From Institutions to the Platform Society: An Interdisciplinary Reading of Recent Works by Roberto Esposito

Introduction

The most recent work of Roberto Esposito – a leading exponent of Italian Theory – can be seen as a culminating moment on his long journey to re-semanticize some of the main concepts of Western philosophical thought. Despite the variety of topics explored along the way, his path can be mapped essentially along three interconnected axes, which also shed light on his most recent thought on institutions, the focus of this article. The first axis concerns a postmetaphysical conception of the subject and community: in Communitas (Esposito, 2004 [1998]), a subjectivity inhabited by a constitutive otherness – as opposed to the subjectivism on which the Western metaphysical tradition was built – leads to a new concept of community, no longer understood in terms of a ‘property’, that is, as possessed of shared characteristics leading to the formation of a supraindividual entity and aimed at excluding those who lack those characteristics. Rather, in the communitas, that which is shared by individuals is the munus, understood as a gift and a debt, a sharing of a constitutive lack rather than a common belonging. The recognition of this debt and lack, as we shall see, proves essential in structuring an interindividual bond that runs from the subjective realm of relationship to the objective realm of a life in common regulated by institutions.

Speaking about a lack of a ‘proper’ type and about overcoming a metaphysical type of subjectivity leads us to the second axis of Esposito’s thought, which explores the concept of the ‘impersonal’, connecting it to a re-semanticization of the word ‘body’. In Third Person (Esposito, 2012 [2007]), Two (Esposito, 2015 [2013]), and Persons and Things (Esposito, 2015 [2014]), Esposito adopts several angles in his approach to the opposition traced out in Western philosophical thought between the person, equated with the rational sphere, and the thing, understood as inert matter, a category under which the body also falls. Adopting a concept of the ‘living body’, Esposito overturns this inert notion of the body: biotechnologies especially – through techniques such as transplants – make bodies expressions of a trans-individuality. Thus, the body is no longer the property of the person but an impersonal material and a common good (see also Serafini, 2017). Esposito further views the body understood in these terms as ‘potential’, since, if it is no longer an inert ‘mere thing’, then it becomes open to the possibility of its continual renewal. This is how the impersonal materiality of the body and its circulation facilitate the institution of a symbolic order that enables life in common in the form of the communitas.

The third axis – traceable among others to texts such as Immunitas (Esposito, 2011 [2002]) and Bios (Esposito, 2008 [2004]) – concerns the search for a positive expression of the relationship between politics and life: in other words, an ‘affirmative biopolitics’ capable of bypassing the immune tendencies that have made the action of protection, control, and regulation of life by power an apparatus of exclusion and even death.

These immunizing actions occurred especially when the body was conceived of as a body politic, an organic totality that has to protect itself from infection introduced by elements outside itself – whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, and so forth. Under this paradigm, the body was conceptualized in the static, inertial dimension typical of metaphysical subjectivism: that is, as an inert materiality at the disposal of a rational apparatus (in this case, a political and statal one). These tendencies conjure up the concept of thanatopolitics: a politics that destroys any forms of life considered inferior. Conversely, an affirmative biopolitics must recapture a relationship between politics and life in which politics allows for the creation of a ‘life in common’, which revolves around the sharing of a lack, an improper, which, as we have seen, also brings us back to the concept of the ‘living body’.

Within this framework, the focus on institutions appears to follow naturally from Esposito’s thought on both the subject and community, on the living body and on biopolitics. A philosophy that inquires into the post-metaphysical foundations of life in common must include the way intersubjective relations and forms of association develop within a stable and systematic set of conventions and norms. Put differently, it must deal with the way the social community relates to the dispositifs that regulate its existence in an organized form. Similarly, as mentioned earlier, the interplay between living bodies produces a symbolic, trans-individual order capable of structuring life in common, which must consolidate itself, once again, in an apparatus of norms and conventions that ensure its continuity and formalization. Finally, inquiring into the relationship between politics and life cannot but lead to an examination of the organized practices and bodies that regulate this relationship, namely institutions.

Esposito’s entire theoretical journey thus arrives at this common landing point in his three most recent books: Instituting Thought: Three Paradigms of Political Ontology (Esposito, 2021 [2020]), Institution (Esposito, 2022 [2021]), and Vitam Instituere. Genealogia dell’istituzione (Esposito, 2023, soon to appear in English). In the following sections, we shall see, among other things, how all three axes of Esposito’s thought enhance our understanding of his work on institutions, its relation to the sociology of institutions (particularly the so-called cognitive turn in neo-institutionalism), and, lastly, how it can give a clearer picture of the institutional dynamics typical of the platform society.

The Instituent Thought of Roberto Esposito

Leveraging on the same method he uses to scrutinize other fundamental concepts of his philosophical thought, Esposito also investigates institutions by questioning the way they have been dealt with in Western philosophy.

As he sees it, the main difficulty in philosophical thought, but also in the legal tradition and sociology, has been how to think of life and institutions as concepts that are mutually implicated rather than opposed to each other. Put simply, what has prevailed is a repressive conception of institutions, understood as apparatuses that restrict the free expansion of individual instincts and life itself. For this reason, too, institutions have often been conceived of in the substantive form of institutio, as static, inert apparatuses, instead of in the verb form, instituere, as dynamic structures with the capacity to renew themselves as situations change, analogous to the concept of the living body and in continual renewal, which in Esposito’s thought ranges from the trans-individual to the social structure. Only this latter sense allows for the idea of an institutio vitae, that is, of life as instituted (and not simply protected or immunized, as in the immune and thanatopolitical paradigm that Esposito criticizes throughout his philosophical work) inside of orders, which it fills up, however, with its own matter. This is precisely the task of instituent thought that Esposito takes on, seeking to provide it with a philosophical systemization. To do so, he must pull through threads of thought – philosophical but also sociological and legal – capable of conceptualizing institutions in this vital form.

In Instituting Thought, Esposito focuses his critique on two paradigms of political ontology that, in different ways, deprive politics of its instituent moment. The first he defines as destituent, arriving from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Although, at least during the 1930s, Heidegger still envisioned a form of institution for the political, which he attributed to the work of poets and thinkers, starting in the 1940s, the political appears to him as incorporated into (and thus compromised by) technological machination (Machenschaft). The almost total identification between politics and technology prompts Heidegger to take refuge in impolitical thinking, namely, a discontinuation of political action that only leaves room for the passive action of listening to poetic and meditative thought.

The second political ontology paradigm that Esposito brings into question, and which he defines as constituent, can be traced to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze overturns the depoliticizing outcome of Heideggerian ontology and comes to equate the space of being with a perennially creative politics. For Deleuze, being is political. In Esposito’s opinion, however, this ultimately makes it impossible to mark out the boundaries of the political and to distinguish properly political action from what is not political. The instituent moment must preserve a form of symbolic transcendence from the social being to which, through its action, it is able to give form.

Esposito traces these presuppositions back to the thought of Claude Lefort, which belongs to a paradigm defined, accordingly, as instituent. Lefort believes that the political is what institutes the social: the political has the capacity to place the antagonisms coursing through all societies onto the symbolic plane of society’s governance.

In Institution, Esposito links the concept of institution’s regression into coercion – with a repressive effect on instincts – to the equating of institutions with static entities devoid of transformative potential. He sees this regression as stemming in part from the difficulty various schools of philosophical and sociological thought have encountered in thinking about an ‘instituent practice’ that holds together what is inside and outside institutions.

In Vitam Instituere, Esposito delves further into the connections between institution and life through a genealogy of modern philosophical thought. He reads between the lines of some of the great Western thinkers of the modern age, reinterpreting some of their concepts in the perspective of an instituent thought. The book begins with a reflection on the Latin phrase – of uncertain attribution – vitam instituere. This locution appears in a passage by the philosopher Demosthenes, cited in Greek by Marcianus in the Digest, which states that the inhabitants of the city must live in accordance with the common pact they have given themselves of their own accord. In Esposito’s interpretation, this relates to the simultaneously instituent and instituted character of life, which is instituted by people through a system of rules that allows them to live together in an ordered way. This is not an imposition coming from the outside, however, such as a command or set of prohibitions, but rather the ‘fundamental rules that people prescribe for themselves or others in view of specific aims’ (Esposito, 2023: 59, trans. from Italian). Understood in this way, instituent thought thus connects together the three axes of Esposito’s thought presented in the first section. If it is true that communitas is based on a sharing of the munus, this can only take place on two conditions: (1) there must be reflexive recognition of the obligations that come with being bound to others as recipients of the gift of community; (2) this reflexivity must translate into the formalization of the sharing into organized structures that ensure continuity. This brings about an affirmative biopolitics in which institutions, regarded as living bodies, neither control nor repress life but allow it to manifest in an organized form.

As Esposito points out, to rediscover the philosophical foundations of this virtuous union between institutions and life, we must wait for the modern philosophical era. In Esposito’s view, the most important authors for tracing this turning point are – along with Spinoza – Machiavelli and Hegel. As regards Machiavelli, the pivotal factor that makes him a thinker of institutio vitae is the productive character he assigns to political conflict. Against an entire tradition of political philosophy that opposed order (guaranteed by institutions, beginning with the state) to conflict (to be neutralized through the construction of an institutional apparatus), Machiavelli emphasizes that conflict actually structures order in a different form and enables institutions to transform continuously.

Turning to Hegel, Esposito believes his philosophy can be rethought from an instituent perspective by reversing the interpretation that focuses on the process of idealizing reality and focusing instead on the reverse process of ‘materializing’ ideas. Central to this viewpoint is the concept of negation: immediate freedom is negated in Hegel through the transition to the objective spirit, which allows it to be expressed in a historical process. The negative thus allows freedom to be thought only in an embodied sphere, that is, within institutions that actualize it. Crucial to the instituent perspective is the Hegelian concept of ‘second nature’: these are the habits that enable the subject to overcome the natural determinacy of sensation, constituting a kind of ‘subjective normativity’ that the subject confers upon itself.

The genealogy Esposito charts in Vitam Instituere, a culminating moment in his exploration of institutions that began in the preceding two books, gives us insight into a few fundamental points of his instituent thought and how it views institutions and life as mutually implicated:

These six points define Esposito’s instituent thought in relation to the three axes of his philosophy outlined in the first section, as well as in comparison with the ideas of other authors. On the one hand, it is clear that Esposito develops a theory of institutions that aligns with thinkers who give prominence to their historical necessity, in order to shape natural, pre-political life and individual instincts. A mention of Hegel and his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right is apropos here: in this work, the German philosopher acknowledges the historical importance of institutions such as marriage and property. Likewise, Durkheim describes society as a structure that self-generates a series of limitations for individual instincts, thereby enabling life in common.

While these two sources emphasize the more structural and ‘objective’ aspect of the necessary relationship between institutions and life, Esposito insists that this must be intertwined with the subjective aspect, where individuals reflexively recognise the need for rules that enable their life in common. From this point of view, instituent thought permits Esposito to go further than authors who address an original relationality between individuals in a purely ontological and pre-institutional framework.

In §26 of Being and Time, Heidegger explores the correspondence between Dasein’s being in the world and being-with (Mitsein) from this point of view. Building on this idea, Jean-Luc Nancy developed his philosophy of intersubjectivity; in Being Singular Plural (Nancy, 2000) he affirmed that relationality (being-with) is an ontologically constitutive dimension of the self. Unlike Nancy, however, for Esposito the sharing of the munus does not make the community ‘inoperative’ (Nancy, 1991), since for the original relationality to fully manifest, it must pass from the ontological plane to the historical plane of institutions. This is a process of reflexive recognition of the munus, of the original debt, that leads to its formalization within institutions perceived not as entities external to the individuals but productively co-implicated with them.

The Sociology of Institutions: The Cognitive Turn

The transition Esposito describes from a vertical notion of institutions – in which they are viewed as dropped into place from on high and centered on a repressive system of prohibitions and sanctions – to a horizontal notion corresponds to the shift from the sociological theory of old institutionalism (Selznick, 1949, 1957) to that of new institutionalism. The latter approach, which in the field of organizational theory can be traced to the contributions of Meyer (1977; Meyer and Rowan, 1977), among others, describes a shift from a normative to a cognitive approach to the topic of institutions. Indeed, institutions are analyzed primarily as macrostructures and impersonal typifications, whose systems of conventions and rules individuals adhere to in a prereflective manner, owing to the naturalization of a set of routines and practices that they end up taking for granted. In this framework, institutionalization is considered first and foremost a cognitive process (Zucker, 1983, 1987).

As Powell and Di Maggio (1991) stress, this same shift from a normative to a cognitive approach can also be found in various strands of sociology and cognitive psychology. As far as cognitive psychology is concerned, Powell and Di Maggio refer mainly to the contribution of the Carnegie School. In Herbert Simon’s writings especially, there is an emphasis on the importance of routines and habits as factors for reducing uncertainties within organizations.

The cognitive turn in the theory of institutions as reported by Powell and Di Maggio can also be traced to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, especially the way it accounts for the cognitive assumptions of the social organization and how they act in practical knowledge and in interactions between individuals. Unlike Parsons’ functionalism, in Garfinkel’s (1967) theory cognition in everyday interaction is not structured rationally. Rather, it starts from ‘practical reason’, leading individuals to give meaning to communicative exchanges with others by adopting routines and behaviors in a flexible manner. This means that these rules of behavior are not rationally conceived of by individuals as norms to be complied with to ensure intersubjective agreement; rather, they take the form of ‘procedural rules’, largely taken for granted, which operate below the level of consciousness but can be adjusted and innovated as situations change.

The cognitive turn in sociological institutional theory as reconstructed by Powell and Di Maggio must also include the thought of Bourdieu (1977 [1972], 1981), especially his concept of habitus. Habitus refers to the set of predispositions and thought schemas that people acquire from belonging to a given social context and from internalizing past experiences, which generate regular behaviors that are expected and consistent with the context and/or class to which they belong. As a cornerstone of Bourdieu’s theory of practical reason, the notion highlights the unreflective character of social action and the underlying aspects of it that are taken for granted. From the vantage point of institutional theory, the concept of habitus can account for individuals’ adherence to supraindividual structures as the result of a cognitive process that is largely prereflective.

Folding the reading Esposito gives of Hegel’s treatment of habit as a ‘second nature’, we find a similar emphasis on the simultaneously horizontal and cognitive aspects of institutions. As for habit, in the Hegelian philosophy that Esposito focuses on from an instituent perspective, it takes the form of a mediation that allows us to overcome the immediacy of sensation. This takes place, however, through the repetitiveness of mental schemas and behaviors that make habit a partly mechanical and pre- (or post-) reflective mode of action, since it becomes automatic as the result of an initially reflective process:

Once we learn to swim or write, at a certain point we do so without reflecting on it anymore. Acting out of habit requires both attention and disattention [. . .]. From this point of view, just as habit tends to consolidate in thought, thought needs habit to proceed expeditiously without interposing too many intellectual mediations. (Esposito, 2023: 102, trans. from Italian)

The process of institutio vitae, of which Hegel’s second nature offers a significant example, is also fueled by routines and scripts. To some extent, it is these factors particularly that place the institutionalization process on the horizontal plane that connects it with life, removing it from the vertical plane of dependence on the repressive order of norms and sanctions.

And yet, Esposito questions how much prereflective attitudes or scripts may lead to the subject being alienated and, as a consequence, to creating space for a power that acts not repressively but through a surreptitious naturalization of routines and practices. Reflecting on the concept of habit in Hegel, Esposito also examines other interpretations, such as Menke’s, that emphasize its ambivalent, potentially alienating and depersonalizing qualities:

By taking on a habit, which is certainly not entirely external but does not adhere to one’s body like skin either, individuals realize themselves, but they do so by alienating themselves [. . .]. If being someone or something presupposes an identification with what one is, this does not apply to having, to which the semantics of habitus refers: one only acquires what one does not have. (Esposito, 2023: 103–4; trans. from Italian)

The reference to Bourdieu’s habitus in this context is particularly significant. In line with Esposito’s interpretation of the self-instituting character of life (evident already in the lemma vitam instituere), in his analysis he, Esposito, ends up favoring the subjective aspect of habit and routines over the objective aspect. Indeed, when discussing Hegel, he describes habit as a form of ‘self-disciplining’, namely a rule that the subject gives to itself, analogous to the common founding covenant of institutions, by which humans live according to rules they have given to themselves.

Nevertheless, some strands of sociological theory mentioned by Powell and Di Maggio regarding the cognitive turn in institutional theory – including that of new institutionalism itself – focus more on the objective aspect of these pre-reflective scripts. According to this reading, forms of self-disciplining are eclipsed by modes of hetero-disciplining imposed from the outside by a power that, rather than acting through repressive practices, directs the habits of individuals according to schemas that the individuals themselves perceive as natural.

The shifting balance between the subjective side of self-instituting life – emphasized by Esposito – and the objective side of power’s modeling of routines and behaviors is crucial, in my opinion, for analyzing some of the operational modes of institutions in contemporary society through the lens of Esposito’s instituent thought. Starting from this outline, then, in the next section I pose a few preliminary questions about the relationship between instituent thought and some of the new institutional forms that have occupied the public space with an increasing impact in the context of globalization and the platform society.

Big Tech: New Challenges for Instituent Thought in the Platform Society

Esposito’s highlighting of the perspective offered by legal institutionalism opens the way for a reflection on institutions that is irreducible to their identification with state power. The ‘rediscovery’ of institutions that Esposito describes, in connection with an important book by March and Olsen (1989), necessarily implies a widening of horizons on the global scene: ‘New institutionalism [. . .] has been unleashed overall by the crisis of the sovereign regime, which has long been replaced, or at least splintered, by governmental practices to which it cannot be reduced’ (Esposito, 2022 [2021]: 77). Among these, Esposito includes governmental practices connected with information technology and implemented by global finance. As Esposito (2022 [2021]: 66–71) points out, the growing differentiation of modern societies must lead to the recognition of a plurality of social constitutions arising out of the various spheres of society, from the economy to technology, science, and the media.

Studies on the forms of institutionalization taken by private companies have abounded for many years now. As a result of society’s ‘platformization’ process, however, something partially new has occurred, due to the growing importance of digital platforms as mediators of economic, communicative, and social flows on the global stage. Major private companies, such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft (referred to collectively as Big Tech), are now performing various functions that have traditionally been delegated to public institutions. This concerns above all how these companies represent their work in society, by presenting various ‘public goods’ such as health, security, and information (Nielsen and Ganter, 2022) as strictly dependent on the datafication processes that they produce (Monsees, 2023) and thus classifying them as ‘datafied social goods’ (Maghalaes and Couldry, 2021: 355). But Big Tech’s performance of public functions is also tied to the dependence of public powers on the services that these same companies provide. This is what van Dijck et al. (2018) have described effectively as the ‘infrastructural’ role of these platforms, given that their functionality is vital not only to specific ‘sectoral platforms’ but also to the public powers that depend on them.

The other aspect to be noted is closely allied with Esposito’s thought on institutions as well as with that of new institutionalism and contemporary sociology. It has to do with the cognitive (and by no means normative) modes through which Big Tech carry out their institutional functions. First, it is clear that social interactions now pass largely through the platforms managed by these companies. Today, social media – among other agents of socialization – ‘institutes the social’ by giving it a specific form, preconfigured by the platforms’ architecture. This ‘institutionalization of the social’ does not come about, obviously, through prohibitions, sanctions, or norms; it arises through the naturalization of practices, routines, and habits forged largely by the platforms’ scripts. For the most part, these routines are accepted and taken for granted by users, despite being strictly dependent on the platform’s affordances and constraints (boyd, 2011; Norman, 2013), which encourage certain actions and prevent or limit others. All these are based on principles written specifically into the algorithm codes (Gillespie, 2014, 2018).

For these reasons, Big Tech offers an ideal case for delving deeply into the link between institutions, social relations, and life itself, into the cognitive and non-normative mode of this kind of institution, and into the power dynamics associated with it. To what extent, one wonders, can pre-reflective institutionalization, revolving around a post-normative practice, implemented by perhaps the most important institutions in the world (digital platforms), be traced to the self-instituting paradigm from which Esposito draws his study of vitam instituere? And to what extent, on the other hand, does the post-normative turn set up by Big Tech give rise to new power dynamics that lead institutions to harness life in preformed structures not produced by it? Without any pretense to exhaustivity, let me attempt to outline an initial exploratory analysis of these issues. To do so, I will examine the instituent practice of Big Tech starting from the cardinal points of Esposito’s instituent thought as they are set out in the first section. We will find that Big Tech companies, though post-normative institutions, reproduce the structures of power and domination over individuals based on the same cognitive modes they utilize to operate. They lack the self-instituting element that Esposito considers a fundamental condition for realizing the virtuous union between institutions and life. They also lack a productive co-implication between free expression of instincts and their channeling into organized forms of life in common, an equally fundamental idea in Esposito’s instituent thought.

First of all, as we have seen, Esposito’s instituent thought envisages power as an ineradicable horizon of human societies: ‘Nothing is more ineffective and simultaneously dangerous as the neoanarchist myth of a society simplified into a stark alternative between repressive institutions or no institutions’ (Esposito, 2022 [2021]: 43). And yet, the platform society has further fueled the disintermediation process inherent in the emergence of the network society and the system of ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2009). The distributed nature of knowledge on the internet ensures that a growing number of people believe they can do without a set of mediations, starting with those of experts. After all, removing mediations is intrinsic to the concrete functioning of the platform system (van Dijck et al., 2018). Also of interest with regard to Esposito’s concepts of instituent thought is the fact that this absence of hierarchies and power in platform society is only illusory. Users find themselves within a system in which mediation is by no means ‘leapfrogged’ but simply made opaque. Indeed, numerous processes of ‘re-intermediation’ are developing (Davis et al., 2016). Private companies, platforms, and algorithms have therefore been described as ‘new intermediaries’ (Giacomini, 2023) or ‘invisible intermediaries’. Expressions of this kind point to traditional intermediaries (including political parties and representatives) being replaced by new forms of power and intermediation managed by the major digital platforms. Even so, new intermediation rests on a myth (that of total disintermediation) that runs the risk of cutting power, as the ineradicable horizon of instituent practice, out of common perception.

An analysis of points 4, 5, and 6 of Esposito’s instituent thought – which are interconnected – on the operational modes of these new institutional subjects may also be of interest. To begin with point 4, the mutual implication between institutions and conflict, which is fundamental to Esposito’s instituent thought, raises problems when analyzed in relation to Big Tech. Although these major platforms play a crucial political role (in terms of communication but also, often, of manipulation – one need only think of the Cambridge Analytica case), they present themselves and are often perceived of as mere technological intermediaries and, hence, as politically neutral: ‘Whereas political parties and governments are perceived as biased and serving a specific interest, the reliance on neutral tech and the power of Big Data makes Big Tech a prime responder to social issues’ (Monsees, 2023: 15). When it comes to Big Tech companies, the pivotal role they have assumed in the global system often clearly implicates them in political and geopolitical issues. And yet, an impolitical bedrock remains, precisely because of the technological neutrality (albeit a facade) that cuts out an aspect of Esposito’s instituent thought that is central to it, namely conflict. This is largely due to the shift in objectives of private companies: while performing public functions, they operate in pursuit of private ends, specifically financial gain.

The effect of shifting the axis of institutional power from a public to a private sector that performs public functions – and the consequent change in objectives (social order versus financial gain) – also holds great significance for point 5 of Esposito’s instituent thought: the relationship between emotions, instincts, and institutions. For the Italian philosopher, as we have seen, to institute life means to convey the instinctual realm from a merely natural plane to the instituted plane of conventions and rules that structure life in common. From this perspective, institutions should not repress instincts and emotions but rather allow them to unfold in a way that enables individuals to live together. The emotional unfolding stimulated by Big Tech, on the other hand, somehow lacks restraints and a ‘molding’ effect. This is because in platform capitalism economic value is generated directly by social actions performed by users: likes, comments, and sharing increase the amount of data released by users and promote the circulation of the content; both these results increase the value of the advertising and – consequently – the profits of the digital platforms. Clearly, the content that works best to provoke such actions is sensationalist or even incendiary, certainly charged with emotional force, and aimed at stimulating what Kahneman (2011) calls System 1 thinking – fast, immediate, unreflective, and hyper-emotional – to the detriment of System 2 thinking – slow, reflective, and analytical. Big Tech’s strategy is not aimed at repressing the instincts, then but, on the contrary, at promoting a ‘hyper-subjectification’, in which instincts and emotions can be expressed as much as possible and with no mediation whatsoever. This leads to forms of hyper-socialization (Aral, 2020) and a full-blown ‘business of emotions’. Clearly, just as hierarchies and power do not disappear from the platform society but are simply made opaque, the same thing applies to the way Big Tech shapes and molds the instincts and emotions of platform users through their affordances. Therefore, the mediation of Big Tech does not disappear, and because it is aimed at maximizing profit, it does not allow for a productive shaping of instincts. Consequently, instead of fostering an ‘ordered conflict’ of instincts, Big Tech affordances promote an uncontrolled outburst, giving users the illusory perception of being on a plane of pure immanence, where no power looms over them.

These observations take us straight to point 6 of our summary of Esposito’s instituent thought: the relationship between immanence and symbolic transcendence. Such a configuration of emotionalism slides effortlessly onto the plane of absolute immanence, something that Esposito criticizes with reference to Deleuze’s thought and the way he interprets the relationship between instincts and institutions in capitalist society. Since the task of the political is first and foremost to incorporate disaggregated social interactions into a formal order that transcends them, and if the symbol is what unifies the multiple and inscribes it in a wider horizon of meaning, then the encouragement of immediate, unreflective emotionalism is situated on an entirely immanent plane.

This brings us to the conclusion of my argument, which has attempted to connect Esposito’s instituent thought to the practices of institutions operating in the platform society – through the mediation of sociological institutional theory and the cognitive turn. For a post-normative institutional horizon, which necessarily revolves around habits, scripts, and routines, to preserve the self-instituting character to which Esposito appeals – in which life and institutions nourish each other – perhaps requires a fundamental condition: the retention of a reflective order not annulled by habits and practices that are taken for granted. Just as the symbol is ‘food for thought’ (Ricoeur, 1960 [1959]), so too the symbolic order of institutions – although not based on norms and sanctions, and therefore not repressive toward life – must be able to stimulate the reflective order, which enables individuals to be part of something greater than themselves but which they recognize as their own creation. If this does not happen, the cognitive turn runs the risk of becoming the ground for new powers and new intermediaries to reproduce the static nature of the institutio, blocking the dynamism of the instituere. This may very well come to pass due to the opacity of operational modes that seem to promote the maximum expression of life but use the (apparent) absence of form to pursue entirely impolitical and privatist ends.

These considerations allow us to reconnect with the three axes of Esposito’s thought discussed earlier in this article. Returning particularly to the concept of communitas, it would seem that to avoid being heterodirected by routines and practices that we take for granted, we must heed the prescribed task for instituent thought: to reflexively question this apparently natural order of institutions that makes life in common possible. This participation in a reflexive – and therefore self-instituting – order is also part of the obligations of the munus, since, as explained earlier, life in common must pass from the ontological dimension (the recognition of a lack and a debt) to the historical, socio-political dimension (the realization of co-belonging with others within institutions). Only through reflexive recognition of, along with the the lack and debt, the necessity of building these institutional forms of life in common, without taking for granted those we already inhabit, is it possible to overcome the alienation produced by new forms of post-normative power due to the naturalization of practices and routines. Only through this kind of practice can we usher in a truly affermative biopolitics.

My hope is that these preliminary, certainly not exhaustive, observations may open a space of reflection and dialogue between the new philosophical thought on institutions, which through Esposito has found a foothold in Italian Theory, and theoretical thinking and research in sociology about the new institutional practices that are structuring the platform society.