Editorial: Gabriel Tarde
Gabriel Tarde: Hvad er et samfund? (in Danish)
Contrary to an economic or legal conception of society, this article - extracted from Tarde's masterpiece, Laws of Imitation - argues that society is imitation and that imitation should be analysed as a kind of somnambulism. This approach suggests a perspective on the social that does not base the understanding of society on a notion of autonomous individuals. Rather, society is envisioned as pure imitation taking place in a context of suggestion. The text provides both a condensation of Tarde's theory of society and a vantage point on his inter-psychological way of reasoning.
Keywords: belief; desire; imitation; invention; memory; sociality; somnambulism; suggestion.
Gabriel Tarde: A Fragment on Difference
In this previously unpublished 1873 fragment from Tarde's private diary, he outlines the contours of the epistemological programme which was to be further developed in his later writings. In the fragment, Tarde elaborates on the concept of difference which he relates to notions of the real and the possible. The fragment is introduced and translated by Cécile Rol.
Keywords: difference; epistemology; social order; social theory; Spinoza; Tarde.
Bruno Latour: Gabriel Tarde og det sociales endeligt (in Danish)
There is a close connection between Gabriel Tarde's social theory and what has become known as actor network theory, especially because of Tarde's two refusals: there is no difference between natural and social assemblages; there is no difference between 'big' and 'small' assemblages in society. Through a reading of Tarde's Monadologie et sociologie recently republished, the paper explores the technical innovation of Tarde and its import for actor-network theory.
Keywords: actor-network; monadology; network; social theory; Tarde.
Éric Alliez: The Difference and Repetition of Gabriel Tarde
In an effort to reverse the 'standard' presentation of the relations between Durkheim and Tarde from the point of view of the birth of the human sciences ('scientific morality' versus the 'psychologistic' tradition), this article attempts to understand the primary importance that Gilles Deleuze has ascribed to the 'philosophy of Gabriel Tarde' ever since Différence et répétition.
Keywords: biopolitics; difference; imitation; interpsychology; invention; microsociology; multiplicity; neo-modalogy; repetition.
Stephan Moebius: Imitation, repetition and iterability: Poststructuralism and the 'Social Laws' of Gabriel Tarde
Are there affinities between the sociological theories of poststructuralist social sciences and Gabriel Tarde? What can be learned from Tarde? The article analyses Tarde's conceptions of imitation, repetition and invention, and then compares these main topics of Tarde's work with Jacques Derrida's and Judith Butler's theories of iterability, repetition and performativity. Such a context, and especially Derrida's theory of a 'passive decision of the other in me', is very important for the understanding of social changes; and it will therefore be brought into relation with Tarde's idea of invention. As the article makes clear, Tarde and poststructuralist social sciences share some basic assumptions: repetition is a social logic; social structures generate and exist because of repetition; these processes are not effects of the will of the individuals but are unconscious, unintended and beyond rational choices; because of the other, there are not only decisions, but also interrupting inventions and events, which are essentially super-social or transgressive and which are at the same time the condition of the possibility of sociability.
Keywords: Butler; decision; Derrida; imitation; iterability; other; repetition; Tarde.
Jean-Philippe Antoine: Tarde's Aesthetics: Art & Art, Or the Invention of Social Memory
Gabriel Tarde's deconstruction of the concept of art that was predominant in his time, and his willingness to address the problems of art as a global social issue define an original approach, whose analysis still partly holds forth today. Using his key-concepts of imitation and invention, Tarde shows that the word art can be applied to two different sets of modern realities: a general, larger one, which covers any human activity inasmuch as it is creative; a more restricted one linked to the Renaissance and the Fine Arts, even though it actually embraces a wider range of practices. This double meaning has usually been sidestepped, in favour of a distinction of essence between the Fine Arts and the rest of human social inventive practices. Against that, Tarde states that the two meanings of the word do not signal essential differences between the many heterogeneous social practices they embrace. Indeed, once conceived as a coefficient of invention, art demonstrates a continuity between all sorts of endeavours. This continuity helps to understand the unrecognized creative aspects of a number of activities usually not recognized as art. It also helps to understand the part that art, in its restricted meaning, plays in the development of democratic politics. Differences of perception are the most irreductible of all differences. Art's ability to give material shape to individual perceptions and memories, and thus make them publicly accessible, is at the core of its important political role, for these differences may then enter the public realm without the artificial homogenization brought along by industry and 'unartistic' politics, which endangers democracy at its most basic level.
Keywords: aesthetics; art; imitation; invention; memory; perception; sociology of art.
Christian Papilloud: Understanding Interactivity with Gabriel Tarde
In this paper, I focus on digital interactivity with help of Tarde's conception of activity. I investigate how Tarde conceives activity as reference of actions and social relations. I derive from it the basic Tardean schemata of activity helping me to conceptualize digital interactivity in an analogous way as referring to hybrid socio-technical relations. Given the parallelism between the Tardean schemata of activity and digital interactivity, I argue that the latter is not limited to media (i.e. the technical apparatus that connect us). In other words, digital interactivity evokes prior media-relations, that is to say the basic relational schemata implemented in the technical devices, able to react to social relations and to varying fragments of routine, to combine them, transform them, and, through them, to make them capable of sociation, to make society possible, etc. Yet, unlike the relations that it mediates, interactivity does not itself develop any relational character. This characteristic distinguishes it from our day to day activities.
Keywords: activity; communication; interactivity; media-relations; new media; sociology; Tarde.
Hans Bernhard Schmid: Evolution by Imitation: Gabriel Tarde and the Limits of Memetics
Meme theory confronts us with a rather unflattering image of ourselves. In Daniel C. Dennett's words, conscious selves are nothing but the 'vehicles' or 'nests' of the true heroes of the evolutionary story of culture, the memes. In the memetic view, cultural evolution is not about 'us', but about 'them': the units of culture such as the ones mentioned by Richard Dawkins: 'tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches'. In this paper, I shall take a critical look at some premises of this memetic 'shift of perspective', which turn out to be highly problematic. In a first step, the memetic image of the self as a 'meme nest' shall be traced back to its neo-Darwinian origins. Meme theory is built directly on the model of genetic evolution (I). As some considerations concerning the ontology of memes shall reveal, there are fundamental differences between genes and memes which cannot be accounted for within the memetic view (II). In a third step, Gabriel Tarde's idea of 'evolution by association' shall be introduced as a convincing alternative to the memetic idea of cultural evolution. Writing almost a century before the term 'meme' was even coined, Tarde put forth a theory, which already contained much of the insights that make memetics attractive to the social sciences. More than that, Tarde was safe from the fatal memetic tendency to model cultural evolution too closely on genetic evolution (III). In the concluding section (IV), I shall come back to the initial question concerning the place of the self in society: what is our role in cultural evolution in a Tardean view?
Keywords: cultural evolution; evolution theory; genetics; imitation; intentional autonomy; intentionality; memetics; social theory.
Barbara Czarniawska: Gabriel Tarde and big city management
This text focuses on the wealth of insight that Tarde has to offer organization theory. It revolves around three pairs of concepts: imitation and invention, identity and alterity, custom and fashion; illustrating their relevance for understanding organizing by relating them to a study of big city management. Imitation, according to Tarde, is the main mechanism of sociality, the main mode of binding people (and things) to one another. If so, how can invention and innovation occur? Tarde answers that inventions occur because of imitation and fashion. Ideas, practices, or objects that became imitated and therefore widely spread are not fashionable anymore. An established fashion becomes its opposite - a custom or an institution. Fashion constantly renews itself, but it chooses among many inventions that are present at a certain time and place. Those chosen are allegedly superior, on the grounds of their qualities, or on the grounds of their provenience in time and place, or because they are well anchored and do not threaten the institutionalized thought structure. Yet, neither imitation not fashion leads to homogenization of social practices, as both are used by the social actors to construct their identity, but even more so to construct their alterity, or the difference. The main attraction of Tarde's thought for organization theory is the capacity of its metaphors to capture paradoxes typical for all organizing. Tarde managed to render a world that was populated with individuals - human and not - who were associated. Following his insights, it is possible to understand that each person employed in a company is much bigger and much more complex than the company itself, the latter being a collection of a repetition of one or few properties of its employees and machines. In the same vein, imitation and fashion - those basic mechanisms of sociality and therefore of its special case, organizing - can be given proper attention with Tarde as a valuable source of inspiration.
Keywords: alterity; city management; fashion; imitation; organization theory.
Roar Høstaker: Gabriel Tarde, postfordismen og det sosiales ontologi (in Norwegian)
The aim of this article is to discuss the basic sociological concepts of Gabriel Tarde and in particular his economic sociology, in relation to Maurizio Lazzarato's recent book Puissances de l'invention. The article presents an analysis of Tarde's social ontology, and Tarde's understanding of sociology as an intercerebral psychology where the primary relations between agents lead to different processes of imitations, oppositions and adaptations. Imitation is the process that can explain the overall conformism in society, but different patterns of imitations form oppositions and new inventions need to be integrated into society through adaptations. The importance of inventions comes to the forefront in Tarde's economic sociology. They make it possible for Tarde to decentre classical economic theory and its emphasis upon reproductive patterns of wealth. Lazzarato follows these insights in a critique of the economic relations under Postfordism. This regime of economic regulation is, in a much more fundamental way than previous ones, dependent upon the ingenuity and inventiveness of the workers. At the same time traditional economic concepts are seen to be unsuitable in order to understand its dynamic. The control of the inventiveness by Capital is an obstacle for the free combination of inventive forces. Lazzarato can, however, be criticised for ignoring Tarde's historical frame of reference and, especially, the importance of the concept of civilisation as opposed to the nation-state. A reinterpretation of Tarde's views is presented in relation to this critique and makes it possible to address Tarde's lack of actuality for most of the 20th century.
Keywords: classical economy; cognitive capitalism; economic sociology; inventions; philosophy of difference; Postfordism; social theory.
Bibliography of Gabriel Tarde