Abstract
Science, then, is the source of every social revolution. It is this extra-social research which opens for us the windows of the social phalanstery in which we live and lets in the light of the universe. (Tarde, 1903: 80)
Over the past decade, the stunning writings of Gabriel Tarde have had a growing influence and his thought has become a key reference in social and cultural theory. Now, set to spur yet another round of reading, and increasingly research application, of this seminal thinker, we have Theo Lorenc’s first-ever English translation of Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology, providing a crystallization of key points of critical contact between these titular terms and Tarde’s thought. That he harks all the way back to the rationalist philosopher Leibniz in this important text is the key to the possibility of finally gaining a coherent view of Tarde’s modern project. The book vividly demonstrates why for him modernity is understood in and through the intimate role of sociology in the epistemology and methods of scientific inquiry. Science constantly refines and alters its theories. Knowing one’s world through science requires eschewing the membership codes of familiar social territories and instead composing singular monadic orders, or multiple temporary orders of reality. As we shall see, at the centre of monadic orders are subjects who experience a profound socially foundational unsociability, an experience of difference that existentially has priority over, and lends information and vitality to, the given forms of their social membership. Tarde’s modern project thus stands to be recognized as the major sociological theory of difference from the classical era.
Tarde was a product of a European fin-de-siècle infused with anxiety and enthusiasm (Toews, 2008). In his day he was a French minister of statistics and a doyen of the nascent field of sociology that sought to give conceptual shape to this brave new world. In later years, his ideas were mostly forgotten in favour of Durkheim’s conception of a modern society emerging from processes of functional differentiation, centred on homo duplex. The latter is an unstable desiring human animal coexisting with a more responsible and consistent self that is bonded to others by the obligation to adhere to common rules, morals, and ethical beliefs, which show up as external and coercive social facts influencing social behaviour in a manner that can be illuminated by quantitative methods of study. At our present-day juncture we are seeing democratic social movements challenging the norms and methods of older modernist conceptions of the social. Accordingly, I believe there is now an opening for a thinker, like Tarde, who is willing to re-examine the possibilities of how we can know ourselves sociologically.
Well before Bergson, at the fin-de-siècle, Tarde had pointed out that the state of science had come to rest upon a false dichotomy of the interior and the exterior of our experiences: for example, where we see qualitative sensation set in opposition to quantitative movement. As a result, the seductive and false idea was being spread that this illusory gap would soon be closed in some new breakthrough that would counter our so-called ‘modern alienation’ (pp. 16, 42, 54). The ‘almost mythological absurdity’ of this notion of final convergence consists in the erroneous notion that ‘distinct beings can of themselves become new beings numerically added to the former’ (p. 35, original emphasis). To the contrary, in pursuing this illusion in ever more unique, intimate, and technically difficult encounters, Tarde asserts, ‘science tends to pulverize the universe’ (p. 15). The pulverizing methods of science ‘multiply beings’ and do this ‘indefinitely’ (p. 15). In sociology as much as in physics or chemistry, it is not a question of discovering isolated individual items bonding to somehow magically form whole new ‘social’ beings. It is rather much to the contrary: through the scientific method the world is parsed into smaller and smaller items, from atoms to particles and beyond. For Tarde, the proper vocation of science is detecting and harnessing processes of the diffusion of similars (p. 15). In the spirit of Tarde, one should therefore ask: how can we see science anew as a popular and communicative activity, as a much more radically de-centred mutual involvement of states and processes – scientific observers and their subject-matters – conceived as meant for each other and as needing to seek a mutual understanding of their relations (Latour, 2007)?
In the late nineteenth century, Tarde struck upon the idea that the project of science could be radically renewed by reorientating it around Leibniz. Leibniz in fact invented the same mathematical tools of scientific inquiry as Newton. He had the same ideas originally inspired by the study of bodies and motion, envisioned in the exact same period of time. Leibniz, though, took this fledgeling science in a very different direction than would Newton and the latter’s philosophical interpreter, Kant, applying it far beyond the physics of known, simply bounded bodies. Leibniz viewed his work as a Scientia Generalis aimed at computing factual truths in a manner that raises them up into rational or conceptual truths (Cassirer, 1943). The key to this broad conception of the application of calculus for Leibniz had to do with the implications he saw in it for conceiving the plastic or composite nature of objects (Smith, 2011). His aim was to use such concepts to gain knowledge of worlds beyond that with which we can normally have any kind of empirical contact (Smith, 2011).
It is quite a challenge to do justice to Leibniz’s thought from a modern vantage point. What makes it worth sustaining the attempt is that it now appears to be as much due to the nature of this vantage point as Leibniz’s aim. With Voltaire’s ridicule of Leibniz in Candide seemingly still burned into our minds, we have been used to labelling his work as speculative, close to a kind of science fiction. An outline of his thought in ninety brief sections, Leibniz’s Monadology describes, as even his most sympathetic contemporary interpreter puts it, ‘an order of reality which, for the sake of being intelligible, leaves the sensible domain almost totally behind’ (Rescher, 1991: 12).
What makes Leibniz still a radically novel thinker is his deceptively simple idea in the Monadology that reality must be made up of substances without parts (Rescher, 1991). Such a premise entails that we accept that the event of these substances, or let us say the mode in which they become matters of concern, exceeds science’s apparatus, which deals only with parts. Many will therefore dismiss Leibniz’s approach as speculative, or idealistic. But they would be missing the fact that he also claims that every object is a composite, which seems, contradictorily, to overlap with current theories of assemblage. Studying the Monadology, one thus searches for an explanation of this apparent contradiction. Following Cassirer (1943), I suggest that for Leibniz the solution is in the vocation of science. However, while Cassirer related this to what he saw as a nascent symbology, I will stress that Leibniz saw science’s vocation as less to construct and more to analyse objects, to break them down into parts. This analytic process can be viewed phenomenologically as an assemblage, but when one brackets the latter view, an interesting insight emerges: assemblage does not, and could not, fully coincide with Leibniz’s reason for scientific inquiry. Here is where I would draw a contrast between Leibniz’s agenda and Weber’s concept of the scientific vocation as value-free (Weber, 1958). The reason to do science, for Leibniz, is neither construction nor destruction, but has more to do with acknowledgement and adaptation vis-à-vis the resistance of the real, which is singular and irreducible to the composite but lives within the composite like an unsociable element precariously subsisting within an infinitely complex environment that wants to subsume it.
These simple elements Leibniz terms monads. A monad is not a specific kind of person or particle. The monad is not held together by a function, or purpose, or how useful it may be in any way. It is not an assemblage or a composite. It does not internalize the perspective of a society. It is deduced from the existence of societies, in the sense that societies are composites, to be sure, but our knowledge of the monad’s integrity and unity is not strictly logical or a priori. The question of whether it can be seen as, or mapped as, a structure is an interesting and open one (Johansen, 2013). Yet it is important to grasp the monad’s experiential dimension. This is because at the same time that it results from deduction, this very deduction is an experienced by-product of empirical scientific inquiry and is historically and culturally contingent (Toews, 2010). The possibility, and the desirability too, of the deduction of monads is itself an inference based on situated observation, taken from the experience that science reaches points at which the identity of certain simple elements resists further analysis. This failure, which is due to the nature of the object and not merely to the insufficiency of funds or ideas, is an integral feature of the event of science (to which would be interesting to relate, for instance, Popper’s notion of falsification). To be sure, everything happens as if it is merely our intelligence which exhausts the possibilities for figuring out further clever ways of breaking objects down; yet while, as we shall see, the event and the human effort, our project, signified here are important, for Leibniz this experience should not be interpreted as an assemblage-building process or reduced to merely a quasi-Kantian transcendental limit of knowledge. Rather, it is interpreted as a necessity of the universe as monadically structured, because if, in addition to composites, monads could also be broken down further, all objects would become indistinct.
To be sure, Leibniz left himself open to simplistic ontologizing: for example, to the impression that his intent was to isolate monads as singular noumenal beings completely unrelated to each other and determined by their own vastly diverse inner logics and appetites. Whatever his intention, Tarde points out that such a construal of the monads unnecessarily stresses their isolation from each other (p. 15). What is needed, though, is not to replace this impression with a more robust theory of how the monads relate to each other from the point of view of their own identities. In the way I see Tarde, what he is suggesting is needed is a description of the dynamic process by which two orders of difference are involved in a give and take in relation to each other. Leibniz asserted that monads denote a maximal order of difference, while composites exhibit all sorts of degrees of difference. The way Tarde sees it, the maximal order of difference among monads should be interpreted as a state of complete belief or commitment of each one to its own logic (p. 15). But this so-called ‘pyschomorphic’ interpretation is only a temporary theoretical conceit which Tarde effects in order to put forward a more lasting, major modification to monadogical theory by positing that we should understand this belief to be for the most part a virtuality, like a force, rather than a simple actual state. This opens the possibility to understand the monad in terms of a dynamic process: that is, as actualizing a desire toward a belief, which is more plausible and useful than just saying it has ‘an appetite’. As we shall see below, Tarde will soon then dismantle the psychologistic aspect of these terms desire and belief, decisively distancing them from mere descriptions of states of self-consciousness. What is important is that the widest form of difference (belief) is thus revealed to be intimately related to the more narrow or subtle degrees of difference (desire), without having to appeal to an external (or composite) cause of the changes that the monad is undergoing (not to be confused with another monadic source of such changes, which he will see in how monads imitate each other). This then, in turn, also allows us to understand better how a monad can be human or non-human. This distinction is usually taken as a wide – even, for some, the widest – form of difference. Of course, though, at the same time we know from our relationship with animals that it can also very often involve very subtle, even imperceptible degrees of difference. In fact, it is not too hard to see that the continuity of any identity is actually just a practical matter of accepting a certain range of small differences as neglible for some particular purpose. Humans, then, can be seen as connected to non-humans by a chain of such identities. Scientific inquiry is this chain’s purpose or guarantor.
A Tardean monad, therefore, is a site of a certain refinement of inquiry as it gradually reaches the point where we can believe that there is something that exists before us that is what it is. This is not at all to say that we can thereby somehow result in perfect knowledge of this given as external observers; nor is it to posit sense-certainty. Like an interactionist sociologist who takes an actor’s definition of his or her situation as fundamental and natural, for Tarde the scientific inquirer detects, rather than defines, the integrity of a monad. A monad is the objectivizing reality and necessity of a belief, which animates and explains the desire subsumed in monads. Tarde here refines and expands the epistemology of monadological theory, effecting a further change in register from psychomorphism to sociomorphism, as he explains that the site of monadic inquiry is a sorting out of possessions in which ‘social elements hold each other or pull each other in a thousand ways’ (p. 56).
Some formulate the ultimate reality of an object as a thing-in-itself that we can only understand through how it ‘reveals’ itself with its appearances. Scientists talk about an individual object in terms of a set of properties. The realist will typically see those properties as appearances with certain qualities that must be described. For Tarde (Bergson would repeat this point), this unfortunately leads to unnecessary intellectualization. Any qualitative description, say, of an emotion is only a ‘sketch’ of what is ultimately a possessive relation (p. 56). Tarde sees a set of properties as denoting not a list of abstract qualities like hardness or liquidity, but rather the fact that a monad possesses certain other items in nature. Monads can be laid bare only ‘in the intimacy of their transitory characters, each fully unfolded before the other, in the other, by the other’ (p. 56). Monads get entangled with each other in this way by imitating each other, which is a sharing of possessions (see, for example, how Sykes, 2010, applies Tarde in her ethnography of borrowing).
Who possesses? Action is possessive action. Possessing a monad, say, a certain chemical property, enables an individual to possess another monad, perhaps a certain organ, which expands capacity for further possession, further action. Unilateral possessions are generally unstable and typically reciprocal possessions become predominant, as in the modern age, where each citizen is ‘at once the master and servant of every other’ (p. 51). This explains why very often individual people strongly resemble each other, even sometimes across cultures. An individual is a concentration of possessions: Tarde says: ‘I desire, I believe, therefore I have’ (p. 52). Yet ‘the initial and final term is always difference, the characteristic, the bizarre and inexplicable agitation at the basis of all things, which reappears more clearly and sharply after each successive effacement’ (p. 41). Thus, science ought to consist in refusing to see resemblances, apparent constraints, and orders as deep forms or principles and ought to insist on seeing them as ordering problems that the individuals are working out amongst themselves (p. 51). The action of a particle on another particle is a problem of relation between them, not a form or a principle of collision; the metaphor used for description should not be granted some mysterious deep meaning of its own. A worshipping woman may possess beliefs that have come from highly definite and predictable, imitative relations with others; it only obfuscates matters to claim she is acting under the constraint of some pre-existing harmony, structure, or other external set of conditions. The problem does not consist in whether it is better to generalize from an a priori theory or a grounded theory. Rather, each individual for Tarde is ‘an indefinitely enlarged sphere of action’ (p. 27). The problem is only to discern how the individual changes in terms of the limits of her perspectival reach as her possessions and relations change, and on a larger scale how diversity produces temporary stable patterns which then form the basis for new diversities (p. 41).
This raises a key point of contrast with Leibniz’s monads: Tarde’s monads can influence each other. All through the composite social structures of social life we can perceive rays or lines of beliefs and desires where actors influence each other. Pillars appear on a house that is centuries and worlds apart from the original context in which pillars were invented. The individual who decided to possess pillars is imitating but at the same time inventing his own order. Order is characterized by symmetry. But the fact of symmetry in general, as seen in all sorts of non-human phenomena (for example, crystals), Tarde tells us, proves that individual social agents are by no means to be understood exclusively or by some kind of priority on the model of human actors, since anything ‘which results not from a competition of intermingled plans which clash together, but from an individual’s design executed without hindrance is symmetrical and regular’ (p. 32). As individual human persons we sometimes succumb to ‘the prejudice which leads us to judge all external monads as inferior to ourselves’ (p. 35), but the necessarily interactive nature of all individuals will always undermine the rugged individual and require opening up to others, since ‘left to its own devices a monad can achieve nothing’ (p. 34).
This appears a contradiction until one realizes that individuals and monads are not to be equated. In Leibniz’s system, monads are, as it were, their own agents. In Tarde’s revision, the monads – sites of irreducible questions, beliefs, and desires – are open to each other. They are not more passive than Leibniz’s monads, but they do require a medium to relate to each other. That is the role of what Tarde terms individuals. Individuals are agents. Monads are like mechanisms in that they enable agents to achieve their goals according to some form of order. However, they are not like mechanisms in that they are singular and irreducible and actually supply, rather than merely facilitate, such goals. They would be very close to being like software programs, except that they are a situated, non-generalizable essence of a specific line of action, not a template. Individuals and monads are therefore intimately related to each other. Monads are like a concept of habitus, but with a tendency toward symmetrical order, and the monad alters only by the influence of other monads that vie for dominance in the individual. Perhaps it would be better to state it this way: that individuals work through the composites that chance has dealt them which make up themselves and their environments, and in doing so aspire to the power, symmetry, and simplicity of monadic order. In this vein, individuals compose their realities. Monadologically speaking, thus, the individuals of Tarde thereby work to mediate monads within composites.
Yet nor is the monadology of Tarde merely one more theory of subjectivation, as beliefs and desires are located in monads, not strictly in individuals per se, and can exist in non-humans. People often miss this point, Tarde tells us, because they tend to think of these qualities as terms of our privileged human emerging consciousness of the world. Yet nothing is more obvious than the fact that there are as many unconscious as conscious beliefs and desires. According to Tarde, ‘a desire or an act of faith not only can exist without being felt, but actually cannot be felt as such, any more than a sensation can be active by itself’ (p. 19). And so why may beliefs and desires not apply ‘just as much to unknown and, I submit, unknowable phenomena, ex hypothesi different from sensations, but no more or less distinct from sensations than the latter are from each other? Why may sensation not be seen simply as a species of the genus quality?’ (p. 19, original emphasis). So, what are the social and psychological implications of a concept of monadic order that extends to a complexity far beyond humanly sensible, observable, presentable order? This is Tarde’s question. How can we open up Leibniz’s famously windowless, free-standing monads to beliefs and desires? Tarde feels confident in asserting that this is a question for sociological research, and remarks that it follows that ‘all sciences seem destined to become branches of sociology’ (p. 28).
What was an ontological factor, a universal substance, in Leibniz turns in Tarde’s post-rationalism into a pragmatic condition, a universal unsociability associated with monadic orders. Yet despite this pragmatic turn, a Tardian sociology cannot rely upon, and in fact must problematize, the traditional interactionist assumption that human beings are naturally communicative or sociable with each other. In Tarde, a kind of universality inheres only in the fact that monads require unsociability of individuals in order to formulate monadic desires, which thereby produces a maximal individual difference. Maximal difference entails a profound unsociability that is not reducible to mere opposition. To oppose, to be merely anti-social, is to react, in a kind of rudderless way, to being at sea in the composite world of degrees of difference. As Simmel (1903) would put it in a different register, conflict is a form, not a limit, of sociation. Tarde (2009), though, much more radically than Simmel, thematizes hesitation, a fecund disengagement which is a limit of sociation. In terms of his monadology, this suspension of sociability is intimately located in what we have termed the individual’s involvement with the pursuit of monadic order. It is thus a necessary condition of action, and of agency. To be sure, an individual takes the attitude of another individual, as the symbolic interactionists say (Mead, 1967). However, in Tarde’s view, the point is to understand how this relation is inspired and governed by a specific monadic schema, not by some general drive to consensus. Individuals who embrace the monadic desires end up sociable, and adherent to similar (though never totally identical) beliefs, whether this takes the form of conflict or another form of interaction.
What Tarde contributes is a unique and completely novel insight into what could be termed the precarious sociability of scientific inquiry, which permeates the problem of any ordering activity in general and the existential situation of the individual in a modern society. There is an irreducibly non-social and unsociable moment, which is meaningful and is prior to sociability and which continues to guide individuals as they go about their business of choosing when and where and with whom to be sociable. Sociability defines much of the active life of individuals who alone, and then together, are in thrall to the perspective supplied by a monadic order, like members of a chess club who are drawn together by the order of the game. The monadic order defines the limit of their sociable impulses; once the game is over, they go on their way. Such separation is of course not anti-social in any way. Sociability is not exhaustively explained merely by a membership which encourages individuals to be sociable with each other and/or anti-social toward those who may conflict or differ by degrees with them. Social membership is a result, not a condition, of sociability. The actions of actors are not ‘socially explained’ by marshalling and categorizing sociable versus anti-sociable elements in their behaviour; nor can we speak of anyone as having an inherently sociable impulse which he or she then deviantly disavows. The origin of the social, in its plural, originary, monadic points of order, is ‘extra-social’ (Tarde, 1903: 80).
This would not prove to be a popular idea in the twentieth century. Rather, Durkheim’s idea that social membership is a given and automatic was to prevail in sociology (Durkheim, 1982: 130). In the prevailing view, spurning another’s attentions or turning away from another is always a disavowal. In my research into the influence of multi-tasking behaviours on the self influenced by digital media (Toews, in press), I have found it impossible to rely on such an idea; social theory has to be rethought for our new era. So much of sociology has been built upon this premise of association as, deep down, obligatory, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. It is well known that many social ordering processes in human affairs, like the instituting of a set or rules or laws, or the figuration of a social object as sacred, may be articulated in terms of obligation. However, others, like the diffusion of certain figures of speech, or the spreading engagement of people with social networking websites, may not. Some may be articulated in terms of kinds of beliefs that have little to do with obligation, repetitions that might be traced to a fear, a love, a pleasure, a wonder, or an attraction. And some beliefs that we tend to think of in terms of the sociology of the sacred and of moral obligation can be described more accurately using other terms, as a prayer may be easily associated with a doctrine, but its discipline may actually arise out of a sense of wonder that connects one person with a star. For Tarde there is nothing less social about gaining a greater accuracy in describing the relations between these items, the monadic contexts and social consequences of their association. There are all kinds, large and small, of constraining, order-forming beliefs and ‘passionate interests’ (Latour and Lepinay, 2010), on which humans have no monopoly.
For Tarde the essence of the problem is actually endemic in the wider context of the development of science in general. It is rooted in how many scientists have poorly grasped ‘the scientific concept of the relation of conditions to result’ (p. 36). The distinction between conditions and result is of vital importance. It should be understood as a premise that leads to inquiries into relations in a broad sense, not merely into causes. By the same token, Tarde concedes that Leibniz’s dogma of pre-established harmony is to be rejected. He replaces it with the formula that ‘every phenomenon is a social fact’ (p. 28), the compositions of which are contingent and multiple. Anticipating ethnomethodological theory, according to Tarde, there is as much complexity in conditions as in what they produce (p. 36). In Tarde’s view, Durkheim became too enamoured of promoting a master sociological myth of origin, too enamoured of modernity as a myth rather than as a method.
Most of social theory is, in fact, rooted in the notion of one modern rupture, and in the end it is by means of contrast with the mainstream viewpoints on this rupture that Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology can best be summarized. In his book The Questions of Life (2002), European philosopher Fernando Savater relates the mainstream story of a humankind undergoing modernization. It begins with humanity’s humbling, through the energy of Copernicus, who with his provocative observations and calculations finally shattered our sense of being at the centre of a universe inwardly arranged around us by a supreme creator. Thus began a long series of indignities and sacrifices and the identity of Europeans as actors who go out into the world. Constant cravings for new experiences, new bridges to new lands and new sensations, the compression of the world, politicization, dispersal, an oddly shared individualism, and worry about lacking a home seem inevitable consequences of a people in thrall to their mission of growing the scope of their actions and their selves. It is a common, albeit Eurocentric, story of the origins of the modern project that all can recognize, and many have expanded upon. Its key element is the constant fated repetition of a scene of humiliation for pretenders to irrational power, combined with the moral lesson of the need for the sacrifice and imperfection of a social contract. For some who may now read Tarde, there will be a strange sensation of absence of these figures of humiliation and sacrifice. But Tarde nevertheless raises a real need with his fundamental question: how does Leibniz’s Monadology allow us to rethink the nature of individuals in a way that makes them useful again to themselves, not as privileged, humanized subjects, but as actors seeking order? Can we eschew the modern myth of sacrifice, humiliation, and the lowest common denominator, and realize a more vigorous scientific conception of active social life?