenth-century popular discourse are illustrative.
In 1897 the New York Times addressed spiders as “builders, engineers and
weavers” and also as the “original inventors of a system of telegraphy.”
For such Victorian writers, spiders’ webs offered themselves as ingenious
communication systems that do not merely signal according to a binary
setting (something has hit the web or has not hit the web) but transmit
information regarding the “general character and weight of any object
touching it.”16 Similar accounts have abounded since the mid-nineteenth
century. Insects sense, move, build, communicate, and even create art in
various ways that raised wonder and awe, for example, in U.S. popular
culture. An apt example of the nineteenth-century insect mania is the
story about the “cricket mania” of a young lady who collected and trained
crickets as musical instruments:
200 crickets in a wirework-house, filled with ferns and shells, which she
called a “fernery.” The constant rubbing of the wings of these insects,
producing the sounds so familiar to thousands everywhere seemed to be
the finest music to her ears. She admitted at once that she had a mania for
capturing crickets.17

In the nineteenth century, insects infiltrated popular culture as fash-

ion figures—literally, as in the case of the beetle dresses and insect hats
of the Victorian era (especially between the 1850s and the 1880s).18
In popular entomology books such as the classic An Introduction to
Entomology; or, Elements of the Natural History of Insects: Comprising
an Account of Noxious and Useful Insects, of Their Metamorphoses, Food,
xvi Introduction

Stratagems, Habitations, Societies, Motions, Noises, Hybernation, Instinct,

etc. etc. (originally four volumes, 1815–1826), insects are approached
as engineers, architects, and tinkerers of the microscopic world. They are
marveled at due to their powers of affect, sensing, and motion—for in-
stance, their ability to fly, for which they were appropriated as models of
the aspiring branch of motion engineering, as were spiders (which were
back then counted as insects):
What will you say, if I tell you that these webs (at least many of them) are
airballoons and that the aeronauts are not “lovers who may bestride the
gossamer / That idles in the wanton summer air / And yet not fall,” but
spiders, who, long before Montgolfier, nay, ever since the creation, have
been in the habit of sailing through the fields of ether in these air-light
chariots.19

In another passage of the book, spiders are referred to as having electric

capabilities, with the authors arguing that “there is a mode . . . in which
some geometric spiders shoot and direct their threads, and fly upon
them; by which it appears that as they dart them out they guide them as
if by magic, emitting at the same time a stream of air, . . . or possibly some
subtile electric fluid.”20
Modern media were constantly present in the animal world and in
the physiological research of animal bodies, understood as wire sys-
tems.21 It is no wonder, then, that the famous entomologist J. H. Fabre
speculated in 1911 whether moths, too—the great peacock moths, to be
exact—were capable of wireless telegraphy, of “Hertzian vibrations of
the ether.”22 Though Fabre quickly came to the conclusion that the curi-
ous communication of the moths did not result from modulating electric
or magnetic waves, the mere fact that he considered such a link is worth
mentioning.
Despite various examples, in most histories and theories of media the
centrality of the human being has persisted since the early nineteenth
century. Media technologies have, since their early modern roots, been
perceived as crucial components in the emerging power structures of the
nation-state and capitalist business, which has contributed to the need to
view technologies as centrally run and controlled by and subject to top-
down functional goals. Yet in recent years of technological “evolution,”
other things have been underlined, namely, a move toward invertebrate
 Introduction xvii

animals. According to Steven Shaviro, the nineteenth-century biological

organic metaphors were based on the seemingly well-structured “verte-
brate body plans,” whereas those of our postmodern age are more closely
related to the lives of insects and, for example, arthropods in their ability
to generate distributed, experimental, and metamorphosing organiza-
tions.23 Yet the division is not so clear-cut, and there is a neglected his-
tory to be excavated: to a certain extent, a history of “postmodern tech-
nology” had already started in the nineteenth century with pioneering
discourses on insect technics. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century
history of media was already filled with such “hidden themes” of alterna-
tive media. Within the majoritarian joining of technology–state–human
being we find cracks and varia: the early modern media sphere incorpo-
rated in its phases of emergence a panorama of ideas and views of media
and technology (even though, one should note, the term “media” is much
younger in its present usage) in which processes of transmission, calcu-
lation, and storage were not restricted to forms of technical media that
we would normally understand by the term (twentieth-century mass
media from cinema and radio to television and network media such as
the Internet).
To follow Akira Mizuta Lippit, the intertwining of animals and tech-
nology was an inherent part of the modernization and emergence of
technical media at the end of the nineteenth century. The disappearance
of animals from urban cultures of technical media was paralleled by the
appearance of animals in various discourses, from media (e.g., cinema)
to modern subjectivity (e.g., psychoanalysis). As Lippit notes, from me-
tonymies of nature animals became embedded in the new industrial en-
vironment, where
the idioms and histories of numerous technological innovations from the
steam engine to quantum mechanics bear the traces of an incorporated
animality. James Watt and later Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander
Graham Bell, Walt Disney, and Erwin Schrödinger, among other key fig-
ures in the industrial and aesthetic shifts of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, found uses for animal spirits in developing their re-
spective machines, creating in the process a series of fantastic hybrids. 24

Siegfried Zielinski’s anarchaeological approach has tried to delineate

media history that has run away from its institutional and conventional
xviii Introduction

definitions to neglected, “minor” phenomena; similarly, Jeffrey Sconce,

for example, has mapped the anomalies haunting the normalized under-
standing of media since the nineteenth century, demonstrating how
media mediate not merely between humans but also, on the imaginary
media level, between ghosts and the living. 25 Again, the media archaeo-
logical method has proved apt as a cartography of media culture beyond
the usual confines of technology and human intentions to encompass a
variety of not only sources used but also analytical perspectives not con-
fined to a narrow focus on actual technologies and their histories. Such
work has already been done in the field of media archaeology, especially
in mapping the histories of “imaginary media.”26
In addition to scholarly contributions, recent decades of media art
have also succeeded in deterritorializing media practices from a nar-
row understanding based on technologies to a wider and more innova-
tive distribution—to organic, chemical, and other alternative platforms,
where not only the established forms of transmission of perception count
but also the realization that basically anything can become a medium—
a realization that easily shakes our understanding of contemporary but
also past media. Exemplary are the ideas proposed by former Mongrel
art group members Harwood, Wright, and Yokokoji to consider the
ecology as a medium in itself. The Cross Talk proposal explains eco-
systems as communication networks, platforms of alternative agencies
and sensoriums, in a fashion that subsequently also radicalizes the idea
of “free” media. Exhibitions such as Bug City (2006) in Canada were as
exemplary in discussing the insect question as crucial to modernity and
postmodernity. Such exhibitions are good educations in the “becoming-
insect” of contemporary culture and how to enter the swarm logic that
seems to characterize network culture: we “enter the swarm” when using
the bit torrent protocol, we are told, as much as when we enter the swarm
space, whether visual or aural, in swarm art installations that introduce
the move from static design to dynamic spaces and interaction with such
processes.27 A recent installation, Timo Kahlen’s 2008 Swarm piece, is a
good example of the way a sound object turns the whole space where it is
placed into a vibratory, lived space with bee sounds that are modulated
and recomposed.
Biomedia art pieces might often work through the centrality of the
algorithmic, which creates “natural forms” in digital environments. How-
 Introduction xix

ever, at least as interesting is how they are able to reframe life in its wet
materiality. 28 Genetic algorithms express complex processes that re-
semble Karl Blossfeldt’s photographic art from the 1920s depicting
“natural forms.” Instead of just representing, digital media were creating
forms in the 1990s of interest to evolutionary algorithms and have been
followed by various biomedia projects that cross the boundary of digi-
tality and the fleshy bodies of animality. In any case, the more interest-
ing experiments not only showed the phenomenological resemblances in
nature and art(ifice) but engaged in a more radical redistribution of the
presumed division. This “art for animals,” as Matthew Fuller has called
it, does not represent or depict animals as objects but targets animals
as audiences: it is “work that makes a direct address to the perceptual
world of one or more non-human animal species.”29 Technologies and
techniques of seeing, hearing, and transmission can be found in the most
surprising places.
In the context of Insect Media, Zielinski’s suggestion regarding the fun-
damental inhumanity of media is important. The earlier idea of technol-
ogy as an organ stretching from the human being has been demonstrated
as dysfunctional, as has the straightforward translation of the organic as
the technological in the era of the computer: “Technology is not human;
in a specific sense, it is deeply inhuman. The best, fully functioning tech-
nology can be created only in opposition to the traditional image of what
is human and living, seldom as its extension or expansion.”30 I take this
as referring to the impetus to steer clear of easy-going metaphorics and
look for another, a more fundamental level, of molecular movements, in-
tensities, which characterize potentials for media. This follows an earlier
critical task of reorientation expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, in which
the human being and the valuation of consciousness as the highest level
of evolution were questioned. 31 This anthropomorphic dream, or preju-
dice, tended to form trees of thought and progress in which the cogni-
tive man was the primary reference point. There is an urgent need for a
cartography of potential forces of inhuman kinds that question evolu-
tionary trees and exhibit alternative logics of thought, organization, and
sensation. 32
This can also be understood as the immanent theme that runs through-
out modernity and the animal–technology relationship, where animals
seem to suggest a mode of communication and media beyond those
xx Introduction

of the human language. As Lippit argues, animals suggested, from the

Darwinian revolution to Freudian psychoanalysis and in the midst of
“the advances of the optical and technological media,” a new under-
standing of technics beyond that of symbolic human communication. 33
This realization is something that should further be added to a methodo-
logical approach to animal technics.
Next, I will address the question of media as a milieu of intensive ca-
pabilities, an ethology, and hence illuminate more specifically the theo-
retical contexts of this book.

MEDIA ETHOLOGY

One might object that it’s all nice and interesting, this talk about animals
and biology, but remains irrelevant to the world of media technologies:
it is in vain to transport biological models into the world of technology,
which, in the age of digital computing, is more mathematical than bio-
logical. Yet mine is not a metaphoric suggestion but one committed to
approaching media technologies not as a fixed substance but as a realm
of affects, potentials, and energetics. It is my contention that contem-
porary analysis of media should furthermore underline the need to re-
think the material basis of contemporary media condition and produce
much more complex intuitions that take into account a certain “activity
of matter,” nonhuman forces expressing themselves as part of this media
assemblage of modernity.
Coupling biology and technology and relying on concepts adopted
from biology in cultural explanations have had their fair share of felici-
tous criticism in recent years. For example, Anna Munster and Geert
Lovink note that we should argue “against biologism.” Networks, for ex-
ample, do not “grow” in the manner of teleological plants, nor do they
“emerge”; contagions, memes, and epidemics are in constant danger of
being pressed into metaphorical use by marketing departments that use
them instead of providing a specific view of what goes on in networks
and other cybernetic systems. 34 This relates to the question, What do we
actually talk about when we address animals, insects, and media tech-
nologies? Do we think of them as predefined, discrete forms of reality
in which natural beings are separated from cultural substance (and seen
only through our discursive lenses)? Or would there be a chance for a view
 Introduction xxi

in which we would not have to assume a preparatory division but could

approach things as intensive molecular flows, in which, for example, the
notion of “media” was only the end result of connections, articulations
of flows, affects, speeds, densities, discourses, and practices (namely, as-
semblages)?35 Could we see media as a contracting of sensations into a
certain field of consistency—whether called an environment or a media
ecology? In other words, could we not (only) ask how nature is evident
in our media cultures but what in media technology is already present
in nature?36 That seems to be the implicit question that various models
of swarms and such projects as Craig Reynolds’s 1980s work with boids
pose: how can we reframe the natural to make it into a viable dynamic
machine for the technological?
Whereas since the boom of network media in the 1990s there has
been a constant danger of inflating the use of cultural theoretical con-
cepts, there is also another a danger in loose metaphorics. By using anal-
ogy as a method of explanation, we often try to see one phenomenon in
the use of some other, usually a familiar one. Take viruses. A computer
virus might be explained as being “like” a biological virus, capturing the
cells of the host, using them to spread its own code, and making new
viruses (perhaps also killing the host). Despite the reasonable-sounding
“analysis,” the problem is that there is so much baggage that comes along
metaphorics, and in the case of biological metaphors, it tends to “natu-
ralize” a cybernetic construction. The phenomena are placed on an ex-
planatory grid that has already stabilized the relations of nodes. What
are neglected are the intensive processes of individuation out of which
more stable formations emerge. In this sense, we should be interested
not only in the actualized technological objects, animal beings or their
combinations, but in approaching them as carriers of potentials, forces
of individuation, expressions of “what bodies can do.” Similarly, when I
analyze literary examples or insect figures in popular cultural objects, I
do not approach them primarily as metaphors but as relays in the wider
structuration of the biopolitical regime of the technical media age.
In this context, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who were reluc-
tant themselves to think in terms of “media” (discarding it as a realm of
communication), can offer media theoretical clues. Their neomaterial-
ist ideas have been continued and developed by many other writers also
mentioned in this book, such as Eugene Thacker, Alex Galloway, Tiziana
xxii Introduction

Terranova, Matthew Fuller, Elizabeth Grosz, John Johnston, Manuel

DeLanda, Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, and Brian Massumi. In this
context, this book approaches the translations and transpositions of in-
sects and biology with technology and media in terms of the following
three key terms: intensity, assemblage, and diagram.

Intensity
As an alternative to years of the hegemony of the signifier, the linguistic
turn, and the various types of cultural constructionism that have placed
“meaning” in its linguistic form as the key object of cultural studies, vari-
ous new approaches have emerged. Within cultural studies, Lawrence
Grossberg was among the first to address the shortcomings of mean-
ing and draw from Deleuze, Guattari, and Spinoza for a more material
approach tuned to affect. Indeed, affect is one of the key words used in
thinking beyond both the signifier and the body as only an individual-
ized entity and to grasp the interconnected nature of bodies of various
kinds. 37 In what has been coined “material feminism,”38 different strate-
gies to counter the primacy of the linguistic have been proposed in order
to adequately theorize the nonhuman and the intensity of the material.
The list could go on, including Bruno Latour’s theories of nonhuman
networks, Langdon Winner’s takes on science and technology studies,
German “materialist” media theories from those of Kittler to those of
more recent writers such as Wolfgang Ernst, notions of abstract materi-
alism suggested by Luciana Parisi and other writers, or, for example, the
critique of hylomorphism. 39
Neomaterialist cultural analysis, in the context of this book, is an
approach that tries to acknowledge the specificity of the material. The
differential creativity of the material stems from a radicality of differ-
ence that is not only difference within a genus, a third general concept,
as the Aristotelian tradition supposes (for there to be a difference, there
must first be something common). Difference, in such a case, is in danger
of residing merely on the actual level of already defined entities of the
world. Instead, difference becomes an ontogenetic—and consequently
heterogenetic—force.40
A differing force of creation, a becoming, an intensity creates what we
perceive. The perceived takes place only through events in which both
the subject and the object are formed. This is the intensity inherent in
 Introduction xxiii

Deleuze’s thought and also in more recent formulations of neomaterial-

ism: to see the divisible, the extensive, the named merely as a result of
forces of intensive differentiation. The focus on the intensive does not
mean that extensions are not real. On the contrary, they are very much
real, imposing themselves, but only as one possible mode of being, on
temporary end results in the intensive processes of individuation. 41
Differentiated entities tend to hide their history of differentiation, which
in a way undermines the creative processuality of the world.42
The focus on intensities, in addition to being an ontological state-
ment, refers to the crucial methodological need to understand the crea-
tive forces of the world. These forces mold our lived relations, which in-
creasingly are characterized by the milieu of technology and nonhuman
technological actors but also by new modulations of nature in the form
of biodigital technologies, nanotechnologies, and biological computa-
tion, for example.43
In general, a new materialism addresses a micropolitics of matter, the
nondiscursive manipulation of energetic material flows that have been
captured in the bioproduction of modern media culture since the nine-
teenth century. This means there is a need to stay in tune with the eth-
ics and politics of life and subrepresentational processes. As Braidotti
writes, there is a whole history of thinking animals in terms of energet-
ics and potentials, often reduced to a technological-industrial mode.
Paraphrasing Braidotti, the idea of animals as machines is not reducible
to the philosophical claim that both lack souls but to think both as work-
ers and producers, like “an industrial production plant.”44 Raw material
for production, but also producers, animals are much more than they are
captured to be.
Thus biopower, the key theme of the book, is to be grasped not merely
as the capture of life as the object of power, which Foucault analyzed
meticulously in terms of the biological features of human populations.
Instead, as Braidotti suggests, life is intensive, creative, and infinite in
the Spinozan take, in which life became a subject as well. It is an agency
that in its intensive creativity is coming up with new solutions and ways
of engaging with the world. This viewpoint differs to some extent from
the recent Heideggerian emphasis on life and biopolitics suggested by
Giorgio Agamben, in which death is the continuous zero point and ho-
rizon of life. Beyond what Braidotti calls a narcissistic viewpoint that
xxiv Introduction

promotes loss and melancholia, a Spinozian version looks at life as some-

thing that surpasses the individual and is a nonpersonal force of creativity
that contracts individuals as its attributes.45 In Braidotti’s take, life is the
double articulation of bios (politics and discourse) and zoe (nonhuman
intensity), a continuous intensive creation that is also continuously
articulated on a social level of power and knowledge that, increasingly
during modernity, has been a level of technical media: from technologies
of the image and the cinema to games, software, and networks.

Assemblages
Seemingly stable bodies are always formed of intensive flows and their
molecular connections. Bodies are not merely predefined organs and
functions; they form as part of the environment in which they are embed-
ded.46 Gilbert Simondon talks about individuation and the (in)formative
role of environmental milieus in this metastability of transductive rela-
tions; Deleuze and Guattari insist that we must get away from closed
models of bodies and organisms and look at how bodies are continuously
articulated with their outsides.47
Another way to take into account the ontological intensity of the
world is to focus on the intensive qualities of beings, their capacities. In a
mode of thought that also draws from Simondon’s emphasis on individua-
tion, this suggests a cartographical mapping of the qualitative modes of
creation of forms of life defined not (only) by their stabilized forms of or-
ganization but by their potentials for experience, sensation, and becom-
ing. Recently an increasing number of media theorists have drawn from
Simondon, including Mark Hansen. For Hansen, too, Simondon offers
a way to step further from social constructivism that stems from what
Hansen describes as an externalist account of the body toward an ontol-
ogy of the originary technicity of bodies.48 Biological and technological
bodies are not natural kinds, but they carry tendencies toward various
relations, percepts, and affects.49 Such points are later elaborated in this
book not only in contexts of philosophy but, for example, through the
“cybernetic zoology” of the 1950s and 1960s, including Karl von Frisch’s
research into bee dancing and W. Grey Walter’s cybernetic turtles. These
various discursive and technological constructions can be seen as envi-
roning and affective assemblages that operate through relating and re-
sponding to the fluctuations of their milieus.
 Introduction xxv

This is where ethology becomes media theory. Such an ethological

perspective (referring to Jakob von Uexküll) of the world leads us to
evaluate bodies not according to their innate, morphological essences
but as expressions of certain movements, sensations, and interactions
with their environments. These are always intensive potentials, not pre-
determined qualities, which underlines an experimental empiricism. 50
Assemblages are compositions, affects, and passages in a state of becom-
ing and a relationality that is the stuff of experience. No assemblage stems
from a prescribed relation hidden inside it, as if it were a seed; rather, an
assemblage comes from the folding of the inside and the outside. An as-
semblage, whether classified as technology, animal, or a human being,
is a product of the connecting relations, and what can become techno-
logical is not decided before the relations are entered into, something that
Simondon refers to as the transductive relation. In other words, assem-
blages are always constituted by a relationality, but this does not mean a
complete external constructivism but an ontogenesis of transindividual
individuation. All relations are enabled by a pre-individual reality of po-
tentials and virtuality, and this transindividual element that beings share
is what affords collective assemblings as well. 51
Affects are always in transit and hence contain an element of virtual-
ity. Jean-François Lyotard refers to the “affect-phrases” of animals that
do not fit into the communicative and discursive logic of human lan-
guage but cut through it, opening up another, alternative, way of relat-
ing and communicating. 52 Animals are beyond language but not mute.
They are stratified by but not reducible to the human signifying practices
and hence offer a fruitful way of approaching affects. Beyond language,
however, animals such as insects map territories, contract forces, fold
their bodies, and establish relations. This is what I find a crucial point
in the field of animal studies and posthumanism as well: we must not
get stuck with the question concerning language and the defining dif-
ferences (usually in terms of language) that remove the animal from the
cultural. Instead we should map the differing modalities of expression
of animal bodies that point toward asignifying semiotics. Animal stud-
ies joins forces with media theory of a nonhuman kind. Reproduction of
culture takes as much into account those semiotics of intensive bodily
interactions and fluctuations as it does the linguistic acts and discourses;
indeed, it is increasingly urgent to recognize the different genealogy of
xxvi Introduction

thought that helps us to realize this regime of asignifying semiotics and

nonlinguistic individuation that draws more from Spinoza, Bergson,
Whitehead, Simondon, and Deleuze-Guattari than from Plato, Descartes,
Hegel, and Heidegger or even Derrida. 53
The asignifying regime of signs can be related to the notion of affect.
Affects are not possessed by anyone, but blocs of them constitute individu-
als. 54 Affects are transitions, gateways, and passages between dimensions.
As an artistic endeavor, however, affects are reducible not to human art
but to art as creation, the art of relations, from animals to technics of vari-
ous other kinds. This affinity with the primacy of affects (as indexes of re-
lationality) is what distinguishes this project from some much-discussed
positions in animal studies. Much of the agenda has been set in relation
to the Western metaphysical tradition in which the intensity of the ani-
mal has been undermined by a lack of language of the beast. Even though
writers such as Jacques Derrida have succeeded in pointing toward the
“heterogeneous multiciplicity” in the animal itself, it is more often writers
coming from Deleuzian or Whiteheadian traditions who have been able
to grasp the vibrant materiality of the animality. 55
In other words, mine is a kind of a milieu approach to the world and,
in the context of this book, to media technologies. Also, media can be
defined as assembled of various bodies interacting, of intensive relations.
Media can be seen as an assemblage of various forces, from human poten-
tial to technological interactions and powers to economic forces at play,
experimental aesthetic forces, conceptual philosophical modulations.
Media contract forces, but also act as a passage and a mode of intensifi-
cation that affords sensations, percepts, and thoughts. An assemblage is
not, then, only a collection of already existing elements (technology tak-
ing the animal as its model, for example) but is in itself a mode of cutting
flows. It consists of much more elementary things such as speeds and
slowness, affects (potentials to connect) and qualities—a mode more
akin to becoming than expressing a solid being (the becoming animal of
technology, the becoming technical of the insect). 56
The assemblage approach underlines a nonrepresentational cultural
analysis. Becomings and machinic conjunctions are not about imitation
and representation of forms or actors. 57 Instead they move on a plane of
immanence that traverses the stable forms. An insect becoming media or
a network becoming an insect swarm is not an imitation but a molecular
 Introduction xxvii

expression of the affects that the assemblage is capable of. Suddenly, in a

certain territorial situation, coupled to its environment, an insect might
be seen as a modern media technology (the entomological translation of
insects in terms of telegraphs, for example), or a network agency might
be modeled as animal packs or insect swarms self-organizing in a certain
environment. The questions of naturality or artificiality are bracketed,
and the focus is placed on the nonrepresentational environment and the
machinic assemblage in which the entities act.
In other words, media can be approached as intensive capabilities
that are constitutive of worlds. 58 Also, animals live in and of media: their
world is by definition formed of the constant interactional sensing, move-
ment, and memory of their surroundings, much as the media environ-
ment in which we live is constituted of our ethological bodies interacting
with bodies technological, political, and economic. Or, to put it a bit dif-
ferently: we do not so much have media as we are media and of media;
media are brains that contract forces of the cosmos, cast a plane over the
chaos. Deleuze and Guattari wrote the seminal book What Is Philosophy?
but someone should address the topic What Are Media? in a manner as
extensive and original. What is the specific plane that media contracts,
or is there even one? Do media work through elements from science, art,
and philosophy, a crisscrossing of various modes of dealing with chaos?
Furthermore, it is not clear that we can find the answer in books on phi-
losophy, but perhaps we can find it in such works of fiction as the film
Teknolust by Lynn Hershman-Leeson (analyzed in chapter 7).

Diagrammatics
Even though in this book I am continuously underlining the importance
of an intensive focus on the plane of immanence on which particular
bodies, organisms, and other stratifications (technologies, animal spe-
cies, human characteristics) are formed, this is supplemented by a histori-
cal view. Any assemblage works on various spatial and temporal scales
and hence as an “ecology” of a kind. In addition to their openness to new
connections, there are what Manuel Delanda calls “universal singulari-
ties” that are the space of potential, of virtuality, which limits what any
assemblage (body) can do (a diagram). Potentials are always articulated
in and through specific historical situations. As will become evident in
the book, the intensivity of affects, whether animal, human, or media
xxviii Introduction

technological, is constantly captured as part of the productive machinery

of media technological modernity. To be sure, this is what technoscience
has been about: rationalizing modes of action, capturing the movement
and interaction of bodies, controlling the future by standardizing the
otherwise fluctuating animal affects. This relates to Michel Foucault’s
interest in analyzing the techniques of the spatialization and channeling
of bodies and the creation of new diagrammatic maps that are not stable,
closed structures but ways of distributing singularities: virtual elements
that define the borders of a diagram and limit the turns and directions
into which it can actualize.
Following Delanda’s terms, diagrammatics can be understood, how-
ever, not only as a parasitical capture but as a tracking of the intensive
singularities of body diagrams. These are spaces of possibilities or topolo-
gies of potential singularities that are the potential modes of actualiza-
tion of a certain body plan. During evolution, vertebrates, crustaceans,
and insects, for example, have developed and followed a certain dia-
grammatic space of possibility that defines (not as preexisting possibili-
ties but as virtualities that need to be actualized in intensive, embodied
processes) what a specific animal is capable of.59 An animal phylum has a
certain topology, a space of possibility, and a key feature of this book is its
analysis of why technological modernity has gradually taken such an in-
terest in the singularities of primitive life, especially insects. For me, this
is also a historical question, which explains the focus on modern times.
Insects have been discussed for a long time; the philosophers in ancient
Greece were already contributing to the topic in various texts. But in
order to question more specifically the biopolitics of technical moder-
nity and technical media, I want to limit my book to developments not
earlier than the birth of modern entomology and modern media.
In one crucial mode, the translation of animals into media has been
part of the science of physiology in diagrams of translation par excellence
that have created media technological sensations and perceptions sev-
ered from the observing, perceiving subject. As argued by several writ-
ers, the sciences of sensation and physiology contributed to the emerg-
ing technological media culture of the nineteenth century, which was
keen on rationalizing procedures of perception, communication, and or-
ganization.60 Animals, too, and even such seemingly irrelevant “dumb”
forms of life as insects, were already then being translated through scien-
 Introduction xxix

tific research into constituents of media technologies and a conceptual

opening to nonhuman affects as the potentialities of a media to come.
The articulations of insects–media–technology were part of a larger dia-
grammatic field of excavation of the principles of (animal) life.
Hence diagrammatics refers to a mode of analyzing, defining, and re-
producing animal affectivity (which spreads from the human sensorium
measured as psychophysical quantities to insect organization and sen-
sation) and distributing it from strict scientific contexts across a broad
social field. Starting in the nineteenth century, insects spread from fash-
ion garments to popular fiction in the form of amazing stories of alien
insects with horrific capabilities. Of course, the diagramming is not uni-
directional, from science to popular culture, but exists as a continuous
feedback loop. This is why the book mixes such a variety of source ma-
terials, from the sciences of entomology and computers to, for example,
media art and surrealism, popular science fiction, techniques of digital
cinema, and concepts of late twentieth-century feminism. This is how
diagrams always work: through mixing and transporting practices and
discourses.

FROM ANIMAL AFFECT TO TECHNOLOGY

Referring to the title of the book—Insect Media—I wish to underline that

I do not intend to write a whole history or a universal theory of media
from the viewpoints of these small animals. The book works through
transversal case studies that address issues I see as especially important
in the present context of the insect media of network culture. The topics
are chosen to represent a transversal link between various levels of knowl-
edge production and culture. In other words, the chapters move from
science (entomology and biology) to technical media, from popular cul-
ture to avant-garde arts, and touch various media from cinema to music,
software, and literature. They act as condensation points for transversal
networks of scientific discourses, popular cultural clues, and media theo-
retical notions. Hence they draw from a heterogeneous source base and
work to illustrate through empirical examples the potentials in emphasiz-
ing the transdisciplinary relations of “the insect question.”
Think of the first half of the book as a media archaeological parallel to
the 1996 film Microcosmos. Through a magnifying cinematic lens, insect
xxx Introduction

life is revealed to consist of industrious workers and factories, weird ca-

pacities and potentials, complex systems. The themes stretch from scien-
tific research and biology to science fiction, the physiology of movement
and perception, avant-garde aesthetics, and the non-Cartesian philoso-
phy of the early twentieth century. The notion of media as technics is
not reducible to technology as we normally understand it (tools and ma-
chines used by humans or technological systems ontologically different
from living organisms). It is much closer to Simondon’s idea of techni-
city as the “transformations and correlations that characterize technical
objects.”61 A primary characteristic of insects, metamorphosis, is trans-
ported to the heart of technics, and technics becomes an issue of affects,
relations, and transformations, not a particular substance.
The first chapter addresses the enthusiasm in insect analysis from
entomology to popular culture and the philosophy of the nineteenth
century. Moving from the early entomological classic of Kirby and
Spence to Alice in Wonderland and The Population of an Old Pear-Tree;
or, Stories of Insect Life, the chapter maps the fabulations of the insect
world as a microcosmos of new movements, actions, and perceptions.
These intensive potentials were tracked in the physiological research of,
for example, Etienne-Jules Marey but also continued in Henri Bergson’s
biophilosophy. There the characteristic mode of life of insects, instinct,
is contrasted with that of the intelligent tool-making animals. Despite
this realization, the primitive insect is revealed as an alternative kind
of technical assemblage, a technics of insects and nature in which the
tools are not yet differentiated from the body of the animal. In a way, the
chapter can be thought of as providing a “response” to Donna Haraway’s
call for a nonanthropological way of understanding reality beyond the
human-centered notion of “culture” or the sociological emphasis on
human groups—the need to turn toward animal societies, which also
“have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization
of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic”62 and
hence are a crucial part of the biopower of the contemporary technologi-
cal world.
Chapter 2 continues the idea of natural technics in the context of ar-
chitecture and organization. The idea of seeing insects and animals as
builders, architects, and geometricians was widely discussed in the latter
 Introduction xxxi

half of the nineteenth century and was also seen in the context of the early
modernist architecture of the early twentieth century. For example, the
comb structures of bees seemed to express a meticulous order, a theme
that was widely used to underline the rigid and hierarchic social systems
of insects. Yet in addition, a whole other contrasting theme should not
be neglected, that of swarming and self-organizing systems. This idea
gained much interest in the context of research into emergent systems,
as with C. Lloyd Morgan, and here insects can offer indispensable les-
sons in the nonhierarchical modes of organization of network society, as
Eugene Thacker has suggested.
Chapter 3 focuses on the work of the early ethological pioneer Jakob
von Uexküll. His research into the affect and perceptive worlds of insects
is a radical continuation (and also overturning) of Kantian philosophy
and attracted much attention in philosophical discourse of the twenti-
eth century from Heidegger to Deleuze and on to Agamben. The chapter
analyses his ideas of animal perception and underlines the issue of tem-
porality as a way to understand the variations and potential openness
in perception. Ethological research works as a double of the 1920s and
1930s avant-garde discourse of technological (mostly cinematic) percep-
tion as radical anti-Cartesian probing.
The next chapter continues along the routes paved by the avant-garde.
The early surrealist movement was very interested in insects, and the
chapter uses the research of Roger Caillois into the spatial worlds of in-
sects as an opening to discuss the metamorphosis of space, temporality,
and devouring mimicry. Later adopted by Lacan in his theories of the
mirror stage, the early surrealist discourses give a hint of how to move
beyond the phenomenal affect worlds of the human being toward ani-
mality as a mythical but also intensive force. As Caillois’s work on play
and imitation has been adopted as part of game studies, what would a
more elaborated “insect approach” to worlds of gaming and play look
like, something that would again challenge the anthropomorphic way of
looking at the genealogy of technics and evolution?
Mediated by a short theoretical intermezzo, the second half of the
book focuses on post–World War II discourse relating to media as in-
sects. The aim of this part is to articulate how insects and animal affects
were directly addressed in technological contexts from research into the
xxxii Introduction

cybernetic loops between machines and animals, the perception quali-

ties of machines and animals, the simulations of swarm behavior and
semiintelligent systems, and, in recent years, media art from the feminist
film Teknolust by Lynn Hershman-Leeson to some other key examples.
The second half of the book tracks the technological synthesis of the af-
fective qualities of animal and insect life, a contracting of the intensive
ecological potential of animals as they were understood in the cybernetic
and digital discourses of recent decades. A simulation of movement,
perception, swarming, and even evolution amounted to a new kind of
approach between biological and technological beings in which the in-
tensive life of the hybrids was discussed not only in terms of cyborgs but
increasingly in those of insectlike distributed systems.
In this context, chapter 5 moves from cybernetics to a related set of
questions developed by researchers of animal perception. Cybernetics
has been identified by a plethora of cultural theorists and historians as
the crucial mode of interfacing animal affects and technological sys-
tems, with a special emphasis on, for example, Norbert Wiener’s work.
However, the ideas offered by Gilbert Simondon in his writings from the
1950s and 1960s offer a much more intensive and embodied understand-
ing of information, communication, and individuation. In this context,
the chapter discusses Karl von Frisch’s research into bee dancing and
communication in the 1950s as well as briefly reviewing the “cybernetic
zoology” of W. Grey Walter with his robotic tortoise. The chapter ad-
dresses the need for an embodied understanding of communication that
is promoted through the concepts of assemblage, individuation, and
transduction.
Similar themes are continued in chapter 6, which analyzes new tech-
niques of computer-generated imaging that spread from computer sci-
ence and visualizing experiments (e.g., in artificial life research) to
mainstream New Hollywood cinema. Addressing the theme of insects
in 1980s and 1990s cinematic culture, the chapter thematizes the cul-
ture of the visual as a culture of calculation based on insect models of
automated systems. The visual creations, “biomorphs,” that were an
example of nature’s computational power harnessed to create complex
forms in Richard Dawkins’s work, provide the key example to connect
the computational powers of nature to the swarms and flocks on the vi-
 Introduction xxxiii

sual screen. However, to address the shortcomings of the neo-Darwinist

discourse in digital culture, the chapter turns to the swarm algorithms
developed by Craig Reynolds. In the 1980s, his “boids” figures emerged
as key modes of programming collective behavior, and the chapter uses
the idea of boids to address ethologies of software.
Chapter 7 continues along cinematic lines but engages with the film
Teknolust (2002). It presents an alternative cinematic account of bio-
technologies in contemporary culture through the lives of three self-
reproducing automata. The automata break free from the home lab of
bioscientist Rosetta (Tilda Swinton) and embark on a life of their own,
trespassing the boundaries between worlds of computer-generated habi-
tat and the analog world outside computers. The chapter analyzes the figu-
rations of sex, sexuality, and reproduction in Teknolust, which presents
a refreshing account of the biopower of contemporary digital culture.
In the context of feminist sexual difference, Braidotti has been keenly
promoting figurations of insects and animals as efficient philosophical
concepts of nomadic cultural analysis. Such alien forms of affects and
sensations offer a challenge to normalized figurations of the male body
as the normalized mold of being. Insects, among other figures, creep
into the supposedly intact but in fact crack-filled phantasm of the body
of late modernity, revealing the distributed and assembled nature of any
body taken to be natural. Insects, then, are a parallel mode of becom-
ing in terms of bodily metamorphoses but also as carriers of nomadic,
energetic thought that turn from an emphasis on metaphors and mean-
ing to one on metamorphoses and temporal bodies.63 We are constantly
penetrated and accompanied by a panorama of nonhuman forces and
“mutations of desire” (Parisi), something that the figure of the cyborgs
perhaps tried to convey but of which more recent variations closer to ani-
mals have been more pertinent examples, as is also argued by Elizabeth
Grosz. In this context, Teknolust demonstrates the new forms of subjec-
tivity imagined and glued as part of the intimacy between female agency
and new technologies.
The concluding epilogue draws together themes discussed earlier and
addresses recent (new) media artworks in which the theme of insects
is analyzed. Seeing insects as a powerful mode of distributed intelli-
gence, harnessing nature and experimenting with nonhuman modes of
xxxiv Introduction

sensation, such insect media can be also be seen as philosophical thought

experiments. The epilogue also addresses some themes of new media art
in recent media philosophy, for example, Mark Hansen’s writings.

In closing, a few words of clarification. Insects are not the only phylum
of animals I analyze in this book, but they provide a generic opening for
my interests in this “bestial” media archaeology of animal affects. Why
insects? Not only have animals been of media historical importance in
general; insects can be seen as “the privileged case study,”64 as Eugene
Thacker notes: they are paradigmatic examples of the many, the emerg-
ing swarm order that questions notions of sovereignty, life, and organiza-
tion that are so crucial for current articulations of politics, networks, and
technology. If the human has been the starting point in most accounts
of Western political philosophy (and also the philosophy of organiza-
tion), insects provide a crucial difference within that mode of thought.
Of course “insects” is a huge category that comprises in its modern
definition a subclass of arthropods of more than 900,000 species from
dragonflies to bees, grasshoppers to moths, flies to ants, bugs to pray-
ing mantises. This book tends to focus on just a few selected ones that
have been dear to popular culture and designers of technology: bees,
ants, wasps, spiders, and a few other examples, which exhibit a curious
creative relationship with the world. Although the twentieth century
has had its fair share of reductive accounts that see various “minuscule
forms of life”—whether behavioral traits of social insects (sociobiology)
or genes, for example—as the defining stuff of life, this book defines this
“stuff” only through relations of externality and change and hence is far
from suggesting that everything is already defined and set for us by and
in nature.
In addition, there is a curious, nearly ephemeral side to insects. They
are probably furthest from the image of domesticated animals that have
been contained and rationalized as part of the pet culture of modern
society.65 Yet, as noted throughout the book, insects have also gradu-
ally been made part of the diagrammatics of the contemporary media
condition as uncanny models of sensation and organization. However,
they remain radically nonhuman: as often presented in science fiction,
insects are from outer space; they remain alien to human life. They pre-
sent a curious threat but perhaps also a possibility of a future nonhuman
 Introduction xxxv

life. In the communist-fearing United States of the 1950s, insects were

models of the cold other, this time seen through the lenses of cold war
politics. For David Cronenberg, the connection and fear were more inti-
mate: perhaps insects are already inside us, perhaps there is an uncanny
animality within us. In his remake of the 1958 Kurt Neumann film The
Fly, Cronenberg’s 1980s vision presented the metamorphosis of the pro-
tagonist, Seth Brundle, as stemming from the molecular level. Despite
the monstrous change, Brundle himself sees it as merely expressing the
dormant continuity between the animal and the human: “I’m an insect
who dreamt he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and
the insect is awake.” The molecular metamorphosis expresses itself on
the level of affects and percepts, the way the Brundle-fly relates to his/
its environment. What distinguishes this new hybrid from humans are
its new strengths, energy, body hair, perceptual capabilities, and sexual
appetite.66 Cronenberg’s film can be seen as a cartography of human and
insect affects. The medium of film continues the work of the microscope
in examining the worlds of animality. However, whereas the micro-
scope was embedded in the scientific practices of recording, analyzing,
and reproducing the motions, percepts, and capabilities of the animal,
Cronenberg’s project is much more poetic and works in terms of an ecos-
ophy: a catalysis of animal forces for the society of technical media and
a mapping of singularities of the new forces stemming from the assem-
blages of technics.67
Swarms, metamorphoses, and weird sensations are easily produced
by digital technologies of imaging, but this theme is not reducible to
technological possibilities. Hence, there is also a philosophical side to
these simple animals, constantly present in this book as well. The insect
becomes a philosophical figure for a cultural analysis of the nonhuman
basics of media technological modernity, labeled not by the conscious
unity of Man but by the swarming, distributed intelligence of insects, col-
lective agents, and uncanny potentials of the “autonomity of affect.”68
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 N
O E

NINETEENTH-CENTURY INSECT TECHNICS

The Uncanny Affects of Insects

Man is inclined to congratulate himself upon his wonderful progress,

forgetting that in many cases he has yet to reach the degree of perfection
seen in numerous animals. The recently developed monoplane, for example,
does not differ greatly in its general proportions from those of our hawk
moths, and the biplane is almost a duplicate of a pair of dragon flies, one
flying above the other; both models that have been favorites in the insect
world for thousands of years. Dare any man say that our latest advancement
in applied science, namely, the radio telephone, is more than a relatively
crude modification of methods which have been used by insects for
countless ages?
—E. P. Felt, “Bugs and Antennae”

This chapter offers key background for subsequent chapters and revolves
around three themes, all of which characterize the nineteenth century:
1. The rise of modern biology from the start of the century, and the emer-
gence of its now most prominent representative, Charles Darwin, with
his theory of evolution. The Great Chain of Divine Being was gradually
confronted with a temporally radical and materialist theory of evolu-
tion in which the continuity of life forms was intimately coupled with
and restricted by their environment. This temporality also opened up
a future for forms of life so far unknown.
2. The emergence of modern technical media, from photography to cin-
ema and telegraphy, all of which presented a new sphere of capturing
and reproducing sensations and communication. Psychophysiological
scientific research into the bodily grounding of sensation was intimately

1
2 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

coupled with the new capitalist sphere of production of perceptions

and communication.

3. The appearance of insects as a special topic of interest among trained

professional entomologists and vast ranks of amateur devotees. There
was continuous work on collecting, inspecting, and classifying insect
genera and individuals in their capabilities, and the insect craze spread
gradually as part of the popular culture of the century and also affected
views on technology and modern society. Much as anthropology
transported knowledge concerning primitive societies as part of the
cultural discussion and theories of society in the nineteenth century,
entomological research suggested how instinctive primitive forms of
life might contribute to contemporary understanding of technical and
rational life. In other words, such discourses pointed not only toward
the fascinating pre- and nonhuman worlds of evolution but, through
different pathways, to a pre-intelligent way of perceiving the creation
of the artifice and hence technology.
Entomology spread much beyond its confines and interfaced its
agenda with those of technology and philosophy. However, the sci-
ence of insects was not part of physics or physiology or any of the key
sciences of the century. It was often practiced by enlightened amateurs
and enthusiasts. This makes it more interesting, however. In a way, it
became a mode of minor knowledge, not only in terms of its objects,
which needed new techniques of visual culture to make them visible,
but also in terms of its transversal links. Entomology had direct eco-
nomic links that made it a crucial enterprise of the century: to protect
crops from insects. Yet there is also a much more fluid way to see en-
tomology as a traveling science or a practice: a movement from insect
research to theological meditations, philosophy, popular cultural nar-
ratives, and, for example, physiological mapping of the capacities and
affects of animal bodies.1

This chapter focuses on what I call insect technics and addresses the
idea of a history of technology in the primitive life of insects, a theme
that emerged during the nineteenth century. This is evident from classics
of entomology such as An Introduction to Entomology; or, Elements of the
Natural History of Insects: Comprising an Account of Noxious and Useful
Insects, of Their Metamorphoses, Hybernation, Instinct (1815–1826), by
William Kirby and William Spence. The book was a huge success, pub-
lished in four volumes, and published through several editions. It can be
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 3

said to have been a popular classic, marked by a pre-Darwinian mix of

science and religion. The two writers have often been referred to as the
fathers of entomology; Spence founded the Society of Entomologists of
London in 1833, and Kirby was well known for his extensive studies and
the collections he made while working at the service of Higher Forces
(the Christian God, that is). The example of Kirby and Spence evinces
the early interest in this kind of an articulation.
From entomological discourses this chapter turns to the philosophy
of technology and biopolitics, moving toward Henri Bergson’s biologi-
cally inspired philosophy to shed light on the idea of animals as innova-
tors. It is my aim to show that insect technics was a transversal theme
articulated in a plethora of contexts throughout the nineteenth century
and that the diagrammatic practices of biopower and notions of insect
technics intertwined. In the midst of the nineteenth century, the im-
portance of animal affects in the diagrammatic construction of modern
technological culture was realized through various practical projects. At
the same time, in philosophy the insect theme offered a way of under-
standing how to approach the instinctual worlds of contracting milieus
into assemblages that function as technological elements. This is where
short-circuiting Bergson’s philosophy as part of current media theory
suggests how to think media through its nonhuman forces.

THE MICROCOSMOS OF INSECTS

To a particular pair of theologically inspired naturalists, Kirby and

Spence, insects, despite the normal opinion of them as noxious and
filthy, expressed nature’s fullest “power and skill.” This power becomes
evident via mimicry, with insects capable of robbing “the trees of their
leaves to form for themselves artificial wings, so exactly do they resemble
them in their form, substance, and vascular structure,”2 or expressive of
forms, colors, and mathematical figures that exceed the model they are
imitating. Mimicry is here a passage or a vector that shows that all nature
is connected, that there is a layer of intensity that characterizes all of the
expressions of nature. Insects are expressive not only of their specific ge-
nealogical record and evolution but of a much broader field of nature—
visual elements from peacocks’ tails to the feathers of birds, movement
of clouds and undulations of water, geometric forms and hieroglyphical
4 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

symbols. It is as if insects were a microcosmical doubling of other ani-

mals, a kind of intensification of potentials of life: “The bull, the stag, the
rhinoceros, and even the hitherto vainly sought for unicorn, have in
this respect many representatives among insects.”3
In Introduction to Entomology, this theme echoes quite evidently the
idea of the Great Chain of Being, the order of nature guaranteed by God.
Angels and “spirits of the just” might be the expressions of a higher
order of perfection, but insects, according to Kirby and Spence, despite
their tiny size and seeming irrelevance, are indexes of forces to be ac-
counted for:
That creatures, which in the scale of being are next to nonentities, should
be elaborated with so much art and contrivance, have such a number of
parts both internal and external, all so highly finished and each so nicely
calculated to answer its end; that they should include in this evanescent
form such a variety of organs of perception and instruments of motion,
exceeding in number and peculiarity of structure those of other ani-
mals. . . . —truly these wonders and miracles declare to every one who
attends to the subject, “The hand that made us is divine.”4

The natural theological tradition that continued as an influential mode

of argumentation in the natural sciences during the nineteenth century
was keen to underline nature as an expression of divinity. Nature was a
model for proper Christian education, organization, the values of soci-
ety, and an industrious lifestyle. 5
In the classical Great Chain of Being, below God, the angels, and man
came the animals with their own hierarchies. Wild beasts reigned, then
came useful animals, and below them were domesticated forms of life.
Insects were not too high on this ladder. Spiders and bees were recog-
nized as useful, but flies and beetles ranked at the bottom of the chain. So
despite the affinities Kirby and Spence wanted to create with this scala
naturae, their version was a bit different, with insects and angels at times
exhibiting common traits.
In fact, at times religious attitudes went hand in hand with a celebra-
tion of the complexity of minuscule life. Étienne-Louis Geoffroy, in his
Histoire abrégée des insectes (1765), argues for the centrality of insects
and even for their philosophical inspection, because their minuscule
and delicate composition exhibits the constructions of a marvellous de-
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 5

sign.6 From Aristotle and Pliny the Elder to modern entomologists such
as Muffet and Swammerdam, various researchers have contributed to
excavating the microcosmos of insect characteristics. In 1824 Thomas
Say, in his American Entomology, echoed a similar attitude in his motto:
“Each moss, Each shell, each crawling insect, holds a rank Important in
the plan of Him who framed This scale of beings.” 7 In natural theological
texts, insects were seen as a celebration of God’s powers in their alter-
native and surprising habits, singular instincts, industrious nature, and
various forms of work.8 Insects and their ingenious and complex form of
organization were sure proofs of the powers of the Creator.
The artist Kevin Murray has suggested in his brief overview of the
insect media of the network age that there was a dualist enterprise in
the nineteenth-century approaches to insects—the pious exploration
ante Darwin and the materialist one after him.9 Yet, as I argue, this dual-
ism is not completely watertight, and there is a fundamental theme of
technics that connects the earlier more religious takes on nature and
primitive life with the Darwinian take. Like his predecessors, Darwin
saw nature as a force of perfection even though he emphasised the ma-
terial force of natural selection behind this evolution. Darwin himself
did not renounce the Creator’s impact in the Origin of Species (1859) but
underlined using similar rhetoric that the machine of nature produces
complex, interconnected perfection that has superseded man’s achieve-
ments (expressed in domestic breeding):
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various in-
sects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from
each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all
been produced by laws acting around us.10

Kirby and Spence’s approach probably attracted the attention it did

not only because of its catchy language but also because of what could
be called its ethological touch (even though the term in its more modern
usage became commonplace only after the turn of the century). Insects
were approached as living and interacting entities that are intimately
coupled with their environment, yet presented as active participants
and constructors. Insects intertwine with human lives (via “direct and
6 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

indirect injuries caused by insects, injuries to our living vegetable prop-

erty but also direct and indirect benefits derived from insects”) but also
engage in ingenious building projects, stratagems, sexual behavior, and
other expressive forms of motion, perception, and sensation. Instead
of adhering to a strict taxonomic account of the interrelations between
insect species by documenting the insects’ forms, growth, or structural
anatomy, the ethnography of insects in An Introduction to Entomology is
traversed by the fantastical spirit of the curiosity cabinet. Insects are war
machines, like the horsefly (Tabanus L.), for example: “Wonderful and
various are the weapons that enable them to enforce their demand. What
would you think of any large animal that should come to attack you with
a tremendous apparatus of knives and lancets issuing from its mouth?”11
The tools are described as intimate parts of the organism:
Reamur [sic] has minutely described the ovipositor, or singular organ by
which these insects are enabled to bore a round hole in the skin of the
animal and deposit their eggs in the wound. The anus of the female is
furnished with a tube of a corneous substance, consisting of four pieces,
which, like the pieces of a telescope, are retractile within each other.12

EXPLORATIONS

Insofar as optical parallels were used, innate insect capacities paralleled

another key nineteenth-century theme, that of artificial light. “The Age
of Machinery” (as coined by Carlyle in 1829) presented new kinds of
expressions of human intellect that put nature to its own use, but these
were disparaged by our entomologists, who argued that the most per-
fect forms of illumination, tools, and artifice were found in simple forms
of life:
Providence has supplied them with an effectual substitute [for artificial
light]—a luminous preparation or secretion, which has all the advan-
tages of our lamps and candles without their inconveniencies; which
gives light sufficient to direct their motions, while it is incapable of burn-
ing; and whose lustre is maintained without needing fresh supplies of oil
or the application of the snuffers.13

Insects’ powers of building continuously attracted the early entomo-

logical gaze. Buildings of nature were described as more fabulous than
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 7

the pyramids of Egypt or the aqueducts of Rome. In this weird parallel

world, such minuscule and admittedly small-brained entities as termites
were pictured as akin to the inhabitants of ancient monarchies and em-
pires of Western civilization. If the Victorian era valued the history of
civilization, which, throughout the nineteenth century, increasingly
became an integral part of museum collections in Europe, this analogy
between insects and ancients suggested not a denigration of the ancients
but a curious kind of a valuation that expressed a particular interest in
microcosmical worlds. Indeed, insects were not seen as small, insignifi-
cant animals but were in Victorian England tokens of civilization and
taste, with insect motifs found in dresses and jewelry.14
Whereas the imperialist powers of Europe, led by Britain, headed for
overseas conquests, the mentality of exposition and mapping new ter-
rains also impacted nongeographical fields. The seeing eye, a key figure
of hierarchical analyzing power, could also be a nonhuman eye, like
that of the fly, which, according to Steven Connor, can be seen as the
recurring “radically alien mode of entomological vision,”15 consisting of
four thousand sensors. Hence, in 1898 one author toyed with the idea of
“photographing through a fly’s eye” as a mode of experimental vision—
one also able to catch Queen Victoria with “the most infinitesimal lens
known to science,” that of a dragonfly.16
Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes that the Victorian enthusiasm for ento-
mology and insect worlds was related to a general discourse of natural
history that, as a genre, defined the century. Through the themes of ex-
ploration and taxonomy, Lecercle claims that Alice in Wonderland can be
read as a key novel of the era in its evaluation and classification of various
life worlds beyond the human. Like Alice in the 1865 novel, the reader
experiences new landscapes and exotic species as an armchair explorer
of worlds not merely extensive but also opened up by an intensive gaze
into alien microcosmoses. Uncanny phenomenal worlds tie together the
entomological quest; Darwin inspired both biological accounts of curi-
ous species and Alice’s adventures into imaginative worlds of twisting
logic. In taxonomic terms, the entomologist was surrounded by a new
cult of archiving in private and public collections. New modes of visu-
alizing and representing insect forms of life produced a new phase of
taxonomy as public craze instead of scientific tool. But here again, the
wonder worlds of Alice or the nonsense poet Edward Lear are the ideal
8 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

points of reference for the nineteenth-century natural historian and

entomologist:
And it [nonsense] is part of a craze for discovering and classifying new
species. Its advantage over natural history is that it can invent those spe-
cies (like the Snap-dragon-fly) in the imaginative sense, whereas natural
history can invent them only in the archaeological sense, that is discover
what already exists. Nonsense is the entomologist’s dream come true, or
the Linnaean classification gone mad, because gone creative.17

For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and “being so many differ-
ent sizes in a day is very confusing,”18 which of course is something in-
comprehensible to the caterpillar she encounters. It is not queer for the
caterpillar, whose mode of being is defined by the metamorphosis and
the various perception-/action-modulations it brings about. It is only the
suddenness of the becoming-insect of Alice that dizzies her. A couple of
years later, in The Population of an Old Pear-Tree; or, Stories of Insect Life
(1870), an everyday meadow is disclosed as a vivacious microcosmos in
itself. The harmonious scene, “like a great amphitheatre,”19 is filled with
life that easily escapes the (human) eye. Like Alice, the protagonist
wandering in the meadow is “lulled and benumbed by dreamy sensa-
tions,”20 which, however, transport him suddenly into new perceptions
and bodily affects. What is revealed to our boy hero in this educational
novel fashioned in the style of travel literature (connecting it thus to the
colonialist contexts of its age) is a world teeming with sounds, move-
ments, sensations, and insect beings (huge spiders, cruel mole-crickets,
energetic bees) that are beyond the human form (despite the constant
tension of such narratives as educational and moralizing tales that an-
thropomorphize affective qualities into human characteristics). True to
entomological classification, a big part of the novel is reserved for the
structural-anatomical differences of the insect, but the affects of insects
relating to their surroundings is under scrutiny.

ANTHROPOLOGIES OF TECHNOLOGY

As precursors of ethnology, the natural historical quests (whether ar-

chaeological, entomological, or imaginative) expressed an appreciation for
phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human who was equipped
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 9

with two hands, two eyes, and two feet. In a way, this entailed a kind of
extended Kantianism interested in the a priori conditions of alternative
life-worlds. Curiously the obsession with new phenomenal worlds was
connected to the emergence of new technologies of movement, sensa-
tion, and communication (all challenging the Kantian apperception of
man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and perception).
Nature, viewed through a technological lens, was gradually becoming the
new “storehouse of invention” 21 that would entice inventors into perfect-
ing their developments. What is revealed is also a shift in the Victorian
understanding technology—a shift that marks the rise of modern tech-
nology by the end of the nineteenth century. This could be also called
an anthropological and an ethnological turn. As Georges Canguilhem
notes, the new appreciation of technology as art decoupled it from a
strictly rational way of seeing technology. In contrast to Descartes’s
understanding of the equivalence of mechanics and living organisms,
at the end of the eighteenth century Kant suggested a reconsideration
of technics in terms of human history. Skill preceded knowledge, just as
machines preceded the scientific knowledge of them:
Art, regarded as a human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from
knowledge) in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a theo-
retical faculty, as technique differs from theory. What one is capable of
doing, as soon as we merely know what ought to be done and therefore
are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect, is not called art. Only that
which man, even if he knows it completely, may not therefore have the
skill to accomplish belongs to art. 22

Canguilhem maps the rise of a philosophy of technology that sought

to find the origins of the skill of art in the anthropological layers of
human nature. As one of the key thinkers of early philosophy of technol-
ogy, Ernst Kapp introduced his famous theories of technology as an ex-
tension of the human species in 1877 in Grundlinien einer Philosophie der
Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten.
In this early prime example of later cyborg theories and ideas of organ
projection, Kapp proceeded to think of technology as based on the
human body. The human being is the measure of all things (Der Mensch
das Maass der Dinge), a proposition that was meant as a continuation
of the Kantian theme of perceptual worlds. There was no way to break
10 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

beyond what we as human beings perceive, which was not a reason for
mourning but an instance of pride. For Kapp, loyal to the Western tra-
dition of thought, the human being as the possessor of a self-conscious
mind was the privileged caretaker of the natural world. Yet Kapp’s image
was more complex than a simple dualism of mind versus body. In fact,
man is also his physiological body, which extends as part of the world,
interfacing the inner with the outer reality. Kapp was highly appreciative
of the physiological understanding of the bodily substance of being but
regarded the human being not as emerging from the animal but as com-
ing after the animal.23 This paradigm relates to his curious interpretation
of the recapitulation thesis, proposed by Ernst Häckel. Häckel believed
that the embryo of any organism recapitulates in its ontogenesis the
phylogenetic history of its species, a theory that underlined that every
individual was in a way a perfect condensation of the whole history of
its species. Kapp adapted this theory to an anthropological and world
historical frame: each human being is a recapitulation of the whole of the
animal kingdom, the potential of any animal whatsoever.24
Through the human form, technology and the animal kingdom are
hence continuously connected. Yet for Kapp, the human hand remained
the ur-form of technics. For this contemporary of Karl Marx and former
student of the Prussian state education system, the creating and labor-
ing man qualified as superior to the nonreflexive animal. The anthropo-
logical notion of technology valued the hand as the natural tool from
which artificial creation stems. Human history was the history of labor,
in which work was one mode of activity (Thätigkeit), but only conscious
activity was work. Hence, for animals work does not exist, even though
bees and ants might seem industrious. 25
The eye provides the model for the camera obscura and other artificial
modes of visualization, and the muscles work in concert with new ma-
chines of industry. The telegraph is formed in parallel with the nervous
system as a coevolutionary system, thereby resonating with Kapp’s gen-
eral anthropology of human culture. This media technological exterior-
ization leads to a Hegelian kind of dialectical emergence to new levels
of self-consciousness, echoing later twentieth-century views inspired
by McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin. 26 Canguilhem notes, however,
that this theory of the parallels between the human and insect worlds en-
countered severe stumbling blocks with such technologies as fire and the
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 11

wheel, which clearly do not stem from the human body.27 In the context
of contemporary network technologies that operate with distributed,
nonhuman speeds and logic, questioning such parallels remains relevant
and is perhaps a reason that the notion of insects has persisted in high-
tech media environments.
In the physiological research so dear to Kapp, the thresholds of human
sensation and perception became a crucial field of research for the as-
piring media culture. This development emerged alongside the need
to provide information for the new rationalization and organization of
human labor and what spun off into new creations of modes of sensing
in the form of audiovisual media culture. The physiological understand-
ing of the human organism provided the necessary impetus for research
focused specifically on perception severed from the human observer,
leading to the subsequent rationalization, reproduction, and control of
physiological events. Jonathan Crary’s work stands out in its media ar-
chaeological focus on the capturing of perception in physiological stud-
ies of the nineteenth century.28 In such analysis of the physiological body,
the human being serves as the storehouse of sensation and perception, as
in Johannes Müller’s Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833–40).
Müller’s work exemplifies research that focused on the interfacing layer
of sense organs between the outer world and the inner consciousness.
Senses were seen as the indispensable layer that informed animals of the
environment outside them, a layer that also determined the mode of ori-
entation for a specific animal. Tones perceived are determined by the
quality of the sense of hearing, just as light and colors are qualified by the
specific energy of nerves of vision. 29 Senses are seen as tools with which
to grasp the world, world-forming probes, modes of folding the inside
with the outside. 30

PHYSIOLOGIES AND BIOPOLITICS

As Crary explains, Müller understood the body as a factory of decentral-

ized actions, “run by measurable amounts of energy and labour.”31 Life
was primarily a set of interconnected physiochemical processes, and the
body became an inventory of mechanical capacities. 32 Not just human
beings but animals and insects also were part of this storehouse. In his
early work Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinns (1826), Müller
12 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics

addressed the sense thresholds of insects. The later work Handbuch der
Physiologie des Menschen (1840), especially its second part, similarly ad-
dresses the visual capacities of insects, spiders, and other “lower ani-
mals,” noting the peculiar aggregate vision of insects. 33 Consider Crary’s
observation of how Müller, also writing as part of the Kantian legacy
concerning the perceptional apparatus of human beings, nevertheless
already stood at the crumbling point of Kant’s conception of appercep-
tion as the crucial and indispensable synthesis of perception:

When Müller distinguishes the human eye from the compound eyes of
crustacea and insects, he seems to be citing our optical equipment as a
kind of Kantian faculty that organizes sensory experience in a necessary
and unchanging way. But his work, in spite of his praise of Kant, implies
something quite different. Far from being apodictic or universal in na-
ture, like the “spectacles” of time and space, our physiological apparatus
is again and again shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion,
and, in a crucial manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipula-
tion and stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience
for the subject. 34

Physiological research returned the material body to the agenda of

perception. From soul to the transcendental subject and on to the physio-
logical human being, Kant’s agenda found a material platform that fur-
ther radicalized its conclusions. In addition to Müller’s early remarks
concerning animal perception and movement, the famous later experi-
ments by Etienne-Jules Marey are relevant to our topic as well. Marey,
known for his pre-cinematic research on the nature of perception and
movement, occupied himself early on with animal motion. In La Machine
Animale (1873), the creator of various mechanisms for tracing the ani-
mal body comprehensively addressed the muscular and mechanical
characteristics of movement and flight of numerous classes of animals.
Even though Marey acknowledged the long history of analogies between
machines and animals, he underlined the importance of this parallel for
contemporary research. Marey wrote that it is not only a valid parallel
but also of practical use: studying animals allows us to engage with the
basic principles of how mechanics work, with the additional possibility
of offering a synthetic counterpart to the moving, sensing animal. 35 In an
age of technical speed and movement (via railroads but also navigation
 Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics 13

and flight), Marey’s underlining of the importance of research on nature

and natural movement for the progress of mankind seemed to offer in-
sights into the physical interactions of bodies with their environment.
Accurate research provided a tool for optimizing certain repetitive acts
and movements. This resonated with the emerging sciences of optimized
labor movements, for example. Sciences of the body in movement offered
ways to map the thresholds of the material body—what a body is capable
of in the context of physical and mental labor—and feed those results
to those trying to meet the needs of the industrial society. Pruning the
body was in isomorphic relation to a macro-level standardization that
characterizes industrial modernity. In the works of Marey and such
people as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Bunker Gilbreth, we find
a form of definition and optimization of the human body as a particular
capacity. 36
In addition to exploring a number of other interests, Marey stands as
one of the early pioneers of insect media. For example, human bipedal
locomotion remained merely one potential example of how movement
could be achieved (contrasted with, for example, the four-legged move-
ment of horse), opening up a panorama of natural creatures to be ana-
lyzed in their discrete moments of movement. For Marey, insects were a
special case of flight, interesting because of the great speed of their wing
movements and the sounds emitted. In La Machine Animale, the issues
regarding insect flight addressed were (1) the frequency of wing move-
ment, (2) the successive positions the wings take as part of the loop of
movement, (3) and how the power of motion that produces and main-
tains the movement develops. The same key issues were also expressed
in various other publications reporting Marey’s insect studies. 37 The
practical dilemma was how to record the movement that was beyond ca-
pability of the human eye to perceive. On the one hand, Marey saw the
acoustic traces left by movement as indexes of its frequency, but on the
other hand, more accurate research equipment was needed. Proceeding
from observation to potential causes, the so-called graphic method, and
especially Hermann von Helmholz’s invention the myograph (early
1850s) for registering movement in graphical form, provided invaluable
assistance in turning continuous movement into distinctive, analyz-
able units. 38 Here the actual wings of insects were taken as indexes and
harnessed so as to leave wing marks on a blackened paper, traces of the
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of La Ronge Journal,
1823
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: La Ronge Journal, 1823

Author: George Nelson

Release date: April 7, 2013 [eBook #42479]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Owen O'Donovan

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LA RONGE

JOURNAL, 1823 ***
 La Ronge Journal, 1823

George Nelson

[Transcriber Note:
Produced by Owen O'Donovan.
(Includes additional materials: List of some other publications of his work;
notes on the editing; example of music scroll; details of Nelson's fur trade
career; table of contents; page images of handwritten manuscript;
references.)]

Also by George Nelson

Peers, Laura & Schenck, Theresa (ed.). My First Years in the Fur Trade:
The Journals of 1802-1804. St. Paul. Minnesota Historical Society Press.
2002.

The La Ronge journal of 1823 has also been published in hard copy in an
extensively researched work by Jennifer S. Brown and Robert Brightman in
1988. This work contains additional commentaries on the Nelson text by
Stan Cuthand and Emma laRoque.

Brown, Jennifer S. H., & Brightman, Robert (ed.). "The Orders of the
Dreamed": George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and
Myth, 1823. Winnipeg. The University of Manitoba Press. 1988

Editing Notes

Nelson's manuscript is a handwritten first draft for a work on North

American aboriginal belief systems, completed in June, 1823. Nelson had
intended to edit and publish it at a later date. The first publication did not
occur until 1988 in "The Orders of the Dreamed": George Nelson on
Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823 where it is given a
comprehensive, analytical and contextual treatment by Jennifer Brown and
Robert Brightman with contributions from other authors.

The goals for this edition of Nelson's La Ronge Journal of 1823 are to
make his work accessible to a wider audience and ensure its preservation
and availability in digital format. It is presented here in three parts.

Part 1 provides a lightly edited version of the manuscript. Nelson's text

is an excellent example of common English usage in early nineteenth
century North America. Idiosyncratic misspellings are generally corrected;
archaisms and localizations have been maintained. Where the spelling of
names is irregular or abbreviated, a consistent spelling is chosen.
Punctuation has been somewhat modernized.
 Editorial interjections, including section and subsection headings not in
the original, are enclosed in brackets. Nelson occasionally used brackets in
the text for parenthetical remarks; these have been replaced with braces.

Part 2 is a verbatim and line by line transcription of the original

handwritten document. The transcription serves as the starting point for
Part 1. It is included here because of the importance of the journal as an
historical document and the desire to preserve and make the manuscript
available close to the original form while moving it to a digital version. No
attempt has been made to edit or correct the text.

Part 3 (omitted from the text-only and portable reader "noimage"

versions) is a set of digital images of the manuscript made from
photocopies provided by the Toronto Reference Library, the holder of the
Nelson papers. The size of the images is reduced to make them suitable for
on-line use; resolution is kept adequate for direct comparison with the
transcription.

An added table of contents provides links (in the hypertext version) to

sections or pages in each of the three parts. Page numbering preserves that
of the manuscript for reference purposes.

Certain sections of the this e-text may display poorly on some e-book
readers: (1) References to World Wide Web resources may be longer than
can be contained on normally formatted lines. To simplify correct copying
of the references, the lines have not been split. (2) In Part 2, the line by line
transcription, Nelson sometimes made additions or corrections increasing
the number of words on a line of text. The length of the transcribed text line
was increased to maintain the correspondence between the manuscript and
the e-text.

The Nelson manuscript was made available courtesy of the Toronto

Public Library. I would like to thank the staff of the Baldwin Room
Manuscripts Collection at Toronto Reference Library for their assistance in
making the material available for digitization. I would also like to express
thanks to my wife, Susan O'Donovan, for the hours spent proofing text and
clarifying many fine details of the language.
 I hear the spirit speaking to us.

I hear the spirit speaking to us.

I am going into the medicine lodge.
I am taking (gathering) medicine to make me live.
I give you medicine, and a lodge, also.
I am flying into my lodge.
The Spirit has dropped medicine from the sky where we can get it.
I have the medicine in my heart.

Midē Song Scroll. Collection and translation by W. H. Hoffman, 1885-

1886.
The Midē´wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa
Project Gutenberg E-book #19368

George Nelson's Fur Trading World

 Larger Map

George Nelson's Postings and Employing Companies

1802/1803 Yellow River, Wisconsin, XY Company (XYC)

1803/1804 Lac du Flambeau, Chippewa River, Wisconsin, XYC
1804/1805 Lake Winnipeg / Red River area (no journal), Manitoba, XYC
/ North West Company (NWC)
1805/1806 Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, NWC
1806/1811 Dauphin River, Manitoba, NWC
1811/1812 Tête au Brochet (Jack Head), Manitoba, NWC
1813/1816 Long Lake, Ontario area, NWC
1818/1819 Tête au Brochet, Manitoba, NWC
1819/1821 Moose Lake, Manitoba, NWC / Hudson's Bay Company
(HBC)
1821/1822 Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, HBC
1822/1823 Lake la Ronge, Saskatchewan, HBC

Nelson's experiences and accounts come from his life and work with
Ojibwa / Saulteau cultures around Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg and
contact in his later career with the Cree of Lake Winnipeg, the
Saskatchewan Delta, Cumberland House and Lake la Ronge. He makes
reference to the Beaver Indians (Dane-zaa) who, until the nineteenth
century, lived as far east as the Slave and Clearwater Rivers bringing them
and other Athabaskan cultures into contact with fur trading at Ile à la
Crosse, the administrative centre for Nelson's post at Lake la Ronge.

His journal of 1802/1803 was instrumental in leading to the rediscovery

of the Folle Avoine posts of the XY Company and North West Company in
1969 by Harris and Frances Palmer with assistance of local residents.
Subsequent archaeological work was undertaken and the forts were
reconstructed and have been operated as the Forts Folle Avoine Historical
Park by the Burnett County Historical Society since 1989. The Society
provides tours, displays and programs on the fur trade and aboriginal
culture of the area.

Nelson recalled accounts of Ojibwa practices in the Lake Superior area

in his 1823 La Ronge journal.

George Nelson's Fur Trading World, 1822-23

 Larger Map
Lake la Ronge was the site of some twenty trading posts dating from 1779.
Nelson's Hudson's Bay Company post was a reestablishment in 1821 of an
earlier North West Company post. According to The Atlas of Saskatchewan,
it was the only fort on the Lake over the winter of 1822/1823. The location
is likely a known archaeological site in the area shown on the map
identified in the Atlas as Lac la Ronge II.
 The road network reached La Ronge, founded in the early 1900's, in
1947, and Stanley Mission, which dates from 1851, in 1978.
 Table of Contents

Part 1

Introductory Remarks 1
Conjuring: The Interpreter's Account
Initiations and Conjuring 4
In Quest of Dreams
Dialogue with a Spirit 5
Principal Spirits
Wee-suck-ā-jāāk / Gey-Shay-mani-to 6
Key-jick-oh-kay (Old Nick)
Water Lynx
Sun
A Dream Meeting with Sun 7
Thunder 8
Roots and Herbs (Medicines)
The Manner of Conjuring
Building the Lodge
Preparing the Conjurer
Spirits who Enter the Lodge and Interactions with Them
Meeh-key-nock (Turtle) 9
Thunder
Flying Squirrel
Wolverine
Loon
Hercules / Strong Neck: Altercation with a Young Man
O-may-me-thay-day-ce-cee-wuck (Ancients or Hairy
Breasts)
Sun 10
Pike
Buffaloe
Omniscience of Spirits
Showing the Turtle Spirit 11
Bear
Keyjickahkaiw
 Wee-suck-ā-jāāk
Practices of Powerful Conjurers
Mythology
North Wind and his Daughter (Birth of Wee-suck-ā-jāāk &
Mishabôse) 13
Death of Mishabôse
Wee-suck-ā-jāāk and Kingfisher
Myths of the Flood
Wee-suck-ā-jāāk's Revenge on the Sea Lynxes
Wee-suck-ā-jāāk Tricks a Water Lynx and Beaver
Recreation of the Land 14
Wolf Surveys the Land 15
Creation of Humans
Separation of Land into Plains and Woods
Wee-suck-ā-jāāk Travels the Earth, Has a Son, Becomes a Woman
Language Use 16
Conversations 17
The Figure in the Dream is Sickness
Sickness Gives Warnings of Diseases
Reappearances of Spirits in Dreams to Teach the Votary 18
Malevolent Spirits (Need for Regular Sacrifices)
Accounts of Pahkack
Attacks at Home and While Hunting
Making Offerings at a Hunting Camp 19
Description of Pahkack
The Feast to Pahkack 20
Roots and Medicines 21
The Abode of the Medicine Spirit
Teaching the Medicines to the Votary
Stones and Their Virtues 23
Songs and Notes
Treatment of the Sick 24
Ceremonies and Songs Related to Starvation 25
Fugitive Pieces
The Soul 27
An Attempt to Capture a Soul
Representation of the Soul 28
 Imprisonment of a Soul
Medicines Used to Harm Others 29
Used Against a Woman
Wild Carroway 31
Used in Hunting
As Love Potions (Baptiste's Stories) 32
Effecting and Avoiding Spells 33
Dealing with Spells on Firearms
The Old Canadian's Account 34
The Iroquois' Account
The Half Breed's Account 35
Stories of the Hairy Breasts and Nayhanimis
North Wind's Challenge 36
Nayhanimis Wars with the Hairy Breasts 37
Notes 40
Motives for Writing the Journal
Comments on Aboriginal Beliefs 41
Mee-tay-wee
Conjuring
Evidence of Spirits through Conjuring Practice
Conjuring Ceremony for a N. W. Co. Gentleman
Stories 43
The Hunter and the Wolf Spirit
Pursuit by a Pahkack
Wetiko 44
Trapping a Wetiko
Habits and Types of Wetiko 45
Those Driven to Cannibalism by Starvation
Story of a Wetiko Woman 46
Those who Dream of Ice and the North 47
Dream Feasts Of Human Flesh
Behavior of Infected People 48
An Account of Survival
Executing a Wetiko
Treatments and Recovery 49
Malignant Spirits 50
North, Ice, Skeleton and the Crazy Woman
 Confession 51
Animal Sacrifice (Beaver Indians) 53
Fragments 54
The Great Doctor
The Devil and the Tailor Caricature
Feasts
Conjuring Ceremony (June 4th., 1823) 56

Part 2

Typescript of Manuscript

Part 3

Manuscript Page Images

References

Part 1

[Introductory Remarks]

The following few stories or tales will give a better notion or idea of the
religion of these people than every other description I am able to pen. And
as their history is read with interest, I am persuaded these few pages will be
found equally deserving attention. I give them the same as I received them
and leave every one to make his own remarks and to draw his own
conclusions.

[Conjuring: The Interpreter's Account]

My interpreter, a young half breed, passed the winter of 1819-20 with

the Indians and gives this account. One day shortly before Christmas, he
was out with an elderly man, a chief of this place, a hunting. Suddenly he
stopped as to listen, apparently with great eagerness and anxiety, upon
which, after allowing a sufficient time, the interpreter asked what was the
matter.

"Listen and you'll hear."

"I have listened," says the interpreter, "but hear nothing, and it is
surprising that you who are deaf should hear and I not."

"Ah! A white man is thy father, and thou are just as skeptical, doubting
and ridiculing every thing we say or do 'till when it is then too late. Then ye
lament, but in vain."

After this the Indian became much downcast and very thoughtful for
several days. And as if to increase his anxiety, or rather to corroborate the
husband's assertions, his wife said that one day she also heard, though the
other women that were with her heard nothing, and an altercation ensued.

His uneasiness increasing too much, he was forced to have recourse to

their only alternative in such cases, une Jonglerie as the French term it, that
is conjuring.

One of their party, another half-breed abandoned many years since by his
father and leading an Indian life, was applied to. He is reputed a true man:
[he] never lies. Out of respect to the other, he was induced to consent, but
much against his will. "For I am much afraid that [one] of these times they
will carry me off."

He was prepared, and entered with his rattler, shortly after which the box
and the rattler began to move in the usual brisk and violent manner. Many
[spirits] entered, and one asked what was wanted that they had been called
upon.

The Indian, from the outside of the frame (for only the conjurer alone
enters), inquired if there was not some evil spirit near from whom he had
everything to dread.

"No." replied the same voice. "All is quiet, you trouble yourself with
vain phantoms."
 "What then is the meaning," asked again the Indian, "of those sudden
flashes of light I sometimes see in the night?"

"What?" rejoined another voice from within. "Hast thou attained unto
this age and never yet observed this?" And then laughing, [it] continued, "It
is always the case during this moon (December). And if you doubt me, for
the future observe attentively and you will find it to be the case."

This satisfied him for the time. He became cheerful and assumed his
wonted ways, but not for a long time. He soon relapsed and, after some
days, applied again to the conjurer. When he had entered his box or frame, a
number again entered and one of them enquired why they were called for.

The conjurer said [why].

"What?" says he, the Spirit, "Again! Thou art very skeptical. Dost thou
not believe? Now thou art fond of, thou wantest to be haunted. Well thou
shalt have thy desire!"

At these dreadful words, which were uttered in an angry and reproving

manner, every soul was struck with terror. But as if to give some
consolation, [the voice] assured him that that spirit had but just left his
home, and coming on very slowly, would not be up with them 'till such a
time, a little prior to which they were ordered to conjure again, when they
would be told what to do.

This was no pleasant information to the conjurer who never undertook

this job but with the greatest reluctance—nay indeed even sometimes
horror. However, he neither, poor creature, had [an] alternative. At the time
appointed he entered again, everything being prepared.

After the preliminary demands or questions, "Yes," replies one of the

spirits, "that which thou dreadest is near, and is drawing on apace."

"How shall we do? What shall we do?" exclaimed the Indian.

At last one of them, who goes by the name of the Bull or Buffaloe,
(through the conjurer, for he alone could understand him, his voice being
hoarse through, his uttering thick and inarticulate) asked the Indian if he
remembered of a dream he made while yet a young man?

"Yes," replies the Indian, "I remember perfectly. I dreamed I saw one just
like yourself who told me that, when advanced in life, I should be much
troubled one winter. But by a certain sacrifice and a sweating bout I should
be relieved. But I have not the means here. I have no stones."

"You are encamped upon them," rejoined the spirit, "and at the door of
your tent are some."

"Yes, but," says the Indian, "the dogs have watered them, & they are
otherwise soiled."

"Fool! Put them in the fire. Will not the fire heat and make them change
color and purify them? Do this, fail not and be not uneasy. We shall go, four
of us (spirits), and amuse him upon the road and endeavour to drive him
back."

At this the interpreter burst out laughing, exclaimed, "Sacré bande de

bêtes! And do you believe all that d——d nonsense?"

"You doubt too." says a voice addressing him (the interpreter) from the
inside. "Go out of the tent and listen, you'll see if we lie."

He did indeed go out to some distance, and after a while heard [the
spirits] as a distant hollow noise which increased 'till it became
considerably more distinct, and then vanished as a great gust of wind,
though the night was mild, calm, clear and beautifully serene. It even
startled the dogs.

"Mahn!" (an Indian term or exclamation signifying haste) said the spirits
from within.
They have turned him off the road as soon as the noise was heard. But he will
not turn back or go home. He is sent after you by another Indian who conjured
him up out of the deep (the bottom of some flood). But be not too uneasy. If these
four will not do, there are yet a vast many of us, so that between us all, we shall
drive him back. We will perplex and bewilder him, surround, torment and tease
 him on every side. But he is of a monstrous size, ferocious and withal enraged
against you. The task is mighty difficult. Observe! See how beautifully serene the
night is. If we succeed, the sky will change all of a sudden, and there will fall a
very smart shower of snow attended with a terrible gust of wind. This will happen
between daylight and sunrise and is his spirit, all that will remain in his power.
He'll then return to his home.

The interpreter, though he laughed at all this and could not bring himself
to credit it, yet swears that he heard the rumbling noise on their road and
seemingly far off. The Indians gave implicit faith to all. And the conjurer
did not know what to believe.

"There is something," says he, "for my Dreamed, or Dreamers have

assured me of it, but I don't know what to say. However, most assuredly,
tomorrow morning we shall have the snow."

This snow both comforted and depressed the poor Indian very much
seeing the weather was then so beautiful and so destitute of all the usual
signs of bad weather. It did snow. It came as foretold, quite suddenly, and as
suddenly became fine again.

In the ensuing morning, the Indian begged of the interpreter to chuse one
of the longest and straightest pine (epinette) trees he could find of the
thickness of his thigh, to peel off all the bark nicely, leaving but a small tuft
of the branches at the tip end. This they painted cross-ways with bars of
vermillion and charcoal alternately the whole length, leaving however some
intervals undaubded. And about five or six feet from the ground, [they]
fastened a pair of artificial horns representing those of a bull, and decorated
[it] with ribbon. He also (the Indian I mean) made the sweating hut, and in
short done [sic] everything as directed, after which he (the Indian) became
to resume his wonted cheerfulness and contentment.

However, once more he was obliged to have recourse again to the

conjurer, from hearing another rumbling noise. "Thou Fool!" answered the
spirits. "Wilt thou never have done tormenting thyself and disquieting us.
That rumbling noise proceeds from the ice on a lake a long way off. It is
only the ice. Be therefore peaceable. I shall [advise] thee if any ill is to
happen thee."
 The flashes of light, or those sudden glares that the Indian inquired of
the spirits, is, as they told him, lightening which always happens in the
month of December. And they laughed at his having lived so long without
observing it before.

The conjurer had lost his smoking bag one day that he was out a hunting.
And as it contained his only steel and not a small part of his winter stock of
tobacco, he was very uneasy and hunted several times for it. They, having
told the Interpreter often how kind and charitable and indulgent those spirits
of the upper regions were, and he, desirous of proving them, told the
conjurer to send for his bag. He asked, "Which of ye will go for my bag that
I lost? He that brings it me, I shall make him smoke."

"I will go," said one. They heard a fluttering noise, and soon after they
heard the same fluttering noise, and the rattler move, and down fell the bag
by the conjurer, covered with snow.

"How stupid thou art!" said the spirit naming the conjurer. "Thou
passedst over it and yet did not see it." It was a long time since the bag was
lost, and the distance was several miles.

Another one could not kill with his gun, owing to its being crooked or
some other cause. However, he attached the fault to the gun. [This
happened] the first time, I believe it was, that this half-breed conjured. The
people on the outside, hearing many voices speak as they entered, at last
they stopped at one whose voice and articulation was different from that of
the others. "Who is that one just now entered?" said those outside.

"It is the Sun," replied the conjurer.

"Ha! Well, I am happy of it." said the the Indian. "Is it not he who says
himself able to repair firearms (guns), and do anything with them he
pleases? Ask him (addressing the conjurer) if he will not have compassion
on me and put my gun to rights that I also may kill. I am walking every day,
and frequently shoot at moose, but always miss."

"Hand it me." said a voice from the top of the conjuring frame. The gun
was given to the conjurer. "It is loaded." continued the voice, "Shall I fire it
off?"

"You may, but take care you hurt nobody." replied the Indian. The gun
was fired, and shortly after handed back to the owner.

"Here is your gun. You will kill with it now." said the Spirit.

Both this business of the gun and smoking bag took place the first time, I
believe, the man conjured.

[Initiations and Conjuring]

There are but few individuals (men) among the Sauteux or Cris or Crees
who have not their medicine bags and [are not] initiated into some
ceremony or other. But it is not all of them who can conjure. Among some
tribes most of them can, and among others again there are but very few. Nor
is it every one of them that tells all truth, some scarcely nothing but lies,
others again Not One falsehood. And this depends upon their Dreamed,
sometimes. But I think [it] may be equally imputed to their own selves, [to]
presumption, ignorance, folly, or any other of our passions or weaknesses.

[In Quest of Dreams]

But to become conjurers, they have rites and ceremonies to perform and
go through, which, though apparently simple and absurd, yet I have no
doubt, but fully answer their ends.

Any person among them wishing to dive into futurity must be young and
unpolluted, at any age between 18 and 25, though as near as I can learn
between 17 and 20 years old. They must have had no intercourse with the
other sex; they must be chaste and unpolluted.

In the spring of the year, they chuse a proper place at a sufficient

distance from the camp not [to] be discovered nor disturbed. They make
themselves a bed of grass, or hay as we term it, and have besides enough to
make them a covering. When all this is done, and they do it entirely alone,
they strip stark naked and put all their things a good way off. And then
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