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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the cosmopolitics of Katsuragi Shugen pilgrimage in central Japan, showing how its digital and ritual infrastructures break down into folds and diagrams—populated by a multiplicity of metapersons who speak and act (enunciate) through pilgrims and visitors.

Paper long abstract

In his posthumous book, Sahlins (2022) used the notion of “metaperson” to indicate sources of agency located beyond the human individual and yet immanent into the world. These entities, which constitute the conditions of possibility of every social activity and cultural production, are often identified with spirits, gods, ancestors, demons, and other more-than-human forces, including institutions, media, and technology. By reframing this notion in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “collective assemblage of enunciation”, I show how the very idea of metapersonal enunciation (Padoan 2025) constitutes an “immanent infrastructure” of social life, through which cosmopolitical action is enacted (Stengers 2005). I investigate these themes through an analysis of digital and ritual infrastructures connected to the heritagisation of the Katsuragi Shugen pilgrimage in central Japan—whose space is nowadays claimed and contested among competing groups, including religious institutions, governmental agencies, tourists etc. Here metapersons like digital maps, social media, deities, and sutra chapters embedded in pilgrimage routes generate processes of cosmopolitical negotiation, whose articulation could be understood as “diagrams” and “folds of subjectivation” (Deleuze 1988). The immanent infrastructure of pilgrimage, I will argue, can only work by breaking down into these folds and diagrams—populated by a multiplicity of metapersons who speak and act (enunciate) through us. Whether the voices and actions deictically made present are the ancestors, the gods we pray, the institutions we belong to, or the media we follow, they all bring about cosmopolitical action, critically questioning the way we recompose our common worlds.