COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions – a case for postfoundational critique

COVID-19 and the virality of contemporary social theory

The special issue that this paper introduces is published in 2022, two and a half years after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept large parts of the world, in many cases prompting political measures that meant the interruption of economic production and social life as we knew it. While the pandemic is still unfolding, and it remains uncertain whether and how societies will learn to live with COVID-19’s viral threat, many countries have eased or even completely abolished pandemic restrictions, putting an end to the above moment of interruption. There is, at least for now, and at least in the Western world, a collective sense of easing, the perception that we have passed the peak of the pandemic, that the worst is over. This position of relative hindsight both creates an opportunity and poses a challenge for a collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the one hand, the moment seems apt to reflect on and examine the pandemic in its entirety, its conditions, stages of unfolding and consequences (Wark 2020). Especially the early months of the pandemic were marked by a flood of philosophical dispatches issued from the homes to which theorists suddenly found themselves confined. Some were speculating about the politically transformative potential of the pandemic rupture, the chance to create a new collectivist politics out of the ruins of neoliberalism that the pandemic would leave behind (Žižek 2020a, 2020b; Nancy 2020; Stimilli 2020). Others prompted readers to look behind the curtain of the pandemic emergency to either uncover how self-reproductive sovereign power was orchestrating a global crisis in response to a relatively harmless virus (Agamben 2020) or to reveal climate change as the underlying, actual catastrophe (Latour 2021; Malm 2020). Beyond the euphoric dreams, premature dismissals and catastrophism of these early accounts, papers written and published in the long durée of the pandemic are able to produce a more measured, nuanced assessment of the changes and continuities that mark pandemic societies.

But on the other hand, any such theoretical retrospective is, at this point, confronted not with one but indeed with two pandemics: the global spread of COVID-19, and the philosophical event that followed when social theory, with viral speed and exponential growth, became infected with the pandemic event. The above thinkers are just some of the more famous contributors to a vast and still growing body of pandemic theory (see also: Repo and Richter in this issue). One cannot help but feel that everything has already been said, analysed and imagined regarding the social effects of COVID-19. But the size and rapid growth of this pandemic theory also opens a new line of investigation. To what extent has contemporary social theory itself become pandemical, viral?

A pandemic is characterized by a locally specific viral outbreak from which the virus then spreads exponentially, finally becoming socially endemic at a global scale (Columbia Public Health 2021). Applying this definition to the dynamics that drive the production of contemporary social theory, its trends and focal points, I suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is only the most prominent example of social theory’s current virality. Political ‘outbreaks’, from the election of Donald Trump as US president, the storming of Capitol Hill in the aftermath of his failed attempt to win a second term in office, or more recently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have, like the COVID-19 pandemic, generated a flood of immediate comments, analyses and evaluations from scholars across the globe, not the least from social theorists. Facilitated by digital media, they deploy the philosophical lenses of their work in order to unpack political happenings in real time and without the traditional lag between a major event and its resurfacing in academic publications a few years later. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, academic publishing, evidently pressured by the speed of online commentary, was quick to print what eminent scholars had to say about the pandemic condition, which both of Žižek’s Pandemic! Volumes and Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency becoming available only a few months into the pandemic’s first global wave in 2020.

From the initial evental outbreak, viral social theory spreads exponentially, transcending boundaries between schools of thought and disciplines to dominate, at least momentarily, the international academic discourse. While research that quantifies the size and growth of pandemic scholarship is mostly focused on the sciences, one study suggests that by January 2021, 10,033 articles related to COVID-19 had been published in the social sciences (Liu, Yuan, and Zhu 2022). Within social theory, the pandemic became the subject of countless blog posts and conversation pieces, working papers and special issues, in Crisis and Critique, Contemporary Political Theory and Thesis Eleven amongst others. Pandemic theory spans contributions from the humanities, the social sciences and economics and includes both postfoundational and normative-analytical approaches, at times woven together in an overarching analysis of the tools social theory has to offer to unpack and respond to the pandemic crisis (Delanty 2020). A significant number of postfoundational thinkers, with Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler or Achille Mbembe as prominent examples, let their theories be infected by the viral pandemic event. In the face of Latour’s famous, and frequently echoed (see for example Vitale 2012), announcement that critique has run ‘out of steam’ (2004, 225) in a social present that demands theoretical engagement with society’s urgent ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004, 248), postfoundational theory might have no other choice than becoming viral.

Latour’s intervention exemplifies that viral social theory’s push towards immediate social engagement often also entails a, more or less veiled, critique of postfoundational thinking (see Ingala in this volume). Postfoundationalism’s genealogical explorations into the intertwined nature of meaning, power-relations and the socio-economic mechanisms through which they operate are viewed as expressions of a socially detached ivory tower intellectualism. Agamben’s widely criticized, early response to the ‘invented epidemic’ (2020) of COVID-19 appears to validate such criticism. While the global public was looking at the surreally horrifying footage of nightly military convoys moving bodies from the Italian hospitals no longer able to store them, Agamben dissected how a performatively constructed sovereign power was instrumentalizing the virus to prove itself necessary. For Latour, and likeminded critics, a social theory that deserves a place in twenty-first century societies must offer more than critique. It must be able to productively respond to the urgent challenges these societies face, be it the endurance of colonial patterns, the erosion of democracy or climate change. Viral societies need viral thought, receptive of and reactive to the many threats and crises that emerge from the interactions between humans and nonhumans.

While this paper argues that the extent to which contemporary ‘viral’ social theory directly and immediately responds to current events is novel and significant, arguments in favour of a politically engaged social theory are of course not new. In a 1995 essay for Political Theory, Jeffrey Issac sharply critiques what he describes as the ‘strange silence’ (Isaac 1995, 636) of political thought vis-à-vis the end of the Cold War. For Isaac, the political silence of a discipline too occupied with professional success, the exegesis of classical theories and ‘proliferating textual commentaries’ (1995, 645) is inexcusable – and dangerous. Political theory has to engage with the political event of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Isaac argues, not just to prove its relevance, but also because such orienting analysis is urgently needed in a rapidly changing present where the unfolding future remains indeterminate and ambiguous. Following Isaac, whose arguments could have just as easily been made about Trump’s presidency or indeed the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘nondecisions’ (1995, 649) of theorists in these matters, ‘the decisions to attend to other things – do have ethical consequences. Political theory fiddles while the fire of freedom spreads, and perhaps the world burns’ (Isaac 1995, 649).

While the viral nature of contemporary social theory provides renewed support for Isaac’s critical intervention, it also gives relevance to the cautionary note Wendy Brown formulated in response in the opening volume of Theory & Event. For Brown, social theory’s turn to political events is precisely not a sign of its continued usefulness in and for changing democratic societies, but rather marks a lack, the ‘absence of other political formations to which such discourse might respond’ (Brown 1997). Brown’s argument does not amount to rejecting a politically engaged social theory. But she highlights the theoretical poverty of a philosophy focused primarily on ‘reading events’ (Brown 1997) as and when they take place. Such a mode of theorizing, Brown fears, ‘becomes trapped by responding to events’ and ‘runs the risk of limiting its capacity as a domain of inquiry capable of disrupting the tyranny or givenness of the present, and expanding the range of possible futures’ (Brown 1997). In order to engage with political events without being reduced to mere political commentary, Brown concludes that social theory must work towards ‘decentering the event, working around it, treating it as contingency or symptom’ (1997).

A social theory that performs the decentering demanded by Brown must operate on two levels. It must unpack and evaluate the event at hand while at the same time exploring the conditions and dynamics that constitute its ‘eventalness’. It must treat the event as manifestly real, while at the same time investigating how its contingent ‘becoming evental’ feeds into, cements or stands in tension with particular power relations, and the social mechanisms of production, extraction and exclusion that maintain them. In short, such an analysis requires direct socio-political engagement as well as the critical distance of a postfoundational theory that analyses phenomena together with their conditions of emergence. Instead of uncritically succumbing to the pull of current events, postfoundationalism renders possible a mode of theorizing that is both viral and virological; it lets itself be infected by current events while at the same time studying, with clinical distance, the origin, makeup and effect of the viral event, and the quality of the viral matter it is spreading. As McKenzie Wark suggests, the pandemic event

might be unprecedented, but we have the precedent of other unprecedented events. We have the precedents of others who found ways to respond that drew on the capacities of concept-creation to equip us with tools of thought that are better than throwing up our hands in resignation or terror (2020).

It is for this reason that, this special issue suggests, we require postfoundational avenues to examine capitalist societies in and after the COVID-19 event.

Crisis, immunity and the evental description of modern society

Before providing an overview of how each of the papers brought together in this collection navigates this two-dimensionality in their engagements with COVID-19, this introduction will attempt such a two-dimensional analysis of its own, and further explore the social conditions that render contemporary social theory viral. Brown’s critical comment on evental social theory includes a remark on ‘eventalness’ taking hold of society at large due to ‘the often-noted pace of late modernity’ (Brown 1997). For Brown, late modernity, with its fast-paced cultural, political and technological changes, lends itself to evental accounts of social life. In Critique and Crisis, Reinhart Koselleck offers a different reading of the relationship between modernity and evental descriptions. Retracing the conceptual history of the notion of ‘crisis’, Koselleck suggests that modern societies’ predilections for evental readings of the present are not, in the first place, caused by the state of the societies described. On the contrary, they emerge on the level social self-description, where the crisis, representative of a division of past and present into events that constitute challenges, issues or threats to be addressed, contains a particular philosophical and political potentiality that is integral to the project of modernity. The political potentiality of the critical event is, for Koselleck, illustrated by the role of the crisis in Rousseau’s social contract theory. Diagnosed against the background of a politically and morally innocent state of nature thoroughly distinct from the corrupt present, Rousseau’s crisis charges his call for revolutionary progress, and upholds the former as long as the utopian ideal of a morally and politically sound democracy is not yet actualized (Koselleck 1988, 110–119).

Koselleck argus that modernity’s conceptual and political apparatus of critique, revolution and progress is hinged on the political performativity of the critical event (Koselleck 2006). Modern history unfolds in a series of crisis events; they bring about an eternal return of openness and thereby ensure that a progressive change in tracks towards a particular future remains possible. ‘The uncertainty of the critical situation contains one certainty only – its end. … The eventual solution is uncertain, but the end of the crisis, a change in the existing situation … is not' (Koselleck 1988, 127). Importantly, for Koselleck, it is not manifest social crises that keep modern progress in motion, but rather their diagnoses, the perpetual return of the critical event on the level of social self-description (Koselleck 1988, 180–186). Modern societies render themselves evental because they require recurrent crises in order to charge and uphold their progressive self-descriptions. With Koselleck, viral social theory can be understood as the continuation of the modern mode of social self-description. Hinged on the critical event, it allows modern societies to continuously render precarious their structures to keep open the possibility of epistemic change, and its social implementation.

Much of the philosophical scholarship that engages with the pandemic uses the former as a lens to critically assess the political present, from the neoliberal governance that permeates most democratic communities in one way or another (Brown 2020; Žižek 2020a) to the undervaluation of care work (Barker 2020), or the failure to adequately respond to ecological destruction (Malm 2020). Against this background, many authors discuss the pandemic as a political opening for creating a better, more democratic, more collective or more ethical society.¹ Especially much of the early commentary is characterized by an almost feverish speculative curiosity about the kind of societies that the pandemic will leave behind. Parallels to the socially transformative effects of the Spanish Flu at the beginning of the twentieth century (Melican 2018; Blackburn, Parker, and Wendelbo 2018) were drawn quickly, and informed philosophical calls for action. They challenged social theorists to seize the COVID-19 rupture in a similar fashion to develop avenues for the actualization of a different post-pandemic future. As Elettra Stimili put it in an early pandemic piece: ‘This is an opportunity. We should not let it pass’ (2020).

At this juncture, Koselleck’s perpetually returning crisis complicates the relationship between political event and evental social perception. Rather than assuming a linear cause–effect relationship between the former and the latter, Koselleck hints at the fact that significant political events, while they obviously ‘happen’, are also conditioned by a dynamic of modern social self-description where crisis perceptions play a functionally necessary role – that of facilitating change and adaption in line with changing social conditions and changing normative and political priorities. Koselleck thus provides us with a framework to understand the prevalence of critical events in the wider societal discourse as well as in social theory, and the grammar of their unfolding. However, what his theory cannot capture is the present virality of social theory, the extent and speed of contemporary social theory’s engagement with current events. I suggest that the puzzle of social theory’s virality can only be solved by completing Koselleck’s turn to the inside of social self-perception. In this sense, I propose to think the virality of contemporary social theory not as a product of infection following contact with a viral evental source, but as the result of immunitarian auto-affection. Understood in this sense, contemporary societies bring forth the crisis events which they perceive themselves affected through an autoimmunitarian mechanism that is particularly relevant, and thus particularly active, in today’s complex societies.

The existence and functioning of an immune mechanism at work in modern societies has been discussed by a number of postfoundational thinkers. In Derrida (2005) , Jacques Derrida identifies autoimmunity as the dynamic that renders possible personal and collective identity-formation and -transformation through exposure to an outside (see also: Rae in this issue). Here, autoimmunity is not ‘an absolute ill or evil’ but ‘enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes’ (Derrida 2005, 152). However, the autoimmunitarian functioning of the democratic community entails a latent suicidal force which is unleashed when the autoimmunitarian democracy, in order to protect itself from external threats, suspends and attacks its own democratic functioning, a dynamic Derrida identifies in the Western response to the 9/11 attacks (Derrida 2005, 40; 96–97). For Roberto Esposito, the modern political community can only exist insofar as it is immunitarian. Lacking any foundational ground, and thus confronting its members with the impossible demand of expropriation to a social common that remains inessential, the political community requires an immunitarian other to give itself form and purpose in the collective warding off of viral threats (Esposito 1998).

The immunitarian functioning of the community creates a political opening in which sovereign power inserts itself, and retains legitimacy. The modern state rules over and through an immunity mechanism that produces viral threats against which sovereign power can be unleashed to produce the community-to-be-protected. Esposito’s antagonistic autoimmunity is not, as in Derrida, the sign of a political malfunction but rather ‘normally pathological’ in modern politics; ‘it does nothing more than express the logic of the immune system in its pure state’ (Esposito 2011, 164). Exemplified by the Third Reich’s politics of extinction directed against its own Jewish citizens, autoimmunity can give rise to a totalitarian paranoia where everything is a potential threat to the life and health of the population and must be eradicated at the first suspicious sign. For Esposito, the immunitarian pathology structurally embedded in modern politics is thus both functionally necessary for the reproduction of the democratic community, and inherently dangerous. While avoiding such ‘autoimmunitarian paroxysm’ (Esposito 2008, 117), the political measures adopted to combat the spread and effects of COVID-19 are certainly marked by the biopolitical inside/outside distinctions that underpin Esposito’s immunity. Delayed lockdowns, insufficient orders of protective equipment for healthcare staff or the classification of Amazon warehouse workers as ‘essential’ rendered vulnerable, or actively hurt, members of the political community externalized from the white, middle-class population to be protected (Ajana 2021).²

Frédéric Neyrat develops Esposito’s ideas by thinking the functional logic of autoimmunity beyond the consolidation of identity. For Neyrat, immunity is an engine of social self-perception that renders society intelligible to the subjects inhabiting it. Neyrat’s starting point is Esposito’s diagnosis of the autoimmunitarian quality of contemporary liberal societies, which Neyrat dissociates from the hinge of modern politics. For Neyrat, ‘capitalism, religion, and technoscience’ (2010, 34) are, just like the modern political community, ‘originary parameters that constitute the goals of immuno-politics’, an insight that forces ‘us to rethink the logic of immunity within a history that is multiple’ (ibid.). For Neyrat, the immunitarian quality of contemporary societies, the frequency with which ever new immunity threats to be eradicated appear, cannot simply be understood as a consequence of their intentional political creation. Rather, it must be explored with a view to the societies perceiving themselves as perpetually threatened. Mobilising Ulrich Beck’s analysis of twenty-first century democracies as risk societies, Neyrat’s analytical angle is not far from Koselleck’s: he unpacks autoimmunity with a view to the role that returning immunity threats play for the way societies perceive and describe themselves. Neyrat turns the immunitarian paradigm social.

For Neyrat, contemporary societies make sense of themselves, their own state and the events they are subject to by employing ‘the fantasy of an absolute immunization’ (2014) that is charged by a social ‘immunological unconscious’ (Neyrat 2014). Here, the immunitarian threat ‘does not only define a fact or an event but a crazy relation with the world’ (Neyrat 2016, 248). Neyrat’s collective immunological unconscious certainly holds the potential for political instrumentalisation, but is not itself politically manufactured. Rather, it responds to the manifest conditions of life in the social and ecological present, where ‘environmental catastrophe is part of our daily reality’ (Neyrat 2016, 247–248). In other words, ‘our crazy relation with the world is justified’ (2016, 248). For Neyrat, we ‘are sane in becoming crazy’ (2016, 248). Driving the autoimmunitarian perception that we find ourselves in the constant presence of a threat, crisis or catastrophe is, following Neyrat, the absence of a transcendental outside. For Neyrat, it is firstly the introversive functioning of global capitalism that has robbed societies of all stable boundaries and therefore of their outsides, and rendered them auto-affective. Secondly, the all too visible effects of climate change mean that nature is no longer available as an outside to which threats can be externalized and thereby epistemically ordered and fixed. We cannot help but be acutely aware of the fact that the dangers posed by recent environmental changes are, both in terms of their origin and their effect, social threats in our immediate vicinity. As Neyrat puts it, nature is no longer available as ‘our hidden trash bin’ (Neyrat 2016, 250).

Where autoimmunity, for Esposito, describes an automated mechanism that brings forth the outside threats political communities require for their relational consolidation, Neyrat explores the social underside of this immuno-political dynamic. For him, autoimmunity marks the chronic condition of a society where such externalization perpetually fails. Its subjects experience themselves as facing multiple dislocated and overlapping threats at all times, which are rendered even more ominous by their ambiguity. Because their origin and quality cannot be firmly pinned down through externalization, everything must be assumed to be latently threatening. In Neyrat’s autoimmune society, the distinctions between threat and resolution, exception and normality have become blurred. The crisis event is no longer singular but normal, meaning that it no longer functions effectively to orient how subjects perceive the society they live in. Together with their outside, Neyrat’s autoimmune societies have lost clear focal points and lines of demarcation to guide the way subjects perceive and describe them (Neyrat 2016, 459–252).

The consequence is a paranoid immune fantasy that permeates the autoimmunitarian society, and guides its perception in place of other epistemic lines of orientation. At all times, it demands vigilance towards the multiple threats that permeate a totalized social whole without outside. Discussing the dangerous political effects of the relational immune fantasy in 2010, Neyrat offers the pushback against the US universal health care reform as an example for how the immune fantasy renders all state regulation ‘an intrusive element’ that has to be ‘unconditionally rejected in the name of so-called individual liberty’ (Neyrat 2010, 34). From a position of 2022 hindsight, one could, with Neyrat, identify the same immune fantasy as the driving force behind the anti-social libertarianism that mobilized Trump’s supporters and motivated rejections of mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccination.

On the level of social theory, Neyrat’s autoimmunity cautions against readily positing ontological relationality, complexity and immanence as a failsafe way beyond the ideational frameworks of liberal humanism that drive ecological exploitation and foreclose adequate action on the former. For Neyrat, essentializing immanence and universalizing relationality is, just like the paranoid belief that citizens are constantly under threat from intruding forces permeating all areas of social life, a symptom of the autoimmunitarian condition of contemporary societies – a way to make sense of a society without outside by totalizing its inside. For Neyrat, ‘relational excess, the belief that everything is interconnected, hyper-connected: that’s the symmetrical fantasy of the immune fantasy’ (2014). An unreflective post-humanist theory that does not examine the social conditionedness and operativity of its own theoretical logic, Neyrat fears, only reproduces the autoimmunitarian paranoia of society. Against the background of his theory of immunity, Neyrat thus reiterates Brown’s call for a postfoundational engagement with – ecological and other – crisis events that is both viral and virological.

COVID-19, viral academia and immunitarian orientation

In this introductory paper, I propose to think viral social theory, and here the scholarship produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, as autoimmunitarian in Neyrat’s sense. It lets itself be infected by political events, not invented but actual and meaningful – but the cause and dynamics of this process of infection are nevertheless to be found on the inside of the social sphere becoming viral. Thought with Neyrat, viral social theory is firstly conditioned by the globalizing and introversive functioning of capital relations. They create a marketized academic knowledge production which envelops its social outsides, creating a dynamic of auto-affective hyper-responsiveness in the sense of Neyrat’s immune fantasy. Secondly, with Neyrat, viral social theory can be understood as responding to a social reality that has become complex, intransparent and can only be described with a view to the viral events that permeate it.

Beginning with the conditioning role of market forces that dissolve boundaries and envelope outsides, Isaac, in his call for a more politically engaged mode of theorizing from the 1990s, already notes how political theory writing is increasingly driven by dynamics and pressures of ‘disciplinary professionalization’ (1995, 646). Whereas Isaac fears that the need to appeal to a highly specialized academic readership and engage with recent publications rather than with political events confines social theory to the academic ivory tower (Isaac 1995, 646–647), I suggest that these professional pressures now instead require academics to reliably and speedily produce research-lead commentary on current events. While academic reputation certainly matters no less than at the time of Isaac’s writing, its assessment, especially in the Anglo-American sphere, is increasingly standardized and quantified. Academic success consists in achieving as many reads and citations for a paper as possible, even better if it is published in a journal with a high impact factor (Crous 2019; Zapata-Sepúlveda 2021). This trend towards quantification, on its own, creates incentives for scholars to work on themes and topics of interest to a broad, general audience. But the digitalization of academic writing, reading and networking further requires scholars to market their work, and their academic persona, to a digital public, following the rules and dynamics of the fast-paced and volatile online discourse. Commenting on current affairs as an when events unfold is a reliable way of ensuring public resonance. The promised reward for whoever is quick enough to use one’s research background for an insightful reading of a current crisis is not limited to momentary online fame, but can extend to follow-up appearances in traditional news media, which can then again be handily publicized via social media (Kapidzic 2020; Bonnie 2017). Viral social theory is thus, at least in part, the effect of academic ‘brand management’ through producing digitally viral content.

This does not mean that the social theory written on the COVID-19 pandemic does not reflect genuine attempts at understanding the event and its implications. But its sheer size, and the speed with which it was produced, indicate that it is also an auto-effective response to dynamics of professionalization and digitalization in the academic sphere which encourage this virality. The push towards frequent and curated online engagement is embedded within a wider neoliberal marketization of higher education, again especially in the Anglo-American realm, where constant productivity and reliable growth in output, grant funding, tuition fee income and public engagements have become the parameters against which academic work is measured. Neyrat’s immunitarian fantasy captures accurately the driving logic of this academic marketization, with university leadership teams and funding bodies calling for ever greater responsiveness to social issues to achieve ever greater social ‘impact’. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped how this marketization of academic labour plays out in practice in particular ways, rendering visible the intersection with dynamics of social differentiation and inequality. Colleagues working at prestigious UK research institutions shared that the pandemic for them meant managerial expectations of increased research productivity as no time was wasted on commuting, chatting to students after class or travelling to conferences. Journals reported an increased number of submissions during the first, long lockdown: researchers found that the number of manuscripts submitted to all Elsevier journals between February 2020 and May 2020 increased by 30% compared to the same period in the previous year (Squazzoni et al. 2021). But these results were clearly gendered: women submitted fewer papers than men, and fewer papers than before the pandemic across the social sciences, for International Studies Perspectives for example by 19% (Wiegand, Lisle, and Murdie 2020). During the pandemic lockdowns, professional demands more than ever conflicted with domestic care responsibilities, especially childcare, which are evidently still disproportionately fulfilled by women.

For non-white academics, the expectation to produce viral social theory added to already racially unequal workloads that were further exacerbated by the pandemic, for example as student support roles are often held by black and Asian academics (McCoy and Lee 2021). Viral social theory interacts with social mechanisms of inequality and exclusion in complex ways, not only because the academic field is not a clean slate and equal playing field, but also because the markers of success that drive it are masculine, white and middle-class. The virality of social theory that the pandemic highlights cannot simply be welcomed as a result of the long overdue recognition that social theory must matter to the societies it is analysing and evaluating because theorizing does not take place in a social vacuum. On the contrary, viral social theory reflects and perpetuates the dynamics of a neoliberally professionalized academic field that has turned auto-affective as scholars are trying to meet the ever increasing demands placed on them. The effect is a mode of academic production that follows the pattern of Neyrat’s immune fantasy, with scholars racing to respond to a current event, drawn from a never-ending pool of latent social issues to investigate, at the first sign of its emergence on the level of general social relevance.

Moving from the dynamics of a marketized, globalized academia to the wider social conditions that render social theory viral, Neyrat prompts us to treat this virality as a sign and symptom of society’s ‘immanent regime of self-perception’ (2016, 251). No longer able to hinge perceptions of society on external threats, social self-description turns inwards, but is here confronted with a problem of orientation. Under conditions where the distinction between crisis and resolution has become blurred, where everything, at least potentially, is a threat, can cause a crisis, the gaze of social self-description must see everything but has at the same time nothing to focus on. The autoimmunitarian society is imperceptible to itself, and to the subjects inhabiting it, beyond the paranoid fantasy of total relational connectedness. I suggest that Niklas Luhmann’s writings on immunity can be read alongside Neyrat’s to further illuminate the relationship between immunity, social self-description and orientation. Like Neyrat, Luhmann also views the discursive predominance of threatening events as symptom and effect of a crisis of social self-description. For Luhmann, the ‘alarming use of an alarming terminology – and alarm means finally “a 1'arme” (take up arm) – coincides with an incapacity of our world society to observe and to describe itself’ (1984, 59).

While Neyrat argues that this incapacity results from the fact that contemporary societies have lost their transcendental outsides, Luhmann instead suggests that societies are no longer able to describe themselves because social outsides have multiplied. Luhmann’s sociological systems theory tells the story of Western modernity as that of increasing social differentiation. As societies grow more complex, ‘tasks, roles, activities, terminologies’ (Luhmann 1984, 63) become more specialized to cope with this increase in social complexity. This social differentiation is centred on distinct functional realms that meet the particular needs of modern societies, such as the economy, education or art. It eventually leads to the formation of epistemologically closed-off, autopoietically self-reproductive functional systems. Each social system manages its internal complexity in a way that is open to further evolution and can thus fulfil its particular functional responsibility in changing societies with changing demands. However, for this to be possible, Luhmann’s social systems make a sacrifice: everything not immediately relevant to their systemic function is externalized to the outside of the system’s meaning relations (Luhmann 2012, 634–750).

Luhmann’s autopoietic social systems can fulfil their function only insofar as they disregard whatever they identify as external to them, and on their part remain impenetrable outside to the rest of society. Complex financialized economies, for instance, provide goods, services and investment opportunities at the expense of excluding the codes that guide religion or law. Other social systems, and the psychic systems of the subjects that inhabit them, rely on the provisions of the economic system, but without having insight to their actual workings and complexity. Luhmann’s functional differentiation creates societies where those existing and acting in them have to cope with the fact that the social environment they are acting in remains unknown. Action takes place with reference, and partially in response, to multiple outsides that have to be engaged with, but cannot be understood on their own terms (Luhmann 1993, 530–531; 538–539). Like Neyrat’s loss of outsides, the autopoietic closure of social systems in Luhmann results in a totalizing turn to the inside for every individual system. Without an external position of observation from which definitive reference points can be identified, the social environment becomes unknowable. This creates a problem of orientation for the observing system. Unable to clearly locate the systemic self in the environment it inhabits, its autopoietic reproduction at the boundary of system and environment is rendered precarious (Luhmann 1990, 206; see also: 217).

What Luhmann specifies beyond Neyrat is that this problem of orientation must be understood as a product of escalating complexity. Luhmann’s systems are second-order machines that are aware of and record the contingency of their observations. They are therefore subject to informational entropy, the constant increase of internal complexity. The issue of escalating complexity is especially acute for the systems and subjects of contemporary, functionally differentiated societies. Adding to their high level of internal complexity is, as argued above, the necessity to interact with multiple other, highly complex function systems (Luhmann 2012, 56–60). This requires, at least to an extent, an opening towards their external complexity; it necessitates being receptive to and processing the new information they produce at high speed while at the same coping with the inability to understand the actions of these other systems in a way that would allow for definitive planning and prediction. For Luhmann, complexity is thus the escalating problem of modernity (Luhmann 1998, 45). For social systems and subjects to exist under these conditions, meaning to continuously reproduce their relational selves vis-à-vis an outside world, requires understanding of the social situation they find themselves in to the degree that the orienting distinction between self and environment remains possible.

Immunity, in Luhmann, describes a social mechanism of complexity-management. Oriented towards Neyrat’s discussion of complexity and imperceptibility at the level of society as a whole, Luhmann’s immunity can here be understood to ensure the availability of social self-descriptions that provide orienting insight for society’s meaning systems. Luhmann’s immunity is hinged on what he refers to as ‘contradictions’ (1995, 371). Contradictions are threats or crisis events experienced by a system in response to the interaction with its environment, but produced internally through self-affection. While Luhmann, like Neyrat, does not suggest that there is no externally real basis for the events that trigger immunitarian responses, the particular threats detected are always the autoimmunitarian creation of the meaning system which immunity protects. As Luhmann puts it, ‘contradictions cannot be unambiguously localized’ but rather ‘circulate within the system’ (Luhmann 1995, 371) in which they raise alarm. The threats produced by society’s immune system condense unprocessable complexity to something concrete and familiar, which society, and its meaning systems, can respond to. Luhmann’s immunity gives concrete meaning to the epistemological insecurity experienced in the face of escalating complexity, and thereby renders it manageable. As a clearly defined threat, ‘the condensed insecurity becomes something almost secure: something has to happen in order to solve’ it (Luhmann 1995, 371).

The negative quality that Luhmann’s social immunity gives to the alarming events it detects – issues, crises, threats, risks, catastrophes – achieves complexity-reduction without requiring meaningful, nuanced accounts of the state that is described. ‘The negative has, by virtue of its own indeterminateness, important strategic advantages. It can be more general than the positive and at the same time closer to action’ (Luhmann 1984, 59). In order to build your understanding of society on the idea that individual liberty is under threat from intrusive state politics, for example, it is not necessary to understand what makes a liberal society, or which understanding of liberty one subscribes to. The immunitarian production of orientation operates by mobilizing

the system's “un-'s,” symbols of rejection that are at one's disposal (relatively) freely but whose use can be conditioned: the world of “no's” in relation to the world of “yesses.” … The system does not immunize itself against the no but with the help of the no. (Luhmann 1995, 371)

Luhmann’s social immunity provides orienting self-descriptions that allow its social systems and subjects to continue at the boundary with the social outside they render intelligible. Understood as its product, viral social theory reduces complexity and orients the perception of society. The events it diagnoses, analyses and comments on provide focal points for understanding society as particularly threatened, challenged or shaped by a certain issue carved out of its otherwise imperceptible complexity. In the midst of an unfolding pandemic, pandemic social theory offered its readers the orienting – even if maybe not comforting – certainty that the present was insecure, and the future uncertain.³

Reflecting on what the proliferation of the immunitarian ‘crisis fashion’ (Luhmann 1984, 59) means for social theory, Luhmann’s conclusions are somewhat ambivalent. ‘Sociological theory’, he writes, ‘may reinforce this appeal of negative self-descriptions’, ‘may, taking distance, observe and describe them’ or ‘may hope to be able to have an impact on societal self-descriptions’ (Luhmann 1984, 60), to change them. Rather than advocating for one over the other, Luhmann suggests that what matters is that social theory retains the ‘intellectual resources’ (Luhmann 1984, 60) for all of the above. To do so, it must resist being fully consumed by the event in an autoimmunitarian society which will, Luhmann predicts, turn to social theory to support its ‘fashionable semantic predispositions’ (Luhmann 1984, 68). Similar to Brown, Luhmann does not think that social theory should be socially disengaged, but suggests that all engagement with current events should be complicated by the self-reflexive awareness of its conditionedness in society’s autoimmunitarian dynamics in order to keep open the avenues of theoretical analysis and normative critique. In the terms of this introduction, Luhmann also calls for a both viral and virological social theory.⁴

Towards a viral and virological critique after COVID

This special issue aims to highlight that postfoundational theory, rather than becoming obsolete in the face of the present’s many crises, is urgently needed because it offers the theoretical tools that allow for a both viral and virological analysis of the evental present. The ‘post-COVID critiques’ collected in this issue unpack the manifest and particular reality of the pandemic while critically interrogating rather than taking for granted its evental status, because many of the economic and political mechanisms that powerfully shape pandemic societies remain continuous in the face of the collectively perceived singularity. Some of the papers brought together in this issue draw out how the pandemic stipulates postfoundational theory to re-use, re-work or further develop its theoretical tool box to capture the workings and effects of, and political opportunities opened-up by, the COVID-19 event. Others juxtapose and complicate the seismic quality of the pandemic rupture with processes and dynamics of colonial extraction, sexual normalization or anthropogenic environmental destruction that emerged long before and continued uninterrupted through the pandemic.

The issue’s opening papers by Ingala and Repo and Richter most explicitly set out a theoretical programme for a both viral and virological postfoundational reading of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ingala counters and complicates the recently popularized narrative that critical thought, as opposed to the viral theories of new materialism and speculative realism, offers no adequate tools to engage with current events from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change. Employing the thought of Deleuze, Foucault and Butler, Ingala shows that postfoundational thought always theorizes in the face of evental encounters, but also makes it possible to situate the viral event in a symptomatology of the present, exploring its relations to the conditions that structure and determine our perception of the present. Repo and Richter draw on Deleuze and Foucault to directly confront the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic should be thought as an evental rupture that releases creative socio-political potentiality at all. They draw out how the existing pandemic scholarship endows the pandemic event with a fixed, latently essential quality as either politically recuperative or rupturing and creative. Nuancing and complicating these theoretical lines, Repo and Richter suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is latently evental, but has to be made an event, either through counter-effectuation or envelopment in the tectonic movement of discursive structures, for it to unfold actual shaping power.

The papers by Rae, de Boever and Taşkale also reflect on the state of postfoundational critique in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, but place emphasis on how postfoundational theory can draw new theoretical and political horizons from the former. Rae unpacks the pandemic as autoimunnitarian in Derrida’s sense, shifting the focus away from the viral threat itself to the political communities whose identities and structures are made and re-made through viral auto-affection. Rae draws out how the creative autoimmunitarian instability that surfaced in pandemic politics can be harnessed for progressively altering (post-)pandemic societies, highlighting the political applicability and practical purchase of Derrida’s thought. De Boever takes Agamben’s infamous assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic as invented sovereign exception as the starting point for a critical investigation into Agamben’s understanding of politics. Retracing the political and theoretical thinness of Agamben’s wholesale rejection of sovereign power to the particular, rigid formalism underpinning Agamben’s theory, he suggests that his underappreciation of plasticity renders Agamben unable to think sovereign politics beyond the biopolitical camp. Taşkale’s paper unpacks the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that shows the reality of and thinks beyond the thanatopolitics of contemporary capitalism. While the pandemic, following Taşkale, exposes how liberal democracies operate by demarcating populations to protect from those left to die, it has also generated islands of an alternative political dynamic centred on the common, which challenge critical theory to imagine and map an affirmative, communal biopolitics.

While the first set of papers, both critically and productively, engage the COVID-19 pandemic as an event for postfoundational theory, the second set of papers situate the pandemic event in political and economic mechanisms that predate and continue through pandemic societies. Shankar’s contribution challenges the Western and heteronormative pandemic imageries that dominate media and academic discourses. Focusing on the experience of queer individuals and communities in India, Shankar draws out how queering the pandemic event problematizes established notions of safety, health and normality and their social distribution, and emphasizes the role of queer activism in redefining politics at this intersection. Ayyash’s paper examines how the experience of COVID-19 in Palestine is shaped by and interwoven with Israel’s settler-colonial (pandemic) politics. Ayyash’s intervention further challenges the appropriateness of the analytical and normative categories available in Western pandemic theory for capturing the case of Palestine, where vaccinations and politics of containment are embedded in governmental mechanisms of debilitation employed by the Israeli state.

Nail’s contribution unpacks the changes and continuities of capitalism in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the dynamics of extractive capitalism, with its social and ecological effects, predate the pandemic, Nail argues that what comes to the fore in the former is a fundamental shift in the operationality of capitalism, which has itself turned viral. Not only is the continuous ecological destruction that global capitalism unleashes on the planet likely to cause future pandemics, creating a viral planetary present of which the COVID-19 pandemic was just a taste. Following Nail, the pandemic condition has also become incorporated in a self-extensive capitalist economy that fuels the former as a means to ensure growth. In many liberal democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the importance of social reproductive professions for sustaining the life and welfare of societies, illustrated by initiatives like the UK’s weekly ‘clap for carers’. Farris and Bergfeld take this public attention as a starting point to investigate the devaluation of social reproductive work within the capitalist economy. Social reproductive labour, they argue, is systemically marked as ‘low value’ within the capitalist economy because of its relative resistance to marketization and its historical identification with the ‘unproductive’ populations of women and immigrants, which will prevent adequate compensation within the existing economic system irrespective of the short-lived pandemic attention. In an even more radical case for the continuity of COVID capitalism, McGowan analyses commodity fetishism, and the liberal freedom to accumulate which it conditions, as the forces that keep liberal societies on the steady trajectory of capitalist extraction and accumulation. Capitalism, following McGowan, channels the subject’s sublimation into the commodity and thereby sets up a an epistemic and normative horizon where the subject can think freedom and desire only in relation to consumption, ensuring the reproduction of capitalist relations.

The final set of papers in this special issue then explores the societal and philosophical event of the COVID-19 pandemic against the background of one very particular continuity: the ongoing climate catastrophe. For La Védrine, the COVID-19 pandemic crystallizes how profoundly our Western understanding of ecology is entangled with the capitalist parameters of value and human exceptionalism. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, he develops an alternative, valueless an economic ecology to guide environmental thought for post-pandemic societies. Along similar lines, Ejsing and Denman undertake an ontological reconfiguration of postfoundational political theory which, they suggest, is necessary in the face of a late stage capitalism that has become increasingly viral in Nail’s sense. Drawing out the manifest danger of democracy being undermined by biopolitical fortification in the face of recurrent ecological emergencies, Ejsing and Denman call for a social theory that both critiques the former and conceptualizes alternatives for a resilient, entangled, post-human democracy. Sotiropoulos’ paper finally undertakes a reconceptualization of one particular parameter of democratic politics in the face of the urgent ecological challenges that the pandemic has highlighted: justice. Sotiropoulos mobilizes Deleuzian philosophy and materialist thought to propose a postfoundational alternative to dominant, deliberative accounts of environmental justice, which renders visible ecological injustices and their embeddedness in a global capitalist system of human and planetary exploitation while guarding against the ideological essentialization of one particular ethical or political resolution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Richter

Dr Hannah Richter is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hertfordshire, where she teaches Political Theory. Her research seeks to develop innovative pathways for contemporary continental theory, particularly in the area of biopolitics and through links to systems theory and ecology. Her work has been published in International Political Sociology, the European Journal of Social Theory and the European Journal of Political Theory. She has edited the collection Biopolitics: Race, Gender, Economy (2018, Rowman and Littlefield International) and is currently working on the monograph Deleuze and Luhmann: sense, immanence, politics.

Notes

1 Alain Badiou (2020), who views the pandemic event as politically unremarkable, is one of the few exceptions here.

2 Esposito himself notes how the medicalization of politics in the face of the pandemic crisis turned ‘social deviance into an epidemic disruption to be treated or suppressed’ (Esposito 2020). Shankar’s paper in this issue explores this further with a focus on queer communities in pandemic India.

3 Immunity is not bound to, and does not prioritize, a certain form or content of the systemic relations whose autopoiesis it facilitates, for example a democratic political system. Immunity transforms a world of outsides that are latently threatening because they are thoroughly unknown into a world that is threatened, alternatively or all at one, by COVID-19, climate change, the surveillance politics of the pandemic state, the undermining of the social fabric through non-Western immigration or ‘woke’ politics. In this sense, Luhmann’s immunity can target and destroy democracy, as feared by Derrida, Esposito and Neyrat, if for example the power of the democratic social is given meaning as an immunitarian threat. However, it also has the potential to change, strengthen or renew particular systems and systemic dynamics. Luhmann insists that immune reactions can actualize manifest change. Because it must facilitate ‘self-reproduction under changing conditions’ immunity ‘is not simply a mechanism for … re-establishing the status quo ante; it must be able also to accept useful changes’ (Luhmann 1995, 369).

4 Acutely aware of the pressures of academic virality discussed above, even without having felt them to a contemporary extent, Luhmann acknowledges that committing to a self-reflexive, postfoundational mode of theorizing might mean having to resist the ‘glitterings of success’ (Luhmann 1984, 68) promised by viral theory. But he concludes on the half optimistic, half humorous remark that at least ‘we cannot be sure on a priori grounds that theories of adequate complexity will turn out to be unsaleable’ (Luhmann 1984, 68).