The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (Culture, Economy and the Social)

 

The Social after Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in nineteenth-century French sociology, a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. Whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the twentieth century, Tarde’s sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist, a metaphysician. The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘every thing is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognized forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and, most recently, to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor-Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as ‘an alternative beginning for an alternative social science’. This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.

 

Matei Candea is a lecturer in social anthropology at Durham University, UK, and previously Sigrid Rausing Lecturer in collaborative anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his doctorate from Cambridge in 2006 for work on difference, knowledge and relationality in Corsica, and has published a number of articles on this topic and on the subject of ethnographic method and anthropological theory. A book entitled Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork is forthcoming with Indiana University Press in 2010. His post-doctoral research focuses on the interplay of engagement and detachment in everyday relations between behavioural biologists and the animals they study.

Culture, Economy and the Social A new series from CRESC – the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change Editors: Professor Tony Bennett, Sociology, Open University, Professor Penny Harvey, Anthropology, Manchester University, Professor Kevin Hetherington, Geography, Open University Editorial Advisory Board: Andrew Barry, University of Oxford, Michel Callon, École des Mines de Paris, Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago, Mike Crang, University of Durham, Tim Dant, Lancaster University, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Écoles de hautes études en sciences sociales, Antoine Hennion, Paris Institute of Technology, Eric Hirsch, Brunel University, John Law, Lancaster University, Randy Martin, New York University, Timothy Mitchell, New York University, Rolland Munro, Keele University, Andrew Pickering, University of Exeter, Mary Poovey, New York University, Hugh Willmott, University of Cardiff, Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College City University New York/ Graduate School, City University of New York

 

The Culture, Economy and the Social series is committed to innovative contemporary, comparative and historical work on the relations between social, cultural and economic change. It publishes empirically based research that is theoretically informed, that critically examines the ways in which social, cultural and economic change is framed and made visible, and that is attentive to perspectives that tend to be ignored or side-lined by grand theorizing or epochal accounts of social change. The series addresses the diverse manifestations of contemporary capitalism, and considers the various ways in which the ‘social’, ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ are apprehended as tangible sites of value and practice. It is explicitly comparative, publishing books that work across disciplinary perspectives, cross-culturally, or across different historical periods. The series is actively engaged in the analysis of the different theoretical traditions that have contributed to the development of the ‘cultural turn’ with a view to clarifying where these approaches converge and where they diverge on a particular issue. It is equally concerned to explore the new critical agendas emerging from current critiques of the cultural turn: those associated with the descriptive turn for example. Our commitment to interdisciplinarity thus aims at enriching theoretical and methodological discussion, building awareness of the common ground that has emerged in the past decade, and thinking through what is at stake in those approaches that resist integration into a common analytical model. Series titles include: The Media and Social Theory Edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee

Culture Class Distinction Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright

Material Powers Edited by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce

Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human Richie Nimmo

The Social after Gabriel Tarde Debates and assessments Edited by Matei Candea

Creative Labour - Media Work in Three Cultural Industries Edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker

 

Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy Edited by Elizabeth Silva and Alan Ward

Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life through the Eyes of the City Beatriz Jaguaribe

 

The Social after Gabriel Tarde Debates and assessments

 

Edited by Matei Candea

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Matei Candea for selection and editorial material; the contributors for their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

 

ISBN 0-203-87631-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0-415-54339-8 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-87631-8 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-54339-2 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-87631-2 (ebk)

‘Traditions of thought are continually remade, not merely by new circumstances, but by self-reflexion. Up to a point, at least, we can choose our ancestors.’

 

J. D. Y. Peel (1971) Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (Heinemann Educational Books, London), p. ix.

 

Contents

List of contributors 1 Revisiting Tarde’s house

xi 1

MATEI CANDEA

PART I

‘The distance that lay between’: the Tarde–Durkheim debate reconsidered 2 The debate

25 27

GABRIEL TARDE & EMILE DURKHEIM

3 Imitation: returning to the Tarde–Durkheim debate

44

BRUNO KARSENTI

4 The value of a beautiful memory: imitation as borrowing in serious play at making mortuary sculptures in New Ireland

62

 

KAREN SYKES

5 Tarde and Durkheim and the non-sociological ground of sociology

80

DAVID TOEWS

6 If there is no such thing as society, is ritual still special? On using The Elementary Forms after Tarde

93

JOEL ROBBINS

7 One or three: issues of comparison TIMOTHY JENKINS

102

x Contents 8 The height, length and width of social theory

110

ALBERTO CORSÍN JIMÉNEZ

9 Faith, reason and the ethic of craftsmanship: creating contingently stable worlds

129

PENNY HARVEY AND SOUMHYA VENKATESAN

PART II

Quantifying, tracing, relating: fragments of Tardean method 10 Tarde’s idea of quantification

143 145

BRUNO LATOUR

11 Gabriel Tarde and statistical movement

163

EMMANUEL DIDIER

12 Tarde’s method: between statistics and experimentation

177

ANDREW BARRY

13 Intervening with the social? Ethnographic practice and Tarde’s image of relations between subjects

191

JAMES LEACH

14 Tarde on drugs, or measures against Suicide

208

EDUARDO VIANA VARGAS

 

15 On Tardean relations: temporality and ethnography

230

GEORGINA BORN

16 Pass it on: towards a political economy of propensity

248

NIGEL THRIFT

Afterword

271

MARILYN STRATHERN

Index

278

Contributors

Matei Candea is a lecturer in social anthropology at Durham University, UK, and previously Sigrid Rausing Lecturer in collaborative anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his doctorate from Cambridge in 2006 for work on difference, knowledge and relationality in Corsica, and has published a number of articles on this topic and on the subject of ethnographic method and anthropological theory. A book entitled Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork is forthcoming with Indiana University Press in 2010. His post-doctoral research focuses on the interplay of engagement and detachment in everyday relations between behavioural biologists and the animals they study.

 

Bruno Karsenti was born in 1966. He taught political philosophy and the epistemology of the social sciences at the universities of Lyon and Paris I, and is now Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. His latest publications are Politique de l’esprit. Auguste Comte et la naissance de la science sociale (Hermann 2006); and La Société en personnes. Etudes durkheimiennes (Economica 2006). He has re-edited a number of classic works by Tarde, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, and is the editor of two book series: ‘Pratiques Théoriques’ (Presses Universitaires de France) and ‘Raisons Pratiques’ (Éditions de l’EHESS).

Karen Sykes is Professor of Anthropology at the . She has completed four years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, which informs numerous research articles. She is the author of Arguing with Anthropology (Routledge 2005), and editor of Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning (Palgrave 2009), as well as Culture and Cultural Property (UBPDS 2001).

xii Contributors David Toews introduced Tarde to an English-speaking audience of social and cultural theorists in articles in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy and Theory, Culture, & Society as a result of research in which he aimed to work out, and critique, the ‘pure sociology’ inherent in Deleuze’s thought as assimilated from Durkheim, Tarde and Bergson. Currently teaching and writing social and cultural theory in Canada, his recent work is immersed in experiences of the borderlands between theory and ethnography in the ‘pure sociological’ setting of online virtual worlds. He is also currently researching the rivalrous relation between Tarde and Mead, with the aim of critically appropriating the notion of imitation as a methodological concept for studying Internet practices.

Joel Robbins is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on cultural change, the anthropology of Christianity, the globalization of Pentecostalism, and the study of ritual, language and exchange. He is the author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (University of California Press 2004) and is co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory.

 

Timothy Jenkins was trained at the Oxford Institute of Social Anthropology (now Social and Cultural Anthropology). He is an Assistant Director of Research in the University of Cambridge, UK (since 2001). His interests are in European, particularly British and French, ethnography, as well as in anthropological theory and the history of ideas. He is the author of various papers and of two books: Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach (Berghahn 1999), and The Life of Property: House, Family and Inheritance in Béarn, Southwest France (Berghahn 2010).

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Senior Scientist at Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC) and Dean at Spain’s School for Industrial Organisation (EOI) and, previously, University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Organisations at the . He is the author of Economy, Knowledge and the Social: Anthropological Proportions (forthcoming) and editor of Culture and Well-being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (Pluto 2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (Ashgate 2007). His areas of interest lie in the history and anthropological theory of knowledge practices, and in particular their contemporary expression in science/management/public encounters.

Contributors

xiii

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the and Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. She works ethnographically in Peru, in the UK and in Spain. Current work focuses on road construction, engineering expertise and transformational ambition. Recent publications include: Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice (2007) and (in press) Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies (both co-edited with Edwards & Wade, Oxford: Berghahn).

Soumhya Venkatesan lectures in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her interest in gods and god-making stems from her doctoral work on agentive things. Her interest in roads comes from Penny Harvey! Soumhya’s work on ritual experts and makers of gods in Hindu south India explores transformations, stabilisation and uncertainty. This paper was written under the aegis of an Individual Research Grant (GR7417) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Bruno Latour is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris where Gabriel Tarde taught sociology while he was at the Collège de France and where most of his archives are still kept (and have been organized by Louise Salmon). See http://www. bruno-latour.fr.

 

Emmanuel Didier is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Centre de Recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Pénales. His work focuses on the social construction and political effects of statistics. He has recently published ‘Do Statistics “Perform” the Economy?’, in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, ed. D. MacKenzie et al. (Princeton University Press 2007, pp. 276–310) and En quoi consiste l’Amérique? Les statistiques, le New Deal, et la Démocratie (La Découverte 2009).

Andrew Barry is Reader in Geography at Oxford University. He is author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (Athlone 2001) and co-editor of Foucault and Political Reason (Chicago University Press 1996) and The Technological Economy (Routlege 1995). He is also the co-designer (with Lucy Kimbell) of Pindices, a public experiment, and formerly Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths College. Together with Nigel Thrift, he edited a special issue of the journal Economy and Society on Gabriel Tarde.

xiv Contributors James Leach is Senior Lecturer and Head of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has undertaken long-term field research in rural Madang Province, Papua New Guinea, and in the UK with people utilizing new technologies for collaborative knowledge production. He was awarded the Philip Leverhume Prize in 2004. His published work includes Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea (Berghahn 2003); Rationales of Ownership: Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea (Sean Kingston 2004), and ‘Freedom Imagined: Morality and Aesthetics in Open Source Software Design’ (Ethnos 2009).

Eduardo Viana Vargas is Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he coordinates the Post-graduate Program in Anthropology and the Laboratory of the Anthropology of Sociotechnical Controversies. After his first work on Gabriel Tarde was published in 1992, he wrote Antes Tarde do que nunca: Gabriel Tarde e a emergência das ciências sociais (Contracapa 2000), edited Gabriel Tarde, Monadologia e Sociologia e outros ensaios (Cosacnaify 2007) and published many papers on Tarde’s sociology and anthropological theory and, after ethnographic research in Juiz de Fora and Belo Horizonte, on licit and illicit uses of drugs.

 

Georgina Born is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at the University of Cambridge, UK. She works on cultural and knowledge production, and is the author of Rationalising Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalisation of the Musical Avant-Garde (University of California Press 1995), an ethnography of IRCAM, the Parisian research centre for music, science and computing, and Uncertain Vision (Vintage 2005), an ethnographic study of the transformation of the BBC by neo-liberal policies since the late 1990s.

Nigel Thrift was educated at Aberystwyth where he graduated with a BA Hons in Geography in 1971. After Aberystwyth he went on to gain his PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol in 1979, his DSc from the University of Bristol in 1992, as well as being granted an MA (Oxon) in January 2004. He is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Bristol and a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. One of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists, he was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and is co-author, author or co-editor of over thirty-five books. Nigel is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, a role he took up in July 2006.

Contributors

xv

 

Marilyn Strathern DBE, Emeritus Professor Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, has recently been made President of the (UK and Commonwealth) Association of Social Anthropologists. Papua New Guinea has been a principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2006, although she is also intrigued by developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. Initial work on gender relations led in two directions: feminist scholarship and the new reproductive technologies (1980s–90s), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990–2000s). A ‘critique of good practice’ has been the umbrella under which she has written about audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity.

 

1

Revisiting Tarde’s house Matei Candea

I may possibly be told that it would have been quite as well had I first presented as a systematic whole that which I have actually cut up into three separate publications. But […] why should we wear ourselves out in the work of building up such great structures – such complete edifices? Since our successors will have nothing more pressing to do than demolish these structures in order to make some other use of the materials or take possession of a detached wing, it is surely as well to spare them the task of demolition, by delivering our thought in fragments only. (Tarde, 1899b: 5)

A re-introduction

 

Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment (cf. Latour, 2002; Latour and Lépinay, 2008: 9): What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queried the ‘thingness’ of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific ‘structure’; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint – Durkheim’s main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science? It is in these terms that mainstream social science has recently been re-introduced to the work of a forgotten nineteenth-century thinker: a theorist whose account of circulating energies and minute oppositions had anticipated Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of the microphysics of power;1 a philosopher whose metaphysics of universal difference and creative repetition has inspired philosopher Gilles Deleuze;2 a sociologist who has been described by Bruno Latour3 as the forgotten grandfather of Actor-Network Theory. Meet the one they have all been talking about: Gabriel Tarde.

2 M. Candea -§-

 

‘It goes without saying that no introduction of M. Tarde is necessary to English and American readers who are versed in current sociological discussions’ (Baldwin, 1899). Thus wrote psychologist and philosopher Mark Baldwin in his preface to the English translation of Gabriel Tarde’s Social Laws. A century on, nothing could be less true – to wit, the text you are reading. And yet Tarde has, in recent years, been making something of a ‘comeback’. This thinker has been the focus of a vigorous revival in France, centered around the republication from 1999 onwards of much of his extensive corpus under the editorial direction of Eric Alliez. The very limited availability of Tarde’s work in translation has restricted the spread of the Tardean revival in the anglophone world; however, a number of recent publications by prominent scholars has helped to bring the nineteenth-century sociologist back into the limelight (see for instance Latour, 2002; Toews, 2003; Latour, 2005; Barry and Thrift, 2007; Thrift, 2007). This book engages with this particular theoretical moment: it asks what the social sciences might look like if Gabriel Tarde were belatedly reintroduced into our gallery of ancestors, and subjected to the same critical scrutiny and creative reinvention as Weber, Durkheim, Marx or Simmel. In the chapters that follow, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and geographers reconsider aspects of Tarde’s extensive and multifaceted work, and experiment with fragments of Tardean theory and method. These chapters do not therefore add up to a painstaking restoration of the Tardean edifice, a work of historical conservation or the creation of a kitsch neo-Tardean monument; rather – as Tarde himself anticipated – the collection is part critical reconsideration and part creative reinvention, inspecting and selectively giving new lease of life to borrowed stones or whole wings of the imposing ruins of Tarde’s theoretical house. In this spirit, the remainder of this introduction does not aim to give a substantive overview of Tarde’s theories, as in the floorplan to a reconstruction. Rather, I attempt, in the first half of this chapter, a historical sketch of Tarde’s life and of the posthumous rediscoveries of his work. The second half will make a case, in the light of this historical discussion and of some recent critiques, for the value of rereading Tarde today.

A historical sketch Gabriel Tarde was born in 1843 in Sarlat, to one of the oldest families in the Périgord region. For a number of generations, the Tardes, ennobled to De Tarde at various points in history,4 had been prominent local magistrates and jurists. Gabriel was a brilliant young man of a somewhat weak physical disposition, who throughout his life was to be plagued with a recurrent ophthalmia leading to periods of near-blindness, and concomitant bouts of depression. After completing his schooling in the local Jesuit college, his initial aspirations towards further scientific studies at the École Polytechnique thwarted by ill-health, Gabriel followed the family path and studied law, taking up his first legal post in Sarlat in 1867, at the age of twenty-four.

Revisiting Tarde’s house

3

Tarde served as a magistrate in the provincial region of his birth for the next twenty-seven years, reading voraciously in his spare time on subjects ranging from criminology to biology, philosophy and sociology. It was only in his late thirties that Tarde began to publish, after some initial dabblings in poetry, scholarly articles situated at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and sociology, principally in the Revue philosophique run by philosopher and psychologist Théodule Ribot. Unsurprisingly, given his profession, Tarde became particularly involved in contemporary criminological debates, gaining notoriety from his vocal critique of the Italian school of ‘anthropological criminology’, and particularly Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri.5 In a series of articles published during the 1880s, Tarde also laid the bases of his distinctive sociology, which would soon come to collide with that of a younger, up-and-coming sociologist: Emile Durkheim. In an article entitled ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une société?’ (1884b), Tarde first posited his definition of society as imitation, which would later form the core argument of his most famous book, Les Lois de l’imitation (1890b). In a careful reconsideration of Tarde and Durkheim’s later battle over the definition of imitation, Bruno Karsenti (this volume) argues that at the heart of the Tardean account of imitation was a head-on engagement with the central paradox of social action: the indissociability of acting and being acted upon. Whereas Durkheim would resolve this paradox into binaries – structure and agency, causes and reasons, social and individual – Tarde’s sociology of imitation proposed a conceptual apparatus for engaging with the paradox itself, since Nothing could be less scientific than this absolute separation, this radical discontinuity between the voluntary and the involuntary, the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not move, by imperceptible degrees, from a considered volition to a more or less mechanical habit? And does the same action undergo any absolute change in nature during this movement? (Tarde, 1890b: quoted in Karsenti, this volume)

 

In ‘La croyance et le désir’ (1880), Tarde outlined his views about belief and desire as the irreducible quanta of human psychology, and began to consider the possibility of their statistical measurement, a methodological discussion pursued in ‘L’archéologie et la statistique’ (1884b). Here and elsewhere, Tarde evidenced the influence of philosopher and mathematician Augustin Cournot, whose thinking on infinitesimal calculus and probability had a profound influence on Tarde’s methodology and metaphysics (for an extended discussion of Cournot’s influence on Tarde, see Milet, 1970: 111–44; see Didier, Latour, and Barry, this volume for detailed accounts of Tarde’s statistics). ‘Darwinisme naturel et Darwinisme social’ (1884a) was Tarde’s first step in what would become a complex and sustained critical engagement with the theory of evolution. Opinions vary on Tarde’s closeness to Darwinian theory, but Milet particularly highlights the fact that Tarde refused the primacy of ‘the struggle for life’ as a motor of history (Milet, 1970: 183, 245). If anything, as we shall see below, for Tarde it was association, harmonization and conjunction which came

4 M. Candea first. After all, Tarde argued in his book La Philosophie pénale, logically speaking, beings must be held together by internal relations before they can clash externally with one another (1890a: 103). On the other hand, Tarde was a far stricter Darwinist than his contemporary Herbert Spencer in two respects: his refusal to see ‘species’ (whether biological or social) as anything more substantial than the ephemeral categorization of a bundle of contingent individual variations (Milet, 1970: 245; compare Darwin, 1859 chapter 2); and his rejection of unilineal evolutionism, which he saw as a ‘simple determinism’ (Tarde, 1899a: ii). Both of these soundly Darwinian points were at the heart of his critique of Spencer’s social evolutionism (Milet, 1970: 244–47). More generally, Tarde deplored the tendency to reduce history, be it natural or social, to a formula, rather than study its ‘hydrostatics’ (Barry and Thrift 2007: 522). Tarde’s commitment to contingency is evident in the following quote – as indeed is his characteristically informal style of argument, of which more below: I must admit that it would not spoil for me the spectacle of the starry sky, to think that the heavens are not the deployment of some desperate monotony. For the same reason, I would not dislike, when I read history, to see in it the unexpected constantly springing forth from regular causality, freedom issuing forth from order, fantasy from rhythm, embroidery from the fabric. (Tarde, 1892: 19) It is such statements that have led to the recovery of Tarde’s thought as a ‘metaphysics of contingency’ (Milet, 1970: 22ff). And yet this does not stop him from elsewhere articulating a number of prophetic, and retrospectively somewhat chilling, predictions about the future of history6 (see ibid. 358ff). Nor, indeed, does Tarde refrain from referring repeatedly to social and historical ‘laws’. Yet these would be uncommon laws indeed:

 

We too see the history of societies as subjected to laws, to very precise laws. [However] these laws do not hinder in the least the rich diversity of social evolutions, unlike those narrow formulae which seek to canalize these great rivers, these Rhines, Niles and Mississippis of history, so capricious and wild. Our laws by contrast affirm, so to speak, the necessity of this freedom. (Tarde, 1893c: 139–140) Where Durkheim saw a sophistic rejection of any notion of real scientific law (see Chapter 2, this volume), the modern reader might see in this attempt to marry laws and contingency an early parallel to Weber’s distinctively non-teleological stance on the history of rationalization, or in biology, to the complex re-historicization of Darwinism by Stephen J. Gould (1989, 2002; cf. Stengers, 2000: 141). But it was in the 1890s that Tarde’s name really came to the forefront of French intellectual life, beginning with the publication in 1890 of both Les Lois de l’imitation and his second criminological work, La Philosophie pénale. In 1893, Tarde became co-director of the Revue d’anthropologie criminelle, founded by

Revisiting Tarde’s house

5

 

criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne. In 1894, as a result of his growing fame as a sociologist and criminologist, this provincial judge was singled out by the government and named director of judiciary statistics at the Ministry of Justice in Paris. In Paris, Tarde met Lucien Levy-Bruhl, René Worms, Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim, and soon became a renowned public figure, assiduously frequenting the Parisian salons. In 1895, he received the Knighthood of the Légion d’Honneur, the Order of Venezuela and the Order of Wladimir of Russia. The next year, he became an occasional lecturer at the Public School of Political Sciences (now better known as Sciences Po) and the newly created Free College of Social Sciences. Finally, in 1900, Tarde was elected to a chair in modern philosophy at the Collège de France – which he tried, and failed, to have renamed as a chair in sociology. The same year, Tarde was also elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. If the 1890s saw the rise to fame of Gabriel Tarde, they were also the decade in which the French public discovered a passion for sociology, as the multiplication of debates over its method, object and definition attest (Fournier, 2007: 209ff). Increasingly, these sociological debates came to gravitate around the crucial contrast between Tarde’s and Durkheim’s answers to these questions. In 1894, Durkheim publishes The Rules of Sociological Method as a series of articles in La Revue philosophique – Tarde, then arguably the leading French sociologist, is only cited once, in a note. The latter responds by dismantling Durkheimian sociology piece by piece in a series of articles including ‘La sociologie élémentaire’ (1895).7 Durkheim retaliates by refuting at length Tarde’s theories of imitation in Le Suicide (1897).8 This increasingly vehement argument over the nature of the social culminated in 1903 in an epic debate between the two thinkers at the École des hautes études sociales, where both were billed to teach an introductory course in autumn of that year. It is this debate that Chapter 2 of this volume tries to reimagine, by re-creating a dialogue out of extracts of the published works of the two sociologists. Tarde published prolifically during the final fifteen years of his life, and most of his books date from that period. Besides those which have already been cited, Tarde published La Logique sociale (1893a) and L’Opposition universelle (1897). These weighty tomes came to complete Les Lois sociales (1898b). Tarde also continued to publish on legal matters (Les Transformations du droit, 1893c), and extended his purview into the analysis of politics (Les Transformations de pouvoir, 1899a), of crowds and media (L’Opinion et la foule, 1901) and economics (Psychologie economique, 1902). But it is an article, published during this period, which was central to the recent rediscovery of Tarde, ‘Les monades et la science sociale’ (1893b), later republished as Monadologie et sociologie (1999b), where Tarde outlines his relational ontology. The recent enthusiasm for this text is perhaps due to the fact that it provides the clearest evidence that, whereas Tarde, as we shall see, has often been dismissed as Durkheim’s individualistic opponent, his supposed individualism in sociology is only the tip of a rather more exciting iceberg. In order to clarify this, however, we need to make a detour through the different ways in which Tarde’s sociology has been revived during the past century.

6 M. Candea

The afterlives of Gabriel Tarde At the time of his death in 1904, Tarde’s fame was at its apex, and he was being compared to Comte, Darwin and Spencer (Milet, 1970: 9). In his 1939 assessment of contemporary French sociology, Durkheim’s former collaborator Célestin Bouglé referred to the erstwhile clash between Tarde and Durkheim as the ‘famous duel [between] the two thinkers whose busts then towered above sociology’ (quoted in Fournier, 2007: 78). Henri Bergson, Tarde’s contemporary and successor at the Collège de France, wrote an extremely laudatory introduction to a posthumous edited collection of Tarde’s works (Tarde, 1909), in which he hailed Tarde’s philosophy of imitation as one of the most eminent and noteworthy instances of nineteenth-century thought (quoted in Milet, 1970: 9). Indeed, some, such as Jean Milet, have argued that Bergson was profoundly influenced by Tarde, and became the means whereby Tarde’s thinking, unseen, in turn permeated the twentieth century (Milet, 1970: 386ff). Whereas Milet tended to see in Bergson the culmination and extension of Tarde’s project, Georgina Born by contrast, in her contribution to this volume, detects a reduction of Tarde’s analytics of temporality in Bergson’s vitalism – and therefore in its recent redeployment by social theorists. And yet, Tarde’s particular approach to the social seemed, on the surface at least, to disappear with him. Outside of criminology, where a ‘Gabriel Tarde prize’ still rewards, every year, the author of an outstanding early volume, Tarde died without leaving a school or group of followers either in France or in the English-speaking world. In France, his memory was not so much extinguished as enshrined within a canonical doxography within which Tarde played the role of Durkheim’s eccentric and unsystematic opponent, whose own account of society was individualistic and psychological and, in the end, failed to make an impact on mainstream sociology. Thus, Durkheim’s nephew Mauss dismissively recalled, in a 1935 interview:

 

Gabriel Tarde was a great success, because he was suggestive, but his Laws of Imitation were of no importance […] He was a popularizer, and something of a metaphysician, but his work on criminology, in which he was an authority, is important. I attended his lectures. Their content was banal and commonplace, but presented most entertainingly. (Murray and Mauss, 1989: 163) After an initial burst of interest by anglophone sociologists around the turn of the century, prompted by the translation of Tarde’s Social Laws (1899b) and his Laws of Imitation (1903), Tarde’s name seems to vanish from English and American sociology – although Terry Clark recalls that Park and Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), a volume which has come to typify the ‘Chicago School’ of sociology (Braude, 1970), contained ‘more references to Tarde than to Comte, Cooley, Durkheim, Simmel, Thomas, or Weber’ (Clark, 1969: 68). We have to wait until 1969, however, for the first serious attempt in the anglophone world to revive interest in Tardean sociology. Clark’s volume of selected translations of Tarde’s work On Communication

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and Social Influence (Tarde, 1969), was prefaced by an extensive introduction. Therein, Clark attempts to rescue Tarde from historical oblivion while retaining, in the main, the established account of Tarde as Durkheim’s individualistic opponent – which, by the 1970s, however, had become a term of praise, not abuse. In France, criminologist Jean Pinatel (1963) and sociologist Raymond Boudon (1971) were, around the same time, rediscovering in Tarde a forgotten precursor to ‘methodological individualism’, an unexpected ally in their critique of mainstream holistic, functionalist sociology (cf. Mucchielli, 2000: 162–66). Clark unambiguously placed Tarde alongside Durkheim and Weber in a Parsonian pantheon of ‘theorists of action’, sociologists whose work examines the five analytical variables: actor, goals, conditions, means and norms. If Durkheim was better on norms, Tarde, Clark felt, was better on actors and goals (Clark, 1969: 19–21). The current rebirth of interest in Tarde, by contrast, centres around the Deleuzian, and later, Latourian rediscoveries of a radically different theorist, for whom the individual is no more of a natural stopping-point for sociology than Durkheim’s social facts. This is a Tarde who, as we shall see below, radically upends our scalar assumptions, with the notion that the whole is always less than the sum of its parts (Tarde, 1999b; cf. Latour, 2002). From this new perspective, an individualist account of Tarde, however positively intended, still leaves him in Durkheim’s shadow: it only opens up a space for Tarde within a Durkheimian distinction between society and individual, structure and agency, which distinctions Tarde explicitly rejected. Before moving on to this rereading, however, it is worth pausing to unpick the ways in which the earlier individualist account of Tarde could be supported by a selective reading of passages of his work, especially perhaps in his short synthetic essay Social Laws (1899; all quotes below are from the essay’s republication as Tarde, 2000). This will allow us to highlight the limits of this interpretation, but should also serve as a caveat to further attempts to represent and unify once and for all a canonical account of ‘Tarde’s system’ – I will return to this point below. At times, and particularly when attacking Durkheim, Tarde seemed to be making straightforward individualist claims. He vehemently and repeatedly attacked the notion of supra-individual entities such as societies or nations that constrain or explain the behaviour of individuals: Beneath the indefinite they, however carefully we search, we never find anything but a certain number of he’s and she’s which, as they have increased in number, have become mingled together and confused […] The genius of a people […], instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; they are in a state of continual fermentation in the bosom of every society, thanks to the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighbouring societies to their great mutual profit. (Tarde, 2000: 27)

8 M. Candea In explicit contrast to Durkheim, Tarde described the elementary social fact as the interaction of two conscious individuals (ibid. 19). In social evolutionary thought as in Durkheimian sociology, the same error always comes to light, namely, the error of believing that, in order to see a gradual dawn of regularity, order, and logic in social phenomena, we must go outside of the details, which are essentially irregular, and rise high enough to obtain a panoramic view of the general effect; that the source and foundation of every social coordination is some general fact […] in short, that man acts, but a law of evolution guides him. (ibid. 75)

 

Doesn’t the author of these lines, who elsewhere criticizes Durkheim for mechanizing history by forgetting the influence of Great Men and heroic inventors, seem a natural champion of individualism? And yet, when we relate these passages to other parts of Tarde’s work, he turns out not to fit the individualist bill very well at all. As Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift have pointed out, it can convincingly be argued that the real elementary unit in Tarde’s account is ‘the relation of modification or communication (such as affect, obedience, sympathy or education), not the subject which was modified’ (2007: 514). As a result, I would argue that when Tarde foregrounds the relation between two conscious minds, he is not in fact starting from individuals but rather arriving at them. As he notes explicitly, it is this relation of a subject to ‘an object which turns out to be a subject’, which founds the reality of both: ‘This consciousness of a consciousness is the inconcussum quid which Descartes sought and which the individual Self could not give him’ (2000: 20). However, the individual is not simply secondary, as in a structuralist view, in which relations come before entities. Tarde’s radical move is to expand the discussion beyond the chicken-and-egg alternation of human individuals and the relations between them, by inscribing this contrast within a much broader multi-scalar, indeed cosmic, perspective. This is most clearly outlined in Tarde’s aforementioned essay, Monadologie et sociologie (1999b), in which he postulates, not so much a Leibnizian sociology, as a socialized monadology. In this peculiar metaphysics, Leibniz’s pre-established harmony is replaced by a universalized Newtonian principle of attraction translated as ‘mutual possession’ (see Chapter 14, this volume). By recognizing that the gravity of a celestial body is none other than the sum of the gravities of its constituent masses, Tarde argues, Newton exploded the individuality of celestial bodies, which had theretofore been considered as superior units whose internal relations bore no resemblance to their relations with external bodies. It took an energetic mind to resolve this apparent unity into a multiplicity of distinct elements, tied together just as they were tied to elements of other aggregates. (1999b: 34)

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Tarde extends this insight into a ‘universal sociological point of view’, in which the resolution of entities into aggregates or societies applies ‘all the way down’, to solar systems and to planets, to nations and to individual bodies, to organs, to cells and to atoms: ‘every thing is a society and every phenomenon a social fact’ (1999b: 58). It is this radical ‘universal sociological point of view’ that leads Tarde to conclude that the whole (the whole society, the whole individual) is always less complex and indeed weaker than the sum of its parts, since these parts are always simultaneously part of other wholes which could at any moment request their allegiance: The internal uprisings which finally destroy all of these great, regular mechanisms – the social mechanism, the vital mechanism, the stellar mechanism, the molecular mechanism – are all due to a similar condition: their constitutive elements, soldiers of these various regiments, temporary embodiment of their laws, only ever belong to the world they constitute by one facet of their being, while by other facets they escape it. This world would not exist without them; they however would still be something without it. The attributes which each element owes to its incorporation within its regiment is not the whole of its nature. It has other tendencies, other instincts, which come from other regimentations …’ (1999b: 39)

 

This particular refusal of scale, in which the big is always recast as a simplification of the small, is one of Tarde’s most daring philosophical moves, and one which could convincingly be taken to prefigure the specific optic of Actor-Network Theory (see for instance Callon and Latour, 1981).9 As Eduardo Vargas details in his contribution to this volume, the interesting result of this universal sociological point of view is a switch from the problematic of ‘being’ and entities, to that of ‘having’: possession, be it mutual or unilateral, of one entity by a host of others. Vargas shows the potential of the Tardean shift from being to having for an ethnographic exploration of drug use. Elsewhere, I have suggested that this approach, as an alternative to the Barthian study of contrastive difference, could help anthropologists reshape the ethnographic study of identity, ethnicity and attachments to place (Candea, 2010). Furthermore, Tarde’s recasting of subjective and objective knowledge as mutual and unilateral possession, is a particularly fruitful model for anthropologists to think with (see Candea, 2008; Leach, this volume):10 When I enter into verbal communication with one or more of my fellows, […] this relation is the relation of one social element with other social elements, considered individually. By contrast, when I observe, listen to or study my natural environment, rocks, water, plants even, each object of my thought is a hermetically sealed world of elements which may indeed know or possess each other intimately, like members of a social group, but which I can only embrace globally and from the outside. (1999b: 90–91)

10 M. Candea More generally, Tarde’s appeal for many current readers is in the seamless integration in his work, of nearly unbounded metaphysical speculations which boldly refashion scale, being, relationship and perspective, with proposals for a minute, careful micro-sociology, focusing on singular events of modification (see Barry, this volume). At the intersection of these two seemingly contradictory tendencies in Tarde’s writing lies perhaps his most productive legacy for contemporary sociologists, anthropologists and others who would engage in what Born (this volume) terms ‘a post-positivist empiricism, in which ethnographic and historical research become the fecund grounds for conceptual invention’ (245).

Why read Tarde today (and how)? And yet, amidst the recent chorus of those hailing the return of Gabriel Tarde, some have sounded a warning note. Barry and Thrift have pointed out that while it is right to emphasize the contemporary resonances of Tarde’s approach his work is, of course, infused by the preoccupations of late nineteenth century scientific thought. Indeed, it is the peculiar mixture of these preoccupations with the power of foresight into contemporary concerns which we suspect is what now makes Tarde such an attractive figure to so many. (Barry & Thrift, 2007: 510–11) More directly, Laurent Mucchielli, in a critique of what he termed the new ‘Tardomania’, argued that Tarde’s rediscoverers have appropriated his name without restituting the whole of his thought, [and that] the characteristics of Tarde’s philosophical system explain in part the issue of his struggle for prestige with Durkheim and the fact that he has been forgotten by the social sciences. (Mucchielli, 2000: 174)

 

We will return to Mucchielli’s first accusation below. As for the second, he argues that it was, at least in part, the strength of Durkheim’s arguments and the clarity of his reasoning that enabled him to turn into disciples men originally opposed to him: Durkheim managed to embody a certain type of rationality – scientific rationality – which consists in methods, in examples, in logical reasoning, in standard procedures of validation and argumentation; these things cannot be found in Tarde, whose thinking is more an instance of traditional philosophy, indeed sometimes of a style of writing and demonstration closer to journalism. And in the phrase ‘social science’ there is the word ‘science’. (Mucchielli, 2000: 181) Mucchielli’s broader historical account is careful and convincing. However, in his drive to prove that Durkheim’s victory over Tarde, and the latter’s disappearance

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from the social scientific canon, were not due to underhand machinations or foul play, he at times overshoots his mark by seeming to suggest that these historical contingencies were in some profound sense justified, inscribed in the very nature of what a social science itself must be. At the heart of this volume, by contrast, is the thought that the history of sociology is not, any more than any other history, the unfolding of destiny, and that another sociology is always possible. As a result, creative and self-conscious anachronism can be as productive and valuable an endeavour as careful historical reconstruction. Some contributors to this volume question and historicize elements of Tarde’s thinking, while others selectively revive and reinvent; indeed, some do both. What has happened has indeed happened, but it could always have been otherwise, as Foucault, and Tarde before him, pointed out. To take just one example, accepting as such the familiar opposition between the ‘scientific’ Durkheim and the ‘unscientific’ Tarde would mean bypassing the important debate between Tarde and Durkheim on the subject of what a scientific approach in sociology would in fact entail (see Chapter 2, this volume). Bruno Latour (Chapter 10, this volume) argues that Tarde never abandoned the striving for a scientific sociology, but rather that he went much further than Durkheim in recasting what was specifically scientific about science in the first place (see also Thrift, this volume, for current scientific vindication of some of Tarde’s theories). Durkheim did indeed win that battle, and in many ways set the terms of the debate over what was to be considered scientific and unscientific in the social sciences. This is precisely why revisiting Tarde’s version of the contrast might open some unexpected avenues at the present juncture. But there is another strand to Mucchielli’s criticism. Whereas many who read Tarde today describe him as an original and misunderstood thinker who suffered from being ahead of his time, Mucchielli notes that both Tarde and Durkheim were very much in tune with sections of French contemporary opinion: Durkheim with the younger Jauressian socialists, Tarde with a section of the Catholic11 haute bourgeoisie (Mucchielli, 2000: 179). This contrast is the crux of an implicit warning concerning Tarde’s politics, which Mucchielli is not alone in issuing. Indeed Barry (this volume) notes that Deleuze and Guattari’s portrayal of Tarde as a theorist of radical politics is seriously misleading. Unambiguously elitist and an ambivalent democrat, Tarde could well be taken to describe himself, when, in his book Penal Philosophy, he exhorted his readers to ‘be revolutionary in the social sciences but conservative in politics’ (quoted in Fournier, 2007: 76) – although of course, one might argue that ‘conservative’, during the Third Republic, was quite a ‘radical’ thing to be.12 The debate continues today: Alberto Toscano (2007) characterized Tarde’s political project as one of elite pacification, and argued that the greatest value of Tarde’s political writings is as a symptom (the anthropologist in me would say, an ethnographic instance) of the type of strategic thinking that is evident in contemporary neo-liberal forms of pacification. By contrast, Toews (this volume) argues that by rereading Tarde alongside and in tension with Durkheim, one can still recover from the former an agentive version of unsociability which goes beyond docility.

12 M. Candea

 

Certainly, any evaluation of Tarde’s moral and political positions requires some careful unpicking both of the enormous Tardean corpus and of the specific historical juncture at which he was writing. But it does not follow that Tarde must stand or fall as one – or does it? Can Tarde’s theories and methods be extricated from his politics and treated in isolation, or is there something profoundly problematic at the very core of Tarde’s project? Some recent readers worry precisely about the element of Tarde’s work which has been hailed by others: the obviation of distinctions between the social, the individual, and the biological. This issue deserves closer attention, insofar as it reveals a profound and somewhat unexamined rift in current social theory. In sundering, on the one hand, the social from the individual, and on the other, the biological from the social, Durkheim’s sociology contributed to the establishment of two firebreaks that have been central to much twentieth-century political and social theory. For their supporters, the first firebreak guaranteed a space for free will within the constraints of society and structure, whereas the second provided a ready-made argument against any attempts to naturalize social differences, from biological racism to sociobiology. In recent decades, a number of social theorists, philosophers and anthropologists, while (and this is crucial) being wary of the same deterministic and essentialist pitfalls, have come to consider these firebreaks themselves as part of the problem, rather than the solution. The supposed freedom of the subject within structures of power was denounced by Michel Foucault, in a line of theorizing that led, amongst other traces, to the ‘post-humanist’ strand in current social theory and philosophy. The aim of these analyses was not to further a drab determinism, but, on the contrary, the pursuance of an anti-essentialist agenda. And yet, read from within the frames of a Durkheimian distinction between free subjects and constraining structures, Mucchielli’s assessment of Tarde’s theory would be just as true of Foucault’s work on power: ‘fundamentally a sort of global philosophy of the universe, which deduces the laws of human functioning from those of cosmic functioning (and, in an intermediary step, from the Vital). In this sense, it is even more abstract, systematic and deterministic than that of Durkheim’ (Mucchielli, 2000: 177). As for the biological and the social, some would argue that what David Schneider once wrote about the anthropology of kinship holds for the role of the social after Durkheim more generally: ‘The focus of the efforts for Durkheim, Rivers, and Radcliffe-Brown was to isolate social kinship as a legitimate subject of study, to distinguish it from its biological aspects, but not to disavow the biological component nor to throw the biology out […], but simply to set it aside’ (Schneider, 1984: 193). In other words, by setting biology aside from the social, some claim, we simply allow it to rebound upon the social with renewed force. A number of very different recent attempts, from all corners of sociology, anthropology and philosophy, to write beyond the nature/culture divide, and to engage with biosociality, have precisely been hacking away at this second Durkheimian firebreak – not of course in the name of some biological determinism, but very much against it. In other words, the firebreaks set up by Durkheim around social theory have been failing. Some would attempt to restore, patch up, refunction these firebreaks; others

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gladly go with the flow while retaining a critical eye for how these new mixings are made. Is human agency simply emptied out and replaced by causally determined forces which are themselves not under question, or is the very notion of action and transformation reshaped and remoulded? Are science and biology remaining stable and simply applied to the formerly ‘pure’ realm of society, to naturalize and enshrine its differences? Or is biology being socialized at the same time as society is biologized, in new theoretical and critically interdisciplinary agendas? Whether one deplores or applauds these recent challenges to the Durkheimian firebreaks, rereading Tarde today is crucial simply because of his insertion into this debate at its very inception, as these firebreaks were being set up. But where would Tarde himself have stood in this debate? What, in other words, did Tarde really say? I have detailed above Tarde’s complex position vis-à-vis the individual. His position on the precise articulation of biology and the social was somewhat more ambiguous, as Barry and Thrift point out (2007: 522n6). Some have seen in Tarde’s account of imitation a precursor of memetics (Marsden, 2000), drawing on passages such as the following: [A]ny social production having some marked characteristics, be it an industrial good, a verse, a formula, a political idea which has appeared somewhere in the corner of a brain, dreams like Alexander of conquering the world, tries to multiply itself by thousands and millions of copies in every place where there exist human beings and will never stop except if it is kept in check by some rival production as ambitious as itself. (Tarde, 1999b: 51)

 

But whereas current meme theory remains resolutely dualist, staking out a claim to explain those cultural and mental phenomena which are left over from the evolutionary explanation of the straightforwardly ‘biological’ (and, what is more, explaining them in essentially the same terms – see for instance Blackmore, 1999), Tarde was an explicit proponent of a thoroughly anti-cartesian monism in which ‘matter is spirit and nothing more’ (Tarde, 1999b: 12). Tarde used this assertion, not to negate material realities or scientific discoveries, as in what he terms a ‘naive idealism’, but to ground the re-spiritualization of the material in a close and at times boldly critical engagement with the most recent findings of astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology – and indeed, as we have seen, of Darwinian evolution itself, which by contrast provides the unquestioned ‘mechanism’ of current meme theory. Tarde, in other words, imagined a philosophical sociology that would inform and modify the other sciences – perhaps even direct them – not simply operate as a footnote to them (as in sociobiology or meme theory), or within its clearly demarcated reservation (as in Durkheimian sociology). And yet a different picture emerges from one of Tarde’s most explicit discussions of the links between the biological and the social, in the second half of his article ‘Les deux éléments de la sociologie’ (Tarde, 1898a). There, Tarde pointedly argued against social evolutionist accounts of humanity’s progressive shift

14 M. Candea from biological ties to more straightforwardly social ones (see Kuper, 2005), as well as Durkheim’s claim to a radical separation between the two ‘levels’ of analysis. Tarde counters that there is no reason to suppose social links supersede the ‘physiological’ links of ‘shared blood’ which unite ‘families’. Rather, he argues, these are merely added to them as another, sometimes cross-cutting strand of associations between individuals (Tarde, 1898a: 90–91). As societies increase in size and complexity, Tarde argues, we see not a shift from one kind of attachment (kinship and ‘blood’) to a different, more abstract one, but rather the concomitant extension, at different rates and through different transformations, of different kinds of attachments – belief, co-residence, shared activity, and ‘blood’ (albeit he notes, often ‘fictive’ rather than ‘real’). In support of this argument Tarde points to contemporary examples of nationalism, in which he takes a straightforwardly ‘primordialist’ position.13 And yet, this is the same theorist who, as we have seen, vehemently opposed essentialist accounts of national entities, and argued for the radical contingency of races and indeed biological species. In other words, any attempt to ‘place’ Tarde in terms of our present concerns raises difficult issues of post-hoc contextualization: was he, when the chips are down, a precursor of sociobiology, for whom the biological ultimately determined the social, as Mucchielli, for instance, suggests (2000: 177), or an early champion of a metaphysics of contingency, for whom biology could only proceed under the aegis of sociology? How should we reconcile his repeated critiques of teleology, with his own attempts at tracing the future developments of civilization? How does his explicit rejection of racism fit in with his guarded defence of eugenics (see Milet, 1970: 356–58)? It is to reconciling these and other seemingly incompatible aspects of Tarde’s work into a coherent ‘philosophy of history’ that Jean Milet’s book is principally devoted, and the reader occasionally gets the feeling that in rebuilding and completing Tarde’s theoretical house, Milet used quite a bit of his own mortar.14 This is where the aforementioned contrast between Tarde and Durkheim’s argumentative and expository style indeed becomes relevant. As Milet puts it:

 

At the heart of the disagreement [between Tarde and Durkheim], there was, first of all, […] a combat between two ‘methods’. Tarde is of the intuitive school. He ‘senses’ things, he guesses them; he uses his imagination as much as his reason. When he meets an obstacle, he tries to avoid it, to go around it; when he meets a contradiction, he attempts to transcend it; for him, as for his master Renan, ‘truth is in the nuances’. He knows that truth is a thing to be solicited, begged for, and that man will only ever receive it in crumbs and shreds. (Milet, 1970: 248) Tarde’s writing is sharply evocative, even mesmerizing, a very model of the generative multiplicity which his metaphysics postulate: on every reading, new ideas bubble up to the surface. By the same token, however, and unlike Durkheim, it constantly evades totalization and structured restatement. Tarde proceeds by additions and supplements, and always stops short of a total recension of his arguments

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which would subsume them and mark out once and for all what was central and what was mere flourish. As a result, any attempt to state, on a general level ‘what Tarde said’, or outline a Tardean ‘system’, must choose what to prioritize and what to residualize – and more violence is done, in the process, to the teeming matter of Tarde’s work than would be done had a similar process been part of the writing itself, as one sees, for instance, in Durkheim.15 One final example of this general difficulty should suffice. In L’Opposition universelle, Tarde writes the following: I gladly agree with Renouvier that the usual opposition between the subject and the object, the self and the not-self, is a dangerous speculative trap. By pitting a single being against all the others, as if it could counterbalance them all, it has contributed to the mirage of subjective idealism. But while the subject and the object are not opposed[1], objectifying and subjectifying constitute a real and fundamental opposition. These two operations, of which the former exteriorizes while the latter interiorizes, are as contrary in this respect as nutrition and generation. (Tarde, 1999a: 225) This passage strikes the contemporary reader as fantastically prescient. Here is indeed the thinker, of whom Latour wrote, that ‘on a few technical points of horrendous difficulty, Tarde possessed the solution we have been seeking in vain for so long’ (Latour, 2002: 118). No subject/ object distinction, but rather, opposed processes of subjectification and objectification: Tarde, in this passage, could be seen to prefigure not only Foucault’s work on subjectification, but also Deleuzian perspectivism, Isabelle Stengers’ reinvention of the subject-object distinction,16 and the Actor-Network Theory notion of ‘translation’ (Callon and Latour, 1981: 279). And yet the corresponding note slightly mars the picture:

 

1. We can say that they are vaguely opposed, at the beginning of mental life, in children and savages, who project themselves into every external object in a generalized and constant personification, which lies at the root of animism and fetishism. But the progress of thinking renders the object increasingly dissimilar to the subject. (Tarde, 1999a: 225) Here is the alternation of prescient and evidently nineteenth-century concerns described by Barry and Thrift. But the problem is not simply that, in associating the child and the savage, Tarde shares the language and assumptions ‘of his time’.17 More profoundly, the link between the passage and the note leaves us with a problem of contextualization. It seems that Tarde, in the note, is not being very … Tardean! While the main passage, in its reference to generation and nutrition, suggests a vision of objectification and subjectification as constantly repeated processes, the note in its reference to a ‘progress of thinking’ seems to suggest a predetermined sequence of increasing objectification and subjectification, which

16 M. Candea seems rather at odds with what Tarde writes elsewhere about the lack of teleology in evolution. Furthermore, having set up objectification and subjectification as processes in the main text, does he not see (or does he not care?) that his own presentation of children and savages must in itself perforce be seen as objectification, rather than description of objects? Ironing out these difficulties into a conclusion about ‘what Tarde is saying’ requires ignoring one part of this passage: one could present Tarde here as a prescient philosopher of alterity who in some details remained mired in the assumptions of his time. Alternatively, one could present him as a nineteenth-century evolutionist who occasionally struck a chord which resonates with current concerns. But either account is perforce a selection. By contrast this book does not aim for such a complete restoration of Tarde’s house. In fact, precisely in order to avoid the symmetrical pitfalls of a hagiographic or uncritical ‘revivalism’ on the one hand, of retrospective demonization on the other, this volume makes a virtue of that which others might portray as a vice: it is intentionally partial, fragmentary and creative. It makes no claim to ‘restituting the whole of [Tarde’s] thought’, and while it remains historically and critically aware, it also proposes a set of creative reinventions, extensions or continuations of Tardean method. Once we have eschewed the holistic project of saving or damning Tarde, of restoring his system or filing it away, we can begin to engage with the fragments of Tarde’s work when and insofar as they are useful: either as evidence of a specific moment in the history of social theory, or as productive starting points for new theoretical and methodological developments.

The chapters

 

Far from any mirage of completeness, then, or from any claim to the total revival of ‘Tarde the Man and his System’, the Tarde in this volume alternates between being more and less than one. More than one, insofar as the first part of this volume deals with a hybrid: not Tarde per se, but rather Tarde-versus-Durkheim. It is in the contrast between Durkheim and Tarde that some of the most productive sparks were generated, and revisiting this clash today is less a case of reinventing a new outcome, as of casting new light on both contestants. Steering a course between the canonical account of Durkheim’s victory over Tarde, and the over-enthusiasm of some neo-Tardean re-readings of the encounter, these chapters map productive disjunctures but also some unexpected convergences between the two sociologies. They also creatively take off from this contrast in new theoretical and methodological directions. Like Tarde himself, in other words, our starting point here is not the individual but that peculiar event, the interaction of two minds. Chapter 2, entitled ‘The Debate’, is an imaginative rerun of the historic debate that took place between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim at the École des hautes études sociales in 1903, assembled entirely from direct quotations from published works by Tarde and Durkheim, which provides a lively introduction to the main areas of disagreement between the two sociologists: the relationship between

Revisiting Tarde’s house

17

 

sociology and other sciences, the role of comparison, the nature of imitation, the relationship between parts and wholes, the role of contingency and rule in history and science and the moral import of sociology. The chapter is the collective work of Eduardo Viana Vargas, Bruno Latour, Bruno Karsenti, Frédérique Aït-Touati and Louise Salmon. In Chapter 3, Bruno Karsenti unpacks the notion of imitation as it is deployed in the sociologies of Durkheim and Tarde respectively, showing that this multiplex notion forms a ‘shadow zone in which their thinking communicates’. The following chapter, by Karen Sykes, creatively shifts this discussion through an ethnographic reflection on Tardean imitation as against Maussian exchange, grounded in the now classic anthropological topos of the Malanggan mortuary sculptures, where the ‘borrowing’ of form becomes a means of eliciting new images and relationships. In Chapter 5, David Toews confronts Tardean and Durkheimian social theory on the question of unsociability. Arguing that Tardean thought is not premised, as Durkheim’s is, on the assumption of an a priori, unconscious sociability of the subject, Toews examines the possibility that a Tardean sociology would have to reject conceiving unsociability as anti-social, lacking in, or repressive of sociability. In an anthropological development on the theme of the social, grounded in an ethnography of global pentecostalist movements, Joel Robbins in Chapter 6 puts (neo-)Tardean thought to the test of the anthropological topic in which Durkheim located the key to the social itself: ritual. Tim Jenkins, in Chapter 7, finds that while many of the differences between Tarde’s and Durkheim’s thinking are finessed away through time as each sociologist’s work develops in dialogue with the other’s, the question of comparison remains a stark splitting-point, and one with far-reaching implications. In Chapter 8, Alberto Corsín-Jiménez further unpacks the question of measurement, quantification and scale: by examining the role of (dis)proportion in Tardean and Durkheimian thought, alongside an ethnography of a management consultancy firm’s attempts to design a proportionate ‘knowledge environment’ for an oil company, he interrogates both sociological and managerial attempts to make knowledge and the social take a commensurable form. In Chapter 9, the final chapter of Part I, Penny Harvey and Soumhya Venkatesan take the Tarde–Durkheim contrast as a springboard for an examination of the power and limits of the relational constitution of entities. Focusing on two ethnographic examples of craft practice (the making and consecration of stone images as gods in a Tamil Hindu temple in South India, and the elaboration of appropriate substance from which to build a road through the Andean mountains and Amazonian forests of Peru), they invoke a Tardean move away from meaning and stability towards emergence and movement, and what Thrift (2007) has termed an ‘ethics of craftsmanship’ oriented towards open-ended futures and the realization of potential rather than proper (normative, established) form. Yet they also draw attention to the importance of disassociating, of ‘cutting the network’ as a means of imparting a contingent stability to the outcomes of the craftsman’s efforts. In the second part of the book, Tarde emerges as ‘less than one’, through fragments of Tardean method and theory reclaimed, reread and reconfigured partly for what

18 M. Candea

 

they can tell us about Tarde, but partly also for the light they can shed on current problems in sociology, anthropology and political economy. In Chapter 10, Bruno Latour kick-starts this exploration by reassembling Tardean method in light of the new digital terrains available to contemporary social science. Tarde, it emerges, was ‘one century ahead of his time because he had anticipated a quality of connection and traceability necessary for good statistics which was totally unavailable in 1900’ (Latour, this volume, p. 160). For Latour, the new traceability of the social retrospectively vindicates the scientific aspirations of Gabriel Tarde; he in turn reaches out over the century to provide a methodology that reveals the supposed qualitative/ quantitative rift within social science, as no more than an effect of poor data. In the following chapter, Emmanuel Didier further deploys Tarde’s very particular account of a dynamic statistics which lay at the heart of his sociology of movement, transformation and change. Andrew Barry (Chapter 12) also puts the emphasis on Tarde’s methodology, rather than on his metaphysics. He extends the discussion of Tardean statistics by showing Tarde’s debt to the experimental phonetics of the Abbé Rousselot, whose attention to infinitesimal variation became one of the models of Tarde’s experimental micro-sociology of events. As noted above, Barry warns against any assumption that this Tardean methodology implied a commitment to a micro-politics of radical heterogeneity – however, he notes that we can recover from a careful study of Tarde some crucial points concerning the interplay of social research and the political. Taking up a similar methodological trail, James Leach asks in Chapter 13 what might happen to a Tardean sociology of events in the specific context of anthropological knowledge practices, since these are centrally concerned with events with which the ethnographer can choose to engage (or from which s/he can attempt to disengage). Contrasting different anthropological approaches to ‘cargo cults’ in Papua New Guinea, Leach uses Tarde to ask how anthropologists ‘gather and make knowledge in the presence of others – not as representatives of another culture, but as people with interests as well’. Drawing a different lesson in anthropological method from a different part of Tarde’s corpus, Eduardo Vargas (Chapter 14) finds in Tarde’s social monadology the key to an approach to drug use which asks what and not why questions, questions which do not predetermine which answers are admissible. In Chapter 15, Georgina Born proposes an extension of Tardean analytics to history and anthropology, drawing upon Tarde’s interest in what she terms the ‘elementary structures of process’. Born reconsiders Tarde’s relational triad of imitation, opposition and invention, noting its productive collapsing of the distinction between the spatial and temporal dynamics of the social. Confronting Tarde’s social theory with ethnographic accounts of media and consultancy industries, she suggests that an extended and critically reformulated Tardean approach would provide a productive counterpoint to some of the recent recensions of vitalism in social theory. Finally, in Chapter 16, Nigel Thrift formalizes and builds upon Tarde’s interweaving of biological and social explanation, in which he sees an early stage in the crafting of what he terms a ‘political economy of propensity’. In her afterword, Marilyn Strathern proceeds to a deft balancing-out of the ‘traps’ set by Durkheim and Tarde, respectively, for contemporary social science: if the

Revisiting Tarde’s house

19

latter allows us to do away with the individual-society apparatus that has become the hallmark of the former’s sociological legacy, he in turn springs on us the trap of detail and the infinitesimal, as though things could be singular, particular, infinitesimal on their own. More than a balancing act, Strathern’s comment itself acts as a ferment, the productive surplus that emerges – as Tarde himself might have wished it – from the encounter of two different theoretical worlds. -§As noted above, then, this book is different in inspiration from the last two major attempts to revive Tardean sociology: unlike Milet or Clark, our aim is not here to outline Tarde’s system as a coherent self-contained thing; rather, it is to launch a discussion. The aim of the volume, in other words, is not to limit the possibilities of interpretation of Tarde’s work, but, on the contrary, to open and multiply them. In this Tardean spirit, as my parting shot, I will offer a series of traces, which each reader can follow in order to engage directly with Tarde’s work, navigate its hidden gems and its potential pitfalls, its coherences and contingencies. Unlike Milet or Clark, we have the advantage of the Internet (Tarde’s vindication?). Much of Tarde’s corpus is now freely available, in French, on the website of the University of Quebec (http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/tarde_gabriel/tarde_gabriel. html). An exhaustive bibliography was recently assembled by a doctoral student, Pierre-Camille Podvin, and is available online, alongside an extensive bibliography of works about Tarde (http://bibliographietarde.blogspot.com/search/label/ Accueil). And so, dear reader, read on!

Notes As Deleuze argues in his Foucault (Deleuze, 1986: 31, 119). Most evidently perhaps in Deleuze (1968) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980). See Latour (2002; 2005). Milet (1970: 11–12) notes that an early distinguished member of the family, the sixteenth-century canon Jean Tarde, appears without the particle. However, the family name appears in the records as De Tarde from the early seventeenth century onwards, until the telltale sign of nobility is dropped at the time of the French Revolution. Although Gabriel Tarde himself never used it, the particle was restored to the family by a state decree in 1885, and Gabriel Tarde’s son Guillaume assumed the noble version of the name. 5 Tarde is often remembered as a sociological critic of Lombroso’s biological determinism. This is broadly accurate, since he refuted, in a series of articles and later in his first book, La Criminalité comparée (1886), on the sociological relativity of the notion of crime, many of Lombroso’s theses about the ‘born criminal’, about evolutionary progress, degeneration and atavism, and argued for the key role of imitation and social communication in explaining the occurrence and spread of criminal behaviour. However, this ‘sociological versus biological’ contrast is arguably distorted by a retrospective reading of the debate which imagines sociology – in a Durkheimian vein – as the radically distinct from biology. As we shall see below, Tarde, unlike Durkheim, was in no sense arguing for the separation of biology and sociology, but rather for a rethinking of both terms of that contrast. His sociological critique of Lombroso does

 

1 2 3 4

20 M. Candea

6 7 8

9

 

10

not therefore imply a fundamental rejection of all the underlying premises of the Italian school’s ‘bio-criminology’ (for a recent re-evaluation of this debate, see Borlandi et al., 2000). And not only in his one work of science fiction, Fragment d’histoire future (Tarde, 1970). Later republished as ‘Les deux éléments de la sociologie’ (Tarde, 1898a). Personally, the two men remain, at least initially, in polite if not cordial relations. Indeed, rather amusingly, the data on the geographic occurrence of suicide which were central to Durkheim’s refutation of the imitative point of view were obtained by a student whom Durkheim had asked Tarde, as a personal favour, to allow access to the office of criminal statistics of which Tarde was then director (Fournier, 2007: 235). However, the next sentence in the passage reintroduces a distinction between individual substance and mere artificial assemblage which does not sit so neatly with this reading. Indeed, Tarde continues by stating that there are still other tendencies and instincts in each element which ‘come from its substrate (fonds), from itself, from its own fundamental substance, on which it can rely to resist the collective power of which it is a part. The latter is much larger, but far less deep, no more than an artificial being, composed of aspects and facades of beings’ (Tarde, 1999b: 39). Until recently, as Harvey and Venkatesan (this volume) point out, Tarde was almost entirely absent from anthropology, with the notable exception of the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (e.g. 2003). And yet elements of Tarde’s thought, as outlined above, seem to prefigure with an uncanny exactitude many central themes of what has recently been termed the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology (cf. Henare et al., 2006): an interest in radical alterity and generative multiplicity, a reformulation of entities as relations which challenges the society/individual dichotomy, a concern with rethinking the relationship between complexity and scale through fractality and holography, the reshuffling of divides between nature and culture, biology and society, etc. One could explain these echoes away as coincidental, or more pointedly put them down to a retrospective reinvention of a Strathernian or Viveirian Tarde (cf. Mucchielli, 2000). Alternatively, one could attempt to trace a forgotten or silent genealogy linking current anthropological theorising back to Tarde. The influence of Tarde, via Bergson and Deleuze on Viveiros De Castro is traceable and non-contentious, and Clark argues that Tarde’s account of diffusion influenced Boas (Clark, 1969: 36). But an obsessive Tardophile might seek to argue, based on correspondences and similarities, that Tarde ‘irradiated’ current anthropological theorising through Gregory Bateson (via James Mark Baldwin), or, via the mediation of Chicago sociology, through McKim Marriott, whose coinage of the term ‘dividual’ was accompanied by the profoundly Tardean-sounding claim that ‘What goes on between actors are the same connected processes of mixing and separation that go on within actors’ (1976: 109, quoted in Strathern, 1988: 349, note vii). However, rather than attempt to establish or exclude an authentic Tardean pedigree for current concerns, the anthropological contributors to this volume are rather more interested in Tarde’s work, either as a productively anachronistic source of new questions, methods and approaches (see for instance Born, Harvey and Venkatesan, Leach), or as an ethnographic terrain for an anthropology of social theory (Corsín-Jiménez). Tarde’s actual position on religion is in fact a matter of some debate. See note 14 below. Clark, for instance, casts the political opposition between Durkheim and Tarde as one between the official bourgeois ideology of state-sponsored Cartesianism, and the oddly combined anti-bourgeois forces of ‘the heirs of the traditional nobility, the rural peasantry, or the urban proletariat’, under the banner of ‘Spontaneity’ (Clark, 1969: 8). He argues for instance that ‘racial’ subdivision makes it difficult for the Austrian empire to produce a unified sense of nationality, whereas the ‘Polish people’ manifest a common purpose even when scattered into different states (Tarde, 1898a: 90–91). One example amongst others is Milet’s keenness to draw out from Tarde’s fragmentary

11 12

13 14

Revisiting Tarde’s house

21

and ambivalent writing on religion, a sense that Tarde lived and died a Christian. Milet (himself a priest and lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris) concludes that Tarde ‘was certainly closer to the Kingdom than he said, even than he thought’ (Milet, 1970: 190n99). 15 Therefore, it is not simply that, as Mucchielli argues of Tardean revivalists, ‘[o]ne can say anything about Tarde or make him say anything. One can put a stress on this and leave out that. One can suggest that Tarde wanted to do or say this or that even if he himself didn’t quite manage it’ (Mucchielli, 2000: 181). Rather, the nature of Tarde’s writing is such that, I would suggest, one must do this kind of selective rereading if – and this is an important if – one is intent on painting a general picture of Tarde’s theory. Indeed, this applies to Mucchielli himself, who arguably rather puts the accent on the deterministic aspects of Tarde’s ‘system’ at the expense of Tarde’s many explicit defenses of open-endedness and contingency. 16 ‘Once it is a question of science, all human statements must cease to be equivalent, and the putting to the test that must create a difference between them implies the creation of a reference they designate, which must be capable of making the distinction between science and fiction. Thus the distinction between subject and object, insofar as it expresses this relation of putting to the test, cannot be purely and simply eliminated. The question of knowing who must submit to the putting to the test, however, remains an open one’ (Stengers, 2000: ch. 8). As Stengers puts it, her reformulation ‘preserves the distinction between subject and object, but modifies its meaning: it is recognized not as a right, but as a vector of risk, an operation of “decentring”. It does not attribute to the subject the right to know an object, but to the object the power (to be constructed) to put the subject to the test’ (ibid.). 17 Even though this passage suggests by contrast the novelty and power of Durkheim’s ‘Elementary forms of religious life’ (Durkheim, 1995), in which simple evolutionist series and theories of animistic projection are convincingly debunked.

Bibliography

 

Baldwin, M.J. (1899) ‘Preface’. In Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology, ed. G. Tarde. The Macmillan Company, New York, p. 4. Barry, A. & Thrift, N. (2007) ‘Gabriel Tarde: imitation, invention and economy’. Economy and Society, 36(4), 509–25. Blackmore, S.J. (1999) The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press, Oxford [England] and New York. Borlandi, M., Mucchielli, L., Blanckaert, C. & Sibeud, E. (2000) ‘Gabriel Tarde et la criminologie au tournant du siècle [special issue]’. Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 3, 161–84. Boudon, R. (1971) La Crise de la sociologie. Questions d’epistémologie sociologique. Droz, Paris. Braude, L. (1970) ‘“Park and Burgess”: An appreciation’. American Journal of Sociology, 76(1), 1–10. Callon, M. & Latour, B. (1981) ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathan: how actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so’. In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro-sociologies, ed. K. D. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 277–303. Candea, M. (2008) ‘Fire and identity as matters of concern in Corsica’. Anthropological Theory, 8(2), 201–16. ——. (2010) ‘Anonymous introductions: identity and belonging in Corsica’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(1).

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Clark, T.N. (1969) ‘Introduction’. In On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers Edited and with an Introduction by Terry N. Clark, ed. G. Tarde. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1–72. Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London. Deleuze, G. (1968) Différence et répétition. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. ——. (1986) Foucault. Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980) Capitalisme et schizophrénie II: Mille plateaux. Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Durkheim, E. (1897) Le Suicide; étude de sociologie. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The Free Press, New York. Fournier, M. (2007) Emile Durkheim: 1858–1917. Fayard, Paris. Gould, S.J. (1989) Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W.W. Norton, New York. ——. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Henare, A., Holbraad, M. & Wastell, S. (eds) (2006) Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kuper, A. (2005) The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth. Routledge, London. Latour, B. (2002) ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’. In The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. P. Joyce. Routledge, London, pp. 117–32. ——. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Latour, B. & Lépinay, V.A. (2008) L’Économie, science des intérêts passionnés: Introduction à l’anthropologie économique de Gabriel Tarde. La Découverte, Paris. Marsden, P. (2000) ‘Forefather of memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation’. Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary models of information transmission, 4. Milet, J. (1970) Gabriel Tarde et la philosophie de l’histoire. Vrin, Paris. Mucchielli, L. (2000) ‘Tardomania? Réflexions sur les usages contemporains de Tarde’. Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 3, 161–84. Murray, S.O. & Mauss, M. (1989) ‘A 1934 interview with Marcel Mauss’. American Ethnologist, 16(1), 163–8. Park, R.E. & Burgess, E.W. (1921) Introduction to the Science of Sociology. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. Pinatel, J. (1963) ‘Criminologie’. In Traité de droit pénal et de Criminologie, vol. 3, ed. P. Bouzat & J. Pinatel. Dalloz, Paris. Schneider, D.M. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Stengers, I. (2000) The Invention of Modern Science. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. University of California Press, London. Tarde, G. (1880) ‘La croyance et le désir; la possibilité de leur mesure’. Revue philosophique, XII, 232–50, 401–18. Tarde, G. (1883) ‘L’archéologie et la statistique’. Revue philosophique, XVI, 363–84, 492–511.

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——. (1884a) ‘Darwinisme naturel et Darwinisme social’. Revue philosophique, XVII, 607–37. ——. (1884b) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une société?’. Revue philosophique, XVIII, 173–92, 489–510. ——. (1886) La Criminalité comparée. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1890a) La Philosophie pénale. G. Masson, Paris. ——. (1890b) Les Lois de l’imitation; étude sociologique. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1892) Etudes pénales et sociales. G. Masson, Paris. ——. (1893) La Logique sociale. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1893) ‘Les monades et la science sociale’. Revue internationale de sociologie, I, 157–231. ——. (1893) Les Transformations du droit: étude sociologique. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1895) ‘La Sociologie élémentaire’. Annales de l’institut international de Sociologie, 1, 209–42. ——. (1897) L’Opposition universelle; essai d’une théorie des contraires. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1898) ‘Les Deux éléments de la sociologie’. In Études de psychologie sociale, ed. G. Tarde. Giard et Brière, Paris, pp. 63–94. ——. (1898) Les Lois sociales: esquisse d’une sociologie. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1899) Les Transformations du pouvoir. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1899) Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Trans. Howard C. Warren. The Macmillan Company, New York. ——. (1901) L’Opinion et la foule. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1902) Psychologie économique. F. Alcan, Paris. ——. (1903) The Laws of I. Trans. Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons. H. Holt and Company, New York. ——. (1909) Tarde, Introduction et pages choisies par ses fils, suivies de poésies inédites de Tarde. Louis-Michaud, Paris. ——. (1969) On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers Edited and with an Introduction by Terry N. Clark. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ——. (1970) ‘Fragment d’histoire future’. Revue française de sociologie, 11(4), 467–87. ——. (1999) L’Opposition universelle; essai d’une théorie des contraires. Le Plessis – Robinson, Paris. ——. (1999) Monadologie et Sociologie. Synthélabo, Le Plessis. ——. (2000) Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Trans. Howard C. Warren. Batoche Books, Kitchener. Thrift, N.J. (2007) Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY. Toews, D. (2003) ‘The new Tarde: sociology after the end of the social’. Theory, Culture and Society, 20(5), 81–98. Toscano, A. (2007) ‘Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde’. Economy and Society, 36, 597–613. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2003) ‘And’. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 7.

 

Part I

‘The distance that lay between’

 

The Tarde–Durkheim debate reconsidered

 

2

The debate1 Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim Script by Eduardo Viana Vargas, Bruno Latour, Bruno Karsenti, Frédérique Aït-Touati and Louise Salmon Translated by Amaleena Damlé and Matei Candea

Do you recall the discussion between Durkheim and my father, at the École des hautes études sociales? Before they had even said a word, one sensed by their faces, their looks, their gestures, the distance that lay between these two men. One knew that such a discussion was sheer madness. (De Tarde 1980: 20)

Introductory notes

 

A momentous debate concerning the nature of sociology and its relation to other sciences took place between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim at the École des hautes études sociales in 1903. Unfortunately the only available record of the event is a brief overview which English readers may find in Terry Clark’s 1969 edited volume On Communication and Social Influence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). The present recension of the debate, therefore, is based on a script consisting of quotations from the works of Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim, arranged to form a dialogue. All text, save that in square brackets, consists of quotations from published works by Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde. This is the short version acted out, in French, by Bruno Latour (Gabriel Tarde), Bruno Karsenti (Emile Durkheim), and Simon Schaffer (The Dean), under the direction of Frédérique Aït-Touati, on March 14th, 2008, at McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK, as part of the conference Tarde/Durkheim: trajectories of the social. A podcast video of it is available at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/ events/47/.

The Dean, M. Alfred Croiset [Ladies and Gentlemen, On behalf of the Directors, Emile Boutroux and Emile Duclaux, and the Secretary General, Dick May, I am delighted to welcome you to the École des hautes études sociales, at our premises of 16 rue de la Sorbonne.

28 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim

Durkheim

 

Founded exactly three years ago, in November 1900, as an institute for the teaching of social sciences, the École des hautes études sociales aims to study the highly complex ensemble of questions that are most markedly and directly social. Not being in the least hostile to theory, it is nonetheless primarily concerned with the concrete, and with an engagement with the issues of our time. Last July, the 10th International Sociology Congress was dedicated to the ‘Relations between psychology and sociology’. Following on from this theme, we have chosen to dedicate a series of conferences to the ‘Relations between sociology and other social sciences and auxiliary disciplines’ in the compass of the sociology course at the Ecole Sociale for the academic year 1903–4. A fledgling discipline, sociology has a definite impact on the apprehension of current social questions. Two eminent colleagues will speak for this discipline today. They will define it and demonstrate its specificity, exposing the methods that they deem pertinent to this discipline within the context of a contradictory discussion. It is, then, as President of the Board of Directors and President of the Teaching Committee at the Ecole de Morale et de Pédagogie, that I have the honour to introduce: To my right, Mr Gabriel Tarde, Professor at the Collège de France, Chair of Modern Philosophy, a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques since 1901, but also a board member of our Ecole, and member of the Teaching Committee at the Ecole de Morale et de Pédagogie. He is the author of the celebrated Laws of Imitation and has recently published a work entitled Economic Psychology. To my left, Mr Emile Durkheim, Deputy Chair of Educational Science at the Faculté des Lettres of the Université de Paris since 1902, he has published the highly acclaimed Rules of Sociological Method and is the founder of Année sociologique, the journal that reviews the year’s international sociological production. Gentlemen, I yield the floor to you, beginning with the younger. Mr Durkheim, let us begin with a definition of your conception of sociology in relation to the other sciences.]

Sociology has recently become fashionable. The word, which was little known and almost disparaged ten years ago, has entered into everyday use. Increasing numbers discover a calling for it, and the general public seems well disposed towards the new science. Much is expected of it. And yet, we must admit that the results it has yielded so far are rather less than one might expect given the wealth of publications, and the interest with which they are received. […] This is because, in most cases, sociology is not asking a specific question. It has not yet gone beyond the age of philosophical constructions and syntheses. Instead of taking up the task of casting light on a restricted portion of the social field, it prefers a dazzling generality where every question is reviewed, and none is specifically addressed. This method may indeed amuse the public’s curiosity by giving, as they say, illuminations on all sorts of subjects, but it can hardly

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produce anything objective. […] A newborn science is entitled to err and fumble, as long as it is aware of its errors and fumblings in such a way as to prevent their recurrence. Sociology should not therefore renounce any of its ambitions; but on the other hand, if it wishes to live up to the hopes which have been built up around it, it must strive to become more than an eccentric kind of philosophical literature. […] The sociologist, instead of basking in the glow of philosophical meditations about social things, should take as the object of his research a clearly delimited group of facts, which one can, as it were, point to, of which one can say clearly where they begin and where they end, and to these he should firmly hold on! Let him carefully interrogate the auxiliary disciplines – history, ethnography, statistics – without which sociology is impotent! […] If he proceeds in this way, even though his factual inventories may be incomplete and his formulas too narrow, he will have accomplished a useful task which the future can continue. (1897a)

The Dean [Mr Tarde, it is now your turn to clarify the object of sociology in relation to other sciences.]

Tarde

 

It is natural for an emerging science to depend upon those sciences that are already constituted, sociology for example upon biology. It is also natural for a developing science to seek to fly the nest and attempt to establish its own separate domain. The burgeoning field of sociology is precisely at this juncture, it seeks to constitute itself by itself and for itself. This is a kind of egoism, a scientific individualism, useful to a certain extent as is any other egoism, be it animal or human, but harmful to the individual himself beyond a certain measure. […] The sterility of such pretensions is well known; they misrecognize the solidarity of the various sciences and consequently the profound unity of universal reality. In the case of sociology too, we should beware the expenditure of such vain efforts; and I believe I perceive here and there the symptoms of such a distraction, which could be disastrous. Let us try to prevent it: let us seek out, with all the necessary precision, but without claiming an absolute autonomy for our dear science, the boundaries of the field that is properly hers to clear and cultivate. […] What is or rather what are social facts, the elementary social acts, and what is their distinctive character? […] The elementary social fact is the communication or the modification of a state of consciousness by the action of one human being upon another. […] Not everything that members of a society do is sociological. […] To breathe, digest, blink one’s eyes, move one’s legs automatically, look absently at the scenery or cry out inadvertently, there is nothing social about such acts. […] But to talk to someone, pray to an idol, weave a piece of clothing, cut down a tree, stab an enemy, sculpt a piece of stone, those are social acts, for it is only the social man who would act in this way; without the example of the other men he has voluntarily or involuntarily copied since the cradle, he would not act thus. The common characteristic of social acts,

30 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim indeed, is to be imitative. […] Here is, then, a character that is clear-cut and what is more, objective. […] And I am amazed to have been reproached for focusing, in this definition, on the externally graspable fact without any regard to its internal source, and this reproach addressed to me – by whom? By [my distinguished colleague] Mr Durkheim, who himself professes precisely the necessity of founding sociology upon purely objective considerations and of exorcizing this science, so to speak, by chasing psychology out of it – psychology which, it is claimed, is not its soul as has been believed until now by all its founders, from Auguste Comte to Spencer, but on the contrary its evil genius. (1895b: 63–6)

The Dean [I believe we have the disagreement clearly articulated: Mr Durkheim would you like to elaborate on your thoughts?]

Durkheim Mr Tarde claims that sociology will arrive at this or that result; but we cannot say what the elementary social act is in our current state of knowledge. There are too many things we do not know and the construction of the elementary social fact can only be arbitrary under these conditions. (1903: 164)

Tarde It is not necessary for sciences to be definitively constituted in order to formulate laws. Research must proceed according to a guiding idea. And, in point of fact, the social sciences have not owed their progress to certain rules of objective method; they have achieved it by tending towards […] the social microscopy that is intermental psychology. (Durkheim 1903: 164)

 

Durkheim Whatever the value of this intermental psychology, it is unacceptable for it to exercise a sort of guiding action on the specific disciplines of which it should in fact be the product. (1903: 164) A purely psychological explanation of social facts cannot […] fail to miss completely all that is specific, i.e. social, about them. (1894: 131) [T]here is between psychology and sociology the same break in continuity as there is between biology and the physical and chemical sciences. Consequently, every time a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may rest assured that the explanation is false. (1894: 129)

?????

Tarde And yet, for all his objections and unbeknownst to himself, the importance of repetition – [that is to say] of imitation once again – impinges upon [Mr Durkheim]. In

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order to prove the radical separation, the absolute duality in nature that he claims to establish between the collective fact and the individual facts which, in my view, constitute it, but, according to him, refract it from the outside (we know not how), he writes [I quote] “Some of these ways of acting and thinking acquire, as a result of repetition, a sort of consistency that precipitates them, so to speak, and isolates them from the particular events in which they are one day embodied.” […] And the proof of this is – listen to this – that collective habit, or custom, [I quote once again] “expresses itself once and for all in a formula which is repeated from person to person, which is transmitted by education, which becomes fixed through writing” [end of quotation]. Without the preoccupation that blinds him, [my opponent] would see the obvious, namely that he has just involuntarily provided fresh proof of the eminently social or rather socializing character of imitative repetition. […] Mr Durkheim seems to gravitate towards some sort of theory of emanation. For him, I repeat, the individual facts that we call social are not the elements of a social fact, they are only the manifestation of it. As for the social fact, it is itself the superior model, the Platonic Idea, the model … and thus the idea of imitation in social matters, imposes itself even on its greatest adversaries. But let’s move on … (1895b: 67–9)

Durkheim

 

Terms […] must be taken in a strict sense. Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, albeit of another sort; they too affect the individual from without, albeit through other channels. The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less than that of cosmic forces, is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way, namely by the uniformity of effects. […] Since, therefore, moral acts […] are reproduced with [great] uniformity […], we must likewise admit that they depend on forces external to individuals. Only, since these forces must be of a moral order and since, except for individual man, there is no other moral being in the world but society, they must be social. But whatever we choose to call them, the important thing is to recognize their reality and conceive of them as a totality of forces which cause us to act from without, like the physico-chemical forces to which we react. So truly are they things sui generis and not mere verbal entities that they may be measured, their relative sizes compared, as is done with the intensity of electric currents or luminous foci. […] Of course, this offends common sense. But science has encountered incredulity whenever it has revealed to men the existence of a previously unknown force. Since the system of accepted ideas must be modified to make room for the new order of things and to establish new concepts, men’s minds resist through mere laziness. Yet we have to be clear. If there is such a thing as sociology, it can only be the study of a world hitherto unknown, different from those explored by the other sciences. This world is nothing if not a system of realities. (1897b: 309–10)

32 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim

Tarde At first glance, one cannot make sense of this; but once initiated into the doctrine of the author, here is what it means: it is not the more or less of generalization, of imitative propagation of a fact, which constitutes its more or less social character; it is the more or less of coercivity. Indeed, according to [my opponent], for by this point we have merely uncovered the half of his thought, the definition of the social fact is double. One of its characters, as we know, is [again I quote,] that it “exists independently of its individual expressions”. But there is another character, no less important, which is to be coercive (1895b: 70).

The Dean [You then both clearly disagree on the question of knowing how appropriate it is to autonomize the specific facts that sociology is concerned with but also on the question of their exteriority and, in sum, on the strength with which this world imposes upon us.]

Durkheim

 

We must delineate, in a precise fashion, the exact field of sociology. It embraces one single, well-defined group of phenomena. A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals. The presence of this power is in turn recognizable because of the existence of some pre-determined sanction, or through the resistance that the fact opposes to any individual action that may threaten it. However, [I grant you that] it can also be defined by ascertaining how widespread it is within the group, provided that, as noted above, one is careful to add a second essential characteristic; this is, that it exists independently of the particular forms that it may assume in the process of spreading itself within the group. […] [M]oreover, this second definition is simply another formulation of the first one: if a mode of behaviour existing outside of the consciousnesses of individuals becomes general, it can only do so by exerting pressure upon them. (1894: 56–7) That is what social phenomena are when stripped of all extraneous elements. As regards their private manifestations, these do indeed have something social about them since in part they reproduce the collective model. But to a large extent each one depends also upon the psychical and organic constitution of the individual, and on the particular circumstances in which he is placed. Therefore they are not phenomena which are in the strict sense sociological. They depend on both domains at the same time, and one could [if you so wish,] call them socio-psychical (1894: 55–6).

Tarde By this definition, nothing would be more social than the relationship established between victors and vanquished through the invasion of a stronghold or the fall

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into slavery of a conquered nation; nor would anything be less social than the spontaneous conversion of a whole population to a new religion or a new political faith preached by enthusiastic apostles! The mistake here is so noticeable to my mind that one is forced to wonder how it could have been born and taken root in such a powerful intelligence. [Mr Durkheim] tells us: […] given that the social fact is essentially external to the individual, “it cannot infiltrate the individual without imposing itself”. I fail to see the validity of this inference. Food is also external to us before being absorbed. Is that to say that swallowing and assimilation are the constraints exercised by food upon the cell that appropriates it? That is not even true of the birds we force-feed in our barnyards, which certainly prefer to be force-fed than to die of hunger. (1895b: 71)

Durkheim [Mr Tarde’s] proposition is purely arbitrary. [He] may of course state that in his personal opinion nothing real exists in society but what comes from the individual, but proofs supporting this statement are lacking and discussion is therefore impossible. It would be only too easy to oppose to this the contrary feeling of a great many persons, who conceive of society not as the form spontaneously assumed by individual nature as it blooms outwards, but as an antagonistic force restricting individual natures and resisted by them! (1897b: 311)

Tarde

 

There follows, according to [you], that it is not permissible to describe as social those individual acts where the social fact manifests itself, for example, the words of an orator (a manifestation of language), or the genuflections of a devotee (a manifestation of religion). No, as each of these acts depends not only on the nature of the social fact, but furthermore on the mental and vital constitution of the agent and the physical environment, these acts are types of hybrids, socio-psychical or socio-physical facts, with which it is important no longer to tarnish the scientific purity of the new sociology. (1895b: 69–70)

Durkheim Undoubtedly, this state of dissociation [between the social and the individual] does not always present itself with equal distinctiveness. It is sufficient for dissociation to exist unquestionably in […] numerous important instances […], for us to prove that the social fact exists separately from its individual effects. Moreover, even when the dissociation is not immediately observable, it can often be made so with the help of certain methodological devices. Indeed it is essential to embark on such procedures if one wishes to refine out the social fact from any amalgam and so observe it in its pure state. Thus certain currents of opinion, whose intensity varies according to the time and country in which they occur, impel us, for example, towards marriage or suicide, towards higher or lower birth-rates, etc. Such

34 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim currents are plainly social facts. At first sight, they seem inseparable from the forms they assume in individual cases. But statistics afford us a means of isolating them. (1894: 55)

Tarde [Oh!], if […] one depends upon statistics as an essentially ‘objective’ source of information, one is deluding oneself. The oracles of this sibyl are often ambiguous and in need of interpretation. In truth, official statistics function as yet too imperfectly and have functioned for too short a time to bring any conclusive factors to the debate that concerns us. (1895a: 154) [I know this all the better since it is I, Mr Durkheim, who provided you, at your request, with the statistics of the office I led and which have contributed to your opus on suicide. …].

Durkheim [Social facts] are […] not inaccurately represented by rates of births, marriages and suicides, that is, by the result obtained after dividing the average annual total of births, marriages and voluntary homicides by the number of persons of an age to marry, produce children, or commit suicide. Since each one of these statistics includes without distinction all individual cases, the individual circumstances which may have played some part in producing the phenomenon cancel each other out and consequently do not contribute to determining the nature of the phenomenon. What it expresses is a certain state of the collective mind. (1894: 55)

Tarde

 

This amounts to recognizing, in terms of social links, only the relation of master to subject, of teacher to student, without any regard to the free relations between equals. And it is to purposefully ignore the obvious: that, in schools themselves, the education that children give one another freely by imitating each other, […] brings them much that is more important than that which they receive and submit to by force. Such an error can only be explained by linking it to this other one, that a social fact, qua social, exists outside all its individual manifestations. Unfortunately, by thus objectifying and pushing to the limit the distinction, or rather the absolutely subjective separation, of the collective phenomenon and the particular acts of which it is composed, Mr Durkheim casts us back into plain scholasticism. Sociology does not mean ontology. I own that I have great difficulty in understanding how it could be that, “the individuals subtracted, Society remains”. […] Are we going to return to the realism of the Middle Ages? I wonder what advantage one gains, under the pretext of refining sociology, by emptying it of all its psychological and living content. One seems to be searching for a social principle where psychology does not enter at all, created expressly for the science one is fabricating, and which seems to me even more chimerical than the former vital principle. (1895c: 61–2)

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The Dean [We have, then, two particularly clear-cut disagreements on the autonomy of sociology, on its power of coercion, on the importance of imitation, and since we are speaking of realism, it seems to me we are reaching the great question of the relationship between the parts and the whole.]

Durkheim Because society is only composed of individuals, it appears to common sense that social life can have no other substratum than individual consciousness; otherwise it appears to be up in the air, floating in empty space. Yet, what is so easily deemed inadmissible with regard to social facts, is commonly admitted for other reigns of nature. Every time elements, whatever they are, combine together and release, by the very fact of their combination, new phenomena, it must be understood that these phenomena are situated, not in the elements, but in the whole formed by their union. The living cell contains nothing other than mineral particles, just as society contains nothing other than individuals; and yet, it is evidently impossible for the phenomena characteristic of life to reside in atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. […] Life is in the whole, not in the parts. […] Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as has been conceded, this synthesis sui generis that constitutes every society releases new phenomena, different to those that occur in solitary consciousnesses, it must be admitted that the these specific facts reside in the very society that produces them, and not in its parts, that is to say in its members. (1901: xvi)

Tarde

 

[Yes, I agree:] When we consider one of the greater social phenomena, such as a grammar, a code, or a theology, [it is true that] the individual mind appears so trivial a thing beside these monumental works that the idea of regarding it as the sole artisan concerned in the erection of these enormous cathedrals seems to some sociologists quite absurd; and one may [indeed] be readily excused if, without perceiving that one thereby abandons all attempt at explanation, one is drawn into saying that these works are eminently impersonal; there is but a step from this position to that of my illustrious opponent, [you,] Mr Durkheim, who [insists] that they are not functions of the individual, but his factors, and that they have an existence independent of human personality, and rule man with despotic might, by the oppressive shadow which they cast over him. But how have these social realities come into being? (I say realities, for, although I oppose the idea of a social organism, I am far from challenging the concept of certain social realities, concerning which some understanding must be reached.) I see clearly that, once formed, they impose themselves upon the individual, sometimes, though rarely, with constraint, oftener by persuasion or suggestion or the curious pleasure that we experience, from childhood up, in saturating ourselves with the examples of

36 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim our myriad surrounding models, as the babe in imbibing its mother’s milk. This I see clearly enough; but how were these wonderful monuments constructed, and by whom, if not by men and through human efforts? (1898: 124–5)

Durkheim It is due to the thoroughly engrained habit of applying to sociological matters the forms of philosophical thought that [our] preliminary definition has often been seen as a sort of philosophy of the social fact. It has been said that we explained social phenomena through constraint, just as, [you,] Mr Tarde, explain them through imitation. We had no such ambition and it didn’t even cross our mind that this might have been attributed to us, it being so contrary to all method. What we were proposing was not to anticipate the conclusions of science by means of a philosophical view, but simply to indicate by which external signs it is possible to recognize the facts that should be dealt with, in order that the scientist may find them where they are and not confuse them with others. The aim was to delimit the field of enquiry as much as possible, not to flounder about in some exhaustive intuition. Thus we very willingly accept the reproach that this definition does not express all the characters of the social fact, and consequently, that it is not the only one possible. There is, indeed, nothing inconceivable about the social fact being characterized in many different ways; for there is no reason that it should only have one distinctive property. All that matters is choosing the property which seems most appropriate for one’s purpose. It is indeed quite possible to employ several criteria concurrently, according to the circumstances. And we ourselves have felt this to be occasionally necessary in sociology; for there are cases where the character of constraint is not easily recognizable. All that is required, since we are concerned with an initial definition, is that the characteristics employed are immediately discernable and can be recognized before research. Other definitions have sometimes been opposed to ours, but it is precisely this condition which they do not fulfil. (1901: xx)

 

Tarde Unfortunately this hypothesis is entirely at odds with experience [l’observation]. Here in sociology we have, a rare privilege, intimate knowledge both of the element, which is our individual consciousness, and of the compound, which is the sum [assemblée] of consciousnesses; here, no one can make us mistake words for things. And what we clearly see in this case, is that if the individual is subtracted nothing remains of the social, and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in society, which does not exist, in a state of division and continual repetition, in living beings, or that did not exist in the dead individuals who came before them. […] [Besides,] what is there at the very heart of the chemical molecule, of the living cell? We do not know. How, then, not knowing this, can we state that, when these mysterious beings encounter each other in some way, itself unknown, and make new phenomena appear before our eyes, an organism, a brain, a consciousness, there has been, at each step taken on this mystical ladder, a sudden apparition, a

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creation ex nihilo of something that previously did not exist, even as a germ? Is it not likely that, if we knew these cells intimately, these molecules, these atoms, these unknown elements of the great problem, so often taken as givens, we would find it very simple to exclude the phenomena which seem to be created by their combination, these phenomena which now amaze us? Notice the enormous assumption implied by the current notions that Mr Durkheim explicitly relies on to justify his chimerical conception; this assumption is that the mere relation between several beings can become itself a new being, often superior to the others. It is strange [it is strange!] to see minds that pride themselves on being above all positive, methodical, minds that hound and harry even the shadow of mysticism, being attached to such a fantastical notion. (1895b: 75–6)

Durkheim A thought which is to be found in the consciousness of each individual and a movement which is repeated by all individuals are not for this reason social facts. These are so far from being constituted by repetition that they exist outwith their individual incarnations. What constitutes a social fact is a belief, tendency or practice of the group taken collectively, which is something else entirely than the form it may assume when it is refracted through individuals. (1894: 54)

Tarde

 

How could it be refracted before existing, and how could it exist, let us speak intelligibly, outside of all individuals? The truth is that a social thing, whatever it might be […] devolves and passes on, not from the social group collectively to the individual, but rather from one individual […] to another individual, and that, in the passage of one mind into another mind, it is refracted. The sum of these refractions, from the initial impulse of an inventor, a discoverer, an innovator or modifier, whoever it might be, unknown or illustrious, is the entire reality of a social thing at a given moment; a reality which is constantly changing, just like any other reality, through imperceptible nuances; this does not prevent a collectivity from emerging out of these individual varieties, an almost unchanging [constante] collectivity, which immediately strikes the eye and gives rise to Mr Durkheim’s ontological illusion. For it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a veritable scholastic ontology that the learned writer is attempting to insert into sociology, in place of the psychology he battles with. (1895b: 66–7)

Durkheim My proposition could only be opposed by agreeing that a whole is qualitatively identical with the sum of its parts, that an effect is qualitatively reducible to the sum of its productive causes; which amounts to denying all change or to making it inexplicable. Someone has, however, gone so far as to uphold this extreme thesis, but only two truly extraordinary reasons have been found for its defence.

38 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim First, it has been said that [here I am quoting you, my distinguished colleague] “in sociology we have, a rare privilege, intimate knowledge both of the element, which is our individual consciousness, and of the compound, which is the sum of consciousnesses”; secondly, that through this double introspection [and you have just reiterated this] “we clearly ascertain that if the individual is subtracted nothing remains of the social”. (1897b: 311)

The Dean [I believe we have now understood what separates you and it seems useless to go any further down this track: you will not reach an agreement. But it seems to me that Mr Durkheim should respond to this serious accusation of ‘mysticism’. The word seems rather strong, does it not? Might this be due to the manner in which you each understand the role of contingency?]

Durkheim For Mr Tarde […] all social facts are the production of individual inventions, propagated by imitation. Any belief, and any practice, would have at its origin an original idea, born of an individual brain. Every day, millions of inventions of this nature would occur. But while most would perish, a few would succeed; they are adopted by other members of society, be it because they seem useful to them, or because their author is invested with a singular authority transmitted to everything he produces. Once generalized, the invention ceases to be an individual phenomenon to become a collective phenomenon. – Well, there is no science of inventions, such as Mr Tarde conceives them; for they are only possible thanks to inventors, and the inventor, the genius, is “the ultimate accident”, a pure product of chance. (1900: 131)

Tarde

 

[Conversely] Mr Durkheim spares us such terrible tableaux. With him, no wars, no massacres, no brutal invasions. Reading him, it seems that the river of progress has flowed smoothly over a mossy bed undisturbed by froth or somersaults. […] Evidently, he inclines towards a Neptunian, rather than a Vulcanian, view of history: everywhere he sees sedimentary formations, nowhere igneous upheavals. He leaves no place for the accidental, the irrational, this grimacing face at the heart of things, not even for the accident of genius. (1893: 187)

Durkheim Certainly, once a genius is postulated, then one can very well look for the causes that favour the mental connections in him, whence new ideas are produced, and here is probably what Mr Tarde call the laws of invention. But the essential factor in any innovation is the genius himself, it is his creative nature, and this is the product of entirely fortuitous causes. Furthermore, since the mysterious source of

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the “social river” is in him, accident is thus placed at the root of social phenomena. There is no absolute necessity to this belief or that institution appearing at this or that historical moment, in this or that social setting. According to whether chance allows the innovator to be born sooner or later, the same idea might take centuries to sprout or might bloom straight away. Therefore there is an entire category of inventions which might follow each other in whatever sequence: they are those that don’t contradict one another, but are, on the contrary, helpful to each another. […] Thus, the notion of law, which Comte had finally [and laboriously!] succeeded in introducing into the sphere of social phenomena, a notion that his successors strove to clarify and to consolidate, is here obscured, veiled[, trampled underfoot]. Whim and caprice, once they are placed in the heart of things, are thereby permitted to seep into thought also. (1900: 132)

Tarde

 

[I quote you once more:] “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought amongst the antecedent social facts and not amongst individual states of consciousness.” Let us apply this: the determining cause of our railway networks should be sought neither in the states of consciousness of Papin, Watt, Stephenson and others, nor in the logical series of conceptions and discoveries which have illuminated [qui ont lui à] these great minds, but rather in the road networks and mailcoach services of yesteryear. […] There is a fetish, a deus ex machina, that the new sociologists make use of, like an Open Sesame, every time they are embarrassed, and it is time to point out this abuse which is becoming truly worrying. This explanatory talisman is the milieu. [Ah!] Reach for that word – what more needs to be said? The milieu is the multi-purpose formula whose illusory profundity serves to disguise the emptiness of the idea. Thus, they have not hesitated to tell us, for example, that the origin of all social evolution should be sought exclusively in the properties “of the internal social milieu”. […] As for this phantom-milieu, this ghost we delight in summoning up, to which we lend all sorts of marvellous virtues, so that we are exempt from recognizing the existence of the true and truly beneficial geniuses by whom we live, in whom we move, without whom we would be nothing, let us eliminate it from our science as soon as possible. The milieu is a nebula which, upon closer inspection, resolves into different stars, of very unequal sizes. (1895b: 78–9)

The Dean [But then, if I understand you both correctly, you disagree not only on the role of innovation and genius in history, but also on the very question of what a science should be?]

Durkheim Tarde’s theory appears to be the very negation of science. […] It places, indeed, the irrational and the miraculous at the foundation of life and, consequently, of social

40 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim science. If we adopt Tarde’s point of view, we see that social facts are the result, more often than not, of simply mechanical causes, unintelligible and foreign to any finality since there is nothing more blind than imitation. (1895b: 85–7) Here, indeterminacy is made into a principle. Consequently, this is no longer science. It is not even the methodical philosophy that Comte had tried to institute; it is a very particular mode of speculation, somewhere in between philosophy and literature, in which a few very general theoretical ideas are trailed around through all possible problems. (Durkheim and Fauconnet 1903: 479)

Tarde This is not an appeal to mystery, but rather to the profound and under-appreciated ability to affirm a beyond to the horizon of facts and not to misjudge, at least, what one cannot know. If to affirm the unknown is to use our ignorance, to deny the unknown is to be ignorant twice over. (1910: 41) [I will say, however, that] Mr Durkheim’s principal idea […] rests on a pure conception of his mind that he has wrongly taken for a suggestion of facts. It only presents, in any case, a highly partial and relative truth, very insufficient as a single foundation or principle of a sociological theory. […] One may well, then, be amazed at the confidence it inspires in Mr Durkheim and at the virtue he attributes to it in leading us necessarily to a higher or more human morality and justice. (1893: 189)

Durkheim

 

As Mr Tarde says […], the origin of our disagreement is elsewhere. It stems above all from the fact that I believe in science whereas Mr Tarde does not. For how can one believe in science who reduces it to an intellectual game, capable at best of informing us about what is possible and impossible, but incapable of serving in the positive regulation of behaviour? If it has no other practical use, it is not worth the effort. And if one hopes in this way to disarm one’s recent adversaries, one is strangely mistaken; in reality, one returns their weapons to them. Undoubtedly, science by this definition would no longer be able to disappoint the expectations of men; but only because men would no longer expect very much from it. It will no longer be exposed to accusations of bankruptcy; but only because it will have been declared minor and incapable in perpetuity. I cannot see what either it or we stand to gain by this. For what is thus placed above reason is sensation, instinct, passion, all the base and obscure parts of ourselves. Let us indeed make use of these when we cannot do otherwise. But when one sees in them something other than a stopgap that little by little must surrender its place to science, when one attributes to these things a pre-eminence of some kind, then, although one may not be openly speaking of the revelations of faith, one is a more or less consequent theoretical mystic. And mysticism is the reign of anarchy in the practical sphere, because it is the reign of fantasy in the intellectual sphere. (1895a: 523)

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41

Tarde It is by asking of science something beyond what it can give, it is by giving it rights that exceed its already quite vast range, that one has given rise to belief in its alleged failure. Science has never failed to keep her true promises, but a great many counterfeit bills marked with her counterfeit signature have been circulated in her name, that she now finds impossible to redeem. It is pointless to add to their number. (1895a: 162)

Durkheim Faced with the results which the comparative history of institutions has already produced, there can no longer be any question of purely and simply denying the possibility of a scientific study of societies; furthermore, Mr Tarde himself means to create a sociology. Only, he conceives it in such a manner that it ceases to be a true science, in order to become a very particular form of speculation where imagination plays the dominant role, where thought is not considered to have a duty to the regular obligations of proof or to the ascertaining of facts. (1900: 130–31)

Tarde

 

Mr Durkheim believes he is honouring science by making it a sovereign over the will, by giving it the power not only to point out the most pertinent means by which the will may achieve its overarching goal, but even to dictate the direction of this North Star of conduct. (1895a: 161–2) If I had to formulate a maxim on this subject, it would address the moral as well as the intellectual conditions which the discovery of truth places upon us. A little modesty and simplicity behoves an adolescent science, just like a young man on the cusp of life; it should refrain from a doctrinal tone and from scholarly jargon. One should approach it with a benevolent and informal cast of mind, and also, and above all, with a vibrant and joyful love of the subject. […] The first requirement for being a sociologist is to love social life, to sympathize with men of every race and every country brought together around one hearth, to research with curiosity, to discover with delight what tender devotions may be hidden in the hut of the reputedly most ferocious savage, sometimes even in the lair of the criminal; finally, never to believe readily in the stupidity, in the absolute viciousness of man in the past, nor in his present perversity, and never to despair of his future. (1895b: 94)

Durkheim Mr Tarde is confusing […] different questions, and [I] refuse to comment on a problem he has not broached as yet and that has nothing to do with this discussion. (1903: 165)

42 G. Tarde and E. Durkheim

The Dean [I think we can stop there. I remind you that this contradictory debate between our eminent colleagues served as an introduction to the sociology course at the École des hautes études sociales, during the course of which students will have numerous chances to discuss these presuppositions. I think now is the moment to give our heartfelt thanks to both speakers.]

Note 1 A longer version of this text was previously published as E.V. Vargas, B. Latour, B. Karsenti, F. Aït-Touati & L.Salmon (2008) “The debate between Tarde and Durkheim”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 761–77. Thanks to Pion Limited for permitting this reproduction.

Bibliography Note: for the purposes of this text, works by Tarde and Durkheim are referred to by their year of original publication in French, with the actual year of the edition cited here, where different, in square brackets.

 

De Tarde, G. (1980) Correspondance Jean Paulhan – Guillaume de Tarde 1904–1920, Cahiers Jean Paulhan. Paris: Gallimard. Durkheim, E. (1894) [1982] The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. London: Macmillan. Trans. W.D. Halls [the translation has occasionally been modified]. ——(1895a) ‘Crime et santé sociale’. Revue philosophique, 39, 518–23. ——(1895b) [1975] ‘L’état actuel des études sociologiques en France’. In Emile Durkheim, Textes 1: éléments d’une théorie sociale. Paris: Minuit, pp. 73–108. ——(1897a) ‘Préface’. In Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide – étude de sociologie. Paris: Féliz Alcan. ——(1897b) [1951] Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe: The Free Press. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson [the translation has occasionally been modified]. ——(1900) [1970] ‘La Sociologie en France au XIXe siècle’. In Emile Durkheim, La Science sociale et l’action. Paris: PUF, pp. 111–36. ——(1901) [1990] ‘Préface de la seconde édiction’. In Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: PUF. ——(1903) [1975] ‘La Sociologie et les sciences sociales [confrontation avec Tarde]’ In Emile Durkheim, Textes 1: éléments d’une théorie sociale. Paris: Minuit, pp. 161–5. Durkheim, E. and Fauconnet, P. (1903) ‘Sociologie et sciences sociales’. Revue philosophique, 55, 465–97. Tarde, G. (1893) [1895] ‘Questions sociales’. In Gabriel Tarde, Essais et mélanges sociologiques. Paris: Félix Alcan, pp. 175–210. ——(1895a) ‘Criminalité et santé sociale’. Revue philosophique, 39, 148–62. ——(1895b) ‘Les Deux éléments de la sociologie’. In Gabriel Tarde, Études de psychologie sociale. Paris: Giard et Brière, pp. 63–94. ——(1895c) [1999] La Logique sociale. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond.

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——(1898) [2000] Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Trans. H.C. Warren. ——(1910) ‘Les Possibles: fragment d’un ouvrage de jeunesse inédit’. Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, 25, 8–41.

3

Imitation Returning to the Tarde–Durkheim debate Bruno Karsenti Translated by Matei Candea

The question of imitation

 

??

The notion of imitation was to a great extent at the root of what later came to be defined as the great opposition between individualism and holism. Tarde, theorist of individuality, or rather of inter-individuality, is traditionally also presented as the theorist of imitation as mould of the social relation, an early counterpoint to the Durkheimian holism which eventually triumphed – both institutionally and methodologically – in France. According to this account, the first consequence of the foundation of positivist sociology was the irrevocable rejection of the notion of imitation. Imitation is an inter-individual relation and as such does not give us purchase on what is properly termed a social relation, since the latter should be conceived of as breaking with and external to the individualities it connects. In accordance with the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, the proper way to reach the whole is not to build it up from the parts, but to grasp it in a qualitative leap, by fusion or integration. Imitation, being no more than an ‘individual rebound’ (Durkheim 1987: 12; 1986: 119), may be a relevant object for psychology, but is of no interest whatsoever from a specifically sociological perspective. The clearest indication of this fact is that imitation cannot be taken as evidence of solidarity. Solidarity, irrespective of its empirical variations – from the mechanical to the organic, the two poles defined in the Divison of Labour in Society – is in a formal sense a type of totalization which is neither summative nor aggregative and which reverses the relation between a whole and its parts. This is in accordance with the Comtian positivist principle: whereas the inferior sciences proceed from the parts to the whole, the higher sciences, beginning with biology and moving up the scale, must proceed from the whole to the parts.1 Now if Tarde deserves to be reread today, it is precisely because – notwithstanding these retrospective accounts – the debate in which his sociology began to distinguish itself did not in fact reach such a neat closure. For a start, it is in no way self-evident that Tarde’s conception of imitation denotes an individualist position. Tarde’s interpsychology is not a psychology, insofar as it wishes to grasp what passes between individuals, to apprehend the relation itself. Interpsychology is not a sub-set of psychology; rather, it aims at studying psychic phenomena which are beyond the individual and yet are not subsumed into collective representations.

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The sociologist should focus on belief and desire, prior to representational thinking and its attendant forms of subjective apperception. In a strict sense, beliefs and desires imitate each other, not individuals. This, as we shall see, is the key to Tarde’s interpsychology, and the clearest sign of its contemporary relevance: the elaboration of concepts of desire and belief which mark a sociological vanishing-point within psychology. From this perspective, rereading Tarde forces us to reconsider Durkheim, not only in order to discover certain ambiguities in his work, but also in order to better appreciate what exactly is at stake in conceptualizing the social as an independent level of reality. Is Durkheim’s critique of imitation as final as it claims to be? Durkheimian sociology is bent on the objectification of the social from a physiological as well as a morphological point of view; it focuses both on the movements of the group and on the composition of its substrate, and is therefore led to apprehend social phenomena as essentially psychic realities – as a particular kind of representation. Can such a sociology entirely do away with any reference to imitative processes – dangerous as such reference might be? It would not seem so, judging by some of Durkheim’s analyses – notably those upon which is built the model of mechanical solidarity, or solidarity through similarity. Rather than oppose the two authors, we should thus re-examine what is for each of them an unresolved conceptual space, a space in which their thought communicates: imitation – taken not as a solution or universal key to sociological analysis, but rather, examined in the multiplicity of its variable meanings, as a form of problematization of social phenomena.

Durkheim against imitation

 

In Suicide, we can see Durkheim’s most solidly supported refutation of the Tardean perspective. Not content with debating principles, the author tries to measure their value for the empirical analysis of one specific phenomenon. Can the psychological factor of imitation provide a satisfactory explanation for variations in the rate of suicide? No, answers Durkheim, thereby clearing the way for an explanation of the social fact – in accordance with one of the rules laid down in 1895 – by virtue of causes belonging exclusively to the ‘internal social milieu’. First, however, the author must demonstrate that imitation is indeed a psychological fact, and cannot in any sense be seen as a ‘social cause’. To this end, a preliminary distinction is drawn between imitative relation and social relation, continuity being the decisive criterion. In order for an interindividual relation to be deemed social, it must evidence a continuity and a stability such that individual variations cannot completely modify its structure, break it or otherwise recompose it. This is not to say that such variations are pre-emptively dismissed as insignificant; but it does mean that their action is pre-emptively relativized, their modifying power essentially limited – sociology’s epistemological condition being precisely this resistant, consistent nature of the social fact. In other words, the object of sociology is that which is not modifiable in the relation, it is the limit which circumscribes the relation. An imitative relation is fundamentally discontinuous, due to its happenstance character, to what one might term its fortuitousness [casualité]. For Durkheim this

46 B. Karsenti

 

fortuitousness occurs on two levels: on the level of the subjects who imitate each other, and on the level of that which is imitated. On the first level, any subjects who are brought together in any given situation which can always be created piecemeal, may imitate each other. It follows that a specifically social situation is not necessary for the manifestation of imitative phenomena. These may arise from the simple fact of contiguity, without the need to presuppose a prior social link of any kind. Such phenomena cannot therefore be taken as evidence of a social relation. To take imitative phenomena as indicators of social relations would be to claim that a social relation can be created fortuitously by contact, out of a mere relation of contiguity. From this Durkheimian perspective, the very idea of sociological experimentation is nonsensical – if by this is meant the creation of social relations out of something else. On the contrary, sociality has its own necessity, which is of the order of nature. We cannot intervene artificially upon social nature without betraying the facts themselves and their necessary unfolding. Social nature, the social as a natural phenomenon, is a level of reality which has its own laws and its own complexity. Concomitantly, such a principle implies a distinction between human nature and sociality. Sociological experimentation based on fortuitous contact is rejected because the only natural link one could admit of between two subjects brought together with no other criterion than that of being subjects, is their shared humanity. And humanity – Durkheim argues contra Comte – is a weak concept, an insufficient basis for a true sociology. Humanity does not exist, since human nature is always manifested in particular social forms, and it is this particularity which must be illuminated, not dissolved into the common determinants of species or genus. The only species there are, in other words, the only ones in which sociology finds its legitimate subject matter, are social species, or social types. Otherwise put, and more radically: the idea of human nature is the implicit presupposition of an individualistic point of view, any given individual being always the bearer of human nature in its abstract generality. An untenable perspective, insofar as it completely masks the social determinations which mean that a socialized individual is precisely no longer ‘any given individual’. We are thus given to understand that imitation is a vague, infra-scientific concept, due to its excessive generality and its individualistic orientation. Durkheim’s rejoinder suffers however from an obvious weakness, due to its circular character. Durkheim, in sum, supposes that which he sets himself as the object to be explained. Opposed to any generativist or artificialist perspective, he maintains that it is because there is already a social relation that one can be produced – which is to say, in essence, auto-produced. Since the social always precedes itself in its own production, the problem of the origin or beginning of the social is the false problem par excellence2 – harking back to hoary ‘social philosophies’. Imitation stands accused of returning us to this false problem, partaking thereby of the illusions of contractualism, even though the processes to which it points are a-rational and non-deliberative. And yet, under closer scrutiny, the accusation seems unfair. One could justifiably claim that imitation does not enquire into beginnings, but rather into the vector of

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sociality. The question it raises is not the origin of the relation, but simply what it consists in, what it is made of, what it is, precisely, that makes it a relation. From this perspective, we can see that contiguity as it is variously instantiated in imitative processes, does not aim to create the social relation, so much as to indicate the path along which it might come into being. Putting two given individuals together is not an experiment upon the origin of the social link; it is an experiment upon a situation of socialization. Grasping the process of socialization as it happens does not imply creating a social link where it previously did not exist; rather it means following the movement of its constitution, focusing on the relation, independently of the elements it relates. In this light, the experiment of a fortuitous encounter takes on a meaning very different to that which Durkheim gives it: it does not aim to create the social from nothing, but rather to hold in abeyance the determinations of the subjects in order to focus on what happens between them. Thus the question of the sociological relevance of imitation is redirected at the content of imitation, at what circulates between imitating subjects, not at the subjects themselves. The focus is not on the characteristics which one must attribute to subjects in order for them to imitate one another, but rather on that which is imitated, enquiring into the type of movement, of representation or affect which can feed into an imitative flow. This is Durkheim’s second level, and here too, imitation betrays a somewhat fortuitous character. Any gesture, any posture, any verbal or bodily expression is potentially imitable. Imitation is, in other words, no more nor less than a form of contagion: Thus, our method of imitating human beings is the same method we use in reproducing natural sounds, the shapes of things, the movements of non-human beings. Since the latter group of cases contains no social element, there is none in the former case. It originates in certain qualities of our representational life not based upon any collective influence. (Durkheim 1986: 107)

 

It is taken for granted, here, that the phenomenon of imitation belongs to representational life. More specifically, imitation is understood to belong to the realm of ‘sense representations’, which point to our affective life, the most patent sign of our individual specificity. The entirety of psychic experience is here apprehended through the concept of representation, which may be either individual or collective. Insofar as they belong to sense experience, representations remain strictly individual, since it is sense experience which makes individuals singular. In fact, it is precisely to the extent that representations are susceptible of leaving behind the realm of sense experience, that they can acquire collective characteristics. Collective representations are essentially ideational, even though they may and do impact upon an individual’s sense experience. Imitation then, is conceived as a free and uncontrolled reproduction of sense representations, and it cannot rise above this level. Durkheim’s presuppositions are once again apparent: since imitation applies equally to all that surrounds us, since it is an extremely generic disposition towards

48 B. Karsenti our milieu, irrespective of any distinction between the different spheres which compose it, it cannot be made into a sociological discrimen. Imitation cannot provide a criterion which allows us to draw a boundary between the social world and the world in general, nor even to find the first within the second. But is such a delineation really a necessary condition of a sociological approach? Could we not claim quite the opposite, namely that the very thing which Durkheim perceives as a weakness is in fact the concept of imitation’s prime strength: the creation of passage points within the different strata which build up our overall experience of the milieu? Indeed it is far from self-evident that intersubjective relations are the only component of the social milieu, or even its centre of gravity. The pertinent question is rather, how is our general experience of the milieu coloured by the fact of being social? In other words, imitation might allow us to grasp, not the experience of the social milieu so much as the social experience of the milieu – which Durkheim’s approach tends to limit a priori. This rejoins an orientation which was already present in Comte’s work: a progression, not from the vital to the social – as the commonplace reading of the hierarchy of sciences might suggest – but from the social to the vital, finding in man’s vital experience the mark of his sociality.3 The aim is not to search for a vital determination from which one might draw sociological conclusions – in the manner of sociobiology – but rather to find the social determination which marks the whole of our vital experience, making sociality into a form of life, and not a mere modality of existence superimposed upon our biological existence.

The imitative relation according to Tarde

 

For Tarde, the imitative relation is first and foremost an intersubjective relation, and not an experience of the milieu. The crucial experiment of the hypnotic relation, representing the pure form of a relation between two subjects artificially removed from any external interference, is the cornerstone of the concept of imitation and justifies its heuristic value. What psychopathology4 can bring to interpsychology is this ability to isolate two pure subjects, to grasp a pure social relation between two pure subjects, to show the imitative movement at its simplest and most spontaneous. Imagine a man hypothetically removed from any extra-social influence, such as the sight of natural objects or the spontaneous obediences of his various senses, a man whose only contact would be with his fellow-men, and initially – for simplicity’s sake – with just one of them. Would this not be the choice subject for an experimental and observational study of the truly essential features of the social relation, isolated from any complicating natural and physical factors? Are not hypnosis and somnambulism precisely the realization of this hypothesis?. (Tarde 1993 [1890]: 83) What Tarde retains from the experiment of hypnosis is the artificial interruption

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of external conditioning, the creation of an enclosed space, beyond the reach of any alteration from outside. In hypnosis we can see the experimental creation of a pure social situation. But in what sense is this situation truly social? Strictly speaking, we might better term it sociological, as long as we allow, against Durkheim’s misgivings, a space for the experimental in sociology’s field of positivity. We would not then be reducing real social relations to somnambulism, to the unilateral hypnotiszer-hypnotized relation as described by psychopathology; we would simply be using the latter to cast light on the former. In other words, hypnotic imitation is an analytical tool for entering into complex social relations which always involve other influences: other imitative relations, beyond those which can be traced to an individual act of suggestion. Temporarily deprived by somnambulism of this capacity for resistance, the somnambulist reveals the passivity of the social being as social being, that is to say, as a being in relation only with its fellows, and firstly with one of its fellows. If the social being were not also a natural being, sensitive and open to external nature and to societies other than his own, he would not be capable of change. (Tarde 1993 [1890]: 86)

 

Hypnotic passivity is abstract, insofar as it suspends the effect of the resistances which we are ever opposing to any suggestion, however powerful, in virtue of our affective plurality – our constant openness to a plurality of suggestions, emerging not only from the complex of inter-individual relations within which we are located, but also from our more general experience of the milieu. But what then have we gained by describing this typical case of hypnotic relation as imitation? If all of our affective insertion is imitative, doesn’t the analytic of imitation dissolve into confusion? To say that our affective insertion is integrally imitative, however, is not to say it is indistinctly so. For Tarde, imitation allows us to analyse a concrete social situation, however complex it may be, because it allows us to distinguish and to sort different processes of assimilation and resistance, of accumulation and substitution, of alliance and conflict between distinct imitative flows. We can thus see that imitation is not reducible to a subjective passivity. It is also the form of the resistance, and thus of the activity, which we oppose to this flow: or better, of the activity within us which is opposed to this flow, activity which in turn is a form of passivity, another form of affection of which we are the patients. In other words, passivity composes with itself, inflects itself until it flips over into its opposite, producing something like an action. In any concrete social situation, then, imitation always consists of a certain passivity-activity relation [rapport passivité-activité]. And this relation does not refer to an already constituted individual subject (which might, as a whole, be characterized as either passive or active), but rather to an intra-subjective milieu, an impersonal field of forces in which imitative flows are built up and clash with one another. What we call the subject is nothing more than the place where these relations play out and come together. It is the internal milieu which opens onto an external milieu peopled with

50 B. Karsenti other subjects, as well as a plurality of other beings which inhabit our vital experience and determine it fundamentally as an affective experience. This is what ensures, for Tarde, that our social experience can be conceived of as susceptible to change. Socialization is a dynamic process which cannot be reduced to a fixed and definitive state, precisely because imitation is a passivity-activity relation. We are constantly multiplying imitating, and sociology’s task is to decode this multiplicity, to untangle this knot of imitative relations which constitutes us. In this optic, the hypnotic relation appears abstract because it is fixed: it is an experiment in pure sociology, insofar as it artificially strips away from sociality the variations which necessarily make up the affective plurality of concrete existence. Indeed, within each distinct imitative flow, there is no internal cause for modification. Considered in the abstract, an imitation is no more than a repetition, an infinite reproduction of the same. Considered in concrete terms, however, imitation becomes pluralized. Multiple flows emerge, within variable relations of composition or substitution. In this context, repetition becomes variation. As opposed to the hypnotic situation, the real situation is intrinsically variable precisely when it follows the principle of imitative repetition – more accurately, it is the simultaneous coexistence of multiple imitative relations which produces this reality effect. Socially speaking, hypnosis is realized – in Tarde’s words, the dream becomes real without ceasing to be a dream – when it is deployed in different directions. And we can thus understand how, against a background of repetition, differentiation not only can, but indeed must necessarily take place. But can we still then speak of imitation? When we move from the hypnotic relation to a concrete insertion into a network of affective relations which the sociologist could untangle and re-order, have we not changed the meaning of the concept to such an extent as to make the use of the same term untenable?

The activity of imitation

 

Indeed, Durkheim criticizes Tarde first and foremost for his indiscriminate use of a term whose vagueness is appropriate for a commonsense usage, but which requires some semantic reduction before it can be adequate for a sociologist’s purposes. Imitation usually denotes three groups of facts which are irreducible to one another. The first refers to a levelling of consciousnesses, ‘in virtue of which everyone thinks and feels in unison’. This concerns ‘the property which enables states of consciousness, when they are felt simultaneously by a number of different subjects, to act upon others and to combine in such a way as to give birth to a new state’ (Durkheim 1986: 108). It is supposed that this mutual transformation derives from a ‘reciprocal imitation of each by all and of all by each’, the paradigmatic case of this kind of ‘common feeling’ being the crowd or the revolutionary assembly. In a second sense, imitation is used to denote the fact of adapting oneself to a standard, to a general disposition manifested outside of us which is taken as a model, invested with authority by virtue of its generality. This perspective covers what Tarde described as two distinct species, trend-imitation and custom-imitation, which Durkheim sees as versions of the same conformism born of one’s consent to

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51

 

the authority of prevalent opinion. Finally, the word imitation can be used to denote the automatic tendency to copy for copying’s sake, understood as a feature of human nature. Movements are repeated when they come into contact, by virtue of the contact itself. This imitation is then a form of automatism, which for Durkheim is nothing more than ‘aping’ (Durkheim 1986: 110). This third meaning is that which we saw Durkheim critiquing earlier. For him, the use of the term imitation is only fully legitimate in this latter case, and this restriction preemptively invalidates any sociology which would take imitation as its principle. Imitation, thus narrowly circumscribed, is a contagious repetition. It is no more than the realization of a single unbroken movement from the model to the copy; we can thus say that it operates mechanically. The decisive distinction here is between this and the second meaning of imitation: adaptation to a norm presupposes consent whereas automatic reproduction does not. In the case of automatic imitation, we cannot find in the qualities of that which is imitated the explanation for why it is imitated. It is once again the fortuitousness [casualité] of the imitated content which stands as the mark of the concept’s lack of explanatory power. For as soon as a reason is given for the reproduction of a model – as soon as, to use Durkheim’s language, we consent to imitate – we can no longer quite be said to be imitating; rather we decide that a model is worth reproducing, by virtue of the authority already vested in it. We thus become the origin of another movement, which may resemble that of the model, but is not its direct extension. Adjusting one’s conduct should not be confused with imitation. Social conformism is in no way automatic, since the subject who reproduces the model because he recognizes its authority, is taking himself as his own principle of action [se pose lui-même comme principe]. Underlying this discussion is the crucial social scientific distinction between causes and reasons: the implicit accusation here is that an uncontrolled use of the concept of imitation leads to a confusion between these two heterogeneous forms of determination. This is why imitation must be strictly redefined, against the commonsense slippage and extension of the term, to denote a purely physical causality: the univocal onward march of a cause diffusing into its effects. In which case, imitation can hardly be an accurate description of what is meant by social determination. Why is Durkheim so intent on rejecting automatism? Is automatism not implicitly recognized as a particular form of social determination, under the Durkheimian category of mechanical solidarity, which supposedly characterizes the cohesion of primitive societies? It is not, because solidarity – of whichever type – is always for Durkheim the regulated articulation of distinct movements. These movements may well be similar or akin to one another, as in the case of mechanical solidarity: the adjective mechanical referring precisely to the fact that individuals’ movements are similar insofar as they all proceed from the same impulsion,5 whereas organic solidarity issues from the unifying organization of distinct movements.6 But imitation is not an appropriate analytic even in the case of mechanical solidarity, since the latter presupposes the predominance of a common rule, applying to all in the same manner, rather than the contagious spread of a single movement through a population. This is why the dominant form of regulation in this type of society is

52 B. Karsenti

 

repressive law, in which the same interdiction applies to all and the saying ‘none should ignore the law’ is fact rather than fiction (Durkheim 1996a: 40). Whichever the type of solidarity, in fact, conformity of conduct is explained by everyone’s respect, understanding and enactment of a specific law, whose authority comes from its social status. Custom and trends too are phenomena of this kind, which can be explained through a reasoned conformism. They only seem to give rise to automatisms. This being said, there is also a deeper reason for Durkheim’s refusal to conflate conformity and imitation. This reason deserves a clear exposition, insofar as it points to an inherent paradox of imitation which Tarde, for one, had not failed to recognize. Strictly speaking, imitation is cast as an activity – the verb ‘to imitate’ describes the activity of he who imitates – while we simultaneously recognize that the imitating subject is repeating an action of which he is not the author, an action resulting from the imprint, or even the influence of another action. A similarity must appear in order for us to say that one subject is imitating another, and the analysis presupposes that this similarity results from a transfer which can be traced either to one of the two or to a third subject to whom both are subjected. In other words, as Tarde never tired of pointing out, we can only grasp the phenomenon of imitation if we begin with its unilateral character (Tarde 1993 [1890]: 220). This is not to say that there is no such thing as reciprocal imitation. But such complexly constructed bilateral relations should not obscure the real problem, which is the diffusion of an action along a slope which always has a summit and a base (ibid. 240). And the problem with a unilateral relation is that it is not clear in what sense exactly it is a relation, that is to say, something which accords some degree of consistency and reality to both terms. An imitative relation involves an extension, a ‘prehension’, an appropriation, even: one subject appropriates the gestures, the thoughts of another. It is, in other words, one single subject who thinks and acts inside another. And the real activity of imitation is that of being imitated. The grammatical passive is the true active. Is that to say that there is only one actor, the one we would have to call the leader? If imitation is merely contagion, then we would indeed have to admit this. Every social relation originates in a subject, every social relation is a subject, a huge subject which branches out and extends itself, coming to occupy empty shells and acting within them. Taken to this extreme, the imitative schema is not merely individualistic: it is super-individualistic – more holistic than holism itself. But the imitative model does not go this far – this is what Durkheim refuses to acknowledge when he confines imitation to its automatic form. Imitation involves a contagious process, but it is not reducible to contagion. This is the other side of the concept: there is something like an activity of imitation in he who imitates, and not only in he who is imitated. When an action, an image or a thought, is repeated, it is not simply repeating itself, but also being reproduced. Passivity involves its own inherent form of activity. The imitative relation, as we noted, is a passivity-activity relation, which appears at the limit of contagion. In this respect, imitation is a concept which goes beyond the specific problematic of crowd psychology. Gustave Lebon, unlike Tarde, does not really think through the notion

Imitation

of imitation: this is the mark of the fact that Tardean sociology has already left behind crowd psychology. And the abovementioned grammatical difficulty – the mutual exchange and communication between passive and active – is the very heart of imitation. Rather than attempt to resolve this paradox, one should accept it. Therein lies the difficulty but also the heuristic value of the concept of imitation as a figure of social relations. Durkheim’s semantics encounters a solid resistance on one other point, too: the boundary between ‘common feeling’ and ‘automatic imitation’. Durkheim argues that common feeling does not point to an imitative process, since it does not involve any real reproduction. On the contrary, this process results from what one might call a sui generis psychic synthesis. The notion of such a synthesis is a central lynchpin of Durkheimian sociology. Crowd psychology is rejected because it uses imitation to describe this phenomenon, seeing a reproduction where one should really see a transformation whose result is a new psychological state, which was not present at the level of elements. In other words, Durkheim reproaches imitation thinkers, not for taking the crowd as the paradigmatic social group, but on the contrary, for conceiving of the crowd itself in individualist terms. And yet, crowd psychologists found the concept of imitation useful because they believed they could discern in crowds a mechanism of reproduction – whence this illusion? For Durkheim, this results from the fact that each individual in a crowd is experiencing a similar affective situation. A crowd is nothing other than a group of individuals whose affective disposition is similar. While they resemble each other in this respect, this is not to say they are imitating each other. They are simply feeling identically, and this feeling is redoubled by the representation of their similarity of feeling. This redoubling creates the illusion of imitation. Two facts must therefore be distinguished: the fact that a certain number of individuals are similarly affected, each of them feeling identically, and the fact of feeling in common, partaking together of the same feeling, which no single individual had previously felt. The question, then, is how we move from the former fact to the latter. This passage can be conceptualized in two ways. The imitative paradigm supposes that one or more of the individuals experiences an affective state which diffuses and spreads outwards from them. Affective imitation aggregates the group. Durkheim disagrees. For him, the common feeling differs in nature from the individual ones, even though the latter are similar. The difference is the fruit of a representation which redoubles each particular affect: the feeling of feeling like others. This representation of affective identity is a type of sense representation which opens up individuality onto another state, which can begin to be termed collective. The representation of the identity of affects is, so to speak, the first collective representation – and it does not presuppose any imitative reproduction. It is worth stressing this point, so often occluded in traditional accounts of for Durkheim Durkheim’s supposed holism. The social is indeed detached from the individual. But it would be inaccurate to claim that Durkheim simply hypostasized a distinct level of reality without attempting to explain what for him was a necessary break [décrochage]. The irreducibility of this level of reality justifies the independence of a science of the social. But this irreducibility itself receives a justification to

 

!!!!!!

53

54 B. Karsenti which we will now return – a justification which necessarily involves sociology in a preliminary discussion on the very terrain it is attempting to free itself from: that of psychology.

Regularity and similarity

 

Durkheim’s perspective becomes most explicit, and its ambiguities emerge most clearly, in a 1898 article in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale entitled ‘Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives’.7 The most patent ambiguity concerns the definition of sociology itself as a new kind of psychology, a ‘collective psychology’ which takes as its object the strange psychic realities known as collective representations (Durkheim 1996b: 7). It is surprising to find Durkheim reincorporating sociology into the very heart of psychology, the discipline which still threatens its independence, threatens indeed to absorb it entirely. Furthermore, this reincorporation will be heralded again in the second preface to the Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1987: xviii), in response to accusations of ‘thing-ism’ [chosisme] and of disembodiment of social facts in the wake of the book’s first edition – accusations emerging in particular from philosophical circles. It is not simply that Durkheim, coming to realize more clearly the mental consistency of social facts – seeing them, precisely, as fundamentally representational in nature – is pulling sociology towards idealism, even depicting the former as the only possible outcome of the latter’s return to form.8 More importantly, we see the affirmation of Durkheim’s desire to conceptualize for itself the passage-point from one level of representations to another, where the articulation of the individual and the collective takes place. It will no longer be enough to say, deploying chemical metaphors with a distinctly Rousseauist flavour, that ‘the strength of bronze is not to be found in the copper, the zinc or the lead which made it up’ but ‘in their conjunction’ (Durkheim 1987: xvi). It will no longer be enough to expect the phenomenon of synthesis to bear the entire creative weight of a new reality. The task will be to consider the detailed combinations which allow us to identify the psychological threshold beyond which one is justified in referring to collective mental states. In the pages of Suicide in which he discusses imitation, Durkheim admits that he is rather impotent in this respect. He writes that he can only give a ‘general and approximative sense’ of the process which give rise to collective feelings, adding that ‘it must be admitted that we know only vaguely what it consists of. How exactly are those combinations produced, which gives rise to a collective state, what elements enter into them, how does the dominant state emerge? These questions are far too complex to be resolved through introspection. (…) We have merely tried to show that something quite different from imitation was at play here’ (Durkheim 1986: 116). But can Durkheim’s explanation of the passage from individual states to a common state, in point of fact, exclude the imitative process entirely? As a starting point, we can see that Durkheim’s argument involves a difficulty of principle. Similarity appears as a given, evading any construction. What, in other words,

Text

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is never explained, is precisely the existence of similar elements. We can thus perhaps return Durkheim’s accusation of fortuitousness [casualité] upon his own conception, insofar as it rests upon this occasional situation which brings together similar individuals, which is to say individuals with similar affective dispositions. If so, the sociologist would be guilty of reproducing in a different form the origin myth of the social philosophies which he denounces elsewhere. Furthermore, we can see that the effect of Durkheim’s argument rests on this second moment – the representation of identity – when the initial affective state is transformed and de-individualized. Identity must be representable to each participant, and the collective representation emerges from synthesis of, on the one hand the sense representations of similar individuals, and on the other the representations of similarity itself. We see therefore why it is so crucial for Durkheim to privilege representation as his key concept in describing the totality of psychic phenomena. The characteristic of representation is precisely to introduce the disjunction which allows psychic states to apprehend their own form – its identical or at least similar nature – as a new content. A collective representation is born of the redoubling which occurs when a sense representation understands itself as formally identical to another sense representation. It does not require the already constituted group as its object – rather, one might say it is always-already aiming at the group by thinking itself identical to other representations. It is thus the similarity of representations redoubled by the representation of this similarity, which allows a synthesis of representations which can truly transform them. One could put this more concisely: represented similarity is what gives birth to difference – the difference between the social and the individual, between collective representation and individual sense representations. This once again sharpens the problem: if one is to think a similarity, if form is to become a new content, the terms which are being identified must be co-present to the individual consciousness which assembles them. The representation of identity enables the passage from ‘feeling identically’ to ‘feeling together’, but this implies that several similar representations were related, compared and finally identified within each individual consciousness. This in turn requires that each consciousness reproduce these representations to some extent. We must then admit that each subject has imitated representations which, while similar to his own, were initially external to him. We return, in other words, to what Kantian philosophy – which is the theoretical framework of Durkheim’s proposed representational analysis – had defined as the schematism of reproductive imagination. In order to schematize, in order to operate a transcendental determination of time without which no synthesis of sense data is possible, imagination has to reproduce. We would then have to say, despite Durkheim’s conclusions, that the process whereby collective representations are constituted, if it is seen as a process and not as a spontaneous emergence, does involve a reproduction. Thinking in terms of imitation would therefore not be entirely inappropriate. In other words, Durkheim is faced with a dilemma: he must reject imitation for its individualist and generative character, but he cannot do so absolutely, and imitative reproduction re-emerges at key moments in his arguments, such as when

56 B. Karsenti he describes the process whereby collective representations are supposedly constituted. In fact, the tension occurs at the very heart of Durkheimian psychology, insofar as its entire understanding of psychic phenomena is organized around the concept of representation. This is such a crucial concept for Durkheim that it even covers the conception of what he sees as affective phenomena. In a resolutely intellectualist way, an affection is always understood as a sense representation, requiring a subjective apperception – since a representation can only exist for a subject, for a consciousness which represents something to itself.9 This psychological subjectivism is, paradoxically, the basis upon which Durkheim erects a sociological objectivism which excludes any consideration of imitative phenomena. The definition of the latter, in the wake of the semantic reduction we have examined above, remains entirely within an intellectualist viewpoint: Imitation occurs when an action’s immediate antecedent is the representation of a similar action, previously accomplished by someone else, and when no implicit or explicit intellectual operation upon the intrinsic characteristics of the reproduced action has taken place in between this representation and execution. (Durkheim 1986: 115) The problem with this definition is that the representation of a similar action is already an intellectual operation. In other words, automatic imitation, insofar as it relies upon a representation – insofar as, immediately or mediatedly, an action must have a representation as its antecedent – becomes something more than a simple communication of movement: it becomes a reproduction. The boundary between Durkheim’s second and third meanings, conformity and automatic imitation, is therefore blurred. Tarde, by contrast, explicitly rejects this boundary as irrelevant. Furthermore, it is by virtue of this rejection that he justifies his extension of the term imitation:

 

Nothing could be less scientific than this absolute separation, this radical discontinuity between the voluntary and the involuntary, the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not move, by imperceptible degrees, from a considered volition to a more or less mechanical habit? And does the same action undergo any absolute change in nature during this movement? I am not denying the importance of the change this shift produces; in its social aspect, however, the phenomenon has remained the same. One could only describe my extension of the meaning of the word [imitation] as improper if by extending the meaning of the word I had rendered it shapeless and devoid of signification. But I have always left it with a precise and characteristic meaning: that of the action at a distance, of one mind [esprit] upon another, an action which consists of the quasi photographic reproduction of a cerebral snapshot by the sensitized plate of another brain. (Tarde 1993 [1890]: viii)

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Confrontation: the quality and quantity of imitation

 

The distinction between conscious and unconscious may be relevant to psychology, but not to sociology. This highlights how mistaken it would be to accuse Tarde of psychological reductionism. Quite the reverse is in fact the case: here, a sociological point of view redefines psychological phenomena objectively, in such a way that there is no social difference in nature between habit and deliberation. Indeed these are, sociologically, a univocal phenomenon. Or rather, the univocity of the sociological point of view allows the individual psyche to be understood in such a way that this distinction emerges as a difference in degree, whereas an individualist approach sees it as a difference in kind. There is an echo here of Leibniz’s theory of small perceptions: as with Leibniz, it is not the cumulative phenomenon which allows gradation to emerge as transformation, but rather the opposite analytical movement, led by infinitesimal calculus. The infinite, in other words, is implied in the finite, it is not beyond the finite as a product of aggregation. This allows Tarde to add, in a note to the passage cited above: ‘the psychological is explained by the social, precisely because the social emerges from the psychological’. This leads to the conclusion that Tardean sociology, far from being an individualist sociology, taking the individual’s reality as a given beyond which it refuses to go, is in fact concerned with social quantities whose analysis takes us to the very core of the individual. The sociological point of view will thus be quantitative, not qualitative. But this is a social quantity, not an individual quantity, whose magnitude is summative or aggregative. It is precisely because we start from social quantity, that we can reach individual psychology. The question is thus no longer, as with Durkheim, to define the quality which allows representations to emerge as collective and as pertinent objects for sociology, but rather to find which kind of psychic determination goes beyond individual psychology, and can therefore be sociologically quantified. This question is the cornerstone of Tarde’s thinking on imitation. It is thus clear how far this thinking diverges from the individualist line to which a convenient doxography has attempted to relegate it. As we noted at the start, this is first and foremost a change in approach: moving from the question of the subject of imitation to a question about what is imitated [ce qui s’imite], about the matter of the process considered from an impersonal point of view. What is the imitative flow made of? That is the real question. And its answer is to be found in Tarde’s first major theoretical text (originally published in 1880): belief and desire are the real quantities which make spirit measurable, both individually and socially – indeed, one might say, individually because socially. The basis of this text is a critique of Wundt and Fechner’s psycho-physics. Its key advance is to introduce a distinction between sensations on the one hand, which are qualitative and cannot be separated from the affected subject, and on the other, desire and belief which enter into the composition of any sensation and render them commensurable despite their subjective character. If we accept this distinction and the concomitant reordering of psychological phenomena it implies, we must also accept that what is quantitative in sensation is not the sensing itself,

58 B. Karsenti but rather the desire and belief without which no sensation is possible. Within each individual sensation and constitutive of it, there is a circulating flow of desire and belief which opens subjectivities to one another, allows them to communicate and weaves the relation within which they detach themselves. There can be no individual sensation without belief and desire, but desire and belief go beyond the individuality of the sensation. Tarde acknowledges that the psychologist, strictly speaking, is only concerned with sensations. But if he adopts a social point of view, which shows psychic facts in a new light, he must develop his analysis and rejoin a truly quantitative level: I hasten to add that the psycho-physicians – with whom after all my disagreement is not great, since I grant them the key point of their doctrine, namely the existence of quantities in the soul – were fundamentally right not to focus on the pure quantities which I describe here, and to study instead a set of impure and derivative quantities. These contain a dominant quantitative element, but remain accessible in some respects to our useful and malleable physical instruments of measurement. Nevertheless, it remains important on a theoretical level, to highlight this mixed quality which they refused to see, just as it is sometimes necessary, in chemistry, to state the premonition of the element even if it can only be seen and touched as part of a compound. (Tarde 1895: 261)

 

A ‘theoretical’ point of view, here, means a ‘sociological’ point of view. For what cannot be touched from a strictly psychological point of view is the quantitative element itself. Desires and beliefs, in the strict sense, are not psychological elements. Or rather, they only become psychological elements if we start from the social, if we conceive of them as that which circulates between individuals and enables them to have sensations. This perspective, outlined in the 1880 article, throws light on the initially puzzling double definition of imitation as an action at a distance, and as a photographic snapshot, the reproduction of a cerebral snapshot on the sensitized plate of another brain. The sociology of imitation is thus indeed in one sense a psychology, an analysis of psychic phenomena, which are in turn primarily conceived as inter-cerebral, rather than intra-cerebral relations. The object of psychology, redefined or rather revealed by the sociological viewpoint, consists in relations between brains, which are the locus of imitation. And such relations share a characteristic: they involve an action which operates not through contact but remotely, at a distance; one might even say by virtue of distance. Imitation cannot therefore be modelled on physical contagion, on the propagation of the same movement from one point of social space to another. If imitation is indeed – alongside biological heredity and physical oscillation – one of the three forms of universal repetition, it is marked out by virtue of its capacity to skip intermediaries, to proceed omisso medio, eschewing transitions (Tarde 1993 [1890]: 38–9). We are thus back to imitation as an active-passive relation: the model is only externally related to the copy, since the latter is less a ramification of the model than its reproduction on

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a different sensitized plate. On some level, therefore, imitation always involves transformation, however infinitesimal; it is always an imitative action. Once we agree that imitation is always a kind of refraction which recreates and modifies the model it reproduces, then, strictly speaking, the distinction between imitation and invention begins to fade. Invention is not the starting point of an imitative process, it is its very texture. It follows that at the heart of the social relation, insofar as this relation is imitative, there is nothing but invention.10 But how are we to understand this remote action? How can we conceive of an action which takes place not between bodies, but between brains, isolated from one another, separated by a distance which the imitative flow traverses yet does not reduce? We can only conceive of this by insisting, once again, on the nature of that which is imitated: desires and beliefs are psychic tendencies which connect brains to one another, or as Tarde would put it, which connect ‘souls to one another through their centre’ (Tarde 1993 [1890]: 232). In other words, one specific assumption about imitation must be strenuously combated: the assumption that what is imitated is the most superficial part of behaviour, that which appears on the surface of beings and attaches them, as it were, to each other’s periphery. Such surface imitation is not impossible, but it can only be secondary. For Tarde, such surface imitation supposes that one has already imitated what lies beneath: the belief and desire of the model, that which, in other words, guides its conduct, gives it its profound meaning and singularity, makes it unique as a tendency. Tarde’s inter-psychology is spiritualist, not because it refers – as does Durkheim’s ‘hyperspirituality’ (Durkheim 1996b: 48) – to ideational representational content, but because it harks to an infra-affective level, before sensation, pointing to belief and desire as fundamental psychic motors; this makes imitative action into significant action in and of itself. We see therefore that there is always action in imitation, or at least that imitative passivity contains a specific activity, without which it would be radically incomprehensible. A spiritual activity, which consists in believing as we see others believe, desiring as we see others desire, because the first similarity we encounter is the similarity of the tendencies which inform and incline a type of behaviour or existence, and, to that extent, give it meaning. To believe is to believe with, and we believe all the more when we believe in the belief of others. Belief is a psychological element which operates beyond the individual’s psyche, referring primarily to other beliefs to which it is contextually linked. The same goes for desire, a correlative tendency which can only be defined relative to the belief it takes as its object. We can thus say that, despite appearances, imitation does not work from the outside in, as in a colonization or the propagation of a force, but from the inside out, by a new subject’s creation or recreation of the similar and the different. It thus becomes both coherent and necessary to speak of an imitative practice. Imitation is a practice because it is essentially subjective, residing in a certain interior disposition. And yet the recognition of this dimension does not necessary reduce us to subjectivism. In the same movement, the subject acts and is acted. In the same movement, as Tarde might put it, the subject affirms himself as inventor – even only in a tiny way, or rather, particularly and always in a tiny way

60 B. Karsenti – and his action is inserted into a pre-existing imitative flow which determines and prolongs its effects. The subjective practice of imitation thereby takes on an equally essential objective dimension. To grasp it is to measure it, to apprehend its quantitative aspect. Sociological analysis is primarily about measurement, applied to that which is imitated and imitable, namely the elementary quantities of belief and desire. Psychological reductionism is avoided by the social nature of these fundamental psychic elements. Psychology is at heart a sociology, because its final object can only be a network of relations, grasped at the elementary level of a creative and diffracting repetition of tendencies. Imitation, in other words, is the practice of a singular subject because it takes place in a subject which is considered not as an inaugural power, but as the original combination of different flows of belief and desire. In these conditions, sociology’s object are processes of subjectivation, relations of passivity-activity apprehended through the concept of practice. The regularity of these practices therefore takes on a new aspect: it is no longer a sign of the degree of resistance or consistency of the fact, but rather of its insistance, its ever-repeated capacity to impose itself against facts of the same order. The sociologist’s task thus becomes to apprehend, beneath the regularity of an imitative practice, the irregularity of constant modifications. Or, better, the regularity of that which is imitatively repeated must be read as a continuous process through which the social creates itself, that is to say, modifies even as it reproduces itself.

Notes

 

1 On the adoption of this principle in sociology, see Halbwachs 1972: 309ff. 2 This emerges even more markedly when social phenomena are conceptualized as instituted phenomena. As Durkheim notes in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The Elementary Forms of Religious Life]: ‘If by origin, we mean a first and absolute beginning, then the question is unscientific and must be firmly discarded. There is no radical instant when religion came into existence, and the point is not to find some means of travelling there in thought. Like any human institution, religion does not begin anywhere’ (1990: 10–11). 3 In the chapter of the Normal and the Pathological entitled ‘From the social to the vital’, Canguilhem notes that Tarde was the first, in Laws of Imitation, to make an analogy between social information through statistics and vital information through sensorial receptors (Canguilhem 1988: 189). 4 Tarde’s sources on psychopathology seem somewhat miscellaneaous: he cites the names of Richet, Binet, Féré, Beaunis, Bernheim, Delboeuf, and alternates the categories of onirism, magnetism, suggestion, hypnotism and somnambulism. 5 ‘This solidarity does not simply consist of a general and indeterminate attachment to the group; it also harmonizes the detail of movements. Since these collective mobiles are everywhere the same, they everywhere produce the same effects’(Durkheim 1996a: 74). 6 On the distinction and justification of this terminology, see Durkheim (1996a: 100–1) 7 Published in English as ‘Individual and collective representations’ (Durkheim 1974) [translator’s note]. 8 On this claim about sociology’s revitalization of idealism, see Durkheim 1990: 326. 9 On this subject, see the distinction between sensation, image and concept in Durkheim’s discussion of pragmatist theses (1955: 169). 10 On the primacy of invention in Tarde’s thinking, see Lazzarato 2002.

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Bibliography

 

Canguilhem G. (1988) Le Normal et le pathologique. Paris, PUF. Durkheim É. (1955) Pragmatisme et sociologie. Cours inédit prononcé à la Sorbonne en 1913–1914 et restitué par A.Cuvillier d’après des notes d’étudiants. Paris, Vrin. ——(1969) Journal sociologique. Paris, PUF. ——(1974) Individual and Collective Representations. In Sociology and Philosophy, ed. É. Durkheim. Free Press, New York, pp. 23–6. ——(1986) [1897] Le Suicide. Paris, PUF. ——(1987) [1895] Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris, PUF. ——(1990) [1912] Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris, PUF. ——(1996a) [1893] De La Division du travail social. Paris, PUF. ——(1996b) Sociologie et philosophie, Préface de C. Bouglé, Présentation de B. Karsenti. Paris, PUF. Halbwachs M. (1972) Classes sociales et morphologie. Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Lazzarato M. (2002) Puissances de l’invention. La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique. Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Le Seuil. Schatzki T., Knorr Cetina K., Savigny E. (eds) (2000) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York, Routledge. Tarde G. (1895) Essais et mélanges sociologiques. Lyon and Paris, Éditions Stork et Masson. ——(1993) [1890] Les Lois de l’imitation, Présentation de B. Karsenti. Paris, Kimé.

4

The value of a beautiful memory Imitation as borrowing in serious play at making mortuary sculptures in New Ireland Karen Sykes

Pretexts

 

It is a rare to make a gift of an ethnographic insight – especially one borrowed from the Barok – to the principal ethnographer of the people who speak that language in Papua New Guinea.1 It may be foolhardy to borrow the work of those who came before you by imitating them. Forgive me. I want to speak in the key of the artists of that country’s region of central New Ireland, although I choose that of its more gently spoken northern people, the Mandak, for whom the will to create the beautiful sculptures known as Malanggan is never straightforward. They speak about their renowned creations in the most understated ways, telling us that the pinnacle of their ritual life, the final feast of the Malanggan, is ‘a little thing that we do that our ancestors once did too’. Their neighbours to the south, the Barok, however, are not so interested in gentle recollections that liberate into conversation so many of their memories of days long past (even as they create and embed those memories in new material forms). The Barok prefer to pre-empt their ancestors in a bit of serious play. Nonetheless, for both, it is the case that they believe that the Malanggan remains inviolate, along with the memory of the ancestors, and that these images are only a beautiful memory of what the contemporary sculptures could be at their best. The Mandak and the Barok each remember and style their sculptures differently, one gently the other brashly, but each is poor imitation of all that went before. Here, I choose the Mandak style of making understatements about the work of imitating sculpture, and explore the power of not saying too much.

1 Imitation as borrowing Imitation is as old as poetry; the failure to mime marks the soul of the poetic and the value of its creative products. According to classical philosophers the imitation casts shadows in which lie creativity; similarly, the shadows are evidence of the creativity that fires an intellectual life and is otherwise hard to see directly. According to modern social scientists, imitation lies at the centre of productive economic life, as shown when bodies mimic machines and technology extends a body’s reach such that ‘the economy’ or ‘the market’ become forms of life.

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However, imitations are both created and creative because they are sequences of social acts that presage materialization, and are the bits and pieces that make up the substance of creative life. Imitations are the mere shadows of beautiful memories and they show classical thinkers and modern scholars how to recognize the value of what they knew and know. In this chapter I define imitation as the conscious social act of borrowing the forms and images associated with one person or group by another one, and I argue that this act values specific social relations between those who imitate each other. My definition is somewhat different from either of two major thinkers of modern social science, each of whom was concerned in different ways with the value of the non-conscious processes of imitation. Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde both argue that imitation is valuable to humans because it functions to integrate humans into society by creating the appearance of similarity between discrete social actions such as personal habits or recognized as social conventions (Candea, this volume, 3–7). Durkheim argued that imitative acts regulate society and specific social relationships, whether or not these are conscious social acts. Tarde argued the strongest case for imitation as the most significant social act in the integration of society, a practice that pulls people together in common styles and interests without them fully knowing how (Tarde 2007). According to Tarde, such acts of the human will are enigmatic and no prior social relationship is needed if humans are to imitate one another. I argue that each scholar’s claim that imitation is largely a non-conscious social act lying largely in the imagination is too narrow for understanding the complexity of imitation as a social act. Although his definition of imitation was exceedingly fine, Tarde’s agenda for establishing its centrality to economic life remained very ambitious; firstly, he defined the central importance of imitation as the work of the imagination in economic life, and secondly, he redefined his concept of imitation/imagination as the soul of what he ambitiously titled an ‘Economic Psychology’ (2007). His assumptions for that project of rethinking the economy are twofold and interrelated: he assumes that the will is central to the creative intellectual project, and he assumes imitation constitutes the genius of a person or of a people through a process of negation and recognition (2007: 614–20). The case for making these arguments lies in his assumptions about the nature of exchange practices: ‘As it stands, donation and theft are moral notions, in themselves foreign to political economy, but exchange is a properly economic notion’ (615). Yet, he claims that the exchange of ideas is different from the exchange of material objects because he does not think that ideas need to be materialized in social relations in order to transmit them, as if economics did not necessarily address the material world. In support of this, he argues that ideas can be imitated without prior social connection, and that imitation creates the social relation.2 If it is possible to rethink the political economy (as the exchange of things) in terms of economic psychology (as the exchange of ideas) (620–5), and thereby invigorate political economy so that it is just as appropriate for old England, New Guinea or contemporary virtual society,3 then there are challenges to be met. The first is what Tarde means by an economic psychology, which he wishes to separate

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(hypothetically) from political economy so that he can rejoin them. A second test is how political economy should be refigured in terms of economic psychology as lived, rather than as only thought.4 Tarde aimed to revise social science by privileging the products of the intellect over those of the body as the ground of economic life, but I confess that these are contentious assumptions for the Barok, the Mandak and no doubt a good number of others. By reflecting on the complications that the ethnography of central New Ireland poses to Tarde’s economic psychology, my aim is to further clarify the terms of Tarde’s economic psychology. That aim can be no bad thing because Tarde writes passionately, and entangles his scholarly points with poetic images. In the following pages I take up the matter of imitation as innovation and creativity in very specific, ethnographically informed ways, and use that as a way of understanding what that unified theory of economy (economic psychology + political economy) might be. So I invite the reader to understand the play of mimicry and imitation very seriously as creative actions that also entail value judgements. My ethnographic analysis of imitation shows that an unpacking of Tarde’s ideas about it as a key aspect of economic psychology/political economy benefits from some clarification of how imitation constitutes a life (which ethnographic analysis is best able to do). Ethnography reveals this central tension: Readers might consider that, for Tarde, economic psychology can access imitation as that aspect of humanity which might be non-corporeal and also non-material (in all senses of the word), in such a way that the economy does not become a simple tool of the human condition but remains a part of it.5 If we are to assume that the creations of the intellect must be dealt with differently than the products of bodily labour before political economy can be rethought in a more integrative way, then we must conversely know what the loss of the body, literally and conceptually, means to any evaluation of life processes? For this conundrum of knowledge, the funeral arts are a primary example wherein the celebrants of the mortuary ritual confront the loss of the material life in its most physical form, the corporeal person. I think that the more specific example of how Mandak people borrow from the Barok when making the forms and images of the funeral shows how political economy is always thought of in tandem with economic psychology in the rituals following death, without reducing imitation to technology, or relegating its work as mimicry to the psychological and even theological interrogations of social action. My ethnography of the Mandak people’s work of borrowing as a form of imitation in creating a mortuary sculpture illuminates the very social nature of imitation as borrowing, and casts doubt upon Tarde’s claim that imitation is the soul of economic psychology by insisting that the imitation of a beautiful memory is valuable because it is practised, lived and materialized in borrowings of it, that are neither thefts nor appropriations, yet entail exchanges between actors. The specific ethnographic case is the art historian’s famous example of the Malanggan. A Malanggan is a mortuary sculpture that has been famously displayed in national museums, thereby making the renown of the New Ireland villages which are its provenance. In keeping with the anthropological habit of arguing from ethnography, I wish to work from the example of the preparations for the

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funeral ritual, and the processes of creating the specific mortuary sculpture, the Malanggan. Before going any further, it is helpful to overview some of the background to the creation of the ritual objects that I am discussing. Malanggans are fabricated in New Ireland villages and are part of the oeuvre normally associated with Oceanic Arts in most national museums (Gunn and Peletier 2006; Lincoln 1987). The varieties of Malaggans are many and expert attempts to classify these have been complicated by the uncanny similarities that arise across the island, despite the range of 11 language groups amongst a population of 100,000 in the last census. The second complication arises from the propensity of makers to create a Malaggan as a composite of images (Strathern 2001), sometimes claiming the borrowings of these from neighbouring language groups, as those carvers who made a Malanggan dance mask insisted they had done when they presented the Nalik ‘tatanua’ as a Mandak ‘labadama’ for ritual goers, and sometimes claiming that the one Malanggan form supplanted another one, as when carvers said the Labadama supplanted the Varima, a Malanggan of local provenance upon which elderly men claimed that they had modelled the Labadama which gained renown in the film Malaggan Labadama: A Tribute to Bukbuk (Chris Owen, director, 1979). In these examples, ‘borrowing’ across groups becomes a form of creative imitation. In order to help the reader to understand how borrowing is mostly a creative and conscious social act that imitates other’s acts, in this chapter I provide a single example of how Malanggans are made. A close examination of the skilled practices of making a Malanggan mortuary sculpture shows us the difficulty that arises when the analyst separates substantive wealth from concepts, images or ideas in order to privilege imitation as a cognitive or psychic apparatus for thinking through economic psychology. What is obscured is the process of passing on images, a process in which people give them to other people, and gratefully or awkwardly receive them too. This imitative work recognizes and affirms the authority and receptivity of those who loan and those who borrow.6 So, instead of imitation as a socializing and cognitive activity, I turn to the creative work of borrowing as a means of eliciting7 new images and social relationships. In specific terms, I use the concept of borrowing to describe the social apparatus that people generally use for understanding what is ‘genius’ in social life.8 Drawing on this conceptual legacy will argue that genius emerges through a process of affirmation, rather than negation. That affirmation is known in giving, receiving and giving back again. In the ethnographic case, as the reader will see, the sculptors playfully imitate the acquisition of the soul of the form they aim to present, or rather to represent. In the case of the Malanggan, borrowing as a form of imitation has been called ‘pre-emptive successorship’ for its ability to create the authority of the ancestors in the very act of displacing the ancestors’ power (Wagner 1986). While Wagner’s theory is elaborated with reference to the ethos of kinship, which I do not address fully here, a brief review of the concept shows that in pre-emptive successorship the younger generation learn how to be the elder generation by pre-empting the elders’ claims to pass on knowledge with the counter-claim that they have learned the skills inadequately, just as I heard them say to me during my residence with

66 K. Sykes them. The Barok, the New Ireland language group studied by Wagner, say that the act of replicating a ritual, which is one and the same as celebrating a funeral, demonstrates simply that such traditions as these will never be seen again, and what stands now in their place is but a poor imitation. Such speech is both respectful deference and coyly pre-emptive. Such talk puts the nature of learning about beautiful memories of the past into the middle of the problem, and shows that the relationship to the elder generation is not severed, or lost, nor is it replaced and forgotten with the advent of the new (which they confess they have received from the their ancestors), nor does it carry ‘tradition’ as if traditional arts exist in a flow continuously from the past to the present. Instead, by highlighting skill-learning as a form of borrowing upon memory, central New Irelanders acknowledge that they can only borrow from their elders, and that is a poor form of imitation. Borrowing is a conscious means of transmission, which otherwise might be non-conscious. The borrowers remain aware of the provenience of their skill and do not fully claim these for themselves. I think this example of imitation as borrowing would interest Tarde for what it might suggest in support of his thesis. However, the repetition of these skills in intergenerational relationships does not naturalize transmission as socialization or learning quite as Tarde and Durkheim have argued, and it is not possible to call Malanggans ‘social facts’ in the Durkheimian sense of that term. Borrowing is a form of imitation, an appropriation or an assimilation of the skills or goods of another as if they were ones own; however, skills are learned by doing what appears natural to create the same effect; this is what might be called direct knowledge. To conclude, the work of borrowing is imitation, but it is imitation as serious play in the work of conscious transmission. It is through analysing borrowing from their ancestors that I intend to show in the next section that the work of creative appropriation and economic innovation exist in tandem with each other, and are complementary forms of imitation when considered as borrowings.

2 Imitation as borrowing while learning ritual skills

 

‘This is Tree that Grows in the Shadow of the Tree from which We Make Canoes’ The work of making a Malanggan, in this example a luwara-lengkobus Malanggan, is hard to learn. This is largely because the teacher, an authority in the ritual arts, must be convinced of the worth of showing the student, who wishes to receive the skills for himself. I have direct experience of Malanggan making, which is different from learning indirectly from interviews with the experts, who will tell you anything. The luwara-lengkobus is made from a tree that grows in the shadow of the tree from which craftsmen make canoes. I did not know the name of the tree for a very long time, and I was given only the nature of the relationship between the trees in response to my questions about its species and identity. Finally, however, I was given a long unusual name, which for three years I believed to be the name of the

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tree until a I was kindly told that the word was Barok rather than the arcane Mandak I believed it to be. For some months I thought the word was a species name, a kind of tree known in Barok, until its translation by a Barok speaker proved it to mean ‘the tree that grows in the shadow of the tree from which canoes are made’. So I was sent back to where I started. All this makes sense with reference to the Malanggan sculpture and its uses in the funeral. In the pre-Christian era, the canoe had been used for burials at sea, carrying the corpse away from the village with a Malanggan carving on board, or gracing its prow. The three entities, the canoe, the corpse and the Malanggan carving, are thought to comprise the person in total and could be seen best as they were sent out to sea and away from the village. The body is just a corpse, the canoe is the shadow of the body and follows its movements, and the carving is the loroxan, or the will that grows in the shadow of the body. Three entities also comprise a Malanggan: the body is the wood, the paint is the shadow that follows it, and the after image captured in the mind’s eye upon viewing all this is the loroxan (the spirit/will). Like the body, which is a corpse without shadow or loroxan, the Malanggan is merely cut wood without paint or without memory of the beauty of its display. The Malanggan carver is only a chopper of wood and has no skills to animate his sculpture as a funeral art, let alone give it the life that many a Pygmalion hoped to do. Many anthropologists find that a word that is borrowed from the Barok presents problems to their understanding of its uses amongst the Mandak, but only if they take its provenance and origin as determinant of its meaning.9 The difficulty in privileging the Barok as owners of the meaning of the word is this: the Barok do not make Malanggans and do not claim to possess the arts. They do, however, upend trees to display shell wealth on the tree-roots as if the necklaces and armbands were fruit or leaves on branches. Amongst the many things that the Barok say about their own funeral arts is their claim that visual displays are meant to turn the world upside down and make participants see things in ways that they have never seen them before that event. And their more difficult claim is this: although the Barok do not make Malanggans, they do complete the conceptual work of Malanggan displays, which is to say they understand the model of the Malanggan very well, although they do not make its material form. They think this is a practical joke that they have ‘played’ on other New Irelanders who are very serious about their work, but that is the point. The Barok are renowned for playing outrageous practical jokes on each other, on visitors and especially on those guests who are speakers of different languages. These are everyday joking practices, which the Barok carry one step further when they turn to ritual. (As you might guess, this does not make Barok villages popular destinations for some visitors. Often, I returned to the Mandak villages from Barok country too gladly, and told them I was happy to be back. They said they also felt that way when they left the Barok.) If funeral ritual is meant to be imitative of ancestral traditions, then the Barok showed the Mandak that the Malanggan ritual is a huge practical joke on the living. The tree that grows in the shadow of the tree used for canoe-making is a model for Malanggan borrowed from people who do not make them. If an anthropologist can suffer a practical joke, in

68 K. Sykes the same way that the Mandak do at the hands of the Barok, then let us say that the Barok word reminded the Mandak that the fabrication of a Malanggan entails conceptual borrowing, rather than imitation. An entirely different story opens to anthropological analysis when borrowing is understood to be a form of imitation. Here I can tell you about the several processes by which the Malanggan is made, and the borrowings that enable the fabrication. I now turn to the creative processes of Malanggan making, outlining them in three sequences. The rest of this chapter describes the making of a funerary sculpture for a son of an elderly man in central New Ireland.10 This sculpture is a lengkobus, one of the luwara known to anthropologists, art historians, and curators of ethnology collections in national as well as university anthropological museums around the world.11 So let us ask about borrowing rather than imitating such forms, by examining how the beautiful memory is valued by affirming the loan of it, even in the creative process of making the sculptures. It also shows that an approach that examines borrowing as a social process might redirect anthropological attention to the kinds of questions that anthropologists might ask about what it means to be human, by considering the sorts of inquiries that New Irelanders ask about what is a life, and thereby illuminate some of Tarde’s concerns.

3 Creativity as serious play in making ‘knots’ in the sequence of technical operations

 

In the course of making the lengkobus-luwara Malanggan with those elderly men who agreed to help me, I learned that the makers of lengkobus-luwara work against the possibility of failure by borrowing techniques. Each link of the chain that makes up the sequence of operations in the creation of a Malangan is borrowed, and still follows upon the previous links in the chain. To take an example of how life is a composite of borrowed social techniques, or the skilled practices which people share, Ingold (2007) looks into the minute acts of cutting wood. He shows that the process of cutting a straight line through a plank might show us that the failure of the relations of conceptual and material form is contingent on human error, but that makes all human creativity into a dangerous mistake that could result in splinters, breaks and useless blocks of wood. He argues that it is the process that is most interesting in understanding the creative work of a life, not simply its openness to the world. The failure to make a straight cut is less a problem of not being able to cut straight, and more a problem of a failure to make the human adjustments of the imagination to enable the straight line to emerge in the process of cutting it. Using saw and wood, he can show that cutting across a board in a straight line requires a series of minute calculations that ensures he can follow the imaginary form of a straight line there.12 Ingold, in these contemplations on technique, might be inspired by Mauss and those like Leroi-Gourhan who follow him. For Leroi-Gourhan, like those working after Mauss, artistic technique is less a tool, or a social effect, than it is a programme that releases memory, without literalizing it as linear text. Reflecting upon this, Derrida tells us that ‘Leroi-Gourhan recalls the unity, within the mythogram, of all the elements of which linear writing marks the disruption,

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the technics (particularly graphics), art, religion, economy. To recover access to this unity, to this other structure of unity, we must desediment “four thousand years of linear writing”.’ (Derrida 1974: 86). The experience of making a rope Malanggan, with all its jokes about the processes, glitches in social arrangements, or knots and muddles in techniques, made the ‘chain of operations’ less a sequence of transmissions, and more of a tangle of borrowings. Yet, these tangles in the techniques, these borrowings between participants, were a source of instability, and of creativity. The makers were careful to acknowledge their borrowings from each other or from their ancestors, and this made for twisted complex practices of knowledge transmission when they became anxious about their failure to imitate carefully or to borrow respectfully. Much of the published work on Malanggan-making concerns itself with carving, rather than knotting as a construction technique. Although Kuechler (1999) has likened the form of carved sculptures to knots that bind memory, it is helpful to take some time to examine the process of making knots if we want to understand the very nature of creativity as imitation (as Tarde would have us do in the rethinking of political economy through the lens of economic psychology). Whereas Ingold’s meditations, which I noted in the previous paragraph, on cutting wood (with a saw) are helpful for redirecting our attention to the process of sawing in a straight line, I think that my less common experience of sculpting a Malanggan by knotting ropes spun from a decayed tree leads to a fuller understanding of imitation as a kind of borrowing. The examination of these processes helps to show the nature of imitation in innovation, and of the failure to imitate in relationship to that. Although the technology of its construction is laborious, it is surprising that the knotted Malanggan is rarely kept. I think this is largely due to the fact that it is already visible everywhere and all around the makers. It is life itself and underlines the serious nature of the play that goes into making it. In what follows I describe three sequences of techniques, each one emphasizing a different column in the register of ethnographic understanding: the eidos, or the concentration of image and idea in the material product; the ethos, which is bound up in the display of how social processes attune both aesthetic and social relations; and the social, which is visible at the point of the dispersal of the relation (which are the very forms of the eidos.) 3.1 Concentration A Trees into white rope The lengkobus-luwara Malanggan is fabricated almost exclusively on the Lelet, but its work begins out of view of the plateau villages, on a sheltered sunny beach on the east coast. There grow two kinds of trees: one that is used for making canoes (which in coastal villages had been used both for practical purposes and for burying the dead at sea), and the one that usually grows alongside it. The tree is debarked, carried to the beach, and lashed firmly in place at the water’s edge in a place to capture the light. After three weeks or three months, depending upon the season

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and the tree’s qualities of density, the tree is taken from the water and left to dry. We were fortunate this time, and after a month it was ready and the soft fibrous wood could be pulled from the trunk and hand-spun into long ropes. I travelled several times with men who were watching over this project while the trees rotted in the water. Later we convened there to make ropes from the trees. The ropes were made on the coast, while sitting on the beach in the shade and while catching a pleasant sea breeze. Sometimes the rope-making was helped by coconut milk, both as beverage for the men working and as a lubricant for the spinning of the wood fibre. Turning trees into ropes is delicate work requiring a touch that does not break the fibres too short, yet manages to extract lengths of wood that are adequate for use in making strings. During these days I learned about the ways of burial in the past. These burial practices focused on substantive changes in the corpse, the stages of decomposition, marking a need for a new ritual process to be completed at each stage. These stages were 1, the cessation of breath; 2, the rotting of the flesh; 3, the burial or reburial of the bones; 4, the dispersal of the life force (Mandak: loroxan). I did not see the cutting of the tree, but the transformation of the tree trunk into rope could be understood as an idiom for second stage rotting of the flesh and the extraction of the white dry bones from the corpse. Given that bodies were analysed as composites of mother’s matrilineage (flesh) and father’s matrilineage (skeleton), this work of turning soft decaying wood fibre into ropes made me wonder if the ropes were like bones, or not. Here, the making of rope, which entails drying out a living tree in order to reconstruct it as a supple rope, is underlined by the possibility of the image of a past mortuary practice: the separation of bones and flesh for final burial. These were convivial times, and the work began easily enough because the Lelet men enjoyed time on the coast. They said the cool winds from the sea stirred them to sing ancient tunes. Some of the songs made them feel sad, and they fell silent from time to time to experience that sadness more fully. After a few days, men began to suffer coughs and watering eyes. They flagged at the work, and worried about their health. As lively and pleasant as the work had begun, they could not complete the ropes as easily as they had hoped. Two men went to seek cures for influenza from the nurse at the aid post. Another retreated to his own men’s house for a period of time near the fire. A fourth went to stay with his cousin in a house down the road. All worried that they should not finish the work of making ropes. They said that their bodies were coming apart like rotten wood. What was needed in order to rejuvenate the failing flesh of the elderly men’s bodies so that we could finish our work? We had come to the point of no return in the Malanggan construction. It was inappropriate to leave so much work incomplete, and at the same time it was clear that the Malanggan needed a maker. I found Lenari, an elderly man of the Solon clan, who knew the techniques for the construction of a rope Malanggan. He took over the production, explaining that while it was a cooperative effort, the rest needed to have one person as the lead, and that he would help to organize the work of the others. I had been told as much about four months earlier, and had made several failed efforts to meet with men

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who might take this leadership. Three had said yes, but soon relinquished the task, always for different reasons of business elsewhere. Lenari was different. As a clansman of Solon, he would be making the Malanggan near to the inspirited ground of his own clan near the hamlet Lemptanas on Lelet, where the Malanggan makers would congregate to turn rope into bodies. B Rope into skeletal bodies

 

Ropes were carried to the Lelet, ready for use in constructing large round discs from the fibres. Each man took three ropes, joined them together and wrapped the end around his large toe and the one adjacent to it. Each man plaited the ropes from this ‘hook’ (that was a foot), so that the ropes would ultimately lie very straight and be easier to work with for the construction of the body of the Malanggan. The increasing lengths were wrapped around the foot and each man aimed to make their rope seamless and knotless. They said the Malanggan would not turn out ‘good’ if they broke the flow of the work. It would cause problems for the rest of the work, to fail to create a continuous length of rope. As we continued to straighten the ropes into plaited ropes, the work seemed endless. It was never clear to me when we would have enough rope to do the work of Malanggan construction: that was a judgement left to Lenari, who led the work. We appropriated the front veranda of a new permanent style house, never used by the owners, and spent the day plaiting ropes there. In the evening, the group reconvened in the men’s house. I did not join them. There they dreamed disturbing dreams. In the morning they told me about them. This continued for three nights, until the dreaming finally stopped. I was not privy to their discussions of the events of the dreams, and they did not tell me of the process by which they made their decisions. They had dreamed of dead ancestors and seen their faces in those dreams. As Thomas, an elderly man who is the most senior of his clan said, ‘I saw all the big men of my clan, even the ones that had been dead long before the day I was born’. As with the others, the dreams warned the senior men of the possible disasters of the work and they discussed whether it was wise to continue the construction of the rattan discs. Strangely, each man’s dreams stretched back in time to recover images from his matrilineage, a long queue of men from one clan only. It was finally possible to construct the sculptures. First, each white wood fibre rope was flattened between two modern planks. In the past they would have split a tree trunk and pressed the rope between the smoothened flat surfaces, but now they took this short cut. The flattened ropes would be most useful for enabling the work. The disc was constructed of crossed over halves of wood, eight in all, which formed a star frame for the ropes, which they then wove through the eight bones of the body of the Malanggan. They wound the ropes in concentric circles, forming a large disc that stood to my shoulder. The weavers aimed to be continuous, as they did not want to knot the ropes and break the flow of the ropes around the disc.

72 K. Sykes 3.2 Display A Bodies animated with ‘eyes’ In the centre of the large disc, there is an open hole large enough for a man’s head to protrude. Sometimes it is filled with a man’s head, sometimes with a wood carving – such as a pig’s head – from the expert repartee of the maker. Sometimes it is made of wood fibre rope itself. The effect of placing the eye in the Malanggan is overwhelming. As with the placing of the eye of the woodcarving, the eye of the woven carving can overwhelm the specialist maker. He is challenged to see himself in the placement of the eye, a pupil and iris unfolding from an open space. B Bodies animated with paint

 

The last work of making a Malanggan is painting it. The paint must glow in the sunlight and have a lustre that catches the eye of the viewer. This is accomplished with magic, but also with a combination of ground seashell and the crushed sap or juice from tree fruits and bush leaves. Colours are applied with a brush made of coconut husk, and the work will be most successful when the final surface is as flat and ridgeless as possible. The paint is most like paste, and it fills porous surfaces until we create a smooth surface on the disc. While preparing the Malanggan, I learned something new. The power of the visual memory on the landscape accounted for difficulties in assembling men and women to create a Malanggan. I shouted too loudly at a group of men passing by on the pathway to the next village, using a local idiom, ‘the men from Lavatkana just keep on advancing’, often used to express appreciation for their renowned tenacity. At the moment they appeared, they had come from a day of house-building near the aid post, and displayed their tenacity now in their community service. I have discussed elsewhere how the men of the contemporary Lavatakana village carefully choose never to walk towards Lempatnas along the same paths as they took in battle a century and a half ago (when they advanced with the intention to murder all of the hamlet’s residents). In present times, they never repeat the same advance towards the Lempatnas hamlet because to do that would be to model the image retained in memory of the massacre and encapsulated in the idiom describing how they walked with tenacity for the purpose of making war. The idiom recalled that history of massacre, in which the tenacity succeeded in eliminating an entire clan, the same clan who could claim a history of relationship to the same Malanggan being made that month at the hamlet. The men from Lavatkana were ashamed at reference to the history of their leadership of massacre. This is an example of one way in which people shared their mutual vulnerabilities, and the ways in which I became embroiled in them.

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3.3 Dispersal A Bodies into memories

 

The songs of the knot Malanggan speaks from the experience of loneliness and lack of connection. (Consider, too, that this Malanggan is made appositely of rope, plaited and bound into a circular disc as if to emphasize how people are bound in relationships as a way of making the viewers imagine how life might be unwoven.) The Malanggan’s song underlines that human corporeal life is an ephemeral experience against the prospects of a non-corporeal eternity. The song is short and its tune is fleeting in memory, just as is life. The lyrics of the knotted Malanggan song are brief: ‘Why did you leave me here all alone, weeping; I enjoyed your body for too brief a time compared with this eternity without you.’ When this song is sung, some women will hear it from a distance. Some will weep, some will mourn. The poetry evokes a response that draws from their common experience of death as the loss of the body, and their particular experience of the loss of kin. Some will speak of their long dead relatives, of whom they do not speak often in the course of everyday life because the social effects of the work of those dead has been completed at last. Kraemer has written that Malanggan images return in dreams. A viewer of the knotted rope Malanggan should appreciate the images over the material forms, just as the viewer of the carving does. However, viewers of the knotted Malanggan must understand the play of ethics and aesthetics. The surface of the knotted Malanggan is painted with red, white, black and yellow paints mixed with powered seashell, which makes a glistening surface to reflect sunlight. The hues are vivid and said to be body colours, not symbols of these. They evoke rather than represent, and hold a place in the life of funeral goers well after the funeral. The viewer who sees the igumes of Malanggan captures an image on the back of their eye. The viewer retains the image after closing the eye; it can be viewed privately on the closed eyelid. What matters here is that the image of the Malanggan can be viewed on the back of the eyelid. The image reverses the colours of the Malanggan as it is viewed, so that what is painted black now glows as bright white light; and the red appears green. The experience of viewing a knotted Malanggan, painted with such glistening paint, underlines a problem central to Malanggans’ importance, namely a person learns about the beauty of seeing a Malanggan, and at the same time learns how to regard it. It is a central issue in the creation of Malanggan, that it is to be enjoyed in the course of a life and not deferred to its end.

4 Imitation as borrowing and creativity as serious play: a summary of the operational sequences The ethnography of Malanggan-making shows how the economic psychology of ‘imitation’ is complemented by the social process of borrowing skills. In the case described here, the makers of rope Malanggans remain much attuned to each other’s well-being, and indirectly care for their own because they know it is the only way to make ‘a life’s work’. Each of the sequences of technical operations,

74 K. Sykes concentration, display and dispersal were recorded here as a story of interruption and near failure. To summarize: Concentration: In the making of the rope from the rotting wood, they saw the permeability and the decomposition of their own bodies. In the making of the Malanggan sculpture from ropes, the makers saw the line of continuity of faces from the dead ancestors of their own clan. They acknowledged their borrowings from their ancestors, and discussed the limits of those borrowings. Display: In the painting of the Malanggan, the makers saw the ghosts of the dead warriors who had murdered their own clansmen and so were reminded that meeting death is a part of living, but one that can be managed with dignity. They acknowledged that those who loaned them a place to build a display of Malanggan risked confrontation with the memory of a massacre, and they attuned their actions respectfully to that. Dispersal: In viewing the complete Malanggan in daylight, the makers saw the disc as an after image, while behind the Malanggan a voice sang weakly of its life as a living body, and of the loss of that life. The after image is all that remains of the tree that grows in the shadow of the tree for canoe-making. It might represent the will, or even imitate it as it possesses the imagination of the viewers, and drives the person to see that Malanggan again. It is the after image that moves people to want to make the Malanggan, to really see it one more time and, in so doing, people in New Ireland generate a new sculptural display at another funeral feast.

 

There is a practical joke in all of this which the reader might not yet fully realize, but which I must point out before I turn to my conclusions (which summarize the point of it all). It is this: the after image that moves the Mandak to generate a new Malanggan carving emerges from a model borrowed from other people, the Barok. If it represents the will, or if it imitates the will, then the will that possesses the Mandak is borrowed from the Barok: it is not possessed by them as persons. Perhaps we could say that the Mandak are possessed by the Barok will. But there is one more turn of the joke yet. The model, and its teachings about the will, are borrowed from people who do not make Malanggans and thus cannot possess their neighbours’ imaginations with the products of their own. What is the point of possessing the disembodied will of another people, what some would have called their ‘genius’. This odd question is simply a particular expression of a more conventional concern, which I introduced at the beginning of this chapter. How are the products of the intellect valued in relation to the products of the labours of the body. Morturary ceremonies, where participants concern themselves with the relationship of the corporeal and non-corporeal person are a good context for considering this question. It is the same question as that of the eulogists, of the mourners, and all those left to grieve the loss of a body. How can a life, the body and the intellect, be valued?

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Post–text/after image: the pidik (the point) of it all We Live on Borrowed Time.

 

Common to all considerations of death is the matter of human awareness that death will happen some day, and so, people value chances to live creatively. What is not known about death is when and how it will come. At the point in life at which a person meets death, they might not be able to weigh up the long chain of lived processes that composed their lifetime. This is because life is lived without the certainty that a meeting with death will occur on this specific occasion. This basic uncertainty about the timing of death predisposes people to live a particular kind of life; a life that is in anticipation of it as a certain fact, but a life that must be about more than the fact itself. It is observed that living a good life does not guarantee a long life, nor does living a wicked one ensure early death. It is the case that a person can find the value of life in triumphing over it, but that does not answer the question of how they might value specific relationships and live a good life. In this ethnography of borrowing as imitation I aimed to provide an insight into the value of a beautiful memory (a life). Here, borrowing is a social act in which the value of social relations must be explicit and discussed as a chain linking people to each other through things and to things. Value in this case is an example of the general theory advanced by Gregory (1997: 12) that value is an ‘invisible chain’ linking people to things and to relationships between people and things. Value links relationships to relationships, at least as strongly as these relationships link people to things. His theory sheds new light on anthropology’s specialist considerations about how to value social relationships (12–40) because value is defined as a form of consciousness of the invisible chains that describe and prescribe. What I have shown here is how his theory opens new questions, rather than answers old ones. Valuing social relationships, what anthropologists describe as a judgement of them, must be undertaken differently from valuing objects in the way political economy does, although relationships can be valued as if objects, because ‘fact and norm are parts of a dialectical unity mediated by value’. The value of social relation can be made conscious and even discussed with concern; but most often borrowing is discussed in good spirits, and in a kindly even playful manner because people joking with each other know that time is neither their own, nor has it been given to them by another. How different this anthropological approach to living on ‘borrowed time’ for understanding valuable relationships is from the post-structuralist philosopher’s claim that lives are valuable because we can contemplate what it means to lose them, as when lives are ‘given to death’ (or ‘put to death’ as Derrida better explains the English translation of the French idiom he invokes), as Derrida (1995) once told us in his curious use of Levinas to critique Mauss’s discussion of reciprocity.13 Instead of making life into an object to be known at the moment of its loss, anthropologists have a chance to examine the processes by which people chose to live their lives, and the ways they compose the lives they share as they meet their obligations to each other. That is a project that really would take anthropologists

76 K. Sykes into the eidos, ethics and sociology of how a life is conceived, given and valued. In this chapter I have explored the creative work of valuing social relations by discussing imitation as borrowing and creativity as serious play. In order to explore how people value social relationships, I discussed my own ethnographic example of making the rope Malanggan, as I helped to fabricate it with a group of elderly men from the Lelet Plateau in central New Ireland in 1999–2000. I learned with them that it was quite right to say that the successful outcome of completing and displaying a Malanggan always remains uncertain, but that it is the case that a sculptor can claim correctly that the Malanggan will be made one day. A rumour that some carver will present one at a funeral feast can never be fulfilled with surety at this time. It may remain a rumour and the best intentions shamed by the failure to display a finished sculpture. It may be simple speculation about the possibility that the hosts of a funeral would display a Malanggan, even when never intending to do so. The value of the relationships can be weighed in the moment as people borrow on each other’s skills and capacities, even as they know that they might not be able to complete their work of living well with each other. They know that Malanggans are composed of series of technical operations, and making one reminds them that life is a process of composing life itself. Making a Malanggan with these men was both a grave and a hilarious experience, a period of serious play in our mutual understandings and misunderstandings about the value of the social relationships that make up a life, the value of a life, and the value of the memory of how that life was lived.

Notes

 

1 This chapter was presented as a paper in Verona, Italy, at the conference of the European Society for Oceanists, 8–10 July 2008, in a panel honouring the work of Roy Wagner as a principal ethnographer of Melanesia. This chapter and its critique of Durkheimian sociology is dedicated to him. 2 If this sounds all too familiar to readers who are also scholars of the Malanggan ritual, then it is also likely that they would baulk at both of Tarde’s assumptions about the will and creative genius. 3 The triad is borrowed from Latour, who names these as the suitable settlements embraced by the super-discipline of Actor-Network Theory. 4 The example of the case of the funeral arts puts the question ‘how should social scientists value life processes’ on the table for discussion by anthropologists. There is discomfort in confronting the loss of the substantive or corporeal human. In some songs ‘the beautiful corpse’ is replaced with the words ‘beautiful memory’, as if it were a euphemism for a life. It betrays a complex popular doctrine to be considered in this, as my epigraph to this section suggests. Life is celebrated with sadness as a beautiful memory. The quantitative measure of its duration (die young) is doubted by reference to its quality (live hard). It shows us that the problem is less; that Tarde separates the intellect from the material for the sake of temporary analytic clarity, but that he thinks that material wealth can somehow be exchanged only as economic value and that it can be free from any moral valuation. 5 Barry and Thrift (2007) have discussed this in greater length than I allow it here. My aim is different from theirs because I seek to unpack imitation ethnographically in order to understand how we can better discuss the value of a beautiful memory in social relationships.

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6 I borrow this ‘correction’ from Mauss (2006: 30ff) whose annoyance with Tarde’s own borrowings is registered in the words, ‘Borrowing is shown all through Tarde, indeed it is borrowing one page after another’. What I wish to show by the end of this chapter is that Tarde’s essay on economic psychology is less inspired by classical theories of economy, and borrows rather heavily on Mauss, whose major point on the ‘economy’ of exchange is precisely this, that reciprocity is not simply economic exchanges of equivalent things; the obligation to reciprocate implicates the economy with moral and ideational concerns. Without discussing it at length, those who know Mauss’s book The Gift will recognize that it is with good reason that the Scandinavian edas stand as epigraph to it, emphasizing that giving and receiving is a way of valuing another person. 7 Elicitation is a central concept introduced by Wagner in his ethnography of the Barok to describe their creative acts that tease out, provoke or create specific responses in others. 8 My concept owes more to the insights of Leroi-Gourhan (1993), Mauss, in Schlanger (2006), and to Wagner (1986) than to Tarde or Durkheim. 9 See Gunn (1987) for a discussion of these concerns. 10 While this case seems a small ‘sample’, the work of mortuary sculpting is not often shared with ethnographers, and our best accounts are often based largely on interviews with expert Malanggan-makers, as the work of Kuchler (2002), Derlon (1997), Lewis (1969), and Brouwer (1977) have shown. This absence of a record of Malanggan-making is a problem for the production of a vulnerable form, the luwara, which is said to be a human body. 11 Lengkobus means to be bound fast with rope. The lashing of the lengkobus is used in the longhouse construction of the Mandak of the Lelet, where an intricate system of ropes and trees make a very warm secure dark house, with the distinctive feature of a moveable ridge pole, that nestles in the meeting of the round timbers at the apex of the house. The lashing at each increase in the height of the house wall is named for their habitual uses in the final house; for example, the lowest is named the rat-run, whereas the highest is named the tobacco row, because this is where fresh leaves hang to dry in the smoky upper area. The longhouse has one low door only, and people enter or leave by the same way, bending their heads low as they come into the home of their hosts. It is respectful to enter the longhouse by extending the bared back of the neck to the hosts. Showing deference upon entering the home is more than a manner of etiquette. It is this expression of vulnerability that makes ethical conduct in the household possible. Luwara does not translate but is demonstrated in various examples as the doorway to the house, the pupil of the eye, the centre of a whirlpool, and the backwards curl of the water at the canoe prow. In many respects the luwara appears to be similar to another Malanggan found in northern New Ireland, the kap kap that is worn around the neck by adolescents. I believe they could have shown me more examples of the places in the world or on the body that are permeable. The examples showed me that the form of the luwara-lengkobus Malanggan is unstable. 12 The influences of Mauss’s theory of technique are notable here. 13 And like Schlanger (2006) and Lemonier (1992), who all build on Mauss’s study of technique, Ingold shows that vulnerability in relations between conceptual and material form is always specific to the sensual and personal experience, which is tacit and not explicit. We know more than we can tell and a reworking of the understanding of what a life is might well open up that part of experience to the anthropological examination. Like Ingold, I propose that pursuing this line of enquiry aids anthropologists in understanding how objects such as Malanggan remain meaningful, without insisting on interpretation of them as representations of other objects, or of social processes. 14 Even more curious when compared with his earlier discussion of Mauss’s student, Leroi-Gourhan in Of Grammatology (1974).

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Barry, A. and N. Thrift (2007), ‘Imitation, Invention and Economy’. Economy and Society, 36(4): 509–25. Bataille, G. (1991), Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin,W. (1969), ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. In Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books: 217–51. Buschmann, R. (1999), ‘The ethnographic frontier in German New Guinea 1870–1914’. PhD Dissertation, University of Hawaii. Breton, A. (1972), The Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986), Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of Califorina Press. Brouwer, E. (1977), ‘A Malanggan to Cover the Grave’. PhD dissertation, Australian National University. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986), Writing Culture, Berkeley: University of Califorina Press. Coote, J. and Shelton, A. (1992), Art, Anthropology and Aesthetics. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. Derlon, B. (1997), Memoire et oublie. Paris: CNRS. Derrida, J. (1995), The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1974), ‘Science and the Nature of Man’. In Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 81–7 Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books. ——. (1984), Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, H. (2004), The Life of a Balanese Temple. Honolulu: University of Hawaii. Gell, A. (1998), Art and Agency. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. Gregory, C. A. (1997), Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. London: Harwood Academic Publishers. Gunn, M. (1987), An Assemblage of Spirits: Idea and Image in New Ireland, L. Lincoln (ed.), New York: G. Braziller, in association with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gunn, M. and P. Peltier (2006), New Ireland: Art of the South Pacific. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly. Hirsch, E. (ed.) (1999), Art and Anthropology: The Anthropology of Alfred Gell. London: UCL Press. Ingold, T. (2007), Lines: A Brief History. New York and London: Routledge. Jeudy-Ballini, M. (1999), ‘The Price of Emotion’, Pacific Arts, 13: 23–37. Kramer, A. (1925), Malanggan von Tombara. Munich: George Mueller. Kuechler, S. (1999), ‘Binding in the Pacific: Between Loops and Knots’. Oceania, 69(3): 145–57. Kuchler, S. (2002), Malanggan. Oxford: Berg. Lemonnier, P. (1992), Elements for an Anthropology of Technology. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Layton, B. (2003), ‘Art and agency: a reassessment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(3): 447–64. Lewis, P. (1969), The Social Contexts of Art in New Ireland. Field Museum of Chicago Chicago: Fieldiana: volume 58.

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Lincoln, L. (ed.) (1987), An Assemblage of Spirits: Idea and Image in New Ireland. New York: G. Braziller, in association with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mauss, M. (1990), The Gift. London: Routledge. Mauss, M. (2006), ‘The Nation’. In N. Slanger (ed.), Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization. Oxford: Berghahn, 40–8. McLuhan, M. (1951; repr. 2003), The Mechanical Bride. Toronto: Viking Press. Owen, C. (dir.) (1979), Malanggan Labadama: A Tribute to Buk Buk. Pinney, C. and Thomas, N. (2001), Beyond Aesthetics. Oxford: Berg. Schlanger, N. (ed.) (2006), Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization. Oxford: Berghahn. Strathern, M. (1988), The Gender of the Gift. California: University of California Press. Strathern, M. (1990), ‘Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images’. In J. Siikala (ed.), Culture and History in the Pacific. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 25–44. Strathern, M. (2001), ‘The Patent and the Malanggan’. In Beyond Aesthetics, C. Pinney and N. Thomas (eds). Oxford: Berg. Tarde, G. (2007), ‘Economic Psychology’, trans. A. Toscano. In Economy and Society, 36(4): 614–43. Tuzin, D. (2002), ‘Art, Ritual and the Crafting of Illusion: A Memorial to Anthony’. Forge: Canberra Anthropology, 3(1): 1–27. Viveros de Castro, E. (2003), And. ASA Address Manchester: Manchester Papers in Anthropology. Wagner, R. (1975), The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, R. (1986), Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, R. (2002), The Anthropology of the Subject. Berkeley: University of California Press.

5

Tarde and Durkheim and the non-sociological ground of sociology David Toews

 

In his Laws of Imitation (1903: 76), Tarde asserts that the “social man” is a somnambulists. The somnambulists sees a version of reality purged of extraneous sensory input as if through a window within the framework of which s/he is interactive and only narrowly sociable – this could be likened to participation in one of today’s online virtual worlds, or perhaps to a false consciousness created by a capitalist culture industry. With an emphasis on this point, Toscano has recently argued that Tarde’s thought, contrary to my interpretation that it aims at liberating the theory of social differentiation from the implicit control of models based on moral solidarity, rather supports a kind of controlling, pacifying rationalization. Indeed, we should push further to find ways to translate Tardean “somnambulism” into the idiom of today’s cultural studies in terms of a cultural or ideological framework. With this aim in mind, in this chapter, rather than argue to the contrary that Tarde intended to describe subjects that are more sociable than has been envisioned in such an interpretation of his thought, I argue that Tarde is indeed a thinker of unsociability. However, my assertion will be that the meaning of unsociability in Tarde’s work has an agentic resonance connected with a philosophical and social-ontological significance that is much deeper than a lack of normal sociability, or some kind of docility, to which the theme of somnambulism seems reducible. Just as the new Tardean reception up to this point has largely begged the question of the changing nature of social and cultural facts, at a more basic level Tarde’s charge that we are somnambulists begs the question of the source of the social meanings of interactions and institutions. This is why we are still at an important early stage in the revival of Tarde’s work in which Tarde must be read in relation to Durkheim, in terms of the context of their social-ontological rivalry. From the Tardean perspective, Durkheim’s social and cultural facts are grounded in a theoretical framework in which resemblances play a role that slides too conveniently between epistemology and normativity. Contemporary Durkheimians like Alexander still see hope in his social ontology, claiming that we can always “recognize the authenticity of others,” as long as “we see them as somehow like ourselves, as members of something larger than we are ourselves, as part of a common humanity” (Alexander 1995: 4). From the Tardean perspective, this kind of reliance on relative perceptions of social resemblances as a way of locating social hope has always rested on a poor understanding of the nature of resemblances

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and their role in science (Toews 2003). I have argued that resemblance is important for Tarde, but for him difference is the primordial fact of the social from the point of view of scientific method and epistemology (ibid.). However, I am lately coming to realize that this is only part of the story. This is only a view of order from the point of view of difference. Science studies “the regular succession of repetitions, struggles, and harmonies in the universe – in other words, the regular side,” but it is also possible to turn the other direction and analyse “those relating to the more uncouth aspect of the universe, which art delights continually to seize and reproduce, and which satisfy (as it would seem) an eternal craving for diversity, picturesqueness, and disorder” (Tarde 1974: 212; italics mine). Somnambulism signifies order, regularity in social life, the “dogmatic slumber” (Tarde 1903: 82). Sociology has often turned in this direction to study social regularities. However, according to Tarde, difference percolates through this regularity and escapes in two forms: in terms of “those who are really unsociable” and who “strongly rebel against assimilation” (86), and in terms of the “super-social” or hyper-sociable innovators who “awake” from their slumber and who “must escape, for the time being, from [their] social surroundings” (88). What is intriguing here is that the unsociable and the hyper-sociable are located on a continuum of forms of difference which are non-sociological and hostile to normal social forms and yet nevertheless remain for Tarde highly significant for explaining social dynamics. More broadly, following through this line of thought has led me to the supposition that the Tardean metaphysics of difference is located, in terms of the raw, experiential dimension of life, within cultural frames – that is, life “that art delights to seize and reproduce” – that involve high levels of activity and yet are not sociable in the traditional sociological sense. Sociology seems to have neglected this ontological possibility of “uncouthness,” preferring to measure the latter as a deviance from social norms. My thesis in this chapter, then, is that we can discern in this problematic of the social experience of difference a long-neglected question concerning the ontological dimensions of unsociability. I want to explore the extent to which unsociability can be related to a fundamental diversity – an experience of difference – haunting and underlying the integrative and regulative effects of sociability. To me, rereading Durkheim and Tarde, taking Tarde’s thought seriously has come to mean posing the question: what is this profound unsociability – this “uncouth aspect of the universe” – upon which the repetition of the social seems to depend? Has there always been a role for unsociability in framing sociability? The approach I am suggesting, in order to do justice to Tarde, is that we put the play of their debate onto a new plateau. This new plateau opens a new vista onto what kind of work we as sociological theorists expect “the social” to perform, and the kinds of materials we expect it to perform its supposed magic upon. Those materials, those resources, will in some sense have to be as bound up in unsociability as in sociability. Durkheim’s presumption that “in reality, as far as one can go back in history, the fact of association is the most obligatory of all, because it is the origin of all other obligations” effectively works to avoid problematizing the sociability of association because he marshalls these purely logical speculations in order to conclude that “all that is obligatory has its origins outside the individual”

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(Durkheim 1982: 130). Why should one discuss the importance of unsociability for shaping notions of sociability if all associations are acts automatically arising from an a priori moral obligation to associate with each other? Such a premise leads to a view that denies any positivity to unsociable acts and unsocial sciences, a form of denial that stunts our understanding of human reality and prevents a thorough examination of the question of the foundations of sociology. At the same time, though, is there not here an opportunity to reread Durkheimian sociality symptomatically? Indeed, to me it often seems more unsociable than sociable, always involving “something larger than ourselves,” always articulated as centrally involving an obligation to associate with others, for example, in an impulse to the sacred. The Durkheimian subject is more often unsociable than sociable, or rather, there seems to be a necessary aspect of unsociability – an ultimate end in itself of the form of the social fact not always experienced but nevertheless inherent in social acts – haunting even the smallest sociable rituals that Durkheim describes. It is like a kind of disavowed unsociability. This unsociability at the heart of the Durkheimian social fact has a seductive quality. It is as if the disavowal of a necessary element of unsociability holds out a promise for acheiving the state of being a moral automaton, like the Tardean somnambulists, who, after all, can have fantastic dreams. Such a subject may very well excel in the technological context guiding and structuring today’s moral and informational complexities. The unsociability of a moral automaton or a somnambulists is often seen as unprincipled behavior, but I’m beginning to see this kind of attitude as simplistic, as an avoidance of the fundamental question concerning unsociability. As a preliminary step, then, it is important for a more positive analysis of unsociability to resist both this reduction of the unsociable to unprincipled behaviors that are formed simply as adaptations to constraints, as well as the temptation to dismiss or steer clear of unsociability by simplistically associating it with individualistic or egoistic behavior (a point to which I will return below). Just as cultural events of all kinds which involve interactive technology can no longer be plausibly seen as distractions from some deeper moral-social duty or telos, so the ontological status of unsociability also emerges as an intriguing new problem. In this chapter, in short, I am putting forward the claim that unsociability has yet to be taken seriously as an important, irreducible part of the conditions of modern societies and cultures, and I intend to explore some of the theoretical implications of this problem. Virtually all of Tarde’s major contemporaries lined up to show their prejudices against unsociability. The concepts of alienation, anomie, and disenchantment were all mobilized to provide counter-examples, exceptions to the rule of the so-called normal social system. Did the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber not depend and aggressively exploit, in some as yet unmeasured extent, a common but vague notion of unsociability? I am tempted to go so far as to say that Tardean thought, revived and taken to its logical conclusion, reveals that unsociability is the unexamined horizon of theory in the 20th-century mode. Tardean thought is itself unsociable – and probably has been forgotten for precisely this reason – as it rejects theories that want everything to do with the social to begin, a priori, with sociability, from a viewpoint that wants to explain engagement by

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reference to engaged acts. But we are only beginning to understand the full import of Tarde’s claim that this kind of viewpoint is tendentious and unscientific. I want to suggest, primarily, that the debate between Tarde and Durkheim is not so much a debate between two kinds of sociology as it is a philosophical debate about the relationship between non-sociological ways of thinking (modes of thought that do not discriminate between unsociable or sociable impulses) and properly sociological ways of thinking, a discussion that marks out a peculiarly positive yet “unsociable” role for philosophy in the process. My argument is that a reading of Tarde, in which we assume that he is not simply trying to undermine the reification of the social (a reading which I believe is not truly supported by the texts), but rather that he is aiming to reinvigorate sociology by taking seriously the notion that genuine sociability is in an important constant interplay with unsociability, ultimately means that his resistance to Durkheim should be interpreted as an attempt to liberate, or at least do justice to, the non-sociological ground of sociology. Tarde and Durkheim were both philosophers before they were sociologists. The fact is often overlooked, which bears repeating, that sociology as we know it today was invented from within philosophy by philosophers in order to deal with inescapable questions which until then had appeared as within the province of philosophy in the Western traditions of scholarship. All polemics surrounding sociology’s autonomy aside, Tarde and Durkheim each saw a continuity between philosophy and sociology, but in different ways that have different consequences for sociological theory and methods. A key argument I want to make is that, in order to fully grasp their different viewpoints on sociability and unsociability, we must first understand why they both took the approach that philosophical propositions are too passive and that they can and should be turned into active sociological research questions. We could perhaps begin with the proposition that the non-sociological ground of sociology is for these thinkers, indeed, quite simply, “philosophy” itself. However, such a proposition could be very misleading if we do not carefully outline the transformation of philosophy that is effected once it is submitted to the pressures of a new sociological approach. Philosophy, transformed by Tarde and Durkheim, retains its profoundly unsociable element (the element that annoyed Socrates’ interlocutors) and remains infused with uncertainty and skepticism. However, I would argue that these qualities of philosophy are, for Tarde and Durkheim, divorced from the practice of philosophy. They are divorced, for example, from the method of Socratic dialogue. Sociological theorizing could not stand such a method. One could say that, in a sense, Tarde and Durkheim strip away from philosophy the sense of a right to question, to relativize, everything. They transfer, as it were, this right to sociological theory. But sociological theory is critical, questioning, and relativistic only within the constraints of the project of theory construction and application, which is very different from the more open, free-wheeling exploration of skepticism by philosophical thinkers (Nietzsche comes to mind). This has indeed remained an important aspect of sociological theorizing to this day. Sociological theorists following Durkheim and Tarde certainly do not aim to eliminate questions

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or promote some kind of quietism, defeatism, or dogmatism. Rather, the theoretical project in sociology is meant to get to the kernel of necessity or need that drives each of philosophy’s interrogations. It is not a coincidence that, as philosophers, both Tarde and Durkheim granted privilege to the rationalist tradition. This is the tradition in Western philosophy that gives the most importance to the role of necessity. Necessity is a fundamental element of the concept of order which, once accepted by the thinker, makes order appear as something more “real” than something which merely suits immediate circumstances and situations. From rationalism in philosophy many sociologists inherited realism. On the basis of an appreciation of the role of necessity, both Tarde and Durkheim saw metaphysics as in harmony with science, and understood philosophy as speculative thought that is necessary to make a larger sense out of reality. Perhaps what best explains the stress on necessity in rationalism historically is that rationalism is centered around the doctrine of the reality of substance, or an essential nature underlying phenonema, as a criterion of unity. Continental rationalists, writing in a period of the birth of modern science, held that the highest purpose of human thought and action is to acknowledge our dependence on substance as a fundamental means of anchoring and organizing conflicting causal and conceptual claims. The notion of substance encouraged early scientists to believe they were doing something more by theorizing in as clear a manner as possible about causes of phenomena than just framing notions that describe the consistency of the effects of new investigative techniques. In this context, as it turns out, the notion that, at bottom, there exists a substance with the properties of causal independence and conceptual independence is mostly important for its implicit argument about what the methods and objects of science, ever undergoing change, cannot be. It inaugurated a distinction between metaphysical contemplation and scientific analysis of causes and concepts, and prepared the ground for Kantians to wedge these forms of thought firmly apart. Human reality since then has often appeared divided into idealist and materialist versions. Following in the wake of rationalism and Kant’s answer in his critical philosophy, Tarde and Durkheim can be described as post-rationalist thinkers. By post-rationalism I do not mean “postmodern,” but, rather, I am referring to a mode of thought that, while accepting the Kantian critical posture towards the doctrine of substance, nevertheless strains against Kant inasmuch as it harks back to the problem of the necessary unity of human reality. The problem of unity in human affairs is solved – it is a non-problem – if you accept the notion of substance. Classic notions of substance from the past have been the notions of the “I” as a rationally unified self and of “God” as a supreme creator. Concepts of substance such as these were seen by rationalists as innate ideas. The empiricists such as Hume famously rejected rationalism on the grounds of the fallacy of innate ideas. But the sociological intuition is that there is something more going on here than just an argument over the logical consistency of certain categories. Much of the interesting theoretical dynamics in the thought of post-rationalist social philosophers like Tarde and Durkheim is indeed created by the fact that, while the problem of unity remains and perhaps becomes more important than ever in their time, the

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solutions of substance such as these are seen as impossible and foreclosed. I want to suggest that a new kind of post-rationalist philosophy becomes, in their thinking, a vehicle for important elements of unsociability that cannot be permitted to inhabit their sociological theories, and thus becomes essential to internally supplement those theories. Long before Tarde and Durkheim came on the scene, these elements of unsociability were taken for granted in pre-modern ages in which speculative thought, contemplation, and meditation were not seen as unusual or eccentric or excessively idealistic practices. They were certainly permitted to unproblematically inhabit the rationalists’ philosophies of substance – for example, the “I” of Descartes clearly could operate only as withdrawn from social interaction and empirical reality. Generally, early European sociology began by noticing certain social qualities associated with different philosophical cultures – with the identification of what we often today call “epistemes.” The ground for this was prepared by the emerging notion, after Hegel, that one could read philosophies symptomatically – by means of what Weber called “verstehen” – as the most culturally manifest part – the “spirit” as Hegel called it – of the social psychology of the subject. Typically, much of the focus of this approach tends to be placed on the social and historical contingency of the individuality of this subject. Almost everyone tends to see sociology as in significant part a movement that denounces the collusion between the ideology of individuality and western philosophy. But I think the sociology of Tarde and Durkheim shows that there is a tendency to link philosophy with unsociability in a way that is by no means reducible to a critique of individuality (or a critique of subjectivity considered as the psychology of the individual). It is as if, once individuality is exhaustively critiqued, philosophy continues to play a role in their thought, indeed a central role, but a much more ambiguous one. I think, where philosophy is referenced in their texts, it tends to mark an irreducible and disjointed remainder of unsociability within the domain of the social. It is a non-sociological element essential to, while nonetheless curiously alien to, the theory of sociology. Durkheim certainly noted the difference between the relation between sociology and psychology on the one hand, and sociology and philosophy on the other. The former relation is squarely a problem of the relation (both Durkheim and Tarde argue, in different ways) of primacy that the social has to the psychological, or the behavior of the individual human mind. The relation to philosophy is distinct and much more ambiguous. It is clear, however, that philosophy was not meant to wither away as societies became more sociologically self-aware. As Durkheim put it, “metaphysical problems, even the boldest ones which have wracked the philosophers, must never be allowed to fall into oblivion, because this is unacceptable. Yet it is likewise undoubtedly the case that they are called upon to take on new forms” (Durkheim 1982: 237). Philosophy is meant “to perceive the unity of things,” in a manner that is “sufficiently limited to be encompassed by a single mind” (238). Thus, I would suggest that for Durkheim while an individual is required to do philosophy, philosophy is about the individual reaching out beyond him or herself “in relation to the totality of things” occupying “a sufficiently central position to provide the basis for speculative thought” (238). The

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task of the philosopher in the future – that is, once he appreciates, in post-Kantian manner, the collective nature and origin of human mental categories – will be to “extend” (239) sociology by providing an integration of social thought and a higher reflection on social unity (238; italics mine). Philosophy “extends” sociology, and one should note, in a contemplative abstract way, not in a way that stresses the messy everyday practice of communicative reason. At the same time, as is widely appreciated in sociology, Durkheim wished for “a sociology to be constructed which would see in the spirit of discipline the essential condition for all common life, while at the same time founding it on reason and truth” (Durkheim 1982: 144). We thus seem to have discovered a contradiction between Durkheim’s avowed interest in disciplinarity and in being a modernist and what I have claimed to be an important socially unifying role for speculative contemplation in his thought. However, this is no simple contradiction once one realizes that Durkheim is not situating the process of this (for him) important speculative meditation on unity in such a way that it could enable the philosophizing individual to escape from the constraint of the social. Rather, what Durkheim has said is that there is a role for philosophical speculation that is within the social and that is part of the practice of sociology while being nonetheless irreducible to (it “extends”) an explicit premise in sociological theory. I interpret this process as occuring when the social part, in this case “the individual,” reaches out to the whole and, as it were, is able to intellectually transcend his or her particularity. We could think of this as like a work of imagining the social totality. However, though I think this is a common way of understanding this moment of the individual negotiating the social, I think, in this case, it would be taking the interpretation too far as it would tend to loop back to the questions of the psychological workings of the social subject (in Durkhem’s case the subject of the moral obligation to associate with others) rather than truly do justice to the active effort of the movement of reaching out. I am tempted to go as far as asserting that theories of the social imaginary, inasmuch as they miss this step, could be said to mystify the workings of this process and perhaps even be said to function as the very disavowal of this active contemplative effort. Be that as it may, what I do want to assert as a fact is that speculative contemplation, while involving abstraction, still involves an active effort, a practice of sorts, despite its bad reputation in modern times as the very symbol of passivity. I think the only consistent interpretation of this Durkheimian sense of reaching out to the social whole in speculative contemplation, though one which Durkheim himself would probably deny, is that, paradoxically, it marks a fundamental practice of unsociability. This would be akin to the unsociability that results from practicing a duty ethics, following out an abstract terrain that the Durkheimian subject has to move through in order to gain its perspective, its compass, and its sense of order and social realism, but one which depends on its practice, its discipline. Now, interestingly, Tarde shares this sociological thrust of transcending the individual subject’s sense of self-ownership in order to gain a sense of social order. However, Tarde sees the task at hand not as an active imagining of unity that transcends the ego, but rather as a problematization of ontology on the part of

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he who owns his thoughts, is not afraid to analyse this ownership (his “I desire, I believe, thus I have”) rather than merely assuming it as an “innate idea,” and in doing so finds material-imitative social connections all over the place with others. As noted above, there are two typical modes of this activism, or activation, of the subject: the nomadic individual who refuses to assimilate, and the hyper-sociable innovator. However, both these modes involve an unsociable contemplation and an active practice, and together, as a continuum, they evince quite a different form of unsociability from that of Durkheim’s contemplative subject. While Durkheim’s sense of “reaching out” contains a pronounced sense of moving toward the abstract, Tarde’s problematization situates his (un)social subjects in the thick cultural dimension of social interactions. In this way, Tarde’s thought can transform rationalism into a situated, culturally materialist, non-teleological theory of society and culture. But what is most significant is that we have seen that active, creative sociological thought, as it passes through a necessary detour of non-sociological or “philosophical” reflection, forges or institutes distinct forms of unsociability. In contrast to Tarde, Durkheim makes clear in his chapter “Speculation and Practice” in Pragmatism and Sociology (1983) that he refuses the cultural-materialist position that reduces thought to having. At first it seems odd for a sociologist, but he tells us very clearly that he is in the tradition of those who reserve a place for the highest form of thought as pure speculative contemplation (Durkheim 1983: 78). Like Tarde, Durkheim differs from philosophical rationalists who are satisfied to simply deposit our ability to contemplate into concepts, i.e. the innate ideas of the self and God. Like Tarde, Durkheim proposes that we search for the sociological sources of our concepts of transcendence. It is thus natural for Durkheim to posit philosophy as an unsociable practice – a single mind reflecting on cosmic unity – that exceeds the proper practice of sociological method but which reaches out, as it were, as a supplementary gesture necessary for both initiating and completing it. Is not Tarde’s thought, also, essentially a “cosmic philosophy,” as F.H. Giddings once pointed out (Tarde 1903: v)? Are not the so-called laws of universal repetition, taken together with the modulations of adaptation and opposition outlined by Tarde, an ultimate formulation of metaphysical reality? Do Tarde’s metaphysical speculations not serve, in effect, to ground his own distinctive sociological method? And yet here we find a very simple but profound point of contrast with Durkheim, since for Tarde the history of human knowledge has progressed from discovering complex and confused resemblances and repetitions of the whole to [discovering] repetitions of the parts. These latter are more difficult to discover, but, once found, they prove to be more exact and elementary. … and while the grosser and more obvious distinctions of the mass dissolve under the searching glance of the scientific observer, their place is taken by others which are at once more subtle and more profound, and which multiply indefinitely, thus keeping pace with the uniformities among the elements. (Tarde 1903: 13; italics mine)

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Thus, uncannily, Tarde’s form of thought, considering just its timing and its location and not so much its content, occupies the position of philosophy that Durkheimian sociology calls for, as a thought that provides a needed supplementary reflection on the data mined by the sciences. However, when we unbracket its content, Tarde’s form of reflection, very differently, has to work against the satisfaction of the mind with its perceptions of unity in phenomena. In Tarde’s approach, social unity or integration, which is, according to Durkheim, the bedrock premise of any sociology, is always a reflection that is constantly undermined by the effort of a conscious form of non-sociological thought of the social – it is a waking up – that is, an analytics of the social that explicitly refuses to be constrained a priori by an assumption of the unity of the social. In contrast, Durkheim’s thought tends to prevent its own necessary unsociable moment from becoming conscious or self-aware, and hence from being consciously integrated into the sociable practices of his subjects. Unsociability is often confused with individuality, but this confusion must be resisted. Each of these thinkers places individuality or individual psychology into the context of the constraint of social structures and processes. But neither of them places the quality of unsociability exclusively into the same basket. In Tarde’s and Durkheim’s forms of thought, very different and often clashing though they are, nevertheless together reveal the measure in which unsociability is not to be reduced to the psychology of the individual. They reveal an unsociability that is proper to, though in a sense hidden by (though Tarde’s thought has less stake in hiding it), the forms of the social as illuminated by sociology. They thus push up against the very limits of sociology. This is where, for them, philosophy can still constructively enter the picture. It is the province of philosophy to do its work in the region of unsociability, but now in the capacity of a collective subject rather than an individual subject. For Durkheim the occasion is a reflection on unity, whereas for Tarde it is a reflection on difference. For both thinkers the guise of a necessary task of philosophical contemplation elevates a certain unsociability of the practice of theory to the status of an irreducible moment of necessity. For an analogy we could point out the highly unsociable but central and sanctified air that the moment of prayer occupied for medieval theologians and early rationalists. Prayer was an unsociable moment, necessary both to integrate theoretical dogma with everyday practice and to permit the reproduction of a desired kind of sociable mindset. One might counter that prayer is a thoroughly sociable act, meant precisely for connecting a person with a community of believers (see, e.g., Robbins in this book). It might also be countered that one has to recognize a wide variety of styles of prayer among various communities, some of which stress privacy and others a highly public confession. I would assert, with Simmel, that the term “sociability” should be reserved for relatively unstructured interactions with others that have spontaneity, joy, and celebration as a principle of good form. As such, sociability is an end in itself. The Kantian terms are appropriate since Simmel is concerned to isolate, by singling out sociability, “the pure, abstract play of form” of the social (Simmel 2004: 271). Sociability “in its pure form has no ulterior end, no content, and no result outside itself [and is] oriented completely about personalities” (271). Indeed, with these

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strict qualifications Simmel seems to be going out of his way to make it tough for us to find clear empirical examples of this sociability that has no other purposive or functional significance mixed in with it. But we sociologists are perhaps conditioned to begin with concepts of form and then to look for empirical content. If an unsociable-philosophical moment in the social is irreducible and is to be sought, then one ought to look instead for the conditions of possibility of the form as a concept invented to guide, or make sense of, action. Simmel is hinting with his comment that sociability in its pure form has no “ulterior end”, that it is futile to search for something such as the philosophical conditions of possibility of sociability. But he has not considered the aspect of those philosophical conditions as a practice. Moreover, Simmel would have to admit that empirically existing sociability never takes this pure form. What this means is that sociability is something that is never fully accomplished but is an empirical experience of striving for good social form. Simmel would like us to believe, in the Kantian manner, that the good social form is a teleological movement of a transcendental concept, an expression or coming into fullness of the pure form of the social, which is taken as an a priori category. But actors who are behaving in a sociable manner, if we accept Simmel’s portrait of social reality, cannot do so without a principle or regulative ideal of good form to guide their self-interpretations, their self-recognition as actors who have no ulterior motives. Sociability in ignorance of such a principle would quickly be recuperated by interests and interested behavior and would fall off the track of purity. I think that under certain, perhaps many, circumstances some actors are demonstrably under the sway of this conception of their sociability. Robbins in this volume describes Pentecostal religious believers who engage in rituals that emphasize spontaneity and ad hoc sociability; despite its spontaneity such behavior is precisely bounded by a principle of good form. The specter of bad form keeps the believers on track. But what if we proposed that instead of this specter of unprincipled sociability there could be an actuality of principled unsociability at the root of sociability? We would as a result have generated two distinct concepts of sociability. Or rather, we would have formulated a dynamics of sociability where in certain instances actors move from sociability towards order and in other instances from order to sociability. The question is: what is it that makes actors head in one direction or the other? What is the condition that must be present for a concern about good form to be operative in an actor’s disposition? I think it is essential to insist that there is no a priori formal symmetry between these two directions and two analytics of sociability. Rather, they are asymmetrical and there is a mobile interstice between them. What has inhabited the interstices between them are practices such as philosophical contemplation and prayer, which guide the actor in one direction or the other. What is really fundamental to the social as a conceptual formation is the unsociability of these practices in these interstices. It is probably absurd to speak of a pure unsociability as if it were a state to be attained, but in terms of this analysis one could say that unsociability in itself is the practical power of contemplation. An unprincipled unsociability would tend to dissolve contemplation and would appear as an arbitrary resignation from life.

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In contrast, experiences such as philosophical contemplation and prayer could in certain circumstances perhaps very well be described as a form of Tardean principled unsociability. Principled unsociability would involve a suspension of the pursuit of good form for the sake of an inventiveness or creativity that can mark a fundamental difference in life. Practices of principled unsociability would use sociability to undermine – to deconstruct if you will – the sense of good form. Against Simmel, then, I would suggest that there is an ulterior end of what he calls sociability, though I would agree with him that we should indeed rule out an ulterior end if it is deposited in an alternate form (e.g., purposive or functional action). It is in this sense, then, that I earlier noted that Durkheim’s concept of social action seems paradoxically unsociable. Durkheim recognizes a role for philosophical contemplation but disavows the unsociable implications of that role. His sociology, and his theory of collective effervescence in particular, is premissed on the symmetry between the interior experience of the individual and the external social fact. But philosophical contemplation is not reducible to such an interior experience of the individual, as it has no correlate in an external social fact. Tarde once commented that “those efforts of genius on the part of philosophers … will end one day by bringing about the recognition of every individual’s right to spread his own particular faith” (Tarde 1903: 373). On the surface, this appears like a vulgar endorsement of the individualist ideology of “philosophical genius.” However, it is virtually the opposite, as, when we place it in theoretical context, “every individual” represents a unique social potentiality. That is also to confirm, as postmodern theorists have noted, that social ideals and narratives necessarily become smaller and plural as modernity advances. The key to the sociological view of both Tarde and Durkheim, but here in particular Tarde, is that the individual plays only a mediating, not an authoring, role in their dissemination. Thus, the sociologist claims to employ philosophy, using the temporary vehicle of the individual, in a way that does not begin and end with the problem of subjectivity. One could say that Durkheim’s view is distinct from Tarde’s in that all the narratives are reconciled into the unity of a grand narrative of modernity. What I am arguing is that they are not so much revealing that sociology and the social are the baselines of ultimate human reality as they are revealing the foundations of modernity to be intimately connected with a profound unsociability, an active thought-filled unsociability practiced in the moments that prayer once occupied in a more naive time – moments of hesitation, of contemplation, of placing oneself into the stream of shared social problems to discern the effects of one’s actions as diffused within the wider trends of social change. For Tarde this is where paths of imitative diffusion interfere with one another, creating moments of pause (Tarde 1903). Having an ideal and trying to hold to it amidst pressures to adapt to other realities, for example, involves this profound moment of pause, of unsociability. Durkheim’s sociology tries to account for the appearance of the ideal as a solid thing that is beyond the capability of the subject to move, that the subject confronts as a thing. Any given ideal is not “simply a future goal to which man aspires” but is really something more concrete and immediate, vital and constraining over the behavior of human beings in the here and now. An ideal is “to be thought of rather

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as looming impersonally above the individual wills that it moves” (Durkheim 1953: 93). Durkheim was, as it were, stuck with the task of multiplying these images of moral facts “looming” out over human beings, quite simply because he was devoted to the premise that every social fact is an expression of the “greater” unity of human reality. In contrast, Tarde places these confrontations with social mores in the context of a layered archeology of repetitions that cannot be kept within the bounds of the contingencies of social repetitions, simply by declaring the latter to be the province of a discipline of sociology. In the productive tension between the arguments of Tarde and Durkheim, the most interesting moments are those moments of struggle between two competing versions of post-rationalist social philosophy. For Durkheim, a constant, innate sociable potential of the human being is stamped as a moral fact; he must disavow the necessity of unsociability. For Tarde, in contrast, it is necessary to continuously accept and explore the unsociable foundations of sociability. Reading their debate can helpfully defamiliarize us, as social theorists, from comfortable assertions about the ontology of the social. It exposes the irony of grounding the ontology of the social in a moral fact that when acted upon requires a form of sociability that is actually a kind of profound unsociability. Sociology needs an understanding of unsociability – the unsociability of many creative practices, for example – as a central constant in all social affairs, one which can be consciously accepted and integrated into society. A promising way forward empirically, in my view, will be to examine areas such as the unsociability of practices of users of the internet, particularly of internet sites that are envisioned as so-called “social media,” which seem to non-practitioners to be unsociable in a random, unprincipled way, but which practitioners nevertheless are claiming as the future of the social. Internet practices are irreducible to the traditional, offline categories of individualism, thwart the Durkheimian forms of social analysis based on differences tied to functions, yet display continuities that in some way do mobilize forms of (un)sociability. A Tardean analysis could look at the internet to identify important continuities in unsociable behavior that cannot be explained from the point of view of a prejudice against unsociability. I think the final point to be made is that the social scientific dimension of unsociability must be linked not only with empirical research that seeks to understand it better, but also, in a larger sense, it must be linked with its experiential dimension. Against the barren and pointless sociability of somnambulism with its automatism of conspicuous social activity, it is not merely a more concerted effort to be “sociable” that we need. Nor is it merely a more concerted and refined sociology that we need. To the contrary, what we need is to mobilize our cognitive and imaginative capacities to understand and accept the role of principled unsociability as fundamental to the social. We must work against the confusion of unsociability with the ideology of individuality and of the private or of some kind of voluntaristic preference for solitude. We must forge a new image of unsociable, non-sociological, thought – call it philosophy if you like – as active and a vital ally of sociology rather than as merely a symptom of a certain ideology or culture. What is at stake, perhaps, is our ability to understand the relationship between unsociability and

92 D. Toews sociability as a relation of social becoming and of social creativity. What other qualities could really be said, for the sake of the future, to lie at the true “foundation” of the social?

Bibliography

 

Alexander, J. C. (1995). Fin De Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London: Verso. Alliez, Eric (1999). “Introduction,” in G. D. Tarde, Monadologie et sociologie. Paris: Institut Synthelabo. Durkheim, E. (1953). Sociology and Philosophy. London: Cohen & West. Durkheim, E. (1982). Rules of Sociological Method (1st ed). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1983). Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, E. (1984). The Division of Labor in Society (1st ed). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1997). Suicide. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (2001). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Simmel, G. (2004). “Sociability,” in L. Desfor Edles and S. Appelrouth, Sociological Theory in the Classical Era (1st ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, p. 269–275. Tarde, G. D. (1903). The Laws of Imitation. New York: H. Holt and Co. Tarde, G. D. (1974). Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Perspectives in Social Inquiry series. New York: Arno Press. Tarde, G. D. (1999). Monadologie et sociologie. Paris: Institut Synthelabo. Toews, D. (2002). “The Social Occupations of Modernity: Philosophy and Social Theory in Durkheim, Tarde, Bergson, and Deleuze.” PhD, University of Warwick. Toews, D. (2003). “The New Tarde: Sociology after the End of the Social.” Theory, 20(5): 81–98. Toscano, A. (2007). “Powers of Pacification: State and Empire in Gabriel Tarde.” Economy and Society, 36(4): 597–634.

6

If there is no such thing as society, is ritual still special? On using The Elementary Forms after Tarde Joel Robbins

In an autobiographical interview given in 1973, Talcott Parsons recalled the academic year 1924–5, which he spent at the London School of Economics studying with Malinowski and Morris Ginsberg immediately after receiving his undergraduate degree. Having noted that he did not hear Weber’s name mentioned even once during that year, he went on to add that by contrast … I did hear about [Emile] Durkheim but what I heard from both Ginsberg and Malinowski was mostly wrong. For example, in his introduction to a volume of essays by Hobhouse which was published after his death, Ginsberg says that Durkheim was the proponent of ‘a mystical view of society as a new entity qualitatively distinct from the members composing it, which was always operating in a powerful and distinctive manner, but whose mode of operation remains wrapped in total obscurity.’ That was Ginsberg’s view of Durkheim. I had to un-learn that. (Moss and Savchenko 2006: 5–6)

 

Perhaps, I might suggest, every genuinely interesting proponent of Durkheim has at some point had to do the same. As this way of opening this chapter no doubt indicates, I come to the themes of this volume from the Durkheimian side. My unlearning of the mystical, or as Tarde (1969: 140) would have it “realist,“ reading of Durkheim has been pushed forward in ways I will discuss later by matters arising from research I have carried out on the spread of Pentecostal Christianity around the world. But my engagement with Tarde and what we might call the neo-Tardean strain of contemporary social thought only really began in any systematic way with the opportunity to write this chapter. From where I stand now, then, my hope is to come out of this encounter between Tarde and Durkheim having experienced some productive unlearning in relation to the latter. That is to say, I would like to end up with some Durkheimian insights transformed but still recognizable; shorn of their mystical tendencies but not so bare as to be beyond use. At the same time, though, I would also like to make a small contribution to the development of the neo-Tardean side by pointing out a gap in its own project that Durkheim could help fill without having to bring with him those of his notions about the reality of the social that proponents of Tarde’s

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vision would be unwilling to accept. The gap I have in mind is that of ritual. As far as I know, neither Tarde nor those who have promoted his rediscovery have shown any special interest in ritual. Ritual can count as a form of association involving people and things, and surely on some level it has to be the result of inter-mental imitation, and as such it is sometimes mentioned in passing as one form of sociality among others. For Tarde himself, however, it was a distinctively secondary one, and this is true even in the religious domain in which it finds it most natural home. In The Laws of Imitation, Tarde (1962: 175–6) argues that ritual is merely an expression of religious dogma, which is the most essential part of religion and is an aspect of belief. This point provides Tarde with the foundation for his later discussion of ritual in the context of his broader argument that imitation generally “proceeds from the inner to the outer man” (1962: 199, emphasis removed). People, that is to say, imitate beliefs and desires before they imitate the actions that express or realize them (see 1962: 207, see also Karsenti, this volume). In the case of religion, this means that any given religion “is first believed in and then practised” (1962: 200). It is beliefs that are fundamental. Rituals are, by contrast, almost afterthoughts, or, as Tarde himself suggests, simply arbitrary symbols of belief, as words are arbitrary symbols of the things they represent (1962: 190). It is little wonder then that Tarde devotes little attention to ritual in his study of imitation, and does not suggest that ritual might in some respect or other have its own distinctive interactional dynamics.1 The neo-Tardeans show a disinterest in ritual that is similar to Tarde’s own, though the reasons for it may be different in their case. The way ritual is usually defined, its demand for invariant repetition, and the air that hangs around it of sanction for non-participation or flawed participation, would seem to make it the enemy of those who celebrate the inventive, labile, differentiating qualities allowed for by a Tardean nominalist view of social life. And these problems with ritual are apparent even before we consider what Durkheim is widely understood to have done with it in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a book he first published in 1912, nine years after the appearance of The Laws of Imitation. In that book, Durkheim argued that ritual has the ability to make people feel the force of “society” in their very bodies. This point is often held up as a key cornerstone of his social realism, one of the crucial instances in which this realism, so distasteful to Tarde and his followers, appears to receive experiential support. Given this baggage, it is not surprising that for neo-Tardeans ritual is not often treated as a special form of association, or at least is not made central to the analysis of social life. I want to argue in what follows that this state of affairs in which one has to choose between neo-Tardeanism and an interest in ritual need not hold. There are ways of treating ritual that recognize its possession of some qualities that are unique in relation to other forms of interaction, but do not, for all that, rely on realist notions of society or preclude the kind of open associative worlds neo-Tardeans have become so good at describing. In order to make this argument, I will draw on two somewhat idiosyncratic but highly ambitious recent engagements with Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, one by Randall Collins (2004) and the other by Anne Rawls (2004). Both of them, I will suggest, read the Durkheim of the Elementary Forms

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as first and foremost a theorist of social interaction rather than of a society that is prior to such interaction, and both are therefore able to discuss ritual in productive ways without courting the nominalist critique. Before I turn to their works, however, I want to motivate my discussion ethnographically by indicating how I came in the first place to be looking for something like neo-Tardeanism, but in a form that would still define ritual as something special. The roots of my interest in finding such a theoretical hybrid lie in research I have been carrying out on the ways Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity have in the last 100 years spread widely and rapidly around the globe. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, or what I will here often call “Pentecostal Christianity” for ease of expression, are forms of Christianity distinguished by their assertion that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are available to all contemporary believers. These gifts allow those who receive them to, among other things, speak in tongues, heal, prophesy, prosper, and struggle with at least some success to lead moral, Christian lives. Promising these gifts to people who convert, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity have become the fastest growing kinds of Christianity in the world today. The Economist (2006: 48) has recently reported that there are 500 million Pentecostals worldwide, a figure that accords well with the high end of social scientific estimates of a few years ago (Robbins 2004). Pentecostalism’s growth has been particularly impressive in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but it is also spreading quickly in the Pacific and in the post-Soviet world. In light of the huge influence this version of Christianity has come to exercise on so many people in so many parts of the world, few would quibble with historian Mark Noll’s (2004: 12) claim that its emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century is an event that “has had world historical significance.” What is important to my argument here is not so much the fact or world-historical extent of Pentecostalism’s growth, but rather the mechanics of the way in which it has spread. Within months of Pentecostalism’s origin in Los Angeles in 1906, with the revival that midwifed its birth still in full swing, individual participants went out across the world to deliver its message of the power of Spirit-filled Christianity. These Pentecostal emissaries were routinely short of funds and lacked the elaborate infrastructural and financial support provided to mainline missionaries. Yet very often they quite rapidly made many converts. And just as these missionaries had gone out to spread the word as soon as the Spirit had touched them, so too did their new converts, becoming missionaries themselves within months of their own conversion, or even more quickly. Via this pattern, repeated over and over, across a number of generations by now, Pentecostalism has traveled around the world with little in the way of central organization. In fact, Pentecostals have mostly eschewed the development of such central organizations, defecting from them as soon as they develop.2 Moreover, they have only rarely tried to make Pentecostalism the center of anything like a society. They have shown little interest in organizing socially beyond the level of the local church. They have also shown no interest in respecting the borders of existing “societies,” “cultures” or “nations,” nor has the movement of their faith been slowed by such boundaries. In their haste to spread their message, the earliest Pentecostals

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were happy to travel as missionaries to places where they did not speak a word of the local language, counting on the Holy Spirit to give them the gift of the foreign tongue (xenolalia) they needed to do their work. It is true that such faith in xenolalia appears even to most contemporary Pentecostals as a quaint expression of the movement’s early enthusiasm, but even so it nicely conveys the extent to which, from the beginning, Pentecostalism saw itself as a religion bound to no society and determined to spread in all possible directions. The explosive, unplanned and at most only very locally organized spread of Pentecostalism around the world should make it a poster-child for Tardean views of the nature of the social. Carried on a wave of interactions among people who usually do not “belong” in common to one or another kind of social group, and appearing wherever it arrives as something quite innovative and thus different than what has gone before (a point I have made elsewhere – Robbins 2007), it provides little for analysts wielding traditional models of society to hold on to, and even less for those who in Durkheimian fashion see societies that fit such models as a necessary foundation for the development of successful religions. Latour (2002: 126) may find Tarde’s notion of an “imitative ray” a bit odd in its phrasing (Tarde 1899: 101). But its imagery nicely fits Pentecostal understandings of the growth of their faith as carried along by a divine “power” (a key Pentecostal term about which more below) shooting out in all directions and summoning forth new believing assemblages wherever it alights. Even though the way Pentecostalism moves fits the Tardean vision quite well, there is one aspect of Pentecostalism that does not seem so in keeping with that vision, or at least is not illuminated by it. This is Pentecostalism’s tendency to elevate ritual to a position of primacy among kinds of social interaction. As an observer, it is hard to miss how much of what Pentecostals do with each other counts as ritual in terms not only of its directedness toward divinity, but also its formulaic quality.3 Indeed, I would suggest that in Pentecostal models of sociality, to relate to one another is to carry out rituals together. These rituals can be praying together as almost a form of greeting, or as a way to define the kind of interaction about to transpire (“God, we have come together today to …” eat/hold a conference/plant a garden/make a business plan/study for a test, etc.). They can be rites of ministration, where one prays for the needs or health of others. They can be celebratory rites of praise in word or song. And they can be the major Sunday service rites that constitute the sacred high point of the week in most churches (Nelson 2005). These rites can also involve a wide range of personnel. They can be carried out by two people, or in small groups (a fast-diffusing social form in many of these churches), or by whole congregations with some people acting as ritual specialists. Clearly, then, Pentecostals can draw on a wide variety of ritual forms and personnel configurations in relating to one another, and this allows Pentecostal sociality in a wide variety of contexts and across a wide range of scales to be marked by a high degree of mutual ritual performance. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to suggest that Pentecostalism’s abilities to spread across borders and to move without central planning are tied to its reliance on ritual. It is as if, I want to suggest, Pentecostalism gains its force by

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yoking a Durkheimian emphasis on ritual to a Tardean model of social life as creative interaction. To see how this might be so, I turn first to Collins’ recent work on what he calls “interaction ritual chains.” The notion of interaction ritual comes, of course, from Goffman (1967), and Collins takes from Goffman a focus on face-to-face interaction. But to construct the heart of his theory, Collins returns to Goffman’s Durkheimian roots. He starts with Durkheim’s (1995: 208–16) argument that major collective rituals produce a kind of effervescence that energizes people and leads them to feel empowered – to feel larger than themselves. He then generalizes this familiar point to suggest that all successful interactions, interactions that, in a way I will lay out in a moment, are sufficiently ritualized, produce some of this kind of effervescence, which he calls “emotional energy” (cf. Durkheim 1995: 213). In a final twist, one not familiar from Durkheim or Goffman, Collins (2004: 44) claims that human beings are at bottom seekers of such emotional energy; they are creatures who go through life trying to participate in as many successful interaction rituals as they can, using the energy generated in each such interaction ritual to fund the next one. It is the human tendency for people to endeavor to move from one successful interaction ritual to another, increasing their store of emotional energy as they go, that generates the chains of interaction rituals that provide Collins with his titular image. And it is these chains, he argues, that give what less interactionally oriented social scientists call “society” its shape. If Collins is right that people seek successful ritual experience and tend to invest in those situations and institutions that most regularly provide it, then it becomes crucial in studying social life to understand what constitutes a successful interaction ritual and how it is produced. For Collins, interaction rituals involve two components. The first is “mutual focus of attention” – a sense on the part of participants that they intersubjectively share a common definition of what they are doing together. The second is what Collins calls “a high degree of emotional entrainment.” This refers to people’s developing sense that they are coordinating their actions together, a sense built up particularly through the rhythmic synchronization of bodily actions such that interaction flows smoothly. Such bodily synchronization can happen as fully in conversation or any other kind of interaction as it does in those social practices, like dancing, that explicitly aim to produce it. When it does happen, and is combined with a strong sense of mutual focus, successful interaction ritual occurs. In this chapter, I will not further unpack Collins’ discussion of the way successful interaction rituals are constructed. Instead, I want to build on his overall argument to suggest that it is Pentecostalism’s emphasis on ritual and the related production of emotional energy that grounds its ability to travel so rapidly beyond social and linguistic boundaries and to do so without itself requiring any central organization that would enforce conformity through sanctions and constraints. The key point in this regard is the observation that Pentecostals go through life producing an unusually high percentage of social occasions that qualify as successful interaction rituals. This would, from Collins’ point of view, be precisely what makes people so eager to adopt it. The emotional energy successful Pentecostal interaction rituals

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produce is, in his model, its own reward – or even what most people, whether they know it or not, take to be the one intrinsic good in the world. Blumhoffer (1993: 210–11) captures well the sense of Collins’ argument when she writes of the “spiritual acquisitiveness” that drove early Pentecostals forward in the pursuit of what she calls spiritual experiences and what Collins would call emotional energy produced out of ritual interaction. As she puts it, “these eager pioneers … pressed relentlessly on to the next experience, impelled by an insatiable longing for more rather than by determination to reach a specific goal.” It is the Pentecostal ability to produce emotional energy in such quantity that keeps Pentecostalism in constant motion across open-ended and ever-expanding networks that traditional notions of society and their allied models of religion cannot adequately describe. Were Collins not so comfortably lodged in the Durkheimian tradition, his emphasis on desire, energy and network-like interaction chains might almost lead one to take him to be a neo-Tardean.4 But it is important to realize that he has painted his picture of social life using a decidedly Durkheimian palette. In doing so, he has suggested an original answer to the question of why people might imitate one another in the first place, something of a gap in Tarde’s system as I understand it. For if people are seekers of emotional energy that they can only get through ritual interaction, and if ritual interaction involves mutual focus and emotional entrainment, then they are required to imitate one another’s beliefs and desires, as well as their patterned actions, to reach their goals. Should they refuse to engage in such imitation, interaction would fail to take ritual form, or would do so only weakly, and they would lose any chance of obtaining what they are after. Here, then, is a Durkheimian basis for Tardean social dynamics, for the fact that “Wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation …” (Tarde 1962: xiv). And it is an account of the nature of social interaction that fits well with the fact that in the Pentecostal case new converts usually work to imitate ritual forms, and hence participate in successful interaction rituals long before they take up the task of learning the niceties of doctrine (Robbins, forthcoming). Even as they begin with ritual, however, Pentecostal converts all over the globe do end up adopting a number of doctrines that appear to be strikingly uniform wherever they appear. Central to all of them is the idea that the Holy Spirit is powerful and gives gifts of power to human beings. In churches from Southern California to Papua New Guinea, and from the Ukraine to Ghana, Pentecostals celebrate this power and extol its superiority to all manner of local spiritual forces they define as demonic. In their celebration of this single kind of power, and their rejection of more local ones, those who embrace Pentecostalism in important respects short-circuit processes of indigenization, syncretism, and cultural appropriation, much vaunted by anthropologists, that would bend core Pentecostal doctrines toward their pre-conversion understandings of the world. Rawls provides one answer to the question of why this should be so, and she accomplishes this by elaborating on many of the same aspects of the Elementary Forms that Collins finds so compelling. Rawls (2004), like Collins, sees Durkheim’s account of the production of effervescence in ritual as central to the argument of the Elementary Forms.5 But while

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Collins takes Durkheim’s point about effervescence in the direction of a general theory of the interactional production of emotional energy and appetite, Rawls reads it as the key to what she sees as Durkheim’s often neglected intention that the Elementary Forms be read as an epistemological work accounting for the origin of the basic categories of thought in a way that accepts neither of the traditional arguments – empiricist or rationalist – for how people come to possess them and, instead, grounds their attainment in social interaction. I am not sure contemporary scholars miss Durkheim’s epistemological argument as routinely as Rawls believes. But a quick review of Rawls’ reading of it will be useful here. The core claim is that people gain the basic categories of thought – categories like time, space, classification, and cause – through participation in shared rituals that produce effervescence understood not in Collins’ formulation as emotional energy, but in Durkheim’s terms as social or moral “force.” The ritual experience of emotions and social forces that people cannot experience when they are alone is crucial in the generation of the categories, for it gives participants a felt sense that there is something else beyond ordinary experience. They take this something else to be the sacred, and the resulting distinction between the sacred and the profane becomes the basis for all other categorical distinctions (the alternation of the sacred and the profane producing the category time, etc.). But more than this, participants’ mutual engagement with ritually fomented force also allows them to be confident that they all share the experiences on which the distinctions that found the categories are based, thus grounding intelligible communication between them (a key ingredient in the production of successful interaction ritual in Collins’ model). Durkheim develops his argument most carefully in his discussion of the production of the category of causality, and this is the one Rawls dwells on. It is also the category that Hume had most famously shown to be especially challenging for the empiricist position. On Durkheim’s account, people obtain the category of causality by having the experience of producing force in ritual. As themselves the causal agents in this process of production, in ritual they can, as it were, experience causality as it happens and develop a shared sense of it. And causality in turn becomes central to their understanding of the nature of force in general. Rawls gives the strongest possible reading of Durkheim’s argument. So strong, in fact, that it is not hard to dismiss it as the kind of just-so account that origin stories – of the categories or anything else – so often turn out to be in the social sciences. But if we set aside the impulse to reach this conclusion and instead take the argument on its strengths, it can help us in our quest to find a role for ritual in a social theory that does not assume the existence of “society.” For Durkheim’s argument, at least on Rawls’ account, is at bottom one about how people can come to share ideas and communicate with one another by first enacting rituals together. And for Pentecostals this argument works quite neatly, for it is precisely ideas about power – about the ability of one singular kind of power to get important things done – that they come to share on the basis of their enactment of emotionally charged rituals with one another as often as possible. On the basis of Durkheim’s argument as elaborated by Rawls, Pentecostal believers’ shared cosmology of force

100 J. Robbins figured as the power of the Spirit is thus explicable as the product of their very mobile repertoire of ritual interactions and the experiences of force such interactions produce, rather than as the coercive imposition of the normatively held beliefs of a society that pre-exists or stands outside these ritual interactions.6 When Latour (2005: 38) catches Durkheim having “a Tardian moment,” it is perhaps no accident that the window through which he is spying on the old master is The Elementary Forms. With the help of Collins and Rawls, I have argued throughout this chapter that, in that book at least, Durkheim can be read as a theorist of interaction, and of ritual interaction in particular. On this reading, the whole edifice we identify as a Durkheimian version of society rests on the emotional and intellectual productivity of such interactional forms – their ability, that is to say, to generate desires and beliefs that propel actors forward throughout life. It is a reading, I have tried to show, that helps us to understand the dynamics of Pentecostal growth. But more importantly, I have also tried to suggest that it is a reading that neo-Tardeans ought not find uncongenial. It offers them a strong view of ritual, and it does so without imposing upon them those of Durkheim’s ideas they are loath to adopt.

Notes

 

1 I thank Matei Candea for directing me to this work of Tarde’s, and more generally for an unusually helpful set of comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also thank Jon Bialecki for some comments on an earlier effort of mine to examine Pentecostal ritual that set me thinking in the directions I take up here. Finally, I also thank Michael Lempert for comments on an earlier draft. 2 In saying this, I am of course ignoring the existence of several very large Pentecostal denominations, such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. As impressive as these denominations are in terms of numbers of members, they still represent a tiny minority of the numbers of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians worldwide and thus do not invalidate the description I am offering here. 3 I say this despite the fact that Pentecostals’ self-representations often focus on their disdain for what they take to be uninspired ritual forms, a point in which I am supported by the important work of the Pentecostal theologian/social scientist Albrecht (1999: 21–2). I make the case for Pentecostal ritualism in much greater detail elsewhere (Robbins, forthcoming). 4 In a recent book, Poloma and Hood (2008) also draw on Collins’ work in their analysis of the rise and fall of a specific Charismatic church. Their use of Collins is very different from mine in that they do not aim to explain the spread of Pentecostalism on the basis of its emphasis on ritual as the key form of social interaction. More importantly in the present context, they also differ from my account in defining the most important interaction rituals in Pentecostal life as the ones a believer has with God. They note that in doing so they take a major step away from Collins’ “secular” refusal to consider the possibility that the interactions people have with deities might be counted as interaction rituals (Poloma and Hood 2008: 11, 12, 41). In doing so, they also take a step away from the Durkheimian tradition on which Collins relies and one toward what, on Latour’s (2005: 235) description, would be a more fully neo-Tardean account. 5 Rawls’ book is a long and sometimes slow-moving close reading of Durkheim’s text. One can gain a sense of her core arguments in a shorter (though still quite detailed) presentation in Rawls 1996. 6 The notion of Spiritual power, or personal “empowerment” by the Spirit, is very widespread in Pentecostalism. I first became aware of its importance in the course of my fieldwork with the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. Very recent converts to Christianity,

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which they took up in a charismatic form, the Urapmin spoke constantly about the “power” of the Holy Spirit and of God, and about how that power was sometimes sent down to them. Having heard them use the term only in Tok Pisin, the main lingua franca in Papua New Guinea (where it is rendered as powa), and never in the Urap language, I eventually began to ask if there was not a cognate term in their indigenous language. People insisted there was not. In their case, the notion of a single overarching power came only with Pentecostalism, and was likely rendered convincing by their vigorous charismatic ritual life in precisely the terms I have discussed here.

Bibliography

 

Albrecht, Daniel E. 1999 Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Blumhoffer, Edith L. 1993 Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Collins, Randall 2004 Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Emile 1995 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. K.E. Fields, trans. New York: Free Press. Economist 2006 Christianity Reborn. In Economist. Pp. 48–50, Vol. December 23. Goffman, Erving 1967 Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City: Anchor Books. Latour, Bruno 2002 Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social. In The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. P. Joyce, ed. Pp. 117–32. London: Routledge. —— 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moss, Laurence S. and Savchenko, Andrew, eds. 2006 Talcott Parsons: Economic Sociologist of the 20th Century. Malden: Blackwell. Nelson, Timothy J. 2005 Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church. New York: New York University Press. Noll, Mark A. 2004 Foreword: American Past and World Present in the Search for Evangelical Identity. In Pilgrims on the Sawdust Trail: Evangelical Ecumenism and the Quest for Christian Identity. T. George, ed. Pp. 11–18. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Poloma, Margaret M and R. W. Hood, Jr. 2008 Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Chruch. New York: New York University Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield 1996 Durkheim’s Epistemology: The Neglected Argument. American Journal of Sociology 102(2):430–82. —— 2004 Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel 2004 The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–43. —— 2007 Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time and the Anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology 48(1):5–38. —— Forthcoming The Obvious Aspects of Pentecostalism: Ritual and Pentecostal Globalization. In Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-charismatic Christians. M. Lindhardt, ed. New York: Berghahn Books. Tarde, Gabriel 1899 Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. H.C. Warren, transl. New York: Macmillan Company. —— 1962 The Laws of Imitation. E. C. Parsons, transl. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith. —— 1969 On Communication and Social Influence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

7

One or three Issues of comparison Timothy Jenkins

 

Tarde was the senior figure in the encounter with Durkheim evoked in the first chapter. It is easy enough to construe their meeting in terms of a conflict, with either the younger man gaining the victory, which is the standard sociological account, or Tarde emerging ahead, as the present revisionist re-telling suggests. Yet, in order to bring Tarde back into play as a contemporary resource, a new perspective is required, one that escapes from setting the two to face each other in the sociological ring, a re-match after Durkheim was felt to have eliminated the challenge of Tarde a hundred years ago. Instead of a contest, we are concerned with questions of interaction and adaptation. This is already to bring a Tardean term into play, but it is not foreign to Durkheim’s approach either. As an example, it seems plausible to argue that Durkheim’s development of the concept of collective representations, first articulated in the 1898 article ‘Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives’, was a response to criticisms of Tarde, for the concept permits ideas of the social contribution of human intelligence and adaptation through collective ratiocination and the selection of ideas. It also leads to the important conclusion that the moral force of collective ideas – their obligatory nature – comes precisely from their richness in comparison to individual ideas, from their being the product of many minds. It does not appear, then, that the issue of psychology presents an essential difficulty between these two authors. Indeed, if Durkheim’s work is read in the perspective of his final achievement, from the ground of The Elementary Forms (1912), many of the oppositions between Durkheim and Tarde detected by readers are finessed or disappear. Nevertheless, there remains a great difference in terms of the experience of reading their texts, which I would point to in this fashion: although Tarde advocates the crucial importance of fine detail and small-scale work, and professes impatience with the generalizations of sociologists, he never (in my reading) offers us examples of such an approach; he tells us what to do rather than showing us how to do it. His fertile pamphlets represent calls to action, rather than sociological treatises.

I My particular focus of interest concerns the place of comparison in the two authors. One might say at first glance that any sociology is impossible without comparison,

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and then go on to say that many sociologies fall down because not enough attention has been paid to the question of how comparison is to be carried out. Certainly, this was Durkheim’s critique of the British comparative method: that by paying attention to comparison as a method it constituted a crucial advance towards the possibility of sociological knowledge, but that it fell down because it carried certain unexamined assumptions of an individualist, contractarian and utilitarian kind, expressed in pre-formed classifications and evolutionary schemata, that failed to offer any explanation of the scale at which human activity takes place, or of the nature of obligation and the force of motivation expressed in human behaviour. The interest of the Rules of Sociological Method (1895) is that it opens up a new, more precise and more controlled theory of comparison. It is also possible to read the Rules as a polemical conversation with Tarde. As is well known, Durkheim begins by identifying a social fact through the constraint – the ‘power of external coercion’ – experienced by individuals,1 and explicitly distinguishes this conception from Tarde’s notion of imitation. Imitation between individuals, he says in a footnote,2 remains individual; although the uniformity of constraint imposed may be described as imitation, imitation is not the cause of the obligation experienced by an individual, but an expression of it. Moreover, social obligation takes on many forms, and it would be a confusion to subsume them all under the single term ‘imitation’. Having identified his object, Durkheim sets out his argument, which we shall follow in outline.3 The sociologist does not set out from the analysis of ideas but from an analysis of the senses, from the human experience of constraint.4 This leads him to consider what philosophers have called ‘conventions’, which Durkheim will later come to call ‘institutions’ (following Mauss and Fauçonnet 1902): collective habits that are expressed in such phenomena as ‘legal or moral rules, popular sayings, or facts of social structure’.5 How are we to think about such objects? Durkheim proposes6 that we identify simple (or elementary) social forms, and consider the successive scales at which these forms may be brought together in social formations. These moments of bringing together he calls ‘decisive facts’. He therefore creates the principle of what we may call (it is not Durkheim’s term) a scale of forms, which is organized around a single variable, which is initially conceived as increasing complexity. There is therefore a scale conceived which runs from the unorganized horde to the clan, from the clan to a segmentary society made up of clans, from the segmentary society to a confederation of such societies, and then on to higher units, through the successive amalgamation of units. We might notice that this is not a teleological series; there is no original society, nor final perfected social form driving social evolution in some mystical fashion. It is rather a classification of ‘decisive events’, where elements are brought into new social wholes, each with their own properties associated with their appropriate scale. Further, although Durkheim suggests that this classification will permit the constitution of species and genera, this is not in practice how he employs it, as will become clear. Durkheim elaborates two further ideas on the basis of this formulation. The first concerns sociological explanation, or the intelligibility of social facts. He sets aside

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any notion of explaining social facts in terms of function or psychology, reverting to his differences with Tarde over the issue of authority. Instead, he suggests that the autonomy of the social fact may be expressed in terms of what he calls the ‘social environment’, a notion that he breaks down into two related concepts. These are social volume and social density. The first relates to the number of social units in the assemblage, which agrees with the place of the social formation under consideration on the scale of forms, and the second to the ‘moral concentration’ of the assembled units: the density of the ties that bind them.7 So the scale of forms is elaborated not only in terms of the number of social units linked in the enterprise, but also in the plurality of moral ties – religious, political, economic, familial and so forth – that join them together. The density of the population and the complexity of physical infrastructure will be an expression of these morphological and moral factors. And we may glimpse how Durkheim will reformulate the scale of forms, from his initial conception, that the two poles are social simplicity on the one hand and complexity on the other, to a more sophisticated idea, whereby the scale is distinguished by the degree of overlap of institutions or, alternatively, of their dispersal. Social forms are to be distinguished not as to whether they are simple or complex, but according to the condensation or separation of their component institutions. I have three comments to offer on this style of explanation. In the first place, we may remark that social volume and social density do not relate to each other in any simple or determinate fashion; it is not the case that an increase in one necessarily correlates to an increase in the other, nor the contrary. In the second place, notice that this style of explanation does not work by clear and distinct differences, according to a logic of identity and non-contradiction, but rather by overlapping forms, according to a logic of family resemblances, to adopt another jargon. This is a different kind of work to separating out social species as if they were natural kinds; it offers a specifically sociological logic. And third, Durkheim uses the specificity of this form of social explanation to set aside sociological accounts that appeal outside the social, allowing non-social conditions to impinge. Under this heading, he includes appeal to either past or future conditions. ‘If there are social species,’ he says, ‘it is because collective life depends above all on concomitant conditions which present a certain diversity’.8 He therefore rejects social contract theories and accounts based upon the individual and his properties, including evolutionary variants.9 The second further idea (with which he concludes) concerns the demonstration of sociological proof, which cannot be achieved by experiment on practical grounds, and therefore has to be by comparison. Durkheim rejects pluralist accounts, proposing instead that the same effect always corresponds to the same cause. However, since social phenomena are complex, one cannot eliminate all causes save one, nor can one look to single correlations, whether of agreement or difference. Durkheim therefore proposes what he calls the method of concomitant variations, relying upon the relations internal to the social environment. This method allows the detection of regularities and, more importantly, it permits the establishment of ‘series of variations, systematically constituted, whose terms are correlated with

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each other in as continuous a gradation as possible, and which moreover cover an adequate range’.10 This exploits the series of forms already identified. On these grounds, Durkheim permits recourse to ethnographic materials, while at the same time stepping clear of any notion of an evolutionary sequence. The series in question may be derived from a single society, or from what he terms several distinct ‘social species’. The former case allows the studying of social tendencies, the latter is necessary for dealing with an institution. Durkheim proposes a genealogical method for tracing the meaning of an institution by ascending a series, tracing the various innovations as social volume and social density alter, and taking into account, too, such factors as the stage of development of each example. This comparative method, he concludes, is not a branch of sociology, but ‘sociology itself, insofar as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts’.11 Once Durkheim begins to take more seriously the ethnographic materials to hand, this method of concomitant variations is put to work with great effect. It appears in Primitive Classification (1903), with a sequence of Australian, Middle and North American and Chinese examples, focused around the variation in degree of identity or detachment between social structure and social thought in each case. It underwrites the argument of The Elementary Forms (1912), and appears perhaps to its greatest effect in the sequence of case studies in Mauss’s Essay on the Gift (1924). In each instance, the variable may be said to be the degree of overlap of institutions in the society in question, an axis running from concentrated to dispersed, with the associated development of forms of relatedness. I have three observations. First, in this form of comparison, the minimum number of instances needed is three, in order to know what is being compared, what is essential and what is accidental. To make a two-term comparison is arbitrary, and cannot escape from being so. Second, in Durkheim’s practice (as too with Mauss), in every series of n cases there is an implicit final term (n+1), which is our own (Western) society, taken to be an extreme of the dispersion of institutions. And third, in order to construct an understanding, it is not only necessary to move along the series towards the so-called elementary or condensed forms, but there may also be an additional factor to take into account: the modes of thought associated with these elementary social forms are better fitted to understanding the social facts at issue. Or to put it the other way round, the forms of thought of dispersed, complex societies may themselves be so fragmented as to be unable to grasp the integrated kind of thought Durkheim is pointing towards. He therefore offers us two aspects of his project: on the one hand, a work of reconstruction, of which his sociological method is a part; on the other hand, a sociological account of the various accounts – contractualist, individualist, psychological, evolutionist, utilitarian, functionalist and so forth – which he rejects as inadequate, but which are continually being imposed upon him as readings, as well as an account in embryo as to why this might be so. In brief, Durkheim offers a sophisticated account of comparison; the minimum number of terms for a comparison in this account is three; and this threefold comparison lies at the heart of his sociology.

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II

 

What then of Tarde? In Les Lois sociales (published in 1898, three years later than the Rules),12 Tarde offers a synthesis of earlier works, drawing together strands from, in particular, Les Lois de l’imitation (1890), La Logique sociale (1893) and L’Opposition universelle (1897), in order to identify the three elements necessary for a scientific description of the world, elements which he terms similitude (or repetition), opposition and adaptation.13 Tarde believes that the same kind of processes are at work in different spheres, and seeks parallel laws in the physical, the biological and the social realms. This allows him to seek analogies between the natural and the social sciences in a fashion that is denied to Durkheim, whose work, despite its positivist language, affirms the unique nature of the social order and the self-sufficiency of sociology.14 By virtue of these analogies between realms, Tarde suggests two compensating ‘laws’. The first is that, in terms of understanding, the smaller the scale of focus or attention, the greater the power of explanation. This feature corresponds to the structure of reality, for larger scale phenomena – whether physical, biological or social in nature – are constructed from smaller scale units, and the diversity at the surface of macro-phenomena is generated by the diversity of a less visible and more plural micro-particularity. There is no base level or ground zero in this account: differences and similitudes are always generated by smaller scale phenomena. Adaptation at a lower level is experienced as invention at a higher, for novelty generated by competition between different strands of imitation stimulates processes at a larger scale. As a consequence, a move to more detailed analysis makes matters more intelligible. This tendency to diminishing the scale of analysis is compensated for by the second ‘law’, which is that smaller units tend to enter into larger-scale assemblages or ‘harmonies’. This tendency arises from the nature of the elementary processes, whereby innovations generated at lower levels of organization spread by repetition as they are imitated at higher levels. These spreading influences encounter other similar processes through forms of opposition, but these encounters lead not to perpetual war but to adaptation, and so to higher forms of life, of more universal tendencies. This is an avowedly optimistic account: not only is opposition a transitory stage between repetition and adaptation, but opposition itself evolves through ever-moderating forms of war, competition and discussion, corresponding to the development of ever-larger-scale units. Tarde sums up these two laws by suggesting that while the evolution of science consists in passing from the great to the small – from the simple external harmony of a group to innumerable interior harmonies, an infinite number of infinitesimal and fertile adaptations – the evolution of reality goes in the opposite direction, and consists in the incessant tendency for small interior harmonies to be exteriorized and progressively amplified.15 What does this mean for the possibility of comparison? While it is possible to describe analogies between processes, these analogies do not concern causal links.

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If the means of explanation is always by looking to smaller scale phenomena, the focus of such a principle is particularity: causalities are always specific, never generic. Although, in the last pages of Les Lois sociales, Tarde is cautious about invoking the ‘metaphysics’ of Monadologie et sociologie (1893), claiming that it is unimportant to the preceding account,16 nevertheless he offers us a monadic account. He is hostile to generic explanations; the point precisely is to seek explanation by going to ever-more specific interactions at a smaller scale. Although we get larger scale assemblages, we do not get a ‘scale of forms’. Comparison is therefore relocated; each comparison is considered as a specific act. A comparison is a moment of opposition which brings together two lines of imitation in some sort of struggle, leading to some kind of resolution: whether one form conquers the other or whether some kind of adaptation results is a matter for observation. Along this line of argument, sociology of a traditional sort is impossible or, more realistically, it is contingent, comprising a series of interventions in specific contexts. This is the sense, too, of the pages Tarde had devoted earlier, in Monadologie et sociologie, to the topic of ‘ownership’, which he prefers to the concept of the innate properties of things: ‘the possessive action of monad upon monad … is the only truly productive relationship’.17 We can conclude then that for Tarde the minimum number for comparison is one, in this sense of being one-off: each comparison is a singular event, an instance of opposition – whether of struggle, competition or discussion – which provides a moment between the social practices of imitation and adaptation. In other words, in order to understand what a specific act of comparison is doing, you should understand the context in which it intervenes. And there is no other sense of comparison which holds up. Can we evaluate these different approaches? Comparison lies at the heart of one, and rejection of comparison, or its careful subordination, is part of the other. Durkheim’s account of a series of overlapping social forms is of interest on two counts. It leaves behind the logic of identity and non-contradiction that seemed at the time definitive of the natural sciences, and moves instead to a logic of family resemblances or a scale of forms, which may offer a logic that is more appropriate to thought in the social sciences. And it points to a linkage between categories of social thought on the one hand and social form on the other, so that Durkheim can begin to offer an explanation of why certain kinds of society, ones as dispersed as our own, might have difficulties in apprehending the integrated styles of thought and action of more condensed societies, styles we apprehend under such terms as ‘primitive’ or ‘magical’. Implicit in this approach is the thought that more condensed societies may have better tools for understanding social reality than we ourselves have to hand (an insight taken further by Mauss), and that it is through ethnography that both social understanding and a critique of our own situation may best be constructed. There is little trace of this last notion in Tarde, who speaks little of other societies; he is concerned with social theory rather than with ethnography and, as I have remarked, for all his declared interest in the generative power of detailed description, there is little illustration of this in his writing. He also appears to accept

108 T. Jenkins the contemporary categories of the natural sciences. But this is only in appearance; although broad-brush, his use of these categories is thoroughly subversive. He begins his account with the notion of imitation or mimesis, which generates series not of identical but of resembling forms. Concepts of distinction and identity are introduced only in the second element, that of opposition; we might suppose that the standard classificatory forms of distinct species organized into separate genera are only transitional stages, ephemera developed with a contextual and polemical purpose. And he concludes his account with the process of adaptation, in which entities experience neither metamorphosis (as in the series of imitations) nor distinction (as in the structures of opposition), but take on properties in an asymmetrical fashion through interaction with other entities, in a fashion that is neither fusion of essence nor exchange. To use a Deleuzian description,18 these are the pathways of becoming. This last process describes a mode of being that is concerned not with representation but with the production of effects, specific and unrepeatable, and therefore may be compared in certain respects with the condensed, primitive or magical forms alluded to. These are far from the concerns of the contemporary natural science model. In this regard, Tarde points us towards the elusive and uncategorizable creative elements of the social world, the unseizable energies that animate both the world and our attempts to understand it. Along this line of thinking, Tarde may well supplement the later Durkheim; they complement, rather than contradict, one another.

Notes

 

1 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, tr. W.D. Halls, Macmillan 1982, 56 (ch. 1). 2 Note 3, 59. 3 We omit the place of ch. 3 on ‘the normal and the pathological’ in this sequence. 4 81 (ch. 2). 5 82. 6 In ch. 4. 7 136–7 (ch. 5). 8 141. 9 139. 10 155, ch. 6. 11 157. 12 Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois sociales, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris 1999. 13 See Tarde, Les Lois sociales, chs 1, 2 and 3 respectively: ‘répétition des phénomènes’, ‘opposition des phénomènes’, ‘adaptation des phénomènes’. 14 See Durkheim 1898, passim. 15 Les Lois sociales, 107. 16 137. 17 Monadologie et sociologie, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 1999, 91; compare Lazzaratto’s remarks (in the ‘postface’ to that edition) on evaluation and perspective, 111. 18 Deleuze & Guattari, Milles plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1980, ch. 10.

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Bibliography

 

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, Milles plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1980. Durkheim, Emile, Les règles de la méthode sociologique [1895], ET The Rules of Sociological Method (tr. W.D. Halls), Macmillan, London, 1982. ——, ‘Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives’ [1898], in Durkheim 1966. ——, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [1912], Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2003; ET The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (tr. Joseph Swain), George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1915. ——, Sociologie et philosophie [1924], Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1966. Durkheim, Emile, & Mauss, Marcel, ‘De quelques formes primitives de classification’ [1903], ET Primitive Classification (tr. Rodney Needham), Cohen & West Ltd., London, 1963. Mauss, Marcel, ‘Essai sur le don, forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaiques’ [1924], ET The Gift (tr. W.D. Halls), Routledge, London, 1990. ——, Oeuvres III, (ed. Victor Karady), Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1968. Mauss, Marcel, & Fauçonnet, Paul, ‘Sociologie’ [1902], in Mauss 1968. Tarde, Gabriel, Les Lois de l’imitation [1890], Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 2001. ——, La Logique sociale [1893], Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 1999. ——, Monadologie et sociologie [1893], Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 1999. ——, L’Opposition universelle [1897], Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 1999. ——, Les Lois sociales [1898], Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 1999.

8

The height, length and width of social theory Alberto Corsín Jiménez

This chapter examines what is at stake in trying to make sociology and its objects (the social, society, sociality) assume an ontological form. This holding of social theory accountable to ontology, I want to argue, involves its own very peculiar anthropological imagination: the making of social analysis and social knowledge into proportionate (sometimes, even, commensurable) objects for one another.1 Gabriel Tarde has captured anew the attention of social theorists for his provocative and original inversion of the ontology/sociology equation. As the conventional history of the discipline has it, whilst for Durkheim ‘society’ was an ontic reality demanding explanation (through ritual, collective consciousness, etc.; see Robbins’ and Jenkins’ chapters, this volume), for Tarde ‘every thing is a society’ (Tarde 2006: 55) and thus sociologically ontological. In an early overview of the new Tardean anti-sociologism, David Toews draws out the terms of such an ontological turn:

 

The new discourse on Tarde involves an exploration of social ontology that presents itself as alternative to basic Durkheimian premises, in particular as an alternative to the idea of the existence of a social species which is supposed to transcend the contingency of social and political history and provide a foundation for the social science. (Toews 2003: 93) Notwithstanding their apparent opposition, however, I want to suggest that both Durkheim and Tarde shared in fact some ‘ontological’ premises in how they went about crafting and putting together their arguments. The chapter suggests that Tarde’s, like Durkheim’s, and indeed like much social theory thereafter, remained a proportional sociology; a theory that called upon itself to have a particular kind of magnitudinous character – a particular kind of height, width and social length.2 To make the effects of proportionality visible, I shall introduce my subject matter by way of an ethnography of the disproportionate. This is a slightly odd formulation, because part of my argument here will be to claim a special status for ethnography as a technique for describing the disproportionate. The ethnography looks at a management and architectural consultancy project I participated in and researched in Buenos Aires during the year 2007–8, dedicated to designing the

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‘knowledge environment’ for the new regional headquarters of one of the world’s largest oil companies (hereon, Petrolco). I shall focus on one particular process within this larger project: that of counting the total number of employees that were scheduled to move to the new building in October 2008. Early on in the project the population to be moved was estimated at 2000 people. The chapter describes how the final Number 2000 was produced. Briefly put, my claim here shall be that the ‘management of knowledge’ – in this case, the process of producing the Number 2000 – functions as an anthropological category of our times because of its very capacity for dislocating the knowledge/ social equation. There is, I want to suggest, a form of disproportionality between ‘knowledge’ and ‘social life’ in contemporary managerial environments (and, for that matter, much social theory) that takes ‘knowledge management’ as its central organizing trope. As I intimated above, it is the disproportionate claims set on ‘managing knowledge’ that makes ‘knowledge’ and ‘the social’ appear commensurable. Said differently, it is through disproportionate descriptions that the knowledge/social equation becomes visible in contemporary social and managerial theory (Corsín Jiménez forthcoming).

Disproportionality

 

My use of the term ‘disproportionality’ is partly inspired by Tarde’s sociology. In fact, it is in dialogue with Tarde’s dis/proportionate sociology – with the playful ambiguity that the proportion plays in Tarde’s thought – that I will try to make my argument carry its force. It takes no stretch of the imagination to justify Tarde’s disproportional sociological thought. In Monadology and Sociology, for instance, he speaks of ‘every living species’ tendency to multiply geometrically’, of the ‘propensity towards universalisation of every reality … hence the spilling-over of variations that penetrates and takes hold of every physical and social being’ (Tarde 2006: 99).3 All objects and agencies, he says, are animated by ‘rhythmic vibrations’ and ‘overflowing revolutionary differentiations’ (Tarde 2006: 78, 80) that feed on each other to create constant displacements of the social, constant residualizations.4 Moreover, for Tarde, every element carries within itself an ontological destiny, a desire of totality to become ‘the incarnation of a cosmic idea’ (Tarde 2006: 95). It is hardly surprising, then, to hear Tarde close the very last sentence of Monadology with an apology, asking his ‘dear readers’ to ‘forgive [the] metaphysical excess’ he has incurred throughout the book (Tarde 2006: 106). However, notwithstanding his beautiful excessiveness, I want to suggest here that Tarde’s sociology remains, at bottom, a proportionate sociology. In many respects this is unavoidable, because it would have been almost impossible for Tarde to establish himself as a sociological thinker in the nineteenth century without stabilizing his theoretical imagination. It is well known that Tarde was writing at one of the most important periods in the history of the natural sciences, when one after another biology, chemistry or physics went through radical paradigm changes, opening up new abysses at the very heart of our ontological

112 A. Corsín Jiménez categories. Thus, Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift write that ‘The social according to Tarde was … understood through an analogy to geology, chemistry or astronomy’ (Barry & Thrift 2007: 512). The exuberance of the natural sciences impregnated Tarde’s sociology, who mixed and borrowed concepts and arguments from various disciplines indistinctively. ‘When Tarde wishes to present the best case of what he has in mind when analysing human societies,’ writes Bruno Latour of the Tardean method, ‘it is always history of science that comes forward’ (Latour 2002: 126). The question of scale, for instance, which dominated much natural ontology at the time, takes hold in Tarde’s descriptions of the folding of the universe through his phenomenal excursions out to the astronomical and back into the microscopic. Indeed, in his descriptions of the properties of monads, Tarde often indulges in spiralling flights of excess, travelling instantaneously the distance from the organic to the cosmological in a single argumentative gesture. As David Toews has put it, ‘for Tarde, the existence of innovative variation [was] veritably a matter of metaphysical linkage with every movement in the universe’ (Toews 2003: 86). However, as wildly disproportionate as these excursions often appear, in the last instance, when Tarde moves to lend his argument a human scale, he regularly ends up stabilizing his imagination around a proportionate figure of sorts. For example, there is a passage in one of Tarde’s many scalar flights in Monadology and Sociology where he describes the dyalitical process through which differences differentiate themselves into the infinitesimal. For Tarde, no object or agency is ever pure, that is, stable and in equilibrium; changes are always taking place at one or another of an entity’s many ontological layers, regardless of whether we have evidence for them or not. He speaks of such changes, invisible to our empirical senses, as ‘infinitesimal inhabitants of mysterious cities, so far from us’ (Tarde 2006: 84). In a footnote, however, he expounds on the notion of distance:

 

I say ‘far from us’ for two reasons: because of the incommensurable distance between their smallness and our relative immensity, and inversely, their apparent eternity in relation to our insignificant existence; and because of the profound heterogeneity of our (theirs and ours) intimate natures. (Tarde 2006: 84) I find this passage fascinating because its terms are almost identical to those of a famous statement by Galileo Galilei who, towards the end of his life, when he was bedridden by his blindness, is said to have remarked: ‘I who enlarged the universe 100,000 times am now shrunk to the size of my body.’ The resonance intrigues me because confronted with an expansion of their ontological imaginations, with the exponential recession of the natural limits of the cosmos and the physical world around them, both men resorted to the same image of proportionality to stabilize the accounts of the changes which they were witnessing. Yet this is no loose coincidence. The image is found yet again in the writings of no lesser figure than Kant, when in the Critique of Practical Reason he writes, The [starry heaven] view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates … my

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importance as an animal creature … The [moral law within me], on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense. (Kant 1788 [1956]: 166) The latter image is in fact invoked in the very same terms by Tarde himself, when in the opening pages of Social Laws he states that the first herdsmen who scanned the starry heavens, and the first tillers of the soil who essayed to discover the secrets of plant life, must have been impressed in much the same way by the sparkling disorder of the firmament, with its manifold meteors, as well as by the exuberant diversity of vegetable and animal forms. (Tarde 2000 [1899]: 7)

 

Kant, Galileo and Tarde all appeal to a relation of magnitude – a figure of proportionality – to render intelligible the new world of possibilities opening up before them. Whatever sense of ontological robustness they were each hanging on to, it was in all cases summoned in the shape of a relation of proportionality. In the light of these cases, one is almost tempted to speak of the proportion as a fundamental anthropological category of western modernity. There is one last proportional excursion described by Tarde in Monadology that I would like to comment on. There is a passage in the book where he confronts a criticism often made of one of his central theses, namely, that all life forms interact in a manner that is essentially sociological, and that this sociological dynamism cuts across all ontological levels. Tarde’s opponents argue that not all life forms have symmetrical forms. Nations and societies, for instance, extend over territories that are often shapeless and irregular, with no clear boundaries, whilst all living organisms, his opponents argue, have clearly bounded morphologies (Tarde 2006: 57). Tarde summarizes their argument by saying that, in their view, an ‘organism’s height, width and length are always in proportional relationship to one another’ (Tarde 2006: 58). For Tarde, however, those who take sides with this kind of symmetrical argumentation fail to understand that human societies’ symmetrical orientation is deployed along different orders of reality. One only need look at China’s ‘social aggregation’, which ‘extends 3000 kilometers long and wide, and only one or two kilometers high, since Chinese people are all short and they build low houses’ (Tarde 2006: 58). Chinese society displays a form of sociological proportionality that is adapted to their territorial and environmental conditions, and the same is true of human societies everywhere: ‘Everything in our social world … is symmetrical and regular’ (Tarde 2006: 60). Indeed, it is the proportional stability – the balance of ontological accounts – afforded by symmetry that justifies ‘every possibility’s tendency towards realization, every reality’s tendency towards universalization … towards the netting out of its characters’ (Tarde 2006: 99). In the rest of this chapter I would like to describe in some detail one of the

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examples used by Tarde to justify the netting-out of ontology, that is, its ultimate proportional form. His example concerns the height of human societies. The example follows his argument about the size – the height, length and width – of Chinese society. He writes that it is only natural for societies to seek higher altitudes, ‘to build ever higher houses … because this satisfies a widespread human need, that of participating of the social advantages that go with concentrating the largest possible amount of people in the smallest possible amount of space’. The only reason why this ‘vital instinct for sociability’ does not develop to the full is that ‘such a high-rise nation would surpass the atmosphere’s utmost limit for breathing, at the same time as the earth’s crust would find itself incapable of supporting the pressures exerted upon it by such vertical growth’ (Tarde 2006: 58–9). The rest of the chapter reflects on just such a Tardean concern with the netting-out of ontology in sociological proportions; said differently, with the ontology of the social, and in particular, the ontological terms of social theory itself. Tarde’s revival in sociology involves just such a ‘coming-into-terms’ of sociology with its own modes of description and analysis: an enquiry into the process of how and where to look for the sociological in descriptions of social life. For Tarde, as noted above, ontology itself is a sociological project, hence his famous dictum, ‘every thing is a society’ (Tarde 2006: 55). The ethnographic example I want to focus on concerns the case of a ‘high-rise society’, in terms not unlike those imagined by Tarde himself. From September 2007 to September 2008 I worked and carried out fieldwork in an international management consultancy firm (which I shall hereon refer to as Innova) researching and designing the ‘knowledge environment’ of one of the world’s largest oil company’s new headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Buenos Aires, I worked alongside a team of ten people, including architects, engineers, consultants and graphic designers, whose task was to design a new ‘office culture’ for the company’s new purpose-made 34 storey building. The original plan made provisions for c.2000 people based in a variety of office locations in Buenos Aires to move to the new building in October 2008. One of the main tasks of the project’s team was to come up with the definite number of people who would be moving to the new premises as planned. What follows is the story of how the Number 2000 was produced.

Ecologies of work Innova brands itself as a consultancy firm specializing in ‘workplace strategies’, aimed at bringing together expertise in the physical, technical, social and organizational systems of a company to design tailored ‘ecologies of new ways of working’ (Becker 2007; Becker et al. 1992). Examples of such ecologies are so-called non-territorial offices, hotelling, collaborative team environments or home-based telework (Becker et al. 1993a; Becker et al. 1993b). When I arrived on the project in September 2007, Innova had already been working on analysing the oil company’s ‘work culture’ and ‘work processes’ for several months. Out of this work, Innova’s analysts had developed three scenarios, each modelling and proposing

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a new corporate approach to the organization of work. Central to all models was the analysis of the spatial dimensions of work. Innova’s strategic approach to ‘work cultures’ revolves around the question of ‘where’ people work. For Innova, knowing where one works is important because it is around the spatial dynamics of work that they construct what they call indices of ‘mobility’ and ‘flexibility’. Simply put, these indices measure a company’s ratio of spatial occupation; that is, how many square metres are occupied by how many people. This is of course directly reminiscent of Tarde’s argument apropos the ‘vital instinct of sociability’, where human creativity is said to be at its highest if ‘the largest possible amount of people [are concentrated] in the smallest possible amount of space’. However, unlike Tarde, at Innova they do not think that spatial concentration leads directly to human creativity. What they do think is that creativity and innovation are the products of spatial dynamism. As they put it themselves in their brochures and documents, ‘the idea is to develop a spatial culture where people are empowered to go and find work regardless of location, rather than having to wait for work to come to them’. By measuring and standardizing occupational ratios, Innova develops models of non-territorial offices and ‘dynamic ecological workplaces’ where no one has rights to any particular workplace and no workplace belongs to anyone in particular. Businesses generally find Innova’s tailored solutions very attractive because the idea that one can create a direct correspondence between an organization’s work dynamics and its use of space – the idea that two or more people can use the same desk and computer without increasing density of population – can lead to huge savings in property rent.

Repetition

 

Two years before I joined the project, the architectural firm hired to develop the interior design for the new headquarters had carried out a preliminary survey and estimated a total population for the company of 2000 employees. Innova’s most important task when I arrived in September 2007 was to count the actual number of people who would be moving to the building in October 2008, and to benchmark this number against the original 2000 count used by the architects to design the building’s layout. The project had also among its tasks surveying the technological and archival infrastructure that would be attached to the moving population. Around the time I joined the project, Petrolco designated a Project Coordinator, whom I shall call George, to supervise our relationship with the various departments in the company. Early in September 2007 Innova presented George with a plan to carry out Number 2000. There were three steps to the plan. First, we had to arrange meetings with every one of the 32 senior directors of the company to introduce them to the project and get them to tell us how many people worked for them. We were hoping it would take just over one month to produce the information: two weeks of meetings and two weeks for directors to obtain the data. Next, we would take the information to the architects and help them design an office layout for every department. Finally, we would be using the information of who-works-where-how to develop a ‘change management’ training programme to prepare the company’s

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population for the new building’s ecology of work. Our plan was to start the training programme early in the New Year, ten months ahead of the move. Although the plan for the production of Number 2000 was ready by September 2007, we did not start meeting with directors until early November. A few days after we presented the Number 2000 plan to George, he called an urgent meeting of a special task force which would later become the project’s Coordination Team. George had looked at a PowerPoint presentation that we had included among the set of documents to be presented to directors, and had panicked. At a private meeting with me, he said he knew nothing of the contents of such a presentation and thus felt he was in no position to validate and sanction it. He had convened a meeting with a group of top managers (the Director of Human Resources, Director of Facility Management, Senior Manager of Internal Communications, Senior Manager of IT and the Head of Corporate Security), whom he was hoping would take responsibility for approving the presentation and giving the go-ahead to our meetings with the company’s senior directors. Over the following three weeks the special task force met three times and kept in regular email contact. Every meeting generated a cascade of emails and suggestions. An original suggestion in one meeting by the Director of Human Resources would be endorsed by the rest of the team, only to be tweaked and tampered with in future correspondence, away from the personal visibility of face-to-face interaction. Decisions that seemed robust, attracted consensus and were agreed upon in one meeting would radically change direction days later following an email or a telephone call. Ideas and proposals bifurcated and multiplied in all kinds of unexpected ways, and no one, not even George, seemed to hold the centre under such overwhelming sense of proliferation. For management consultants proliferations had material consequences. Over their three weeks of meetings, the discussions and resolutions taken by the task force led to Innova developing eight different versions of the PowerPoint presentation. During this time, a team of no less than six of Innova’s consultants worked night and day to make hundreds of changes so trivial and minute that some of the members of the task force eventually asked for them to be revised again, not remembering they were the ones who had asked for those changes in the first place. Such was the havoc generated by the presentation that in the end a decision had to be taken by one of the company’s highest ranking world directors to use an original presentation prepared by Innova in 2006, back when the project was first pitched to the Board of Directors. This is an important point and one I would like to underscore: the economy of knowledge management, as I came to experience it, is an economy of repetition. The work of management consultants consists in generating the material conditions for what Marilyn Strathern has called the ‘literalisation’ of a cultural ideal (Strathern 1992: 5), in this case, the notion that business innovation and knowledge management are better provided for in a cultural and physical environment that is flexible, mobile and transparent. Social change often involves a simple process of making the implicit explicit (Strathern 1992: 44), and this is certainly true of the production of knowledge as a managerial process. However, for management

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consultants to turn this idea into something patently obvious to the oil company required abundant material work, generally of a repetitive nature. The work of knowledge managers and consultants consists thus of generating ever new material forms (Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations, email exchanges, meetings) where the mantra of innovation and flexibility is repeated time and time again (cf. Thrift 2005: 215). There are different modes of repetition, however, and the one I would like to talk about here resembles what I shall call a whirlpool economy of repetition. The episode with the PowerPoint presentation is a clear instance of such a whirlpool dynamic, where an idea or object swirls around in circles producing many variations of itself before it settles down and sediments. The idiom is one that Tarde would have approved of, for he too thought reality tended to gyrate and spin in sociological fashion – which is why he so often falls for the metaphor of the ‘whirlwind’ to describe the original vibratory impulse of social life (for example, Tarde 2006: 28, 72, 74, 78). The image recalls, too, Georgina Born’s description of the ‘circulatory economy of expertise’ of corporate managerialism as a ‘parasite assemblage’, a form of knowledge that feeds on/off its own proliferation (Born, this volume). Another example is the conceptual and editorial work that went into producing different illustrations (below, from A to B to C to D) of the one idea, ‘the new building will support our work processes’, which was used in the PowerPoint presentation. Over three weeks of periodic meetings, images A, B and C were discarded by the Coordination Team for variously invoking, in the words of some of the attendants, ‘a machine-like environment, as if our people were simply cogs in a larger machine’, or ‘the notion that our new building is a beach resort. We don’t want to convey the wrong impression: people come here to work.’ At the meetings, nobody ever contested the notion that a more dynamic environment would, indeed, improve work processes. Rather, what dominated the discussions over the appropriate images to use was a sense of social ‘integrity’, a variously perceived urge to make

Figure 7.1

118 A. Corsín Jiménez sure that the final outcome delivered the right apportionment between aesthetic, cultural and institutional processes, so that the image and the message chosen would create no distress among the workforce. Image D was finally designed by George himself, in a desperate last attempt to prove to Innova’s graphic designers that one could indeed illustrate the notion of ‘work processes’ – although George’s design was never subjected to public scrutiny at a meeting of the Coordination Team. These two examples, of the many versions produced of the PowerPoint presentation and the various images proposed to illustrate the concept of ‘work processes’, are, in some respects, trivial examples. But my argument here is that it is such trivia, such minutiae, that make up the economy of knowledge under contemporary ‘knowledge economy’ conditions. It is the economy of scale of repetitive trivia that leads to the production of knowledge as a managerial process. Let me elaborate a little further on this point.

Appropriateness

 

After the two-month ordeal of preparing the PowerPoint presentation, in November 2007 Innova’s consultants were ready to start meeting with the company’s senior directors. At the meetings, directors were asked to help manufacture three types of information: (i) A list of all the people working under their directorship, including temporary workers and subcontractors. We also needed them to produce a three-year forecast of their department’s growth. To help them compile this information, we emailed them an Excel sheet containing a list of all the people Human Resources had registered for their directory. We asked them to check the list and complete it with the names and rank of anyone missing. We further asked them to complete this information using a colour code: red for tenured members of staff who did not appear in the list; green for temporary workers and subcontractors who did not appear in the list; orange for expected increases in the population of tenured professionals; and yellow for expected increases in the population of temporary workers and subcontractors. (ii) Building on the Excel sheet, we asked directors to assign to every member of their department a category of mobility. At Innova, so-called ‘mobility categories’ are used to describe how and why people move around: whether one works mostly from one’s desk and computer (the category for this kind of mobility is called Standard); whether one spends most of the time in meetings, or helping out colleagues based in offices other than one’s own (for example, the way IT technicians visit people to do repair work – the category for this kind of mobility is called Advanced); whether one spends most of the time outside the building (for example, if you are a sales person, or a manager who travels regularly); or whether one’s job requires special technical and spatial appliances (this category is called Technic – most technics in Petrolco are geologists and geophysicists, who work with huge satellite maps of oil fields and thus require unusually long desks to fold these out). Following on from Innova’s earlier scenario-building analysis, directors

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were recommended to consider dividing their workforce into the following statistical blocks: 25% Executives, 25% Advanced, 40% Standard and 10% Technics. (iii) Finally, directors were asked to draw a ‘relational map’ for their unit, indicating degrees of connectivity with those units or departments they regularly worked with, detailing the types of relationships that different people, with different mobilities, had with colleagues inside and outside their departments. This would give Innova an idea of the types of dynamics prevailing in each department: who meets with whom, where and for how long, and what their categorical relationships are. Further, Innova’s consultants created a column in the Excel sheet with the name ‘Relational Map’, to be used by directors to link a person’s entry in the sheet with their position in the map. The project’s team held 32 meetings over the following three weeks. Every meeting went through the same routine: we showed the PowerPoint presentation, explaining the project’s philosophy and the competitive advantages that would accrue to the new ecology of work; we went through the Excel sheet, explaining that some tenured, and certainly all temporary and subcontracted workers, would be missing from the list; we explained the mobility categories; we sketched a relational map of their department, and then took a photograph of it; and on every occasion we obtained a commitment from a director that the information we required from them would be ready in two weeks’ time. It took not two weeks but two months to obtain the information. A minority of directors diligently returned the revised Excel sheet by email. But in most cases we had to make new appointments, visit the directors in their offices, and sit side by side with them working our way through the name, position, rank and mobility category of each individual listed under their department in the Excel sheet. On one occasion we even had to walk around a director’s department in his company, jotting down the names of all the people working there. In this process, the number of people went through an excruciating politics of (dis)aggregation. For example, we found directors regularly adding people to their Excel sheets without introducing the details of every new employee added; deleting proper names and adding generic names, such as ‘engineer’, ‘lawyer’, ‘geologist’ or ‘temporary staff’; changing people’s rank and status; sometimes, even, adding comment fields to the Excel sheet, as when a comment was inserted noting that an expatriate worker ought to be counted and assigned a desk of his own in the new building, despite currently living and working in Spain. Moreover, most directors failed to produce forecasts of population growth for their departments, and when they did they often confused the colour code, mistaking temporary workers for permanent staff, or forecasts of the former for current staff of the latter. And almost no director remembered to create a link between people’s entries in the Excel sheet and their position in the relational map. Notwithstanding, after much work and not a little patience, a final count was produced by the end of January 2008. Throughout this period, every time a director sent us a new version of the Excel sheet we forwarded a copy to a Senior Manager in the Human Resources department (hereafter, Paul), who had been allocated the task of making sure that the data produced by directors was in line with company

120 A. Corsín Jiménez policy and predictions. By the end of January, Paul’s version of the Excel sheet threw a difference of 200 people when compared to Innova’s, because he had given up trying to make sense of the colour codes used by directors and decided to count current and future staff as one. Below are a number of copies of Excel sheets we received back from directors:

Figure 7.2

 

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

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Having produced a record of all the people in the company was only half the story, however. The next thing Innova had to do was to visualize such numbers, that is, to make the numbers ‘look good’, fit for their public presentation. This was no mean feat. A final count of more than 2000 people, for example, would have been disastrous for the project, since the architects had been working for over two years with an estimated population of 2000 people in mind. Inversely, a count of fewer than 2000 people would have also created difficulties, because the oil company was planning to rent five of the building’s 34 floors. Thus, a population of less than 2000 people would mean that there was vacant space over and above the estimated, meaning the oil company would have to forego rental earnings at a rate of $3000 per square metre. The project team’s task, then, was to find a right visual and rhetorical device that would help make the numbers look appropriate. One such strategy involved a particular choice of rhetorical device to be used when speaking of a department’s population. The original layout for the building had estimated an average occupation of 100 persons per floor, which gave the project team and the architects some room to speak of every floor as one or as 100 people. For example, when a department’s size had exceeded even the most optimistic of forecasts, consultants would often speak in terms of a departmental allocation: they would say ‘Human Resources will populate the 16th floor’, thus disguising the fact that the population for that department had increased almost 16% in the past two years, from 80 to 100 persons, generating additional pressure on the building’s overall stacking. Or they would divert a direct question about a department’s growth by speaking of a spatial surplus elsewhere in the building. ‘Making the numbers look appropriate’ was important for a number of reasons. It turned out that some directors had, with good reason, exaggerated their forecasts when first asked about expected increases in the size of their teams back in the year 2006. Two years later, however, their expectations were not made good, and their departments had experienced very little or no growth at all. George and the Director of Facility Management were anxious about this scenario, because they had made budgetary allocations for the project in accordance with the 2006 population survey. For instance, if a director who had been allocated two floors ended up needing only half a floor, this would create a problem because it would suddenly create open spaces at random points in the building, which would affect both the building’s overall layout and that floor’s specific layout (with implications for office furniture purchase orders for that floor, IT infrastructure, etc.). Innova’s strategy then was to produce and circulate pie charts of ‘mobility categories’ per department shown as a percentage of the company’s total population. This created enough of a distraction for consultants to wait until another director, with exactly the opposite needs, sent in his or her Excel sheet, whose numbers would then help compensate the distortion created by the first director’s numbers. Why generate distress among the managerial classes, consultants reasoned, if the whole counting process remained open-ended and inconclusive?

122 A. Corsín Jiménez

Counting to infinity Describing the bureaucratic work that went into the drafting of the United Nation’s Global Platform for Action document, the written outcome of the ‘Fourth World Conference on Women’, Annelise Riles reports on the delegates’ impatience with the procedural constraints of UN conference meetings (Riles 2006). Meetings were experience by delegates with a sense of gridlock; they often felt as if locked up in endlessly detailed discussions, where the passage of time was held in suspension. The elaborate process through which documents were crafted, whereby every delegation had a right to raise queries about every word in the text, always led to a sense of impasse. Riles says that delegates were caught up in the (temporal, but also literal) ‘brackets’ of the document’s narrative, because at meetings words or passages queried by different delegations were marked off the text by placing brackets around them, thus calling for the opening-up of an institutional space (and additional time within a meeting) to attend to such divergences: What caused gridlock for the delegates was the collapse of time and institutional progress … such that no measurement of one against the other was possible. There was no way of measuring the passage of time until the institutional problem was solved, and likewise no means of measuring progress against the passage of time. Hence any problem required a seemingly infinite amount of time, and any moment of time could generate a seemingly intractable bureaucratic problem. (Riles 2006: 82–3, emphasis added)

 

Bureaucrats feared intractability, and they feared infinity too. For this reason, the UN’s procedural mechanisms for conflict resolution in the making of administrative process rendered bureaucratic knowledge essentially its own form: the focus on bracketing meant that the process was made ‘internal’ to itself; there was no mechanism for measuring bureaucratic knowledge except its own progress (Riles 2006: 85–7). Not surprisingly, delegates, own admission of how progress was made always pointed to sources of agency and creativity outside the internal form and structure of the process: ‘it was widely acknowledged that nothing ever got accomplished at UN conferences in the formal sessions that adhered to proper form; that progress only occurred in the “informals”’ (Riles 2006: 87). As Riles points out, whilst out of synch with procedural form, in the last instance ‘informality’ (meetings of smaller groups of people, unconstrained by institutional norm) rendered the bureaucratic process consistent with itself, because in providing for its ultimate completion it allowed for its internal cohesion. Thus, informality unhinged the organisation as a procedural compact and prompted a disproportionate effect of sorts: an opportunity for seeing from the inside the bureaucratic process’s own internal mechanism (Riles 2006: 87–89). Riles’ ethnography of documentary and bureaucratic practices at UN conferences echoes the description of the production of Number 2000 as an instrument of social-cum-technocratic knowledge. As we have seen, at Petrolco the work of

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Innova’s consultants consisted in creating the standards that would allow speaking of social relationships in terms of flexibility, transparency and mobility: flexibility, transparency and mobility were turned into modes of description internal to social relationships.5 Thus, consultants developed a discursive field where terms such as ‘organization’ and ‘building’ worked as proportional objects for one another, helping to keep in place the equation between the productivity of ‘management’ and ‘the social’, such that the measurement of one against the other was possible. Keeping such measurements in place required making other measurements invisible. This was most prominent, as we have seen, in the work of making numbers look appropriate. Consultants played with numbers, making them now work as absolute figures, now as percentages of relative change, now as occupational ratios, now as square metres. The organization and the building were squeezed or expanded at leisure, as long as the fiction of their equation was held in view. The process of counting became an excruciating exercise too, with numbers assembling and disassembling as directors aggregated their figures, corrected them, withdrew some numbers, only to come back with further additions. There was a sense in which the numbers folded into themselves, stretching their own numerals with the passing of time. Time dwelt in each number, and it reached a point where every new number agreed upon, every time a definite entry was made into the Excel sheet, ‘we move an inch closer to finishing this damn infinite counting business’, as a consultant put it.

Conclusion

 

‘What imaginative work do measurements do?’, asks Marilyn Strathern in an essay on the imagination of scale in compensation payments and gift-exchange in Melanesia (Strathern 1999: 221). In the Papua New Guinea Highlands, exchanges of pigs and shells index the exchange of human capacities, which index in turn the exchange of body expenditure, such as body exertion and body loss over reproduction, land cultivation, pig rearing or caring for relatives, for instance. As Strathern puts it, ‘what keeps one equation in place can only be other equations’ (Strathern 1999: 209). In this chapter I have described one such exchange of equations: the making of knowledge management into an analogy of the social. This required of consultants to deploy an array of management techniques of ‘measurement by ratio’ (Strathern 1999: 218), such as converting people’s time–space relations into mobility ratios or using such mobility ratios to draw and map occupational ratios. To such effect, consultants set out to measure and count people, desks, archives, square metres and their interconnections (as in the ‘relational maps’). Equations were set up that would hold in place and make significant other equations. Gabriel Tarde, we have seen, was keen on such equations too. Indeed, part of my argument in this chapter has been to show that, in this sense, Tarde participates in the proportional imagination that is constitutive of modern social theory. Such imagination provides the measurements – the height, length and width – for our sociological descriptions. It allows for thinking of social life as an analogical stream of equations, an ongoing conversion of social measures into other social

124 A. Corsín Jiménez measures. But if there is a lesson to be taken away from the Number 2000 project, that is that not all forms of conversion do the same work: a proportional imagination dictates not how to proportion the world. Take Melanesians (in this case, Hageners’) exchanges of ratios. Strathern indicates how the conversion of ratios across cultural and social domains has led Hageners to engage resource extractors (mining and timber logging companies) through a mode of proportional exchange. For Hageners, gift-giving and taking are cultural techniques for measuring human capacities: The Hagen negotiator puts his wealth into his exchange partner, and the ‘produce’ comes back in the form in which it was inserted. People thus measure what is taken out by what was put in; their own power to extract wealth is measured by the power of those who had extracted it from them in the first place. (Strathern 1999: 222)

 

Profit extracted from the ground by mining companies must therefore index the hidden resources that the ongoing exertion of human and ancestral capacities by Highlanders has lodged there. For Hageners, compensation claims are simply expressive of a conversion of ratios. Not for developers, though, who have responded to resource compensation claims by Highlanders with disconcert and an outright sense of disproportion. Like Riles’ bureaucrats, in their experience of social management, developers fear encountering the intractability of the infinite. In this respect, it is clear where and when the Number 2000 project confronted its own disproportionality: appropriateness and repetition were cultural and institutional forms demanded by those involved in the project to gauge and measure their own sense of accomplishment. George’s nervousness about the PowerPoint presentation centred on his requirement that it became a vehicle for reproducible knowledge; that it gathered enough consensus for it to be repeated and travel along the organization. One may say that what George was hoping to accomplish through the consolidation of repetition was the establishment of an exchange ratio whereby his own self-image was enabled as a proportion (a measurement by ratio) for the idea of organizational change as a whole. He mobilized PowerPoint as a politico-organizational technology of de-monstration (Stark & Paravel 2008), for re-surfacing and re-assembling the corporate. Hence the significance of what, on the surface of it, looked like organizational trivia and minutiae – but not for George, who knew that the (anthropological imagination of the) figure of proportionality enabled the conflation of the infinitesimal into the infinite. The process of making numbers look appropriate involved a similar zooming in and out of the organization and the building as comparable objects at any and every level of analysis, from the molecular to the infinite.6 The production of analytical data and the imagination of a social ontology thus became correlative exercises. The disproportionate and the infinite finally bring me back to the question with which I opened the chapter, about the ontological turn in contemporary sociology: how social theory ‘nets out’ its descriptive projects in ontological fashion. Where does social theory confront its own disproportionality?

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The recent Phoenix rising of a neo-Tardean social imagination owes much to Bruno Latour’s concern for finding a forefather to Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2002, and his chapter in this volume). For Latour, Tarde’s attempt at building up an associative monadology is emblematic of an ontological project to be lauded for rendering the world flat. Tarde’s imaginative flights between the big and the small are strategically deployed to render negligible any notion of sociological size. Latour writes: With this principle we should not consider that the macro encompasses the micro, but that the micro is made of a proliferation of incommensurable entities … which are simply lending one of their aspects … to make up a provisional whole. The small holds the big. Or rather the big could at any moment drown again in the small from which it emerged and to which it will return. (Latour 2005: 243)

 

Without size, what the methodological world of social theory ought to look like, then, is a ‘flatland’ (Latour 2005: 172). Social theorists need to flatten every empirical concept and object they come across in order to trace their proliferating connections and associations. Only once flattened will we get some sense of purchase over the real distances that connections have to travel every time they render the social visible and intelligible – albeit not political, because the political requires, for Latour, a second strategic move, whereby the flatland is rendered once again dimensional and volumetric. The political involves the moment of re-description through which the flatland is reassembled again into a collective. Such project in proportional re-description (from the empirically sizable to the methodologically flat and back to the politically dimensioned) has as its ultimate aim ‘the progressive composition of one common world’ (Latour 2005: 256). The ontology of the common world, as much as the ontology of the sociological whole or the ontology of social relations, is an effect of our proportional imagination. Flattening and re-dimensioning the world is an obvious exercise in re-proportioning. Indeed, the very attempt at rendering the social accountable to ontology, as I have tried to show, falls prey to the same aesthetics of proportionality. Unless the sociological project is finite (which I take it not to be), then ontology is no size for it. This is not to say that such analyses are flawed; only that they do not take stock of the full extent of their own analytical movements. And just what may those analytical movements be in Tarde’s case? Tarde’s descriptive language is charged with metaphysical excess, as he himself acknowledges in the last sentence of Monadology. His prose is infused with size, scale and exorbitant magnitude.7 Perhaps then it will pay us to stay with him, by his sense of excess. In Fragments of a Future History (2002), the science fiction novel he authored, Tarde takes the action underground, into an underworld where humanity has sought refuge from a dying sun. This is hardly a flatland, an open territory of ramifying connections, but, in the words of H.G. Wells, who wrote the book’s postface, a world apposite for a ‘stalactite philosophy’ (Wells 2002: 118). In this fictional pre-(post)-ANT world, the greatest exemplar of the arts is architecture,

126 A. Corsín Jiménez which has finally liberated itself from the burden of façade-building and can now dedicate itself to exploring the beauty of the interior: architecture renders the search for the human soul an enterprise in pure excavation (Tarde 2002: 72). Inside the world, Tarde seems to be telling us, humanity will eventually come unto itself. In a wonderful passage, Tarde recounts the philosophy of the underworld’s ‘most famous sociologist’, for whom the history of mankind will realize itself when ‘the last man finds himself alone, the only and final survivor, heir to a hundred successive civilizations’, inhabiting the very centre of the earth (Tarde 2002: 99). ‘Happiness’, Tarde tells us in another of his wonderful end-of-story sentences, ‘lives hidden’ (Tarde 2002: 108). Tarde’s philosophy emerges thus as a philosophy of extremes, of abyssal depths and subterranean metaphysics, that makes life flow deeper and deeper, against the odds of a frozen exterior. Where does social theory confront its own sense of disproportionality? With Tarde, one is tempted to say inside itself: in the stalactitical residues of every ethnographic re-description.8

Acknowledgements My thanks to Matei Candea for his invitation to contribute to the volume and for the close reading and commentary he provided on an earlier version of the chapter.

Notes

 

1 A note on convention: hereon I distinguish between proportionality and commensurability. Proportionality posits a relation of magnitude between two objects or orders of knowledge; commensurability, on the other hand, standardizes such relation to a common measure. Although it is not uncommon to use the two interchangeably, in my usage proportionality refers to a sociological imagination whereas commensurability is a description of a normative discursive effect. Thus, in a passage cited below, Tarde uses a proportional imagination to posit a relation between the ontic reality of being human and the microscopic reality of atomic and subatomic action. Tarde brings to life the relation between big and small, the eternal and the ephemeral, through a proportional imagination but, as he observes poignantly in the same passage, such relation entails no commensurability at all. On a similar distinction, between measurement as scale and measurement as matching, see Strathern (1999: 205–6). 2 The use of an ontological proportionality for sociological purposes is not, however, Tarde’s or Durkheim’s achievement. One can trace the imagery of political and sociological proportionality all the way back to sixteenth century mechanical philosophy, if not before. A wonderful example is to be found in the use Hobbes makes of proportion in his political ontology: ‘The world … is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of Magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth, and Depth: also every part of Body, is likewise Body, and hath the like dimensions’ (Hobbes 1651 [1909]: 524, emphasis added). 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Tarde’s texts are my own. 4 Tarde speaks variously of ‘excrements’, ‘fugues’ and ‘losses’ (Tarde 2006: 29, 81, 84). 5 A Tardean move by all accounts: ‘The advance of every science consists in suppressing external likenesses and repetitions … and replacing them by internal likenesses and repetitions – that is, comparisons of that material with itself’ (Tarde 2000 [1899]: 31).

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6 ‘[The social laws (of repetition, opposition and adaptation) have] a tendency to move along a path of steady growth, from a comparatively infinitesimal to a comparatively infinite scale’ (Tarde 2000 [1899]: 94). 7 Summing up his social laws (repetition, opposition and adaptation), Tarde sentences, ‘all three of these factors work together to effect the expansion of universal variation in its highest, widest, and profoundest individual and personal forms’ (Tarde 2000 [1899]: 98, emphasis added). 8 In case you wondered, the count of the final Number 2000 project threw up 1772.

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Barry, A. & N. Thrift. 2007. Gabriel Tarde: imitation, invention and economy. Economy and Society 36, 509–25. Becker, F.D. 2007. The ecology of knowledge networks. California Management Review 49, 1–20. Becker, F.D., B. Davis, A.J. Rappaport & W.R. Sims. 1992. Evolving workplace strategies: investigations into the ecology of new ways of working. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University International Facility Management Program. Becker, F.D., K.L. Quinn, A.J. Rappaport & W.R. Sims. 1993a. New working practices: benchmarking flexible scheduling, staffing, and work location in an international context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University International Workplace Studies Program. —— . 1993b. Telework centers: an evaluation of the North American and Japanese experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University International Workplace Studies Program. Corsín Jiménez, A. forthcoming. Managing the social/knowledge equation. Cambridge Anthropology. Hobbes, T. 1651 [1909]. Leviathan. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Kant, I. 1788 [1956]. The critique of practical reason (trans.) L. White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Latour, B. 2002. Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social. In The social in question: new bearing in history and the social sciences (ed.) P. Joyce. London: Routledge. —— . 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riles, A. 2006. [Deadlines]: removing the brackets on politics in bureaucratic and anthropological analysis. In Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge (ed.) A. Riles. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Stark, D. & V. Paravel. 2008. PowerPoint in public: digital technologies and the new morphology of demonstration. Theory, Culture and Society 25, 30–55. Strathern, M. 1992. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century (Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, 1989). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 1999. Property, substance, and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press. Tarde, G. 2000 [1899]. Social laws: an outline of sociology (trans.) H.C. Warrent. Kitchener: Batoche Books. —— . 2002. Fragmentos de historia futura [Spanish translation of Fragment d’histoire future]. Barcelona: Ediciones Abraxas. —— . 2006. Monadología y sociología [Spanish translation of Monadologie et sociologie]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Cactus. Thrift, N. 2005. Knowing capitalism. London: Sage.

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Toews, D. 2003. The new Tarde: sociology after the end of the social. Theory, Culture and Society 20, 81–98. Wells, H.G. 2002. Posfacio. In Fragmentos de historia futura [Spanish translation of Fragment d’histoire future]. Barcelona: Ediciones Abraxas.

9

Faith, reason and the ethic of craftsmanship Creating contingently stable worlds Penny Harvey and Soumhya Venkatesan

 

There are many reasons why the work of Gabriel Tarde might appeal to contemporary social scientists, not least his interest in the general principle of vitality that resonates so strongly with current research at the interface of the biological and the human sciences.1 And the drama of his confrontations with Durkheim are spectacular – both in terms of Tarde’s ousting from the sociological scene by the Durkheimian conceptual apparatus, and the subsequent moment of reinstatement, aided by Latour’s rhetorical prowess: Durkheim’s time is over; the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ have lost their power to energize and now appear only as spent forces – too static, too inflexible, incapable of capturing the dynamic uncertainties and destructive desires that characterize our contemporary world. As ethnographers with a keen interest in social theory, yet lodged firmly within an anthropological rather than sociological tradition, we find the drama intriguing. Durkheim has had a hugely influential presence in the formation of modern British social anthropology, but it would be fair to say that until Deleuze (2004), and subsequently Latour (2001, 2004, 2005), brought him to our attention, nobody had thought much about, and much less with, Tarde. His minute empiricism, coupled with an interest in psychology, was enough to deter all but the most specialist interest, but most people simply hadn’t come across him. The question thus emerges as to what it is that Tarde has to offer a contemporary anthropology, when we had been getting over Durkheim on our own for the past few decades. Getting over Durkheim is of course not a straightforward task. His determination to build a social science that would allow us to account for social norms without recourse to the non-social remains central to the anthropological endeavour. His questions about coercive, moral forces that shape human endeavour, the sense of collectivity expressed in ritual, social institutions and enduring traditions, and the patterned regularities that statistical devices and longitudinal or comparative studies reveal, remain enduringly fascinating. And for this reason Tarde’s alternative approach to these matters is intriguing, for it makes explicit all that had to be forgotten for the Durkheimian paradigm to prevail. Durkheim’s social science hinged on the establishment of the possibility of studying ‘social facts as things’, entities in the world that exist beyond, and external to, the individual. Tarde’s notion of ‘things as social entities’ relocates society as integral to all entities. This relocation has a radical potential in relation to established, positivist social science,

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for it foregrounds the processual, and captures the importance of relational dynamics of becoming, the open-endedness of all things, the potential of all things to transform through their inherent situated relationality. Latour highlights Tarde’s interest in relationality as the key site of contention between our two protagonists: ‘[Tarde] vigorously maintained that the social was not a special domain of reality but a principle of connections’ (Latour 2005: 13). Thus, while for Durkheim the social is the external force that holds things together, Tarde approaches the social from another angle. As Alliez points out, for Tarde ‘everything is a society, in which every phenomenon is a social fact’.2 In Strathern’s terms we are faced with a contrast between ‘relations between things’ and ‘things as relations’ (Strathern 1996: 19). These contrasting approaches to the social are visible in the history of ethnographic writing, and emerged in debates concerning the ways in which ethnographers appear to shift scales between the detailed precision of their everyday observations and the kinds of theoretical and/or descriptive entities that emerged from the analytic process. The ‘writing culture’ debates of the 1980s opened up a new critical awareness of the ways in which generalizations were habitually made in the discipline3 – and at issue was precisely the connection between specifics and generalities, parts and wholes. For Durkheim, the details of specific interactions were necessarily subordinated to the ‘bigger’ picture. Contingency, error, uncertainty were simply not relevant in his view of the social, where the whole was necessarily more than the sum of its parts, and thus beyond the detail. But for Tarde, as for many contemporary ethnographers, the detail is not approached as less than the whole, for it is through attention to the detail that we can find different kinds of collectivity in formation. Attention to this formative process is what Durkheimian sociology put aside. The attraction of Tarde today is thus not simply the focus on relationality (for as we have seen Durkheim was also interested in the relation), but rather his further probing into the forces that motivate specific relations of imitation – and his refusal to assume established (and unquestioned) social entities as a starting point. Tarde approaches social entities as relations that are made and remade in specific circumstances that guarantee that no repetition is ever exact. For this sociology the mechanistic metaphors of social cohesion no longer suffice. Contingency and variability, passion and desire are recognized as integral to the social. This perspective resonates with approaches that have been developed in various empirical and theoretical quarters over the past century.4 For ethnographers it is interesting as it creates a new visibility for an approach which is premised on attention to the detailed study of specific interactions, and in which any kind of apparent stability or continuity has to be accounted for rather than assumed. The ‘situational’ or ‘processual’ analysis that grew out of the Manchester School provides a good example: ‘If situational analysis brings the social structure to life, it does so by obliging the analyst to view the social structure, whatever its relative stability, as essentially an open dynamic. It entails that the situation must be grasped more fundamentally in its temporal openness than in its substantive definition and design. Put another way, it reminds the analyst that the substantivity of social structure is,

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though necessary and efficacious, if not exactly a fiction, at least both more and less than a thing’ (Evens, 2006: 56). Thus although Tarde has not been a major figure in anthropological worlds, it appears that we continue to rehearse the tensions expressed in the debates between Tarde and Durkheim. Why has this particular mode of repetition had such hold? One obvious possibility is simply that the argument, far from being resolved by Durkheim’s victory, was in fact amplified by the entrenchment of positions which have surfaced in diverse forms in more recent times, in various junctures of disciplinary crisis across the academic landscape. In this chapter we try to make a different kind of position available by working from ethnography. Keen to avoid the battles and stand-offs of the ‘science-wars’ scenarios,5 we do not set out to choose between Tarde and Durkheim or to arbitrate between them. By sitting on the fence we get some perspective – not only on what their divergent positions bring into view, but also in relation to what else might be going on that neither of them have noticed. Thus, taking the lead from the sage advice of Isabelle Stengers, who argued that the science wars would have been more interesting from the point of view of political struggle if the scientists had been asked about their practices and about what matters to them as practitioners (Stengers 2007: 12), we decided to follow through by attending ethnographically to a couple of examples where our practitioners might recognize themselves in both Tarde and Durkheim. In the ethnographic sections that follow we describe two scenarios: one relating to the practices of road-building engineers in contemporary Peru, the other relating to the practices of architect-sculptors of Hindu temples and gods. The architect-sculptors and the engineers provide interesting comparative material for a consideration of what is at stake in the contrast between ‘relations between things’ and ‘things as relations’. Both groups of practitioners enjoy expert status. Both are engaged in ordering and fixing the world, in keeping specific entities stable and relevant. Both work in established institutional settings (we focus specifically on the laboratories and the temples in this chapter). Both have clear ideas of correct and incorrect practice. Doing things properly is important to them and knowing how to do things properly is integral to their professional status. They embrace social rules and social facts. They are also explicitly involved in making things, and are thereby engaged in transformational process. In their material engagements with the world they bring things into relation, but, as our ethnographies show, in so doing they also recognize the relationality of things, and the open-endedness of all relational process. What we are interested in is how these apparently contradictory perspectives emerge in practice as mundane and unremarkable continuities. Thrift’s interest in the ‘ethic of craftsmanship’ offers us an important starting point. His invocation of craftsmanship relates to ‘a means of composition and channelling which involves bringing together discipline and concentration, understanding and inspiration, in order to bring out potential: a different model of homo faber, if you like, working both for its own sake and as part of a community of ability’ (Thrift 2008: 15). To configure the architect-sculptors and the engineers in these terms, to focus on their craft skills rather than their institutional identities, alerted us to how their

132 P. Harvey and S. Venkatesan practice drew together embodied skills, relational knowledge and the capacity to engage and transform matter in processes which, while open-ended, are also understood to be finite. As craftsmen they can succeed or fail, they recognize and draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable practice, they acknowledge the specificity of their expertise and agency, and they know that their influence on the world is bounded and temporary. In short, if Tarde tried to teach that the process of association is what needs to be studied, these craftsmen add the caveat that in the process some things are disassociated. The authoritative refusal of certain kinds of association has strong resonance with Strathern’s response to Actor-Network Theory, which is also strongly embedded in ethnographic methods. Anthropologists, she reminds us, ‘take their lead from the relations they find themselves in’ (Strathern 1996). Furthermore, ‘the concept of relation can be applied to any order of connection’ (1995: 17). ‘The relation requires other elements to complete it – it summons entities other than itself – whether looking at relations between things or at things as relations. To talk about relations is to make connections explicit’ (1995: 19). And as specific relations are made explicit, others are cut, or simply fall away.6 Strathern’s own intellectual interests connect the ethnographies of Melanesia to the concerns and preoccupations of Euro-American institutions – including what has become known as ‘audit culture’, that desire to enhance performance by making relations explicit. Her analysis generates a powerful sense of a diversity of network forms, as well as an awareness of the multiplicity of relations that could be followed or described. The particularity of ethnographic work is thus – not its relational form, but its commitment to holding back, at least for the duration of the fieldwork period, to try and find out what relations are in play, and to what effect. In this enterprise neither scale nor mode of connectivity can be assumed in advance.

Road-building in Latin America: Penny Harvey

 

Our first example is taken from an ethnographic study of road-building practices in Peru, in which the tensions between diverse modes of expertise are examined in relation to practices of material and social transformation.7 For the purposes of this chapter I pay particular attention to the ways in which the engineers produce the materials from which the road will ultimately be constructed. This focus takes us to the laboratories that, according to those who work in them, lie at the heart of the construction process. Before the construction camps are built, before the bulk of the workforce is recruited and mobilized, the topographers and laboratory engineers can be found tracing the route and testing the soils. The technical dynamics of road-building revolve around three key elements – human labour and expertise; the machines and tools deployed by these people; and the characteristics of the physical environment that they aim to transform. The associations between these three elements are always specific and frame what can be known, the measurements that can be taken, the properties assessed. But this specificity is itself unevenly acknowledged. For this reason, I do not introduce the engineers by name, for while my relationships with individuals were of

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course specific, it is important to hold to their sense that the technical procedures in which they are engaged should not be understood in relation to their personal circumstances and biographies. Indeed, technical practices are by definition generic, and the disassociation of the personal from the technical is the achievement of the professional worker. However, these same workers need to attend in minute detail to the specificity of the materials that are brought to them for analysis. These moves between an appreciation of the relative importance of generic and specific knowledge are what interest me here. The road we are studying will run for approximately 750km between the city of Cusco in the Peruvian Andes and the border with Brazil in the Amazon forest. Even before the final route is decided upon, soil samples are taken and transported to the labs. Here they are sorted, measured and tested in various ways and subsequent decisions about where the final route should go, where building materials should be drawn from, where waste materials disposed of, are made in relation to the results of these tests. In the laboratory the soil is made to reveal its capacities, to show its potential for the work it has in store – its density, porosity and plasticity are all assessed. Knowing the soil thus involves analytic procedures – composite materials are broken down to reveal their constitutive elements, and capacities are measured and documented in carefully controlled conditions. In this respect laboratory work is built upon procedures of systematic disconnection. In order to clearly apprehend the relations between things, the intrinsic relationality of things has to be both recognized and held in abeyance. Such is the power of abstraction. In the laboratories the engineers produce the earth as epistemic object by isolating it from the more complex relational worlds on the side of the road. But this is just the first step. Having found what the soil is made of, the laboratory engineers set about transforming it – modelling its capacities in virtual form to start with, and then with the help of more machines and other materials brought from elsewhere they reassemble the components into a more appropriate substance, one that maximizes its capacity. At this point the choices that are being made in the analytical process become explicit. What is the most appropriate substance? Or rather, appropriate to what? Well – appropriate to the functions designated elsewhere and by others, in relation to all kinds of decisions about what kind of road this is going to be, in relation to projections and calculations as to what kind of traffic, with what cargo, travelling how fast and how frequently. The most appropriate substance turns out to be the best that can be produced ‘in the circumstances’, given the inevitable compromises, the difficulties in finding materials, the fluctuations in prices, the unstable political and social agreements. Indeed, as I got to know them better, I found the engineers to be thoroughly open about their inability to achieve ‘proper form’. They know that these projects are compromised from the start by both social and environmental contingencies. They measure and label the land but they know that the land moves. They sample meticulously but they know that the spatial and temporal gaps between sample points are crucial unknowns in what become overtly speculative calculations. Entangled in classic ‘actor networks’, they muster the allies they can find: the webbings, the concrete, the stones, the machines, the politicians, accountants, bankers, lawyers, anthropologists,

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archaeologists, economists – but they know such allies to be intrinsically unstable social elements, none of which can entirely be trusted, although they are all needed for things to hold together in the end. Meanwhile local people watch and wonder. They know that there are qualities to the soil that the engineers take no notice of. For example, the road passes through an area which has for several decades been the site of widespread artisanal gold mining. There is gold in the mountains, washed down the valley floors, leaving residues in the water courses and traces in the soil. It is hard to find, but the engineers must know where there is gold, or they could use their analytical procedures to find out. But they do not appear to act on this information. People wonder whether this is because the information is simply irrelevant to them, or whether perhaps they just keep it to themselves. And then there is the more general problem that the engineers ignore, indeed are often ignorant of the earth’s more fundamental capacities and energies. The Andean people who live along the edges of this road in the mountains and the forest lowlands understand that the earth requires relations of a different kind – it needs feeding, it needs attention. For them the earth is fundamentally a relational and sentient being. The transformations required to produce generic substance in the labs, and to reconfigure the materials to build a road entail a violation of these relations – as the earth is cut into, dislocated, reconfigured. When these violations are not acknowledged or compensated in some way, fatal accidents occur. The earth demands a return of vital force. Many people die on the roads, and all these deaths link back to the voracious and unpredictable capacities of the earth itself. Accounts of the vengeful taking back of life are very common in relation to mining and construction work – but also characterize a more widespread understanding of the inter-dependence of human and non-human powers in this area. I spent a whole day hearing about the ghosts who occupy the house where the engineers were staying. But when my enthusiastic local friend attempted to engage one of the engineers with the details of these spectral beings, he cut her short declaring that he did not believe in ghosts, he believed in maths. This response was typical. Ghosts are irrelevant, maths is foundational. On the whole the engineers refuse to engage with these elusive powers, except when pushed by a pragmatic need to keep the workforce working. There was, for example, an occasion where a man killed on the construction site was said to be haunting the place. Men were falling sick and the company finally agreed to hold a mass to pacify the unhappy spirit and allow work to continue. On other occasions the company went further and made traditional ritual payments to the earth to ensure a propitious outcome to their venture. These were particularly common when new construction camps were erected. Such payments did not require the engineers to believe, but they demonstrated an appreciation of what mattered to those with whom they were working. I did come across one account of shamanic engineering. In the course of an interview with an experienced civil engineer living in the city of Cusco, I asked him about how engineers deal with local beliefs in a sacred and animate landscape. His response was interesting. Citing dates and names he began to tell me of a case that he had personally been involved in. They had been trying to put a bridge across a

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ravine. It was a rigid prefabricated structure which required a provisional prop to be erected halfway across to enable them to slide the bridge into place. On various occasions these attempts had failed because flash floods had washed the props away just as they were about to push the bridge structure across. One company went out of business in their attempts as the floods came year after year. Five years after the original attempt he found himself in charge of the project. They planned the operation to ensure that they were operating in the dry season – but again the floods came – and they nearly lost everything. On hearing of the latest failure, the president of the company, who happened to be an anthropologist, rang from Lima and told them to have a 4 x 4 waiting for him at the airport. On arrival he went straight up to one of the higher and more remote regions of Cusco, famous for their traditional shamanic specialists. Returning at four in the afternoon with an experienced shaman, the CEO/anthropologist went to the market, bought all that was needed for a payment to the earth and then spent the night carrying out the required rituals. In the morning the sun came out, the river dried up and the bridge was pushed into place. As he himself remarked, ‘It could have been a novel.’ I asked how he explained what had happened – was it just coincidence? He responded saying that you could say it was a coincidence, but he had asked the anthropologist how he had made sense of it. He was told that there was a village on the side of the ravine where people made a living out of the fact that the existing bridge could carry very little weight – so lorries had to unload and reload, there were long delays and people needed all kinds of services. The local economy totally depended on this weak connection. Somebody in that village had been making payments to the earth spirits to ensure that the bridge was never built. And half-joking, half-serious, the anthropologist revealed that he had sought out a shaman of the highest level to annihilate the other – and now that village no longer exists. You don’t have to decide where you stand on this story to understand that road construction involves the negotiation of incommensurable affective landscapes, negotiations in which engineering degrees offer scant protection. Both the engineers and local people recognize the instability of matter – but they deal with contingency in different ways, and the associations and disassociations that concern them, and that are acknowledged, also differ. The expertise of engineers lies in their ability to produce relatively stable material forms through an experimental, pragmatic and reasoned attention to matter. At the same time, an experienced and skilful engineer will also know how to orchestrate the divergent responses that these construction projects produce. The skilled practitioner knows how to invoke norms, to stabilize convincingly, to work in recognizable ways (that they can both reproduce and account for) and be flexible and aware of how their relational fields always preclude certainty.

God-making in South India: Soumhya Venkatesan A 600-year-old Hindu temple in Madras, South India, which has only its two principal deities, Agathiswarar, a form of Siva, and the goddess Ambal, is being rejuvenated. To this end, 21 subsidiary deities (parivara bimbam) are being added

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to the temple. Selvamani, a ritual architect and sculptor, is commissioned to make these 21 stone images-in-the-round (vigraham, murti) that will become gods.8 Our second example focuses on the handover and consecration of these images. It is July 2007. The 21 new images are in the temple. A three-day event is arranged wherein, in addition to the consecration of the new images, the entire temple will be recharged with power through the performance of a kumbhabhishekam or water-pot bathing ritual. At the culmination of the kumbhabhishekam, specially prepared and ‘charged’ water pots are poured down the temple’s towers as well as over the deities within the temple.9 The Agathiswarar temple brought in for the event a number of expert priests (Sivacharya) who are versed in the Agama texts specified for the consecration of Siva temples and the rituals therein. On the first day, the Sivacharya connected the two main temple deities with strings made from the ritually important darbha grass to the necks of several specially prepared pots filled with water. As they chanted from the texts, the power of the deities was channelled into the water in the pots. The images were, then, stripped of their power. The pots of water were taken outside the temple complex to a specially prepared fire-sacrifice hall with altars for Siva and Ambal and the other new deities. Here, they were chanted over even as the sacrificial fire was fed. Every pot had a little twist of the ritually important darbha grass poking out into the air, connecting the water in the pot to the outside. A Sivacharya explained that the darbha grass functioned ‘[l]ike a television aerial. The chanting and the darbha twists bring the power into the pot like the television aerial picks the signals that are everywhere and brings the right ones to your TV. The water in the pots, which is already charged with the power of the main deities, is becoming more powerful with every passing moment.’ Throughout this event the temple is very busy even though its reigning deities have left it and moved to the site of the fire sacrifice. A group of teachers and students from a nearby Vedic pathshala or school for priests is sitting in the courtyard and chanting from the Vedas. I am told that when they hear these words, malevolent spirits and other undesirable beings that might be around will flee. The temple is not an appropriate place for them and they need to be disassociated. Some young men, many of whom are regular worshippers at the temple, bring out from a storeroom the new images that are to be added to the temple. Raja, who, like Selvamani, is a graduate of a college that teaches traditional sculpture and art, has been building and painting the pavilions built to house the new gods whose images Selvamani has carved. Amidst the bustle, the head of the temple committee (also treated here as karta or patron) has a quick word with the priests and then asks Raja to open the eyes of the new images. This is a significant task. Until now these images are lifeless. They are closed to the phenomenal world and cannot see or meet the gaze of those who gaze upon them. Once their eyes are opened, they become appropriate seats for the deities they represent who will come to inhabit them. They can now become gods. Sheets are held around the images. Raja, his fingers ablaze with rings, freshly bathed and wearing new clothing, goes behind the sheets. He has taken with him a golden needle, a pot of honey, both of which he will use in the eye-opening, and

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a mirror. The newly opened eyes of the god must see itself first before anything else.10 Then, one after another, according to Raja’s previous instructions, a cow and calf are taken behind the sheet, then a number of pre-puberty virgin girls, a married couple, a group of male celibate students and finally the patron of the temple. The sheets are lowered. Raja says ‘welcome your gods’. People crowd around and pour rice and coins over the images. All the while a drummer is beating a celebratory rhythm. But the images are still waiting for more. Outside, at the site of the fire sacrifice, the chanting goes on as priests feed the fires surrounded by the pots of water. The performance of the kumbhabhishekam or the pouring of the powerfully charged waters over the deities and the temple kumbha or pinnacle is the culmination of the three-day event. The pouring of the waters, accompanied by the chanting of appropriate mantras, is what will bring each deity into its appropriate image as well as rejuvenate the entire temple. This is the final transformation: the congealing of the relations between humans and gods and transcendent and immanent deities in their specific manifestations. Later that same day, Selvamani arrives. He goes to greet the patron and says he has come to fulfil his final obligation and open the eyes of the images. I go with him. The patron says, ‘Raja has already done this. But I am glad you came. You know we want to raise the plinth of the main deity so that people can see better to worship. The image can only be touched now that it has been temporarily deconsecrated (balalayam). You said you would do this.’ Selvamani is polite but firm. ‘Only the maker of the images can give them life. I must do this. I will also raise the plinth and have brought a worker with me for this task. The auspicious time for the eye opening is soon. Please arrange for some sheets to cover the area.’ Again sheets are held up. But this time there is no fuss, no excited air of anticipation, only bewilderment and embarrassment. Selvamani goes behind the sheet and beckons me to follow. His assistant too is with us. Using a golden needle he has brought, Selvamani dips it into a jar of honey and touches it to the centre of the outlined pupil of each eye. He is chanting under his breath. He then touches the needle to the centre of the image’s forehead and chest, then each of its extremities – ears, palms, feet and genital area. His assistant holds up a small mirror to each image’s face when Selvamani is done. We re-emerge from behind the sheets that are immediately lowered. There is a small crowd, but when people see that nothing is going to happen they move away and resume their tasks. After a few hours Selvamani, his assistant and several helpers take on the task of physically lifting the images and fixing them into the spaces assigned for them within the temple. This causes some excitement as people crowd around to touch the images for one last time before they are rendered untouchable, except by their priests. The texts on image-making and consecration emphasize the importance of the eye-opening ceremony (Ganapathi Stapathi 2002: 107–17). From what sculptors say and from the heightened air both among priests and worshippers when Raja first opened the images’ eyes, I had been led to believe that this was a crucial ritual – one that it was important to get right. And indeed, Selvemani’s reaction on his arrival confirmed this belief. But when I enquired about the error that had

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clearly been committed, responses were ambiguous. Raja said he had not been told that Selvamani was coming to the temple. Had he known, he would have refrained from opening the images’ eyes. Raghu, an IT consultant and a regular worshipper at the temple, who was very actively involved in the kumbhabhishekam as a volunteer-helper, suggested that it was impolite for me to ask questions about the fact that the images’ eyes has been opened twice. ‘What to do? It has happened. Leave it,’ he recommended. The head of the temple committee, busy and triumphant that a complex, expensive and time-consuming event was coming to fruition, was impatient: ‘any trained sculptor (stapathi) can do this. Raja has been working here for months building and then painting the pavilion. I wanted to give him the honour. And anyway, the priests said it was time.’ The Sivacharyas, though, seemed fairly unconcerned. The eye-opening had to be done and the liminal (alive but unconsecrated) image/deities installed in their places before the water pots could be emptied over them in order to invoke and invite the deities to take up residence. The priests’ main foci were the water pots and the fires and the timings of the culminating event. Who opens the eyes and when exactly seemed not their business, so long as it was done at an auspicious time. I ask Selvamani what he thinks about what has just happened. ‘The head of the temple committee just wanted the job done. Raja is young and perhaps he wanted the honour and the gifts that follow this duty (Tamil maryadai: simultaneously honour and the gifting). They made a mistake. Only I, as their maker, can open their eyes. But they do not know this. That was why, even though it was difficult, I insisted. Now I am done with the images and they with me.’ In the past, while sitting in his sculpture yard watching him and his employees at work, Selvamani and I have had long conversations about how he feels when an image he makes becomes a god and he is no longer in any privileged relation with it, not even being able to touch it. This is true even when he is required to adjust some aspect of an image or its plinth, both of which he has made. It has to be deconsecrated for him to go near it. He says: ‘you know this is the way it should be. I do my work and when I am finished I hand it over. Then the priests take over. This is now their expertise. How can I keep asserting some right I do not have. The thing is transformed. It is no longer what it was. It has left me behind.’ Both Selvamani and Raja receive new clothes (maryadai) from the head of the temple committee before they leave. Once the waters have been poured over temple and images, the specialist priests too will leave, having received their payments and maryadai. All the material paraphernalia so crucial to the successful performance of the ritual – the strings of darbha grass, silk and cotton, the terracotta pots and the bricks that made up the fire-pits, are discarded and lie in untidy mounds outside the temple. Their task was to create relationships – between image and water, transcendant and immanent deities, earth and sky (by means of the smoke from the fires) – at specific times and for specific purposes. This done, they drop away unremarked. The temple and its deities will return to their regular priests and devotees.

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Conclusion

 

In this chapter we have taken inspiration from Strathern’s amusing (and accurate) observation that parallels can never be taken too far (1996: 518). The parallels between our ethnographies bring them into descriptive and analytical relationship with each other in such a way that the relationship between Tarde and Durkheim is transformed from one of antipathy to a means of exploration, understanding and explanation. From Tarde we take the importance of not assuming a priori ‘stable social facts’ – whether they be temple gods or roads – and of attending to the processes by which specific entities emerge and exist in the world. We have taken care to recognize the work involved in producing (provisionally) stable workable entities through the orchestration or assemblage of diverse kinds of materials, knowledges and actions. Yet we have also shown how these processes in turn manifest the tensions between acceptance and refusal, exemplified in our accounts here that speak of both rules and compromise, ideals and contingency. Durkheiman interests are not erased by a Tardean perspective. The temple gods and the road, once stabilized, take on a presence in social life that goes beyond the individuals who are responsible for their existence. Settlements relocate or are relocated beside roads, trade flourishes here even as it dies out elsewhere, worshippers throng to newly rejuvenated temples, the state begins to take an interest in its finances, new networks come into existence. Ghosts can co-exist with tarmac and ritual errors can nonetheless lead to acceptable manifestations of deities as long as there are people to worship them. Both our ethnographies describe activities that are premised on a desire to order and to fix. We have suggested that the craftsman’s commitment to proper outcomes (the appropriate transformation of pre-existing forms and relations) does require the authoritative refusal of some potential associates in the emergent entity. Such refusal is key. Indeed, even Tarde’s rock (seen by him as a society) refuses the society of non-rock-like entities in order to remain a rock. If it accepted them, it would be something else. Perhaps here society equates to system. Transforming the rock into embodied god or the earth into road requires modification in the form of both the addition of new entities or elements and the rejection of some existing qualities, capabilities and forms. This is the expertise of the craftsman who is drafted in to the project. But, the craftsman also knows that it is crucial to the success of the enterprise to cut himself out of the network; and he knows when to make this cut, refusing to make it before the time is right. For Selvamani, disconnection from the images only comes when he himself opens their eyes, thereby changing their nature from statues to fit bodies for gods. Until then, their possibilities were still in his possession. As far as the temple committee and the specialist priests were concerned, Selvamani, in fashioning images that were proportionately and iconographically appropriate, had done his job. He had activated his knowledge of divine images and materialized them for the temple. The temple had now taken possession of them and could begin the work of transforming the images without Selvamani. The eyes of the images needed to be opened and Raja, equally skilled and knowledgeable, was at hand. Moreover, the patron had a closer relationship with Raja because, unlike Selvamani,

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he had been physically working in the temple. Selvamani’s knowledge as a temple architect was still important as he possessed the technical skills to rebuild and raise the height of the main deity’s shrine and plinth. But that skill was seen as separate from his skill in sculpting the images. The patron was working on the assumption of discrete skills and natural (in the sense of expected) disconnections; Selvamani was basing his actions on the conceptual understanding that disconnections need to be achieved in the right manner. He firmly believed that he was not replaceable until he had opened the eyes of the images and, in bringing them to life, cut them from his own self – this notwithstanding the fact that cutting himself back in inevitably caused some embarrassment and tension between Selvamani and the head of the temple committee. In another sphere of his life Selvamani was looking for some help from the head of the temple committee, but he was nevertheless insistent. The road engineers also worked to produce the appropriate materials for the job, and they cannot and do not entertain the possibility that the road might appear by other means. Their laboratory work systematically disconnects the earth from its unstable and open-ended environment. They discard the ghosts and the earth powers in order to explore a specific range of capacities, capacities that they have learnt (agreed) to appreciate and recognize. Working from this starting point, they can begin to create new materials which they reconnect in controlled ways through the skilled orchestration of machines and people and an unstable environment. At this stage in the process they both hold fast to the adequacy of the materials they have created in the labs, and remain open to the need to adjust to contingency. They continue to measure and monitor and model until the road is done. And it is done when it becomes an object in the world to which they are no longer required to attend. The road may be maintained or it may be neglected but the work of the engineers is done when they cut themselves out of the network and move on. There is even a hint of nostalgia about the inevitability of such erasures. As I drove down a completed stretch of road with the boss of the supervisory engineering company who had finally completed a very contentious project in the Northern Peruvian Amazon, he commented on how quickly their work would be forgotten. He added, however, that one day his son might drive down this same stretch and be able to proudly tell his companions that his father had built this road. A final word on craftsmanship and ethnographic practice. ‘Ethnographic practice … elicits the open-endedness of institutions and organizations as “society”. What characterizes people’s behaviour in “society” is precisely their capacity to tolerate loose ends, to deal with unpredictability, and to revel in the disconnections that mean that they live in multiple worlds and traverse different domains. This is where intensive ethnography comes into its own. It is a matter for investigation what works people pack into one another, the contexts they think they have abstracted themselves from and that fuel their own sense of efficacy. Investigation has to be open-minded in the matter’ (Strathern 2002: 309). In this chapter we have created two parallel ethnographic accounts by casting the sculptors and the engineers as craftsmen – that is as skilled practitioners possessing specific knowledges and capacities which give them the ability not simply to relate diverse entities, but to fix the properties of specific entities to keep them in an

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appropriate relationship to the properties of other entities. Their acknowledgement that world-making is collaborative across all kinds of agencies is simultaneous with the knowledge that what they do is crucial to the enterprise. Indeed, in the case of the road builders it could be argued that their capacity to act as engineers is revealed both through the connections to and the disconnections from other knowledge practices. And when connections appear inappropriate, controversy ensues. Such cases often arise when the engineers feel that political and social facts have forced them into building roads that, from their perspective, are inadequate and/or unnecessary. In such cases, rather than understanding their activity as the application of technical knowledge to enable social transformation, they experience the social as an external constraining force that exercises negative effects on their capacity to shape viable social forms. The collaboration between the engineer, the anthropologist and the shaman, however, reveals another side to these dynamics – faced with a situation in which their engineering skills were rendered utterly inefficacious in the face of the flash floods, they found themselves forced into a pragmatic decision to address the ‘problem’ in its own terms. Asserting their power, not through superior reason but through a capacity to enlist a superior shaman, they restored the conditions that allowed them to operate as they saw fit. In the example of the sculptor, his specific action is cut out of the network before he is willing or able to make the cut. This is a controversial moment that we link back to the ethic of craftsmanship – that orientation towards the future where the propriety of form matters but not everyone has the knowledge of what constitutes proper form. But we might ask: is there only one proper form and is this a product only of ‘proper processes’? The craftsman’s authority is an artefact of the refusal of improper processes, but that cuts both ways. The temple patron seemed to be humouring Selvamani’s refusal to cut himself out of the network until he had finished what he claimed was uniquely his task. Had Selvamani not shown up when he did, the images would have been consecrated nevertheless. Likewise, the refusal of workers to work until ghosts had been exorcised, pushed the engineers to act in certain ways. Again, a kind of humouring seemed to take place, but one that was necessary to achieve proper outcomes. We have found the craftsman a useful figure for thinking through the relationship between Tarde and Durkheim. Craftsmen make things, and make things happen, out of specific potentialities of form, a process that requires both a cutting of networks and an assertion of authority or mastery – and a setting free of the emergent form to create new relations for which they are no longer responsible. The things the craftsmen make, be this a road or a potent sculpture of a deity, are what remain. Their agency becomes subsumed into the object and they vanish from sight. Only if things go wrong might they be re-called – but then, like the proverbial plumber, they will, by definition, be fixing someone else’s problem.

Bibliography Alliez, E. 2001. The difference and repetition of Gabriel Tarde. Read online at http://www. goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/tarde/alliez.pdf (accessed March 2008).

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Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. 2004 [1980]. A thousand plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Clifford, G and Marcus, G. E. 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eck, D. L. 1998. Darsan: seeing the divine image in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Escobar, A. 2008. Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham: Duke University Press. Evens, T. M. S. 2006. Some ontological implications of situational analysis. In T. M. S. Evens and D. Handelman (eds.) The Manchester School: practice and ethnographic praxis in anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 49–63. Franklin, S. 2007. Dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press. Fuller, C. J. 2004. The renovation ritual in a south Indian temple: the 1995 kumbhabhiseka in the Minaksi temple, Madurai. In Bulletin of SOAS 67(1): 40–63. V. Ganapathi Stapathi. 2002. Indian sculpture and iconography: forms and measurements. Trans. S. Ananth. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society and Mapin (Ahmedabad). Haraway, D. 2008. When species meet (posthumanities). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Helmreich, S. 2009. Alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Landecker, H. 2007. Culturing life: how cells become technologies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2001. Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social. In P. Joyce (ed.) The social in question: new bearings in history and the social sciences. London: Routledge. 117–32. ——. 2004. Never too late to read Tarde. In Domus. Read online at http://www.bruno-latour. fr/presse/presse_art/GB-DOMUS%2010–04.html (accessed January 2009). ——. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Trans. C. Porter. Strathern, M. 1996. Cutting the network. In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–35. ——. 1995. The relation: issues in complexity and scale. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Pamphlet no. 6. ——. 2002. Abstraction and decontextualisation: an anthropological comment. In S. Woolgar (ed.) Vitual society? Technology, cyberbole, reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 302–13. Stengers, I. 2007. ‘Diderot’s egg: divorcing materialism from eliminativism’. In Radical Philosophy 144. 7–15. Thrift, N. 2008. Non-representational theory: space/politics/affect. London: Routledge. Wagner, R. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part II

Quantifying, tracing, relating

 

Fragments of Tardean method

 

10 Tarde’s idea of quantification* Bruno Latour

“[Thanks to statistics] public broadsheets will be to the social world what the sensory organs are to the organic world.”

(Lois de l’imitation)

 

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Sociology has been obsessed by the goal of becoming a quantitative science. Yet it has never been able to reach this goal because of what it has defined as being quantifiable within the social domain. The work of Gabriel Tarde has been resurrected for many reasons. One of them, to be sure, is an acknowledgement of the diminishing returns of “social explanations.” In my view, however, it would be wrong to limit Tarde’s contribution to the theme of the “end of the social” (Latour 2002; Toews 2003). If he has become so interesting, if he is read with such great avidity today, it is also because he engaged sociology, and more generally the human sciences – history, geography, archeology, social psychology and above all economics – with a different definition of what it is for a discipline to be quantitative. (He also had an alternative definition of what it is to be a science, but this is another subject.) In the twentieth century, the schism between those who dealt with numbers and those who dealt with qualities was never bridged. This is a fair statement given that so many scholars have resigned themselves to being partitioned into those who follow the model of the “natural” sciences, and those who prefer the model of the “interpretive” or “hermeneutic” disciplines. All too often, fields have been divided between number crunching, devoid (its enemies claim) of any subtlety; and rich, thick, local descriptions, devoid (its enemies say) of any way of generalizing from these observations. Many domains have abandoned the hope of proving any point by transforming quantities into qualities, and qualities into quantities. Many in history or anthropology, as well as in sociology or psychology, have tried, but, at every occasion, the difficulties of reconciling the two types of proof have been so great that it is impossible to transition smoothly from one to the other. Many have despaired, as a consequence, of ever being able to develop a scientific social science; while others have claimed that this goal is no longer desirable, that the best that can be hoped for is to obtain some political or literary effects on readers. What is so refreshing in Tarde (more than a century later!) is that he never

146 B. Latour doubted for a minute that it was possible to have a scientific sociology – or rather, an “inter-psychology”, to use his term. And he espoused this position without ever believing that this should be done through a superficial imitation of the natural sciences.

1 Social Sciences Are More Quantitative Than Natural Ones

 

Tarde’s reasoning goes straight to the heart of the matter: the natural sciences grasp their object from far away, and, so to speak, in bulk. A physicist deals with trillions upon trillions of gas molecules, a biologist with billions of cells. It is therefore quite normal that they should rely on a rough outline of the “societies” of gas and cells to make their observations. (Remember that for Tarde “everything is a society.”) Resemblance is what appeals to the natural scientist. Individual differences can be safely neglected. Although the very distinction between a law or structure and its individual components is acceptable in natural sciences, it cannot be used as a universal template to grasp all societies. The distinction is an artifact of distance, of where the observer is placed and of the number of entities they are considering at once. The gap between overall structure and underlying components is the symptom of a lack of information: the elements are too numerous, their exact whereabouts are unknown, there exist too many hiatus in their trajectories, and the ways in which they intermingle has not been grasped. It would therefore be very odd for what is originally a deficit of information to be turned into the universal goal of any scientific inquiry. In the face of such a striking gap, it would make much more sense to tackle this limitation and to try to get more detailed information, instead of glowing with the belief that one has reached the level of an exact science. Physicists and biologists may be forgiven for having so little information since, for the most part, they continue to access their objects of study from a great distance. But those who deal with types of societies composed of many fewer elements, societies that can be observed from the inside, do not have this excuse. Consider sociologists who study human societies. (After all, what are a handful of billions of fellow humans when compared to the number of animalcules teaming in a drop of water?) Given the immense privilege of having proximity to their objects of study, sociologists should not be (mis)led into imagining that there could be a strict distinction between structural features and individual or sub-individual components.1 If they are, they have been engaged in the rather silly task of becoming voluntarily estranged from the societies they are studying. It implies that they are attempting to grasp them in the same way that astronomers deal with stars or biologists with cells. And yet, if the latter must handle their subject matter from far away, it is not because it is especially “scientific” to do so. It is because they have no other way to reach their objects of investigation. Paradoxically, those in sociology who try to ape the natural sciences have mistaken the latter’s constitutive lack of information for their principal virtue. Yet what is really scientific is to have enough information so as not to have to fall back upon the makeshift approximation of a structural law, distinct from what

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its individual components do. What is perfectly acceptable for “sociologists” of stars, atoms, cells and organisms, is unacceptable for the sociologists of the few billions of humans, or for the economists of a few millions of transactions. For in the latter cases, we most certainly have, or we should at least strive to possess, the information needed to dissolve the illusion of the structure. This first point about replacing the idea of what a science should be is crucial in order to grasp the deeper reasons for the opposition between Tarde and Durkheim. The tension is not simply due to a difference of attitude, as though one was more inclined to follow the individual agents while the other became obsessed by the relationship of the actor to the overall society. To be sure, this opposition is present, as the encounter between Tarde and Durkheim reproduced in this volume has made quite clear.2 Beyond this, however, the tension is a consequence of a completely different way of calibrating what should be expected from any science of any society. Durkheim deals only with human societies and borrows his ideal of science from natural scientists with whom he has little occasion to collaborate since, for him, human societies should remain radically different from biological and physical ones. Tarde’s position is the reverse; for him there exist only societies. Human societies are but a particular subset of these societies because they exist in so few copies. But since human societies are accessible through their most intimate features, social scientists have no need to let natural scientists dictate what their epistemology should be. The paradox is that it is Durkheim who imitates the natural sciences while at the same time distancing his discipline most radically from theirs. Meanwhile, Tarde, because he does not distinguish the ideal of science by separate domains, takes the greatest liberty by moving away from the customary ways of the natural sciences for presenting their objects. The shibboleth that distinguishes their attitudes is not that one is “for society” while the other is “for the individual actor.” (This is what the Durkheimians have quite successfully claimed so as to bury Tarde into the individual psychology he always rejected.) The distinction is drawn by whether one accepts or does not accept that a structure can be qualitatively distinct from its components. In response to this test question, Durkheim answers “yes” for both kinds of societies. Tarde says “yes” for natural societies (for there is no way to do otherwise), but “no” for human societies. For human societies, and for only human societies, we can do so much more.

2 Bypassing the Notion of Structure In the tired old debate pitting a naturalistic against an interpretative social science, a strange idea appears: that if we stick to the individual, the local, the situated, we will detect only qualities, while if we move towards the structural and towards the distant, we will begin to gather quantities. For Tarde the situation is almost exactly the opposite: the more we get into the intimacy of the individual, the more discrete quantities we’ll find; and if we move away from the individual towards the aggregate we might begin to lose quantities, more and more, along the way because we lack the instruments to collect enough of their quantitative evaluations.

148 B. Latour And this is the second reason why a science of society is possible for Tarde: the very heart of social phenomena is quantifiable because individual monads are constantly evaluating one another in simultaneous attempts to expand and to stabilize their worlds. The notion of expansion is coded for him in the word “desire,” and stabilization in the word “belief” (more on this below).3 Each monad strives to possess one another. Most social scientists remain limited to the study of qualities when they handle only one entity, and quantification begins, so to speak, once they have collected large numbers of those entities. To the contrary, for Tarde, quantification began with the individual and was very difficult to maintain when shifting to aggregates. Consider this passage: But before we speak, think, or act as “they” speak, think, or act in our world, we begin by speaking, thinking, and acting as “he” or “she” does. And this “he” or “she” is always one of our own near acquaintances. Beneath the indefinite they, however carefully we search, we never find anything but a certain number of he’s and she’s which, as they have increased in number, have become mingled together and confused. (Tarde 1969: 25) He then added: The impersonal, collective character is thus the product rather than the producer of the infinitely numerous individual characters; it is their composite photograph, and must not be taken for their mask. (1969: 27–8)

 

The relationship of the element to the aggregate is not the same as that of an ingredient to a structure. A “composite photograph”4 is not more than its individual components; it is not a law of behavior to which they should submit, minus individual variations. An “impersonal collective character” does not produce a behavior; it is itself produced by a multiplicity of individual innovations. There is nothing more in the accumulation of traits than there is in the multiplicity of individual components; but there is definitely a lot less since elements become “mingled together and confused.” Or rather, there is perhaps more in the “they” than in the “he” and “she”, but this is because one monad has succeeded in expressing and possessing the whole (on the key concept of possession, see Debaise 2008). So, if we jump too quickly to the idea that an altogether different type of entity has taken over the action, just what that supplement is will becomes obscured. It is readily apparent that confusion increases when moving from the “he” to the “they,” instead of decreasing as might be expected following an introductory class in the methodology of the social sciences: “Gather more examples; forget individual traits; see things from farther away; from above; in bulk not in detail; for goodness sake, put it into a frame.” According to Tarde, from those well-meaning pieces of advice, only disorientation can ensue.

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Does this mean that we should always stick to the individual? No, but we should find ways to gather the individual “he” and “she” without losing out on the specific ways in which they are able to mingle, in a standard, in a code, in a bundle of customs, in a scientific discipline, in a technology – but never in some overarching society. The challenge is to try to obtain their aggregation without either shifting our attention at any point to a whole, or changing modes of inquiry. Composite photography is a very crude and primitive way that confuses all the criminals into a single type. Let’s try to find a better, more sensible, and above all, more traceable way of doing social science. And it does exist: those who commit crimes imitate one another. They have to learn from one another, modus operandi per modus operandi, crime by crime, trick by trick.5 And the same can be said of the Ministry of Justice or of the police. By assembling file after file, case after case, identification after identification, they end up producing “types of criminal” out of which the science of criminology will emerge.6 Following the “imitative rays” will render the social traceable from beginning to end without limiting us to the individual, or forcing a leap up to the level of a structure.7 Tarde is often presented as a man with one idea – imitation. It is true that he became famous following the publication of his book The Laws of Imitation in 1890 (Tarde 1962). Nevertheless, it is important to understand that imitation is not an obsession of his. Nor is his point a psychological argument about how humans imitate one another, as if Tarde had generalized from some observations to the rest of his social psychology.8 The situation was rather the opposite. He was searching for a route by which to bypass the ill-conceived notion of structure when he stumbled upon a plausible vocabulary, borrowed in part from medicine, and later from psychology.9 Imitation, that is, literally, the “epidemiology of ideas.” With this notion, he could render the social sciences scientific enough by following individual traits, yet without them getting confused when they aggregated to form seemingly “impersonal” models and transcendent structures. The term “imitation” may be replaced by many others (for instance, monad, actor-network or entelechy), provided these have the equivalent role: of tracing the ways in which individual monads conspire with one another without ever producing a structure.10 In opposition to the entire century of social theory that followed it, this often-quoted passage summarizes what is at stake for sociology to be scientific: But, no matter how intimate, how harmonious a social group is, never do we see emerging ex abrupto, in the midst of its astonished associates, a collective self, which would be real and not only metaphoric, a sort of marvelous result, of which the associates would be the mere conditions. To be sure, there is always an associate that represents and personifies the group in its entirety, or else a small number of associates (the ministers in a state) who, each under a particular aspect, individualize in themselves the group in its entirety. But this leader, or those leaders, are always also members of that group, born from their own fathers and mothers and not born collectively from their subjects or their constituency. (Tarde 1895/1999: 68)

150 B. Latour For Tarde, if we were to believe that the first duty of social science is to “reconcile the actor and the system” or to “solve the quandary of the individual versus society,” we would have to abandon all hope of ever being scientific. This is tantamount to aping the natural sciences, which are perfectly alright in getting by with discovering a structure and neglecting minor individual variations because they are much too far to observe whether or not a “collective self” emerges ex abrupto from “its astonished associates.” Fortunately, in the case of human sciences, we know this emergence is different. We can verify every day, alas, that “leaders” are “born from fathers and mothers” and not “collectively.” This forces us to discover the real conduits through which any group is able to emerge. For instance, we might search for how associates might “individualize in themselves the group in its entirety” through legal or political vehicles. Once we have ferreted out what makes this phase transition possible we will be able to see with clarity, the difference between “individualizing a group” and “being an individual in a collective structure.”11 Each case requires a completely different feel for the complex ecology of the situation. If this requirement strikes you as less demanding, less empirically exacting, less “scientific” than the search for a structure, then it means that you will have abandoned, in effect, the search for quantification, for the real quanta that lie at the heart of each monad.

3 Tracing the Social World Anew

 

There is a third reason why Tarde believed in the scientific program of the social sciences: he thought that we could invent the instrumentation for capturing the inner quantification of individual entities. This implies that the great quandary of “the actor and the system” is but a consequence of a very patchy statistical apparatus; or, to put it more bluntly, that you have the social theory of your statistics. Tarde, who is often derided for having been “literary” instead of “scientific” knew very well what he was talking about. The misunderstanding is always the same. We confuse quantitative social sciences with a historical way of doing statistics.12 But those techniques have changed immensely over the years. Rather than trying to eliminate individual variations so that they don’t perturb the overall result, many other ways of handling them have been discovered. The situation of the natural sciences, where individual variations remain inaccessible to any direct inquiry, and are far too numerous to record, is in no way the same as for the social sciences. For human societies, there is no reason to limit quantification to only some of the ways of doing statistics.13 This assessment of statistics is so close to the heart of Tarde’s work that he actually moved from his position as a judge in the provincial town of Sarlat (which he had occupied since 1875 before moving to Paris in 1894), after proposing alternative ways of assembling, interpreting and publishing, criminal, civil, and commercial statistics to the Minister of Justice. (By then Tarde was already well known as a criminologist.)14 As he argued, there is no reason to consider individual variations as deviations from a more stable law that statistics was in charge of educing out of the morass of chaotic data. Individual variations are the only phenomenon worth looking at in societies for

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which there are comparatively few elements. We have (or should have) full access to the aggregated dynamic. What is called a “structural law” by some sociologists is simply the phenomenon of aggregation: the formatting and standardization of a great number of copies, stabilized by imitation and made available in a new form, such as a code, a dictionary, an institution, or a custom. According to Tarde, if it is wrong to consider individual variations as though they were deviations from a law, it is equally wrong to consider individual variations as the only rich phenomenon to be studied by opposition with (or distance from) statistical results. It is in the nature of the individual agent to imitate others. What we observe either in individual variations or in aggregates are just two detectable moments along a trajectory drawn by the observer who is following the fate of any given “imitative ray.” To follow those rays (or “actor-networks” if you feel more comfortable with some updated vocabulary) is to encounter, depending on the moment, individual innovations and then aggregates, followed afterwards by more individual innovations. It is the trajectory of what circulates that counts, not any of its provisional steps. The importance of trajectory is most clear with intellectual arguments, a domain of great fascination to Tarde. It is in the study of scientific practice that one can see how useless it is to drown individual contributions into statistical means (scientists are so few and so far between that any “whole” is provisional). Nonetheless, it would be just as silly to deny that, from individually made arguments in specific journals and at specific times, aggregates are not produced, in the end, by consensus formation and paradigm entrenchments that deeply modify how an individual finds their way in an argument. This result is in no way due to a structural law suddenly overwhelming the diversity of negligible individual positions (the ex abrupto we saw above). In each of the scientists’ laboratories, for each of the issue at hand, each individual converts to the consensus, each for his or her peculiar reason. Later, they may once again re-differentiate themselves from any established dogma. Of course, the wonderful thing about science, contrary to criminology or fashion, where the traces are much more elusive, is that there exists – thanks to footnotes, references, and citations – an almost uninterrupted set of traces, that allow us to move from each individual innovation, up to the aggregate, and then back again to the individual resistance that can develop in response to a given paradigm. When, during some universal exhibition, we realize retrospectively how means of transportation have appeared in succession, since the time of the sedan-chair and the chariot until the time of the suspension carriage, the locomotive, the automobile and the bicycle, we behave much like the naturalist in a museum who compares the long series of vertebrates along the course of geological times from the lancelet to man. And yet, there is this difference that in the first case we are able to date exactly the appearance of most links in the chain and determine very precisely the invention and inventor from which each specimen comes from, while in the second case we are restricted to mere conjectures about the way a species transformed itself into another. (Tarde 1902: 12)

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We can understand from this passage what was meant earlier in pointing to the distinction between structure and ingredient as being due to a deficiency of information. If the researcher is in possession of this information, this chain of invention, this “imitative ray,” then there is no reason why they cannot follow the individual innovation as well as the aggregates, smoothly. If there is a map of a river catchment, there is no need to leap from the individual rivulets to the River, with a capital R. We will follow, one by one, each individual rivulet until they become a river – with a small r. What is so striking in the sociology of science is even more evident with regard to the law. This might explain in part why such an original social theory finds its origins in the writings of a man who was a judge. For a practicing judge the difference between the slow process of Common Law is not very different from Code-based law. In both cases, and this is a peculiarity of legal reasoning, the rule does not give you an easy access to the individual case (Latour 2009). A “juge d’instruction” (a strange mixture between a prosecutor, a judge and a lawyer, typical to the French “inquisitorial” tradition) is well placed to see that any “general opinion” grows case by case to form a “whole” that is never superior to the case law and that a reversal of precedent can easily reverse (well not easily, that’s the whole point). For a judge, the Code (or the case law) is never seen as more than a reference, a summary, a memory, a “composite photograph,” a guide; it is not a structure from which one could deduce any individual motif or which individual behavior should obey. The law sits side by side a multiplicity of cases and precedents. Son of a judge and a judge himself for most of his active life, Tarde could feel the gap between rules and individual behavior every day. It is tempting to find within that longstanding judiciary practice the root of his deep-seated diffidence to any structural account.15 When Tarde heard the words “laws of society” in Spencer or even Durkheim, or “laws of nature” when reading natural scientists, he knew, first hand, that this was, at best, a loose legal metaphor, and that it could never truly be the way that elements and aggregates would conspire together.16 Although deeply fascinated by Darwin, Tarde avoided the temptation of social Darwinism (quite a feat at the end of the nineteenth century) and for the same reason. Just as there is no “collective self” in human society, it cannot be expected to appear in any animal or plant society. He could not believe for one minute that sociology could be “reduced” to biology since, in both cases, societies are made of the same stuff. Hence Tarde’s powerful appropriation of Darwin’s discovery that no clarification on the genealogy of, for instance, individual horses, could ever come from an appeal to any Idea of a Horse. Among “astonished associates,” evolutionary biologists will never see the emergence ex abrupto of this “marvelous result”: a “collective Horse” born “collectively” from no mare and no stallion! Tarde might be considered the only French Darwinian, the only one who saw that the problem of composing organisms was the same in human and biological assemblages. No overall scheme in one, no overall scheme in the other. And especially, no “law of the jungle.” A judge, an avid reader of Leibniz (witness his most daring article Monadologie et sociologie) and of Darwin, could not but be struck by the case-by-case, organism-

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by-organism nature of any genealogy. For him, in whichever domain – science, law, biology – any belief in a structure is nothing but the pre-scientific, pre-Darwinian infancy of the social sciences. Structure is what is imagined to fill the gaps when there is a deficit of information as to the ways any entity inherits from its predecessors and successors. Tarde would not have been greatly surprised to learn that when we apply the same ideal of science to societies of apes, ants or cells, here too, we begin to shift from a gross, statistically produced structure, to a trajectory of individual innovations. When primatologists learned how to recognize individual baboons, vervets, or chimpanzees, they too had to abandon rough and ready notions of a “collective self.” They began to follow how each organism managed to engender a highly unstable aggregate that had to be constantly surveyed and reassembled through interactions (grooming, following, fighting, copulating, etc – Strum and Fedigan 2000; Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). Tarde would have been even more thrilled when the discovery was made that the study of bacteria, marked so as to individualize them, produces different results from those obtained by studying them in bulk. What was lost in the idea of a law plus minor individual variation was the rather amazing differentiation between individual bacterial contributions to reproductive success (Stewart et al. 2004). The scientist who was clever enough to succeed in inventing an instrument able to capture the contributions of each bacteria (the same has been done with ants), has produced a much more accurate picture of their aggregates. Here again the opposition is not between a holistic view of the societies (bacteria, ants, monkeys, or humans) and an individualist one. It is between a first approximation through crude statistical records that loses most of the inner quantification of the organism, and a more refined one that has learned how to follow how each of those organisms inherits and transmits its own individual innovations. Change the instruments, and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them. The only thing to lose is the notion of a structure, distinct from its incarnations, this artifact that compensates for a deficit of information.

 

4 A Monad, Not an Atom The more we focus on the individual monad the more quantitative evaluation we will get. As long as we have not grasped this point, which seems at first so counterintuitive, the main difficulty of Tarde’s idea of quantification will remain, despite radically improved instruments. This is especially true in economics, a science to which Tarde dedicated his last years17 in an attempt to render it more quantitative and more psychological: “The tendency to mathematize economic science and the tendency to psychologize it, far from being irreconcilable, should rather, in our view, lend each other mutual support.”18 He would add: No man, no people has ever failed to seek, as a prize for relentless efforts, a certain growth either of wealth, or glory, or truth, or power, or artistic perfection; nor has he failed to fight against the danger of a decrease of all of these

154 B. Latour assets. We all speak and write as though there existed a scale of these different orders of magnitude, on which we can place different peoples and different individuals higher or lower and make them rise or fall continuously. Everyone is thus implicitly and intimately convinced that all these things, and not only the first, are, in fact, real quantities. Not to recognize this truly quantitative – if not measurable de jure and de facto – aspect of power, of glory, of truth, of beauty, is thus to go against the constant of mankind and to set as the goal of universal effort a chimera. (Tarde 1902: 67)

 

Here resides the fourth and final reason why Tarde’s sociology seems so original and so fresh for us today. A judgment of taste, an inflexion in the way we speak, a slight mutation in our habits, a preference between two goods, a decision taken on the spur of the moment, an idea flashing in the brain, the conclusion of a long series of inconclusive syllogisms, and so forth – what appears most qualitative is actually where the greatest numbers of calculations are being made among “desires” and “beliefs.” So, in principle, for Tarde, this is also the locus where we should be best able to quantify. Providing, that is, that we have the instruments to capture what he calls “logical duels.”19 The quantitative nature of all associations will seem bizarre if we mistakenly impute an idea of the individual element seen as an atom to Tarde. But the very idea of an individual as an atom is a consequence of the social theory he is fighting against. It is an outcome, as we just saw, of the statistical instruments that were available to him. In this traditional view, quantification starts when we have assembled enough individual atoms so that the outline of a structure begins to appear, first as a shadowy aggregate, then as a whole, and finally as a law dictating how to behave to the elements. The division between a qualitative and a quantitative social science is in essence the same as the division between individuals and society, tokens and type, actors and system. This is why no one has ever succeeded in “overcoming” the dichotomy between holistic and individualistic social theories. But for Tarde, the whole scene is entirely different. The reason why there is no need for an overarching society is because there is no individual to begin with, or at least no individual atoms.20 The individual element is a monad, that is, a representation, a reflection, or an interiorization of a whole set of other elements borrowed from the world around it. If there is nothing especially structural in the “whole,” it is because of a vast crowd of elements already present in every single entity. This is where the word “network” – and even actor-network – captures what Tarde had to say much better than the word “individual.” Contrary to what is often said, there is not even a hint of “methodological individualism” in this argument. There is no psychologism, nor of course any temptation toward “rational choice.” Hesitation is the great focus of Tarde’s work. When actors are found to be hesitating, it is not because they are an atom taken in different fields of forces pressing on them from the outside. An actor hesitates as a monad which has already gathered within itself vast numbers of other elements to which it offers the stage for an indefinite number of logical duels to take place. In other words, if we are able to

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quantify an individual “one,” it is because this instance is already “many.” Behind every “he” and “she,” one could say, there are a vast number of other “he’s” and “she’s” to which they have been interrelated.21 When Tarde insists that we detect specific embranchments and bifurcations behind every innovation, he is not saying that we should celebrate individual genius. It is rather that geniuses are made of a vast crowd of neurons! In a society no individual may act socially without the collaboration of a vast number of other individuals, most often ignored. The obscure workmen who, through the accumulation of small facts, have prepared the apparition of a grand scientific theory formulated by a Newton, a Cuvier, a Darwin, compose, if one may say so, the organism of which this genius is the soul; their obscure works are the cerebral vibrations of which this theory is the conscience. Conscience means cerebral glory, so to speak, of the most influential and most powerful element of the brain. Left to itself, a monad is powerless. This is the most important fact, and it leads immediately to explain another one: the tendency of monads to aggregate. (…) If ego is nothing but a directing monad among myriads of monads commensally aggregated under the same skull, what reason do we have to think that they are inferior? Is a monarch necessarily more intelligent that his ministers and subjects? (Tarde 1902: 28)

 

A monarch is to his people what conscience is to the brain, what ego is to the neurons, what Darwin is to the thousands of naturalists through the obscure work on which he depends for his “glory”! Once again, the “one” piggybacks on top of the “many” but without composing a “they.” This is where Tarde’s originality resides: everything is individual and yet there is no individual in the etymological sense of that which cannot be further divided. This loss is a paradox, but only for those who would begin by opposing the structure and the elements. Tarde derives his position from Leibniz’ solution: there are monads all the way down, and God is in charge of regulating the connections between all of them without any of them acting directly on any other. For Tarde, of course, there is no God; therefore no pre-established harmony, no transcendence of any sort. (Tarde is probably the most systematic atheist there has ever been since he rejects even the transcendence of a “collective self” emerging ex abrupto from its associates.)22 If there are monads but no God, the only solution is to let monads penetrate one another freely. Tarde’s monads are a cross between Leibniz and Darwin: each monad has to get by in order to interpret or “reflect” (Leibniz’s term) all of the others, to spread as far and as quickly as possible. Tarde devises his notions of “desire,” “belief,” and “possession” very early on to code those relationships of interpenetration and competition from which all quantification resides in the end. The question “how many” is as essential to a monarch representing his people without any already existing political structure to hold them, as it is to Darwin’s theory of evolution emerging out of the myriad of factoids assembled by his numerous collaborators toiling to collect samples

156 B. Latour in obscurity. How many entities can one entelechy reach? – That is desire. How many can they stabilize, order, fix or keep in place? – That is belief. No providence whatsoever can produce any harmony over and above the interplay of desire and belief in each monad, let loose on the world.23 This is precisely the reason why quantification is so important: not only does it capture internal logical duels, but it is the only way for monads to coordinate their actions externally with others in the absence of any providence. In a very strict sense, in Tarde’s atheist monadology the practice of quantification plays the role of Leibniz’ God. With extreme avidity (a term Tarde prefers to that of ‘identity’), all monads will seize every possible occasion to grasp one another in a quantitative manner. This accelerates and also simplifies their aggregation and cohesion; it modifies them and gives them another turn and another handle. It is in this sense that Tarde can be considered as the inventor of the notion that producing instruments and formalisms plays an active role in making the social visible to itself; and that such production offers many new handles so that the social can be performed anew.24 Examine what he says about how the advent of the press facilitates all judgments:

 

[…] The development of the press had the effect of giving moral values a quantitative character that was more and more marked and better and better suited to justify their comparison with the exchange value. The latter, which must also have been quite confused in the centuries before the common use of currency, became better defined as currency spread and became more unified. It was then able to give rise, for the first time, to political economy. Similarly, before the advent of the daily press, the notions of the scientific or literary value of writing, of people’s fame and reputation, were still vague, as the awareness of their gradual waxings and wanings could barely be felt; but with the development of the press, these ideas became clearer, were accentuated, became worthy of being the objects of philosophical speculations of a new sort. (Tarde 1902: 76) When Tarde says there is no “whole” transcendent to its instantiations, and when he says that any quantification deployed by various statistical or metrological instruments will have a huge influence on the way all monads cohere and conspire, he is repeating the same argument twice. This is why his theory of science is so original: science is in and of the world it studies. It does not hang over the world from the outside. It has no privilege. This is precisely what makes science so immensely important: it performs the social together with all of the other actors, all of whom try to turn new instruments to their own benefits. The continuity between the inner and the outer quantification is so complete that Tarde goes even further. He assimilates the quantitative apparatus of so many social sciences to the biological senses. He imagines a progressive fusion between the technologies of statistical instruments and the very physiology of perception. A day will come, he argues, when the standardization and development of statistics

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will be so complete that we will begin to follow the trajectory of some data about the social world in the same way that we follow the flight of a swallow without eyes.25 Does this strike you as poetry? History is not yet finished, so we must wait and see. A century later we might well read those predictions in a very different light: data-gathering instrumentations will have changed again, and so will the social theories associated with them.

5 Digital Traceability … Tarde’s Vindication? The amazing chapter devoted to statistics in The Laws of Imitation is inescapably connected to the digital world to which we now have access. If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in dispatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accomplishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press. Then, at every step, at every glance cast upon poster or newspaper, we shall be assailed, as it were, with statistical facts, with precise and condensed knowledge of all the peculiarities of actual social conditions, of commercial gains or losses, of the rise or falling off of certain political parties, of the progress or decay of a certain doctrine, etc., in exactly the same way as we are assailed when we open our eyes by the vibrations of the ether which tell us of the approach or withdrawal of such and such a so-called body and of many other things of a similar nature. (Tarde 1962: 167–8)

 

Is this the prose of someone who despises quantitative science? If it is true, as Tarde never tired of objecting to his younger colleague, Durkheim, that the theory of “society” was an artifact of rudimentary statistics, then the consequence for the present are obvious: what would happen to the respective programs of Tarde and Durkheim if social scientists began to have access, a century later, for reasons totally unexpected to both, to types of data that would allow them to follow, without any interruption, with the same tools, and in the same optically coherent space, those “imitative rays” that encompass individual innovations as well their aggregates? It is on this point that we discover why Tarde appears so fresh. The interest he triggers is not about a curious failure of social theory to become scientific, a quaint and queer qualitative view of the social. The most interesting part of Tarde is his lucid expectation of the type of information that should be gathered for a science of the social. It is indeed striking that at this very moment, the fast expanding fields of “data visualisation,” “computational social science,” or “biological networks” (Lazer et al. 2009; Wimsatt 2007) are tracing, before our eyes, just the sort of data Tarde would have acclaimed. If the sociology of science, because of the traceability

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inherent in the scientific references, would have been the model for disentangling the “he’s” and “she’s” from the “they” for Tarde, then what we are witnessing, thanks to the digital medium, is a fabulous extension of this principle of traceability. It has been put in motion not only for scientific statements, but also for opinions, rumors, political disputes, individual acts of buying and bidding, social affiliations, movements in space, telephone calls, and so on. What has previously been possible for only scientific activity – that we could have our cake (the aggregates) and eat it too (the individual contributors) – is now possible for most events leaving digital traces, archived in digital databanks, thanks, let’s say, to Google and associates. It is quite amusing to imagine Tarde directing his statistical bureau, nurturing so many doubts about the quality of the data he was handing out to the Ministry of Justice (and also to Marcel Mauss who was helping his uncle to write his book, Suicide, in which Tarde was trashed every two footnotes …), while dreaming, at the same time, of the many interesting quantitative instruments he had no way of obtaining: the “gloriometer” for following reputation (so easily accessible now with page rankings); conversation for understanding economic transactions (now the object of so many tools following buzz and viral marketing – Rosen 2009); “phonometers” like those invented by Abbé Rousselot26 in order to follow the smallest inflexions of the native speakers (now accessible through the automated study of vast corpora of documents). When Tarde claimed that statistics would one day be as easy to read as newspapers, he could not have anticipated that the newspapers themselves would be so transformed by digitalization that they would merge into the new domain of data visualization. This is a clear case of a social scientist being one century ahead of his time because he had anticipated a quality of connection and traceability necessary for good statistics which was totally unavailable in 1900. A century later, networks and traces are triggering the excitement of social and natural scientists everywhere (Barabasi 2003; Benkler 2006). Here again, we note that the same scholars no longer make any distinction between the natural and the social domains to which they apply the same notion of networks: “Everything is a society,” including ants, bacteria, cells, scientific paradigms, or markets. What Tarde could not have anticipated, however, are the added bonuses of the digital world that now provides an embodiment for his theory, at last: the notion of navigation where we are able to physically (well, virtually) navigate on our screens from the individual data points to the aggregates and back. In other words, the aggregate has lost the privilege it maintained for one century. Through the ease with which we can navigate a datascape, we manage to interrupt the transubstantiation of the aggregate into a law, a structure, a model, and complicate the way through which one monad may come to summarize the “whole.” But the “whole” is now nothing more than a provisional visualization which can be modified and reversed at will, by moving back to the individual components, and then looking for yet other tools to regroup the same elements into alternative assemblages.27 To be sure, the many tools we now have on our screens are still primitive (and many network-based images are often no more readable than tea leaves at the

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bottom of a cup). But that’s not the essential point. The point is that the whole has lost its privileged status: we can produce out of the same data points as many aggregates as we see fit, while reverting back at any time to the individual components (Mogoutov et al. 2008). This is precisely the sort of movement that was anticipated by Tarde’s social theory, although he had no tool to explicate his vision, other than his prose. While he was attempting to direct attention towards the “imitative ray” in and of itself, in order to displace the individual element as well as the structural whole, it has been altogether too easy for sociologists, starting with Durkheim, to corner him into dead-end discussions about the micro versus the macro, the psychological versus the sociological, or the individualistic versus the holistic. In an unfair twist, it has been those who had only rudimentary tools, who have appeared more scientific than the one who was envisioning a much more refined and accurate type of data. Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde’s insights. The overarching advantage of this type of quantification is worth underscoring: because “everything is a society” there is no clear divide between the biological and the social. For the first time in the history of science, the same data may look just as familiar to those who come from the “natural” sciences as to those who come from the “interpretative” ones. At the very least, reading Tarde might help social scientists to seize upon the opportunity provided by new digital media much faster than they might otherwise have done. The insights in his work can assist us in abandoning the impossible task of reconciling an old social theory, born out of discontinuous data, with the research terrain we now have readily available, at a click of a mouse.

Notes

 

* This chapter has been written with the support of the European Program MACOSPOL (www.macospol.com). I thank Dominique Boullier, Emmanuel Didier, Louise Salmon and especially Isabelle Stengers for their useful remarks. I benefited once again from Martha Poon’s editorial skills. 1 It is the very definition of the individual being that is in question for Tarde, see below. 2 Chapter 2: “The Debate,” pp. 27. 3 See the excellent point made in Montebello (2003), esp. pp. 122–7, on those two difficult and central notions of Tarde. 4 This was a great attraction at the turn of the century, especially when it was used to visualize the “criminal type” by superimposing images of criminals in the police archives! (Gamboni 2005). 5 “Il en résulte que la contagion imitative de cette corporation antisociale [les brigands] ne reste pas tout entière renfermée dans son propre sein, où elle se traduit par le mutuel endurcissement, mais qu’elle rayonne en partie au dehors parmi les déclassés qu’elle classe, parmi les oisifs qu’elle occupe, parmi les décavés de tout genre qu’elle enfièvre des perspectives d’un nouveau jeu, le plus riche en émotions. Voilà la vraie source du mal” (Criminalité comparée, p. 52) cited in Didier (2007a). 6 For Tarde, the production of data by the administrations and the institutions is always foregrounded, which makes him, once again, an important precursor of science studies. For him, the sciences – natural, social or cameral – are added to the world they study. This is especially true in the case of criminology (Tarde 2004). In the case of criminal

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records, he had first-hand knowledge of the ways in which they work (see below). 7 In Laws of Imitation Tarde claims that the best way to detect those imitative rays is in archeology, since only there – when the living beings have disappeared and you are left with a long series of artifacts – do you see in the purest and most abstract light what has been imitated by the long-disappeared humans. 8 This is the critique made by Sperber (1996). No doubt that Tarde would have been fascinated nonetheless by the discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti, Sinigaglia, & Raiola 2008). 9 Tarde does for social theory what Pasteur had done in epidemiology: in the same way that bacteriology allows one to move from a regional theory of miasmas to a pointto-point and person-to-person theory of contagion through a specific vector (cholera bacillus, Koch’ bacillus, etc.), Tarde moves from an aggregated cloud of collective qualities to a highly specific point-to-point, person-to-person “contagion” of ideas, each of them having its own peculiar effectivity. 10 This is what allowed me to consider Tarde as the real inventor of ANT (Latour 2005). 11 What makes a society in Tarde has been the special concern of Debaise (2008). 12 I am following here Didier (2007a, 2009). 13 For a broad view of the many different ways social sciences have developed to grasp the collective, see Desrosières (2002). 14 A “Mémoire sur l’organisation de la statistique criminelle en France”, 1893. Most of his work is now available in Tarde (2004). 15 See the same argument in Milet (1994). I thank Louise Salmon for this reference. Her thesis on the history of Tarde’s milieu will contain much important material on this link between the practice of law and Tarde’s social theory. 16 He even extended this diffidence to the laws of nature: “materialists have to invoke, as complement of their erratic and blinds atoms, universal laws or the unique formula to which all those laws could be reduced, a sort of mystical commandment to whom all beings would obey and which would emanate from no being whatsoever, sort of ineffable and unintelligible verb which, without having ever been uttered by anyone, would nonetheless be listened to always and everywhere” (Tarde 1969: 56). 17 But on which he had already contributed in one of its earliest articles, “La psychologie ou économie politique” (Tarde 1881). 18 Psychologie économique was published in 1904; see Latour and Lépinay (2009). See also the special issue on Tarde’s economics (Barry and Thrift 2007). 19 See Tarde (1999) which is entirely devoted to an alternative quantitative and yet non-formalist socio-logic. 20 The same argument is made by the pragmatists; see Dewey (1927 1954), especially the second chapter, which deduces the very notion of an “individual” from a faulty definition of the state. It is interesting to note that the domination of the notion of structure on social thought is so strong that Tarde, as well as the pragmatists, have been constantly misunderstood. 21 Hence Tarde’s interest in the phenomenon that economists of innovation and historians of technology call “lock in,” “standardization,” or “entrenchment.” 22 Witness the radical critique of providentialism Tarde pursues throughout the whole of Psychologie économique. This critique allows him to criticize the notion of a social animal as well as that of the laissez-faire free marketers … (Latour and Lépinay: 2009) 23 Tarde’s first paper on the question from 1880 has a very revealing title: “La croyance et le désir, la possibilité de leur mesure” (Tarde 1885). “No intellectual effort will make it possible to conceive of an animal, or a monocellular organism, which, being sensitive, would not also be endowed with belief and desire, that is, will not associate and dissociate, collect and reject its impressions, its sensations whatever they are, with more or less intensity. M. Delboeuf explains very well that even an infusorian is able to utter this mute judgment: I am hot” (ibid. p. 185). 24 Even though the word “performative” is hotly debated (see Didier 2007b), it is still

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the best concept to define science studies’ interpretation of the reflexive nature of formalisms. 25 Tarde (1903: 75–132). 26 See Andy Barry’s chapter in this volume. 27 For striking examples of such a navigation, see http://www.demoscience.org/ assembled by the European project MACOSPOL.

Bibliography

 

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo (2003) Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, New York, Plume. Barry, Andrew and Thrift, Nigel (eds.) (2007) Economy and Society, 36(4), 509–643. Benkler, Yochai (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Market and Freedom, New Haven, Yale University Press. Cheney, Dorothy L. and Seyfarth, Robert M. (1990) How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Clark, Terry (1969) Gabriel Tarde: On Communication and Social Influence. Selected Papers, ed. by T. Clark, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Debaise, Didier (2008) “Une métaphysique des possessions. Puissances et sociétés chez Gabriel Tarde,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 60(8), 447–60. Desrosières, Alain (2002) The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (translated by Camille Naish), Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John (1927/1954) The Public and Its Problems, Athens, Ohio University Press. Didier, Emmanuel (2010) “Gabriel Tarde and Statistical Movement,” The Social After Gabriel Tarde, London, Routledge. ——(2007b) “Do Statistics ‘Perform’ the Economy?,” in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, ed. MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu, L., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 276–310. ——(2009) En quoi consiste l’Amérique? Les statistiques, le New Deal et la démocratie, Paris, La Découverte. Gamboni, Dario (2005) “Composing the Body Politic. Composite Images and Political Representations 1651–2004,” in Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Latour, B. and Weibel, P., Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 162–95. Latour, Bruno (2002) “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social”, in The Social in Question: New Bearings in the History and the Social Sciences, ed. Joyce, P., London, Routledge, pp. 117–32. ——(2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press. ——(2009) The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat transl Brilman, M. and Pottage, A., London, Polity Press. Latour, Bruno and Lépinay, Vincent Antoine (2009) The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago. Available online at: www.bruno-latour.fr (accessed November 2009). Lazer, David, Pentland, Alex, Adamic, Lada, and Aral, Sinan et al. (2009) “Computational Social Science,” Science, 323, 721–3. Milet, Jean, (1994) “Introduction”, in Tarde, G., Les Transformations du droit, Paris, Berg International, pp. 7–9. Mogoutov, Andrei, Cambrosio, Alberto, and Mustar, Philippe (2008) “Biomedical Innovation at the Laboratory, Clinical and Commercial Interface: A New Method for

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Mapping Research Projects, Publications and Patents in the Field of Microarrays,” Journal of Informetrics, 2, 341–53. Montebello, Pierre (2003) L’Autre métaphysique. Essai sur Ravaisson, Tarde, Nietzsche et Bergson, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Sinigaglia, Corrado, and Raiola, Marilène (2008) Les Neurones miroirs, Paris, Odile Jacob. Rosen, Emanuel (2009) The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing, New York, Broadway Business. Sperber, Dan (1996) La contagion des idées, Paris, Editions Odile Jacob. Stewart, Eric J., Madden, Richard, Paul, Gregory and Taddei, François (2004) “Aging and Death in an Organism that Reproduces by Morphologically Symmetric Division,” PLoS Biol, 3, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030045. Strum, Shirley and Fedigan, Linda (eds) (2000) Primate Encounters, Chicago, University of Chicago Press Tarde, Gabriel (1880) “La croyance et le désir, la possibilité de leur mesure,” Revue philosophique, 10, 150–80, 264–83, republished in Essais et mélanges sociologiques, Paris, Maloine (1895). ——(1881) “La psychologie ou économie politique,” Revue philosophique, 12, 232–50; 401–18. ——(1895/1999) Monadologie et sociologie, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. ——(1902) Psychologie économique. Paris, Félix Alcan. Available online at: http://classiques.uqac.ca/ (accessed November 2009). ——(1903/1962) The Laws of Imitation, transl E. Clews Parsons with an introduction by F. H. Giddings, New York, Henry Holt and Company. ——(1999) La Logique sociale, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. ——(2004) La Criminalité comparée, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. Toews, David (2003) “The New Tarde: Sociology after the End of the Social,” Theory, Culture and Society, 20, 81–98. Wimsatt, William C. (2007) Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

11 Gabriel Tarde and statistical movement Emmanuel Didier Translated by Peter Figueroa and Carol Sanders

Look at any curve on a graph, for example of criminal or minor second offences in the last fifty years. Don’t those traits have a physiognomy, if not like that of the human face, at least like the silhouette of hills and valleys, or rather, since we are concerned here with movement – for we speak so appropriately in statistics of fluctuations in crime or births or marriages – like the twists and turns, the sudden dives, the sharp ascents in the flight of a swallow? (Tarde 1890a: 191)1

 

Today statistics is almost always thought of as a photograph, a fixed image of reality, which is itself always changing (this being moreover Durkheim’s notion of it). Tarde thought differently; he championed a theory of statistics as a specific means of expressing changes in society. For him statistics is not static, as its etymology might lead one to think, but rather dynamic. This conception of statistics by Tarde is interesting because it is original and surprising, but above all because Tarde makes statistics an absolutely central mechanism of his sociology. He considers it much more than a simple method; rather than being a secondary tool, for him there would be no sociology without statistics.2 In order to present his theory, we will begin by showing that, for Tarde, the world – and with it society – is first and foremost quantitative; it is in itself numeral [nombre] even before it is analysed by statistics. Following on from this we will see how statistics can be the sociologist’s best ally in expressing the modifications of society so that they may be studied scientifically. We will give a number of statistical examples much used by Tarde, and we will see how his ideas enabled him to interpret them. Finally, Tarde’s statistical theory would be incomplete if one last point was not stressed, one moreover which was largely neglected at the time, but which was crucial for him: turning on its head the question of how it is that societies can be described by figures, he asks what statistics itself does, and would do, to the societies that they describe. So, like him, we will conclude by sketching the portrait of this seldom identified social actor.

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1 Psychology: tension between initial quantities The starting point for understanding the increasing importance of statistics for Tarde is to be found in his psychology. In ‘La croyance et le désir’ (published as a chapter in Tarde 1895a: 180–235), Tarde explains that for him all psychological states are combinations of the following three unique elements: belief, desire and sensation. Although sensation is a quality, the other two are quantitative. So for Tarde two-thirds of psychological elements are, unquestionably, quantities. The crucial point is to understand ‘the quantitative character of belief and desire alone’. To explain this, Tarde first of all proves that sensation is not quantitative. He argues that: All quantitative reality known to us may by its nature have positive or negative values, internal oppositions. But sensation, which is a reality, has no negative values. Hence it cannot be a quantity. (Tarde 1895a: 194) Further on he explains that, ‘What prevents me from accepting sensations as being in essence quantitative is that, in their apparent increasing or decreasing, they manifestly change in kind; these apparent increases or decreases are in reality metamorphoses.’ When sensations undergo chang,e it is a change, in kind, not in degree. On the contrary, belief and desire are quantities. All opposition is a conflict, an attempted or realized counterbalancing, which supposes a similarity of the opposed terms, their numerical comparability, the possibility of putting them into an equation. Hence no true opposition can be found outside of quantitative realities. So if belief and desire contain undeniable oppositions, it is proven that they are quantities; and it is evident that both of them encompass positive and negative states. (Tarde 1895a: 196)

 

It seems to me that his argument is very powerful: opposition automatically implies similarity, for opposition is a certain form of equivalence, of equation. There being similar elements automatically implies reduplication, and this means they can be counted; hence they are quantitative. ‘Quantity is in effect the possibility of infinite series of similarities and of infinitely small repetitions’ (Tarde 1999: 57). Thus opposition is always in part quantitative. Since opposition is universal, quantity too is universal. However, these quantities are always intermingled with sensations, making it complicated to enumerate them. ‘The main difficulty in recognizing the quantitative character of belief and desire is the eminently qualitative nature of sensation, with which they are always found in combination’ (Tarde 1895a: 197). Psychology thus allows us to see that the world is almost completely quantitative because exact similarities [de l’identique] occur, but that it is difficult to see this simply because the world is also made up of sensations.

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It must be stressed that for Tarde these psychological components are never states, but always tensions, oppositions, or to repeat an apt expression used by one of Tarde’s commentators, ‘whirlwinds or spiralling clusters’ (Bertrand 1904: 637). There is never anything fixed or stable. Hence statistics takes on board exactly similar factors [des unités identiques], but these exact similarities [identités] are always ‘desires and beliefs’ – and therefore tensions, not resolutions of tensions (contrary to statistical categories which are constructed precisely so as to be stable) – or failing this they are ‘products’ resulting from belief or desire (Tarde 1890a: 120). When Tarde speaks of ‘imitation’ what he means is the action of imitating, not the result of this action (see Benvéniste 1993: endings in ‘sis’ and ‘tus’; ‘sis’ is the name of the result of an action whereas ‘tion’ is the name of the action in the process). The proper task [of statistics] is to measure special beliefs, special desires, and to use the most direct procedures to study as closely as possible these quantities that are so difficult to get a hold of; to count actions that are the most similar to each other. (emphasis added in ‘actions’) (Tarde 1890a: 120)

 

The statistician may be feeling elated with all of this, but he must first of all come down to earth. In fact, these individual psychological components, although they are quantitative in nature, are very difficult to measure in practice. In ‘La croyance et le désir’, Tarde carries on an impassioned and closely argued discussion with Cournot (1843) in particular. The works of Cournot on the probability of working-class juries making an error when they are asked to give a verdict on the guilt of an accused are known. These represented one of the most successful attempts to measure beliefs. Tarde’s discussion reveals, however, that, while in theory the two quantities, belief and desire, can indeed be measured, Cournot’s probabilities in fact also confuse belief with the objective reasons for belief. The probability of winning on the lottery increases if I buy more tickets, but there is nothing to say that my belief in the possibility of winning will increase proportionately. Similarly, there are certain objective reasons which influence the probability of a jury making an error, but these do not influence in the same way its members’ reasons for holding a particular belief (for example, the number of jurors affects the calculation of the probability of jury error, but it is not certain that this counts in the same way in the minds of the jurors). Cournot’s probabilities depend on psychological hypotheses that have not been verified. For these to be established once and for all, what is needed is clarification of the relationship between probabilities and the mechanisms for holding beliefs, but this has not yet been done. The practical quantification of beliefs is not yet within easy reach. Thus, taking a psychological analysis as his starting point, Tarde shows the importance of the quantitative in the whole of human activity. All mental mechanisms have a quantitative aspect. It becomes obvious that this can give a very important role to statistics, which will open up a fundamental field of research, if it can account for these quantities. However, it immediately comes up against a

166 E. Didier problem: these quantities are difficult to express in practice as long as they remain in the mind. How can statistics overcome this difficulty?

2 Social aggregates

 

Once it has been noted that exactly similar units within any given individual [les identités inter-individuelles] are difficult to measure, the question arises about the measurement of such units between individuals. The question is: ‘under what conditions can the powers of belief and of desire within distinct individuals be legitimately added together?’ (Tarde 1999: 58). In other words, ‘Having demonstrated that individual belief and desire can be measured, we need to ask whether beliefs and desires of different individuals, taken together, may legitimately be added together into one total’ (Tarde 1895a: 207). Tarde’s argument was refined over time. In his earlier writings he seeks to identify what it is exactly similar that passes from one person to another. He notes that orders given by an irascible general are understood in the same way if they are given by a phlegmatic general (Tarde 1999: 57). And, in any case, he observes that if there were no such transmission, the existence of many things would be made impossible: ‘tradition would only be an empty word; nothing human could be transmitted unchanged from one generation to the next’ (Tarde 1895a: 208). So there must indeed be transmission of the exactly similar. These exactly similar things that are transmitted are not sensations, precisely because these latter depend on how each person is constituted: ‘We consider that a certain sensation is missing in Peter, and that Paul has a different kind of sensation’ (Tarde 1895a: 208). So the only exactly similar things which can be transmitted are beliefs and desires. ‘Only through beliefs and only through desires do we collaborate, do we fight; so it is only through these that we are alike. No better reason can be given.’ Tarde cannot help it, that is how things are: human beings have a tendency to imitate each other, and there is no better explanation. Belief and desire are that ‘which, under the variable tinge of the shades of the feelings proper to each individual, circulates as exactly similar things’. It should be stressed again that beliefs and desires as such are quantitative. The statistician, therefore, just needs to be skilful enough to locate them, to find actions or outcomes that are sufficiently similar and to count them. Tarde gives the examples of the fluctuations in the stock exchange, in marriage rates, and in crime statistics. These exactly similar things that pass from one person to another, and which statistics traces with such ease, are beams of imitation [des faisceaux d’imitations] (Tarde 1895a: 207). And Tarde concludes later: This is why statistics develops with greater and greater ease when nation states get bigger:3 statistics, the proper object of which is to enquire into and to untangle the truly quantitative from the jumble of social facts, and which is all the more successful if it concentrates on measuring large amounts of belief and desire in depth, by means of the human acts which it adds together. (Tarde 1999: 57)

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Statistics therefore locates, within the mass of beliefs and desires, the exact similarities that pass from one person to another. Later on, in L’Opposition universelle (1897), Tarde generalizes this argument. In his treatment of what he terms ‘oppositions of degree’ or ‘quantitative oppositions’ (parts 6–9 inclusive of ch. 7) he realizes that it is not necessary at all for anything to be transmitted for there to be a beam of imitations. The question he raises is what is truly quantitative and what is truly social about these oppositions. He now notes that these oppositions need not be reduced to belief or desire. Admittedly, these two elements are added together and combined, thanks to diffusion by imitation [la progression imitative], and so they can be enumerated, but they are not necessary to the enumeration: Even though everything in each of us belongs to affect and sensation, with no consistency, all that is needed is for our brains to reflect each other, to communicate their states of mind to each other, for the dissemination by imitation [la propagation imitative] of each of these states to become a magnitude that can be expressed by a number. (Tarde 1897: 202) All that is necessary for statistics (and, as we shall see below, for society) to come into play is that there is (active) similarity between two beings, and this similarity may even relate to qualities. Nevertheless, ‘it is true that the quantitative aspects of psychological phenomena can be communicated much more easily and rapidly from person to person’ (Tarde 1897: 203). Thus, quantitative opposition often rests on a basis of belief and desire, but this need not be the case.

 

Hence there are these two great social quantities, which may be termed truth and value, in the broadest sense of these two words, or in more concrete terms, knowledge [les lumières] and wealth. The dualities of belief and desire are reflected, although transfigured, in this fundamental duality, from which flow all the different magnitudes, whether or not they are measured by statisticians. (Tarde 1897: 204) There are, therefore, realities of a different order, more properly social, which are made up, albeit not exclusively, of belief and desire, and which can easily be enumerated. The relationship between social quantities and psychological quantities is that the social ones ‘take for granted and confirm the consistency’ of the beliefs and desires of distinct individuals, being the living collection of these; furthermore, social quantities demonstrate the ‘communicability’ of the psychological ones, which they subsume. It must be stressed that, for Tarde, although statistics involves enumeration, this does not mean that it reduces the world, forces it into over-simple categories, that

168 E. Didier it simplifies it. On the contrary, Tarde stresses that the production of figures is a creative endeavour deserving the name of art. Admittedly it is not one of the fine arts, but it is a craft; something is produced, something is added, it is not diminution. Statistics brings forward, artistically, the similarities of the world. The special feature of statistics is thus to produce similar elements in the overwhelming diversity of the world, and thereby to provide the means of enumeration: statistics is the counting of similar actions, as similar as possible. The art lies in the choice of factors [unités], which are so much the better the more they resemble and are equal to each other. (Tarde 1890a: 162)

 

Without similarity, there can be no addition, and no figures. This leads Tarde to conclude that ‘statistics is limited to the field of imitation and excludes the field of invention’. Statistics produces the similarities of imitation. Accordingly, it cannot deal with unique elements. It is not entirely accurate to say that the field of invention is outside the scope of statistics; this is a slip by Tarde, because statistics has to invent the points of resemblance and sometimes, for example, the relevant unit for one or other measurement. But, even if it sometimes has to invent, this is with the ultimate purpose of producing imitations of the world. What statistics expresses, and what is proper to it, are series of similarities. It is now time to stress that for Tarde the statistical and the social are practically identical. He gives statistics such a central place because the quantitative nature of belief and desire is essential (in the strong sense of the term) for society to be possible: without these quantitative realities there would never be any coming together. ‘If this characteristic is denied, sociology is deemed impossible.’ In L’Opposition universelle Tarde ‘replies to a criticism once and for all’ saying that it is not because he takes psychology as his starting point that he destroys the specificity of sociology. It was sufficient for me to see that people coming together make the social from the individual, from the mental, by virtue of their animal and pre-social sympathies, and that social reality is distinct from psychological realities precisely because it is a combination of these, because it is their non-contrived synthesis, their true union, their objective numerical reality [le nombre objectif ]. (Tarde 1897: 203) This is important since the social is defined by number (imitation, i.e. repetition and thus it is quantitative). So statistics is entirely within its place when it constructs and brings to light curves of rays of imitation [des rayons imitatives]. Statistics is the social made visible. To quote Tarde:

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To say that immorality, criminal tendencies, demonstrated today by an increase in misdemeanours, existed previously in a latent state, would be to express oneself poorly. It is not true either psychologically or sociologically, and this so-called demonstration is equivalent to a veritable creation, to a passage from nothingness to being. (Tarde 1886: 49) What he says here of immorality is true of society: statistics does not make manifest a society that was latent; it brings it from nothingness to being. This argument is directed against Durkheim (even though he is not named). Actually, the question of how it is possible to add together individual psychic states could not be raised by Durkheim. At least, it could only have been raised in reverse: his question would be how the suicide rate, a social fact, worked so that certain persons actually committed suicide. This is the problem of embodying an abstract entity. Durkheim starts from the results of the enquiry to go back to the individual (see Durkheim 1930: 314) ; he does not enquire how individuals come to constitute, statistically, a rate.

3 Applied studies of imitation

 

In practice, which statistics interest Tarde, the sociologist, and how does he use them? First of all let us look at his great work ‘La statistique criminelle’ published in Criminalité comparée (1886). It contains very many examples of tables of figures examined by Tarde. These data were not produced by him, but by his predecessor at the Ministry of Justice, M. Yvernès. However, he commented on them. In my view there are two points of particular note. The first is the subtlety with which he separates the effects of the construction of the figures from the effects of the reality observed. One example (frequently cited – by Boudon (1979) among others) is his work on how crimes are formalized as offences in the magistrates court [la correctionnalisation des affaires]. He shows how crimes are transformed into offences. And this he explains, on the one hand, by how the court works and the recording of the statistics, and, on the other hand, by the behaviour of the criminals themselves. The second point to note is how the analysis of the curves of a graph is buttressed by the model of imitations. For example a discussion of re-offence leads him to the following conclusion: From this it follows that contagion through imitation from this antisocial confraternity [the bandits] is not completely contained within this group, where it is manifested in their reinforcing each other’s toughness, but that it partly radiates beyond, among the classless, giving them a class, among the idle, giving them an occupation, among those who have been cleaned out in whatever way, firing them with the perspective of a new and very exciting game. This is the true source of the evil. (Tarde 1886: 52)

170 E. Didier If criminals are left together they reinforce each other’s toughness, whence re-offending, but at the same time the contagion radiates out, all the more strongly to those who are the most likely to be inclined towards crime. Tarde’s model is a powerful tool for interpreting the data (on this point, I find that sometimes his analyses sound just a little dogmatic). It will be remembered also that he liked to refer to postal statistics (Tarde 1886: 48), statistics of shipping tonnage and statistics that today would be referred to as ‘demographic’ – birth, marriage and mortality rates. At the end of L’Opposition universelle (1897), after having presented value and truth as purely social quantities, he expresses the regret that he has not seen enough statistics that measure the ‘truth’ of a nation. In referring to the statistics of knowledge, he comments on a problem that arises when belief and desire are transformed into knowledge and value. Knowledge is no less quantitative than wealth. How is it that, while a figure is bandied about for the public purse, and the national wealth of France can be estimated at 200 billion approximately, no one has thought of drawing up, even very approximately, an inventory of the national Truth, a statistic of its growth and shrinkage? (Tarde 1897: 205)

 

That is the question: why is one more frequently enumerated with statistics than the other, and yet both are quantitative? The first answer is because there is money, the gold standard of all value, but there is no money for truth: ‘But why isn’t there this spiritual money?’ Because the accumulation of knowledge does not presuppose the sacrifice of some other knowledge, and so a yardstick is not needed to measure the extent of this sacrifice. When one hesitates between two ideas, one might end up by sacrificing one to the other, and by believing one while forgetting the other. But Tarde considers that this is a ‘purely individual’, subjective matter, and that society does not need a yardstick: ‘Thus it is because of its eminently liberal characteristic that truth, in the sense I intend, has been deprived of the sociological rank which is rightfully its own.’ But this is a shame; it could be useful to have statistics of truth: one could investigate which intellectual field – linguistics, law, science, and so on – contributes most knowledge to society. The ‘variations of public opinion’ could be studied with ‘a good bookshop statistic’ or with ‘the rise or fall of religious faith’. The problem is that these statistics are sensitive, and above all they deal with virtuous acts, but it is not necessary to have as good a knowledge of virtue as of crime because ‘the contagion of virtuous acts is less to be hoped for than that of crime is to be feared’. Basically, Tarde provides a kind of methodology for statistics: The sociological statistician [must] always strive for and remain committed to this aim, or rather to these two aims: 1st by recording actions or works, to trace the curve of successive increases, inactivity or decreases of every new or old idea, of every old or new need, in so far as they spread and consolidate

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or are suppressed and uprooted; 2nd by skilful linkages among the series thus obtained, by throwing into relief their concurrent variations, to note the more or less large or zero resistance or support that these diverse disseminations lend or oppose to each other. […]In other words for sociological statistics it is a matter of: 1st determining the imitative power of each invention, in a given time and country; 2nd showing the favourable or adverse effects resulting from the imitation of each of them. (Tarde 1890a, 170) There is then a long discussion with Quételet who defended the importance of averages, while Tarde on the contrary stressed the importance of the rising sections of the curves. The lines concerned are always either ascending, horizontal or descending, or else, if they are irregular, they can always be broken down in the same way into three types of linear elements: escarpments, plateaux or declivities. According to Quételet and his school, plateaux would be the places of predilection for statisticians; discovering them would either constitute their greatest triumph or else should be their constant aspiration. There is nothing more appropriate according to him on which to found social physics than the uniform reproduction of the same figures over a considerable period of time, not only for births and marriages, but even for crimes and trials. Thus the illusion (since dissipated, it is true, especially by the latest official statistics on rising criminality over the last half-century) of thinking that these latter figures actually recurred with uniformity. But, if the reader has taken the trouble to follow us, he will realize that, without in any way reducing the importance of the horizontal lines, a much higher theoretical value must be accorded to the ascending lines, signs of the regular dissemination of a kind of imitation. (Tarde 1890a: 173)

 

Tarde stresses the periods of growth because the development of an imitation, of a movement, of avidity, can be seen there, while Quételet, according to Tarde (who gives no precise reference, but we can infer that he mentions Quételet 1846), arrives on the scene once everything is finished; he is interested in society precisely when it is hardly still moving. To finish this point let us stress the fact that the most impressive tool for Tarde is the curve, in preference to charts or tables. Each of these tables, or better still each curve of a graph which represents them, is in some way a historical monograph. And taken all together they are the best history that could be told. Synchronic tables presenting comparisons of country with country and province with province, usually offer much less of interest. (Tarde 1890a: 164)

172 E. Didier The statistics are presented in the chapter on history, which shows again to what extent Tarde considers that they aggregate actions and events. Thus, the statistics that most interest Tarde concern a multitude of acts, and indeed some of these had not yet obtained, at that time, the statistic best suited to them; but the tool that fascinates him most is the curve, and preferably time curves, because they make it possible to show how rays of imitation [rayons imitatifs] are disseminated.

4 Avidity Having arrived at this point, Tarde takes a step back; he incorporates statistics into his own metaphysics. Indeed, as statistics uncovers the history of the trends of imitation, so statistics itself develops and appears as one trend of imitation among others: societies believe more and more in the use of statistics and want it more and more. What is to be said of that trend of imitation? What future can be predicted for it? This is the theme of the very elegant discussion on the particular avidity of statistics at the end of Les Lois de l’imitation (1890a: 191–8). Tarde’s thesis is that, as it is perfected, statistics will become one of society’s senses, just as the ear and the eye are senses for individuals. He compares the ‘statistical patterns traced out along this sheet of paper’ with ‘the line traced on my retina by the flight of a swallow’, and asks what the differences are between these two curves. To start with he stresses that this difference does not at all consist in one being ‘symbolic’, but not the other. The first is said to be symbolic and not the second, but this is not right; both are ‘symbolic’ for both differ from what they ‘express’ or ‘convey’. In both cases there is, on the one hand, ‘a heap of facts’ (the different crimes, for example, and the different positions of the bird), and, on the other hand, a curve. The curve of the bird’s flight and the statistical curve are both symbolic in so far as they combine facts, which otherwise would only be accumulated. The only differences between the two are:

 

1 the cost of statistics (while looking does not cost anything); 2 the time it takes to produce the one and not the other (producing statistics is very slow; looking at a swallow, very quick): the statistical patterns traced across this sheet of paper by the mass of successive crimes and offences that are transmitted in statements of offence to the prosecution, from the prosecution, in annual reports, to the bureau of statistics in Paris, from that bureau, in bound paperback volumes, to the magistrates of the different courts (Tarde 1890a: 191–2) are to be contrasted with ‘the line traced on my retina by the flight of a swallow’. These differences are indisputable, but according to Tarde, they are only differences of degree; it is only because statistics are more recent than eyes that they are less efficient and function less smoothly. As they develop, statistics will become

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perfectly adapted to the world and will be able to ‘statistify’ it in the blink of an eye (to extend a metaphor). If statistics continues to make the progress it has made for many years, if the information it provides keeps constantly improving, speeding up, being normalized and increasing, the day could come, when, from every social event that is taking place, a figure will so to speak automatically slip out, which would immediately take its place in the statistical records continually communicated to the public and reported widely in graphic form by the daily press. (Tarde 1890a: 192) The symbolization peculiar to statistics will reveal the homogeneities in ‘the mass of facts’, just as the eye reveals and expresses the visible (and not the tactile) in the mass of facts. ‘Consequently, accepting the perfecting and extending of statistics pushed to this point, statistical services would be entirely comparable to the eye or the ear’ (Tarde 1890a: 193). The avidity of statistics would transform it into a sense for society just as efficacious as the eye is for the individual. As a consequence, it would influence people more and more at the point of action. Consequently [its function will be] to have an influence on the tendency of those who know these numerical results to follow or not to follow this or that example. (Tarde 1890a: 170)

 

Tarde gives the example of medical statistics (Tarde 1890a: 121), which has ‘contributed to making vaccination more widespread’. ‘The day will come, let us hope, when it will be unheard of for a deputy, a law-maker, who is called on to reform the magistracy or the penal code, to be ignorant (hypothetically) of statistics’ (Tarde 1890a: 146). In other words, the more the trend of statistics itself for imitation is reinforced, the more statistics will interfere with, and could reinforce or counter, other trends, just as statistics shows how trends can be countered (decrease) or reinforced (increases). The point, then, becomes that statistics, ‘like any other need’, will also itself encounter opposition, other trends of imitation that conspire to crush it. It is not alone in rendering the social ‘expressible’; but it does this in its own unique way, which itself also encounters opposition. It is legitimate to add together amounts of belief or desire held by separate individuals. In fact, this has been attempted with complete success and with a satisfactory approximation. The variations in the monetary value of things, statistics and also, as we shall see, the military triumphs or defeats of nations are all affairs variously appropriate for such measurements. (Tarde 1895a: 273)

174 E. Didier

 

In other words, just as rail transport tends to cover the world in opposition to the horse, so too statistics encounters other means of expression which represent other rival trends of imitation, such as in particular war. This example is crucial: war allows better measurement of the relative desires of two nations. ‘But the oldest and the most primordial, if not the most rigorous, scale of this kind is war’ (Tarde 1890a: 275). Indeed, at the end of a war the winner has also learned that he had a stronger desire to live than his opponent. The scale, ‘war’, has shown him that he was superior to his opponent (note here that the sufferings relative to statistics and to war are not taken into account.) The difference in the sum that a statistic or an army constitutes is that, in the first case, the putting together is done by adding up; in the second case it may be done in some other way. ‘Similar desires and acts of faith have only one way of forming a [statistical] whole: their actual enumeration.’ The army, on the contrary, is the result of a combination of diverse elements: ‘dissimilar desires and acts of faith have [the] potentiality of being able to cooperate in the production of a work that is not the direct purpose of either of them’. In other words, in an army diverse elements are incorporated one with the other. The army too is subject to ‘counting’, for one can see by the outcome of the battle which army was superior. In addition, although the elements are different, they can be aggregated. War is like the total statistic of all a nation’s trends of imitation. Next, statistics still has weaknesses which could be said to be intrinsic to its youthfulness. In L’Opposition universelle Tarde points out that statistics also has gaps which can be accounted for ‘either by the practical uselessness, apparent or real, of certain records, or by the practical difficulty of operationalizing them’. Among these ‘difficulties’ he cites the fact that statistics can be sensitive (he has in mind an enquiry into religious practice). Let us bring to an end this discussion on the weaknesses of statistics by considering a number of the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle devoted to Tarde after his death (vol. 19, nos 127–8, August 1904). It contains ‘La psychologie de Gabriel Tarde’, an article in which N. Vaschide (1904) writes as follows about a discussion with Tarde: He was surprised to see certain psychologists turn to statistics and to assertions that were too categorical on the basis of a few poor data. He hated averages and enquiries. This was, he told me one day, mediocrity of thought. (Vaschide 1904: 672) This is bizarre and yet no doubt quite true. Nevertheless, Tarde sees statisticians who do not follow his example bringing the profession into disrepute and reducing what could be a noble project to mindlessness. He writes for instance in his commentary on Dumont’s Dépopulation et civilisation (1890) about ‘the range, the complexity, the greatness of a subject too often abandoned to pure statisticians’. In short, he was not an advocate of relying exclusively on statistics. It should never be forgotten that he devised very many other methods of quantifying besides statistics.

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Conclusion Alexandre Lacassagne, a criminologist from Lyon and a friend of Tarde’s, relates in In memoriam (1904), how the judge from Sarlat came to be appointed to a post in Paris. In 1893 Professor Rollet, also from Lyon, sang Tarde’s praises to his friend, M. Antonin Dubost, the Minister of Justice. The Minister ‘requested him to write to Tarde to engage him to prepare a report on the organization of criminal statistics in France’. Tarde did so, then on 26 January 1894, wrote back to Lacassagne, My dear friend, I would not like you to learn of my nomination through the Officiel. Only two days ago I submitted my report to the Minister – a manuscript of 44 pages, where of course I often cited the Archives regarding Bodio, de von Listz and the remarkable articles by de Corre on military criminology. And this morning at mid-day the Minister put a call through to me and has just told me that I have been appointed Director of Criminal Statistics. (Lacassagne 1904: 525) Thus Tarde’s life was deeply changed, and, we might say, propelled by statistics. Tarde knew this, and he served statistics well by giving it pride of place in his works. Statistics is at the core of his sociology, as it was at the centre of his life.

Notes 1 The quotes in this paper have been rendered into English by the translators; however, the page numbers refer to the French texts. In certain places, the original French expression has been included in square brackets. 2 Many thanks to Olivier Martin and Bruno Latour for having discussed this paper with me. For a broader view on statistics and on the their social effects see Didier, 2009. 3 The opposition to Foucault must be underlined here. Foucault conceives statistics, by and large, as a means of control, and this is why he argues that statistics first appear in small countries, easier to dominate (Foucault 2004: 180).

 

Bibliography Benvéniste, Emile (1993) Noms d’action et noms d’agents en indo-européen, Genève, Maisonneuve. Bertrand, A. (1904) ‘Un essai de cosmologie sociale. Les thèses monadologiques de Gabriel Tarde’, Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, 19(127–8), 623–60. Boudon, Raymond (1979) Présentation, in Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation, Genève, Slatkine, 5–12. Cournot, Antoine-Augustin (1843) Exposition d’une théorie des chances et des probabilités, Paris, Hachette. Didier, Emmanuel (2009) En quoi consiste l’Amérique? Les statistique, le New Deal et al démocratie, Paris: La Découverte. Dumont, Arsène (1890) Dépopulation et Civilisation: Étude Démographique, Paris: Lecrosnier et Babé. Reissued, with a biographical and critical introduction by André Béjin, Paris: Economica, 1990. Durkheim, Emile (1930) Le Suicide, Paris: P.U.F.

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Foucault, Michel (2004) Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil. Lacassagne, Alexandre (1904), ‘In memoriam’, Archives d’anthropologie criminelles, 19(127–8), 520–31. Quételet, Adolphe (1846) Lettre à S.A.R. le Duc régnant de Saxe Cabourg et Gotha, sur la théorie des probabilités, appliquée aux sciences morales et politiques, Bruxelles: Hayez. Tarde, Gabriel (1880) ‘La croyance et le désir; la possibilité de leur mesure’, Revue philosophique, 10, 150–80 and 264–83. ——, (1886) La Criminalité comparée, Paris: F. Alcan. ——, (1890a) Les Lois de l’imitation: étude sociologique, Paris: F. Alcan. Translated by Elsie Clews Parsons in 1903 and published as The Laws of Imitation, with an introduction by Franklin H. Giddings, New York: Henry Holt & Co.; reprinted 1962, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith; online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/11483225/TARDE-1903-theLaws-of-Imitation. ——, (1890b) La Philosophie pénale, Lyon: Storc. Translated by Rapelje Howell and published as Penal Philosophy in 1968. ——, (1892) Études Pénales et sociales, Lyon: Storck et Masson. ——, (1893) Les Transformations du droit, Paris: F. Alcan. ——, (1895a) Essais et mélanges sociologiques, Paris: Maloine. ——, (1895b) La Logique sociale, Paris: F. Alcan. ——, (1897) L’Opposition universelle: essai d’une théorie des contraires, Paris: F. Alcan. ——, (1898) Études de psychologie sociale, Paris: Giard et Brière. ——, (1999) Les lois sociales: esquisse d’une sociologie, Le Plessis-Robinson; edition Synthélabo-les Empêcheurs de penser en rond ; reprint from 1898, Paris: Alcan, translated by Howard C Warren and published in 1899 as Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology, New York: Batoch Books, Kitchner, 2000; online at http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ ugcm/3ll3/tarde/laws.pdf. Vaschide, N. (1904) ‘La psychologie de Gabriel Tarde’, Archives d’anthropologie criminelles, 19(127–8), 661–74.

12 Tarde’s method Between statistics and experimentation Andrew Barry

 

‘As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know is which peasants, in which regions of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May ’68: those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216). As an indication of Tarde’s political sympathies, Deleuze and Guattari’s association between the work of Tarde and May ’68 is misleading: Tarde, the judge and liberal imperialist, was more concerned with the problem of how to monitor and govern the desires of the populace than with how to foster them (Toscano 2007). Yet this reference to Tarde’s text The Social Laws is instructive nonetheless in indicating his approach to the question of sociological method. Tarde was preoccupied, as Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks suggest, with the importance of quite specific movements or variations in social life, their timing and location, how to ‘catch them in the act’ (Alliez 2004: 52). In this chapter, I follow Tarde’s interest in finding methods that would be adequate to his conception of the task of sociology. One of the difficulties that he confronted, I argue, is how to produce evidence of the processes of imitation and invention that he saw as central to understanding the phenomenon of variation. What methods were available for those concerned with the study of the kinds of micro-social variations that were at the heart of Tarde’s sociology? This chapter reviews Tarde’s efforts to find a solution to the problem of sociological method, and his suggestion that sociology should be an experimental and observational as well as a statistical science. In the first part, I discuss the difference between Tarde’s interpretations of the value of statistics and the more influential approach of his adversary, Emile Durkheim. In the second part, I focus, in particular, on his interest, expressed in The Social Laws, in the development of experimental phonetics pioneered by his contemporary l’Abbé Rousselot. In the conclusion, I return to the question, raised by Deleuze and Guattari’s observations on The Social Laws, of the politics of Tarde’s approach to sociological method and his interest in how both to account for, and to detect, variation.

178 A. Barry

Sociological methods and the detection of variation The Laws of Imitation, published eight years earlier than Social Laws, gives a good indication of Tarde’s concern with method and, in particular, the difference between his understanding of the place of statistics in sociological research and that of his rival Emile Durkheim (Antoine 2001; Karsenti 2006). In this text, Tarde makes it absolutely clear that the main value of statistics lies in indicating the trajectory of variation over time: In general, there is nothing more instructive than the chronological tables of statisticians, in which they show us the increasing rise or fall, year by year, of some special kind of consumption or production, of some particular political opinion as it is expressed in the returns of the ballot box, or of some specific desire for security that is embodied in fire-insurance premiums, in savings-bank accounts, etc. These are all, at bottom, representations in the life of some desire or belief that has been imported and copied. Every one of these tables, or, rather, every one of the graphical curves which represent them, is, in a way, an historical monograph. Taken together they form the best historical narrative that it is possible to have. (Tarde 1903 [1890]: 104)

 

In tracing how the prevalence of particular actions increased or decreased over time, statistics indicated, for Tarde, those beliefs and desires that had come to be copied or imitated. The social facts, to which statistics gave some collective representation, were the forms of imitation, the realm of the inter-psychological, which both exist within individuals and flow through them (Tarde 1898: 64; Chapter 2, this volume; Alliez 2004; Barry and Thrift 2007). In effect, the individual was a nexus within which flows of belief and desire coexisted, interfered with and opposed one another. In this way, for Tarde, history was to be understood, not as an evolving context within which events happened and individuals were constrained, but as a ‘multilinear’ series of intersecting and potentially antagonistic movements (Tarde 1999b [1895], 1999c [1897]). In this account, the individual was not an autonomous agent or a source of rational action, but was recognised as a site within which the cross-fertilisation of distinct currents of practice and thought sometimes occurred, and invention was thus possible (Antoine 2004: 73, Lepinay 2007). The term cross-fertilization is apposite, for Tarde considered that social and vital processes took similar forms. At the same time, while Tarde was interested in the spatio-temporal movement of beliefs and desires, he was unimpressed by the idea that comparative statistics could inform sociological analysis, certainly on their own. There was little to be gained, he observed, in merely knowing the quantitative differences between, for example, the level of telegraph use in France and England at a particular moment in time. But there could be, he suggested, a great deal of interest in tracing the growth of telegraph use over time in one country. Why might this be so? Tarde did not give an explicit answer to this question in The Laws of Imitation. But what might be of

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interest, for the Tardean sociologist, would be to answer the question of how the use of the telegraph became both progressively imitated and transformed, so that it not only came to be used by business and government, but also acted as a medium for personal correspondence (Marvin 1988). How was it that the telegraph became not just a means for the communication of market information and state organisation, but also for the communication and transmission of affect? How did the telegraph become not just part of the technological apparatus of a market and its coordination in space (cf. Carey 1989, Callon et al. 2007), but also came to act as a device for the coordination of political action, by trade unions and others, in opposition to business (Barry 1996)? In other words, how did the progressive repetition of an act (the use of the telegraph) lead to the generation of something novel? As Bruno Karsenti reminds us, Durkheim’s use of statistics in Suicide (1897) is explicitly opposed to the position taken by Tarde during the same period (Karsenti 2006: 165). On the one hand, Durkheim mocked what he took to be Tarde’s stress on the importance of inter-personal imitation as an explanation for the reproduction of acts, such as suicide, over time: ‘are we then to imagine that, in some way, each suicide had as his initiator and teacher one of the victims of the year before and he is something like his moral heir? Only thus can one conceive the possibility that the social suicide-rate is perpetuated by way of individual traditions’ (Durkheim 1952 [1897]: 308–9). In arguing thus, Durkheim seemed to discount the possibility, recognized by Tarde, that imitation did not require explicit instruction, but occurred as much through relations of desire and fantasy, affectives states of the mind which were not so much unconscious as pre-conscious (Thrift 2008). Tarde himself, as a criminologist, was particularly interested in the imitation of specific acts in time and space, and in what he understood to be the ‘contagious’ character of criminal acts. Moreover, as a form of contagion, criminal acts not only spread, they also mutated. Poisoning was a good example of Tarde’s sense of the historical and social geography of crime, a practice which was once invented and has subsequently mutated into a virulent disease: ‘poisoning is now a crime of the illiterate; as late as the seventeenth century it was the crime of the upper classes, as is proven by the epidemic of poisonings which flourished at the court of Louis XIV, from 1670 to 1680, following the importation of certain poisons by the Italian exili’ (Tarde 1912 [1890]: 332). On the other hand, Durkheim claimed that Tarde’s interpretation of criminal statistics in his text on Penal Philosophy was itself questionable. Whereas Tarde argued that the number of murders carried out in France had been progressively increasing in the nineteenth century, Durkheim countered that ‘the variation in figures for murders is not very regular; but from 1835 to 1885 they have perceptibly decreased in spite of the rise about 1876 … Nothing therefore permits the conclusion that there was an increase in criminality in question’ (Durkheim 1952[1897]: 350). Of interest here is what this dispute between the two sociologists tells us about what Tarde and Durkheim thought statistics could demonstrate. For Durkheim, the problem of the lack of variation of murders over time within a given society was more significant than the existence of variations. For it was precisely this lack of variation in the rate of suicide, Durkheim argued, that demonstrated the existence of a ‘moral order external to the individual … a totality of forces which

180 A. Barry cause us to act from without’ (ibid.: 309–10). By contrast, Tarde’s interpretation of statistics was rooted in a sense that their variation was the outcome of a multitude of infinitesimal changes: in short, his sociology was a science grounded in an analysis of differentiation. Whereas Durkheim supposed the existence of a society which evolved, Tarde was concerned with the way in which trajectories of social change were the cumulative outcome of small variations. The debt of both sociologists to Darwin is clear enough, although the lessons that they derived from Darwin were radically different. Tarde expressed this difference thus: This conception is, in fact, almost the exact opposite of the unilinear evolutionists’ notion and of M. Durkheim’s. Instead of explaining everything by the supposed supremacy of a law of evolution, which compels collective phenomena to reproduce and repeat themselves indefinitely in a certain order, – instead of thus explaining the small by the large, and the part by the whole, – I explain collective resemblances of the whole by the massing together of minute elementary acts – the large by the small and the whole by the part. This way of seeing is destined to produce a transformation in sociology similar to that brought about in mathematics by the introduction of infinitesimal calculus. (Tarde 1999d [1898]: 63, emphasis in original) Moreover, Tarde’s opposition to Durkheim centred not just on the notion of the evolution but on the idea of environment (milieu) (Karsenti 2006: 168). Tarde’s approach is not to seek to account for specific acts in the context of their broader social environment, but to situate ‘minute elementary acts’ in relation to the line or multiple lines of movement of which they formed a part.

The experimental method

 

Tarde’s interpretation of statistics raises two sets of questions, however, to which statistics alone could not provide answers. The first is the problem of determining which variations mattered, and to whom. Tarde himself recognized that there were considerable limitations to existing statistics. They only recorded certain activities and not others, and they could only be analysed after the variations that they recorded had already happened. Moreover they could not detect the existence of desires which were developing, but had yet to be actualized. In this context, one can understand Tarde’s welcoming of universal suffrage not so much because he was a democrat, but because it was a device ‘through which a nation is made conscious of the changes in its desires and opinions in vital matters’ (Tarde 1903 [1890]: 109). Elections provided the means through which a near instantaneous feedback could be established between expression of beliefs and desires, and their subsequent transformation. But while a growing range of statistics were produced by both government and business during Tarde’s lifetime, Tarde does not give us any clear answers to the question of why particular statistics might be important: what might be considered vital for citizens to know. Why should sociology be concerned, for example, as he had suggested, with knowledge of the changing level of fire insurance premiums,

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or the tendency of the French not to travel by train on Fridays? Tarde himself did not offer an answer to the question of which kinds of variations might be instructive or valuable to track using statistics, and thereby determine the relevance of the knowledge of tendencies that statistical analysis might reveal. A second problem confronting the Tardean sociologist, however, is the question of the mechanism or process of variation. While statistics pointed to the existence of the kinds of variations that were of interest to Tarde, they could only detect such variations after they occurred, and at a distance (cf. Latour 1987). Understood in the terms of differential calculus, they provided the integrated summation of infinitesimal variations, but they could not track or observe individual variations as they happened. Statistics were only available after the event, leaving the sociologist who relied on statistics able to trace variation without gathering any sense of its process. In this way, the methods and conclusions of statisticians were not so different, as Tarde observed, from the methods of archaeologists (Antoine 2001; Tarde 1903 [1890]). In the Laws of Imitation, however, Tarde suggested one response to this problem. This was to propose the development of a more fine-grained statistics, a psychological statistics, which might trace the variation of belief and desire at the level of the individual. Such a statistics ‘would take note of the individual gains and losses of special beliefs and desires called forth originally by some innovator, [and] would alone, if the thing were practically possible, give the underlying explanation of the figures of ordinary statistics’ (Tarde 1903 [1890]: 106, my emphasis). As this quote suggests, Tarde was preoccupied with the phenomenon of imitation and its mechanism. He also had a special interest in the figure of the ‘innovator’ and how, in particular, the ideas and practices of cosmopolitan innovators, such as artists, scientists, engineers, might or might not be imitated and adapted by others (Antoine 2004; Toscano 2007: 599). But if the idea of psychological statistics remained an aspiration for Tarde, what other methods did he consider that the sociologist might employ to gain a more direct access to those social facts, the relations of imitation, to which conventional forms of social statistics merely pointed? How was it possible to observe or detect the existence of those forms of inter-molecular, inter-spiritual, inter- and intra-psychological, and what we might now call affective relations, which should be of particular concern to social researchers (Tarde 1898: 64; Thrift 2008)? As Lisa Blackman argues, hypnosis provided Tarde with one model of how such inter-psychological processes of imitation could operate, and how they might also produce variation: Tarde’s concept of imitation was one which was not about mechanical reproduction, but more complex forms of imitative desire which was thought through concepts derived specifically from hypnotic trance and psychical research. This allowed for spontaneity and repetition to exist in close proximity, and to trouble any notion of a simple stasis of reproduction, which he attributed to Durkheim. (Blackman 2007: 581, emphasis in original).

182 A. Barry While Blackman rightly emphasizes Tarde’s sense of the importance of hypnosis and suggestion as a way of thinking about imitation and difference, what is equally of interest is Tarde’s broader interest in methods, such as hypnosis, that were experimental. Hypnosis did not merely record a process of suggestion and imitation; it produced the forms of inter-psychological relation which Tarde wished to observe. Whereas Durkheim studied society at a distance using statistics, leaving the object of research apparently undisturbed by the conduct of research itself (cf. Osborne and Rose 1999), Tarde’s vision of sociology was intentionally interventionist. Hypnosis was, as he put it, ‘the experimental junction point of psychology and sociology. … [showing] us the most simplified sort of psychic life which can be conceived of under the form of the most elementary social relation’ (Tarde 1912 [1890]: 193, my emphasis). Sociology, along with the other sciences, might deliberately have to intervene in social life in order to render the dynamics of social processes visible (Hacking 1983). The sociologist might need to employ experimental techniques in order to observe processes of imitation and differentiation as they happened. Although the objects of sociological research were potentially extremely small, they could be recorded collectively, as determined by statistics. But they could also be observed closely by being placed under a microscope and, if it were necessary, produced or isolated by artificial means (Karsenti 2006: 168). Yet while hypnosis provided one model for an experimental sociology, in the long footnote from Social Laws cited by Deleuze and Guattari, Tarde suggested another method:

 

If we wish to make sociology a truly experimental science and stamp it with the seal of absolute exactness, we must, I believe, generalize the method of Abbé Rousselot in its essential features, through the collaboration of a number of trustworthy observers. Let twenty, or thirty, or as many as fifty sociologists, from different sections of France or any other country, write out with the greatest care and in the greatest possible detail, the succession of minute transformations in the political or economic world, which it is given for them to observe in their native town or village. … (Tarde 1999d [1898]: 130–1) Lets us leave aside for the moment the question of why it might be helpful and appropriate for sociologists to observe social life in their own town or village. Why was the work of Rousselot so significant for Tarde? One reason was the level of detail in which Rousselot sought to track modifications in forms of pronunciation. In his doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne, Rousselot began to develop a field of experimental phonetics that relied not on the interpretation by the human researcher of the sound of speech, but on the use of an array of precision electrical and mechanical devices. These devices recorded both sound and also the physical movements of the lips, the tongue and larynx (Rousselot 1891: 8, Rousselot 1897). Indeed, Rousselot’s investigations are remarkable not just in their exhaustiveness, but in their level of attention to the corporeal basis of speech. He produced a whole series of diagrams, for example, which traced the relation of the tongue and the

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palate of individual speakers, as well compiling detailed records of the movements of the lips and larynx associated with different ways of pronouncing the same word (see figures 11.1 and 11.2).

 

Figure 11.1

Figure 11.2

 

Figure 11.3

Figure 11.4

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In the 1900s Rousselot’s experimental approach influenced not only Tarde. It was also taken up by the Berkeley anthropologist Pliny Earle Goddard in his study of the Hupa Indians in California, for whom ‘phonograph records … can never be sufficient in themselves because they utterly fail to show the physiological processes by which the sounds upon them have been produced, and after all the manner of making the sound is more important in the study of language than the sound itself’ (Goddard 1905: 619, figures 11.3 and 11.4). In a 1907 issue of American Archeaology and Anthropology Goddard accounted for why he thought a meticulous record of the language of the Hupa was important: ‘the great danger. … [is] that American languages will become extinct in a few generations, it is extremely important that a comparative study may be recorded of their relation to each other and to other languages of the world’ (Goddard 1907: 1). While Goddard’s research focused on the embodiment of speech, and not just its sound or meaning, and was explicitly influenced by Rousselot, Rousselot had already gone further than Goddard, taking experimental phonetics in a different direction. After all, he had not confined himself to the study of the relation between sound and muscular movement. Nor was he interested simply in the problem of how to record the way in which words were spoken before a language or dialect disappeared. Rather, through studying generations of his own family, he sought to detect changes in process. Through the study of how a foreign word was spoken, he became equally concerned with ways in which the repetition of a sound or word could, in different speakers, lead to its subtle modification. In his thesis, titled the ‘Phonetic Modifications in language studied in the dialect of a family of Cellefrouin’, Rousselot noted how he came to realize that genealogy was critical to his analysis (Rousselot 1891: 2). It was not just a matter of recording speech, but of tracing variations in time and space. Using his methods, Rousselot was even able to detect variations in the expression of parts of letters, thereby demonstrating that individual letters were not, as he put it, ‘real unities’ at all, but only ‘unities of impression’ (ibid.: 21). In this way, his research bore out Tarde’s observation that more ‘subtle and profound’ distinctions opened up as investigation became progressively more detailed (Rousselot 1891: 21, Tarde 1999b: 48, 1999a). As Tarde’s work suggests, the micro turns out to be more complex than the macro (Latour 2002).

Field research Yet perhaps there was another reason why Rousselot’s work was so significant for Tarde. For unlike the work of the hypnotists, Rousselot’s experimental phonetics involved field research. Rousselot’s methods were geographical, as well as experimental. His research was like ‘a walk in a phonetics laboratory’ (Rousselot 1891: 5). Indeed, towards the end of his thesis, Rousselot gave a preliminary analysis of the geography of phonetics through a brief tour of the villages of the Franco-Italian border, working on behalf of the Ministry of Public Instruction (figure 11.5). This was a geography, as Rousselot recognized, that was rapidly changing, driven by the progressive development of universal education and the

186 A. Barry newspaper. Rousselot’s maps of the border region pointed both to the sedimentation of history, and the geography of its movement. He argued that Cellefrouin had been a good place to begin his earlier research project because, on account of its location, it revealed the linguistic influence of the two regions (the north and the Midi) which divided France and were engaged in what Rousselot called a ‘secular struggle’ (Rousselot 1891: 347). Later, in 1902, he returned to the question of the political geography of the pronunciation of French: ‘In effect, what is French? An artificial language like Italian or German, imposed through the power of literary works? No, it’s the language of the monarch carried to the provinces by the administration’ (Rousselot and Laclotte 1902: 11). There is also an underlying concern with the relation between the city and the provinces in Tarde’s work. Tarde himself stressed the importance of the work of the metropolitan creative classes (Lepinay 2007; Tarde 2007 [1902]) and the subsequent imitation of their inventions elsewhere. In this respect Tarde’s use of Rousselot is utterly different from Goddard’s. As an anthropologist, Goddard was concerned to record the existence of a cultural form before it disappeared, while Tarde was interested in the manner in which traditional habits and practices were transformed, but not in order to preserve them: But anyone who knew thoroughly, in exact detail, the changes of custom on some particular points, in a single country and during ten years, could not fail to lay his hand upon a general principle of social transformation, and consequently upon a principle of social formation, that would apply to every land and to all time. In such a research it would be well to take up a very limited number of questions: for instance, it might first be asked, by whom and how the custom was originally introduced and propagated, among the peasants of certain rural districts of the Midi, of not greeting the well-to-do landowners of their neighbourhood; or what influences led the belief in sorcery and were-wolves to begin to disappear. (Tarde 1899: 93, 1999d [1898]: 131, my emphases)

 

In his concern with the specific, Tarde might appear to be advocating a form of ethnography, but only if we understand ethnography in a particular way. After all, Tarde’s interest was not in the comparative study of cultural or linguistic differences between distinct societies, but in the analysis of spatio-temporal variations in specific elements, as they are enacted historically (Born 2009). Tarde recognized that statistics and archaeology might make it possible to trace the accumulation of variations, but there were obvious limitations to such methods, not least because of the poverty of existing statistics (Tarde 1903 [1890]). The Tardean sociologist might need to study a particular setting that s/he knows well, not in order to show how the parts of a community come together to form a whole, but because it would only be through the acquisition of detailed knowledge, accumulated over time, that s/he would be able to detect, trace and map the course of variations. No wonder that it would be better, in Tarde’s view, to send sociologists to their own villages, for this would enable them to be attuned to the most subtle variations in,

  Figure 11.5

188 A. Barry for example, language, clothing or gesture, and to be able to place them in the historical trajectory of their own experience, as well as the experience of their family and acquaintances. The sociologist, for Tarde, could act as a kind of monitoring or tracking device, picking up movements when and where they occurred. There was a need to know the histories of particular objects, forms of speech and habits within a particular village, not in order to give an account of the culture of the village or the nation as a whole, but in order to be aware of the occurrence of variation, and why it mattered in this location. In thinking about history, Tarde frequently drew on the language of geology and physical geography, writing about those processes of sedimentation and accumulation over time, as well as those moments of violent eruption, through which radical differences or inventions arose. For Tarde, the sociologist would need to be sufficiently immersed in a specific setting to be attentive to, and to be able to record, both kinds of movement.

Conclusion What are the implications of this discussion of Tarde’s approach to the question of sociological method for an understanding of his politics? Deleuze and Guattari read Tarde as a theorist of the micropolitics of 1968; a sociologist who pointed to the space and time of those movements which eluded the grasp of social analysis and party discipline. This interpretation is, as I have noted, radically at odds with Tarde’s own political analysis (Toscano 2007). In both his Penal Philosophy and the Transformations of Power, Tarde made it absolutely clear that it is primarily social superiors (inventors, the nobility, geniuses) who create, and social inferiors who imitate:

 

Go into the home of the peasant and look at his household effects. … not one of his implements, which, having come down to his cottage, was not originally an object of luxury of kings or warrior chiefs. … [and] you will find that [the peasant] has not a single idea on law, agriculture, politics, or arithmetic, a single sentiment of family or patriotism, a single wish, a single desire, which was not originally a peculiar discovery or initiative, propagated from the social heights, gradually down to his low level. (Tarde 1912 [1890]: 329) But if Tarde is not the kind of political radical that one might imagine from reading Deleuze and Guattari, his work is nonetheless important in the light that it sheds on the relations between social research and the political. In his essay ‘Political Education’, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott stressed that the study of politics needs to be ‘an historical study – not, in the first place, because it is proper to be concerned with the past, but because we need to be concerned with the detail of the concrete’ (Oakeshott 1962: 63). In his concern with the concrete and the specific, Oakeshott was critical of the reductive formulations of the social sciences, in part because of their tendency to explain away the indeterminacy and specificity of political events, and their failure to recognize political transformation

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unless it is ‘self-consciously induced change’ (ibid.: 8). Part of the antagonism of Oakeshott towards the reductivism of the social sciences is analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s antagonism to the molar political thinking of the established political parties. This line of argument, from philosophers on both left and right, is that the social sciences have all too often failed to attend to subtle movements and variations that occur in political life, which cannot simply be understood as the product of decisions, or a manifestation of competing interests or conflicting ideologies. A Tardean sociology, likewise, might be a form of social research that is attuned to forms of variation that are critical to politics, including those that may exist ‘below the thresholds of conscious communication and intent’ (Colebrook 2008: 127; Thrift 2008). Tarde pointed to the need to attend to variation, and to locate and trace it, to keep the possibility of both temporary disturbances and long-term tendencies in vision. What is questionable about the political thought of Tarde is the assumption that the origins of movements are likely to derive from the actions of the nobility or the minds of geniuses or innovators, which are only subsequently imitated by others. But if social research followed Tarde’s approach to the question of method, it should not be hostage to such assumptions about the timing and spacing of variation. It would find the origin of variations not just in the ideas of geniuses, the habits of the nobility, or the doctrines of political leaders and activists, but at unexpected times and across a range of settings. It would not assume, in other words, that politically significant variations had their origins in sites and practices that are conventionally understood to be political. Social research, following Tarde, would need to be attentive to the occurrence of those variations that might or should come to matter.1

Note 1 My thanks to Georgina Born for her insightful and critical reading of this chapter.

Bibliography

 

Alliez, E. (2004) ‘The difference and repetition of Gabriel Tarde’, Distinktion, 9, 49–54. Antoine, J-P. (2001) ‘Statistique et Métaphore: note sur la méthode sociologique de Tarde’, introduction to Tarde (2001), 7–42. —— (2004) ‘Tarde’s aesthetics: art & art, or the invention of social memory’, Distinktion, 9, 71–81. Barry, A. (1996) ‘Lines of communication and spaces of rule’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, London: UCL Press. Barry, A. and N. Thrift (2007) ‘Gabriel Tarde: imitation, invention and economy’, Economy and Society, 36, 4, 509–25. Blackman, L. (2007) ‘Reinventing psychological matters: the importance of the suggestive realm of Tarde’s ontology’, Economy and Society, 36, 4, 574–96. Born, G. (2009) ‘On Tardean relations: temporality and anthropology’, this volume. Callon, M., Y. Millo and F. Muniesa (eds) (2007) Market Devices, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Carey, J. (1989) Communication as culture: essays on media and society, London: Unwin Hyman. Colebrook, C. (2008) ‘Bourgeois thermodynamics’, in I. Buchanan and N. Thoburn (eds) Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone. Deleuze G. and F. Guattari (1987) Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Durkheim, E. (1952 [1897]) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, London : Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goddard, P. E. (1905) ‘Mechanical aids to the study of language’, American Anthropologist, NS 7, 4, 613–19. —— (1907) ‘The Phonology of the Hupa Language’ American Archaeology and Ethnology, 5, 1–20. Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayward, K. (2000) Experimental Phonetics, Harlow: Longman. Karsenti, B. (2006) La Société en Personnes: Études Durkheimiennes, Paris : Economica. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. —— (2002) ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’ in P. Joyce (ed.) The Social in Question: new bearings in history and the social sciences, London: Routledge, 117–32. Lepinay, V-A (2007) ‘Economy of the germ: capital, accumulation and vibration’, Economy and Society, 36, 4, 526–48. Marvin, C. (1988) When old technologies were new, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1962) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London: Methuen. Osborne, T. and N. Rose (1999) ‘Do the social sciences create phenomena? The example of public opinion research?’ British Journal of Sociology, 50, 3, 367–96. Porter, T. (1986) The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rousselot, L. (1891) Les Modifications Phonétiques du Langage Étudiées dans la Patois d’une Famille de Cellefrouin, Paris: H. Welte. —— (1897) Principes de Phonétique Expérimentale, tom. 1, Paris: H. Welte. Rousselot, L. and F. Laclotte (1902) Précis de Prononciation Française, Paris: H. Welte. Tarde, G. (1898) ‘Les deux élements de Sociologie’ in Études de Psychologie Sociale, Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière. —— (1903 [1890]) The Laws of Imitation, New York: Henry Holt. —— (1912 [1890]) Penal Philosophy, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. —— (1999a [1895]) Monadologie et Sociologie, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (1999b [1895]) La Logique Sociale, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (1999c [1897]) L’Opposition Universelle, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (1999d [1898]) Les Lois Sociales, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (2001 [1890]) Les Lois de L’Imitation, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (2003 [1899]) Les Transformations du Pouvoir, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (2007 [1902]) ‘Economic Psychology’, Economy and Society, 36, 4, 614–43. Thoburn, N. (2003) Deleuze, Marx, and Politics, London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler 86B, 1, 55–76. —— (2008) Non-representational theory, London: Routledge. Toscano, A. (2007) ‘Powers of Pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde’, Economy and Society, 36, 4, 597–613.

13 Intervening with the social? Ethnographic practice and Tarde’s image of relations between subjects James Leach

So many other entities are now knocking on the door of our collectives. Is it absurd to want to retool our disciplines to become sensitive again to the noise they make and to try to find a place for them? (Latour 2005)

How would we think of the practices of ethnographic fieldwork if we were to accept the Tardean premise of ‘mutual possession’, ‘the transmission of something internal and mental, which passes from one to other of the two subjects’ (Tarde 2008 [1899]: 20)? Might we need to elide one of the foundations of Durkheimian sociology in our practice of ethnography? That is, does the assumption of a super-organic entity, an over-arching, determining structure of social and conceptual relations (which Tarde argued against) shape our position as ethnographers in a manner whereby we not only construct culture in order to explain what we see to ourselves (Wagner 1975), but misperceive the actions and requests of our informants as representative of this abstraction, rather than their perception of our relationship? Early in The Social Laws, Tarde writes:

 

Sooner or later, one must open his eyes to the evidence, and recognize that the genius of a people or race, instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; … (Tarde 2008 [1899]: 27) Working loosely with Tarde’s idea (Bateson 1972: 82–6), I look to Tarde’s work as impetus in thinking through ethnographic practice and the relationships that constitute anthropological method. What is the alternative to an ‘impersonal synthesis’ made abstract through the concept of society or culture, one which does approach what is ‘real, effective, and ever in activity’? To this end, and in an exploratory mode, I follow Andrew Barry (2005) in asking

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about ‘events that matter’ (see also Strathern 1990), with the intention of understanding ‘matter’ not as merely that which causes change (as Tarde may be read), but as that which causes change which is desired, that has recognized value for those involved as subjects. As Tarde says, ‘The relation of one mind with another mind is, in fact, a distinctive event in the life of each’ (Tarde 1999: 20). Tarde’s emphasis on micro-interactions, and on tracing change to specific moments in relationships is a spur to ask how we can understand the ethnographer’s role with informants as more than just that of collecting data about an entity beyond any of them. This chapter, then, is an attempt to think about the value of the ethnographic method for its subjects in relation to its users, its effects as an encounter for the people concerned that is not premised on the notion of culture contact or system collision, but specific meetings between specific people. Attention to the ethnographic method, and to the process of abstraction through distance and inscription, is (of course) a perennial one for social anthropology (e.g. Fabian 1983). Recently there have been several convincing arguments for the necessity of distance from one’s informants, building on the origin points of this method. David Mosse (2006), writing of the reactions of his informants (people working for international development agencies), tells us that the integrity of anthropological knowledge is given by the fact that we do not have informants with us as we write. His concern follows from an explicit recognition of the receding possibility for other kinds of (geographical/temporal) distance, particularly when studying powerful institutions and groups close at hand. As he writes, ‘as other boundaries fade, it is often the detachment of writing that has become the primary mode of exit’ (937). And ‘exit’ is necessary for ethnography as such to happen at all; ‘anthropologists have to negotiate a space for their involvement to be more ethnographic and resist institutional pressures’ (941). The outcomes of these analytic moments in ethnographic practice are generalized as a result. They are precisely not about particular people, or the effects of particular relationships and projects. Rather, ‘[t]he ethnography explains all these [pressures/contradictions] as general and inherent features of the system of international aid not as failings of one particular project’. To achieve this ‘ultimately’ requires ‘the re-affirmation of the Malinowskian boundary between field and desk’ (948). It was the shock of the rejection of his ‘well made’ analysis by his informants that caused Mosse to ask ‘who anthropological knowledge is for’, and examine its construction in contemporary conditions of practice. Mosse’s answers come down to the fact that ethnography becomes analysis outside relations with informants by necessity, and that this involves translating personal, real relations with people into knowledge about the wider conditions and systems in which they find themselves. The move is to make ‘relationships become evidence’ according to Hastrup (2003), in the service of making representations. Mosse agrees that uncomfortable relations with the subjects of ethnography are an almost inevitable outcome as they try to ‘unpack’ this evidence back into relationships (Mosse 2006: 951). It is not that I disagree with Mosse’s argument, which is a nuanced and brilliantly realized one in defence of the classical separation of responsibility which has made the discipline possible after Durkheim. (Responsibility is best realized through

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remaining true to the method.) I do, however, want to examine what ethnography might look like if it were not in the service of making the kinds of representations specified by Durkheim’s legacy: abstracted ‘features’ of super-organic ‘systems’. Or rather, if that claim sounds too grand, to examine, with the assistance of some of Tarde’s ideas, the implications of the assumption of culture on what it is that anthropologists end up interacting with. My concern is that the relations demanded by ethnographic research, in specific instances where informants have asked anthropologists for help, can be misperceived because of these abstractions. I start from the idea that we ‘invent’ culture while in the field to make sense of our experiences, and the now well-established argument that the legacy of Durkheimian sociological thought, because of its emphasis on the super-organic creation that is society or culture, has been a hindrance (as well as a necessity) to the impetus for understanding other’s worlds in their own terms (see e.g. Wagner 1975: 32–3 and passim, Strathern 1996 [1989]). And that the work that the notion ‘society’ does in shaping Euro-American thinking needs to be part of our investigation, not its guiding and shaping force (Strathern 1988; Latour 2005). In a very Durkheimian manner, the concept of a super-organic entity has, on the one hand, been dictated by some very specific historical conditions, the outcome of a particular (if expansive and colonizing) life world, and, in turn, the concept has dictated how we can come to think about difference (Durkheim 1915: 17–20).1 Fundamentally, it leaves anthropologists in the position of imagining their relations to be to an abstract entity (Wagner 1975) rather than to other people (Strathern 1990, Strathern 1991). That is, we misapprehend data and interactions as concerned with our own categories, and thereby miss the possibility of developing our theory and understanding in relation to other categories based on rather different principles.2 In seeming contrast, Barry writes that, ‘one could say that Tarde conceives of empirical research itself as a form of inventive activity, one which should never merely confirm what one knows already, but makes a difference’. This could be read in several ways. Perhaps what Barry means is that for Tarde, sociologists should intervene through making information available. This information and the resultant understanding of emergent patterns is not just reporting, but suggestive of modes and possibilities for interventions, thereby tracking and understanding the changes that continually occur in social life (cf. Latour 2005). But what would a more direct interpretation look like? As we know, the fact of intervention by an ethnographer in the field has only very occasionally been seen in a positive light. And that is a consequence of the way the entry into others’ lives has been conceived: that societies and cultures are whole entities, internally consistent and coherent, subject to generalized change, change that at this level is conceived of most easily as loss (of the integrity of meaning) once elements of a more powerful or technologically expansive system come into contact with it. While Tarde is arguing for a sociology that intervenes, anthropology has had to live with a methodology of intervention that undermines the integrity of its own explanatory abstractions. The engagement with Tarde then becomes a real chance to grapple with a

194 J. Leach long-standing puzzle, one that was forcefully brought to my attention while undertaking long-term fieldwork on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. That puzzle is not the puzzle of angst-ridden reflexivity of the colonial or neo-colonial anthropologist. As I will outline, it has remained through fieldwork in other contexts as well. And that puzzle is how one maintains integrity as a social scientist, with the aim of producing knowledge for the academy, having a disinterested, if you like, approach to the phenomena under study, and yet providing something of value for the people one works with and among (an ‘interested’ position) that does not assume that the contribution to overall public human understanding will satisfy everyone. I am taking as a given that what we hold steady in the different ethnographic relationships we have is this integrity. Put simply, I argue that the knowledge we produce should hold some interest and value not just for ourselves, but for those whose lives we have become involved in. That may not be best served by the Durkheimian legacy. Tarde was certainly interested in the aspirations and values of the people sociologists study. His focus on imitation and repetition that might have effects in social life revolved around the aims people have. Tarde writes: successful imitations are numerous indeed, but how few are they in comparison with those which are still unrealised objects of desire. So-called popular wishes, the aspirations of a small town, for example, or of a single class, are composed exclusively, at a given moment, which, unfortunately, cannot at the same time be realised to ape all particulars of some richer town or superior class. (Tarde 1903: 107)

 

A mixture, in other words, of a desire to imitate and achieve the same status, inevitably modified by circumstance and history. Reading this quotation from Tarde, I was put in mind of those extraordinary imitations-cum-innovations that have commonly been called cargo cults in the South Pacific. I am also mindful to acknowledge that the ethnographers I know well in two cases (one because it is my own experience that is in question; the other because of a recent film that engages the issue in a very evocative manner) are not observing but participating in the social relations of these phenomena’s emergence and development. I refer here to the work of Andrew Lattas among the Pomio Kivung in West New Britain, and my own fieldwork in Reite on the Rai Coast, both in Papua New Guinea. In my own case, and I suspect in the case of Lattas (more than he admits to in the film at least), the ‘aspirations of a small group’ are directed through the ethnographer themselves. The imitations and innovations are to have their effect through him. Ethnography is not observation in such instances, but elicitation of a form for social action. As Paul Ricoeur, Marilyn Strathern and James Weiner among others pointed out some time ago, and Hastrup has recently reiterated (2003), it is through social relations that we study social relations.3 Our subject is also our tool, as Strathern puts it. In other words, I take from Tarde a rejection of the

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position that ‘social scientists tend to stand aloof from events, preferring to analyse what is common to society as a whole, or understand events in what are thought to be more general social processes’ (Barry 2005: 8). As Barbara Bodenhorn has recently argued (2008), the idea of ontological separations between worldviews is challenged in practices whereby relations emphasize the mutuality of interest and method between apparently very different modes of knowledge practice. She is making a claim, similar perhaps to Tarde,4 for the social sciences to consider carefully what the reliance on ‘conceptual separations’ do for our disciplinary understanding of knowledge and politics.

Eliciting data and shouldering burdens

 

A large amount of my time on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea was spent in the negotiation and renegotiation of the effects and potentials of my presence. It became uncomfortable at times. From the very outset of fieldwork it was clear that for some members of the villages that welcomed me, there was a hope that my presence might be the recognition they felt they had long deserved. Closely associated with what became known as the Yali movement (Lawrence 1964), these villages have lived with the reputation of being kago kalt since the 1940s. Australian colonial officers were still complaining in their reports in the late 1960s that these people had no cash crops and no interest in starting any business enterprise because they considered such activities distractions from the ‘work’ of imitation: of ritually complex, local versions of Western bureaucratic organization. Kiap, an old man whose enthusiasm for my presence in the village had been a major factor in my choice of field site,5 for example, never tired of telling me that Reite deserved recognition as the source of the power which brought national independence to Papua New Guinea in 1975. The fact of their power and centrality had been acknowledged, he told me, by the District Administrator in the 1950s. As a younger man, Kiap had been arrested and threatened with prison for involvement in the meetings and ceremonies organized by the local leader, Yali. Kiap had been released, he said, because of the position of Reite village at the very base of the mountain (Apirela) which dominates that area of the Rai Coast. Having heard the story so often, I can repeat by rote what the district officer is said to have said to Kiap on releasing him from gaol: ‘[Y]ou are the base/foundation of Apirela. You must go back to your village and work for change.’ Kiap took this as both an acknowledgement of his vital and powerful position, and of his right to lead others in the movement for development and independence. Kiap felt that the work he had done ever since – organizing what are called lo bos meetings6 – had not been acknowledged. In addition, he felt that his work had not brought the change he had felt was promised by the District officer either. My arrival presaged another flurry of activity to realize this potential. Kiap was an old though still vigorous and energetic man. My arrival, as he kept saying, was the reason he would undertake laswok (the final work), the final piece of ritual organization which would bring about the change to ful independens (full independence) so long desired.

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Most ethnographers must surely work with some version of this difficulty (see Webster 1982), with negotiating perceptions of their use or aims. I found other people in the village who had, in my terms, more realistic expectations of what my presence and work could bring. It turned out that these people were more careful and detailed in their engagements with my questions and confusions as well. In the end, I came to actively avoid lo bos meetings, as I had come to understand that, although I could participate and record what was occurring there, the (to me) confused and confusing elements of those activities were unlikely to be resolved, as my presence, thus implicit endorsement, was a varying element in their continuation. In one instance, during a three-month return visit I paid to Reite five years after my initial fieldwork, things came to a head. Kiap was impatient. Very. He organized a large ‘last work’ meeting in a neighbouring village where he had many affinal kin. I demurred at the invitation to attend, but found myself forced to make the trip by a delegation who said they would not leave the house in which I was staying until I came along with them. They had worked hard to prepare for this, and I was not going to refuse them what was their due. It was a nerve-wracking experience, made more so by the long lines of people waiting for my arrival. Many of them smiled, and all shook my hand, standing in lines to do so. As we shook hands, each and every one pressed coins into my palm. I unwillingly gathered a large amount of small denomination coins before being led to a central, elaborately decorated platform from where I was told to address the meeting. I had been in such situations before, and stuck to my script: I was a student who was there, and had been accepted there, to record kastom (local ancestral knowledge and practices), to write down for people in the future and people outside Papua New Guinea things about the way of life and the history of people there. I probably said something about how we can learn from each other, and that it was important that people in other parts of the world knew of the beautiful and clever things people on the Rai Coast do. There was obvious disappointment. In fact, there were some rather demanding and tough questions: how would I use the coins I had just collected to ‘open the path’ for radical change in their lives to occur? I was told that the valuables I had been given were not for me, but for me to give to The Queen (Papua New Guinea is a Commonwealth country), from whom they expected a return, and so forth. Then, in one of the few instances where I have been happy to be dismissed as useless in public, a man stood up and made a speech to the effect that the audience were not listening to what I had said; that I was a student there to record kastom, nothing more. They were wasting their time. I had no power or influence. ‘Just a student’ sent to record kastom let me off the hook in one sense. (There was a danger, ever present in these movements, of secondary elaboration going on here as well of course – I was not in a position of enough power or authority to have the desired effect. They were wasting their time with me but may not be with someone else, etc.) But it did suggest that, for the purposes these 400 people had been brought together, I was useless. In the course of my extended, ongoing and happy presence in those villages, I made this emergent understanding of my uselessness in this sphere my own, as it

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were, by never eliciting information on the lo bos activities, avoiding the meetings when I could, and thus not encouraging my association, or the association of some hopes of that movement, with my work. My explanations to myself at the time and since have been focused on the fact that the premises on which the actions were occurring were misguided.

Eliciting culture

 

The very language of my explanation until now has been indicative of a notion of cultural misunderstanding at the foundation of what I was observing. To caricature the position would be to write, ‘these movements were bound to fail, and encouraging them by my interest and questioning would only serve to build up an expectation that the “right” approach to me might yield spectacular results’. In this, I was perhaps not taking enough account of the relationship I had to Kiap. (I will come back to this.) Another strategy however seems to be to take more interest, to gather information on what is occurring. To focus on it, as a chance to focus attention on the meeting of cosmological worlds. In a recent highly acclaimed ethnographic film, Garry Kildea and Andrea Simon teamed up with Andrew Lattas, an Australian anthropologist who has written extensively on a social movement usually termed cargo cult in New Britain, an island in Papua New Guinea adjacent to the Rai Coast. The film is called Koriam’s Law and the Dead Who Govern (Kildea & Simon 2005). The film is brilliant, the anthropological analysis it contains first rate, and the evocation of the situation true to my own experiences of being in the field. Although I take elements of the film as material for my argument here, I do so in appreciation of its many successes (described by Deger 2007). Koriam’s Law takes as its subject how members of the Pomio Kivung movement perceive the material inequalities between themselves and white people. The members of this political and religious movement believe that both the church and the government of their region hide the knowledge that has led to the whites’ power and technology. Thus, they seek to uncover the knowledge that lead to the whites’ standard of living. Part of this involves harnessing money, and bureaucratic practices, to rituals that their charismatic leaders outlined. Activities include confession and attempts to undo the ancestral fault that subjugated them to the whites. Note how, so far, the explanation is about how Pomio people attempt to use relationships to further their aims. It is our tendency to translate this into aspects of ‘cultures’ and meetings between them. Using the vocabulary of culture then, the Kivung movement marries traditional images of power (the dead) with new images of white power: money and the tools of bureaucracy. The ultimate aim in doing so is to develop their own ‘central government’, which consists of Koriam and the deceased (Lattas 2006). Money is used to atone for sins. In this the activities are very similar to those of lo bos. As interpreters, we are drawn to see these moments as imitations, but specifically as imitations of cultural practices adopted as symbols empty of any real power. Tarde, however, offers us a different notion of imitation, as Karsenti (this

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volume) points out. Tarde insists, against Durkheim, on the fact that imitations go from the inner to the outer, from the core to the surface, and not the other way round. He applies this principle to religion and ritual, for instance, in his Laws of Imitation (Tarde 1903 ch. 6.1), in which he claims that in cases of inter-faith contact, people of different faiths tend to imitate each other’s beliefs before they imitate each other’s rituals, just as Renaissance Italians, he claims, embraced the spirit of classical paganism before they took on its outer artistic and other forms. This reaffirms the more general point that imitation goes from the heart of things to the outer trappings, because imitation for Tarde is inter-subjectivity and not just mechanical reproduction. In Pomio Kivung, sins are confessed in front of a bottle in the village square and money is cast into the bottle. More prosaically, the power of money is validated in the fact that it is bribes from the movement that stop the government and the church from intervening with and preventing their practices of ‘feeding the dead’. ‘Money protects us’, claims the main protagonist of the film, ‘it shields us while we contact the dead’. In an articulation which echoes complaints familiar to me from Reite he tells us: ‘They come and tell us we should plant [tea, coffee, coconuts] … and if we do that we’ll get change … a better life and change. But though we do this we just grow old and die. We have the same problems and worries we had before whites came.’ The filmmakers are concerned to be ‘reflexive’. That is, they show the presence of the anthropologist, we hear him asking questions, see him sweaty and flumoxed at times, and so forth. Yet there is a lack of acknowledgement, in the film at least, of the effect that the presence of the anthropologist, and then, anthropologist and filmmakers, may be having on the scenes they are capturing. As an old hand, as it were, at such an enterprise, I cannot help seeing the remarkably clean and neat villages shown as conscious effort on the part of villagers in response to the outside presence. I cannot help but imagine that people put more money and more effort into their confessions and payments to the dead with the presence of not only white people (representatives of the dead), but also of a piece of technology (the camera) directly associated with reporting on their activities to others who are not present, who maybe ‘govern’. There is a very poignant moment in the film where an old woman who has been close to the anthropologist for many years, has nurtured and fed him, and whose husband has recently died, questions Andrew about when he is going to give them what they have been asking for, for so long. When, she asks, will he reveal the secrets of the white people and allow her some respite from all the hard work of care, feeding, ritual and so forth, which she has put in all her life? She cries, thinking on all this work and how she is still waiting for the results now her body is old and broken and her life nearly at an end. Andrew, clearly moved by her emotion, gets up and leaves the scene without answering. Now, this is my own interpretation based on my own experiences and reactions, but I think he leaves because he cannot answer her question, cannot and could not give her what she has come to expect white people to possess. There are differences between lo bos activities on the Rai Coast and Pomio

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Kivung in New Britain. Pomio Kivung is well established. It has many followers and supporters. The film even shows national politicians attending Pomio Kivung ceremonies in order to gather political support at election time. (The commentary in the film makes clear that they do not go anywhere near these meetings when they are not canvassing for that support!) Lo bos meetings and agendas are faltering, small affairs in comparison. Lo bos ideas meet internal resistance in the villages where it occurs, as in the speech during the village meeting that I have described. Nevertheless, I cannot help but question how much influence the attention of anthropologists and filmmakers has on the Pomio Kivung. How much do these micro-interactions (in Tarde’s language), these particular and structured interventions with technology, shape the subsequent trajectory of the social form that is under scrutiny as if it were independent and impermeable to such influence?

Other contexts for ethnography: other demands for influence

 

Now Tarde may have been sympathetic to my intuition here. There is something in Lattas’s approach that has to obviate the possibility that he is eliciting what he sees. And my suggestion is that it is the generalization ‘culture’, something which Tarde saw as too vague to be useful to sociology, which is the stumbling block. Tarde’s answer was to focus on highly detailed studies of minute interactions over time. I am going to ask the reader to follow me to another ethnographic context: one where concerns over having ethnographic relationships, and an analysis based upon them shaped by generalizations, were prominent for me. A few years ago, a PhD student, along with a postdoctoral researcher and myself were commissioned by the European Commission to investigate gender imbalance among Free/Libre and Open Source software (F/LOSS) designers in Europe.7 Starting from the remarkable fact that in 2001/2, 98 per cent of these software engineers were male, the Commission asked us for an analysis of the phenomenon, and policy recommendations for correcting what they saw as a problematic imbalance. This concern picked up on emergent support groups within F/LOSS for women. Given the ideology of freedom which is central to the formation of these production focused groups, and the contexts in which F/LOSS is written, the numbers of women seemed to require explanation (Leach 2009). While the numbers of women in computer science generally is lower than that of men (with 72 per cent of coders who work in proprietary software contexts being male [National Science Foundation 2004]), the figures in F/LOSS were remarkable enough to concern those who also wished to promote it as a progressive mode of software production. The fieldwork for this research was carried out in major European cities, as well of course as in the online discussion groups and forums of software projects themselves. One immediately obvious element was the highly stereotyped views of gender attributes and capacities that emerged in informants’ statements, whether to us, or among interactions that had nothing to do with our study. People in the developer groups and surrounding them had ideas about gender that appeared to account for the division of labour within the groups. For example, men were

200 J. Leach

 

supposedly correctly engaged in the edgy, dangerous and risky work of actually making new functions and operations though writing the code, while women were in the softer, socializing roles of translation of this technical material into more user-friendly formats (Nafus forthcoming; Nafus et al. 2006). They were involved in the documentation. Furthermore, direct questioning about gender produced stark stereotypes: women are more socially minded than men; men are more aggressive. Women have differently structured brains because of evolutionary pressures on them to multitask rather than relentlessly pursue a single goal, and so forth. Men were continually cast in the role of making technology work while women were cast as negotiators, as translators, making accessible the valuable creation of the men. We also came across pervasive ideas of ‘geekiness’, men in the communities often described themselves, without regret, as poor in social situations. In conducting their work on the projects, they did not see the value of politeness or of consideration of other people’s feelings. OK, so this is all very stereotypical. Clearly, these views and behaviours were part of the data, not part of the explanation of that data. The challenge for us became whether we could produce an analysis which avoided saying ‘the reason for so few women in F/LOSS is because these perceptions are inevitable and true (I think they are not) or, that stereotypical, societal images of gender roles direct participants into behaviour which is off-putting to women’. That also seemed unsatisfactory. The resultant policy advice (why we undertook the study) would have to be ‘change the culture in which these stereotypes have currency’. I felt that that level of abstraction was useless. What we actually needed to try to describe was how stereotypes about gender roles were being made and remade in particular social and technical endeavours. To that end, micro-observations about actual technical activities and their framing in emergent relations of prestige, hierarchy, power and so forth in the developer communities seemed vital (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009). I would be hard pushed to claim we were deliberately pursuing a Tardean ethnographic approach here. The ethnography was not that well observed, or that detailed, but it was also not a straightforwardly Durkheimian approach either. Rather than find social categories that explain behaviour, leaving little chance of changing or influencing them, we looked at the everyday minute interactions in which imitation played a large role – imitation by newer and less well-known programmers of the behaviours and attitudes of prominent ones, the emphasis on the centrality of the technical procedure, not the social context of that procedure, and so on. Rather than look to the super-individual entity ‘gender role stereotype’, we became interested in the actual emergence and change in gender positions and roles as they came into being alongside significant software objects. As Barry says of Tarde, ‘the contingent historical formation of social institutions, galaxies and landscapes could only be understood as a product of a whole series of interactions’ (Barry 2005). As I mentioned above, there is clearly this element latent in Tarde’s sociological project, a sociology of events, a sociology of the minor modifications and innovations that make a difference in the subsequent trajectory, the social form. In his seminal and widely read 1936 book Naven, Gregory Bateson describes the progressive differentiation of persons from one another through individual

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events among Iatmul people from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. He noted early on that this was a society with no chieftainship, and thus structural positions were necessarily emergent from individual actions with regard to specific other persons. The Naven ritual complex refers to a series of acts of submission by a mother’s brother to their sister’s child, in recognition of the achievements of the later (Bateson 1958 [1936]). These acts are elicited by achievement, by progressing through various elements of initiation, or growth and success. The events in the Naven ritual are events for me in the Tardean sense I have just referred to because they progressively and cumulatively differentiate persons so that they can be in productive, if antagonistic, relation to each other. These relations are taken by Bateson as elements of a communication system. Information communicated comes to have the status of event in Bateson’s analysis when it produces changes and innovations in the behaviour of another person or group. This then has a further differentiating effect on the original performer, their reaction causing a further response of difference, and so forth. A micro-sociology of the emergence of persons and identities is what Bateson points us towards then. For Bateson, these ‘schismogenic’ processes, this coming into being of productive difference in ongoing feedback loops of communicated information, revealed what he called as shorthand, ‘ethos’ (Bateson 1972: 82). Ethos might be taken as a series of understandings or principles that guide action because of imitation and precedent, without that being anything existent in some mystical and abstracted realm above and beyond the persons themselves. A similar notion was helpful in the research for the European Commission on F/LOSS producers and took us back to relationships in the field as the most significant aspect of our study. We actually made an intervention in that case. We wrote a report on the findings and analysis. And we finished it up with policy recommendations: how one might make small interventions that would change the overall pattern of the communities’ emergent form so that more women were represented at the highest levels. But that was not the end of the matter. In response to requests from F/LOSS participants, we invited the most influential software developers we could find to a meeting to discuss and disseminate our findings and recommendations. It was easy in a way Tarde would have recognized perhaps, as one of the researchers on the project was a free software developer herself. She was in fact already feeding back ideas and suggestions through the specific contacts and relationships she had – not to serve our agenda – but because she found them interesting or pertinent for those interactions. The workshop we held was a success insofar as we found agreement in general that the picture of the community that emerged from our work was accurate, and also, that we had hit on some of the behaviours being imitated in the actions of aspirant developers, which might be having disproportionate effects on gender balance. One response was particularly telling: in response to a question as to how our research would be perceived by the developers, after making what could only have been seen as some critical observations, one developer replied, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. We will take this work and promote it and defend it. It is useful for us, and it is our community!’

202 J. Leach All this leads me to wonder whether, for Tarde to be helpful in thinking through what ethnography is and does, we might need to consider two levels of ‘event’: that is, events which perpetuate, through continual minor replication or innovation, a wider ‘ethos’ formation, and in contrast, events which come to cause a change of direction or understanding. With Tarde, there is no need to posit a system which the actors may be ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of, a tempting thought habit, but one which makes for problems. What then of the innovation that is the presence of and engagement with the ethnographer in Papua New Guinea? What Tarde lets us see clearly is that without an imagined culture or abstraction in place which could be disrupted by the seismic shock of contact with another similarly sized and weighty system, the ethnographer’s presence produces events – micro-moments of replication and differentiation, ideas and suggestions, associations, and so forth which may well be innovations. But that these (a few emails, a report, a few conversations, presence at a lo bos meeting, holding a workshop in Cambridge for software developers) may or may not be events that matter, events that have an influence on the future trajectory of the social form or ethos.8 For Tarde, the elementary social fact is inter-subjectivity, and the realization of each individual in relation to that fact:

 

The relation of one mind with another is, in fact, a distinctive event in the life of each; it is absolutely different from all their relations with the rest of the universe, giving rise to certain most unexpected states of mind, that cannot be explained at all according to the laws of physiological psychology. This relation between a subject and an object which is itself a subject – and not a perception in no way resembling the thing perceived – will not allow the idealistic sceptic to call in question the reality of the latter; on the contrary, it means that we experience the sensation of a sentient thing, the volition of a conating thing, and the belief in a believing thing, – the perception, in short, of a personality in which the perceiving personality is reflected, and which the latter cannot deny without denying itself. This consciousness of a consciousness is the inconcussum quid which Descartes sought, and which the individual Self could not give him. Moreover, this unique relation is not a physical impulse given or received, nor is it the transmission of motor energy from the subject to an inanimate object or vice versa, according as we are dealing with an active or passive state; it is rather the transmission of something internal and mental, which passes from one to other of the two subjects, and that, curiously enough, without being lost or in the slightest degree diminished in the first. (Tarde 1899: 19–20) Culture and rationality The manifest advantage of allowing the abstraction of system, of ‘cultures’ meeting to explain the phenomenon of cargo cults is to level the playing field between people like Kiap and myself by acknowledging that we are both subject to irrational

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interpretations of the world driven by our cultural categories. And, of course, that is the main message of Lattas and Kildea’s moving film. They go out of their way to show that we are all operating under cosmological assumptions and beliefs which mask other realities. The film makes us realize that we are all irrational in that we are governed by culture and cosmology. They make it explicit. The Catholic priest in Pomio is shown undertaking rituals and saying things which seem wholly incredible. The message is: we all operate in cosmologies and are driven by the wide belief systems that we call culture. Cargo then is always seen as a meeting of two cultures, and we are reminded of our own because of the very fact of the apparent irrationality of the other. In many anthropological studies, this approach sets the agenda, and thus we are left not looking at systems of relations between persons at all, but at a relation between inside and outside forms of symbolization and rationalization. And that, I suggest, disempowers by locating the agency in culture, in the abstraction, which only Westerners have the language and tools and, most of all, interest in analysing. Kiap was clearly not doing this. Back to Tarde then: he says we must focus on the moments of imitation and difference in social relations. Not starting with the category ‘culture’, or its emergent corollary (cargo cult). This gives us a chance to start from the relationship in which we are enmeshed when we think about these experiences of ethnographic knowledge making. In a relational frame such as Tarde’s, there is room to examine exactly what it is that people are doing in their imitations and differences from one another, and how they draw relations such as those to the ethnographer into those projects. Perhaps personal emergence and influence is the real issue in Pomio Kivung and Lo bos, not the acquisition of material wealth through symbolic manipulation (see Hirsch 2001); that I was uncomfortable on that trip to Kiap’s affinal village, not because I was being dragged into an irrational cultural efflorescence that threatened the Rai Coast with irrationality writ large, but because I was being dragged into representing the desire of Kiap to make himself prominent through showing effective organization of me to the detriment of other people. In other words, missing the ethnographic engagement, missing the relationship in which these matters occur, is to misguidedly focus on culture as explanation and miss the scale of what is occurring, a scale of principles of effective action and the emergence of differentiated persons as the key to people’s motivations. Working with Tarde, with the focus on micro-interactions as a refinement of large abstractions, helps us to understand the micro-relations of fieldwork and influence, value and so forth, in a new (old) way. These moments are not about culture, but about people, and about how people change and develop, through their relations to others, be those anthropologists or kinsmen.

Conclusion Why am I worried by Lattas’s approach (and see Jebens 2002)? Because I think it will encourage activity that is a waste of time, that will not achieve the stated desired ends, and so forth. Who can say if I am correct in that thought? What I can say is that I would not undertake that study in Reite (Leach 2003: Preface). It seems

204 J. Leach that such a thing would be far too likely to be an event in Tardean terms. In her book on scale and anthropological knowledge, Partial Connections, Strathern (1991) points out that anthropological authority has always been premised on a scale shift: the anthropologist has a one-to-one-relationship with each informant, but also a one-to one relationship to ‘the whole culture’ which that informant could never have. The observation was in a sense prefigured by Tarde in Monadologie et sociologie, where he made a critical distinction between ‘mutual possession’, that which flows from and in social relations between subjects regarded as subjects, and ‘unilateral possession’, the possession or apprehension of a whole social world from without. When I enter into verbal communication with one or more of my fellows, […] this relation is the relation of one social element with other social elements, considered individually. By contrast, when I observe, listen to or study my natural environment, rocks, water, plants even, each object of my thought is a hermetically sealed world of elements which may indeed know or possess each other intimately, like members of a social group, but which I can only embrace globally and from the outside. (Tarde 1895 [1999]: 90–1 trans. M. Candea) As David Mosse puts it: Anthropology does not have the option (moral or epistemological) of a devolution to science that disregards social relations that are the basis of its knowledge. The right to academic knowledge has to be negotiated among other legitimate claims. And the negotiation of ethnography as a ‘situated intervention’ rather than a disinterested observation (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 38) requires that its practitioners are clear on their position, perspective and purpose. (Mosse 2005: 952)

 

I have suggested that it is the idea of an abstract entity – society, culture – that prevents us from seeing clearly what that position is. It is not ‘society’ or ‘culture’ that is the problem, but what ‘it’ is: a super-organic, organizing entity to which all are necessarily beholden (society) or subscribe (culture). Or is ‘it’ a series of relationships and interactions? This chapter has been a thought experiment. In it I have rehearsed an old dilemma, but have drawn on some of Tarde’s words and ideas to illuminate one aspect: the relation between ethnographer as subject and informant as subject. I took up the Tardean emphasis on two core elements of social life, imitation and repetition, and events as causal moments in social innovation. I also took from Tarde his emphasis on micro-observation, explicitly though arguing against the value of emergent super-organic abstractions for entering into relations to other people. Tarde considered it essential to identify moments in which the trajectory of particular social processes were given new direction, and considered a concentration

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on individual encounters, exchanges and interactions to be vital. I turned these ideas to the service of considering something like the responsibility we have to informants and to our discipline, the potential influence of ethnographic relationships to produce something of value to both parties, without suggesting that one must always do what one’s interlocutors want. Tarde has proved valuable insofar as many of his abstract and technical sociological/philosophical insights provide a counterpoint to well-established Durkheimian frameworks, which I have attempted to deploy. All of this holds even though Tarde himself is not necessarily a model for anthropological practice or ethics by our current standards. The dual emphasis on micro-interactions (on collecting them together to build a picture of continually emergent social forms) and on events (moments which can be seen to change the direction or trajectory of the social form) has been helpful as it is a way to place a kind of sociology which is theoretically driven to explore the tools of our science and thus examine how we gather and make knowledge in the presence of others – not as representatives of another culture, but as people with interests as well.

Acknowledgements Matei Candea has been vital in more ways than one to the production of this chapter, while he can in no way be held responsible for its inadequacies. I have benefited greatly from reading Andrew Barry’s work, and from conversations with him. I thank the participants of the Department of Anthropology weekly seminar at the University of Aberdeen for their comments, and also Gary Kildea.

Notes

 

1 ‘If it seems to many minds that a social origin cannot be attributed to the categories without depriving them of all speculative value, it is because society is still too frequently regarded as something that is not natural; hence it is concluded that the representations which express it express nothing in nature. But the conclusion is not worth more than the premise’ (Durkheim 1915: 19fn2). 2 ‘[W]e are at best making prior assumptions about the logic of the system under study, and at worst using symbols of our own as if they were signs; as though through them we could read other people’s messages, and not just feedback from our own input’ (Strathern 1980: 179). 3 Although as has been pointed out to me (Candea 2009), Tarde relies on a notion of ‘intuition’ rather than social relation with his subjects. His attempts to understand others are more of an attempt at an intuitive grasp of remote or opaque social objects than an investigation of them through ethnographic relationship. 4 And certainly similar to Latour: ‘At Context, there is no place to park’ (Latour 2005) [because there’s no there there]. 5 I had no idea at that stage what this enthusiasm was based on, of course. 6 Lo bos as in, ‘in charge of the law’: people who make sure people abide by the laws handed down by Yali, and which would bring about millennial change. 7 See http://www.flosspols.org. 8 Clearly, where I lump together lo bos meetings and workshops in Cambridge, I am losing vital distinctions and subtleties. For one thing, I did not want to change lo bos

206 J. Leach activity, other than perhaps to discourage it in relation to expectations I would have to fulfil. That lack of attention was clearly not an event that mattered to people involved. Rather, it confirmed their suspicions that I was unwilling to aid them as they required. That may in fact have been the event that mattered. In contrast, I had been expressly asked to make policy interventions in the world of software. The influence I might have on lo bos activity, having been made central to its revival and effects, was more likely to cause events other than a meeting with a group of software engineers in Cambridge. There are very different power relations and expectations involved in the two scenarios. People are trying to do very different things, and realize themselves as persons in different ways.

Bibliography

 

Barry, A. 2005. Events that matter. Paper presented to the Workshop on Gabriel Tarde, University of London, Senate House. Bateson, G. 1958 [1936]. Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —— . 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bodenhorn, B. 2008. Temporary communities of knowledge: sciences and other expertises on the North Slope of Alaska. Paper presented to the SaNECH Seminar, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. Candea, M. 2009. Personal communication. Deger, J. 2007. Koriam’s Law: film, ethnography and irreconcilable accountings. Australian Journal of Anthropology 18, 249–52. Durkheim, E. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: G. Allan and Unwin. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Hastrup, K. 2003. Convincing people: knowledge and evidence in anthropology (Abstract). Paper presented to the American Anthropological Association, 102nd Annual Meeting, Chicago, 19–23 November, 240. Arlington, VA. Hirsch, E. 2001. Review: Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults by Andrew Lattas. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, 772–4. Holbraad, M. & M. A. Pedersen. 2009. Technologies of the imagination. Ethnos 74, 1–23. Jebens, H. 2002. Trickery or secrecy? On Andrew Lattas’s interpretation of bush Kaliai cargo cults. Anthropos 97, 181–99. Kildea, G. & A. Simon. 2005. Koriam’s Law and the dead who govern. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Film Unit, Australian National University and Arcadia Pictures. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Lattas, A. 2006. The utopian promise of government. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, 129–50. Lawrence, P. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District New Guinea. Manchester: Melbourne University Press and Manchester University Press. Leach, J. 2003. Creative land: place and procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Leach, J., D. Nafus & B. Krieger. 2009. Freedom imagined: morality and aesthetics in open source software design. Ethnos 74, 51–71. Mosse, D. 2006. Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 935–56. Nafus, D., J. Leach & B. Krieger. forthcoming. Patches don’t have gender. New Media and Society. Nafus, D., J. Leach & B. Krieger. 2006. Free/Libre/OpenSource Software Policy Support. Gender Track. European Commission. NSF. 2004. Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering. In NSF0 4–317. Arlington, VA: NSF. Strathern, M. 1980. No nature, no culture: the Hagen case. In Nature, Culture, Gender (eds) C. MacCormack & M. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— . 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkley: University of California Press. —— . 1990. Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of images. In Culture and History in the Pacific (ed.) J. Siikala. Helsinki: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society. —— . 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. —— . 1996 [1989]. The concept of society is theoretically obsolete. For the motion. In Key Debates in Anthropological Theory (ed.) T. Ingold. London: Routledge. Tarde, G. 1903. The Laws of Imitation. (trans.) E. Worthington Clews Parsons. New York: Henry Holt. —— . 1999. Monadologie et Sociologie. Le Plessis: Synthélabo. —— . 2008 [1899]. The Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (trans.) H. C. Warren. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Wagner, R. 1975. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Webster, S. 1982. Dialogue and fiction in ethnography. Dialectical Anthropology 7, 91–114.

14 Tarde on drugs, or measures against Suicide1 Eduardo Viana Vargas Translated by Maurits Kapenga

Abstract

 

One of the most challenging points of the controversy on the status of the social, which Tarde and Durkheim sustained one century ago, concerns the place that each gives in their sociologies to the notions of difference and identity – and, by extension, to the notion of relationship. Whereas, for Durkheim, we begin life in a simple state of sameness and we grow into increasingly complex states of otherness, for Tarde we begin as we finish, as we live, that is, different, since “difference keeps differencing” (“la différence va différant”; Tarde 1999a: 69), since difference is something that has the unique capacity to take itself as a target or as an object of change. This point is crucial, directly affecting the ways each thinker has chosen to define society and to practice sociology, the former arguing that the social is a special – that is to say, transcendent – domain, the latter that the social is immanent to relations of association. As Tarde claims, “those final elements at which all sciences arrive, the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom, were final only to the eyes of their particular science; even themselves are composites” (Tarde 1999a: 36). Against those who take for granted the identity of the collective or the composition of the social – as Durkheim did for example in his Suicide – Tarde argues that we must follow the associations, the movements of composition themselves. This chapter experimentally deploys Tarde’s intuition that the social is association, gauging its effect on an ethnographic field in which I have been working for many years: drug use. Trying to articulate Tarde’s intuition ethnographically, this chapter suggests that it is not enough to ask “why do people use drugs?” and “what is the meaning of drug use?”; nor can we be content with the answers that are presented when these questions are put forward, answers usually premised on “error,” “lack,” or “weakness.” Following Tarde’s intuition, it is possible to propose other questions: “what happens with practices like these?,” “what kinds of experiments are users and drugs engaged in?” This allows us to consider other answers, answers that point to the existence of events (the “high” of drugs), events that, in turn, bring to the fore paradoxical agencies of self-abandon, for which substances are indispensable mediators. This chapter proposes that the “high” event is neither a by-product of users’ subjective fantasies, nor a by-product of substances’

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objective determinations, but rather a modality of (in)action such as those present in the paradox of passion or in “deep play.” Finally, it suggests that rather than asking who controls the “high,” we should ask whether the “high” occurs or not, or, following Tarde, whether or not there are alter-a(c)tions.

Suicide, and Measures Against it

 

There are several reasons that made Le Suicide one of the most important books written by Emile Durkheim, a classic in sociology. The content was one of them: after all, a certain audacity is necessary to affirm that something as intimate as deciding to put an end to one’s life results from the inflictions of others or, and I quote, that “each society is predestined to generate a certain amount of voluntary deaths” (Durkheim 1986: 15). The scientific rhetoric and the appeal to method were others: after all, Durkheim never tires of opposing his studies to those that came before, like someone who opposes a scientific work to the works of more or less enlightened amateurs, such as philosophers; besides this, he innovates in a decisive way through promoting an unprecedented use of statistics, which had already drawn the attention of many in nineteenth-century France, but, up to that moment, had never been treated as extensively as Durkheim did in many pages of his book. But Suicide also became famous for other reasons, noticeably because Durkheim obstinately tried to get even with the man who, until then, was being acknowledged as the most brilliant French social scientist at the end of the century, Gabriel Tarde. As we know, the polemic between Tarde and Durkheim was long and arduous. It did not start with Suicide, neither did it end with it, although Durkheim and those who followed him had adopted this work as the decisive proof of his success. The fact that Tarde had neither finished nor published in his lifetime a direct answer to Durkheim’s Le Suicide certainly contributed to this.2 I will not go into detail about this polemic here, having done so on another occasion (Vargas 2005; on the polemic see also Karsenti 2002). For now, I only point out that Durkheim refers, also in Suicide, to one of his fundamental arguments against Tarde and in favor of sociology, which would consolidate itself in France and beyond in the following decades: to turn a work of sociology into a scientific one, it is, first and foremost, necessary to consider the “social environment,” which, as Durkheim accuses Tarde, had not been done by the latter anywhere in his vast work. In fact, even though Tarde had not published a direct answer in his lifetime, he did not omit to take measures against Suicide. Maybe never accepting the notion of “social environment” has been the most important. This notion is to him an “explanatory talisman,” “a fetish, a deus ex machina which the new sociologists (read Durkheimians) use as an open Sesame each time they find themselves confused and lost,” a formula with which they intend to explain everything and consequently with which nothing can be explained anymore, a formula “whose illusory profoundness serves to cover up the emptiness of the idea” (Tarde 1898: 78–9). In a few words, what Tarde rejects in the notion “social environment” is that it assumes exactly that what needs to be explained, namely, the proper composition of the social. In Tarde´s terms, “in postulating this grouping the big and first question is eluded.

210 E. V. Vargas A question that consists of knowing how it was formed, how this similarity of so many diverse individuals […] was produced in such and such a century, such and such a nation and not somewhere else or in another era” (Tarde 1999d: 312).3 In other words, for Tarde, it is not possible to consider the social as something given, isolated, as constituting a domain sui generis. But, if the social is not given, this is because, according to Tarde, it results from an incessant activity of composition. To Tarde, therefore, the decisive question is the one regarding the composition of the social, and, as he himself indicated, it was “above all this question that I really tried to answer.” That is what I will try to show in the following. Society as the Reciprocal Possession of Everyone by Each One

 

Although Tarde and Durkheim disagreed on almost everything, they agreed on the fact that philosophy alone was not enough anymore, that taking into account the internal coherence of statements was not sufficient anymore, and that it was necessary to consider more things than just logic, things such as sciences and societies. Nevertheless, this dissatisfaction with philosophy did not provoke the same effects in Tarde as in Durkheim. We all know that Durkheim tried very hard to develop sociology into an autonomous science in radical rupture with philosophy. Tarde did something else: he extracted from philosophy the leading hypothesis of his universal sociological point of view, and for this operation he looked for support at the development of contemporary sciences. This extracting operation resulted in a peculiarly different image of thought4 from the one that became canonical in social sciences. Contrary to the characteristic line of thinking of identity, the image of thought projected by Tarde operates within the element of universal difference, the different difference. In order to imagine this, Tarde called upon an intricate notion: “the monads, daughters of Leibniz” (1999a: 33). For Leibniz, monads are the elementary particles, the simple substances of which the complex ones are made up: they are, therefore, differentiated (equipped with qualities that distinguish one in relation to the others) and differentiating (animated by an immanent power of continuous change or differentiation). Besides this, or because of this, they pay respect to the nuances, to the infinitely small, to the infinitesimal that makes up all differences. In Tarde, the monads will be all of this and a little more, as will be shown next. For now, we should proceed contra-intuitively and recognize that, for Tarde, the universal can only be reached through mediation of the elementary, the infinitesimal. This is the lesson that Tarde learned from Leibniz, the monadic lesson. This is also the lesson that sciences assimilated from philosophy and were able to take further, whereas the latter stayed put, not because science became more positive than philosophy, but because it demonstrated an incomparable capacity to prodigiously multiply the world’s agents (1999a: 33–43). Even though his debt to Leibniz has remained inestimable, Tarde introduced decisive modifications in the monadic lesson and proposed a “renewed monadology” (1999a: 56), the infinitesimal sociology which he was about to invent. In other words, what Tarde wished for was a social theory that retained from Leibniz

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the principle of continuity (which is the foundation of infinitesimal calculation) and that of indiscernibles (or of immanent difference), while at the same time letting go of the principles of reclusion and of pre-established harmony (in short, the hypothesis of God) in which Leibniz had enclosed the monads. Tarde never tired of censuring the shyness of Leibniz and other monadologists, for having shut down the monads too quickly; nor did he tire of insisting that it is necessary to follow the monadic hypothesis through to the end, or to the infinite, because there is nothing that obliges us to stop at the monads. Neither absolutely spiritual, nor wholly material, in Tarde the monads are not, as in Leibniz, the simple substances that are part of the composed: “these final elements which each science gets down to, the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom, only are final within the perspective of their own peculiar science,” affirms Tarde, “even themselves are composites,” composites to the infinitesimal (Tarde 1999a: 36). In sum, Tarde broke the seclusion of Leibniz’s monads just as scientists had broken the atom: if atoms are whirlwinds, the finite entities do not constitute realities sui generis, but integrations of infinitesimal differences, in the meaning of this expression given to it by infinitesimal calculation. Therefore, like elementary infinitesimal compositions that are reciprocally interlinked, the monads opened up by Tarde are not imperturbable as they are in Leibniz, given that they do not limit themselves to expressing the universe. Instead, they are spheres of action which penetrate each other and whose center “is a singular point by its properties, but, even so, a point like any other” (1999a: 57). For Tarde, the monads do not have any essence aside from the activities that they exercise onto one another; each monad, thus, “is completely there where it acts” (1999a: 57). The monad, like the atom, is “a universal means or one that aspires to be one, the universe in itself, not merely the micro cosmos, as Leibniz wanted, but the entire cosmos conquered and absorbed by one unique being” (1999a: 57; original emphasis). This formulation is decisive and will be retaken by Tarde on several other occasions and in many other ways. It is this that permits renewing monadology and, simultaneously, liberates it from the danger of precipitate unification, so common to atomism, to sociologism and to individualism. Yes, the monadic lesson is reductive, its proper movement ranging from big to small, although “the pure” or “crude reason” will be “willing to believe in completely pre-prepared divine types ab initio that suddenly encircle and penetrate a piece of land from the outside to the inside” (1999a: 39). But it is also about a bizarre reductionism, because it sustains that there is always more in the micro than in the macro, that “there is more logic in a phrase than in a discourse […], in a special rite than in a whole credo” (1999b: 115). However, it is a common mistake to think that Tarde replaces society with individuals like someone who changes the whole for its parts. What he proposes is something quite different: substitute the big by the small; the totalities and the units by crowds; the atoms, the individuals, the societies, or other “divine types” precipitately unified as such by infinitesimal actions of an infinity of open monads, each composed by all others. In short, if action is the essence of the monad, this is because each monad is already a crowd. For this reason, in Tarde´s renewed monadology the “real agents would be […] these little beings that are said to be

212 E. V. Vargas infinitesimal, and the real actions would be these small variations said to be infinitesimal” (1999a: 40; original emphasis). If it were like this, what would diversity consist of? What is society if not the reciprocal possession, in extremely varied forms, of everybody by each one? As Latour observed (2002: 120; 2005: 13), social is a term that can be applied to any modality of association; however, it does not indicate, or at least should not indicate, a special ontological domain, nor any other entity which leans itself for serving as the substance to seal off the hollows of a world precipitately divided between men and things; a world from which the agents are removed beforehand; instead, what he indicates is a “principle of connexion.” So, as Latour (2002: 128) reminds, “to have or not to have, that is the question” in Tarde; since, if “to have is to be different,” it is the possession that leads us from one existence to another, from one difference to another. Maybe that is Tarde’s most audacious proposal, the one that suggests that “we should abandon the irremediably solipsist concept of Being and relaunch metaphysics on the basis of Having (Avoir) – with the latter’s implication of intrinsic transitivity and an originary opening towards an exteriority,” as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2003: 17) observed. In Tarde’s words: [A]ll philosophy has been founded until now on the verb To Be [Être], whose definition seemed to have been the Rosetta stone to be discovered. One may say that, if only philosophy had been founded on the verb To Have [Avoir], many sterile debates, many slowdowns of the mind would have been avoided. Despite all the subtleties of the world, it is impossible to deduce from this principle, I am [je suis], any other existence beyond mine; therefore the denial of the external reality. But when “I have” [J’ai] is postulated in the first place as the fundamental fact, the have [eu] and the having [ayant] are given at the same time as inseparable. (Tarde 1999a: 86; original emphasis)

 

The verb “to be” concerns identity by default: we are unable to say anything beyond our own existence when we say “we are.” In the mode of Being, self-relation is the model of relation; in the mode of Having, relation is alter-a(c)tion. In this way, while being does not admit grey areas, as there is only to be or not to be, having enables grading, because you can always have more or less. To renounce the metaphysics of Being – or ontology – in favor of a metaphysics of Having – or, as Jean Milet suggested (1970: 164), of ecology – it is necessary, however, to make a radical change: instead of looking for the identifying essence of objects, we should define them by their different properties and zones of power, since, if “any possibility tends to become true, [if] any reality tends to become universal,” this happens because each monad is avid, any infinitesimal has the infinite as its ambition (Tarde 1999a: 95). As Deleuze (1988b: 147) wrote, “these avatars of belonging or possession have great philosophical importance” because they permit solving the dead-ends of Being or of attribution through predication, as predication refers directly to having

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or to possession. “In fact, this new domain of have does not introduce us into a calm realm determined once and for all as the one of the owner or property. What is being regulated in the domain of have are the moving and perpetually modified relations of monads among themselves,” adds Deleuze (1988b: 147–8), since “a monad does not have as its property an abstract attribute, movement, elasticity, plasticity, but other monads, like a cell has other cells or an atom has other atoms,” he concludes. But if the philosophical importance is great, not less important is avoiding from the start the wrong step that consists of considering the philosophy of Having as a bizarre variation of possessive individualism. We notice therefore that: as a subscriber to a newspaper, I have my journalists, who have their subscriber. I have my government, my religion, my public strength, as well as my specific human type, my temperament, my health; but I also know that the ministers of my country, the pastor of my religion or the local police counts me in as part of the flock they guard, just like the human type, if it were personified somewhere, it would see me only as one of its peculiar variations. (Tarde 1999a: 86; original emphasis)

 

The solution proposed by Tarde is not individualism but relationism.5 What Tarde obstinately refuses is intellectual juggling of inestimable political and ontological consequences, which consists of believing that a simple junction of disparate elements would be able to produce a supra-numeric entity. In other words, Tarde rejects the idea that something can exist beyond the relations which constitutes it as such. Properly speaking, in Tarde there is no transcendent society, only immanent association and composition in the act, that is, relations: at the bottom of each impersonal entity, “we will find nothing but a certain number of he’s and she’s that have blurred and confounded themselves through their multiplications” (Tarde 1999b: 61). So, it is a serious mistake to account for the appearance of a being sui generis at each adding of a unit; this error, which repeats itself at “every level of scale from phenomenonic complications of the atom up to me,” finds itself in trouble, however, when we reach human societies, since “here we are at home, we are the real elements of these coherent systems of people called cities or states, regiments or assemblies. We know everything that happens here” (Tarde 1999a: 68). And the error finds itself in trouble because, when we consider things from the proper human perspective, never do we see emerging ex abrupto, in the midst of its astonished associates, a collective self, real and not only metaphoric, a sort of marvellous result, of which the associates would be the mere conditions. To be sure, there is always an associate that represents and personifies the group in its entirety, or else a small number of associates […] who, each under a peculiar aspect, individualise in themselves the group in its entirety. But this leader, or these leaders are always also members of that group, born from their own fathers and mothers. (Tarde 1999a: 68; original emphasis)

214 E. V. Vargas And if we do not observe among ourselves the rise of these “marvelous” or “divine types,” it is because there is no providence, there is no society beyond or without the processes of association. Equally, there is no need to suppose that they occur in other types of association, no matter if they compose stars or atoms, cells or organisms, since “why then would the agreement of unconscious nerve cells have the ability to evoke daily and out of the blue the conscience in an embryonic brain, while the agreement of human consciences never had this virtue in any society?” (Tarde 1999a: 68). This does not mean that agreements do not occur, that harmony would not be established, that there would not be order anywhere. It does not mean that the existence of processes of composition is rejected. It means exactly the opposite, that they are treated with all due respect: they are not the first given, but exactly that what needs to be explained; they are not born ready, but exactly that what needs to be constituted. How to deal with their occurrence? For Tarde, there is no mystery: what explains that the monads walk together is that “left alone a monad cannot do anything” (1999a: 66). Finally, if the monads are universal means, it is because there is no agency without others, there is no existence without relation; there is no relation without difference. So, if society is the reciprocal possession of everyone by each one, it is because processes of social composition do not occur independently of micro-politics of possession that constitute them as such and which are immanent to them. As Milet (1970: 158–9) noticed well, what Tarde proposes is a social theory which suspends (and puts in doubt) the antinomy between the uniform continuity and the punctual discontinuity or, more precisely, which considers the finite entities as peculiar cases of infinite processes, the stable situations as movements of blockage, the permanent states as transitory agencies of processes to come (and not the opposite). What is more, the social theory proposed by Tarde establishes that the exercise of social composition is the political activity by excellence, the one which is always (re)made.6 Is this not all very bizarre?

 

For Erroneous Questions the Only Answer is Mistake Perhaps it gets a little less bizarre if we direct our attention to more concrete questions. Let us consider the problem of the use of drugs.7 This social and sociologically glaring problem has produced among us a great variety of responses. Even so, a certain officially upheld moral consensus regarding the issue is noticeable; a consensus according to which the link between drugs and evil is unbreakable. The moral consensus is not, however, the only consensus activated around drugs. It is also possible to notice the existence of other consensuses, for example, analytical, as they are associated, on the one hand, to the questions usually addressed to the use of drugs, and, on the other hand, to the type of answers that specialists on the subject usually give to these questions. Worried by the wide gap between the evaluation that non-medicinal use of drugs is harmful, if not lethal, and the tenacity of practices of non-medicinal drug use, which continue to exist notwithstanding the vigorous repressive expedients trying

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to contain them, we usually put forward the following questions: “why do people use drugs?” or “what does it mean to use drugs?”. At the same time, the answers that specialists usually give to these questions present a no less impressive regularity which goes well beyond the disciplinary differences expressed within them: the reason and the meaning of drug use are regularly imputed to a flaw or weakness, whether physical and/or moral, psychological and/or cultural, political and/or social. Said more prosaically, we are used to thinking that the uses of drugs are responses to crises or to some type of need: drugs are used because of a lack of health, affection, culture, religion, school, information, money, family, work, reason, conscience, freedom, and so forth. In other words, most of us consider the problem of illicit drug use as a form of physical defect or psychological flaw, of loss of symbolic reference or moral deviancy, of erroneous information, alienation or failure of social rules. These notions of lack, flaw, error, crisis or loss are so strong and persistent that we encounter the following in the World Drug Report: a broader justification [for the use of illicit drugs] might be found in the assumption that the addictive properties of psychoactive drugs are such that individuals who consume them lose the status of beings governed by reason – if they are no longer “the best stewards of their own welfare” their behaviour challenges the personal autonomy on which rational-actor models rely. To paraphrase this in Kant’s terms, the illicit drug consumer is not a rational agent. It can thus be argued that prohibition is in the interests of the common good because behaviour which undermines self-regulation and self-control is potentially a threat to liberal society. (UNODC 1997: 156)

 

If the era of artificial paradises is no longer ours, if today drugs are hell, as Francis Caballero (1992: 13) said, or the “reenchantment of evil,” as indicated by Alba Zaluar (1994), this is so because among us the perception prevails that the continuous non-medicinal use of drugs has harmful effects on the development of societies, and hence of humanity itself, since it produces subjects who, in losing their own will, also lose the proper condition of being someone and become “alienated,” “robots,” “zombies.” For now, I would like to stress the following point: the questions of “why” or “meaning” of the non-medicinal use of drugs are neither the only ones that could be asked, nor, do I believe, the most relevant, as I will try to show below. I anticipate that they are not the same as the ones put forward by users themselves, who generally show little interest in knowing why they are using drugs or the meaning of their practices, except when analysts or other authorities investigate them. I even anticipate that these questions precondition the types of answers that we are likely to consider, as we have just observed, to the questions put forward since, by considering the practice of the use of drugs as absurd, the answers proposed (which, as a rule, stem from a reduction to the absurd) are only able to present solutions if they come to a conclusion based on error, lack, weakness, or any other of its semantic peers.

216 E. V. Vargas Other Questions, Different Ways of Problematizing

 

These types of answers always seemed dissatisfactory to me: it is epistemologically negative and turns the use of drugs into a “mere product of a precariousness created by others”, as Janice Caiafa (1985: 17–18) wrote; it is asymmetric and not only supposes the moral divide between legal and illicit drugs as a given fact, but also explains the use of the first by its smartness and that of the second by its error; it disregards what I, inspired by Michel Foucault (1994) and Néstor Perlongher (1987: 3), have coined dispositive of drugs, a characteristically ambivalent dispositive simultaneously present in the production of medicinal and illicit drugs;8 and, finally, it leaves out the types of questions that the users themselves usually put forward. Regarding this last point, Emilie Gomart & Antoine Hennion (1999: 242), like François Dagognet & Philippe Pignarre (2005: 342), have already attested that asking why people use drugs or what it means to use drugs is not putting forward the right questions. Instead, it might be more adequate to ask more pragmatic questions, questions closer to the peculiar ways in which these experiments work. That is why Gomart & Hennion (1999: 242) suggest that we should ask: “what occurs,” “what happens” in these types of experiences? Or, as Dagognet & Pignarre (2005: 342) asked, “what kind of experiences do the ones that use the substances have?”. This last type of question has, at least, the advantage of being far closer to the ones that users ask themselves; once in a while they ask themselves in their characteristic words: “and so, did it work?” (“e aí, fez?”), “did it buzz?” (“bateu?”), “what is going on?” (“o que está rolando?”), “what is the trip?” (“qual é a viagem?”), “what is the wave?” (“qual é a onda?”), “it’s all right? Are you high?” (“tudo certo? Tá de barato?”). Certainly, these new kinds of questions are not about inverting the types of answers given to the first kind and saying that the use of drugs is not based on error, but on rightfulness. If it were to proceed in this way, not only do we risk losing sight of the critique that should be addressed to the first types of answers – since the new answers will only be new as an effect of inversion – but we will also have maintained, although furtively, the same set of questions as before. In this case, nothing would be more out of place than simply inverting the cards in play, while continuing to play with the same deck … Instead, I consider it more profitable to treat this issue in terms of social logic, as long as this is done in accordance with the acceptation given to this expression by Tarde, that conceives it as “the art of changing yet always maintaining, without increasing nor decreasing, the distance that separates us from the truth or the untruth” (Tarde 1999c: 119). Considered like this, the social logic does not refer to a search for or to a revelation of the truth, but to the management of the assemblages (or the waves of beliefs and desires, said Tarde) which animate the social field. Treating the issue this way, not only will the types of answers change, without this alteration transforming itself into a mere inversion, but thought itself will also change, as will transforming the proper way of problematization of the issue in question. It changes as we become capable of resisting the temptation of

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substituting the surprising expression of the actors with the well-known repertoires of explanation (those that the actors would ignore because these repertories supposedly are hidden in dimensions or substrates which the actors, high because of the proper effectuation of the actions, would be unable to reach); or, what comes down to the same, as soon as we are able to follow closely the footsteps of the proper actors, as Latour (2005: 49) noticed, d’après Garfinkel (2004), of course. The Event of the “Wave” and the Formula of Ecstasy [T]he people [that use drugs] say: “did it buzz?” “Yeah! It buzzes.” They also say: “wave,” “there was no wave,” “did it connect?” (“ligou?”) […] When you are able to notice exactly the line between one state of consciousness and another, you call this passage “buzz” or “connect.” MICKEY*: It gives this knack (“estalo”). SOL*: That´s it, you keep traveling. ÁDMA*: […] it is a channel that you tune into; […] you smoke and change the channel. CIBELE*: High is what takes you away from the centre. IGOR*: Ah, high is staying […] on the wave. That is what is high, got it? Courting the wave, courting some different weirdness, really. JULIANA*: It is an alteration […], you really change your senses […], the form of perception … ISMAEL*:

 

One of the most confusing points revealed by the use of non-medicinal drugs concerns that which the old types of questions considered to be absurd, in other words, the discordance between the acquired authorized knowledge – according to which drugs are harmful, cause dependency, suffering and death – and the persistence of the users in the practice of these activities. It can be seen, however, that this discordance has led the specialists to disregard what the users say or do in favor of theories that explain their actions as caused by their mistakes, faults or errors. The users, however, do seem to be aware of the risks involved in their practices. Nevertheless, besides, or exactly because of that, they insist on the occurrence of events, or on what goes on when the use is effected. “Did it buzz?” (“bateu?”), “did it happen?” (“rolou?”), “did it work?” (“fez?”) are questions that users ask themselves and that validate the occurrence of peculiar events: the “high” (“barato”), the “trip” (“viagem”), the “wave” (“onda”) of the drug. But what are the “high,” the “wave,” the “trip?” It is hard to say, it is difficult to express, it is difficult to represent, since they are events that “happen” (“rolam”), which develop throughout the experience, which occur through experimentation. So, when asked to talk about it, the users usually narrate lived-through experiences in which “happened” the “high,” the “trip,” the “wave”: “I went to that place,” “around that time of the day,” “I was with those ‘mates’ (“chegados”)”, and then “arrived the presentation” (“pintou a presença”) and the drug was consumed, and then “I got (or everything got) changed.” It is hard to extract more than this, because there is nothing more to say beyond what happened.

218 E. V. Vargas

 

But what is an event? I follow Latour (1999a: 280–3) in this matter, who borrows from Alfred North Whitehead (1920: 52; 1927: 73) the notion of event in order to avoid the blur of current theories of action; in short, to avoid the reduction of action to the language of domination; the endless quarrels between individual and society, or between subject and structure as the masters of action; as well as the iconoclastic gesture that divides the world into facts and fetishes and does not offer an alternative besides the opposite and complementary positions of realism and constructivism, or of dialectics which intend to conciliate both positions at the price of digging even deeper the moat that separates them. Latour suggests that, in the place of a comminatory choice between a subject that produces and facts given from the beginning, or the dialectic whirlwinds which intend to overcome them, one should put oneself beyond this break and follow the movements that make us do something that surprises us, since “whenever we make something we are not in command, we are slightly overtaken by the action” (Latour 1999a: 281; original emphasis). As Gomart & Hennion (1999: 225) also noticed, it is because an event causes actions initiated in other places to last longer, while at the same time transforming them in a surprising way, that we can say that it occurred, appeared or is of the order of events. And in what measure is it possible and adequate to consider the “wave” as an event? Is it that, like any event, this also has to be made, better to say, meticulously fabricated and realized; just like any event, its results are unpredictable and, in one way or another, escape what conditions them and produce some kind of surprise, difference or alteration. Just like any event, the “wave” is something that goes by, that happens. And what happens during the “wave” is a “knack,” an “alteration” of perception, a “delight in other states of perception,” an “intense perception,” an “intensification of perception,” “a higher intensity of perception of life,” an alteration that makes the moments “intensely” experienced, since “life is only worth living, living it intensely,” as we hear from users. That is why, when Nosferatus* affirms that “I do not drug myself, no; I use … you get it?”, it seems to me that it is not about self-deception or a mere euphemism acting as evasion to dissimulate a morally condemned practice, but an affirmation of experimentation in which what is at stake is of the order of the intensive, or of intensities which are inseparable from the experimental modes of its effectuation: “Nowadays I live intensely, you know? I don’t know when I am going to die, so I am not going to feel sorry … I prefer regretting things that I have done than the things I have not done, you know?”, according to Nosferatus*. The point to be stressed is that these experimental modes end up in deliberate production of intensive alteration, which “change the channel” and “draw you away from the center,” and in this way make movements of transformation or displacement appear, movements which involve giving in or renouncing, or, to say it like Foucault (1980: 61), the “dissolution of the self.”9 It is worth telling, the occurrence of events over which neither users nor the drugs hold control, of events that escape each and everyone, of events that consequently imply more or less high levels of abandon during the course of the experiment. However, what turns practices of the use of non-medicinal drugs into a paradox is that these intensive

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alterations which imply abandoning or dissolving the self are self-invented; they are voluntarily probed, they are painstakingly prepared. This point is decisive and Perlongher (1994: 77) already called our attention to it: dislocation, outward movement, arousal, transformation, “leaving yourself” (“sair de si”), is not this exactly the “formula of ecstasy”? From this perspective it is possible to summarise the paradox of ecstasy or the event “wave” caused by drugs, when this gets created as such, in the following terms: doing everything (or almost) to make something happen that escapes us right from the beginning … Drugs and Medicine

 

These events, the “high,” the “trip,” the “wave,” do not come for free. They need to be meticulously prepared, materially and technically. Among others, from the user’s point of view it is necessary to “get” (“descolar”) the drug, or better, to score it, which already supposes the existence of chains of production and distribution networks, as well as the relative ability of the users to circulate through them, at least up to a certain point. “Having scored” the drug, it is necessary to arrange the “shooting gallery” (“quebrada”), in other words, the appropriate place and/or circumstances for its use. It is necessary also to be able to prepare and use the drug, that is, getting the substance ready for use: “to roll a joint” (“apertar o baseado”), “to trace the line and prepare the straw” (“esticar a carreira e preparar o canudo”), “to make the mushroom’s tea” (“aprontar o chá de cogumelo”), “to dilute it and fill the syringe”, in short, to prepare the necessary separations or mixtures and the indispensable material utensils for the administration of the substance in question; just as well as having the necessary technical knowledge and means for usage, such as knowing how to administer the drug – draw without coughing, sniff without sneezing, swallow without vomiting, or hitting the vein at the moment of injecting – and what the correct doses are without which there is no “wave” and beyond which the “wave” diverts, depending on the case, in the form of an overdose. In a certain way, it is as with a medicine. As Madeleine Akrich showed in her “little anthropology of medication,” the phases between the introduction of a new molecule on the market and its biochemical action on the body of the patient are not transparent, making a scale of socio-technical activities necessary in order to make the molecule that left the laboratory create effects on the bodies of patients: in order to be able to reach what is considered the therapeutic action of medicine, i.e., a certain biochemical reaction, it is necessary to go through a long list of steps that take place in different places, from laboratory to consulting room, pharmacy up to home, or even other places, and which involves a series of players, be it directly present – doctor, pharmacist, patient, buyer – be it represented in the handled objects, like pharmaceutical labs, the social security or sanitary authorities. There are also numerous and divers objects: prescriptions, jingles, dossiers, external wrapping, wrapping in contact with the medicine, drug facts, droppers, spoon, cup, etc. (Akrich 1995: 131)

220 E. V. Vargas

 

These long roads cannot be abstracted or put between brackets, because if they are marked by transformation and several reformulations that imply so many diversions, it is in these that they entangle themselves, “the interlinked destinies of medication and the ill” (Akrich 1995: 131). The roads are no less long in the case of illicit drugs. However, as they are treated here as roads that became illicit, the socio-technical activities that these drugs are supposed to involve, generally, do not involve instruction manuals and other expedients of this kind which are able to establish the modes according to which to use them at the minimum in a non-controversial way, but have schemes of more or less ritualized action established in an inter-subjective way – or through imitation, this characteristic mode of differentiated repetition, as Tarde said (2001) – which gives them far more considerable latitudes of variation than those which we are used to observing in the use of medicine. Consider, for example, the non-medicinal and therapeutic uses of drugs. The non-medicinal uses of drugs generally start through initiation, that is, rookies are introduced in new practices through the mediation of others. The users usually say that it was with “friends,” with people from the “group,” from the “gang,” that the first experiments of use took place; and also the ones that follow. Therefore, the people with whom the use of illicit drugs is practised are not exactly any kind of person, but to be more precise, “all my friends,” the “people that are close to me.” This preference for “friends” as companions in the use of illicit drugs, on the other hand, contrasts with the situation of alcoholic beverages, especially when the first use is considered. This is an extremely relative contrast, since alcohol is also a drug that is used among friends, as almost all users affirm. Nevertheless, it exists and it has been reported on many occasions that alcohol was used, at least the first few times, in the “family sphere.” This predominance of friends over family members as companions in the use of illicit drugs, as well as the proportionally bigger numbers of family members as companions in the use of alcoholic beverages, on the other hand, contrast clearly with the conditions in which controlled psychotropic drugs are normally used, a situation in which the alleged reason for medical indication prevails as the reason for first use and subsequent uses. However, there is also another difference to take into consideration. As Pignarre (1999: 104; original emphasis) notes, while the medicinal and therapeutic uses of drugs tend to spread through “a vertical and hierarchical system of filiation (the medicine goes from the therapist, who does not take it, to the patient who does take it),” the non-medicinal uses of drugs tend to be propagated through an epidemic system or dispositive. This epidemic mechanism gives a striking place to employment by initiation – by varied repetition or contaminating imitation, we might say, following Tarde (2001) – from which they make “friends” or “mates.” Although these two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, they do not function in the same registers: on one side the mechanism works, roughly speaking, by means of prescriptions effected by competent authorities who abstain from following them, while on the other side it only operates through mediation of initiators capable of sharing acquired experiences; on one side, the imperative of the order is almost unavoidable (drugs are used because of a prescription or an ordonnance, as the

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French say), while on the other side people experiment with borrowed examples as a start. On one side, the diversion with regard to the prescribed order is perceived as a lack of collaboration or an indication of misinformation or resistance, while on the other side improvisations, adaptations, and variations in the experimentation are part of the proper mode of functioning. On one side, the drug, while being a “forced abstract” (Pignarre 1999: 104), is prescribed for a specific case, constituted of the patient and their disease, and aims to obtain certain previously established (in lab tests) effects, while on the other side, the drug is used as a shared substance by a collective and the effects of experimentation carry a high element of surprise. For sure, these dispositives do not put into motion the same assemblages. Here we have touched on a main point, because what happens to drugs and medicine is the same as for weapons and tools. As Deleuze & Guattari (1980: 491) noted: It is always possible to distinguish weapons from tools according to their use (destroying men or producing goods). But even if this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a technical object, it does not impede a general conversableness between the two groups, to a point where it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic difference between weapons and tools.

 

“Working tools and weapons of war exchange their determinations,” just like drugs and medicine do. “This does not impede [the fact] that interior differences, although not intrinsic, that is, logical or conceptual, can be recognized, even if only through estimation,” amidst all these things, although it needs to be stressed that it is not the tool that defines the work, neither is it the drug that defines the crime, nor the remedy that defines medicine, but the inverse: the drug supposes the crime, like a remedy supposes medicine and the tool supposes work. On the one hand, this means that, like weapons and tools, drugs and medicine are “submitted to the same laws that precisely define the common area”; on the other hand, this also means that any technical object (weapon, tool, drug, remedy or food) “continues to be abstract, completely undetermined, as long as no assemblage is reported” which establishes it as such (Deleuze & Guattari 1980: 491 and 495). The “Wave” of Drugs and the Paradox of Passion In order to better understand assemblages effected when consuming non-medicinal drugs, we return to “highs,” “trips,” and “waves” of drugs seen as events. Firstly, we should notice that events like these do not result from an objective determination of the substance, neither from a subjective fantasy of the user, as Gomart & Hennion (1999: 227) already observed. As users affirm, it is possible to lose control, abandon oneself, cross the line or let other means overtake you (like sex, yoga, radical sports, and religion, among the most cited), but with drugs the “wave” is different, because the substances – or, better, the assemblages that they call up as mediators10 – make a difference. Much of the contents of users’ “trips” can be doubted, as many analysts frequently have: they are considered diversions, deliria, or hallucinations, an idea

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reinforced by the nicknaming of certain drugs as “hallucinogenic” (we have to remember, attributed as such by non-users). However, even though the contents of these “trips” go beyond reality or take imaginary possibilities to its limits, this does not make the created alterations any less real. Therefore, we are not faced with users’ subjective fantasies. But even so, we are not closer to an objective determination regarding substances, even if users are taken by the drugs they have taken, since not even for that reason do they enter into a state of pure abandon, as users adopt uncountable procedures to exercise a minimum level of control regarding the degree of abandon: control of doses, avoiding certain combinations, intake of other substances capable of minimizing or even “cutting the high” (“cortando o barato”), and so forth. The situation of using (and, with it, that of self-abandon) has to be meticulously produced: although the drug frequently “arrives” (“pinte”) or “happens” (“role”), that is, appears to be a event from the start, not less frequently is it necessary to “run after it,” or better, to make the event “wave” happen – which means, at least, frequenting the places where the chances of it “happening” (“rolar”) are optimized, if not deliberately going out to find drugs and the appropriate circumstances to consume it. But even meticulously produced, it surpasses all previsions and results in surprising events, because this is typical for assemblages that imply “loosing control,” self-abandon – or, as the users say, it is about “getting stoned” (“ficar doidão”), “getting away from normal” or everyday “reality” and perceiving things and people according to another register of reality, according to an intensive register of reality. The point is that, when “letting your hair down,” the situation necessarily runs out of control, since this escape is, in itself, the sought assemblage. It is about risky assemblages, and that is why, sometimes, its consequences are unpredictable; and not all are appreciated as such by the users themselves. Finally, as Gomart & Hennion recall, any conditioning requires that conditions are to be meticulously established, since an “active job has to be done so that it will be moved” (1999: 227). In the same way, the self-abandon, while it is the user´s aim, “denies the possibility of ‘pure’ abandon” (1999: 227). Therefore these events suppose either an active set of actions by actors, or a no less active giving in to actions that stem from other sources, from other agents: letting oneself be taken by the effects of the drugs, letting oneself be manipulated by them, requires, paradoxically, an active manipulation by the users, and vice versa. The passiveness, originated from the above, does not indicate a “moment of inaction” or “a lack of will of the user who suddenly fails to be a complete person,” note Gomart & Hennion (1999: 243), but “if added to the action, it intensifies the action.” We are far from the classical model of rational actors who act with the intention of making complete subjects of their actions, but neither are we any closer to the classic sociologic models which suppose that agents are submissive from the start to social obligations. Instead, as Gomart & Hennion (1999: 243) remind us, agencies like these challenge the classical paradox of passion, usually described in cases of love: “how can anyone act so intensely in order to make things happen against which nothing can be done?”. As I have suggested before, this is also the

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paradox of ecstasy or of the event “wave” of drugs: doing anything (or almost …) so that something happens that escapes us right from the very start. As we will see in what follows, this paradox, however defined, involves those who take part in deep plays. Deep Play and Mediators of Alter-A(c)tion Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian philosopher who at the turn of the eighteenth century became one of the main proponents of the theory of hedonistic calculation, coined the concept of “deep play” to designate, as Clifford Geertz (2000b: 432) noted in his well-known analysis regarding Balinese cockfighting, plays in which “the stakes are so high that it is, from a utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all.” Since, from a utilitarian point of view, participating in plays like this is irrational, because in this type of game the risks involved are superior to the expected benefits, Bentham concluded, according to Geertz, that “deep play is immoral” and that, therefore, “should be prevented legally” (2000b: 433). However, analyzing the Balinese cockfight, Geertz touched upon a particularly crucial point. According to him, more interesting than the ethical problem [raised by Bentham], at least for our concerns here, is that despite the logical force of Bentham´s analysis men do engage in such plays, both passionately and often, and even in the face of law’s revenge. For Bentham and those who think as he does (nowadays mainly lawyers, economists, and a few psychiatrists), the explanation is […] that such men are irrational – addicts, fetishists, children, fools, savages, who need only to be protected against themselves. (2000b: 433; my emphasis)

 

The solution Geertz gives for this problem is explicitly culturalistic, since it establishes that, if deep play does not respect the patterns of utilitarian calculation, that is because it was not created to do so, but in order to “express symbolically” social codes: the cockfight is a cultural text, and what the Balinese put at stake in this text is more than money, and cocks …, it is the status of each of them.11 I return to the theme of deep play because the similarity between the modalities of non-medicinal uses of drugs and deep play does seem to be more than mere coincidence. However, if the utilitarian explanation is not satisfactory because it cannot handle, other than in an asymmetrical and negative way, the fact that “men do engage in such plays, both passionately and frequently, and even in the face of law’s revenge,” the alternative presented by Geertz does not seem to be adequate either, since it puts us at risk of loosing the vehicle utilized to “express symbolically” the social codes: in this case, the use of drugs!12 The problem is that the use, in last retort, of the arguments of the (ir)rationality of “symbolic expression” interdicts, previously, the proper consideration of the efficiency of the use of drugs. This way we have just lost sight of that which is productive in the use of drugs, or what the event “wave” makes happen, to wit, other modes

224 E. V. Vargas of engagement with the world, more or less adequate ways in which “people,” as “agents,” engage with the world, or even, other ways of being an “agent.”13 And it produces modes of engagement with the world that are not assembled at the expense of objects, and that also do not take them only as intermediaries of a theatrical play in which the curtain for the main scene opens on other stages, but that articulate with them as indispensible mediators in this case, so that the agencies are effected in an “altered” mode or, better, in the mode of an alter-a(c)tion.14 There is What Exists: Alter-A(c)tion

 

Who, then, is the master of action? Will it be the individuals, rational autonomous agents who calculate hedonistically? But they cannot do whatever they might want to without the intervention of other agents, people or things, beyond living and passionately giving in to these deep plays where they risk more than they have, where they loose more than they win … Will it be the organisms and their psychophysical predispositions? But they are so vague, so inexact, and make so many tabula rasa of the operations necessary for the realization of any action; neither does it shine a light on how some are able to stop, others are satisfied with little, others have to go so far, others have to go beyond … Is it the things, the properties intrinsic to drugs? But, if they exist, whatever they might be, they do not discard any artifact necessary to produce them and to put them into action, all of the mediations necessary for such “intrinsic properties” to produce, after all, anything whatsoever … Will it be the society? But what is society besides the associations that produce it?15 Or without the crowd of objects that support it? The decisive problem here is that it is never possible to decide beforehand who counts and who does not count as agents, since actions are alter-a(c)tions. Will it be a dialectic relation of these entities taken two by two? Reason and organism? Individual and society? Things and people? Or a little of each, as if the recipe of mastership were the result of an exact mix of the right doses of each of these entities? That does not seem to be the case either, since such a mix of relations, put in this way, leaves intact the “entities” whose enclosure it intends to “overcome.” Besides, and this point seems crucial to me, these arguments do not take into account the “high,” the “trip,” the “wave” of drugs, this risky and unpredictable composition between the most varied agents that do not exist before nor after the composition itself. Once more it is necessary to admit that, postulated in these terms, the question is put forward badly, since it refers always to the wrong distinction between fact and what is done, truth and falseness, right and wrong, given and built, reason and belief, when it seems to me to be more profitable to follow the footsteps of Tarde and treat this matter in terms of social logic, or, maintaining ourselves at an equal distance to the truth and the untruth and considering the associations that

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constitute the society, not as a separate domain, but as the “reciprocal possession, in extremely varied forms, of everyone by each one” (Tarde 1999a: 85). Who is the master of the “high,” the “trip,” the “wave”? The individual, the society, the organism, or the thing? None of them it seems to me, because the “wave” does not have a master nor a servant, controller nor control: it occurs or does not occur, “happens” or does not “happen”. It is of the order of the event. However, it is not about knowing who is the master of the “wave,” but whether it comes or not, whether it happens or not. Following Tarde (1999c: 119), the question is not whether one is or is not being drugged, but whether one has a “wave” and is had by it. As we can already see, stating the problem according to the mode of Have implies recognizing “intrinsic transitivity and an originary opening towards an exteriority” (Viveiros de Castro 2003: 17) which, as an event, demands the “wave” from the beginning. Thus, is the “wave” not – as the native slang expresses it – another name for the action of change, of transformation, of intense differentiation, in sum, of the action of others, of alter-a(c)tion? Is that not the formula for ecstasy? In sum, if the “wave” is an event, and if such an event is part of the order of the alter-a(c)tion, that is because it is always put into motion by others. And, if it is difficult to put the question in these terms, that is because we are used to thinking as if there were a limited repertoire of “first entities” ready to use and complete, to which we add, in order to help, a no less limited repertoire of “secondary relations” also ready to use and complete. At the same time, we infer from this double movement a corollary of masters and servants, autonomous and automata, whole subjects and haunted zombies. And through the same double movement, we have become used to treating facts and fetishes, evidence and belief, separately and opposing them systematically. From these we have even taken another contrast: on one side, the specialists and “good men,” and on the other, users and their “bad habits” – or the reverse, when the users consider themselves wise or “open-minded” (“cabeças feitas”) denouncing the “world of bigots” (“mundo dos caretas”). Drugs are made, and this does not make them any less real, or any less constructed. In other words, they constitute what Latour (1996) appropriately called a “factish” (faitiche), a word that combines fact and fetish and that denotes types of actions that do not require the choice between one and another. And if drugs are factishes, that is because neither they nor the users are merely intermediaries, but make up (one and another, like the others aliud without which there is, in the case presented here, no event-drug, no event called “wave”) “a chain of mediators, each not being the exact cause of the next, but instead, each enabling the next to become, in turn, the originator of action: literally, each renders causal its successor” (Latour 1999b: 26). In other words, if it is hard to state the problem in terms of this question, that is because it is difficult “to become detoxified of this drug, mastery” as Latour (1999b: 22) noted. To renew the proper mode of problematization of the “drugs problem”, it is necessary, right from the start, “to emancipate oneself from the hard drug of emancipation” (1999b: 22). Instead of repeating once again the litany that what is important are the drugs and their intrinsic properties, or the organisms and

226 E. V. Vargas their predestined bio-psychological features, or the society and its capacities for coercion, or the individual and its calculated actions, be it well or badly informed, we should consider what drugs and users, or the “wave” and its alter-a(c)tions, are “made to do” (faire-faire). But, if it is necessary to take the “wave” and its alter-a(c)tions into account, it is necessary not to forget that the actions of others, those produced under of mode of self-abandon are, by definition, surprising or unpredictable. Taking this into account, the problem of drugs becomes reconfigured as follows: the main question is no longer that of control, or of emancipation, but that of the quality of the mixture or of the compositions. In other words, it is not about getting rid of drugs, or about getting into them, but about knowing how to qualify the modes of life (and death) that are given by them. However, for this it is necessary to make yet another move and recognize that there is more than one way of living life (or of experiencing death) and that, among all the possible modes of living (modes that do not involve the same risks, or realize the same events), some prefer to make life an experience that should last forever (even if to do so it is necessary to mobilize a series of drugs), while others consider that it is worth more to live life intensely (even if to do so it is necessary to mobilize yet another series of drugs, or the same drugs, but in another way). Whatever it is, to do so we need to take measures against suicide.

Notes

 

1 This chapter has benefited from different research projects and has been supported by FAPEMIG, CAPES, CNPq and UFMG. In addition to the drug users who collaborated in this research, I am grateful to the students who work with me in the Laboratory of Anthropology of Sociotechnical Controversies (UFMG), to Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion, and Dominique Linhard, who hosted me at the CSI (ENSMP), and to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marcio Goldman, from PPGAS (UFRJ). Although this chapter could not have been completed without their help, none of them is responsible for the remaining mistakes. I also wish to thank Matei Candea and the audience at the conference Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the Social for their warm reception of my contribution. 2 Tarde´s answer only became public more than a century afterwards (Tarde 2000). For a contemporary answer, see Bruno Latour (2005), for example. 3 Tarde raises this question on a number of occasions. In Les Lois sociales (1999b: 62) he writes almost the same words. In Les Lois de l’imitation (2001: 120) he asked himself: “the conformity of intentions and beliefs, this mental similarity that is found to be covering at the same time tens and hundreds of millions, man is not born ex abrupto; how is it produced?” 4 The notion of image of thought, which I borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, is used here to show that the difference considered is of another order than a difference between paradigms (Deleuze 1988a: 169–217; see also François Zourabichvili 2004: 15ff). 5 It was Viveiros de Castro who drew my attention to the contrast between “the relativity of the truth” and “the truth of relativity” introduced by Deleuze (1988b: 30) and furthered by Deleuze & Guattari (2005: 123). Here also “perspectivism is not a relativism – the affirmation of truth’s relativity – but a relationalism – relativity’s truth is relation” (Viveiros de Castro 2001: 38). On this, see also Zhourabichvili (2004: 56) and Latour (2005: 95).

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6 See Vargas (2000, 2006 and 2007) for developments on most of these points on Tarde. 7 The empiric references in this study come from ethnographies realized with drug users in Juiz de Fora (1998–9) and Belo Horizonte (2003–4), Brazil. In this study, all names marked with asterisks are fictitious names of drug users; the users themselves were asked to choose their own nicknames, which is why some are so bizarre. The words or phrases in quotation marks are local Brazilian terms and expressions. 8 On these points, see Vargas (2001: 65–94 and 204–14; 2005; 2008). 9 As Foucault (1980: 60–1) already has observed, “the intensity, long before being graded by representation, is in itself pure difference: a difference which unfolds and repeats itself, a difference which contracts and dilates, a singular point which ends or sets free, in its sharp event, undefined repetitions. […] Dissolution of the self.” 10 Here, I come back to the difference between intermediaries and mediators as formulated by Latour (2005: 37–42 and 232–41). According to him, an intermediary adds “predictability to the established,” because it “transports meaning or force without transformation”; being so, intermediaries are easily ignored, whereas it is always necessary to take mediators into account because they “transform, translate, distort and modify the meanings or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005: 39). Mediators are not causes, but that what is “made to do” (faire-faire), that which updates differences. 11 For Geertz, who follows Weber on the idea that “the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence,” cockfights are not irrational activities because “the access of significance more than compensates for the economic costs involved” (Geertz 2000b: 434). Hence, since “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz 2000a: 5), that is why this animal is apt to put other animals to fight in order to enact through them a kind of Aesopian representation, a cultural text in which “the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society’s temper at the same time” (2000b: 436 and 451). In this scheme, the cocks are considered because, and since, they can say “something of something” (2000b: 448), i.e. because they can compound a moral allegory of the Balinese way of life, which is the same as saying that in a cockfight those who are fighting are the men, since in this scheme the cocks are not mediators, but only intermediaries. 12 What I want to say with this is that, if we apply Geertz’ solution to the use of drugs, drug use in the strictest sense remains inexplicable, as it does not make the slightest difference. In this scheme, drugs are no more than intermediaries; they cannot change the chain of transmission of what, in Geertz’ view, really matters: the social codes. This interpretation runs parallel to the one proposed by the theory of deviance, with which it shares at least this equivocation: not taking into account the proper vehicle through which the social codes are updated. I maintain, however, that the drugs’ “problem”, in various meanings of the expression, is that they act as mediators and, as such, are agents of alter-a(c)tions. 13 Here I summarize, certainly in a hurried way, an argument adapted from the notions of “consumptive production,” of “improductive costs,” and of “modes of production of persons,” as these notions were developed by, respectively, Marx (1993), Georges Bataille (1967), and Chris Gregory (1982). This argument suggests that the modes of the non-medicinal use of drugs put in motion an ethic of intensity, which contrasts with the ethic of extension that prevails in the medicinal use of drugs. However contrasting, these ethics maintain ambivalent relations. For this to become evident, it is necessary to avoid the reduction of the ethic to the moral, as well as a rationalist interpretation of extension (which confounds it with quantity) and a romantic interpretation of intensity (which confounds it with quality); moreover, it is necessary to considerer extension and intensity as distributed in polarities which, being as tense as they are fragile, are opened up by countless intermediary situations. Regarding these topics, see Vargas (2001: 551–61; 2008). 14 On the concept of alteration as action of others and as intensive differentiation, see

228 E. V. Vargas Viveiros de Castro (2001: 16), from whom I borrowed the idea of alter-a(c)tion. 15 Tarde put this question forward a long time ago (1999d: 312) after he had said: “all phenomena are nothing but a nebulous decomposable in actions emanated from an infinity of agents which are other invisible and uncountable little gods” (1999a: 55).

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15 On Tardean relations Temporality and ethnography1 Georgina Born

Imitation and Primitivism

 

In this chapter I consider the relational nature of Gabriel Tarde’s social theory and propose that Tarde proffers an analytics that can productively be taken to anthropology and history. My contention is that we find articulated in his relational sociology the germ of a methodology that has subsequently been overlooked: one that, at its most abstract, concerns itself both with spatial relations and transformations and with temporal relations and transformations. If circulation – in the sense of spatial diffusion and distribution – has recently been a theme of social theory (Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Heiser 2005), its intimate articulation with temporality has been less discussed. But in Tarde, we might say, the spatial and the temporal dynamics of the social occupy a single conceptual gesture. To develop my case I begin with perhaps the best-known example of this feature of his thought: his focus on the dynamic relation of imitation. As a way in, I want to conjure up three spectacular and surreal figures of imitation. First, imitation’s privileged relation with the primitive, for which I take my cue from Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Early in the film, in a sequence set in a prehistoric desert landscape captioned ‘The dawn of man’, a band of foraging, apparently herbivorous hominids look for food. Following various adversities, they wake one morning to find that a bizarre towering, black monolith has appeared overnight in their vicinity, and they cautiously approach and circle it. Soon after, an individual hominid finds some scattered bones, picks one up, begins rhythmically to chop at the other bones, eventually raising it over his head with both hands and smashing it down to crush the skull of the long-dead animal. This is intercut with shots of a living animal being smashed and killed. We have watched the lone hominid ‘inventing’ the use of the bone as a tool, and thence, it is implied in this and subsequent scenes, weaponry, violence, meat-eating, domination and murder. Others in the band soon emulate him in these behaviours, indicating that through instinctive, unreasoning imitation these capabilities have been rapidly diffused among a population. A second figure of imitation comes to the present while, intriguingly, retaining a link to primates. It is the recent discovery (or invention) by cognitive neuroscience of a kind of internalized, neurological imitation enabled by what are called

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‘mirror neurons’ (Adolphs 2003). In the words of a proponent, ‘Mirror neurons are neurons that have been found in human as well as other primate brains which are active both when someone performs a specific action themselves, and … when that person observes another individual performing that same task. Some of the first observations of this phenomenon were that particular neurons that were active when a monkey picked up a specific object – such as a peanut [or bone?] – were also active when the monkey observed another monkey … pick up a nut. [Thus] the monkey’s brain mimics at least some of the neuronal activity that would be taking place if it was carrying out the action that it observes. … [T]his may be the neurophysiological basis for primary semiotic functioning. … [It may also be] the basis of … a kind of cross-modal neurobiological empathy’ (Clarke 2008: 10).2 Here we follow imitation deep inside the hard wiring of those robust agents, primates and humans, to their involuntarily possession by imitation and semiotic functioning, apparently beyond or bypassing culture, subjectivity and desire. A third figure of imitation returns inexorably to the primitive, suggesting (and I permit myself more than a hint of irony) that the mirror neuron may provide a rational and physiological basis for Frazer’s theory of sympathetic or imitative magic, manifest in the many ethnographic instances of effigies being used by magicians to make the person or being represented suffer or die. In sympathetic magic, according to Frazer’s Law of Similarity, ‘like produces like, or … an effect resembles its cause’; that is, ‘the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it’ (Frazer 1911: 52, cited in Taussig 1993: 47). It rests on the disturbing proposition that ‘the copy … [affects] the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires the properties of the represented’ (Taussig 1993: 47–8, emphases in the original). Published in the same period as Tarde’s writings on imitation, Frazer’s theory drew on Tylor, who argued that the ‘Association of Ideas’ underlay this phenomenon, and that instead of moving ‘from fact to thought, from things to image, in magic the flow was reversed’ (Tylor quoted by Taussig 1993: 49). Michael Taussig comments in Mimesis and Alterity that Frazer’s is a ‘primitivist theory of magic’ (ibid.: 59) – a telling comment, in turn, on the mirror neuron. Against this circular background, I want to jump cut and register what is remarkable about Tarde’s take on imitation. For in Tarde imitation is rescued from its association with the primitive and cognitive, and endowed with an urbane, ordinary quality as a universal tendency. Tarde included among imitative acts ‘a word or phrase spoken, a job executed, or a legal procedure enacted’ (1969a: 143). Moreover, for Tarde imitation is linked to opposition and invention: the three amount to ‘general relationships’ that can be observed in the physical, biological and social worlds (ibid.: 143–4), while the social can itself be understood by analogy with chemistry, geology or astronomy. Thus imitation and opposition can characterize entities as diverse as molecules, masses or human consciousnesses (Tarde 1999: 83, quoted in Barry and Thrift 2007: 513). Here we glimpse the insouciance of scale that characterizes Tarde’s thought, an experimental attitude, as Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift put it, demanding ‘an extraordinary attention both to detail, and to the singularity of the example’ (ibid.: 511) – both, of course,

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recalling ethnography and history. Tarde held that ‘Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism’, a logic of semi-conscious suggestion fuelled by collective flows of affect in which the focus is on the intensity of suggestibility (Borch 2007: 561). He abjured the separation of psychology from sociology, as well as the dualism of encompassing social and sovereign individual, proposing instead an inter-psychology which ‘recognized that subjects [are] open to affecting and being affected’ (Blackman 2007: 577, 576), and in which the economy is conceived as a ‘machine for promoting passionate imitation’ (Barry and Thrift 2007: 518). Lisa Blackman, in a piercing analysis of the route from Tarde through the early twentieth-century Anglo-American social psychology of William McDougall and Edward Ross, has shown how Tarde’s ‘mimetic paradigm’ was deformed in its repetition by these later theorists. Where for Tarde suggestion is to be understood as the ontology of the social, transcending the dualisms of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, social and individual, culture and nature, suggestion was reconceived by Ross and McDougall in terms of instinct and habit, an eruption of psychic or motor forces, a ‘kind of physiological automatism located in those who were considered lower, inferior and closer to the so-called animal and primitive. … [By contrast,] the normative psychological subject was increasingly seen to be coherent, bounded and autonomous, able to withstand social influence [or imitation]’ (Blackman 2007: 585, emphasis in original). Thus Ross’s social psychology placed at the apex of civilization what he called Americanism, ‘which is distinguished from the suggestibility of … primitive cultures … [and] expressed through a patriotic feeling embodied by the capacity to be self-made and move in a path of one’s own’ (ibid.: 586). We might say that in Ross’s Americanism, and in some later versions, while imitation and suggestion are held to be manifest in the crowd behaviour of others, autonomous, rational entrepreneurial agency – that is, invention – is thought to reside within the American subject. I am certainly sympathetic to Blackman’s discovery in Tarde of the notion of a malleable and radically heterogeneous subject, where ‘no “real” self exists prior to mimesis’ (ibid.: 585, quoting Leys 2000: 71), and to her scepticism regarding recent ontologies of flatness and flow, which abjure the Tardean potential to explore subjectivity and intersubjectivity as a critical element of a psycho-social theory (ibid.: 592; she is referring to Deleuze, Latour, Massumi and others). But as an anthropologist I am troubled that her account invokes an alternative analytical ontology that already seems to know, as it were, what the terms are of the social and of personhood or subject. No less than Durkheimians may project social integration, perhaps Deleuzians may discover multiplicity in Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 2004), or Latourians may discover flat associations in the circulation of Bach’s music (Hennion 2001). The question, then, is whether Blackman, along with those that she upbraids, projects an analytical ontology that occludes the ontologies of those we study. Put another way, is it possible for us to efface our own ontological projections – flatness, flow, or malleable intersubjectivity, as much as ‘social and individual’ – so as to access the cosmologies of others? This is perhaps the same problem identified by James Leach when, in a recent

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paper (2007) addressing the anthropology of art and creativity, he criticizes Alfred Gell’s (1998) influential theory of agency, abduction and the index. His case is that Gell’s account of creativity repeats a ‘Euro-American tendency to locate reason or knowledge in the individual mind [which] reproduces the self through its operations in the object world’. Here, Leach argues, a putatively ‘non-representational theory of art turns out to be about the representation of social agency by objects’ (Leach 2007: 183). Now I am not sure that I agree with Leach’s assessment of Gell’s work, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Born 2005a), has other powerful virtues and in some ways offers a kind of circulationism or theory of mediation that could be brought into dialogue with Tardean relations. But my larger point is that Leach’s observation is about the problem of ontological projection. I want to suggest that, in addition to bracketing enduring ontological hierarchies (notably reified social and autonomous individual), it is other aspects of Tarde’s work – and specifically the variety of mechanisms of dynamic relation that he adumbrates in opening up questions of the inter-subject and subject-object – that proffer an analytics that might productively be put to work in a post-positivist empiricism, one in which ethnography can provide the basis for conceptual invention.3 This is particularly important for anthropology, which can still fall back on reified notions of culture, society or region. Instead we should begin, as recent neo-Spinozist scholarship has it, with a radical suspension of belief, by asking ‘How could ontological hierarchies be possible?’ – that is, by assuming that ‘substance is not prior, logically or chronologically, to its attributes: the cause does not precede its effects; the whole, its parts; or unity, division.’ Rather, ‘substance is “its” infinite diversity …; it is realized in this diversity and is nothing other than the process of production without beginning or end (beyond teleology, without goals or direction)’ (Montag and Stolze 1997: xvi). It is a version of these principles that Bruno Latour enunciates when he insists on Tarde’s ‘reverse reductionism’. For in contradistinction to Durkheimian sociology, Tarde ‘refuses to take society as a higher, more complex, order than the individual monad, [just as] he refuses to take the individual agent as the real stuff out of which society is made. … [Rather], for the only aggregate we know well [ie human societies], no emergent superorganism takes over from the mesh of competing monads. … The big, the whole, the great, is not superior to the monads, it is only a simpler, more standardised version of one of the monad’s goals which has succeeded in making part of its view shared by the others’ (Latour 2001 [online ms pp. 2–3], emphasis in the original). Yet it is notable that when writing of aggregation or association, in comparison with the neo-Spinozists, Latour’s attention is consumed more by topology than chronology: by questions of space, scale and scope rather than by the temporalities manifest in these processes. Moreover, as will become clear, and despite Latour’s and others’ keenness to detach him from later structuralisms, Tarde is insistent in dwelling on what might provocatively be called the elementary structures of process, including the ways in which aggregation can entail negative and antipathetical relations. My proposal is that it is by pursuing the methodological emanations of these elementary structures that ontological projection can most readily be held in check.

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Tarde’s Relations

 

At this point it is productive to outline the main relational mechanisms in Tarde’s analytics. In doing so I want to highlight three striking features, the first to do with his variegated and dynamic account of difference and opposition, the second concerning the temporal nature of the relations he describes, and the third to do with his productive overcoming of the distinction between intra- and inter-psychology. What, then, are the components of Tarde’s relational schema? They encompass, on the one hand, adaptation or alliance, imitation and invention, and on the other hand several types of opposition (Tarde 1969c: 165–74). These mechanisms are mutually implicated and entwined. Thus the copy, reproduction and collective labour are opposed to the model, production and the ‘joy’ of individual invention; and yet ‘every invention, be it theoretical or practical, is only a combination of imitations’ (1969b: 153) – a formulation that foreshadows later concepts of intertextuality and hybridity, as well as the dynamics of repetition and difference captured by genre theory. Indeed, Tarde’s Psychologie Économique is intent on portraying the entanglement of economic and cultural processes, such that the exchange of ideas, religious beliefs, books, art and institutions is taken to prepare the ground for economic exchange while exemplifying what Tarde calls ‘reciprocal addition’: the capacity to give and retain at the same time, itself anticipating today’s information economy (Tarde 2007: 615). Repeatedly, Tarde’s critique of political economy develops by reference to cultural production, with questions of the ‘creation of a new genre’ (ibid.: 617) and the ‘social value of invention’ – that is, the generative entanglement of economic and cultural processes – to the fore. Pursuing the economy of books, Tarde offers an extraordinary description of the ‘alliance and struggles’ that occur between products: ‘A book is capable of allying itself with other books or of combating them. There is no book … which is not made with other books, often given in the bibliography, … [and which also] confirms or completes them. Moreover, there is also no book which is not made against other books. … Products combat one another when … they pursue the satisfaction of the same need, each claiming to be the best. … They ally and adapt when they complement one another from the standpoint of the satisfaction of the same need. … These incessant duels, these logical or teleological duels of commodities and books, statues and furnishings, demand, no less than their fecund unions, to be studied’ (ibid.: 621–2, emphases in the original). What this points to in outline is a material semiotics of relations between things, anticipating what Saussure would soon identify as associative (or paradigmatic) and syntagmatic relations, but caught up here in a ferment of dynamic inter-object relations. It is in theorizing opposition that Tarde’s temporal thinking is most developed. Opposition, he proposes, is not the maximum degree of difference but a ‘special kind of repetition … of two similar things that are mutually destructive by virtue of their very similarity. … [O]pposites or contraries always constitute a couple or duality … opposed to each other … as tendencies or forces’ (Tarde 1969c: 165, emphasis in the original). He distinguishes between three forms of opposition:

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oppositions of series, of degree and of sign. Oppositions of series involve heterogeneous entities and result in evolution or counter-evolution. Those of degree involve homogenenous factors and entail increase or diminution. Oppositions of sign, finally, consist in entities engaged in the negation of each other, or diametrical opposition; Tarde gives as examples phenomena such as affirmation and rejection, desire and repugnance, or the collective conflicts that occasion war. On the basis of this brief overview I offer three observations. First, it should be clear that Tarde’s analytical palette of repetition and alliance, difference and opposition, both recalls and augments classical structuralism and other conceptualizations of difference and negation while, decisively, adding a dynamic aspect to these forms. At the same time he resolutely refuses any Hegelian telos, such that negation is released from any dialectical imperative.4 Second, in contrast to relational thinking in structuralism and psychoanalysis, Tarde’s terms involve not only spatial but temporal relations and transformations, in this way collapsing the distinction between the spatial and temporal dynamics of the social. Deleuze comments that in Tarde, ‘opposition is … the figure by means of which a difference is distributed through repetition’ (Deleuze 1997: 313 n3). While in Barry and Thrift’s enlightening formulation, ‘[t]he elementary social fact of Tarde’s system was the relation of modification or communication (such as affect, obedience, sympathy or education). … He was preoccupied by the question of the moment, the location, and the mechanism through which difference or invention are produced’ (Barry and Thrift 2007: 514).5 They continue, ‘Tarde’s social theory … [rejects] the idea that it is possible to develop a synchronic analysis of social structure prior to an analysis of the contingent processes of social change’ (ibid.: 512). Rather, his concern with infinitesimal change makes ‘visible imitative and inventive activity over time’ (ibid.: 515), pointing to the path-dependence and the curve of historical change, whether the amplification or diminution of invention, or the existence of unstable equilibria or plateaux. Indeed, the brilliance of Tarde’s method is its concern with analysing not only the elementary structures of process (opposition, imitation, invention and so on), but their cumulative outcome in historical trajectories of variation or transformation, stability or stasis – amounting to the sociological equivalent of differential calculus.6 Third, Tarde proposes that oppositions can occur either within the same entity or between different entities. As he puts it, ‘The oppositions of every sort – of series, degrees, or signs – may take place between terms that find expression either in one and the same being (whether the same molecule, organism or self), or in two different beings (molecules, masses, organisms, or human consciousnesses)’ (Tarde 1969c: 167, emphasis in the original; quoted in Barry and Thrift 2007: 513). In this way he describes a mechanism, ‘internal opposition’, that rivals psychoanalytic concepts of splitting and fragmentation. Deleuze observes playfully that Tarde’s microsociological focus on opposition within a being suggests that ‘hesitation [can be] understood as “infinitesimal social opposition”’ (Deleuze 1997: 314 n3). At the same time, by pairing this with the concept of ‘external opposition’, Tarde overcomes the distinction between individual and group processes, intra- and inter-psychology, psychology and culture. In doing so he cuts the connection both

236 G. Born to depth psychologies and their elaborate narratologies, and to psychopathology, positing internal and external opposition as universal and ubiquitous.7

For a Tardean Ethnography In the second half of the chapter I want to move out from Tarde and indicate how the relational schema that he proffers can be employed ethnographically. In showing its generative nature, I subject his schema (naturally) to modification. In particular, his concern with temporal relations when taken to ethnographic material requires an expanded analytics of temporalities, in which time is conceived as multiple – for which I turn in part to genre theory and philosophies of time.8 I divide the discussion, which can only gesture at the ethnographic resonances of Tardean relations, into three parts: temporalities of imitation, of opposition, and of invention. Through a series of ethnographic screenshots I invoke not only temporalities, but politics and power – indicating how this material necessitates a move away from the flatness of certain interpretations of Tarde. Temporalities of Imitation (and Projection)

 

According to Tarde, imitations of custom commonly diffuse downwards from higher to lower social orders. But ethnographically, we find a complex counterpoint. In 1954 in Ghana, still under British rule, Jean Rouch made a film of the annual Hauka possession ritual, ‘a cult of the colonial period’ (Rouch 2003: 193). The result was the film Les Maitres Fous (1955), in which Rouch’s anthropological sensitivity to ritual as dramaturgy is married to his reflexive narrative style and his capacity to integrate realism with surrealist and montage techniques (Feld 2003). During the filmed ritual, which took place in the suburbs of Accra, cult members were possessed by various colonial figures of power – the Governor-General, the engineer, the major, the corporal of the guard, the doctor’s wife – while an effigy of the governor stood apart under some waving cloths representing the Union Jack. In a climactic scene, following an escalation of possession among the motley Hauka characters, one of their number breaks an egg over the head of the governor effigy and its contents cascade down the effigy’s hat. Rouch’s voiceover asks ‘Pourquoi un oeuf?’, and in rhetorical response the film cuts instantaneously – mobilizing a provocative anti-realist juxtaposition – to a scene of ceremonial colonial power in Accra: the real British Governor emerging from his official car, wearing a white and yellow plumed hat, to inspect the trooping of the colour. Taussig comments that, with this montage, Rouch creates a mimetic magic which repeats or echoes that of the Hauka: ‘Here film borrows from the magical practice of mimesis in its very filming of it’. He adds that the British authorities in Ghana banned the film; according to Rouch, ‘the egg being broken over the head of an image representing the Governor-General, in imitation of the real Governor-General’s plumes’, was taken as ‘an insult to the Queen and to her authority’ (Taussig 1993: 242, quoting Rouch 2003: 192). Effectively, the egg-breaking on the image of the Governor’s head was thought by the British to have the power of sympathetic magic: of real

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insurrection. What Rouch captures and amplifies filmically is mimesis as insubordinate parody: imitation from below, imitation as opposition, and specifically imitation as an opposition of sign – evident in the symbolic negation of, or antagonistic resistance to, colonial rule. Moreover the implied temporal (and causal) relation of opposition between British administration and Hauka cult is concretized in the condensed narrative time of the film. But imitation can also be from above, and this is particularly notable in contemporary forms of economic and corporate governance and administration. I refer here to the recent accounts of framing, formatting and performativity in economic anthropology and sociology, and the burgeoning ethnographic analyses, including in my own work, of auditing, corporate accountability and corporate social responsibility.9 Standardization has been a key term in these debates, but this lacks the temporal force of Tarde’s concepts of imitation as circulation or contagion. For what we observe in this material is both the specialization of institutional spheres, and yet at the same time a historical contagion of certain management, governance and accounting techniques – their capacity to jump species, as it were, across distinctive sectors and transnationally. In an ethnographic study of the BBC from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, I charted its imitation of commercial management techniques in the guise of the ‘new public management’. The BBC had for decades been perceived as highly bureaucratic, but over the 1990s the nature of the bureaucracy changed through the introduction of novel kinds of professional management along three vectors. The restructuring of the BBC through the implementation of internal and external markets led to a rapid increase in management to oversee them, while the fracturing of the BBC’s ethos stoked a growing need to monitor performance and corporate compliance. As a result, tiers of financial, legal and administrative apparatuses grew to handle the new operations. In response to expanding media services and the burgeoning concern with marketing them, these years also saw the growth in many parts of the BBC of managements focused on strategy, planning, market analysis and market research. In each area management consultancy took a leading role, as consultants arrogated for themselves the role of elite intellectual vanguard, on the basis of near-permanent contractual relations with firms like Deloitte Touche and McKinsey. In parallel, from the late 1980s, government demands for accountability became a central plank of public sector reform, and auditing a core means of delivering it. The BBC duly responded, creating exhaustive processes of corporate accountability and cycles of self-auditing or ‘rituals of verification’ at all levels of the corporation. The BBC’s mimesis of commercial techniques drew on the conceptual framework of business administration, as notions of value for money, cost control, financial transparency and performance measurement coalesced into a ‘vague normative space’ (see Born 2005b, esp. chs 5 and 6; the quotations are from Power 1997, ch. 1). In imitating commercial administration, the BBC was itself copying policies already being introduced into other British public sector institutions; and in due course, through its managerial innovations, notably picking up and reinflecting the hybrid concept ‘public value’,10 the BBC came to be seen as the model of reform

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for the public sector in Britain. In turn, in the last decade, the BBC’s policies have repeatedly been formatted for public broadcasters around the world, such that European and Commonwealth broadcasters imitate the BBC, implementing their own marketization, audit and public value regimes six months to a year later. In this example and in the wider epidemics of marketization, auditing, corporate governance and transparency, we see the effects of the internationalization of the sciences of business, management and accounting, a circulatory economy of expertise flowing through corporate capillaries, mediated by global consultancies and their opportunistic inhabitation of the corporate hosts. Imitation is here comprehensible in terms both of infiltration or imposition, and of affect or desire. I show in the BBC ethnography how the introduction of the new management forms engenders internal opposition: in part it is experienced onerously, with passionate resistance to the occupation of inter-psychological space by this circulatory economy; and yet at the same time the marketization of the BBC and its milieu is perceived as exhilarating, auguring a libidinalization of entrepreneurialism (Born 2005b: 173). But temporalities of imitation also feature in another sense in this material, not in the terms of formatting and circulation, but of projection: the attempt to manipulate time and reduce uncertainty by projecting the future and bringing it into being. Michel Callon, Donald Mackenzie, Andrew Barry, Don Slater and others have analysed the performativity of economics in formatting the economy and financial markets.11 In my ethnography of the fast-moving media and IT industries I extend this discussion by describing how market and technological forecasting are used performatively by corporations and government to engage in what might be called the temporal politics of markets (Born 2003b, 2007). Asking ‘What direction is this market moving in?’ and ‘How best can we intervene to reconfigure this market?’, corporate actors wage struggles over future market structures by commissioning forecasts from global consultancies. On the basis of analyses usually of existing North American markets and consumer behaviours, forecasters derive speculative models that purport to predict the future unfolding of, say, British digital television markets or international markets in audio-visual content for mobile phones. The projections obscure their origins in very particular cultural and geo-political conditions; the data are universalized through abstraction. There is a collusion in their universalization; after all, industry actors require such models: they cannot proceed without planning their future on the basis of some kind of oracular knowledge.12 The forecasts are widely diffused through industry meetings and other channels; at such meetings conflicting interpretations are aired and the politics of the industries ignite. Forecasting is, then, a theatre of abstractions in which are enacted collective imaginings of the future, which are eventually concretized in commercial and regulatory strategies, thus (per)forming how markets develop. By becoming the basis for institutional strategies, the projections condition the markets in which actors operate, altering the relative positioning of competitors, delimiting the alternatives available to consumers, opening up some possibilities and closing down others. Forecasting is therefore a sturdy oracle: through projection as hypothetical imitation, and its subsequent actualization in strategies, economic transitions are made more tractable.

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Temporalities of Opposition (and Imitation)

 

In marked contrast, in the ethnographic example that follows, temporalities of opposition are at work in the long-term generation of stasis. Tardean oppositions of sign play a central part in my ethnographic analysis of the modernist computer music institute IRCAM in Paris, founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977, and the music department of the Centre Georges Pompidou. In this work I problematize the transformation of musical composition through its engagement with technology and science over the course of the twentieth century, as well as the dissociation between modernist composition and public musical tastes. Repetition with difference is, of course, the basis of the coherence of artistic and musical genres and movements; in this light, the peculiarity of modernist avant-gardes is that they proclaim as their goal permanent revolution (Poggioli 1968; Osborne 1995). IRCAM, heir to this tradition, therefore inhabits a paradox, which I address through a combination of ethnography and history: it aspires to be in the vanguard, while firmly inhabiting and reproducing the aesthetic boundaries of musical modernism, now almost a century old. Indeed, IRCAM’s legitimation is achieved by the subtle interplay between two dimensions of modernism: on the one hand, the content of IRCAM’s modernist discourse, with its stress on invention, progress and the future; and on the other hand, the substantive temporality of musical modernism as a genre, evident in IRCAM music – the long-term continuity or sedimentation of modernism, and thus its cumulative authority and power. While logically in contradiction, in relation to IRCAM the two dimensions are experienced as complementary, effecting a formidable legitimacy (Born 1995, esp. ch. 11). But how, one might ask, was the policing of modernist aesthetic boundaries achieved at IRCAM? Through a series of political mechanisms of external and internal opposition. Externally, or inter-psychologically, a pure Boulezian compositional modernism stood implacably against the hybrid aesthetics of postmodernism – the latter betrayed by hints of tonality or modes, of rhythm or pulse, of simplicity as opposed to complexity: all were regarded ambivalently and controversially, dividing IRCAM musicians and official policies on composer commissions and invitations. Moreover, both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics were opposed to the profane aesthetics of popular musics, whether commercial, ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’, which were rigorously excluded by IRCAM music policies and could be heard only rarely, at the margins of the institution’s functioning. As a result it was possible to discern a matrix of distinctive oppositions of sign, in which the relation between IRCAM modernism and IRCAM postmodern aesthetics took the form of a negation (A :-A), while IRCAM’s musical universe stood opposed to external postmodern musics, which had a perceptibly less modernist cast, also as a relation of negation (A :-A). But, in turn, this entire aesthetic forcefield stood opposed to popular musics not in the form of a negation, but a relation of absolute difference or non-reference (A : B).13 The repressions and conflictual divisions entailed by such dynamics were apparent not only in the politicized differences in aesthetic stance between IRCAM musicians and intellectuals. They were also present intra-psychologically, in oppositions or splits within IRCAM subjects

240 G. Born between different dimensions or eras of their musical selves, some rendered secret, disowned or denied. Internal opposition manifest in ‘hesitation as “infinitesimal social opposition”’, for example, was evident in individual musicians’ repudiation of their former musical lives, in which they had foolishly taken jazz seriously, or had performed in what was now judged to be a juvenile avant-garde rock group. It was shown too by a splitting of practice, as when a musician secretly composed a funky film track in the middle of Sunday night in an IRCAM recording studio, while denouncing this as not his ‘real’ compositional activity.14 Such internal oppositions, and the larger matrix of oppositions described, served continually to stoke imitation or repetition: IRCAM produced an illusion of musical movement through its activities, but a movement that amounted to a ‘mobile stasis’ – a Tardean plateau.15 We might think of this as a type of anti-invention. Temporalities of Invention (and Repetition)

 

And so to temporalities of invention. If Tarde opens up an analysis of relational transformations, he undertheorizes invention – which cannot be grasped simply as ‘a combination of imitations’. This is where a concern with multiple temporalities can supplement Tarde.16 In an ethnography of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of art-science, in which artists and scientists collaborate, I take up the question of invention (Born and Weszkalnys 2007; Born and Barry 2010; Barry, Born and Weszkalnys 2008). In such a nascent, heterogeneous field, itself obsessed with invention and replete with novelty – novel practices, objects and recombinations – I faced the task: how to identify real invention? By following the actors I was able to elicit emergent criteria of value which (to cut a long story short) posed ‘decorative’ or ‘celebratory’ art-science – in which the encounter between artist and scientist is short-lived or superficial – against originality and invention, which were associated with projects where the engagement between art and science is deeper and sustained, thereby enabling artists to ‘get very close’ to the science and vice versa.17 But understanding invention requires four further steps. It necessitates, first, an analysis of the historical orientation of art-scientists by reference to the genealogies or intellectual and aesthetic coordinates – that is, the horizon – of the genres in which they work (Jauss 1982, ch. 1; Neale 1980; Frow 2006). For only against the background of an analysis of the temporality of genre is it possible to grasp the degree of inventiveness or redundancy of current objects or practices: to assess when it is that the object or practice introduces a difference that makes a difference – that departs from the normal curve of repetition-with-difference – or not.18 This in turn depends on an account of the distinctive temporalities constructed by particular genres.19 The challenge, then, is precisely one of developing a differential calculus of genres-in-process, one that enables a non-teleological analysis of invention or its absence. A second requirement of an analytics of invention is to unearth the governing temporal ontologies or philosophical constructions of cultural-historical time that inform artists’ creative practice, manifest in concepts such as ‘modernism’,

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‘postmodernism’, ‘innovation’, ‘avant-garde’ and so on (Osborne 1995; cf. Koselleck 2002). As Peter Osborne observes, such notions are ‘categories of historical consciousness which are constructed at the level of the apprehension of history as a whole. … [Each] involves … a distinctive way of temporalising “history” – through which the three dimensions of phenomenological or lived time (past, present and future) are linked together within the dynamic and eccentric unity of a single historical view. … The historical study of cultural forms needs to be rethought within the framework of competing philosophies and politics of time’ (Osborne 1995: ix).20 It is only by addressing such temporal ontologies that we can grasp how these diffuse categories of experience mediate artists’ relation to the genres in which they work, and thus the distinctive temporalities of genres. A third dimension of an analytics of invention cuts across the previous two. It consists of an existential dilemma or hiatus thrown up at the interface of temporal ontology and genre, a dilemma that was present among my art-science interlocutors and that is evident in their reflexive concern with what one calls ‘genre-hunting’ and ‘first-ism’: In these interdisciplinary fields you have artists that are genre-hunting, looking for the next big thing – like XX: if you look at his history, it’s first-ism, going through genres and finding new niches to be the first. I think that’s an important role that art can play, but when there’s no content, it can be a little tiresome.21 Moreover, while the art-science practitioners fully acknowledged the genealogical orientation and significance of genre in their work, another spoke of the need to suspend such historical awareness in order to be able to act:

 

I never claim that everything I do is new; I’m much more interested in the idea that art is clear about its claims to historical linkage. … [But] I can get very early on in a project to a point where I say, ‘This has been done already, it’s a total waste of time …’. So some of the external referentiality that I know is there, I have to push aside for some phases of the project, or actually I can’t make any progress at all. It’s a kind of ‘as-if’ period – a suspension of belief, and it can last quite a long time.22 Despite the mediation of ontology, genealogy and genre, then, this existential situation speaks to a fourth dimension of an analytics of invention: the need to read the singularity of the art-science object against its reduction to other histories, by taking seriously the cultural object’s own retentions and protentions (as Gell has it after Husserl): that is, the immanent temporality that it both embodies and proffers (Gell 1998, esp. ch. 9). Christopher Pinney develops a similar argument against those forms of interpretation – Herderian, Hegelian or Durkheimian – in which ‘objects and culture are sutured together in national time-space’, or in which ‘specific times and specific objects can be conjoined (just as specific “cultures” and specific objects can be), and the one explained in terms of the

242 G. Born other’ (Pinney 2005: 262, 261). Instead, Pinney turns to Siegfried Kracauer to elaborate on multiple temporalities, extending his notion of the ‘nonhomogeneity’ and ‘uncontemporaneous’ nature of time. Pinney comments, ‘To make time “uncontemporaneous” is to insist on its multiplicity and difference’ (ibid.: 264). For Pinney, attempting felicitously to disrupt the assumed unity of object and epoch, ‘[Artworks] are not simply, always, a reflection of something happening elsewhere. They are part of an aesthetic, figural domain that can constitute history, and they exist in a temporality that is not necessarily coterminous with more conventional political temporalities’ (ibid.: 266). The point when analysing invention or its lack, in both object and practice, is therefore to evade the foreclosures entailed in reading history simply as genre, and genre itself as a uniform temporality. Instead, a post-Tardean analytics of invention such as that sketched here would acknowledge the potential phasing or interference between multiple temporalities – the time of the object, the time of genre, the temporal ontologies that enfold object, practice and genre, and the existential hiatus or ‘as-if’ time thrown up at the threshold of practice by the clamouring demands issued by these temporalities – phasing that may allow for invention.

From Becoming to Temporalities

 

I have suggested that Tarde’s elementary structures of process are generatively attuned to circulation and contagion, differentiation and resistance, as well as to the historical nature and location of such temporal relations. By alerting us to the cumulation of these processes, and thereby also to the potential production of stasis and borders (the cutting of the network – Strathern 1996), Tarde offers conceptual resistance to an analytics merely of flow. In this sense my intention has been to rescue Tarde from the Tardeans by noting his concern not only with imitation and association but with aggregation and sedimentation, the differential curves of change and the creation of plateaux – methodological directions that lead inexorably to questions of history, politics and power. But as implied by my ethnographic examples, while Tarde’s empirical orientation entails comparative forays across domains from crime to fashion, language to furniture, and while he advocates research on transformations within such domains, he is less concerned with the dynamics of specific institutional orders, whether Ghanaian possession cults, Anglo-American art-science, European musical modernism, or transnational media industries. Augmented by such an attention to specific institutional orders, their internal dynamics and mutable interrelations, the implications of a Tardean analytics are considerable; for in its insistence on connecting mediation with history, it works against any disembedded and dehistoricized conception of the object of anthropological knowledge. In this way a Tardean analytics has the potential to rebalance anthropological attention towards such historical relations and temporal transformations, which themselves subsume spatial dynamics, away from a primarily spatialized comparative method. From another angle, a Tardean analytics can also rebalance the recent turn in anthropological and social theory to the vitalism of Bergson and Whitehead, in

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which an analytical ontology of process and becoming is equated tout court with an anti-teleological analytical consciousness attuned to temporality. Vikki Bell, for example, criticizes Butlerian theories of performativity on the basis of what Deleuze calls ‘preformism’, in which ‘the real is thought to be the image of, or to resemble, the possible that it realizes. … [That is,] performativity is preformativity whenever analysis claims to describe the idea(l)-form that the subject is said [merely] to imitate or instantiate’. Following Deleuze, himself drawing on Bergson, she asks, ‘Rather than a belief in unified and unifying structures, could we not begin with a belief in difference as the fundamental principle and differing as the ontological assumption?’ (Bell 2007: 106, 105, emphasis in the original). In this alternative temporalized account, premised on the creativity and self-organization of the material world, ‘Evolution is a process of differentiation that has to be understood as mobile and open-ended … [while] life is not passive adaptation to the activity of the external environment but is itself an active response, a differentiation’ (ibid.: 108). Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, on the other hand, set out in Tardean spirit by problematizing the modernist opposition in which creativity is held to be the antithesis of imitation or copying, and by rehabilitating the creativity in copying (Ingold and Hallam 2007: 2). Echoing the critique of preformism, they reject the view that ‘nothing is created that was not designed in advance, pre-existing in virtual form the processes that give rise to it’. As an alternative they contend that creativity is ubiquitous in cultural life and that, given the radical contingency of the world, it is also necessarily improvisational: people ‘are compelled to improvise, not because they are operating on the inside of an already established body of convention, but because no system of codes … can anticipate every possible circumstance. … The improvisational creativity of which we speak is that of a world …“always in the making”’ (ibid.: 5, 2–3). Moreover ‘improvisation … is inherently temporal’; equating it with Bergson’s durée, ‘the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’, they suggest that ‘[w]hat Bergson is describing here is the duration of a consciousness that is improvisatory: guided by the past but not determined by it; heading into a future that is essentially unforeseeable’ (ibid.: 10 and 11, quoting Bergson 1911: 4–5). Ingold cites approvingly Whitehead’s concept of concrescence, inspired by Bergson, which suggests that ‘[c]reativity … [lies] in that very movement of becoming by which the world, as it unfolds, continually surpasses itself’ (Ingold 2007: 47). While in many ways propitious, the vitalist analytical ontologies proffered by these writers can go too far, amounting to encompassing optics: for Bell, a set of principles detached from any empirical materials; for Ingold and Hallam, a methodological imperative worked through in the papers in their volume. But it is now possible to see that, in contrast to a Tardean analytics, much is obscured by adhering to a monotemporality of becoming, which can flatten out and pre-empt investigation of the multiplicity of time, as well as the manifest differences between styles, degrees and rates of improvisatory creativity, and between more and less genre-bound or mimetic creative practices. My comments are illustrated not only by my ethnographic screenshots, but by some papers in Hallam and Ingold’s volume. Karin Barber, for instance, disturbs their approach through a discussion of

244 G. Born the temporality of genre, which she addresses through the ethnographic example of a genre of oral praise poetry from the artistocratic court culture of Old Rwanda, igisigo, which ‘reputedly [dates] back fourteen generations’ and which has an ‘oblique and evasive style’ designed to be incomprehensible on early hearings. Rather than continually evolving or becoming, Barber’s question is how this genre endures, and her answer is that it entails ‘a kind of conspicuous consumption of creative energy’ such that its transmission ‘for long periods was simultaneously a cause, result and a sign of its immense prestige’ (Barber 2007: 37). With reference to the concept of entextualization (Urban 2001), Barber considers ‘how and why some kinds of cultural elements are more successful at being transmitted through time and space than others’. And in response she edges back towards Tarde: instead of a unified structure, culture should be conceived ‘more like a population, a congeries of … elements which move around, mutate, cluster … and are more or less successful in reproducing themselves’ (Barber 2007: 36). Process and becoming, then, do not so much resolve as position us at the threshold of a wide vista of questions of temporality. Rather than adopting an analytical ontology that focuses on becoming in general, we might more profitably enquire into the diverse temporal relations and categories and the variable trajectories and rates of change that are discernible, as well as their complex conjunction. It is as though the transition from Tarde to Bergson – who knew Tarde’s work and was his successor to a Chair at the Collège de France – is one of reduction or simplification, in the strict sense of the articulation of an analytics of temporality or of the variety of mechanisms of dynamic relation. For those interested in developing a post-positivist empiricism, in which ethnographic and historical research become the fecund grounds for conceptual invention, Bergson’s temporal ontology, when held up as methodology, is in certain very real ways less powerful than the Tardean legacy envisaged in this chapter.

Notes

 

1 I would like to thank Andrew Barry and Caroline Humphrey for helpful comments. 2 For the scientific basis of this theory, see Molnar-Szakacs and Overy (2006). 3 On post-positivist empiricism, see Born (2009: 108–9), which draws on Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (1987: vii–viii). 4 Here I disagree with Deleuze’s saddling of Tarde with the dialectic: ‘All of Tarde’s philosophy may be presented … as a dialectic of difference and repetition which founds the possibility of a microsociology upon a whole cosmology’ (Deleuze 1997: 314 n4). 5 Here they draw an analogy with Foucault (2000). 6 On Tarde’s method, see Andrew Barry’s paper in this volume. 7 For an analogous argument centred on Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts, including splitting and fragmentation, see Born (1998). 8 On time as plural, see also James and Mills (2005). 9 See, inter alia, Callon (1998); Strathern (2000); Born (2002, 2003a); Barry (2004). 10 The source was the American management theorist Moore (1995). 11 Callon (1998, 2002); Mackenzie (2001); Barry and Slater (2005); Mackenzie, Muniesa and Siu (2007). 12 The oracular analogy here is quite precise, as is the analogous existence of secondary elaboration around forecasting (Evans-Pritchard 1963).

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13 Born (1995: ch.10); and for a summarizing diagram of the matrix of oppositions, see Figure 14, p. 303. 14 See Born (1995: 279–300) for a fuller account of this material, summarized in Figure 13, p. 280. 15 For this analysis of temporalities, see Born (1995: ch. 11, esp. pp. 317–27); on mobile stasis, p. 326. 16 On multiple temporalities, see Born (2009, esp. pp. 97–110, esp. pp. 104–10). 17 For an example of invention in art-science, see the discussion of Beatriz da Costa’s public art work ‘PigeonBlog’ in Born and Barry (2010). 18 On genre theory and the analysis of temporalities, see Born (2009: 101–10). 19 Analysis of the different temporalities of genres is well developed in research on music, both popular and classical: see Straw (1991); and on classical music, Cook (1990). 20 On the question of the relation between phenomenological and cosmological perspectives on time, with reference to Ricoeur, see Osborne (1995: 47–55). 21 Interview with Garnet Hertz, Irvine, California, February 2006. 22 Interview with Antoinette Lafarge, Irvine, California, February 2006.

Bibliography

 

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16 Pass it on Towards a political economy of propensity Nigel Thrift

Introduction

 

This chapter will begin its course by taking up the work of Gabriel Tarde on the economy, but as a signpost to what is occurring in the present. In other words, I will use Tarde as a staging post in a longer and more involved history of what I will call propensity, understood jointly as both a tendency-cum-attraction and an innate implication, that is, as a disposition to behave in a certain way which is only partly in control of the agent. In other words, I want to produce an account of contemporary ‘societies’ in which the biological can be put on much the same footing as the cultural (if indeed, that is a distinction worth having). In turn, I want to argue that this blurred vision can become the foundation of a different kind of political economy – a political economy of propensity – which understands the promise of the economy in quite different ways, ways which are gradually starting to reflect back upon themselves and so produce new economic technologies. Let me start with two different but related examples. In the year 1597, when Yang Shicong, a Ming dynasty official, was born, no one in his home province of Shandong to the south of Beijing had tasted tobacco. Few Chinese anywhere had. In all likelihood tobacco was introduced into China from the Philippines. There were some tobacco smokers on the southeast coast, and the leaf had found its way to Beijing, where it appears on lists of purchases as a very expensive luxury. But Yang is at pains, in Collected Writings from Jade Hall (1643), to emphasize just how quickly the situation changed. By the time he arrived to take the examinations that would assure his progress up the bureaucratic hierarchy, smoking was well established in the capital. ‘Yang dates tobacco’s arrival in Beijing to the reign of Emperor Tianqi who was enthroned in 1621 and died six years later. Beijing farmers, he writes, have been cultivating tobacco for “the last twenty years”’ (Brook 2008: 121). The shift to ‘eating’ or ‘sucking’ smoke finally caught the attention of the authorities, who, predictably enough, tried to ban it. The Emperor Chongzhen was particularly concerned that land used for grain was being turned over to tobacco and in 1639 he decreed that anyone caught selling tobacco in Beijing would be decapitated. But in 1642 the ban was lifted: it was already too late. The habit had caught on, not least amongst the influential constituency of soldiers. Smoking

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had rapidly moved from an exotic custom to becoming the habit of large segments of the population, surrounded by all manner of paraphernalia and protocols and its own economic infrastructure. Indeed, China rapidly took on a reputation for being smoking-mad, which it more than justified in terms of overall levels of consumption and the elaborately performative nature of its smoking cultures (Brook 2008). Now fast forward to the present and to the other example: the case of modern-day financial markets.1 Such markets have, of course, been in operation for many centuries – indeed, Tarde (1902/2007: 630) commented upon them extensively in Economic Psychology, arguing that ‘the peaks and troughs of values in the stock market, unlike the oscillations of a barometer, could not even remotely be explained without considering their psychological causes: fits of hope or discouragement in the public, the propagation of a good or bad sensational story in the minds of speculators’. But their reach and complexity has expanded inordinately since Tarde’s time, allowing them undreamt of generative powers that precisely follow a logic of ‘mimetic rationality’ (Marazzi 2008). That expansion has taken place for four reasons. First, new socio-technical platforms have allowed price-fixing, market-making, and means of generating liquidity undreamt of by Tarde. Second, new kinds of complex product have become available, based upon these socio-technical platforms but with their own powers. Third, new regulatory frameworks have forced particular economic behaviours which have ultimately proved problematic, such as mark to market. Fourth – and this is the issue I want to concentrate on – there has been a powering up of communication. As a result of this general tendency, the role of the mediated conversation has moved centre stage. Similarly, the financial media have become actors in their own right and what was largely private, or at least conducted behind closed doors, has become largely public, as institutions of public intimacy born out of the concatenation of performance and the media have become general in the economy as dances of calculative affect (Roach 2007). Enhanced communication has allowed what Dawkins called the meme to become something like a reality in financial markets, markets which depend upon a pyramid of promises for their existence and which therefore generate a pervasive and probably inescapable degree of uncertainty, since ‘chance, ignorance, or knavery – in the jargon, uncertainty, adverse selection, or moral hazard – can intervene to prevent financing from being repaid’ (Rajan and Zingales cited in Wolf 2009: 13). Following Marazzi (2008), we can therefore say that the markets are based on herd behaviour which is dependent upon the information deficit of individual investors. This herd behaviour depends for its momentum on the swash and swirl of affect that is both the fuel and the result of the systematic uncertainty created by this deficit. This uncertainty allows prices to be continuously made and unmade, liquidity to be maintained and profits to be taken – until market sentiment turns and panic, caused by a ‘flight to safety by investors who know they do not know the riskiness of the assets they own’ (Wolf 2009: 25), sets in. As it now has. Here, then, are two textbook examples of imitative processes rapidly sweeping through populations; one fuelled by a substance with an addictive property,

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tobacco; the other by a series of conversations fuelled by hormones reacting within a mediated environment to produce something not dissimilar to addictive behaviour. It is Tarde’s work come to life in the most graphic kind of way. Tarde (1902, cited in Hughes 1961: 555) was, above all, interested in psychosocial processes of imitation, processes that were the result of mind working upon mind, of ‘mental states acting upon each other’, and the way that these ‘interspiritual’ states gradually evolved through minute changes without necessarily needing the push of any structure. For a long time, Tarde’s work fell out of fashion, not least because of its emphasis on process at the expense of the substantive results of social interaction.2 But now it is coming back into favour, fuelled by new work in disciplines as unlikely as cognitive science, archaeology, primatology, social medicine, and media studies in which renewed attention is being given to basic biological processes, like imitation, which do not assume such social intermediaries as ‘the development of a self or the possession of a theory of mind’ (Turner 2007: 367). My aim will be to use Tarde’s work to begin to construct that missing portion of political economy that might be understood as Keynes’s infamous ‘animal spirits’ – contagious spirits such as confidence, fear, ‘irrational’ exuberance, bad faith, corruption, confidence, a sense of fairness, and the very stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes, with all the push that they encapsulate. The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that these powerful psychosocial forces have come to imperil the wealth of nations today, whether we consider the overweening confidence of so many consumers so that house prices could continue to rise indefinitely or plummeting trust in the workings of capital markets (Akerlof and Shiller 2009). Yet, until recently, only a very few commentators – Mill, Bagehot, Pigou, Keynes – have explicitly considered these forces as anything other than epiphenomenal to the real business of economy and, even then, they are often consigned to what is quite literally a spirit world outside the bounds of normal economic calculation. Tarde was different. For him, there was no concealing ‘under abstractions such as credit, service and work, the sensations and feelings underlying them’ (Tarde 1902/2007: 630). This chapter is in two main parts. I will commence by trying to etch the main components of mimetic rationality and radiation as we might now understand them, with another one hundred years of scientific knowledge to hand. That will involve the consideration of four different biological-cultural moments: imitation and neurological processes of mirroring more generally; what might be termed short-term genetic change; what can be called the to and fro of hormonal swashes; and what might be identified as the humours that arise from particular kinds of material culture. I will then turn to two other aspects of Tarde’s work that can be updated with the benefit of historical hindsight, namely the growing importance of what I will call ‘premediation’ and how it is possible to understand the gradual build-up of small changes into something significant without the benefit of a guiding hand. The second part of the chapter then moves on to consider how aspects of the economy, which were considered as without the sphere of economic calculation, are gradually being brought within through the increasing interest of business and economics in things biological. I will show how the first glimmerings of this

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interest are turning into an attempt to produce a world in which semi-conscious action can be put up for sale, so sealing Tarde’s account in practice as well as theory. Then the final part of the chapter provides some brief conclusions on what I call the political economy of propensity.

Understanding the bio-social constitution of human being

 

Let me begin this section of the chapter by addressing the mutual constitution of the ‘social’ and the ‘biological’. For a long time, the categories of the social and the biological have bedevilled rational analysis of human cultures, producing no-go zones which are only just beginning to crumble. On the one side have stood the guardians of ‘causes understood as “social” (Freese 2008: S3), on the other side have stood the guardians of biological causes, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Indeed, the two sides are often actively opposed to each other. Worse than the obstinacy of the distinction has been the ways in which it has disallowed research into areas of human experience which can only be explained by appealing across the divide: affects like violence, or fear, for example. Tarde is interesting precisely because, as a writer who at least acknowledged Darwin,3 he sought models which would incorporate both domains. This he did by privileging ‘conversation’, understood not just as a linguistic process but as something much broader, taking in gesture and other forms of interaction, for ‘if, among the actions from which opinion results, one seeks the most general and constant, one perceives easily that it is this elementary social relation … which has been most completely ignored by sociologists’ (Tarde 1902, cited in Hughes 1961: 556).4 Key to this great science of communication, in which ‘symbolic networks provide a fourth dimension of heredity and evolution’ (Jablonka and Lamb 2005: 201), were models of semi-conscious imitation which, by Tarde’s day, already had a long history,5 models which could explain the dynamics of change. But Tarde was no mere diffusionist. He well understood that ‘the needs and labours of men do not simply repeat themselves; they are often opposed, and more often adapted. It is on condition of being adapted to one another that they succeed in repeating themselves’ (Tarde 1902/2007: 627). In other words, each iterative act of imitation was more likely than not to undergo adaptation. Like one of his forebears, Ravaisson (1838/2008), Tarde never considered habit as a fixed repetition but as a general disposition which permits initiative.6 The importance of models of semi-conscious imitation of the kind that Tarde espoused has been confirmed by subsequent work in the area of what might be called ‘cultural biology’, work that is dependent on the discovery of the prominence of short-term and comparatively rapid biological change which is clearly connected to and indeed is part and parcel of cultural change. Habit, if you like, is gradually laid down as biology. This change can be found in four areas that Tarde’s work can be seen as prefiguring, each of which I will address in turn. These are changes in neurophysiology, in genetic make-up, in hormonal balance, and in tool use. Work on such changes already begins to provide something of an extension to Tarde’s thinking in its own right. I will then continue to update Tarde by considering two other issues, namely the rise of what I will call ‘premediation’, the process

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by which the media have tapped into semi-conscious processes of imitation and amplified them in various ways, and how the gradual build-up of small changes produces large changes without there necessarily having to be any large structure to contain and guide the process. Let me begin, then, with habit, understood as both culture and biology. My first moment is, not surprisingly, Tarde’s subconscious processes of neurophysiological imitation. These processes are now better understood than ever before and I will therefore simply reprise the summary I gave first in Thrift (2007). We now know that the bulk of what we understand as a person is ‘mostly unconscious, or spontaneously and intrinsically generated brain activity’ (Stafford 2008: 4) which is continuously active.7 Though we may not want to go quite as far as Metzinger (2003: 1) in arguing that ‘no such things as selves exist in the world’, only the ‘shaded surfaces’ of a continuous process of self-modelling (see Thrift 2007), still we now realize that we are founded on a neurodynamics which is the result of evolutionary developments that mean we experience the world in very particular ways. Thus, we now comprehend that human beings are imitative animals – depending on what is meant by imitation, of course. Human beings subconsciously mirror each other’s actions in a constant iterative ballet of not-quite duplication, that rolls what we call society over but which also allows room for the vagaries of accident and the necessities of improvisation, just as did Aquinas’s original notion of habitus signifying a durable characteristic that could therefore become the foundation of virtue (Davies 2002). Imitation takes place through media, such as conversation and gesture, but can be boosted and extended by all manner of technologies, such as print and now the various new visual media. Thus, what we can see is a constant adaptive creep that has its own momentum and cannot be catalogued as a social category or force since it is happening continuously, as a background of contagion which acts equally as a foreground. The contagion includes all manner of psychosocial states. For example, recent research (see the summary in Steptoe and Diaz Roux 2009) suggests that even a condition like happiness (and, by implication, important determinants of health and well-being) may be contagious, travelling via particular social connections in ways which seem to be independent of factors like socioeconomic status. The importance of imitation has only been underlined by the discovery of mirror neurons which fire at the perception of another’s actions – with no motor actions involved at all. This discovery confirms this line of thinking in the way that it produces a plausible neurophysiological explanation for the means by which the existence of the other is etched into the brain so that we are able to intuit what the other is thinking – we are able to ‘mindread’ – not only because we see others’ emotions but because we share them (Rizzolati and Sininaglia 2008; Iacoboni 2008). Through the template of movements we have built up, which activates particular muscles and provides us with particular movement properties, we learn not just to identify but to anticipate; ‘our brains are capable of mirroring the deepest aspects of the minds of others, even at the fine-grained level of a single cell’ (Iacoboni 2008: 34). In other words, to see others perform is to perform ourselves: ‘we reciprocally paint our affective lives inside one another’ (Stafford 2008: 76). For

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example, a subset of the cells in our brains fires ‘when an individual kicks a soccer ball, hears a ball being kicked, and even just says or hears the word “kick” …’ (Iacoboni 2008: 12). Perception, cognition and action do not therefore occupy discrete zones. Indeed, such descriptions of behaviour are suspect when perception and motor functions occupy the same space. In other words, the dictates of phenomenology find a neurophysiological anchorage, an insight now being followed up by all manner of investigators. In turn, imitation is understood as at the root of what it means to be human. Moving well beyond the kind of stimulus enhancement routinely observed in animals, imitation is revealed as a high-order evolutionary construct, not least because it has been shown that mirror cells can acquire new properties and therefore can fuel emergent behaviours: what fundamentally distinguishes humans from animals is not language, but the capacity to imitate and this ability to imitate is innate: babies as young as 41 minutes have been shown to imitate. In other words, imitation provides a novel evolutionary pathway for learning. Babies do not learn to imitate, they learn by imitating, and imitation is the prelude to and facilitator of verbal communication. Indeed, imitation is probably even more important than Tarde thought it to be, not least because the imitative faculty underlies the empathy which human beings feel for each other. In other words, imitation is the condition of being human. Put another way:

 

These [scientific] discoveries transform empathy, taking the attitude of the other, and imitation, from a vague and dubious phenomenon that can be observed and described but not explained, into something that can be explained in terms of brain processes. This on the one hand validates them – especially against the scepticism of positivists about such things as empathic understanding – but on the other hand forces us to ask some serious questions about brain processes and about the ways in which our received descriptions of phenomenon, such as taking the attitude of the other, do not match up with the neuronal evidence. (Turner 2007: 367) But there is something else that Tarde did not really foresee. There is no reason to think that our imitative faculty will just stand still, not least because the human brain is still evolving. Nor can imitation be understood as just relying on imitative capacities and capabilities; the rest of the brain function also needs to be taken into account, partly because the most relevant trend in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens is a rapid increase in brain size and complexity and there is no reason to think that it is not continuing in present-day humans: after all, there is no reason to think that evolution stops at the neck or that, more generally, evolution suddenly ground to a halt when human beings came on the scene – indeed, it may even be that it is speeding up. In other words, there is no completed human being. One way of approaching this question of current evolutionary change is through genetics (Bearman 2008); after all, many human characteristics which

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are conventionally regarded as social have been found to have substantial genetic heritability (see Table 1 in Freese 2008). If a gene has evolved adaptively in the making of the human species, there seems no obvious reason why it will not continue to undergo adaptive evolution after the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Indeed, by analysing human polymorphism patterns, some evidence is emerging that certain ‘humanness’ genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans. Of particular interest are the ASPM and Microcephalin genes. In each of these two genes, a new sequence variant has arisen in the recent past of human history, and has since swept to exceptionally high frequency around the world, presumably due to strong positive selection (Linden 2007). The exact fitness advantage conferred by these new variants is not yet known. However, given the highly specific function of ASPM and Microcephalin in regulating brain size and also given their history of intense adaptive evolution in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that these new variants may improve some aspect of brain function. Work is currently under way to test this hypothesis and the preliminary findings suggest the tantalizing possibility that the human brain is still evolving, in the sense that it is still undergoing adaptive change, through plodding but detectable increases in brain size. One thing Tarde did foresee, however, was the importance of fugue. Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by states such as hypnotic trances, sleep, sleepwalking, and night terrors, and all the other ‘spiritual’ conditions in which the social vocabulary of agency, inner worlds and outer worlds breaks down and is unable to be restored because of the prepersonal ‘biological’ nature of such moments (Lee 2008). Famously, Tarde wrote of imitation as though it could be likened to somnambulism, and of a resultant somnambulist society. But states of fugue have increasingly come back into scientific notice and as they have done so the resultant research has thrown down some challenges to Tarde’s account. Take the case of sleep. Increasingly, NREM sleep, which, incidentally, is the phase of sleep in which sleepwalking occurs, is understood as an evolutionary phenomenon, a way of producing enforced inactivity during periods when being inactive is the optimal strategy,8 as well as reducing the requirement for food. NREM sleep is not so much recuperative as a mechanism to ensure that animals stay still when they have nothing better to do. Such a theory also explains why babies sleep so much: there is not much else they can do with their time (Martin, 2002). But REM sleep, a universal characteristic of all large-brained animals which makes up 20 to 25 per cent of sleep in mature human adults (and much more in babies), is a very different matter indeed. There the chief function seems to be maintaining the brain in some way; the resting body is put to use. There is considerable evidence that REM sleep is chiefly concerned with learning, and most particularly the consolidation of memory (for example, the rehearsing of experiences from earlier in the day), and also with the regulation of mood (Linden 2007). Dreams process the whole of cognition, and most especially emotion,9 into narratives that allow distant associations and insights which would be much more difficult to make within the continuous sensory bombardment of everyday life: they are ‘faulty’ awakenings (Horne 2006). In other words, dreams involve what might be called ‘worlding’,

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but as the shaping of a highly selective and distorted model of the world in which some elements of reality are systematically over-represented while others are under-represented. What’s most important about dreaming is that it allows you to experience a world where the normal waking rules don’t apply, where causality and rational thought and our core cognitive schemas (people don’t transform or merge, places should be constant, gravity always operates, and so forth) melt away in the face of bizarre and illogical stories. And, while you dream, you accept these stories as they unfold. Essentially the experience of narrative dreams allows you to imagine explanations and structures that exist outside of your waking perception of the natural world. In your waking life you may embrace the distorted structures of the dream world or you may be a hard-headed rationalist, or you may blend the two (as most of us do), but in all cases the experience of dreaming has thrown back the curtain and allowed you to imagine a world where fundamentally different rules apply. (Linden 2007: 220)

 

The point is that these REM states are not so much unconscious as semi-conscious acts of redescription – Tarde’s exact description of much of human life. But the model of somnambulism that Tarde adopted as a description of semi-consciousness is not a good one, since it suggests NREM automata with only a limited repertoire of behaviour. However, the example of REM sleep shows that human beings are actually wired to produce alternate worlds, to unward rather than toward, as a matter of course (Tallis 2008). The brain can create a ‘virtual reality’ of a kind (Hobson 2002).10 Thus, the language of worlding may well hold at the deepest level. A second moment follows, namely short-term genetic change, on the same timeframe as cultural change. The evidence for this proposition is steadily increasing too. There are, of course, famous cases of the progress of genetic adaptive evolution in the historical short term. The case of the spread of lactose tolerance comes to mind, a change which happened about 8000 years ago, sufficiently recently that many populations still do not have the gene: one in fifty Swedes, for example, but nine out of ten Asian Americans. So does the ambiguous case of the sickle cell trait as a response to malaria. But more recent, admittedly controversial, studies suggest that up to 10 per cent of the human genome may be evolving at the maximum possible rate – far faster than at any other time in history. If these studies prove to be accurate, then it may be that ‘we invented agriculture, started eating different food, and began dwelling in cities. Our numbers swelled, our world changed, and our DNA is still catching up’ (Phelan 2008: 66). What seems likely is that changes to environment (the change from hunter-gathering to more sedentary existences), to diet (the corresponding shift to less diverse food sources), and to the susceptibility to disease (occasioned by larger, more concentrated populations) have produced new genetic vectors. What would be the most interesting finding would be to show that intelligence is still being selected for. There are some studies that very

256 N. Thrift tentatively seem to suggest that this may be so. Others suggest that qualities such as emotionality are still evolving. What does seem certain is that ‘culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind’ (Phelan 2008: 68). Once the brain gets to a certain level, it permits an explosion of cultures, which in turn condition the brain. Perhaps we can evolve into our successors before we destroy ourselves – or perhaps not. A third moment is in the history of brain–body chemistry and especially the interaction between hormones, psychotropic mechanisms,11 and material cultures. After all, in everyday life we are constantly altering our brain–body chemistry. This is the neurohistorical vision that Daniel Smail (2008: 157–8) has recently conjured up.

 

In everyday life, we do many things that alter our moods and feelings on a regular basis. These alterations are reflected in constantly changing levels of chemical messengers in our tissues and in our brains. In principle, an omniscient observer of human moods should be able to track these changes, like a technician in a recording studio facing an array of dancing meters. Each meter on the board would register a different neurochemical: serotonin, dopamine, all the androgens and oestrogens, and dozens of others besides. Most bars, as they rise and fall, would follow a fairly slow rhythm, measured on the order of hours, days, or even weeks. A few, such as those registering epinephrine, norepinephrine, or corticotrophin-releasing hormone, would occasionally show rapid spikes and dips, corresponding to the sudden shocks or flashes of rage we experience from time to time. With enough study, patterns would emerge: of the Wall Street trader, say, whose testosterone takes a beating in a bear market and is restored by visits to sex shops. Of the teenager, whose frenetic spikes and dips show as much variation in a week as an older and wiser person would experience in several months. Of whole groups whose levels of dopamine or serotonin, averaged across a month, are distinctly higher than those of other, more favoured groups. Studies like this might show, in fact have shown, how social privilege, a product of cultural patterns and historical trends, correlates strongly with levels of stress hormones. The array of meters might also reveal how the neurotransmitters and hormones present in our bodies, in theory, could unite to produce an infinite range of different moods and feelings. As a practical matter, however, we soon learn to recognise the familiarity of certain combinations, certain chords, both in ourselves and in others. Our cultures have found it convenient to assign names to these common chords: joy, depression, sadness, anticipation. Your moods and feelings may be tinted with a slightly different range of combinations than mine, and we gossip about the variations so as to calibrate our mood-descriptions more closely to the feelings we actually have. In some cases, we may find that we have nothing to share whatever, and that is where we reach the limits of empathy. Our bodies, by virtue of the genomes they carry, are capable of providing us with a whole palette of sounds. But it is our own life histories, the variations between the alleles we carry,

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and, perhaps above all, the cultures we live in that write the actual music. In other words, history can be seen as the swash of hormones which constantly operate on what are remarkably plastic brain synapses through the medium of cultural amplifiers like caffeine, sentimental novels, pornographic works, and all manner of consumer goods. Thus Smail writes of the constant generation of neurophysiological ecosystems as ‘a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways’ (Smail 2008: 155). Like Hawks, Smail cites the extreme changes that took place in the Neolithic – the expansion in calories available for human consumption, the domestication of animals, new more sedentary lifestyles, and the growing density of human settlement, as central to the contemporary ecosystem. But equally, he is willing to countenance all kinds of other shorter-run biological-cultural ecosystems, each with their own hormonal ways of going on. For example, in the passage above, he points to the financial markets as being awash with hormones. Indeed, recent research suggests that there is something in this: the waves of irrational exuberance and pessimism that routinely destabilize the markets may be driven by naturally produced steroid hormones that have mildly addictive effects. With receptors in almost every nucleated cell of the body, steroids like testosterone and cortisol affect the behaviour displayed in risk-taking situations. Thus, Coates and Herbert (2007) found that a male trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. They suggest that higher testosterone levels may contribute to economic return while cortisol is increased by risk. Elevated levels of steroids may even shift risk preferences.12 A fourth moment lies in material culture, which now becomes something akin to an all-enveloping miasma as technological objects are no longer just tools but means of grounding (Tresch 2007). Whereas the mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the brain and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of the brain’s mental capacity, most material culture approaches now posit an extended and distributed mind, in which material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but a part of it’s functioning: ‘objects also make the mind’, laying ‘down tracks that affectively activate our eyes and mind … [and] … stamp us with the marks and textures of the phenomenal world’ (Stafford 2008: 9, 11). Think, for example, of the interaction between hand, brain and object in which evolution has responded to the environment by producing a more and more complex brain architecture that can cope with reaching out and grasping what is to hand, and has coevally produced more and more complex models of the hand which can form brain and world in myriad ways (Thrift 2007). It follows that, if material culture is an extension of human cognition, then it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence. Tarde, being interested in ‘inter-spiritual’ contagion, tended to neglect the influence of the technical environment as a crucial determinant of cognition. Take the case of the media. It is true that Tarde well understood the importance of the print media of the time as a determinant of contagion. But subsequent developments have made the importance of the media much clearer. That development

258 N. Thrift has taken place on a number of levels, all of them precipitated by the internet to a greater or lesser extent. The first is the identification of populations. Indeed, the spread of the internet has produced both a new medium and a means of getting much closer to what Tarde was trying to study (Latour 2007) through developments such as geodemographics, geographical information systems, and data mining. The second development results from the fact that these new forms of demographic have also produced the means of reflecting on medium and message in a concerted manner from everyday metrics like hits, through social networking sites to the ubiquitous website and blog – with clear and obvious consequences, not least for participants and organizations who are increasingly able to see and measure their own influence. Thus, a new source of reflexivity has become available. The third development has been the addition of locative technologies allowing both data acquisition and reflexivity to move with the agent, producing all kinds of new possibilities. In turn, and in aggregate, these three developments have produced an enhanced power to propagate psychosocial forces. Kellaway (2009) points to precisely this quality when she discusses the current recession:

 

This is our first experience of recession in the internet age … You could say that the internet makes the recession more bearable as there are all those networks to help people get jobs and there is Ebay for buying things second-hand. Yet such things are trivial compared to what the internet is doing to our confidence. The internet has created a global psyche. The web has mentally joined us at the hip, so we can no longer put our heads in the sand … Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world’s economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours and yours become mine. On the internet, a trouble shared is not a trouble halved. It is a trouble needlessly multiplied all over the world … This would not matter so much if it were not for the fact that confidence is the medicine that cures the recession: and all this sharing of bad news leaves one with no confidence at all. If I had been alive during the last comparable recession, over 60 years ago, I would have limited my news injection to reading The Times front page every morning. In those days it had a front page given over not to big scary headlines, but to small classified ads. The news inside would probably have left me a little depressed over breakfast, but I would have had the rest of the day to recover my equanimity. (Kellaway 2009: 12) The point is that something like memetics has become a practical possibility as communication systems have broadened and deepened. The language of memes, one of those terms that says both something and nothing, has not been a good one, I think. It has flattened analysis by positing a cultural equivalent of a genetic engine in ways which Tarde would never have allowed (Jahoda 2002). It may be marginally

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useful as an expression of what is attempting to come into existence. But, no more than that. There is, in any case, an alternative – one that arises from within the study of the media. Niklas Luhmann was known for his study of communication, but he also applied this interest, notably in his Zettelkasten system, an index card reference system which was used to map out ideas, thoughts and theories. The Zettelkasten system allowed Luhmann to think about society as a system of communication rather than individuals or actions, and as a series of multiple, independent and parallel subsystems dividing in non-linear and non-hierarchical ways. In effect, Luhmann had invented hypertext of the kind now found structuring the world wide web, in which no text is more important than any other, and the entries refer to each other by links. From this experience, Luhmann fashioned an autopoietic theory of communication which replaced the delicious certainty of the notion of goal-oriented action with something closer to the reference system of poetry, in which the system ‘gives itself priority over all external reference, but only to make itself seem ambiguous’ (Luhmann 1998: 21). Such systems provide a practical means by which memes can spread since there are no barriers of hierarchy to constrain them. To summarize, culture is gradually biologically aggregated and embedded as a series of temporal scales. The process of aggregation and embedding can be short-term as in the to and fro of imitative rays and their accompanying hormonal reactions. It can be longer-term as in practices which bring various cultural actions together which, if taught over a long period, can produce neural grooves in the brain as a normal part of development. It can be longer-term again, as in the invention of new pharmacopeias like those that came together in eighteenth-century Europe, or drastic material rearrangements like agriculture (Smail 2008). And it can be very long term, as in the interaction between the structure of the brain, and the body more generally, and genes. But note that, in each case, the interaction between what was formerly termed the biological and the social is often all but immediate, given the timeframe within which particular biological processes work. Indeed, we can now see the way in which particular economies can have biological effects in what, in evolutionary terms, is short order. Take just the period after speciation and the longest term of these biological processes – the interaction between culture and genes. Thus the great settlement of the Neolithic is now being inscribed in our bodies at the genetic scale. Our bodies are being born with its sedentarist genetic imprint (Gamble 2007; Renfrew 2008). The great age of globalization is likely to achieve something similar because of the unparalleled degree of genetic mixing in large populations, though these effects are unlikely to be seen and felt for many hundreds of years (Bayart 2007). Finally, the imprint of the economies of the present is registering in our bodies in all kinds of ways and may well in time provide genetic shortcuts as a saleable commodity. But, more generally, and as this example shows, it is possible that material culture is often acting as a surrogate for genetic change. Changes that would have taken place biologically are now taking place through technical means. I will now move to my second aspect: it has become increasingly clear that subconscious processes of imitation can be directed, most particularly by processes of what might be called ‘premediation’. Tarde pointed to the power of imitative pro-

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cesses in the mediated environments he recognised at the time, such as newspapers and markets. But too often he tended to see these mediated processes as spreading like wildfire, like mobs all but out of control, or as currents pushing up against each other in a fluid dynamics in which ascendancy could be all but accidental. However, there are numerous examples of ways in which imitative processes can be consciously and carefully steered. One on which considerable work has been carried out is democracy as it is practiced in a media age (Thrift 2007). Here we find that getting people to vote in particular ways through the appliance of mediated narrative framings which have taken on their own force has become something much closer to a science than an art. For example, Lakoff (2008) argues that modern political consultants now understand enough of the dynamics of imitative processes and brain–body chemistry to be able to make reasonably predictable interventions in the political unconscious of the democratic political process. They can construct ‘neural bindings’ which frame events in particular ways, narratives of national life that work as part of the unconscious as biases to understand the world in particular ways, and to be susceptible to that call on them.13 The result is that it is possible to tug on the behaviour of voters by transferring these narratives into the political domain as forms of habitual response which the individual voter is plainly susceptible to. For example, the narrative of celebrity, which has been a staple of many popular cultures since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and no doubt before, is transferred into politics, producing responses which arise out of a potent combination of technology and genre, imitation and hormone. One way in which we can approach these kinds of developments in simultaneous measurement and influence is through Tarde’s own writings in Economic Psychology on ‘glory’. For Tarde (1902/ 2007: 618, 619), not only can we think of a division of labour and a division of riches but also of a division of glories: ‘an ever-growing multiplicity and difference of celebrities and notorieties’ buoyed up by persistent media attention.14 What counts as glory will vary from culture to culture, of course. The accent might be on the doings of musicians or merchants – or both. But what is clear is that ‘the most intoxicating glory began as the fanatical, impassioned and devoted admiration of a small group of partisans, of acolytes gathered in a narrow chapel; it ended up as the relatively cold – and never truly devoted – acclamation of a dispersed and immense public, which does not know its hero personally’. In turn, such musings can be understood as part of a more general process of what Agamben (2007) calls ‘glorification’, a process which has religious overtones and which can be seen flowing over into the economy. Thus, Agamben argues that the word oikonomia is itself religious in origin and that a providential understanding of the economy still continues, albeit honoured in the breach. The trace of a theologically founded ordering of the world can still be detected even though the expansion and intensification of capitalism has become an autopoietic mechanism with no soul, no sovereign, no law. Without having to subscribe to all of Agamben’s theses, it is worth thinking about how the feverish work of glorification of a non-existent deity has continued in the economy, even as the economy seems to become ever more technical, through the use of the media as both ceremonial and liturgical builders of reality: ‘If the role of the media is so

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important in modern democracies, it is not only because they allow [us] to control and to govern public opinion, but also because they administer and dispense Glory: that doxa, that acclamatory element of power, that seems to have disappeared in modern times’ (Agamben 2007: 11). In other words, the economy can have all kinds of richness inserted in it by these media ferrymen, and many of these will operate at the semi-conscious or unconscious level. Indeed, Tarde thought that it would be possible to develop a ‘gloriometer’ that would be able to measure admiration and notoriety (Hughes 1961), using techniques not so far removed from the kinds of network analyses now routinely performed on the web. A third aspect is simply the importance of small changes that cumulatively produce large changes, on the model of evolution. Famously, Tarde wanted to set up experiments in which he and a network of correspondents would trace out these small changes, bit by bit (Barry and Thrift 2007), showing the way that they produced an emergent drift in particular directions without there being any centrally located, controlling agency. This thinking has migrated into modern social thought as a virtual dimension. Here is Deleuze, drawing on Tarde: The actualisation of the virtual … always takes place by difference, divergence or differentiation. Actualisation breaks with resemblance no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualisation or differentiation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any pre-existing possibility. (Deleuze 1994: 178–9)

 

Although this kind of vision has often been seen as unusual, even bizarre, in cultures like those of the West which depend on abstract modelling of ideals which are then applied as goals, it is the kind of view of social change which has been shared by a number of cultures. Take the culture of classical China. François Jullien (2009) has argued that this culture followed a quite different course, one which stressed responding to the vagaries of the situation as constituting an art of living in itself. In such an art, the trick is to detect favourable factors in a situation which allows the agent to be carried forwards. The agent keys into the momentum of the situation and surfs its possibilities. The agent is not surrounded by a situation which (s)he attempts to control but, rather, weaves in and out of it, detecting factors that display promise and putting them to work, exploiting them as they become available, accepting the situation when they are not. Each situation has a potential which can be harvested: the ‘aim’ of Western styles of thought is dispersed and replaced by something much more diffuse and silent which is never completed but forms part of an endless tactical adjustment. This is the logic of propensity rather than purpose and it seems to me to fit this strand of Tarde’s work much more exactly. The idea is to conform to propensity and support it, not to guide but to ‘second’: as Laoxi puts it, to ‘help what comes of its own doing’. This is not, it needs to be stressed, either non-action or passivity. Rather, it is the work of aiding and abetting certain aspects of continual transformation, strategically bending process so that it ‘ripens’ in certain directions rather than others (Jullien 2009).

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Capitalism tracks Tarde The preceding section has been a report back from the academic world. But what is interesting is how these developments are being replicated in the world of business and economics, sometimes using exactly the same inspirations for fuel. Let us examine some of the developments aimed at maximizing ‘mindshare’ by inducing particular habits of buying, but with one caveat. These developments are at an early stage. They usually come laden with hyperbole in the manner of many management books – what Tallis (2008) calls ‘overstanding’ in contrast to understanding. But that is no reason to believe that they can therefore have no grip. Behind the hyperbole, a series of practical experiments continue to allow this kind of thinking to inch forward and to begin to produce prescriptions that work, not least, of course, because they begin to change how the world is thought to turn up – through a combination of rhetoric, new technologies and practical shortcuts – all against a background of a capitalism which is increasingly rooted in the exercise of biopower and of populations through which discourses circulate and which are increasingly medicalized, partly as a result of capitalism’s ‘biologization’ (Esposito 2008). Indeed, in Economic Psychology, Tarde can be seen as prophesying their arrival when he argues that, The tendency to mathematize economic science and the tendency to psychologize it, far from being irreconcilables, ought rather, in my view, to support each other. In a statistics, reformed and better understood – in a statistics penetrated by interpsychological spirit, I see a possible and even an easy conciliation of these two apparently divergent tendencies. (Tarde 1902 cited in Hughes 1961: 558)

 

Three developments are producing what might be termed a ‘capitalist meteorology’, an atmospherics dependent upon unpacking what might be called the simple mechanics of sociality, a mechanics that operates at the intersection between the biological and the cultural, understanding that the basic building blocks of sociality are genetically encoded and neurally etched (for example, certain facial expressions formative of strong emotions do seem to be genetically inbuilt) but that these building blocks are still open to all kinds of operation. Primed by all the work on social networks in business throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, by the work on ‘sensory brands’ and allied work on brands as emotional touchstones in the 2000s, as well as all the work on redefining work both to make it more satisfying and to harness the potential of the whole of the body, which dates from at least the 1950s but has undergone a renaissance in recent years, this variant of capitalism has now turned to cognitive science in particular, and biology in general, for further inspiration with the firm intent of producing what Lindstrom (2008: 6), with tongue only partially in cheek, calls ‘buy-ology’ – ‘the key to truly and completely understanding the thoughts, feelings, motivations, needs, and desires of consumers, of all of us’. And this is not an insignificant problem for business – after all, eight out of ten product launches in the United States fail, even more in countries like Japan. Put another way, business is intent on the construction of gloriometers.

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The first of these developments is the rise of what might be termed neuro-marketing. Here the intention is clearly to sell more goods by using the latest techniques and technologies of cognitive science. Focus groups, surveys, and the like, are replaced by experimental techniques from cognitive science such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional diffuse optical tomography, and magneto-encephalography (MEG) in order to trace out correlations between brain activity and propensity to buy. Notwithstanding caveats and cautions (see Zaltman 2008), and (brief) moments of ethical awareness, the aim is clear: to ‘unlock the innermost secrets of the consumer’s mind’ (The Economist 2008: 109)15 and this development has already led to the use of ‘decoy items’ and other means of making the consumer happier in stores and therefore more likely to make a purchase. Although in its infancy, the literature on reading (and, more to the point, re-engineering) the mind of the market has produced some interesting results: for example, fragrance and sound produce more powerful reactions than brand logos, and brands associated with fragrance and sound can produce very powerful reactions; strong brand icons code for the selfsame areas of the brain as religious experience; brands must play an integral part in the narratives of television programmes, that is they are only effective if a credible part of the world is being conjured up; images associated with cigarette brands may produce more craving than the brands themselves and many anti-cigarette warnings actually seem to stimulate smoking; objects like i-pods can be designed to simulate mimetic rays; smiling faces really do sell goods, subliminal advertising does work, the most effective advertising tries to initiate small social rituals, and so on (Lindstrom 2008; Zaltman 2008). The trick has now become to understand how specific neural and endocrine agents interact, for example, how mirror neurons and dopamine (one of the most addictive brain chemicals) affect self-perception and socially held emotions, and, in turn, produce greater susceptibility. The talk is not just of sensory branding but of worlding. The intent is, by means of selection and integration, to operate in the semi-conscious domain. The goal is profit. The second development is the study of imitation, particularly through technologies that recognize faces and gestures. Using image recognition software, the study of footage from cameras can be analysed in order to track the unconscious emotional reactions of consumers. Cues from the face and gestures are becoming much more easily read for ‘honest signals’ that facilitate this tracking. I have already considered the face in other papers (Thrift 2007, 2008). Here I will look at gesture and body movement cues more generally. Consistency is increasing all the time in the analysis of gesture and body movement: ‘we need to look for signals that are processed unconsciously, or that are otherwise uncontrollable, before we can count them as honest’ (Pentland 2008: 4). Historically akin to the physiognomic systems of the eighteenth century, these shortcut signals are usually counted as of four kinds, each of which corresponds to a distinct brain function: influence, the degree of influence one person has over another, usually measured by the extent to which one person’s speech or bodily activity pattern becomes entrained to the other’s (attention and ordering systems); mimicry, the extent to which one person copies another during an interaction, measured by, for example, nodding heads

264 N. Thrift

 

(cortical mirror neurons); activity, where increased activity is usually a sign of interest and excitement, measured by activity levels (autonomic nervous system); and consistency of emphasis and timing, where many different thoughts and emotions usually lead to movements becoming jerky and uneven, as measured by bodily movement (integration of action sequence control). Tiny temporal and spatial differences, which are now measurable, can predict and influence future behaviour.16 For example, imitation of an agent very often leads to feelings of trust, which means that the agent is likely to imitate them in a loop of ‘self-inflicted brainwashing’ that many businesses are feeling more and more confident they can set up. These effects can be extraordinarily simple: ‘when experimenters ask people to move their heads up and down while listening to a sales pitch or seeing a consumer product, the people end up liking the pitch or product more, and they are more likely to buy it’ (Pentland 2008: 41). The third development is the greater and greater understanding of hormonal swashes and how to influence them through the media. This dimension is probably the most advanced in that it has been a dream of business at least since the 1950s. The intent is clear – to identify susceptible populations and to render them open to suggestion. That involves a series of techniques which allow the susceptibility of populations to be described and worked upon. To begin with, contemporary information technology allows populations to be gathered up and monitored in ways heretofore impossible, for example, through emotional stance, with the result that it increasingly becomes possible to track mimetic rays. The rise of analytics premised on the mining of very large and continuously updated data sets allows ‘prediction competition’ to become general (Ayres 2008; Davenport and Harris 2008). Then, through the internet and various mobile technologies, it becomes possible to rapidly feed information and recommendations to these populations, producing a means of trading on those susceptibilities that have been identified. Finally, it also becomes possible to enter into something like an individualized dialogue with members of these populations, so that they feed back their reactions, both producing more information on their susceptibilities, and new triggers. In extremis, they may well produce their own new and innovative variants which can themselves become the basis of new business. In other words, an era of permanent survey of populations replaces the fractured surveys of ‘samples’ that used to be king (Savage and Burrows 2007), survey which is active, able to initiate, modulate, even pre-empt. These kinds of developments in the wild go hand in hand with developments in the academic world. Indeed, the links seem to have become ever closer. Consider first the case of sociology and the career of Duncan Watts, a quantitative sociologist of networks, who became well known through his book Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age. Several degrees removed, Watts’s work on social influence and contagion bears some relation to Tarde’s work and it has been influential in business as well as academe. Indeed, in 2007, Watts moved to Yahoo as a Principal Research Scientist, working on the determinants of success in cultural markets.17 Then take the related case of Marc Davis, a UC Berkeley computer scientist-cum-literary theorist, who since 2006 has also worked for Yahoo. His brief has been to design networks that use mobile media metadata to achieve

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breakthroughs in context-aware face and place recognition, so producing maps that are simultaneously social networks in that they represent where, when, and by whom data is created, shared, and recombined (Davis 2008). But, not surprisingly, it is economics that has become the best barometer of interchange. Thus, the rise of behavioural economics – the marriage of economics with the procedures of experimental psychology – since the 1990s and before has been meteoric and threatens to convert economics into a ‘romantic economics’ (Bronk 2009: 297), which insists that only by employing ‘many (more or less) systematic forms of analysis … can we hope to capture the multivalence of socio-economic reality’. In turn that rise has primed the ground for the ascent of neuroeconomics: ‘the biological science of making choices’ (Politser 2008: 3). Neuroeconomics holds out the prospect of using knowledge of the brain to rework microeconomic theory, and it recognizes the full range of human abilities and constraints in this domain, including feelings. This field has already reached a second generation of research, one in which much more sophisticated experimental techniques (single neuron recordings, functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencelography, evoked signals in the electroencephalogram, positron emission tomography, measures of biochemical metabolites, etc.) are combined with more sophisticated models and experimental procedures that can interrogate many different kinds of populations. Of course, it would be foolish to say that, as yet, neuroeconomics constitutes a coherent body of knowledge, not least because of the sheer heterogeneity of subjects, models, definitions, measures and tasks to be found in the literature and the undoubted difficulty of matching specific neural circuits to particular neuroeconomic parameters. Equally, there is no such thing as a neuroepidemiology of decision-making which searches out different kinds of efficacy. And the study of non-monetary outcomes, especially those that stimulate strong feelings, is still in its infancy. All that said, it is also clear that such a field will gradually come into existence as neural and economic correlations and explanations move together and are shown to be, at the very least, plausible. This plausibility will only be spurred on by neuroeconomics’ performativity, which is now becoming considerable, as part of a more general move in economics towards intervention in the design of markets and institutions which might be thought of as ‘economic engineering’ (Guala 2005). This performativity takes two forms. First, it produces a set of experimental sites – laboratories if you like – in which the new can be simultaneously born and demonstrated: fMRI imaging suites, for example. This experimental moment is important in its own right, not least because it can be seen as heralding a much wider turn in the protocols of the human sciences in data-rich environments (Lash and Lury 2009), as well as intersecting with a cultural inflection which is closer to the notion of propensity found in non-Western cultures (Lash 2009). Second, it produces new rhetorics which are gradually convincing more and more actors and institutions. In this case, neuroeconomics is a sign of new norms shaping economic action, norms that are remaking the world in their image. The formal institutions and procedures of economics interact with economics in the wild to produce a new landscape, one which, if anything, is becoming closer to Tarde’s vision, not farther away (Callon 2007).

266 N. Thrift

Conclusions I have tried to show how the potential for a new kind of political economy of propensity is coming into being, one that is inspired by the spirit of Tarde but that also goes beyond his work. To summarize the thrust of my argument: we might see this orchestration of the world by business and other institutions as the next stage of the spatial evolution of the attempt to ‘visibilize the compressive structure of attentive thought’ (Stafford 2008: 24) in that what becomes clear is that it is now possible to produce a mobile tapestry which acts as a permanent prosthetic to thinking, just as the denizens of the Neolithic transformed the world when fixed sites were first installed in human history not just as stopping places but as productive nodes, so allowing human and natural resources to be rearranged in a very substantial way. But instead of being based around the discovery of writing and other graphic forms of mediated memory-communication which transformed thought, this stage will be based on the manipulation of mediated iconographic images, so as to act directly on sensations, affects and intensities (Thrift 2009). We will feel knowledge through dynamic shapes. In other words, the dominant model will be art (Grosz 2008), and the aim will be to produce pleasurable and intensifying qualities that can be both partaken of and passed on. But this is an art that is becoming a science: art no longer imitates life, rather it creates it. There are many ways of achieving an art-science, of course,18 but perhaps the model of such an artform that we are coming closest to is that of Francis Bacon, an art which Deleuze (2005) describes as ‘figural’ because it relies on the visceral force of painting but is contained in a part rather than the whole of the painted field:

 

the figural is, for Deleuze, the end of figuration, the abandonment of art as representation, signification, narrative, though it involves the retention of the body, planes, and colors, which it extracts from the figurative. The figural is the deformation of the sensational and the submission of the figurative to sensation. It is the development of art as an ‘analogical language’, a non-representational language of colors, forms, bodily shapes, screams. (Grosz 2008: 88) Bacon yearned for a future in which brute reality directly impacted on the nervous system through the reinvention of a sensuous realism, a kind of neuro-art. As the techniques of the cinema and all forms of recording become better and better, so the painter has to be more and more inventive. He has to re-invent realism. He has to wash the realism back onto the nervous system by his invention, because there isn’t such a thing in painting any longer as natural realism. But does one know why very often, or nearly always, the accidental images are the most real? Perhaps they’ve not been tampered with by the conscious brain and therefore come across in a much more real sense than something that has been tampered with by consciousness. (Bacon in Sylvester 1987: 177–8)

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Now that future of an alternative realism appealing directly to sensation and perception is starting to come into being. ‘Presence, presence … this is the first word that comes to mind in front of one of Bacon’s paintings’ (Deleuze 2005: 36) and it is the first word that should come to mind in understanding the changes that are now taking place as art becomes science. What if presence can be re-engineered? Certainly, that is what is being attempted. Indeed what might be seen as happening is the construction of a giant temporal shortcut. For all their comparative speed, neural and genetic changes still take time to impact the body, but now, courtesy of new technological practices that make appeals directly to particular biological territories, simulations of their work can come into existence all but immediately as sensations and perceptions. Animal spirits indeed.

Notes

 

1 Equally, I could have used the example of other market forms, for example, housing markets. See Smith, Monro and Christie (2006); Monro and Smith (2008). 2 But it is worth remembering that imitation does not have to be understood as a necessarily bad thing. As Brecht (1976) put it: ‘From new transmitters came the old stupidities, Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth.’ 3 Some authors describe Tarde as an unabashed Darwinian (e.g. Hodgson 2006), but this is too simple. In fact, he was influenced by Darwinism – but only barely and, in part, based on misunderstandings (see Jahoda 2002; Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). 4 Of course, in a time after Garfinkel and Goffman, such an insight seems less compelling, but it is worth remembering that. 5 Such as in the work of Erasmus Darwin, William Preyer, James Mark Baldwin and William James, and in therapeutic contexts by Hippolyte Bernheim and Jean-Martin Charcot (Jahoda 2002). 6 This tradition can be thought of as having some roots in biology, notably through the work of Bichat and its influence on Maine de Biran. 7 Indeed, recent research suggests that the brain never rests. For example, the brain’s visual centres remain active even when eyes are closed or when asleep. One suggestion is that neurons must ‘think’ in order to live. Another is that a minimal level of activity allows a ‘quick start’ from rest if there is a crisis (see Britt 2009). 8 Though inactivity is a relative term, since human beings move incessantly whilst asleep, changing body posture every fifteen or twenty minutes. However, their muscles are near paralysed during REM sleep. 9 Indeed, the regions of the brain that subserve emotion seem to be particularly strongly involved in REM sleep, not least because they activate certain hormones. 10 But, as Hobson (2007) points out, the structure of this reality still eludes us. Is it based on narrative, or is that simply how dreams tend to be reported by awake respondents? Is it based on logic and associated detail or, more likely, hyperassociativity and emotional salience? And so on. 11 In Smail’s (2008) usage, these mechanisms encompass all kinds of objects, practices and institutions which have similar neurochemical effects to those produced by psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. 12 In another paper, Coates, Gurnell and Ristichini (2009) suggest that high levels of prenatal androgens, as measured by the second to fourth digit ratio, may produce more successful traders, given that prenatal androgens increase risk preferences and promote more rapid visuometer scanning and physical reflexes. 13 It is no surprise that the new neuromarketing techniques are finding favour with political consultants.

268 N. Thrift 14 We might, at least in part, link this narrative to Weber’s account of charisma, noting that Weber did not think that charisma could be fully understood without reference to biology. 15 In fact, these techniques are already being used in other domains, most notably in politics and the media. 16 Pentland (2008: 41) claims that about 40 per cent of variation in behaviour can be predicted by social signalling, regardless of what words are used or the array of personal attributes. ‘To put this in context, that is the same as the percentage of personal characteristics that can be attributed to your genetic make-up.’ 17 I am indebted to David Stark for this example. 18 After all, Western art has always been replete with technologies (think only of the perspectival grids and optics used in the Renaissance and thereafter) and with discourses on the science of art (think only of the Impressionists linkage of the science of colour with painting [Schafer, Saint-George and Lewerentz 2008]).

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Afterword Marilyn Strathern

 

The itch to imitate can get quite strong. What someone else is already doing suddenly seems novel – creative – for oneself. Perhaps that is one of the drivers of academic-based scholarship: we constantly create insofar as our proximity to those like ourselves makes us constantly imitative. One can actually feel the rush of innovation in taking up a phrase or image or argument from another! And if I am really (only) speaking for myself then I (also) project that feeling onto countless others, a sort of return flow, unafraid to generalize because I imagine I am not alone. I am persuaded by the book’s themes and intentions, fascinated by some of the arguments, intrigued at the comparisons and juxtapositions, and would like to think I could gather sufficient insight to add more insight. This is of course to be conscious and explicit about a process observed to be largely semi-conscious or subconscious in its workings (Thrift). But then, like objects for display (Sykes), scholarship lives by its explicitness. And explicitness in this case leads to such folly as imagining that one could out-do imitation. Consider that rush, like a high or a wave (Vargas), or the kind of emotional energy generated by interaction rituals (Robbins), here virtual ones with academic interlocutors: if imitation can give the sense of being innovatory, resistance to imitation is hardly likely to be ‘more’ innovatory. But what stops me from immediate imitation, from writing another chapter in kind, is a further scholarly predilection. Also a product of explicitness, this is to imagine that one’s own insight (the buzz that comes from innovating upon another’s) has incremental value – that it does indeed ‘add’ something, and that as in product enhancement the addition will be instantly visible. The hubris of imagining one is adding insight to insight is of course contained in the very notion of an Afterword. So it is salutary that (after Blackman 2007 [see n2]) Born reminds us of the way Tarde’s mimetic paradigm became deformed through repetition. What on this occasion makes me reticent is the sheer range and interest of the chapters, the particularities of the arguments, the knowledge the authors bring, the shifts of emphases, all of which give them a diversity of sorts. Normally a comparative anthropologist would not turn a hair at diversity – it is always possible to discern threads, analogies, echoes across contexts (forgive the word). And anyone with an investment in intellectual history would embrace the different turns that are made,

272 M. Strathern the variations they inscribe (Barry). But given the subject matter of the book, tracing threads, analogies and echoes seems too thin and literary a rendering of the social action implied in imitation, mere bookish garnish. By contrast, intellectual history seems too thick. For what also stops me is the invitation to take imitation seriously. If imitation in the sense discussed here is a matter of intersubjectivity, and not simply that of tracing overt form (Candea, Karsenti), there would have to be engagement with the authors (Leach), and with the authors’ authors in turn. In lieu of that potentially massive enterprise, I allow the book to stimulate another kind of effort.

 

Let me touch on the intransigence of pre-existing social forms that get in the way of or, alternatively, encourage certain kinds of social / sociological understanding. They reside in how as practitioners we already think. Inevitably, we inhabit an already imagined, layered and sedimented, highly institutionalized world (Born). The buzz that comes from innovating upon another’s inventions is intrinsic to scientific as well as other kinds of scholarly endeavour. One interesting feature of the Euro-American social environment (if I may use that term neutrally) in which natural science flourishes is the institutionalization of this endeavour in a property form, the patent. As textbooks tell, the criterion of novelty demanded by patent law is largely technical. It has very little to do with the creativity of the inventor, and everything to do with being able to demonstrate that the device in question, building on myriad antecedent devices, takes a form different and particular enough to support the claim of uniqueness. It is likely to be a difference at once miniscule (literally an addition to all the inventions that have gone before) and massive (the dividing line between being awarded a licence or not). Difference is all that matters. Magnifying difference in a situation like this would of course confound those who in consciously borrowing images from others (Sykes) imagine they are reproducing what went before, despite myriad differences introduced into the designs. The patent specifically enshrines not the accumulated process of manufacturing an artefact but the particularity of the example to hand. Copyright institutionalizes imitation in a second mode. Anything that takes a produced form, such as writing, music, photography, speech, belongs to, is possessed by, the producer of it, regardless of whether they register their interest. Here communications take on modes of explicit, conscious expression that can also be turned into property. Indeed, a reader might question the relationship of a notion such as possession (Vargas) to the institutionalization of possession in property rights. An inclusive invitation, to think of society as the reciprocal possession of every by each one, has to negotiate possession as an already existing prop to rights intended to exclude, although one might argue that the former sense derives some of its rhetorical force from the existence of the latter. Again, note, there is an investment in particularity: the law of copyright only works with an exactitude of replication. Any small difference or deviation and the second work is no longer a copy of the first. While the sense of creativity that comes with innovating upon others’ creations

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is sedimented in the idea of the original author of a copyrighted work (for however technical lawyers make the notion of originality, popular imaginings often take it in far a larger sense), the scientific or industrial inventor must do everything to prove human handiwork. Discoveries of natural phenomena do not count, even though the instruments to describe them may. Here is an already institutionalized contrast (the difference between invention and discovery, a foundation to patent law) it may be helpful to deploy. Latour has asked us, and Candea opens the volume with a similar question: suppose we had kept to real time, and suppose anthropology / sociology possessed Tarde before Durkheim, what would Durkheim after Tarde have been like? By contrast with the buzz of imitation in the course of (re)invention, there is in the unearthing of Tarde, the exhilaration of (re)discovery. Perhaps it comes from a sense of release – like freeing a trap. In any event the history of anthropology / sociology has done the ordering for us – Durkheim has come first in most genealogies of the disciplines, and his rules for the investigation of society acknowledged as agenda-setting. In short, it was Durkheim who got to set the trap. The bait had to be a superordinate sense of the capacity for analysis that his ambitious project yielded the emerging disciplines, an already existing dream that sociology might create itself out of itself. So the question now becomes: if he had been first, what trap would Tarde instead have set anthropology / sociology? I ask it because the exhilaration that comes from taking away something that was there before – like lifting the bars of a trap – could be thought of as imitation not through repetition in the mode of replication but through that special kind of repetition, opposition (Born), or indeed as a refusal of association (Harvey and Venkatesan). Discovery rather than invention. Take away the distorting lens: one theory discarded, the world is there to be re-described through another (Toews), like nature to be discovered, all over again. Coming on Tarde, many of these chapters suggest, is indeed like a discovery, for which at least in one case the writer was already waiting (Robbins). But – obviously – it is not the same world! One reported effect of Tarde’s sociology as it is taken up today is that society is no longer so easily found. If every thing is a society (relational, associational), society also appears present in no thing in particular. There is more to it than, in their wonderful phrase (Harvey and Venkatesan), getting over Durkheim. Take away ‘society’ in this sense, and what happens?1 You also take away ‘the individual’. We might say that what ‘Durkheim’ institutionalized in his notion of society was a particular kind of individual – society’s individual (‘Durkheim’, the institution, the stereotype to which Robbins refers, intellectual tradition rather than author.) This is the very kind of individual that is produced by the notion of a superordinate entity. So what happens when, with society, that kind of individual is also thrown out? The individual precipitated by the Durkheimian notion of society has bedevilled the last sixty years of much social anthropology. It is a truism that this individual always has to struggle with its own agency in conjunction with the agency of external forces. What is interesting now is that we see just how that conjunction rendered size an issue; in effect, ‘how large’ was the scope of the agent against

274 M. Strathern

 

the agency of society, of institutions, of structures? Long after society ceased to be a ubiquitous reference point, the discipline was fuelled on anxieties generated by the question of ‘how much’ agency individuals had. Again, Latour has already said it, in his famous question about the magnitude of IBM. In Reassembling the Social, he has also drawn our attention to an adjacent issue, complexification and simplification. Tarde’s monads are incommensurable entities that cannot be aggregated to make up larger entities because that process of aggregation would strip them of all other facets than the one sign under which aggregation occurred. That radical simplification means that the larger they are, the less complex entities appear. The big amplifies but simplifies. Hence the sense in which the smallest entities can be considered richer in difference and complexity than their aggregates observed from far away (Barry and Thrift [2008], after Latour).2 And (Barry and Thrift quote Lepinay 2007) every act contains a surplus that allows it to deviate into invention.3 Size presents a more general starting point for Corsín Jimenéz. Much social science work, he suggests, rests on the search for the size of sociality – a double search for proportion, to find the measure of events and institutions against one another, and the measure of them against writing about them. Description that strives for proportion is inevitably always out of proportion, since the world runs on disproportion. His own concern is to make the effects of proportionality in the sociological imagination visible, as in Tarde’s askance interest in the extensiveness of phenomena, in the spilling over of constant variation. The individual produced by the notion of a superordinate entity, society, had another characteristic. In addition to that of the agent, this individual also looked rather like a person. An endless source of confusion, this, to equate an elemental unit of description with people (Karsenti), but understandable, at least insofar as it was aggregations of persons that gave Durkheim’s British descendants in anthropology the collective sentiments that they could equate with the way society knows itself. Barry’s move is to put the question of detail at the centre of his understanding of Tarde’s kind of individual. This is the discrete unit of social analysis. An individual entity is a point of intersection or interference between diverse lines of imitation (Barry and Thrift 2008). It is certainly not an individual person – though a person’s mind, like mouth and vocal cords, is a prime example of a place where such flows intersect. Rather, it is the individuating effect of that intersection that constitutes the elementary fact of social science, a relation of communication or of modification (Thrift). Insofar as those repetitive acts that are never quite identical (e.g. Harvey and Venkatesan), this in turn liberates us from having to agonize over what was for so long so awkwardly called social change. If, as we have seen, it is no paradox that the micro is more complex than the macro, then the infinitesimal, the detail, can, so to speak, be given a technical definition. It is the moment at which we recognize complexity. But what hangs on ‘recognition’? Recall that Durkheim’s interest in social volume and moral density yields a ‘scale of forms’ and thus typologies of diverse connections. This points to a comparative promise (Jenkins) in the way constituent units are linked to one another, and the scale goes unquestionably from smaller to larger (Jenkins). Jenkins

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suggests that Tarde, by contrast, in delving into the particularities that make up ‘larger’ units, recognizes every comparison as a single event, a momentary opposition of factors not to be systemically ordered by scale. But there is, it would seem, one scale effect: for the Tardean investigator, the smaller the scale of focus or attention, the greater the power of explanation. Durkheim’s heirs continued to invent the individual in a particular form – the individual person, the anxious agent of much C20 anthropology. But with (Durkheim’s kind of) society taken away, what could Tarde’s individual be? How would we recognize it? As we have heard, the individual element is not the person as such but what persons do in conjunction with one another, a communicative event, pluralized in those constant interactions that repeat encounters. As a point of method for the investigator, only the details will offer insight into the creation of effects. But what is this singularity of the individual, as in the singularity of the particular example (Barry and Thrift 2008)? And if indeed we should be looking at minutiae, at repetitive trivia (Corsín Jimenéz), what is minuteness? For somehow, in Tarde’s world as it is described here, to draw effective sociological attention the elementary communicative event also has to be small. I wonder if this is a glimpse of Tarde’s trap. I implied that anthropologists might be exhilarated by the fact that Tarde seems to have come after Durkheim. Yet Tarde does not just come after Durkheim – for Latour, in only now coming ‘before’ he comes after Actor Network Theory. One of ANT’s preoccupations is with how entities – actants – not only encounter one another but prop one another up. How together they assume, keep, sustain a specific, that is, recognizable, character. Do we see the trap’s contours taking shape? Following Latour himself, shouldn’t we also be asking, how small is a detail? What sustains it? How do we recognize the infinitesimal? Above all, what kind of conceptual bundle tends to hold together both diminutive size and singularity? So other questions follow: what does one need to identify the presence of the singular? What keeps something ‘particular’? The institutionalization of the infinitesimal is well described in the extent to which it is known that Tarde was drawing comparisons with advances in chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology and so forth (Vargas, Barry and Thrift 2008) and their revelations of particles, atoms, cells in awe-inspiring multitude. It became common sense that the elemental was smaller than the universes these sciences created, and that the assumption was open to inspection: scientific instruments created numerous ways of magnification by which the particles could be ‘seen’. Smallness could even be measured. So do we come to the trap? I wonder if we would have been trapped by our already thinking that if things are recognizably infinitesimal by inspection, singularities are self-evident too in presenting themselves to the observant. The bait would be the ready apprehension that this addressed a truth. It would at the very least have been a positivist one, for it would be a truth already encountered in the known and experienced world (illustrated here for the sake of argument by patent and copyright). It would be a truth about the power that comes from dealing with entities – whether to observe, describe or exert rights over them – imagined as specifiable by their particulars.4 Is this starting with relations in which we are

276 M. Strathern already enmeshed (Leach)? Perhaps it would have called forth gigantic mapping skills on the part of social science.5 Given the attraction of particularity and specificity, what about the non-specific? Perhaps the question echoes Toews’ adumbration of the ‘unsociable’, namely, what about acts and reflections that lie outside relational engagements with others (in his terms the unsociable would include virtual engagement)? It is not only through social resemblance that others are like ourselves. Indeed, I would point to the prevalent perniciousness of taking social resemblance as an index of likeness, of humanity, of what Toews calls ‘social hope’; it is an old, well institutionalized, Euro-American if not Eurasian, rationale for racism. Communications that disregard the social basis for solidarity bring us back to Thrift’s contagious spirits, the crash of confidence in financial markets, and to Robbins’s Pentecostals, who enthuse themselves by their own energy. Yet, to take the book as a whole, at this moment of discovery as well as invention, a hopeful endnote seems called for. Writing about a contemporary icon for hope, the election of Obama as US President, Miyazaki (2008) observes that it was the lack of specificity that enabled Obama’s publicly voiced hope to be replicated as other people’s personal hopes. I use his words: ‘the power of hope lies in its capacity to replicate itself interactively from one person to another, one moment to another, and in this case across evident social categories and boundaries’.6

Notes

 

1 At the conference that first generated these chapters, Ssorin-Chaikov pertinently asked what kind of society do we think we are taking away. When society becomes the conscious project of inventors, what then? -- And not anthropological authors as inventors, but those with the power to realize some of their inventions through the apparatus of government. 2 Given the way that the commentary written by Barry and Thrift before they contributed to this volume has also informed contributions here, I include this paper in its authorship (Barry and Thrift 2008; an introduction to a collection of essays). The references to Blackman (2007) and Lepinay (2007) can also be found in this edited collection. My own comments are further informed, although otherwise unacknowledged, by recent writings of Candea. 3 By contrast perhaps with the disassociative conditions of discovery, the need to depart from familiar shores. 4 I refer to particularity or singularity as attributes or qualities that do not presuppose reified entities, but can attach as well to networks, relations, associations. 5 The next move had already been given of course – the recognition of complexity is also the moment of recognition of difference, the moment at which difference is generated (invention), such that singularities (identities) can only be known relationally (Barry and Thrift, Vargas). Perhaps under a different chronology social science would have embraced the metaphysics of difference differently. 6 But here too we come back to the specific, albeit in another sense. As his earlier work (in Fiji) on the replicative capacities of hope show, hope is very particular form of effervescence.

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Bibliography

 

Barry, A. and N. Thrift (2008) ‘Gabriel Tarde: imitation, invention and economy’, Economy and Society, 36: 4, 509–25. Blackman, L. (2007) ‘Reinventing psychological matters: the importance of the suggestive realm of Tarde’s ontology’, Economy and Society, 36, 574–96. Lepinay, V.A. (2007) ‘Economy of the germ: captial, accumulation and vibration’, Economy and Society, 36, 526–48. Miyazaki, H. (2008) ‘Barack Obama’s campaign of hope’, Anthropology News (AAA), November, 5, 8.

Index

 

a priori 48, 82, 88–9, 139 academic-based scholarship 131, 264, 271 Actor-Network Theory 1, 9, 15, 125, 132, 154 alcohol use 220 alternative realism 267 analysis of senses 103 anthropological knowledge 18, 242; integrity 192–4; scale 204 anthropology 9–12, 17–18, 20n10, 64, 67–8, 75, 98, 110–11, 123, 129, 131–3, 275; method 191; neo-colonial 194; social 129, 192, 173 art imitating life 266 artificial paradises 215 artificialist perspective 46, 48–9 association 3, 14, 81, 92, 94, 125, 132, 202, 208, 212–14, 224, 232–3, 242, 254, 273 Association of Ideas 231 astronomy 13, 112, 231, 275 atom quantification 153–4 automatic imitation 51–3, 56; see also imitation autonomy 29, 35, 83, 104, 215 avatars of belonging/possession 212–13 averages 171, 174 avidity 145, 156, 172–4; see also identity; identity representation Bacon, Francis 266–7 Balinese cockfighting 223, 227n11 Barok people 62, 64; language 66; practical jokes 67–8, 74; see also Mandak people Bateson, Gregory 200–1 behavioural economics 265

Being 212 belief and desire 3, 57–60, 155, 164–8, 170, 178, 181, 194; imitation 45; ritualism 98 Bentham, Jeremy 223 biological–cultural moments 250; hormonal swashes 264; material culture 256–7, 259; neurological processes of mirroring 252; short-term genetic change 255–6 biological networks 157 biology 3–4, 12–14, 29–30, 44, 111, 146, 152–3, 251–2, 262, 275 bio–social constitution of human being 251; biological–cultural moments 250; brain–body chemistry 256; cultural biology 251–2; evolutionary change and genetics 253–4; fugue 254; hormonal swashes 264; mirror neurons 252–3; moods 256; neurological processes of mirroring 252; neurophysiological imitation 252–3; short-term genetic change 255–6; sleep states 254–5 brain–body chemistry 256–7 bypassing structure 147–50 capitalism 262–5 capitalist meteorology 262, 264; economic barometer of interchange 265; hormonal swashes 264; imitation study 263–4; neuro-marketing 263 cargo cults 194, 197, 202–3 celebrity 260 chemistry 13, 58, 111–12, 231, 256, 260, 275 China’s size 114 China’s social aggregation 113

Index

 

Chinese classical culture 261 Chinese tobacco history 248–9 city–provinces relation 186 code-based law 152 coercivity 32, 103 cognition 253–4; imitation as 65, 231; principled unsociability 91; technology 257–9 cognitive neuroscience 230 cognitive science 250, 262–3 collective effervescence 90, 97–9; see also ritualism collective feeling 54 collective habits 31, 103 collective representations 44, 47, 53–6, 102, 178 common feeling 50, 53–4 communication 9, 17, 27, 29, 58, 189, 235, 249, 251, 253, 258–9, 266, 272, 274–5; automatic imitation 56; internet 91, 258, 264; passive–active 53; quantitative psychological phenomena 167; reason 86; ritualistic 99, 201; statistics 157; via telegraph 179 comparative statistics 178–9 comparative theory 102; Durkheim’s 103–5; Tarde’s 106–8 computational social science 157 computer music 239 computer science 199, 264 computer use 115, 118 Comtian positivist principle 44 conceptual separations 195 conformism 1, 50–2, 56, 97 consecration 17, 136–7 consent to imitate 50–1 conventions 63, 126n1, 181, 253 copyright 272–3, 275 cosmic philosophy 87 creativity as serious play 68–9; concentration 69–71; dispersal 73; display 72; operational sequence 73–4 criminal statistics 175, 179–80 criminology 3–7, 149, 151, 159, 170, 175, 179 Croiset, Dean M. Alfred 27–30, 32, 35, 38–9, 42 cultural biology 251–2 cultural–materialist position 87 cultural temporal scales 259 culture elicitation 197–9 culture invented 193 custom-imitation 50–1

279

Darwinian theory 3–4, 6, 13, 152–3, 155, 180, 251 data elicitation 191, 195–7 data visualization 157 death 6, 64, 73–5; voluntary 209 debate see Tarde–Durkheim debate decisive facts 103 deep play 209, 223–4 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 212–13; actualization 261; figural art 266; opposition theory 235; performism 243; perspectivism 15; philosophy of Having 212–13; portrayal of Tarde 11, 129, 177, 188–9; weapon– tool distinction 221 democracy 260–1 desire see belief and desire detachment 53–4, 58, 105 detection of variation 178–80 different difference 210 differentiation of persons 200–1 digital traceability 157–9 disciplinarity 86 dispositive of drugs 216 disproportionality 110–14, 122, 124, 126, 201, 274; see also social ontology dissolution of self 218–19 distance from informants 192–3 Division of Labour in Society 44 division of labour, riches and glory 260 dreams 254–5; Mandak people 71, 73; to reality 50 drug use 208, 214–15; alcohol 220; alternative questions for 216; deep play 209, 223–4; dissolution of self 218–19; epidemic mechanism 220–1; events 217–18, 221–3; friends–family interactions 220; master of action 224–6; paradox of passion 221–3; perceptions 218; process 219; social logic of 216–17; symbolic expression 223–4; therapeutic 220–1 Durkheim debate see Tarde–Durkheim debate Durkheim, Emile 3; collective effervescence 90, 97–9; collective tendencies 31, 102; comparison theory 103–5; defining sociology 36; delineating sociology 32; dissociation 33–4; genius 38–9; grand narrative of modernity 90; holism 44; individualism 35, 38; intermental psychology 30; mysticism 36–8; science 39–41; social acts 30; social realities 35; sociology’s generality 28; statistics 34; unsociability 82; see also imitation

280 Index

 

ecologies of work 114–15; see also social ontology economic barometer of interchange 265 Economic Psychology 249 economics 63, 145, 153, 238, 250, 262; neuroeconomics 265 economy of knowledge management 116, 118 economy of propensity 248, 251, 266; capitalist meteorology 262–6; economic barometer of interchange 265; hormonal swashes 264; imitation study 263–4; material culture 256–7, 259; neuromarketing 263; premediation 250–1, 259–60 economy of repetition 117 effervescence 97–8; through ritualism 99 egoism 29 element–aggregate relationship 148 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 94, 98–100 elementary social facts 8, 29–30, 202, 235; refracted 37 emotional energy 97–9, 271 emotional entrainment 97–8; see also ritualism emotions 99, 252, 262–4; feelings 54, 166, 200, 250, 256, 262, 264–5; happiness 126, 252; love 222–3; moods 256 empirical research 91, 125, 130, 193, 243; analysis 45; reality 85; senses 112; sociability 89; Tarde’s orientation 242 entities 129–32, 139–40, 146, 156, 193, 201, 211, 214, 224, 231, 235; asymmetrical property adoption 108; incommensurable 125, 274; individual 150; Malanggan 67; relational constitution 17; resolution into aggregates 9; superordinate 273–4; supra-individual entities 7, 150 ethic of craftsmanship 17, 131, 139, 141; Latin America road-building 133–5; South India god-making 136–8 ethical awareness 263 ethnographers’ difficulty of perceptions 196 ethnographic analysis 59–60, 129–30, 139–41, 186, 188, 192; field research 185–6, 188 ethnographic analysis of imitation 75–6; concentration 69–71; creativity as serious play 68–9; dispersal 73; display 72; imitation as borrowing 62–6; learning ritual skills 66–8; operational sequence 73–4

ethnographic fieldwork 114, 185–6, 188; art–science invention analysis 240–2; BBC neo-liberal policies 237–8; China’s size 114; China’s social aggregation 113; F/LOSS designers in Europe 199–201; Ghanaian possession cults 236–7; god-making in South India 135–8; Hupa Indians 185; Innova workplace strategy consultancy 114–22; modernist computer music analysis 239–40; mutual possession 191; Papua New Guinea cargo cults 195–7, 198–9, 202; Pentecostal movement ethnography 93–101; road-building in Latin America 132–5 ethnographic method 192–3, 203–5; alternative contexts 199–202; culture and rationality 202–3; elicitation 194; eliciting culture 197–9; eliciting data 191, 195–7; see also ethnographic fieldwork ethnography of global Pentecostal movements 93; cosmology of force 98–9; emotional energy 97–9; emotional energy 97–9; emotional entrainment 97–8; fit within Tardean view 96; growth based upon ritualism 96–101; Holy Spirit belief 95–6, 98, 101; interaction ritual chains 97, 271; interaction ritual chains 97, 271; mechanics of growth 95–6; primacy in social interaction 96 ethnography of UN practices 122–2 Europe Commission on F/LOSS 200–1 event theory 217–18 events 192; drug use 217–18, 221–3; impersonal synthesis 7, 191; that matter 202 experimental methods 180–3, 185 experimental phonetics 177, 182, 185 explicitness 8, 13–14, 56, 75, 86, 88, 103, 116, 131–3, 179, 204, 223, 271–2 F/LOSS see Free/Libre and Open Source software family resemblances 104 fantasy 40, 179; subjective 208, 221–2 feelings 54, 166, 200, 250, 256, 262, 264–5; emotions 99, 252, 262–4; love 222–3; moods 256 field research 185–6, 188 fieldwork 185–6, 188; art–science invention analysis 240–2; BBC neo-liberal policies 237–8; F/LOSS

Index designers in Europe 199–201; Ghanaian possession cults 236–7; god-making in South India 135–8; Hupa Indians 185; Innova workplace strategy consultancy 114–22; micro-relations 203; modernist computer music analysis 239–40; mutual possession 191; Papua New Guinea cargo cults 195–7, 198–9, 202; Pentecostal movement ethnography 93–101; road-building in Latin America 132–5 financial markets 249–50 fMRI see functional magnetic resonance imaging 263 fortuitousness 38, 45–7, 51, 55 Foucault, Michel 11; dispositive of drugs 216; dissolution of the self 218; microphysics of power 1; posthumanist social theory/philosophy 12; subjectification 15 Free/Libre and Open Source software (F/LOSS) designers 199–201 friends over family 220 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 263, 265 Galilei, Galileo 112–13 genius 7, 30, 38–9, 63, 65, 74, 90, 155, 189, 191 Ghanaian possession cults 236–7 Ginsberg, Morris 93 global Pentecostal movement see Pentecostal movement ethnography Global Platform for Action (UN) 122 glory 153–5, 260–1 Goddard, Pliny Earle 185

 

habit 252; brain–body chemistry 256–7; material culture 257–8; neurophysiological imitation 252–5; short-term genetic change 255–6 happiness 126, 252; see also emotions Having and Being 9, 212–13 hedonistic calculation 223–4 herd behaviour 249 hesitation 90, 154–5, 235, 240 Hindu temples and gods 132–5 holism 1, 7, 16, 44, 52–3, 153–4, 159 Holy Spirit belief 95–6, 98, 101; see also ritualism human sciences 129, 145, 150, 265 hyper-sociable innovators 81, 87 hyperspirituality 59 hypnosis 48–50, 181–2, 185, 254

281

identity 9, 104–5, 107–8, 208, 210, 212; affective 53; avidity 145, 156, 172–4; individualism 5, 7–8, 29, 44, 91, 154, 211, 213, 273–4 identity representation 9, 53, 55, 104–5, 105, 108, 208, 210, 212 illicit drugs see non-medicinal drug use image recognition software 263 imitation 1–3, 5–6, 13, 17–18, 44–5, 271–2; activity 50–4; applied studies 169–72; automatic 51, 53, 56; conformism 50–2, 56; Durkheim against 45–8; fortuitousness 45–6; hypnosis experiment 48–50; inter-personal 179; quality and quantity 57–60; regularity and similarity 54–6; rejection of 44; relation according to Tarde 48–50; social conformism 51–2; sociological relevance of 47; solidarity 29, 44–5, 51–2; Tarde– Durkheim debate 30–2, 35–6, 38, 40; see also ethnographic analysis of imitation imitation as borrowing 62–6; operational sequence 73–4; while learning ritual skills 66–8 imitation, temporalities of 236–8 imitative magic see sympathetic magic imitative phenomena 46, 56 imitative practice 59–60 imitative repetition 31, 50 imitative reproduction 53, 55 incommensurable entities 125, 274 individual innovations 148, 151–3, 157 individualism 5, 7–8, 29, 44, 91, 154, 211, 213, 273–4 infinitesimal calculus 3, 57, 112, 180 infinitesimal sociology 210–12, 235, 240, 275 infinitesimal to infinite 124, 212 infinitesimal variation 18–19, 59, 181 inner quantification 150, 153, 156–7; see also quantification Innova workplace strategy consultancy 114; appropriateness 118–21; counting to infinity 123; ecologies of work 114–15; economy of knowledge management 116, 118; economy of repetition 117; PowerPoint presentations 116–19, 124; repetition 115–18 innovation from innovation 272–3 institutions 103 integrity of social scientists 194 intellectual history 271–2 interaction ritual chains 97, 271; see also ritualism

282 Index inter-individuality 44 inter-mental imitation 94 inter-mental psychology 30 internal social milieu 39, 45 internet technology 91, 258, 264 interpsychology 44–5, 48; belief and desire 45, 57–60, 164–8, 170, 178, 181 invented culture 193 invention, temporalities of 240–2 IRCAM, Paris 239–40 Kantian philosophy 55, 84, 86, 88–9, 112–13 knowledge interest 194 Koriam’s Law and the Dead Who Govern 197, 203 Latin America road-building 132–5 Lattas, Andrew 194, 197, 199, 203 law 152 Laws of Imitation 6, 28, 80, 94, 149, 157, 178, 181, 198 Le Suicide 5, 209 Leibnizian sociology 8, 57, 152, 155–6, 210–11 Les Lois de l’imitation 3–4, 106, 172 living on borrowed time 75 love 222–3

 

magneto-encephalography (MEG) 263 Malanggan Labadama: A Tribute to Bukuk 65 Malanggan-making 69; concentration 69–71; dispersal 73; display 72; operational sequences 73–4; rope into skeletal bodies 71 Malanggan sculptures 62, 65–6; materials 66–7; see also Mandak people Malinowski 93, 192 Mandak people 62; borrowing from Borok people 64–5; dreams 71, 73; social facts 66; see also Malanggan-making material culture 257–8 medical statistics 173 MEG see magneto-encephalography memetics 13, 258–9 metaphysics 1, 3–4, 8, 14, 18, 81, 84, 107, 126, 172, 212 method see sociological method micro-interaction 192, 199, 203, 205 microphysics of power 1 milieu 39, 45, 48 mimetic paradigm 232, 236, 243; deformed through repetition 271

mimetic rationality 249–50 mimetic rays 263–4 mirror neurons 231, 252, 263–4 moments 103; biological–cultural moments 250; ethical awareness 263; of imitation 55, 197, 202–4 monad 5, 8, 18, 107, 112, 148–9, 211–14, 233; incommensurable entities 274; not atoms 153–7 Monadology and Sociology (Monadologie et sociologie) 5, 8, 107, 111–13, 125, 152, 156, 204, 210–11 moods 256; see also emotions moral automaton 82 moral force 99 moral obligation 82, 86 mutual possession 8, 191, 204 mysticism 37–8, 40, 93, 103; ethos 201 natural sciences 107–8, 111–12, 172, 272; Darwinian theory 3–4, 6, 13, 152–3, 155, 180, 251; less quantitative 145–6, 150, 159 Naven 200–1 necessity 84; of sociality 30, 46, 88; of unsociability 91 neo-colonial anthropology 194 neo-liberalism 11 neo-Spinozist scholarship 233 neo-Tardean contemporary social thought 93, 98, 100; ritualism disinterest 94–5; social imagination 125 neuroeconomics 265 New Britain cargo cults 195–7, 198–9, 202 New Ireland 62; Barok people 62, 64, 66–8, 74; Malanggan sculptures 62, 65–6; Malanggan-making 69–74 nomadic individuals 87 non-medicinal drug use 208, 214–15; alcohol 220; alternative questions for 216; deep play 209, 223–4; dissolution of self 218–19; epidemic mechanism 220–1; events 217–18, 221–3; friends– family interactions 220; master of action 224–6; paradox of passion 221–3; perceptions 218; process 219; social logic of 216–17; symbolic expression 223–4 non-representational theory of art 233 non-sociological ground 80, 83; cosmic philosophy 87; disavowed unsociability 82; disciplinarity 86; hyper-sociable innovators 81, 87; ideals 90–1; nomadic individuals 87; philosophy 83–5;

Index post-rationalism 84, 91; principled unsociability 89–90; rationalism 84; self-ownership 86–7; somnambulist 49, 80, 82, 254; unsociability confused with individualism 88; unsociable power of contemplation 89–90; see also association NREM sleep 254–5 Oakeshott, Michael 188–9 Obama, President 276 On Communication and Social Influence 6–7, 27 ontological separation 195 ontologies of flatness and flow 232 ontology 5, 34, 37, 82, 86, 91; see also social ontology ontology, social 80–1, 110, 123–6; analysis–knowledge proportion 110; appropriateness 118–21; counting to infinity 122–3; disproportionality 110–14, 122, 124, 126, 201, 274; ecologies of work 114–15; measurement 122–3; repetition 115–18; scale 112, 118, 123 oppositions 235–6; temporalities of 239–40 outer quantification 156–7

 

Papua New Guinea cargo cults 195–7, 198–9, 202 paradox of passion 221–3 passivity 49–50, 52, 59–60, 86, 261 passivity–activity imitation 49–50 patents 272–3, 275 Penal Philosophy 11, 179, 188 Pentecostal movement ethnography 93; cosmology of force 98–9; emotional energy 97–9; emotional energy 97–9; emotional entrainment 97–8; fit within Tardean view 96; growth based upon ritualism 96–101; Holy Spirit belief 95–6, 98, 101; interaction ritual chains 97, 271; mechanics of growth 95–6; primacy in social interaction 96 Pentecostal religious rituals 89 perceptions 80, 88, 252–3, 263, 267; drugged 218; of drugs 215; Leibniz theory of small 57; personality 202; physiology of 156–7; subjective apperception 45, 56 performism 243 perspectivism 15 Peru road-building 132–5

283

philosophy as non-sociological ground 83–4 philosophy of Having 212–13 phonetics 18, 177, 182, 185 physics 146, 171, 275 physiology of perception 156–7 political economy of propensity 248, 251, 266; capitalist meteorology 262–6; economic barometer of interchange 265; hormonal swashes 264; imitation study 263–4; material culture 256–7, 259; neuro-marketing 263; premediation 250–1, 259–60 political unconscious of democratic political process 260–1 Pomio Kivung 194, 197–9, 203 positivist sociology 44 possession 148, 155; mutual 8–9, 191, 204; unilateral 9, 204 possessive individualism 213 post-humanist social theory/philosophy 12 post-positive empiricism 233, 244 post-rationalism 84, 91 power of contemplation 89–90 PowerPoint presentations 116–19, 124 practical applications 59–60; see also ethnographic analysis of imitation; ethnographic fieldwork practical jokes 67–8, 74 practice of imitation 59–60; see also imitation premediation 250–1, 259–60 Primitive Classification 105 primitivism and imitation 230–3 principled unsociability 91 processual analysis 130–1 productive economic life 62 progressive differentiation of persons 200–1 propensity 248, 251, 261, 263, 265–6 propensity/purpose logic 261 proportionate sociology 111–12 psychological reductionism 57, 60, 211; reverse 233 psychological statistics 181 Psychologie Économique 234 psychology of sensation 40, 57–9, 164, 166–7, 266–7 psychopathology 48–9, 236 psycho-physics 57 purpose logic 261 quantification 145–6, 156; bypassing structure 147–50; competition 155;

284 Index quantification (continued) digital traceability 157–9; element– aggregate relationship 148–51; imitation 149; individual innovations 153; individualism 148–9; inner–outer 156–7; interpenetration 155; law 152; monad vs. atom 153–7; social science vs. natural 146–7; sociological quantification 57, 145–6; statistics assessment 150–1, 158; uninterrupted traces 151 quantitative associations 154 quantitative nature 154 quantitative theory of sociology 57–60

 

Rai Coast cargo cults 195–7, 198–9, 202 rationalism 84 reductionism 57, 60, 211; reverse 233 relational theory 48–50, 213, 234–6; element–aggregate relationship 148–51; imitation and primitivism 230–3; mimetic paradigm 232, 236, 243, 271; mirror neurons 231, 252, 263–4; ontologies of flatness and flow 232; spatial relations and transformations 230; sympathetic magic 231, 236–7; temporal relations and transformations 230, 235–6, 242, 244; temporalities 242–4; temporalities of imitation 236–8; temporalities of invention 240–2; temporalities of opposition 239–40 relational ontology 5 relationism 213 REM sleep 254–5 repetition 115–18; see also social ontology replicating ritual 66 representation of identity 9, 53, 55, 104–5, 105, 108, 208, 210, 212 representational analyses 55, 59 representational life 47, 54 representational thinking 45 reproductive imagination 53, 55 resemblance 80–1, 87, 104, 107, 146, 168, 180, 261, 276 ritualism 94, 101; emotional energy 97–9; emotional entrainment 97–8; Holy Spirit belief 95–6, 98, 101; interaction ritual chains 97, 271; Pentecostal movements growth 96–7; primacy in social interaction 96 romantic economics 265 Rousselot, Abbé 158, 177, 182, 185–6 Rules of Sociological Method 5, 28, 54, 103

scale 9–10, 17, 103, 112, 123, 231 scale of forms 103–4, 107, 274–5 scholarship 82, 233, 271 science debate 39–41; see also Tarde– Durkheim debate sciences, the 13, 17, 34, 44, 48, 88, 208; astronomy 13, 112, 231, 275; biology 3–4, 12–14, 29–30, 44, 111, 146, 152–3, 251–2, 262, 275; chemistry 13, 58, 111–12, 231, 256, 260, 275; criminology 149, 151, 170; human sciences 129, 145, 150, 265; metaphysics 1, 3–4, 8, 14, 18, 81, 84, 107, 126, 172, 212; physics 146, 171, 275; psycho-physics 57; sociobiology 12–14, 48; wars 131; see also natural sciences; social science self-abandonment 208, 222, 226 self-ownership 86–7 sensation, psychology of 40, 57–9, 164, 166–7, 266–7 senses analysis 103 separation of phenomenon and act 3, 14, 31, 34, 56 separation of psychology from sociology 232 separation of responsibility 192–3 sin confession in Pomio Kivung 197–8 situational analysis 130–1 Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age 264 size of society 110–11; analysis– knowledge proportion 110; appropriateness 118–21; counting to infinity 122–3; disproportionality 110–14, 122, 124, 126, 201, 274; ecologies of work 114–15; measurement 122–3; repetition 115–18; scale 112, 118, 123 sleep 254–5 sociability as an end in itself 88–9 social acts 3, 29–30, 45, 54, 66, 82, 90, 101, 103, 129–31, 139, 141, 166, 202, 235; refracted 37 social aggregates 166–9 social analysis–social knowledge proportion 110 social anthropology 129, 192, 173 social cause 45 social conformism 51–2, 56. 97 social convention 63, 126n1, 181, 253 social environment 104, 180, 209; Euro–American 272 social facts 7–9, 29–35, 103, 202, 235; autonomy 104; refracted 37

Index

 

social force 99 social–individual detachment 53–4, 58, 105 social–individual dissociation 33–4 Social Laws 2, 6–7, 113, 177–8, 182, 191 social man 80 social manifestations 33–4; individual 34–7 social milieu 39, 45; imitations role 47–8 social monadology 8, 18, 111–13, 125, 156, 210–11 social obligation 103 social ontology 80–1, 110, 123–6; analysis–knowledge proportion 110; appropriateness 118–21; counting to infinity 122–3; disproportionality 110– 14, 122, 124, 126, 201, 274; ecologies of work 114–15; measurement 122–3; repetition 115–18; scale 112, 118, 123 social phenomena 8, 32, 35–6, 39, 45, 104, 148 social quantities 57–60 social resemblance 80, 87, 104, 107, 146, 168, 180, 261, 276 social science 1–2, 10–11, 28, 99, 106–7, 274; actor-network theory 150; conceptual separations 195; digital terrains 18; Durkheim’s 129; more quantitative than natural 146–2; naturalistic vs. an interpretative 147–9; Oakeshott’s criticism 188–9; preDarwinian 153; qualitative–quantitative division 154–6; revising 64; scientific 145 social species 4, 46, 104–5, 110 social statistics 34 social volume and density 104 society as imitation 3; see also imitation society as reciprocal possession 210–14 society dismissed 273 sociobiology 12–14, 48 sociological explanation 103–4 sociological method 177, 188; city– provinces relation 186; detection of variation 178–80; experimental method 180–3, 185; field research 185–6, 188; hypnosis 182; psychological statistics 181 sociological proof 104–5 sociological quantification 57, 145–6 sociology and comparison 102–5 sociology debate see Tarde–Durkheim debate sociology revived 6–10, 19

285

socio–technical platforms for financial markets 249 solidarity 29, 44–5, 52; mechanical 51 somnambulist 49, 80, 82, 254 South India god-making 135–8 South Pacific cargo cults 194, 197, 202–3 spatial relations and transformations 230 spatio-temporal movement 178, 186 species 4, 14, 46, 50–1, 66–7, 103–5, 108, 110–11, 237, 254 stalactite philosophy 125 statistics assessment 150–1, 158, 175; applied studies of imitation 169–72; averages 171, 174; avidity 172–4; comparative statistics 178–9; criminal statistics 175, 179; medical statistics 173; psychology of 164–6; social aggregates 166–9; war 174; weaknesses 174 Stenger, Isabelle 15, 21n16; science wars 131 subject–object distinction 15 subjectification 15–16 subjective apperception 45, 56 substance abuse 208, 214–15; alcohol 220; alternative questions for 216; deep play 209, 223–4; dissolution of self 218–19; epidemic mechanism 220–1; events 217– 18, 221–3; friends–family interactions 220; master of action 224–6; paradox of passion 221–3; perceptions 218; process 219; social logic of 216–17; symbolic expression 223–4; therapeutic 220–1 suicide 33–4, 45, 54, 158, 169, 179, 208; measures against 209–10 superordinate entity 273–4 supra-individual entities 7, 150 symbolic expression 223 symbolic manipulation 203 symbolic networks 251 sympathetic magic 231, 236–7 Tarde–Durkheim debate 16–17, 27; collective tendencies 31; delineating sociology 32–3; egoism 29; genius 30, 38–9; imitation 30–2, 35–6, 38, 40; individual manifestations 35–7; intermental psychology 30; mysticism 37–8, 40; ontology 34, 37; science 39–41; social acts 3, 29–30; social–individual dissociation 33–4; social manifestations 33; social milieu 39; social statistics 34; sociology’s generality 28; specificity in research 29; statistics 34; theory of emanation 31

286 Index

 

Tardean ethnography 236; temporalities of imitation 236–8; temporalities of invention 240–2; temporalities of opposition 239–40 Tardean imitation 1–3, 5–6, 13, 17–18, 44–5, 271–2; activity 50–4; applied studies 169–72; automatic 51, 53, 56; conformism 50–2, 56; Durkheim against 45–8; fortuitousness 45–6; hypnosis experiment 48–50; inter-personal 179; quality and quantity 57–60; regularity and similarity 54–6; rejection of 44; relation according to Tarde 48–50; social conformism 51–2; sociological relevance of 47; solidarity 29, 44–5, 51–2; Tarde–Durkheim debate 30–2, 35–6, 38, 40; see also ethnographic analysis of imitation Tardean method 177, 188; city–provinces relation 186; detection of variation 178–80; experimental method 180–3, 185; field research 185–6, 188; hypnosis 48–50, 182; psychological statistics 181 Tardean quantification 145–6, 156; bypassing structure 147–50; competition 155; digital traceability 157–9; element– aggregate relationship 148–51; imitation 149; individual innovations 153; individualism 148–9; inner–outer 156–7; interpenetration 155; law 152; monad vs. atom 153–7; social science vs. natural 146–7; sociological quantification 57, 145–6; statistics assessment 150–1, 158; uninterrupted traces 151 Tardean relations 48–50, 213, 234–6; element–aggregate relationship 148–51; imitation and primitivism 230–3; mimetic paradigm 232, 236, 243, 271; mirror neurons 231, 252, 263–4; ontologies of flatness and flow 232; spatial relations and transformations 230; sympathetic magic 231, 236–7; temporal relations and transformations 230, 235–6, 242, 244; temporalities 242–4; temporalities of imitation 236–8; temporalities of invention 240–2; temporalities of opposition 239–40 Tardean somnambulists 49, 80, 82, 254 technical environment determining cognition 257–9 technology 62, 64, 115, 149, 198–200, 238–9, 252, 257–8; cognitive science

263–4, 268; economic 248; politicoorganizational 124; statistical instrument 156–7; telegraph 179 Tarde, Gabriel 2–5; against Durkheim’s sociology definition 32–3; coercivity 32; comparison theory 106–8; egoism 29; individualism 33, 35–7; mysticism 36–7; publications 5–6; repetition and imitation 30–1; ritualism 94; science 39–40; social acts 3, 29–30, 63–5, 75, 82, 90–1, 163, 194, 272; social milieu 39; social realities 35–6; statistics 34; see also imitation Tarde’s revival 6–10, 19, 44; sociology today 10–16 telegraph communication 179 temple-building 135–8 temporal relations 234–4; ethnographic material 236; imitation 236–8; invention 240–2; opposition 239–40; transformations 230, 235–6, 242, 244 temporality 6, 18, 178, 186, 230, 235–6, 242, 244 theory of comparison 102; Durkheim’s 103–5; Tarde’s 106–8 theory of emanation 31 theory of small perceptions 57 therapeutic drug use 220–1; see also nonmedicinal drug use thing-ism 1, 54 tobacco history in China 248–9 traceability 157–8 tracing 157–9; change in relationship moments 192; future civilization 14; individual monads 148; institution meaning 195; prevalence of particular actions 178; social world 150–3; uninterrupted 151 Transformations of Power 188 trend-imitation 50–1 unconscious emotional reactions 263 unconscious sociability 17, 56–7 uncouthness 81 unilateral possession 9, 204 United Nations Global Platform for Action 122 unlearning Durkheim 93, 129–30; ritualism 94–5; through Pentecostal movement ethnography 97–101 unsociability 80–3, 85–8, 276; a priori moral obligation 82; as power of contemplation 89–90; association 81, 92, 94, 125, 132, 202, 208, 212–14, 224,

Index

 

232–3, 242, 254, 273; confused with individualism 88; cosmic philosophy 87; disavowed 82; disciplinarity 86; experiential dimension 91–2; hyper-sociable innovators 81, 87; nomadic individuals 87; principled 89–90; profound 91; relationship with sociability 91–2; somnambulist 49, 80, 82, 254; uncouthness 81 unsocial sciences 82, 276

287

variation 18–19; detection of 178–80; infinitesimal 59, 181; process 181; vector of sociality 46–7; Suicide 45, 54, 179, 208–9 war statistics 174 Watts, Duncan 264 workplace strategies 114; appropriateness 118–21; ecologies of work 114–15; repetition 115–18