A fly in the appointment

posthuman-insectoid-cyberfeminist-materiality

Ben Woodard

pp. 89-111

in: Svitlana Matviyenko, Judith Roof (eds), Lacan and the posthuman, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Theorists such as Jussi Parikka, Jakob von Uexküll, Eugene Thacker, Sadie Plant, and others have utilized the figure of the insect as a particularly salient way of reading the materialization of information. Certain affinities of insect anatomy and behavior (such as antennae, segmentality, and swarm behavior) with technology aesthetically collude with technologies of communication (nanorobotics, military drones, and surveillance devices). But is such use of the insect figure merely metaphorical, or does it drag with it other (less functional, less descriptively desirable) aspects of the insect body and its bearing on the physicality of information? In either case, the notion of the insect body (as the actually biological entities that also carry aesthetic and cybernetic valences) proves an interesting point for recognizing a tension between communication (as information) and language (as speech) in contemporary posthuman discourse. As Lacanian psychoanalysis is invested in this difference, and in unfolding the post-, in-, or non-human within the human, a guiding question issued to Lacan in the name of the insect body could be: Did he have a vested interest in the non-discursive or "primordial" materiality of the world other than as an instructive disruption of language? In other words, does materiality (insectoid or otherwise) have a role in his theories other than that of the speaking of/as the symptom, thereby cutting through, but ultimately mutating, communication?

Cited authors

Lacan Jacques

von Uexküll Jakob

Plant Sadie

Parikka Jussi