Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Parikka on Juenger in the latest issue of Angelaki.

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Special Issue: We have never been human: from techne to animality 
ISSN 0969-725X (Print), 1469-2899 (Online, link HERE

Of special interest, perhaps, to After Nature readers... 

A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory.  Stephen Loo, Undine Sellbach.  Angelaki Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2013: 45-64.

INSECTS AND CANARIES: medianatures and aesthetics of the invisible.  Jussi Parikka. Angelaki Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2013: 107-19.



 
Jussi Parikka. INSECTS AND CANARIES: medianatures and aesthetics of the invisible

Abstract
This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological question is unravelled, furthermore, with examples concerning the mass extinction of bees, also discussed in Lenore Malen's video installation The Animal That I Am (2009–10). In this way, it argues for a media theoretical understanding of the visual culture of ecocrisis as well as the complex question of epistemology of such a visibility/invisibility.


Stephen Loo, Undine Sellbach.  A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory

Abstract
Dorion Sagan observes that pioneering ethologist Jakob von Uexküll tends to be read in contrasting ways, as a “humble naturalist” pre-empting current research in biosemiotics, animal perception and agency; and as a “biologist-shaman,” gesturing to a transcendental realm where the life-worlds of animals interconnect in a vast symphony of nature. In both cases the tools of the laboratory are thought to generate complete pictures of the invertebrates that Uexküll studies, in unity with their environments. As Giorgio Agamben points out, these experiments form part of an abstract mechanism that produces the human, by isolating instinctual life as an object for study and management from social and ethical modes of existence. What these readings neglect to consider is that Uexküll imagines his experiments through a Picture Book frame. We argue that for Uexküll there is always something fabulous and child-like about the enterprise of reconstructing the subjective environments of the small animals he works with. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, we propose the Picture Book as a particular technics, or tertiary memory, that cultivates modes of attention that are associated with childhood and are open to the emergence of partial objects and relations. Considered through the Picture Book frame, the Umwelten of insects and other small animals are no longer fixed but are drawn and redrawn in partial expressive ways, through the uncanny picturing – or what Brian Massumi would call “semblances” – of different configurations of animal, technology, human relations. By considering the Picture Book as a technic for ecological thought and imagination, our paper will explore how the small creatures that Uexküll describes might enable the emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations.