The Insect Technics of Rhetoric

Review of Insect Media by Jussi Parikka in enculturation.

Parikka_Insect coverIn a recent blog post, Jussi Parikka wrote that he had “not meant to poke at anyone just to irritate” (Oops par. 2). And irritate he did. Parikka, as Graham Harmon put it, finally weighed in with a few questions for what often gets called object-oriented ontology (OOO). Parikka asks whether there was a problem with the notion of ‘object’ given that it paradoxically still implies “quite a correlationist, or let’s say, human-centred view to the world” (OOQ par. 2). Paradoxical because pushing past a human-centered view or correlationism, where the human has access to objects only in so far as we can think about them, is what OOO is supposed to oppose. Or, as Quentin Meillassoux put it in After Finitude, many of the thinkers working in OOO challenge the idea that “all we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself” (36).

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Published in: enculturation
By: Jeremy Cushman