Counter/Infections: Dis/abling Spaces and Cultures

Introduction

While writing this supposedly short article on “Dis/abling Spaces and Cultures,” as part of the Editor’s Choice Series, the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing. Captured by the intensity of troubled togetherness of humans and their environments—human and nonhuman alike—I had to pause, think, and re-approach my topic through the experiences of being potentially exposed to an infectious disease and its possible consequences. It made me realize that an understanding of “infection” as a most existential mode of social process will offer a helpful conceptual framework to engage with dis/abling ¹ spaces and cultures. Thus, the prospect of a short article turned into a longer one that first required a thorough discussion of the social relevance of infection for sociological and anthropological inquiries and before seeing how the past contributions of Space and Culture concerning issues of dis/abling experiences can be rethought and re-presented. ²

Slowed Down by the Social (in) Question

With COVID-19, we experience the nexus of powerful effects of a cosmopolitical event by which a nonhuman actor politicizes, that is, unbuttons the normalcy of the “cosmos” of lived relations, what we take for granted and what we expect from shared, namely, convivial spaces (Schillmeier, 2011). Unlike the SARS epidemic in 2003 (Schillmeier, 2017), which could be contained before it became a pandemic event, the COVID-19 virus is currently unfolding the often highly situated and diverse effects of a “global assemblage” (Ong, 2004, p. 81) endangering millions of human lives, putting our diverse health care systems and their workers at a brutal stress and survival test, harming local, national and (trans-)national economies, producing new socio-political conflicts and controversies, exclusion, inequalities, and disabilities. Most cultural locations are closed, and related modes of production and consumption are at a standstill. The cosmopolitics of COVID-19 collates the insecurities, precarities, vulnerabilities, inequalities, hopes, fears, and im/possibilities and dis/abilities of human life by dis- and reassembling relations of, and between, humans and nonhumans, the material and immaterial, the organic and inorganic, nano-, micro-, and macroscaled bodies, and the different temporalities and spatialities that make up the conduct of everyday life.

COVID-19 (as with other infectious diseases before such as Spanish influenza, cholera, Ebola) makes us experience “the vulnerability of public life” mediated by humans and nonhumans alike (van Loon, 2002; Sampson, 2012; Schillmeier, 2017; Wald, 2008). Since the co-presence of others could “bring disease” (Goffman, 1971, p. 329), social relations are thinned out and lived at a distance, interaction is restricted and much is invested in protection (Goyal & Vigier, 2015). All direct or close embodied practices that cannot be avoided turn situations taken as unproblematic into “hot situations” of suspicion, alert, and embodied risk. With Ervin Goffman, we may say that living with the virus our “Umwelt becomes hot” (1971, p. 328). In the course of the pandemic, we have experienced the highly connected and practiced spaces of heterotopological, public, and shared places (de Certeau, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Harvey, 2001; Shields, 2013; van Loon, 2005) as “junctural zones” of contamination where the migration of an imperceptible agent provokes socio-cultural penury. Forced by state policies all over the world, national borders have been closed; more than a third of the global population have been living at home more or less in isolation from other embodied human practices and related societal spaces. If one was lucky enough to have a home or can afford to remain at or work from home, staying at home is understood as the safest place—relatively speaking. Quarantine places are thought to enact the physical power of an “absolute space” (Harvey, 2005) that only appears more or less safe when isolated from other physical spaces. Drastic measures like quarantining places slowed down the spread of the virus and cut the power of infectious networks, but none of these homes can be fully closed or 100% safe. And as we have seen, vulnerable places (e.g., care homes or accommodations for refugees) become more vulnerable.

Staying at home and living in isolation from outward spaces and their interactions not only produce considerable immobility, but also unfold the ambivalent experiences of physically bounded (public/private) and functionally overloaded (work/leisure) home spaces. Quarantine spaces are emotionally demanding. Isolation and loneliness affect stress, anxieties, and depression, or create tension, aggression, and/or violence when the lack of close others or the permanent and unavoidable nearness of others becomes overwhelming. Within isolated homes people have to deal and experiment—more or less creatively and successfully—with a previously unknown situation. More than ever before, our everyday socio-cultural spaces, knowledge practices, affective relations, and perception are mediated, that is, stained, impregnated, and shaped, documented by and dependent on the infectious dynamics of digital technologies. Social media become auto-ethnographic time-spaces that register and enact what it means to communicate and live with the effects of the cosmopolitical event of COVID-19. In effect, many of our direct, taken-for-granted, and highly normalized forms of interaction are now mediated forms of e-communication.

Counter/Infections

By their desire to propagate and assemble, viruses are clever and resistant social agents with high capabilities to adapt and change. Like humans, viruses enjoy mobility, interaction, and networking. Yes, we have to accept that viruses desire socializing and collectivizing as much as we humans do. Still, whereas for the virus the pandemic is a feast of life, humans experience COVID-19’s social and societal ambitions as the endangerment of human life and health. For humans, the COVID-19 pandemic puts at risk embodied individual life as well as social and cultural practices, which are the necessary ingredients to sustain and enrich humanity. With the spread of SARS-COV-2, we are living a (nonmetaphorical) crisis of human societies—a crisis which in its etymological roots describes and expresses the climax of an embodied process, a phase, a critical situation, an interstice in which either life or death may take a hold. Crisis as interstice can be understood as a disruptive and ambiguous space that joints the possibilities of health and illness, life, and death. It unfolds an emerging and transformative space by which the survival of the crisis and how to survive are uncertain. To counter the threats of a spreading illness that may cause death, interstices of crises require the protection of these spaces where “life lurks” (Whitehead, 1978). To survive means to shelter the diversity of enabling practices that enrich the plasticity of our embodied social relations with human and nonhuman environments and related societal re/orderings. Addressing and resisting the pathological effects of viral infection require that we need to find modes of counterinfections that deal with the crisis situation.

Transformed by the spread of a virus we face the following questions: What are the social processes within the body and of the body and its outer environment capable of while their possibilities remain uncertain, undecided, open? How to protect oneself from and how to live with the presence of the virus and its multiple effects that connect, separate, and produce fragile, vulnerable, and dis/abled bodies with the changing facets of personal, public, and societal life? Most generally speaking we may ask: How are human societies capable of counterinfecting their diverse environments in order to live well with the situation? Can human life get a stable hold despite the desire of the virus to spread and live?

If we agree that humans like viruses are (structured) societal effects of social processes, we may think of the COVID-19 situation as a dramaturgy of the cosmopolitics of human and nonhuman existences (Schillmeier, 2019) that help, foster, dominate, or endanger each other. With COVID-19, we experience how new emerging viral societies massively intervene with human societies and derive its social features and effects from these human–nonhuman mediations. Human societies assemble and mediate living and nonliving, organic and nonorganic, material and immaterial entities. Like all living societies, humans and viruses are thieves. Life is robbery, as A. N. Whitehead reminded us: “Every society requires a wider social environment” and “may be more or less ‘stabilized’ in reference to certain sorts of changes in that environment” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 100). Most importantly,

In the case of living society, the interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or not it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robbery requires justification. (Whitehead, 1978, p. 105)

We may easily say that nothing justifies that a virus disintegrates, endangers, and kills human life. But we also need to think which practices brought the emergence of the new virus into being, what forms of environmental robbery can or cannot be justified. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic adds dramatically to the urgent request of the Anthropocene to put the question of justification of environmental robbery in all its forms on the agenda of responsible global human politics and everyday action.

Unlike mere physical societies, which are affected by their environment but remain fairly indifferent to it, living societies—human and nonhuman alike—must be “vitally interested in their environment” (Debaise, 2013, p. 106). What makes human societies so complex are their diverse and changing “partial connections” (Strathern, 1991/2004) with human and nonhuman relations, bodies and technologies, etc.? Consequently, human societies must be “approached of questions that render explicit its partial character: What is food or poison for it, what will allow it to reproduce, what will provide it the opportunity to survive, what will kill it” (Stengers, 2011, p. 425)? Human societies make apparent that existence is a matter of values that become important as relational effects that gain more or less stability and endurance. But, to be sure, all modes of existence—human and nonhuman alike—are the effect of values in the way they relate to and create differences (Schillmeier, 2019; Tarde, 2012; Whitehead, 1978).

We can follow this trace of thought a bit further and argue that every mode of spatial existence depends on how it is affecting and is being affected by value differences—differences that emerge and infect those involved in the process of how societies co-become with their environment. In Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers (2011, p. 157) has argued that to become a societal effect, that is, to endure, depends precisely on the “dynamics of infection”—the dynamics of the virtuality of value infection. Stengers (2011) stresses:

If we, as humans can claim to be different, it is not because we nourish values. Value belongs to the order of nature: it is what is realized by all that exists, in the sense that what exists succeeds enduring, succeeds in maintain its individual way of gathering together, that is, of making things hold together in a determining way. Value indicates a success in and for itself. . . . The explanation of endurance is not an attribute of the individual who endures, but depends first of all on a dynamics of infection. All that succeeds in enduring has succeeded in infecting its environment in a way that is compatible with this endurance. . . . The infectious holding-together is not a fusion, but a valorization, a determinate shaping, conferring a value . . . on what is prehended.

Value infection is practiced by many agents at the same time, both human and nonhuman. Counterinfections of value attempt to find new balances to distributed equilibria. With the experience of the dynamics of the COVID-19 infection and how we are affected by it and engage with it, we realize and question at the same time: What the human and nonhuman societies involved are capable of? We are enmeshed in the cosmopolitics of nonhuman viral infection and human counterinfections that unfold the insecurities, uncertainties, and im/possibilities of our current everyday live transformations of values that require justification. Thus, the cosmopolitical dynamics of counter/infections unfold an existential learning situation not only of how we live and how we wish to live.

Faced with an existential threat, we need to compose modes of counterinfections that enable us to be better “equipped” to keep living well with others. By doing so, we cannot neglect that life is robbery and that we need to address the question of justification of environmental robbery in the presence of those who may suffer and become victims of these counterinfections. And clearly, to counterinfect should not mean or justify a return to a past health before the pandemic—no matter how stable or precarious, how “normal” or “justified” it appeared to be.

The Vita Activa in Question

Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing the topologies of uncertainty that assemble the densely connected spaces of world-risk society (Beck, 2008) in which quarantined life not only radicalizes experiences of individualization, but also demands and enables novel modes of solidarity and public engagement. “Living alone together” becomes the barren experience that aims at collective survival, underlining the fragile vita activa of our “human condition” (Arendt, 1956/1998). ³ The COVID-19 experience is more than just a medical crisis, but has wide, long-lasting, and existential implications on the dynamics of the vita activa, that is, the close link between the activities of labor, work, and action that configures the possibilities of the human condition. This is the case precisely because the human condition is more than just the interaction of given human bodies. Human life is conditioned by the way we engage and live with our environment—human and nonhuman alike:

Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers. (Arendt, 1956/1998, p. 9) The co-dependency of humans and their environment configures the conditions of possibilities of value relations, the condition of possible interstices (Debaise, 2013; Whitehead, 1978), unfolding d’espacements possibles of life that joint the differences and infect the modes of living—for all involved—for the good and bad. Human bodies desire and enjoy contact with their environment; they foster contact with others, and by doing so, create, live, and are conditioned by the possibilities of emerging spaces of differences of differentiation. Living spaces are infecting spaces of value differences, social processes as it were, that require complex societal spaces, that is, modes of ordering that embrace the differences, modes of organization that grant these assemblages of differences more or less endurance, that keep the joint differences as (shared) value differences alive. The more flexible, the more plastic, and the more adaptable these interstices are, the healthier they are, the healthier their modes of participation are, and the healthier are those who/which participate. If humans or nonhuman others suffer from the “conditions of togetherness,” are, or feel, oppressed and disabled by them rather than being enabled, and if their possibilities become limited and their lives are at risk or endangered, these conditions unfold the pathological power of disabling relations.

By troubling the human condition, the COVID-19 experience reveals that we are earthbound creatures whose biological life is closely linked to the human condition. This is Arendt’s point when she introduces the first fundamental human activity: labor. “Labor,” according to Arendt, “is the activity that corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process of labor. The human condition of labor is life itself” (Arendt, 1956/1998, p. 7). With labor, we humans not only aim to sustain life by creating “more-life.” By depending on labor and not only on our living bodies, we expose ourselves to a wider set of possibilities through which life differentiates and becomes more diverse and multiple that unfold the risky adventures of the novel. Following Gabriel Tarde, we may say that with labor, we humans are social beings in the ways we imitate our biological bodies and thus become more than just biological creatures (Tarde, 1921). Labor imitates life and thus produces “more-life” as Georg Simmel (2010) would add. With labor, we humans imitate

the movement that, for each of its parts, even when these are comparatively pitiful, at every moment draws something into itself in order to transform it into its life. No matter what its absolute measure, life can only exist in that it is more-life; so long as life is present, it begets vitality. (Simmel, 2010, p. 13)

To imitate life as more-life is vital for humans as earthbound social beings. This is precisely what the COVID-19 emergency tells us about how much our human societies depend on earthly life itself and what happens when other living societies (like a virus) draw their human environment into themselves in order to transform it into their lives.

However, although human societies essentially depend on human bodies, the former can be described as alive precisely because they cannot be characterized by living bodies alone. We humans not only engage in embodied labor but also “work,”—which is Arendt’s second fundamental activity of the human condition. The creation and invention of human ideas, artifacts, and technologies draw attention to “more-than-life” by mediating, complexifying, and conditioning the vitality of human earthly life. For Arendt, “work,” as the creation of ideas, artifacts, and technologies transcend the necessities of mere embodied living systems and unfold the “worldliness” of the human condition (Arendt, 1956/1998, p. 7; Simmel, 2010). We experience the worldliness of human life

when we call ourselves creative, not just in the specific sense of a rare, individual power, but in the sense—obvious for all imagination—that imagination produces a content that has a sense of its own, a logical coherency, a certain validity or permanency independent of its being produced and borne by life. (Simmel, 2010, p. 15)

Science and technology, law, religion, and art are vital processes—culture if you will—that create their own realities (ideas, materials, artifacts, and spaces) in their very idiosyncratic ways, which—as humanly produced but self-referential objects—affect and partially condition our ways of life. These relations refer to the socialness of all forms of the creativity of life that can be understood as a process that overflows life itself. In order to sustain life as “more-life,” it creates, relates, and consequently becomes affected by its other, that is, “more-than-life” (Simmel, 2010, p. 13). The vitality of life issues the virality of life as more-life and more-than-life: Life infects more-life and its nonliving other. This social process of assembling “more-life” and “more-than-life” affects the possibilities as well as the limitations of related modes of ordering. So, for example, artifacts and technologies contribute extensively to the ways we remember the past, act in the present, and expect and imagine the future. Technoscience and biomedical expertise alter the ways we experience health and illness. They infect the possibilities of living and the modes of dying.

Thus, life and world emerge as social processes of infection that assemble and affect life and nonlife, boundless processes and bounded things, the social and the nonsocial, the traditional and the novel, and order and transformation. Life is shapes and us shaped by “more-life” and “more-than-life.” (Simmel, 2010) The corona crisis affects both earthly human life and the world. It intensifies the effects and experiences that derive from the connectivity of more-life and more-than-life. It unfolds the complexities of social processes that gather the risky togetherness of life and world. The intensity of the dramaturgy of the COVID-19 situation is the existential actualization of the “antinomial relation” (Simmel, 2010) between “more-life” and “more-than-life” that manufacture the changing facets, in/stabilities, possibilities as well as uncertainties and risks of the techno-scientifically mediated human condition. With COVID-19, we humans also become globally aware of the fragility of life that cannot be separated from its absolute other, that is, death.

The social processes of infection are further complexified and complicated by what we call “politics” as the human signature of infective agency. Experiencing the COVID emergency, we humans not only get infected, become ill, recover, or die, but also, we observe what is going on, we validate the pandemic as a real or as a false propaganda, and we invest in strategies of understanding or ignoring what it means to become infected. We are looking for ways of how to counter and stop the multiple adverse influences of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas others may instrumentalize the situation for their own motivations of engagement that are only partially connected to the COVID-19 issues. This is Arendt’s third mode of human activity that comprises the political space of the vita activa of human practices. It involves “action” as the activity “directly between men [sic] without the intermediary of things or matter” that “corresponds to human condition of plurality.” She defines plurality as “the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world” (Simmel, 2010). For Arendt, action—as the particularly human mode of infection—unfolds an enabling space through which we perform the capability to begin anew, to initiate transformation.

The Cosmopolitics of Pathological Norms

Clearly, with the COVID-19 experience, we realize what it means to live a restricted vita activa and the limited possibilities of nongovernmental political activity that became a techno-mediated affair. Not merely, but primarily, we communicate via digital media by which we speak to each other, watch how others speak and act, discuss, resist, and initiate. But we also see how the political space in Arendt’s classical sense regains some power in a highly diffuse and risky fashion within the public sphere where people physically meet and protest despite the danger of spreading the virus. The public sphere is where practices of infections are articulated, disputed, revised, and countered: Infections multiply and meet counterinfections!

It seemed just a matter of time. The enforced spatial limitations and individualization of everyday life activities become more and more contested the longer they are in place. People feel deprived of their freedom to live the human condition—be it that the neo-liberal market economy that wishes to re-assure its tactics of market dependency that organize people’s “freedom,” their “power” to “connect” and be “mobile,” or be it that people mistrust and resist governmentally enforced restrictions in general since “Corona” is fake news by the state or less problematic than generally believed. To be/come political has many reasons: Be it that people distrust the close link between the ongoing biomedicalization of life and strategies of governmental surveillance that is argued to be closely linked to entrepreneurial interest and paternalism. In effect, biomedical, expert-led knowledge and advice, as well as related governmental modes of infecting people’s life, are challenged by provoking counterinfections that promote alternative ways of perceiving, engaging, and interrogating the situation. Or be it that people just wish to enjoy social habits and activities that make and keep life agreeable, diverse, interesting, colorful, sensory multiple, or be it to re/gain a bit of power over what it means to live a “healthy,” spatial life.

The COVID-19 crisis unfolds the experience of what it means to live with “pathological norms” that infect the spaces of the human “allure de vie” (Canguilhem, 1991/2007). These pathological norms not only compose the experience of a possible life-threatening illness but also infect our capabilities to participate and contribute to societal and cultural activities. Pathological norms, and not the absence of norms, significantly govern the COVID-19 experiences of human life in a “limited milieu,” that qualitatively differs from the life milieu before the pandemic event (Canguilhem, ibid.). We find the effects of pathological norms not only within infected bodies that become ill. We also experience pathological norms as a direct result of government policy that aims to protect ourselves from becoming infected. The enforced self-isolation, quarantine life, and the restrictions of economic, cultural, and public life are experienced by many as being exposed to pathological norms.

Under the conditions of uncertainties and risks, the more or less diffuse and diversely motivated public counterinfections of “hygiene demonstrations” of so-called “corona rebels” unfold modes of “democratic resistance” that aim at challenging the validity, truth, and effectiveness of biomedical, expert-led governmental policies. People articulate their mistrust in carceral politics of governmentally enforced impositions of pathological norms which limit the freedom and conduct of embodied social practices of “the people.” What regulates “normality” and enables a “healthy” life and what is considered as “pathological” become contested public issues by asking, for example, who is in the position to say that bodies don’t need vaccines to become immune? Or who says that “the people” need oppressive and manipulative governmental policies that limit fundamental rights and basic liberties to overcome a staged crisis? Whereas on the one hand, debates contribute to “healthy publics” by challenging positions of the majority, on the other hand, socio-political controversies over pathological norms often have polarizing tendencies and set out oppositional views that define the “unhealthy” situation of living beings and the milieu in and with which they live:

The relation between the living and the milieu establishes itself as a debate (Auseinandersetzung), to which the living brings its own proper norms of appreciating situations, both dominating the milieu and accommodating itself to it. This relation does not essentially consist (as one might think) in a struggle, in an opposition. That applies to the pathological state. A life that affirms itself against the milieu is a life already threatened. Movements of force . . . translate the exterior’s domination of the organism. A healthy life, a life confident in its existence, in its values, is a life of flexion, suppleness, almost softness. The situation of a living being commanded from the outside by the milieu is . . . the archetype of a catastrophic situation. (Canguilhem, 2008, p. 113)

We can easily see how catastrophic situations are perceived in diverse ways by which the imposition of pathological norms are affecting and experienced—bodily, culturally, politically, economically—as limiting, weakening, threatening. Whereas one may define a situation as catastrophic, being exposed unsheltered to a potentially deadly virus, others may consider the governmental commandments of quarantined life as a reaction to it as similarly catastrophic. This double effect of being infected by nonhuman-made and human-made pathological norms makes people feel most insecure since not only their bodies become extremely vulnerable to an “outside,” that is, to life-threatening illness. Moreover, another “outside,” that is, the government and linked biomedical experts, is perceived to deprive people from a healthy social, cultural, and societal life that is meant to enable their bodies to live more or less well, to be able to create and adapt to transformations without a pathologizing outside.

The “outside” infects the “inside” of the body and its milieu (oikos) with pathological norms—be it by biomedical or political infection. This is the point: The interstices of the dynamics of infection and counterinfection produce the power of “closed spaces,” it generates their outsiders, friend−enemy divisions, unwelcomed co-habitants, pathologizing agents, and infectious conspiracies that are experienced and perceived as noxious and damaging, alienating and disabling objective forces that stand against living societies, that limit and cut off (and are cut off from) the possibilities to enjoy life. Specific Corona experiences draw attention to the tragedy of all cultural processes of living societies that “life often wounds itself upon the structures it has externalized from itself as strictly objective; it finds no access to them; it does not, in its subjective character, satisfy the demands that it develops in their character” (Simmel, 2010, p. 61).

Most generally speaking, these controversies draw attention to the diverse perspectives of what bodies are capable of, who and what is or should be part of these capabilities, who or what should be excluded to re/establish a “healthy” situation. COVID-19 disputes are fights over boundaries that secure life, over the limits between the capabilities of bodies, over what is “inside” and what is “outside” of one’s milieu, what is egoistic or altruistic, what is dangerous and what is no, what is healthy and what is not, what is rational and what is not, what is normal and what is pathological, and so forth. It is a fight of and over values, over inclusion and exclusion, over in/capabilities, over what means to survive, to heal, and to live well under conditions of social uncertainty: With the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects, we experience the importance of the existential connectivity and togetherness of our bodies and their changing environments as a social process that co-infects the im/possibilities to remain healthy. It remains disputed what this social process looks like and who or what is included or excluded. In that sense, the COVID-19 cosmopolitics of existence, by which different embodied living societies—viral and human—are its main unruly actors, comes with the experience of power relations of risk and their “will to spread” and take hold of the situation.

But to be sure, despite the controversies about how to re/achieve a healthy life, health is not a given and steady “normality” to return to, but quite the opposite, the capability to transform what has been considered normal (Simmel, 2010, p. 305). Health is a precarious, fragile, distributed, and accomplished process of life between bodies and their environments and the ways these relations are capable of adapting to the transformations that emerge from that very existential mode of togetherness. As Canguilhem (1988/2004, p. 62) stressed, strategies of immunization (e.g., vaccination) do create “produced bodies” for which health is the expression of an insurance against the risks of life as well as of taking the risk to live life. Under conditions of risk, it allows bodies to do things that they couldn’t do beforehand.

Under such intense conditions of pathological norms, uncertainty, and risk, the COVID-19 situation forces us to think and be creative, to gain original ways of keeping human bodies and their relations with others alive. This involves the risk-laden capabilities of the social to transform the dynamics of infection; and it is a societal question of how to attain novel modes of ordering which are required and affected by the different social transformations. It would be rather a-social to wish to return to a given past or any embodied scenario to which a taken-for-granted and fixed quality of “health” or “normality” is attributed. There is no h(e)aven of health or normality to return to—with or without COVID-19. Thus, we should not fall prey to a right-wing utopia and/or conspiracy-Angst-entrepreneurs that proclaim a given “healthy” state or “natural” normality that needs to be recovered.

Between Force and Persuasion

The signature of viral infections like COVID-19 is the plasticity of living entities to adapt to different environments while enforcing pathological norms upon its human environment. The pathological is kept spreading due to the plasticity to engage with the demands of its changing environment. Like viruses, we human societies also enjoy the “plasticity” of life. “Mankind [sic] is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature” (Whitehead, 1933/1961, p. 78). We may say, human societies exhibit the plasticity of nature as a matter of infective agency. However, as the Anthropocene shows, human plasticity not only evokes benign possibilities of “more-life,” but also leads to the enforcement of pathological norms that adversely infect human–nonhuman societies alike: Human plasticity enriches but also limits and endangers life.

COVID-19 makes us humans experience what it means when other living societies like a virus unfold their plasticity and affect the enforcement of pathological norms upon us. Sadly, we find the self-produced enforcement of pathological norms on others as a major facet of the human condition. It is “war, slavery, and governmental compulsion,” “a rule of men over women” . . . or imagined conspiracies that all “exemplify the reign of force” (Whitehead, 1933/1961, p. 83) and their pathological effects. However, the vita activa of our human condition also reflects a long history “of respect for the preciousness of human life” that aims to resist the power of enforcement. It is precisely “the creation of the world” which “is the victory of persuasion over force. The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse” (Whitehead, 1933/1961, p. 83). To counterinfect with persuasion is the signature of civilized human practices of life that wish as well as demand to enable and shelter the benign and creative togetherness of human beings and their environment—human and nonhuman alike.

The COVID-19 experience relates enforcement and persuasive agency in often complex ways. Lockdown as a form of solidarity was and is necessary where the situation requires it to cut off the spread of viral pathological norms. However, if lockdown is perceived as the effect of enforcement policy, it adds pathological norms with different means. If lockdown is perceived as a persuaded activity, it can be celebrated as a sign of “healthy publics” instead. ⁴ Healthy publics civilize the forces of oppositional or war-like differences; they translate a them-or-us situation that unleashes agencies of enforcement of friend/enemy rationalities—nonhuman or human, governmental or from “the people”—into the power of persuasive action. Persuasive action emerges from ideas and practices that act as modes of suggestion, as lures for possibilities of infection to re-normativize the values of embodied collective life. Persuasive action proposes requirements that enable living the risks of a healthy life which embraces the social creativity that links humans and their changing environments, “more-life” with “more-than-life” process with sustainable orderings and vice versa.

Whereas enforcement installs norms that narrow down the possibilities of a healthy future, persuasive action acknowledges that the norms are situated and relational achievements prone to being transformed by the changing situations “permissible to test the normal by varying the ambient conditions” (Canguilhem, 1994, p. 370).

Behind all apparent normality, one must look to see if it is capable of tolerating infractions of the norm, of overcoming contradictions, of dealing with conflicts. Any normality open to the possible future correction is authentic normativity of health. Any normality limited to maintaining itself, hostile to any variation in the themes that express it, and incapable of adapting to new situations is a normality devoid of normative intention. When confronted with any apparently normal situation, it is therefore important to ask whether the norms that it embodies are creative norms, norms with a forward thrust, or, on the contrary, conservative norms, norms whose thrust is toward the past. (Canguilhem, 1994, pp. 351–352)

The cosmopolitics of COVID-19 puts human societies to a test to explore the possibilities to cultivate interstices of socially produced and societally organized counterinfections that may protect us from viral forces taking hold of the vulnerabilities of human life as well as from any pertaining attitude that healthy social relations are or can be fixed by given norms that define or delimit normality. The “normal” begins and ends with “normative inventions” (Canguilhem, 1994, p. 369) of socio-cultural practices that leap into the unexperienced. These normative inventions demand novel ways of thinking, experimenting and engaging, trial and error practices, which are more or less costly, disruptive, problematic, disputed, demanding, meaningful, helpful, caring, or canny, without shared or common knowledge of how to measure and justify these practices. In a situation of emergency where shared uncertainty dominates our lives, the habitual, the normal, the taken for granted, the known as modes of the social are questioned and often suspended. It requires that we cultivate interstices of experimentation with new and novel ideas and practices, that is, with the socialization of the “nonsocial.” These interstitial practices may contribute to living well with the threat of the virus’ modes of plasticity and its desire to live. As Stengers (2011, pp. 327–328) has put it:

Everything we know, and can do, seeks to become an environment for something possible, which is not ours, because it is nonsocial, but whose eventual “socialization” depends entirely on “us,” on the environment we constitute for it: a culture of interstices.

In sum: How to adapt, re-think, and transform our lived relations with others and its orderings becomes a local, regional, and global “theme” of emerging risk-publics all over the world. COVID-19 risk-publics bring together people who share a concern for an issue for which no immediate answers and fixed solutions are given, or consensus can be expected. The COVID-19 infection provokes multiple sets of human counterinfections, that is, rationalized forms that wish to make sense of the situation and justify related strategies of re/imagining, re/composing, and re/organizing our social practices and societal organizations that may have polarizing and destabilizing effects but also may generate novel forms of solidarity, friendship, trust, and creative togetherness.

The processes of counter/infection have the power to disassemble as well as reassemble living societies. To counterinfect our environment is the aim so that life gets a strong(er) hold to unfold the plasticity of healthy human relations. Clearly, how to be/come healthy is highly disputed, involves enforced and persuaded action, depends on how the situation of risk is experienced, perceived, and defined, which actors play a decisive role in infecting and counterinfecting, who is included and excluded, who benefits and who becomes a victim of it. Conceptually, the discussion so far has led to an understanding of (human) life as the social processes of counter/infection that relate and affect the differences of more-life and more-than-life, human and nonhuman, organic and non-organic, of and between scales of action, enforcement and persuasion, plasticity and pathology, etc.

Infectious Relations of Dis/abling Spaces and Cultures

We may argue that fundamental to the field of Disability Studies and the core motivation of Space and Culture is precisely the understanding of counter/infectious relations of the social that bring to the fore the experiences of dis/abling spaces and cultures. Infectious relations are empirically situated spatial processes that mediate ideas and practices, bodies, and their environments. To be sure, the conceptual effort to better understand such diverse issues as COVID-19 and disability, space, and culture have to acknowledge that it can’t be separated from the contingency of the lived realities in the making.

Both, the field of Disability Studies and Space and Culture, are adamant in highlighting that the empirical and the conceptual should not be conflated but they only should be explained in relation with and through each other. The empirical and the conceptual infect each other without being their direct cause. Hence, these infectious relations between the empirical and the conceptual are social processes of value production as well. They relate and create differences in how the empirical is understood conceptually and how the conceptual may affect the empirical. Thus, to be able to “infect” values also means to be aware of one’s responsibility for the possibilities of infection and its effects. Conceptual work is infection, is intervention, requires responsibility. It is also a mode of counterinfecting ideas, practices, and related values that presuppose a given and fixed, normal or healthy order of things.

Thus, to draw attention to dis/abling spaces and cultures is never purely a neutral descriptive effort of how diverse spaces and cultures co-produce experiences of dependencies, inequalities, oppression, marginalization, or exclusion. It also aims to contribute to possibilities of counterinfective, transformative imaginaries, processes, and practices of inclusive and enabling spatio-cultural relations of lived values (Gibson, 2006). This is crucial, since “disablement is a profoundly spatial experience, meaning something that is lived and produced at every imaginable scale, ranging from a chair, or stairway through to the macro policy realms that constitute institutional practice” (Gleeson, 1999, p. 195). The “geographies of disability” (Butler & Parr, 1999; Gleeson, 1999; Imrie, 2004; Imrie & Edwards, 2007) shape and are shaped by material and embodied ways of living, lived experiences. With the spatial perspective, the socio-cultural studies of dis/abling experiences and practices may provide most significant insights in understanding and conceptualizing the embodied and material infections by which “relations of forces are deployed and given concrete expression” (Foucault, 1980, p. 90) as well as it may contribute to a “revaluation of the qualities of those living at the margins” (Shildrick, 2017, p. 147).

Most importantly, then, thinking with the experiences of dis/abling practices, a multiplicity of “situated” (Haraway, 1988), “minor” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), or “local knowledges” (Foucault, 1980) may visualize as well as disrupt, question, and/or alter spatio-cultural relations that either completely neglect living bodies or depend on and enact a normalized, somatypical body with more or less given, homogeneous and universalizable capabilities, requirements, and needs. These practices interrogate, dispute, and thus counterinfect architectural attitudes and spatial imaginaries that assume

that disabled people can be defined through a series of unproblematic and unchanging categories such as wheelchair user, deaf, blind or visually impaired. Or that disability itself, and its relationship to the built environment, has no history . . . but is simply a matter of technicalities—design guidance and legal requirements. Or that explicitly introducing disability as a concept and/or disabled people’s perspectives and experiences into architectural history is too problematic or marginal to consider. (Boys, 2017, p. 9)

In that sense, people with disabilities and their diverse experiences and practices unfold “genealogies” of cosmopolitical agency, modes of counterinfection that—wittingly or not—bring to the fore and politicize the “power-effects” of normalized and taken-for-granted relations—empirically and conceptually—of bodies, spaces, and cultures (de Certeau, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Harvey, 2001; Schillmeier, 2012; Waldschmidt et al., 2017).

With the experiences of dis/ability, the taken-for-granted normality of bodies, spaces, and cultures proves unfit for the requirements of lived social relations. It is the idealized, materialized, and objectified normalcy of bodies, spaces, and cultural practices that become the sources of infective pathological, that is, limiting and disadvantaging, norms for those who differ from these norms in one way or another. The fixation of normalcy produces disability. How bodies are capable to infect the environment and the environment-related bodies is crucial in understanding dis/abilities. What appears unproblematic for one body may become disabling or even life threatening for another. This is what the COVID-19 experience also crudely reveals: Although we humans all are at risk to be adversely affected by the pandemic, these risks are not equally distributed and heavily depend on, for example, people’s life and work situation, race, age, body condition, activities, on their environment, and so forth. The uncertainties of the COVID-19 risks turn into a stubborn social fact of vulnerable people becoming more vulnerable, people with disabilities becoming more disabled, ill people more ill, disadvantaged people more disadvantaged, and so on. ⁵ COVID-19 was able to unfold the existential violation of everybody’s “Right of Health” as part of our human rights. It dramatically troubles the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ⁶ and the “liberal demand for rights, choice, and self-determination” (Shildrick, 2017, p. 147).

A Path Is Not a Path

As we have argued earlier, the infection of pathological norms limits the possibilities to adapt and engage with environmental requirements. Pathological norms disadvantage and disable people in various ways. Dischinger and Jackson Filho (2012) show how urban territories can be considered “spaces of noncitizenship” by excluding people with disabilities to access and participate in urban life by investing how tactile tiles in public spaces of Florianópolis/Brazil dis/allow visually impaired individuals to access public spaces. People have been “disabled by design” (Dankl, 2012, p. 206). The implementation of tactile floorings revealed a significant lack of usability and safety issues for visually impaired people. It became apparent that visually impaired people weren’t included in process of implementing tactile tiles. Consequently,

the materiality of the artifacts symbolizes the social and political exclusion of impaired citizens, operated by the very public agents who should be guaranteeing their social inclusion through creating accessibility to public spaces. (Dischinger & Jackson Filho, 2012, p. 219)

Fitzsimons (2012) stresses that “scrutinizing design language from the perspective of sensory disabilities can expand the limits of architectural discourse” (p. 242) which too often focuses “either on ideal embodiment or on functional aspects of disabled experience” (p. 241). The ideal body for designing environments has two legs and eyes, and once this is challenged, design takes part of fostering pathological norms that disable people. These spatially performed pathological norms not only may deny access to physical space and, for example, in a museum to related objects and artifacts. It also may limit the access to related knowledge and knowledge practices (Rieger et al., 2019). Hence, Fitzsimons urges designers to become more open to “the plurality of being” (Kristeva) and what it is to sense, perceive, move, feel, experience, and express otherwise: “The transition from accommodation to what may be called openness could manifest itself in environmental design as an evolution from prosthetic correction, whether at the scale of the body or the building, to attention to other ways of being” (Fitzsimons, 2012, p. 243). The fact that and how we move, sense, perceive, and express in multiple ways, should be incorporated into the possibilities and experimentations of inclusive environmental design practices (Heylighen & Strickfaden, 2012).

The call for an open architecture can only be done by including the living experiences of those who perceive, sense, and express differently from the pre-supposed ideal embodiment of life (Heylighen & Strickfaden, 2012; Rieger et al., 2019). Inclusive architectural practices are advised to translate the call for spatial openness toward multisensory perception and techniques into modes of enabling rather than restricting motion and mobility, sensory/sensing plasticity rather than into pathological norms that thin out the possibilities of lived spaces. ⁷ Thereby people with disabilities have to be included as co-researchers and co-architects, who, by differently moving, feeling, sensing, perceiving, and experiencing their environment, add and complexify the requirements of inclusive spaces. Thereby they address the obligations of architectural practices of “doing inclusion” that incorporate spatial plasticity as an active achievement of place-making, rather than selling a fixed “product” of applied functional and legislated “codes/guidelines and standards” of “barrier-free” design (Rieger et al., 2019, p. 10):

If inclusion is thought of as something that is not “out there” to be attained or achieved but rather as something that is challenging, complex, and at times unpredictable, then new modes of engagement and new processes can be created around inclusion. Trying to “fix” inclusion in order to achieve inclusion is an impossible task. (Rieger et al., 2019, p. 14)

“Sites of Conscience” (Lloyd, forthcoming; Lloyd & Steele, forthcoming), like Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin) provide interesting cases to enact spatial plasticity (Fitzsimons, 2012). Being controversially perceived in many ways, disabled activists in particular criticized Eisenman’s Memorial. The slopes are too deep, the flat landings too short and the paths too narrow to be suitable for wheelchair users and thus discriminate against disabled people. After a court decision, only 13 of the 130 paths were made accessible for wheelchair users with the argument that “too much modification would harm the work’s ‘artistic concept’” ( Fitzsimons, 2012, p. 251) for which “paths are not the way to something but rather are that something. It is by experiencing the paths themselves that one accesses the sense of this particularly difficult subject of remembering, that is, memorializing the holocaust” (Fitzsimons, 2012, p. 252). These paths are sensory multiple and different, more or less problematic to access and unfold individual experiences of usage. Bodies are exposed to the architectural performance of pathological orderings and norms. In an extraordinary way, the memorial’s paths are not paths that lead from one way to another or wish to realize all possibilities of functional accessibility. Rather they enable the virtuality of differently embodied, sensory, and affective relations of counterinfection to emerge by the multiple and highly individual ways the architecture of the paths and their changing environments are experienced:

The grooves for walking sticks found along some of the Memorial’s paths do not ensure only that one gets from one point to another (Figure 10). Like the groove on a vinyl record, they draw a sensitive instrument along a channel whose rhythmic structure and changing amplitudes unfold in time. There are variations in air pressure caused by compression and release as one moves between stelae and through intersections. Heat and coolness alternate on skin as the sun peeks out from behind a stele and disappears again. As the air temperature drops in the descent into the sunken areas, it is akin to the incremental changes in a repetitive Philip Glass composition, drifting almost imperceptibly from one scale to another. The resonance between rhythms in space and those in the body may be related to functions such as the heartbeat, digestion, and respiration. (Fitzsimons, 2012, p. 253)

While memorizing the sufferings and killings of millions of people, Eisenman’s art is also a celebration of the hope of life to be able to perceive, do, and express things differently and in multiple ways. While the Holocaust expresses the horrors of the imposed denial of life as a multiple becoming, the memorial enables life to be experienced by itself as more-life mediated by the art of more-than-life. By remembering the terrorization, disabling, quarantining, and erasing of life, the memorial also embraces life without neglecting its individuality, fragility, and vulnerability. It unfolds the art of counterinfection that actively wishes to resist the lures of emotional, sensory, and affective anesthesia of practices that made and make life impossible. It affects instead ways to experience life as more-life, life as be/coming otherwise, with its changing Umwelträumen (Uexküll & Kriszat, 2010) of situated plasticity. Rather than a “store[s] of memory,” Eisenman’s memorial unfolds “opportunities to become alive, to be taken as resources for present and future practices and action” (Nijs & Daems, 2012, p. 191), it allows the productive counterinfection of the material and immaterial (Heylighen & Strickfaden, 2012).

Conclusion

COVID-19 has been described in this article as a cosmopolitical event that unfolds most complex and often highly uncertain dynamics of infection and counterinfection that disrupt, question, limit, alter, and even endanger human modes of existence. Counter/infections can be seen as central not only in understanding the complexity of the COVID-19 experiences but reveal the most general mode of how social processes relate and create differences, of how living societies existentially depend on the effects and requirements of changing environments. Rather than being understood merely as a medical issue, counter/infections unfold how humans are affected by and affect their modes of existence. Thinking with Arendt’s understanding of the vita activa of the human condition as well as with Simmel’s understanding of life, this article outlined that COVID-19 affects not only human bodies but links life with the time-spaces of world-making and culture of human societies on a global scale.

We have seen how infections and counter infections may spread pathological norms that significantly limit or even endanger our embodied, materialized, and spatialized modes of living. The strategies and controversies over COVID-19, its effects, and ways of dealing with it, unfold the political space of counter infections that aim and dispute of how to re/establish possible forms of healing, healthy relations, and well-being. The litmus test of civilized practices in a crisis situation like COVID-19 would be to indicate inasmuch as these controversial political fights of risk-publics over the possibilities of “normative inventions” (Canguilhem) are able to turn modes of enforcement of pathologizing norms into the power of persuasive agency to live well with the risks of life.

All this in mind, COVID-19 made me slow down considerably in my attempt to reassemble the dis/abling spaces of cultures as it has been outlined in past issues of Space and Culture. The unfolding discussion of counter/infections, however, proved most helpful in rethinking and reinterpreting the previous findings in Space and Culture. Clearly, the COVID crisis shows dramatically that vulnerable and disadvantaged people become more vulnerable and disadvantaged. However, the logic of counter/infection helped me to promote an understanding of the experiences of people with diverse and alternative, embodied, sensory, and neurological abilities that address not only the vita passiva and related forms of oppression, dependency, and exclusion. Rather, it made me imagine differently abled people as profound counterinfective actors that disrupt, interrogate, and alter the taken-for-granted modes of socio-cultural practices, experiences, and perceptions of how we engage with, validate, and design our environment. It highlights the importance of understanding the social as mode of counter/infections that assemble, create, and transform the value-differences bodies, spaces, and cultures. In that sense, dis/ability studies contribute not only to the experiences of being negatively infected by pathological norms but also may highlight the cosmopolitical agency of disability as a cultural “transformer” of lived experience and its futures (Devlieger & Strickfaden, 2012). The experiences of dis/abilities require that we think of healthy and civilized spaces and cultures as relations of persuasion, relations that enrich the plasticity of embodied life, experiences, and practices by enabling modes of resisting and counterinfecting the enforcement of pathologizing norms and disabling processes.