SOCIAL AFTER PANDEMIC DISTORTION : TOWARDS THINKING IN PLANETARY TERMS

Along with climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a specific planetary event, with surprising effects that require a rethinking of the social. The paper starts from the thesis that the pandemic essentially undermines modernity and the institutions of sovereignty, geopolitics and political economy due to their essential separation from non-human things. In the second part of the paper four propositions for a better understanding of planetary events are offered, including removing the difference of parts/wholes, non-relational thinking, rejecting the difference between global and local, and understanding collectives as constantly made in a continuum of humans and non-humans. Finally, the importance of speculation as the basis of planetary thinking is considered. There is a need to revise scientific practice and enhance its sensitivity to recognizing heterogeneous attachments of humans and non-humans in planetary settings.

Drastic changes in everyday life caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in a strange way have showed probably the first among events with truly planetary pedigree. Since it was freed from its ecology in the south of China, this tiny object that reaches only between 60 and 140 nanometers in diameter, 2 managed to create serious tumble and leave many wonder-struck in front of its rapid spread across the planet. Lockdowns, quarantine and other epidemiological measures introduced around the world in order to prevent the virus transmission have been pushed by peculiar "isolationist" ethic created with an aim of saving both human lives and health systems. Virus, still, has succeeded with great ease to suffocate the hectic and chaotic intensity of contemporary life and bring indeed incredible scenes of deserted cities. With numerous transaction chains being cut-off and leaving the everyday without much of habitual comfort, Western world has faced an unprecedented situation that caused nervousness especially among neo-conservative politicians who hastily refused to treat the virus condescendingly while hurrying to restore the regular economic flows as soon as possible (Sheilds et al., 2020).
On the other hand, countless dissonant tones regarding the coronavirus "management" hinted serious cracks concerning the political guidance in this strange occasion. Genuine infocide and a flood of different interpretations, accompanied by indeed shocking depictions of people from hospitals struggling to catch their breath, combined with conspiracy theses about the origin of the virus. Moreover, these delicate moments represented for some the sudden collapse of some of the glorious institutions of Western civilization (see : Maffesoli, 2020). All this, however, indicates a much deeper confusion and anxiety created with pandemic distortion and its uncanny planetary scale. Namely, how did one micrological entity manage to break away from human control, take over the regular course of events and become a strange hyper-globalizer -which causes similar effects all over the planet?
While the many socio-economic pitfalls created by the  pandemic are yet to come to light, along with all the destructive implications, the potentially reformative germ for understanding the complicated ecological continuum in which humans are involved in planetary settings is already emerging. The shocking astonishment, mystery, and so much anxiety that COVID-19 brought to the planet, stems in large part from the macroconceptual division grounded in the foundations of the Western world, that left aside nonhuman entities, most often crammed into a robust concept of nature (Horrigan, 1988;Descola, 2013a;2013b). Entire conceptual cascade that first has kept culture, but nonetheless economics and politics, at a "safe" distance from matter as ahistorical pile of things, also has cultivated a specific mode of being. Unlike nowadays rare tribes who fully acknowledge an animated features outside the human world (Skafish, 2016), anxiety of the Westerners have been almost completely set around the famous questions of "subjectivity", distribution of political rights and the race to improve living standards in a kind of ecological vacuum. In a somewhat bizarre way, COVID-19 brought "awakening" of this strange world at times when rather dark prospects of climate future are becoming, year after year, more visible in infamous breaks of temeperature records and numerous meteorological destruction. Accidental or not, together with the "discovery" of the so-called deep history related to the Anthropocene as geological epoch within which anthropogenic sources of climate change are clearly presented (Delanty, Mota, 2017), a warning have been issued: humans are not the sole proprietors nor they are ultimate planetary engeeners. Although the pandemic has no anthropogenic roots as in the latter case, it potentially heralds future encounters with entities that are difficult to spot, yet cumbersome, scattered, and difficult to localize insofar as they do not easily obey to sovereignty that people claim over matter or fall under the principles of political economy, as usable resources.
Central line of argumentation in this paper lies exactly here. At the very beginning, in several theses, we will point out the exhaustion of the sovereignist platform and the presumed logic of the distribution of deontological and legal obligations, which is severely being eroded by this pandemic. Namely, effectiveness in resisting the fundamental premises of Western political philosophy on the sovereign supremacy over matter brings in question the doctrine on its passivity and ahistoricity and directs attention towards hybrid encounter. Through a comparative confrontation with the recent breakthroughs in literature on climate change, we will further point out that geopolitics has also remained blind to the geophysical world, although a human expansion has reached significant spatial limits at present, indirectly triggering many meteorological, climatic and thus pandemic excesses. At the end of this section, we will briefly point out the necessity of moving from the doctrines of political economy to a more integrated political ecology that would bring a shift in the mercantile attitude towards non-human entities. Putting under scrutiny the doctrinal dominance of political economy, which has recently been found in the so-called post-developmental approaches, the idea is to underline the necessity of an effective relationship that would be closer to the issues of planetary habitability and robust coexistence.
With the cumbersome grip of global warming and potentially inconceivable indications of geophysical and biochemical mutations that lead to hitherto unexplored ground, a multitude of mysteries that are nonetheless social arise along with the increasing need to innovate theoretical apparatus. The task in the second section is to outline several propositions that aim to strengthen this planetary sensibility by directing the social to a continuum with ecological and other non-human beings in general. These propositions can fit into four points. First of all, 1) it is necessary to avoid the inconvenient dualism of the whole and parts, especially in order to properly recognize the robust, planetary agency and concatenated actions of numerous entities, whether they are corporations or tropical forests. If this concatenation suggests that 2) the world needs to be understood as the fruit of relations -therefore, different types of being dependent on a set of other entities, whether human or non-human, it is also important to think in non-relational terms, that is, to assume silent existence of diverse entities beyond the reach of human cognition. As a result, 3) it becomes difficult to squeeze the planetary imagination within spatial levels, to think exclusively globally or locally, since the relentless ability to spread and reach, sudden "intrusions" and the effects of actions from other meridians are constantly present. Finally, 4) the contours of the collective must be sought in a constant and chaotic process of making and fitting human and non-human elements, which certainly includes numerous disputes and dissonant tones, making the agency to be better perceived.
At the very end, this paper has a normative idea, close to the one that Abbott recently recognized (Abbott, 2018) in a combination of canonical and legalistic approaches, where the theoretical platform is built as an evaluative model. In times when the so-called posttruth way of thinking is becoming increasingly popular and exposes the scientific venture to a considerable skepticism (Larregue, 2018), it is important to redefine objectivity, and without arrogance, to analyze various aspects of making the world. Avoiding of perrenial dilemmas that occasionally emerge in sociology -such as the recent debate regarging the relationship between empirical and theoretical primacy (cf. Ermakoff, 2017;Besbris, Khan, 2017), is not a sole impetus behind this shift, as the ultimate aim is to also penetrate into more delicate ontological questions. In this sense, at the very end of this paper, we will consider speculation as a potential epistemological platform. Apart from critique and other anthropomorphic models, it reinforces the skeptical and experimental moment, without avoiding "classical" requirements such as precision and the like. In a way, this encourages an inventive sense of objectivity that this pandemic encounter further enhances: the effectiveness of knowledge lies in actively perceiving a multitude of intertwined milieus where scientific practice itself becomes sensitive towards various loops and entanglements in which the social life is situated.
A collapse of modernity: sovereignity, geopolitics and political economy meeting the pandemic enigma Similar to the increase in CO₂ emissions which puts on display the erosion of sovereign jurisdiction over matter, the pandemic outbreak with largely unexplored micrological agent also presents a shocking and somewhat enigmatic planetary event, but only if thought within modernist frame. Deontological, economic and even legal matrices built in the system of sovereignty of political rights and identities have, by coinciding with the relentless anthropocentrism of political economy, led to a schematization of people and things according to the division of labor, responsibility and usefulness. "Secondary" beings of material world have left homeless in this constellation: their multiplicity was at best seen as a heap of diverse phenomena and related to general quality through the notion of nature which has been left to autopoetic regulation (Williams, 1980). Accident with the pandemic, but even more so with the dramatic scenario of global warming (cf. Danowski, Vivieros de Castro, 2016) is that it causes existential horror precisely because of the poorly adapted framework and poorly suited political infrastructure given by the categorical coordinates of collective life, such as the market or sovereignty and their supposedly superior relationship to matter, deprived of historicity and agent capacity. Yet, the pandemic, has brought to light that the erosion of never-fully-rounded sovereignist platform, along with extractive geopolitics and the great economic promise of "development".
Erosion of sovereignty that started with the globalizing expansion of corporate business, the deployment of cultural forms and simply, the strengthening of the spatialtemporal reach of events introduced from other meridians has never fully dismantled the territorially-bordered legal competencies of the Westphalian system. With the pandemic, however, the metageographic problems of the distribution of production and exchange relations and the dilemmas associated with them, which have been embedded since the 19th century in the famous left/right distinction regarding distribution and political authorization (cf. Mann, 1993), become indeed marginal when the question of how to coordinate materiality beyond sovereignty comes to the fore. This issue is becoming more urgent due to global warming and the pandemic is just continuing this puzzle. As Mann and Wainwright (2018) try to set it up, the lack of a super-sovereign -different from the classic Leviathan that served as a refuge from alleged natural "atrocities" -is becoming increasingly striking for a simple reason: mobile and historical materiality. Although the draconian measures established to prevent viruses and the legislative actions aimed at maintaining public health adopted in each state closely follow the sovereignist key (Stott et al., 2020), they are more the outcome of a hybrid conglomeration within which legal apparatus and people as political "operators" are placed. In short, the political not only does not stop with humans, but is based on a progressive confederation with "foreign" materialities that certainly have an intricate territoriality made up of intertwined human and non-human spaces (Bennet, 2010).
Confusion created with the pandemic is therefore found in the constitution of politics with the modernist invention of civil society as an autonomous controller of the sovereign where the moral qualities of "public" governance are placed at the center. Congestion created by the sovereignist division of duties, however, becomes apparent, as the anger in many countries was directed at bearers of sovereign authority due to poor control of the new virus, although its active properties have proven to be far more resilient and capable of creating its own territory. In that sense, a soveringist narrow-mindedness does not even fall under famous criticism concerning the so-called territorial trap (Agnew, 1995;Brenner et al�, 2002), since similarly to Weber's formula which is the subject of criticism (Weber, 1978), it retains the anthropocentric premise. Such a neo-Kantian model where the state would be ontologically founded as a semiotically understandable consent of those who agree to the use of coercion by the sovereign does not recognize anything even close to a situation in which materiality has a surprising plasticity. Again, evidence arrived primarily from geography suggest that coordination involving a heterogeneous landscape of agents is often irreducible to socio-legal notions of dominance over matter (Swingedeouw, 2005;Whatmore, 2002). These hybrid collisions spring precisely in the spatial flows that are hardly subject to the territorial imagination that humans would easily simbolically process. Similar to the bizarre claims of the Brazilian authorities based on the socio-legal picture of territorial ownership during the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires that the rainforest itself produces air that is therefore "Brazilian", 3 similar cases of setting a horizon of human practices, biophysical structures, technology, socioeconomic structures and political institutions occurs in water management (cf. Boelens et al., 2016;Sarmiento et al., 2019), difficulties in categorizing meteorological destruction (Osaka, Bellamy, 2020) or the complexity of coastal land use during climate change (O'Donnell, 2020).
Cases like these open not only the problem of heterogeneous ontological determination of space and the riddle of overflowing territorialities (cf. Amin, 1997;Elden, 2005), but also hint at the problem of linking geopolitics with geophysical foundation (Elden, 2017). The strange cohabitation of the sovereignist platform with a rather controversial policy of intervention and other resilient forms of control such as trade agreements and the extremely cunning representation of "civilization" and "development" as universal (Wallerstein, 2006) were the connective tissue of the geopolitical mosaic we know today. Eurocentric reading of entire landscapes as a calculable resource base -quite foreign to the ones who were colonised (cf. Barker, Pickerill, 2019), led to famous land grab which established humane control over most of the planet at the beginning of the 20 th century (Tilly, 1990). Key problem here lies in way more delicate and incredibly relentless eqation of geopolitics as an embodiment of realpolitik. Even when it is not interpreted in a brutally naturalistic framework as an almost immanent geographical ability to expand (Atkinskon, Dodds, 2003) and softened by "factors" such as human decisions and geopolitical agendas of powerful countries (for a useful overview of the US post-war plan, see: Lane, 2019), scenarios such as defensive protection of "national resources" do not fall outside this logic.
Assumed unity of mind and geography where geopolitical divisions and fractures are accompanied by ideological rivalries seem as persuasive model of planetary distribution seen as a distorted chessboard on which political actions are written only when seen in ecological vacuum. Yet, when one, like Karl Schmitt, assesses from the perspective of deep penetration into once independent ecological chains, geopolitics becomes even more "realistic" and seen as an expansive engine but also as a machine for "deep excavation".
Historically unique event of the expansion of the normative order across the planet, which Schmitt analyzes in his study Nomos of The Earth (Schmitt, (1956(Schmitt, ( ), 2006, identifies the successive utilization of land, followed by the great 16th century discovery of seas, and then the transfer to air appropriation. "Today, " says Schmitt, "many believe that the whole world, our planet, is just a field on which an airport, a raw material warehouse or a mothership will be built. Sure, it's fantastic. But it demonstrates the power of how to raise the question of the new nomos of the earth" (ibid: 354). Nomological direction that Schmitt identifies is therefore based not only on shifting from traditional land occupation, but also on recognizing the ultimate question that geopolitical metaphysics has somewhat nihilistically eliminated: what happens when spatial limits are reached?
Moreover, what happens after the encounter with beings, safely kept aside and out of human experiential reach, who possibly mutate into a planetary "monster" that is hard to locate, such as oil spills or possible melting of ice caps? Only recently, with the recognition of people as a geophysical force, it has become clearer that this geopolitical trajectory based on "ecological imperialism" (Lock, Palsson, 2016, 59) has led to a tense state which, Latour (2017b) notes, has led to a far more intense formula "drill, baby, drill". The intensification of ecological breakthroughs and some marginal cases where it is difficult to establish a spatial order as in the Arctic (Bruun, Medby, 2014), again, suggest that difficulties regarding the "manageability" of matter and its potentially mutating characteristics would bring cumbersome global distortions. COVID-19 exactly does the later. Even if it does not emerge from deep, ecological "excavation", it inhabited a geopolitical arena through an odd trial regarding the distribution of responsibility for the pandemic, 4 annoucing the further encounters with man-made geophysical changes and rather confusing scenario with the "awakening" of entities that cannot be utilized -in stark contrast to what the political economy ascribes.
As an amalgam of practices, learnings, institutions and principles, political economy always presented more than a "vocabulary" for translating of materiality into value, as it also served as fundamental ontology of modernity. Similar to pacifying function of sovereignty, the great "promise" of economics, is drawn from the almost eschatological teaching on the improvement of living conditions which, as some authors note (Crownshaw et al., 2018), is present in ideologically contradictory theories -from laissez-faire models all the way to command economies. Depth and resonance of such matrix brings even supposedly rival positions not to leave its foundations. This is also the case with classical Marxism, ennobled with some environmental concern and the moral question to which resources belong (e.g. Smith, (1982Smith, ( ) 2009). Moreover, Timothy Morton (2013) observes that the developmental mantra is an integral part of Marxism and that it simultaneously leads to the understanding of a bunch of non-human beings only an expression of human, metabolic pathways. "Nature", he states, "are not really real trees or arctic foxes, but trees and foxes that are metabolized by human economic relations" (ibid: 26). Planetary spread of efficiency, division of labor and skillful value creation took place in an ecological vacuum, with extremely normative tones setting production, consumption and growth as the ultimate embodiment of Being and even the key to describing and standardizing human actions through concepts such as "choice" or "interest". It is exactly why the understanding of pandemic shock as an extremely destructive and the basis of the impending economic crisis: it collided with the doctrine of growth, which already becomes troublesome and in need for a serious revision (Reichel, Perry, 2018).
With numerous eco-toxic hazards (see: Morris, 2019), this subtle normalization of growth especially before the enigmatic future after the pandemic becomes questionable if it is kept out from genuine ecologization. Some of the emerging post-development currents offer a different view of economics outside the extractive model based on the abstract character of industrialization (Kidner, 2012), a radical critique of the modernist deevaluation of nature reduced to food, energy, raw materials and human life (Moore, 2016). but through the utopianism of potential disillusionment with growth (Kallis, March, 2015) with inspiration taken from divergent, postcolonial sources that indicate unencumbered development issues (Asher, Wainwright, 2018). To that extent, the alleged pandemic shock is reminiscent of how privileging public health issues and stopping the expansive spread of the virus comes into incoherent cohabitation with the principles of modern business and, in general, articulated space-time distributions between work, matter and value. This same collapse, however, is an indication of the urgency of perceiving transactional chains, with respect to agency in the plural -as are numerous examples of agricultural practices in which the effectiveness of direct tools and relations with other beings comes before efficiency (cf. van der Ploegh, 2009), relying on the immediate, situated importance of relationships with non-human entities (Stengers, 2017) which overall leads to a different collective sensibility that collectives cultivate in their own evaluative regimes.
Same sensibility pushes towards political ecology and specific paradigmatic shift for which a pandemic, and first of all climate shock, is a good reason. A whole series of conceptual, and first of all ontological indications hidden behind the notions of Gaia and Anthropocene, hints at fragile planetary attachments that bring much more delicate task: how to achieve arbitration around material things in the absence of a clearly distinguished sovereign (Mann, Wainwright, 2018) and how to direct the political towards materiality that would, against elitist blindness to climate issues, be sensitive to terrestrial (Latour, 2018)? Yet the key question of the emerging planetary situation with the hyperglobalizing reach of materiality, especially in terms of endless climate distortions, is how to make the planet itself habitable (Chakrabarty, 2019)? Here, the narrative of sustainability has little or no significance. Precisely due to the fact that it remains in the image of an external nature that can somehow be reset to "factory settings" with the same mercantile relationship and eventually restore the "balance" (Lenton, Latour, 2018), there is a renewed depoliticization and a resolution from the deep, geological history of humans that is irreversible (Chakrabarty, 2009). After all, it remains within Kantian, entirely atomistic framework of personal responsibility (Szerszynski, 2005), leading to tiresome circle of accusation on who did or did not used the paper bag, planted a tree or wore a mask, instead of directing attention towards complicit human interdependence. As the COVID-19 virus is nothing "external" to the world, nor is the pandemic a rare excess, but the result of intertwining of ecologies and life forms, the awakening of political ecology therefore primarily has a deeper, epistemological motive: how to engage with planetary thinking.

Reconnect the world: four propositions for planetary thinking
A really urgent need to find a new epistemological direction due to the allegedly unexpected encounter with materiality, for obvious reasons, is happening as a sharp ontological upheaval. A quote from the book with somewhat apocalyptic title The Ends of the World written by two spouses -Brazilian philosophers and anthropologists Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, perfectly describes the irony that underlies the cognitive paralysis resulting from the epochal separation of the two regimes.
"This sudden collision of Humans with the Earth, the terrifying (or terrafying) communication of the geopolitical and the geophysical, contributes decisively to the crumbling of the foundational distinction of the modern episteme -the one between the cosmological and anthropological orders, separated "since forever" (namely, at least since the seventeenth century) by a double discontinuity, in essence and in scale. The evolution of the species on one side, the history of capitalism on the other (in the long run, we are all dead); everything is thermodynamics at bottom, but the dynamic of the stock market is the matter that really matters; quantum events fluctuate at the heart of reality, but it is the uncertainties of parliamentary politics that really mobilize our hearts and minds... In other (and fewer) words, it is the split between Nature and Culture that we are talking about" (Danowski, Viveiros de Castro, 2016: 14).
Anthropology has seriously stepped into this cognitive reform, trying not only to understand the co-determination of human existence through complicated connections with non-human entities that is difficult to fit into the seemingly provincial protocols of "culture" or "society" and bizarre learning accorrding to which the world, at the best hand, is a matter of symbols, representations, and significations that people project onto a passive non-human world (see Charbonnier et al., 2016). In this task, sociology is somewhat lagging behind. Although bypassing some of the stubborn differences, such as the ontological priority of structure or action, has produced academic heroism, the planetary situation makes it increasingly difficult to build descriptive tools only through human intentionality -pushed and shaped with some societal engine. As the social life appears in such a complicate continuum with fabric woven from the biotic, abiotic and technological processes (Szerszynski, 2016) and where the human existence is attached to numerous other enitites and put into a constant circulation and enaglement of political institutions, socio-cultural apparatus, material settings, socio-technical devices (cf. Amin, Thrift, 2016) it appears to have more web-like shape (Ingold, 2011). It is even more cumbersome to devise a proper model, when one in mind has a planetary scope and such an ease of reach in a globalized world. Still, some points drawn from recent speculative developments in philosophy (Bryant et al., 2011), heavily driven by an enhanced version of realism, call for more situated approach that would first 1) abandon the division of whole and parts, 2) think non-relationally, in addition to relational thinking, 3) forget about the spatial levels and 4) think of collectives in terms of constant making.
First, the division between the parts and the whole is a well known of numerous puzzles, even though it goes against experience. Political economy, the anthropology of sovereignty and even many fundamental divisions among sociological models stand in one of two scenarios: the one in which individuals, like "industrious wasps", jointly and unintentionally create a higher order or an image where the "larger" order that is somewhat organically coordinated between parts and functions as a whole (Latour, 2017a). Speculative philosophy, however, turns out to be a solution that emphasizes the chained interdependence between entities, robust character and consequently, endless geography, where it is difficult to separate people from non-people like socio-technical devices or beings of "nature". Through concepts such as hyperobjects (Morton, 2013) or machines (Bryant, 2014), they want to underline the often endless and chaotic conglomeration of different objects, whose shape of which depends on the situation, approach or simply what stands out for agent performance and for which it would be utterly obscure to think of them in atomistic terms, as much as to imagine a more complex harmony. Entire geopolitical and bureaucratic conglomerates, alike the corporations, are the result of historically evolving entanglement which has set a bundle of complicated humannon-human relations, tightly wrapping them into a heterogenous, yet entirely conflated landscape. Their connection is neither compact nor complete, since each of the elements might switch agential properties from mediative connectors into fully-blown operators. As a result, as Graham Harman (2016) recalls, first it is important to avoid undermining: no matter how tiny some objects are -and COVID-19 certainly is, they are no less important due to their micrological size and their agent performance can suddenly change regular flows as soon as they are inserted into different conglomerates -such as trade, city life and tourism. It also seems important to bypass overmining. Diverse elements composing the "whole" does not make it superior to the "parts" or more complex. Often, the whole is nothing more than terms or names, nominally united, and one should always be careful where and how the denominator of the whole appears: just as a city as a term has a completely different experiential property in legal documents where it is organized through related elements, so and it has, say, a different meaning in tourist brochures (ibid., Harman, 2011).
Within such amalgamations of relations and interconnected actions, there are also scenarios created with the existence of objects beyond the reach of human perception. In a few spots in his Civilizing Process, Elias (2000) remarks very well how new standards of collective life shaped by court affinities have removed objects from view, such as bodily excretions, or delegated their manipulation to others, as in meat processing. However, that did not mean their disappearance, but only their removal from the perceptual horizon. Similarly, speculative philosophers just want to understand how complicated networks, which are not reduced exclusively to semantic or discursive ones, especially in the case of climate change, are shaped by the autonomous action of objects (Morton, 2016). Here comes probably a key breakthrough of speculative philosophy that can be taken as a second proposition. Unlike the classical relational repertoire, which at least in sociology refers to a set of features from which the structure of relationships is derived or to the relations that individuals establish through different types of exchanges (see: Depleteau, 2018), the extended version of relationality implies not only that human actions are coordinated with the help of structural and cultural repertoires. First of all, they are also shaped by things, but they are also always juxtaposed with non-relational existence: a huge set of objects beyond the reach of human perception that actually make up a huge share of reality. These dark objects as Harman (2016) calls them, perform robust, mutual interactions beyond human knowledge. Occasionally, their agential properties enter the horizon of human perception and sometimes become key bearers of actions that simply chain people into a very uncomfortable coexistence, as is the case with, say, meteorological destruction or, even more obviously, as with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objectivity therefore implies that space-time is the multiphase product of multilateral movements and that the local manifestations appearing in the human experience are only part of a larger concatenation. This leads to an extremely horizontal model of space, completely different from the ontology of levels, which makes up the third proposition. For a long time, the image of "nested" scope and reach of phenomena -decomposed through macro, mezzo and micro scales, each with its own territoriality, alleged set of phenomena and segments of reality that can also be methodologically isolated, has obsessed the social sciences, although it is contrary to experience and poor tool to understand how contractions of space take place (Marston et al., 2005;MacLeod, 2014). Instead of seeing space as a mere backdrop for societal processes, retrieving its importance encompasses attention active work, practices, materials and trajectories that are used in various cultural topographies (Sheilds, 2013) that help complex formations to be held together, in spite of apparent lack of visible links. As Allen illustrates (Allen, 2016), the range of relations and properties derived from other meridians, as found in the geography of global institutions and their local presence, are the result of assembling through distinctive links. Thus, the disputed World Health Organization is more like a neural cluster that gathers various practices and knowledge gained in other locations, materially related and mediated, gatherings and interpretive discussions that lead to the formulation of certain recommendations and policies, etc. After all, the non-local character of space, especially when the planet is thought through figure of Gaia, that is, a loosely bounded bio-film in which geochemical processes take place (Latour, 2017b;Arenes, Latour, Gaillardet, 2018), indeed suggests that even growth the price of wheat that are part of our diet and that we get only a few tens of kilometers from the place of residence is in an awkward relationship with the global warming caused in part by the rapid industrialization of the so-called Third World countries.
Fundamental question then becomes what actually constitutes collective life and where the social "substance" can be located. Given the uneasiness and uncertainity of planetary coexistence, which shows how even micrological "subjects" like COVID-19-like can easily disrupt normal everyday life due to equally relational and non-relational localization, collectives can no longer be thought of solely as based on, say, political order or the division of labor. As we will see in the next section, the fragile, chaotic and completely speculative framing of the collective takes place through moral, semiotic and material frameworks, which inevitably involves defining their composition, history and politics. Simply put, the task thus becomes to consider the various distributive regimes: the ways in which beings are deployed and transactions are performed, through continuous material attachment. Although abstract, the latter definition refers to the processes we directly encounter and very subtle differentiations concerning nutrition, appearance, basic life flows, but also public political matters, economic distribution and the like. With the collectives, however, there is nothing prepared in advance, no matter how much the perseverance of the institutions acted almost by inertia. Ecologically located and subject to various forms of moral evaluations that are extremely decentralized, collectives are subject to constant redrawing of boundaries and form. This shift requires that the direction of knowledge be reformulated equally.
Employing the speculation: from critique to planetary plurality With this non-relational, entangled planetary coexistence and numerous agencies operating (Thrift, 2015), a "syntax" of scientific endevor also has to be more susceptive to these mutating realities and different ways in which they are composed, intepreted and presented. It is thus necessary to move from triumphalism of rational sorting of the world that certainly lost its breath: while its marvelous achievements and blessings in enhancing the human life are apparent, it came at the cost of sometimes excessive reduction, ordering and classification that ran along with forcible separation from religion and politics. With almost entire civilizational project on its shoulders of science, postmodern nihilism found an easy target but exactly because epistemology came as an ultimate foundation before any ontological assesment -the one that is rather necessary because across the globe there are variety of modalities how the being is seen (Law, Mol, 2002;Vivieros de Castro, 2015). Rigid Cartesian separation of the object as simple, amorphous and ahistorical matter (Ingold, 2007), first is reflected in the understanding of objectivity as a generic "generality". The second problem is closely related to the previous one and lies in the so-called the problem of access (Dreyfus, Taylor, 2015) that lies in the alleged particularity of subjective seeing. However, the planetary situation shows not only that objectivity is problematic and that science can hardly provide a superior view out of nowhere (ibid.), but also that the resonance of different "readings" of reality must be taken into account as such. This is where the formula of speculativeness lies, which seeks to approach this very issue of fragile creation of objectivity without escaping from collective disputes over the form of reality (cf. Boltanski, 2011).
In that task, it is first necessary to bypass criticism as an instrument due to an echo of academic superiority that is brought along and, of course, related Cartesian traps. Critical impulse that many theorists are looking for, observes Eliasian-minded sociologist Richard Kilminster (2011), is reduced either to Kant's scenario of supplying people with the power of judgment, or to the one with a more Hegelian overtone that awaits for a birth of a consciousness. Another problem, related to the exclusivity of this form of knowledge, was long ago noticed by Rorty (1981): the intellectual endeavor associated with philosophy and science was too often seen as the search for universals to which one group almost prophetically has access. Such an attitude leaves a deep political mark, although it allegedly goes against those theories of action that overemphasize the human capacities of trial and choice propagated by some theorists, with strong Anglo-Saxon prejudices and their neoliberal background which even within biology manage to successfully insert a model of "individual action" (see : Ingold, 2007;. Here, understanding human action comes as a matter of choice and thought, and then a manageable reflexivity (Archer, 2010). A critical variant of action theory does nothing better. In addition to the concern for the "subjugated" which becomes a potential basis for intellectual heroism, it is ultimately anthropocentric, equally tied to the abstract space of thought and completely blind to extrahuman action and true practical engagement that is filled with semiotic enigmas to which people are directed exactly by being located in a complex environment.
Latter position emphasizes more practical knowledge, while also focusing on disputes, trials and other evaluative processes that are quite affectively initiated. Abandonment of intellectualist delusions therefore leads to a completely different definition of politics: far more procedural, subject to constant negotiations and controveries, but also filled with multiple affects that mobilize actors. According to Trift's formula, the intensity of affect is what occupies collective life in general, "referring to abandoning the ancient quarrels between knowledge and passion (as well as nature and culture, people and things, truth and force) in favor of considering what binds together things as explicit politics" (Thrift, 2004: 75). Growing wave of pragmatically oriented authors follows this line of thought, underlining the complicated processes of trial, measurement and evaluation. Pragmatic sociology proves to be particularly important in pointing at reference chains -different cultural sources and material mediators that are used in the trial and critical examination of reality. In stark contrast to the models that stop at the doctrine of "beliefs" and the liberal image that the sequels of Weberianism place at the center with a multitude of "opinions", these evaluative processes suggest how and who judges in a particular way, with distinctive sociocultural repertoires that provide moral clues that fundamentally differentiate collective well-being (Boltanski, Thevenot, 2006;Thevenot, 2001;Blok, 2013). Therefore, we are now closer to understanding how the collective history, which precisely refers to cultural "upbringing" and the profiling of specific affinities, also brings specific interpretations of materiality and the social world in general.
Science, by no means, is imune from this, nor it should be. Because otherwise, by making it a superior form of knowledge and, even worse, a universal moral compass, it would be deprived of historicity and the possibility of experimentation, which always contains error. Such a sequence speaks first of a fragile rather than a compact reality and of the basic problem which the superior repertoire of science tried to eliminate for the sake of building objectivity -but the one understood within the framework of generality and numerical values, of a measurable majority. Such a distorted definition, however, not only proved weak for understanding of the so-called post-truth world and to point at the multiplicity of cross-cutting perspectives, but has also distanced the objectivity from the very materiality and understanding that, as we have seen, accentuates the inventory of all agencies -whether they include sharp disputes that COVID-19 certainly has encouraged regarding its origin, together with the distribution of moral and political burden or come from medical measurements with instruments and interpretation of the performance of the virus itself. "The theme of 'rationality'", Isabelle Stengers recalls "changes meaning depending on whether it refers to the register of requirement, where it is most often a vector of arrogance and infamy, or that of obligation, where it becomes synonymous with risk and challenge, not for opinion or ignorance but for the one who chooses to enroll in a practice that claims it" (Stengers, 2010, p. 53). Taking the speculative direction, finally, enables these, seemingly unexpected partners -value and fact, to be compared as a procedural course.
Although speculation itself does not seem tempting due to the semiotic ballast that points to either market manipulations or rhetorical skills, its imminent revival as a field where ethical and practical intertwine, aims to open the possible horizons. Precisely with its origins in the philosophy of science Isabelle Stengers (ibid. 2010) and its simple question "why not", speculation activates this formla of linking once conflicting extremes, trying to reach different ways of experience and approach to matter through practices that scientific insight allows (Savransky, 2016). Unlike prescriptive, normative models of science, most often reduced to empty methodology and discussion of technical properties of methods, speculation leads to the fact that scientific practice and its everyday situations as such are first emphasized, in order to take over the various risks which emerge by moving from the "ethics of alienation" (Savransky, 2016, p. 185), which Savransky relates to empty, aempirical theorizing. Speculativeness has a strong empiricist basis, and not only due to the need to respect various moral perspectives. Aiming to show the becoming of reality, the speculative program is fully open to new, unexpected events (ibid; Savransky et al., 2017).
While acknowledging a certain importance of "trends" and probabilities, such an orientation still tends to step into future scenarios while maintaining a plurality of the present. At a time when the vaccine is eagerly awaited and while laboratories are trying to penetrate the enigma of what makes this virus so potent, a completely similar task speculation finally poses to the social sciences. In stark contrast to the unjustifiably shy approach that has made the natural sciences (along with economics) more exact and relevant, the reform of the definition of objectivity that finally excludes the ahistoric character of the natural sciences and draws the social sciences far closer to the non-human world. Also, such a model for revitalizing the relevance of the latter is not in the simple separation of cognitive production from public engagement that would reduce their activity to common concerns of public life, without much concern for the world in which it takes place. "But, " Savransky asks, "how are we to understand the possible locations and limits of the ecologies of relevance addressed by the contemporary social sciences in an age where the modern cosmology does not seem to hold any longer, an age where Nature has violently intruded in human affairs and where humans, with all their cultures and differences, have themselves become natural forces that transform the material fabric of the world?" (Savransky, 2016, p. 43) Potentially, a pandemic will drive the question of relevance even further. But the key mutation is moving the questions of insquiry away from epistemological issues. The riddle of the planetary situation and the planetary future is precisely how to reach and learn from practical encounters where multiple forces and beings come together, anticipating the relationality and non-relationality behind them in order to realize this deep planetary existence for which sovereignty and political economy no longer have the key.