Contagions, Sleepwalkers, and the Nonconscious of Social Media: An Interview with Tony D. Sampson

Abstract

The concept of contagion has marked 2020 as we have witnessed the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, this concept, situated as the ‘in-between’ of bodies, as that which breaks down their boundaries and compromises their supposed unity, has been also used to explain phenomena outside the domain of biology and viral microbes. The diffusion of fear, panic buying, or conspiracy theories, for example, which have accompanied the corona-virus outbreak, can be equally understood with reference to the logic of virality. While the marketing machine has been, with various degrees of success, frantically trying to get a handle on this logic, a number of attempts to conceptualize it have been made within cultural and media theory. In opposition to theories that take the domain of consciousness as its starting point, Tony D. Sampson has been, since the early 2000s, developing his own materialist brand of contagion theory. Contesting grasping contagion through analogies with biological diseases or seeing it as a contamination of an autonomous subject by false ideas, his approach has been focused on the bodily domain of affects, habits, and pre-personal inclinations. Sampson’s relational and process-oriented theory of virality has been most significantly advanced in his trilogy of books, which includes Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture