Tarde, Latour, and community

(Picture taken from this place, which also contains a full translation of Tarde's "Laws of the Social" available for free..)

Had not discovered Gabriel Tarde while working on my Ph.d. from 1998 to 2003. Pity, but meeting his ideas now is combined with the relevance of discovering at this moment that there actually was a sociologist trying to work from some of the same breaking points as myself. In spite of the inevitable distance brought in by the advances of physics and human biologym, as well as some of the developments of social formations, after Tarde, I find myself inspired mainly by the ambition and radicality in his thought. Tarde does not hesitate to take seriously Leibniz' idea of the monad as a possibility to be examined, yet he also, as one would expect, reaches the conclusion that when you take monads into social existence (out of Leibniz' baroque chambers), you have to open them up. The idea of the isolation of the monad is unsustainable, if you want to reach any understanding of societies or communities from it.

"Could we hope to solve them [the problems of the isolated monad] by conceiving open monads that interpenetrate reciprocally instead of being exterior to one another? (...) every one of them, previously seen as a point, becomes an infinitely enlargened sphere of action" (monadologie et sociologie, p. 56-57, my translation)

I have some other problems with Tarde, quite important ones, I think, but he is one of the few moving within social science/philosophy of the social to remove the problem of identity from the centre of the scene. This is important, though I doubt that his insertion of "to have" as the replacement for "to be" is sufficient to solve the problems and enigmas we face today.

But, as Latour says, "let's slowly down". I will leave it to Latour to explain the movement towards avoir, as he is so taken in by it.

No wonder that someone like Bruno Latour, with his ideas of the actor-network-theory (one of the most misleading names of a theory I have seen as yet), would be in favor of a sociology such as the one that Tarde wishes to develop. Latour writes as explanation for his text that he has found in the well-hidden archives af Tarde a forefather to ANT:

"I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished most daring book, Monadologie et sociologie (M&S), that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:
a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions ;
b) the micro/macro distinction stifles any attempt at understanding how society is being generated."

Now, I am not sure that Latour is quite right in making these two points the essentials of what Tarde introduced into social sciences. This is mainly relevant if taken from the point of view of what was comme il faut in these sciences at the time. But if you take the second point first, then there is a question that could be asked: why is this the case - what are the reasons that a micro/macro distinction is a problem for explaining social genesis? There could be the answer that social genesis is a question of dynamis, of forces, of events, whereas the micro/macro distinction has always been a structural one. And you cannot explain dynamics by structure (with the risk of sounding like an old hippie..). Take that answer back to the first point and we end up with a similar possibility: that the divide between human and other nature is one constructed in order to discard or at least conceale the genetic link between "the social" and "nature". Or, as it has been put, between first and second nature.

And Latour is caught up by the distinction between être and avoir - if not seduced by the way leading to it, through unfamiliar forms of reductionism and bold attacks at philosophy as we knew it..

"We may now be better equipped to grasp this sentence of Monadologie et sociologie which was going to have so much influence on Deleuze :

‘’To exist is to differ ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different. One has to start from this difference and to abstain from trying to explain it, especially by starting with identity, as so many persons wrongly do. Because identity is a minimum and, hence, a type of difference, and a very rare type at that, in the same way as rest is a type of movement and the circle a type of ellipse. To begin with some primordial identity implies at the origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason.’’ p. 73

But what is going to be the bridge allowing one to go from one difference to the next ? Identity is ruled out. What then ? Possession ! In one of the most important sentence of his work, Tarde remarks almost in passing :

‘’So far, all of philosophy has been founded on the verb To be, whose definition seemed to have been the Rosetta’s stone to be discovered. One may say that, if only philosophy had been founded on the verb To have, many sterile discussions, many slowdown of the mind, would have been avoided. From this principle ‘I am’, it is impossible to deduce any other existence than mine, in spite of all the subtleties of the world. But affirm first this postulate : ‘I have’ as the basic fact, and then the had as well as the having are given at the same time as inseparable’’p. 86

Here goes Hamlet, as well as Descartes with his cogito, Heidegger with his Being qua Being, together with thousand of homelies about the superiority of what ‘we are’ above what ‘we have’. Quite the opposite, Tarde instructs us. Nothing is more sterile than identity philosophy —not to mention identity politics— but possession philosophy —and may be possession politics ?— create solidarity and attachments that cannot be matched. ‘’For thousands of years, people have catalogued the many ways of beings, the many kinds of beings, and no one ever had the idea of cataloguing the various kinds, the various degrees of possession. Yet, possession is the universal fact, and there is no better term than that of ‘acquisition’ to express the formation and the growth of any being’’ p. 89. If essence is the way to define an entity within the ‘To be’ philosophy, for the ‘To have’ philosophy an entity is defined by its properties and also by its avidity…"

And this is where I start to disagree, even though it seems like an important move away from identity politics, towards another possibility. At the same time, though, I feel a strong discomfort at explaining the world from possession, when obviously the urge for possession seems to make such a mess of the world, to an extent where the American citizens in space declare that they are stunned by the destruction visible from above that we have made upon the atmosphere.. ok, it would explain a great deal, yet again, this would have to be through the explaining of the distortion of reason and collectivity. Thus, if we really took Tarde seriously on this point, we would have to accept that there is no way out of the problems we face. None except control and power. Could the small control the great? Logically, no, if we follow Tarde again, for then the collectivity of the small will always be more complex than the big. And have less power to act, if more potential to have it. Problems, problems. I think we have to stay for a while on the "have" and its alternative possibilities - or even, on the possibility of seeing the monad in a different light once again. We may have to take the monadology even further away from its starting point, in order to understand better the events taking place "inside" it.

Community is far away from creation still, though Tarde is probably so much closer to a less ideological solution that the economists trying to explain development through invisible hands and rational choice games..