There is either society or there is sociology – Gabriel Tarde
I came to the works of Gabriel Tarde by way of a book entitled Reassembling the Social by French sociologist Bruno Latour. In it, Latour explores the philosophical underpinnings of a new school of sociology based on Tarde’s work along with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, among others. Actor Network Theory is based on the radical premise that there is no such thing as ‘society’ as an empirical unit or agent. It argues that social phenomena are far too numerous, complex, and multidimensional to ever constitute the discrete totality of the ‘social whole’ or ‘social organism’. Latour locates this radical break with what he terms the ‘sociologists of the social’ in the disagreement between Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, his lesser known rival and predecessor. This paper is intended as a brief investigation into their debate and its philosophical ramifications.
There are several points in Durkheim’s Division of Labor that betray his conception of society as a totality. The first and most prominent is his use of the ‘organism’ as a metaphor for society. As he says in his introduction: “…the law of the division of labour applies to organisms as well as to societies…the division of labour in society appears no more than a special form of this general development,” (DOL 3). This view implies that the division of labor responds to a sort of biological necessity, that it has a specific function. It indicates that Durkheim believes in a social end or purpose in relation to which the division of labor can be considered as a means. This is made all the more evident when he poses the question: “… is it our duty to seek to become a rounded, complete creature, a whole sufficient unto itself or, on the contrary to be only part of the whole, the organ of an organism?” (DOL 3). Either we strive for a complete society or we strive for society to complete a part of a larger organism: what is taken for granted in this choice? In both cases Durkheim frames social life as aspiring to a wholeness and completeness, either for itself or something larger than it. That the question is posed as one of duty further betrays his notion, for duty is here, as in John Stuart Mill, the ethical dimension of being part of a whole. Consider the two following excerpts:
“In short, in one of its aspects the categorical imperative of the moral consciousness is coming to assume the following form: equip yourself to fulfill usefully a specific function,” (4)
And later, as he introduces his method: “…we shall first investigate the function of the division of labour, that is, the social need to which it corresponds.” (6)
In the first passage Durkheim implicates the problem of ‘fulfilling a specific function’ with the emerging division of labor in society. Yet as his first gesture toward this problem he manages to perfectly reproduce it: he interrogates functionality by analyzing its function[1].
We may also locate Durkheim’s idea of the social totality where he speaks of ‘society’ as having a kind of agency: “thus punishment constitutes essentially a reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts through the mediation of an organized body over those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct,” (52). In this sentence, ‘society’ and ‘its members’ are portrayed as separate agents, acting upon each other from positions so ontologically separate so as to require the ‘mediation’ of organized bodies. For Durkheim, society is enough of a complete whole that he can speak of it as distinct from its constituent elements, conceived necessarily as mere ‘parts’ serving a specific function. It is on the basis of this notion that Durkheim may then declare some societies to be abnormal or incomplete in their composition, and permits him to draw sharp lines between different societies conceived as mutually exclusive ‘types’.
An article from the Political Science Quarterly, dated 1897, succinctly orients Gabriel Tarde’s work against the dominant conception of the ‘social organism’: “At that time the infatuation of sociologists for the Spencerian conceptions, however misapprehended, was at its height. The metaphor of the ‘social organism’ was the motto of the day. After his debut, the unknown magistrate from Sarlat [Tarde] took a firm stand against the dominant doctrine… Tarde necessarily assumes the non-identity of social and biological, and regards their typical and differential elements as irreducible” (504 PSQ). This article establishes Tarde’s posture against the dominant idea of the ‘social organism,’ which brings with it the injunction to interpret all social phenomena as being ‘organs’ within a more or less homeostatic system. For Tarde. ‘differential’ elements in society are ‘irreducible’ to an organic function, and cannot be represented as part of a coherent unity. Tarde here uses the word “identity” in refuting this idea of social unities (aka ‘the social’ or ‘society):
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… 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. M&S pg. 73
In this passage, Tarde calls society “a prodigiously unlikely singularity” – and criticizes those, like Durkheim, who treat it as an axiom. For Tarde, one must begin with the social in all its inconsistency, difference, and multiplicity. He cautions sociologists to ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by rationalizing incongruous elements into functions of the social whole, or of any whole whatsoever. Gilles Deleuze, the theorist largely responsible for Tarde’s resurgence, explained the matter concisely: “Durkheim’s preferred objects of study were the great collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded… Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative matter,” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 217). Tarde’s attention to ‘subrepresentative’ detail derives from his rejection of the great representations of social life in the form of social unities. Again we find the same warning: the sociologist must inhabit the diversity and irreducibility of social phenomena; they must remain there and ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by an order exterior to it:
"It is always the same mistake that is put forward : to believe that in order to see the regular, orderly, logical pattern of social facts, you have to extract yourself from their details, basically irregular, and to go upward until you embrace vast landscapes panoramically ; that the principal source of any social co-ordination resides in a few very general facts out of which it falls by degree until it reaches the particulars… I believe exactly the opposite.'' p. 114 L/S [viii]
Here Tarde cautions against an ‘upward movement’ that recalls Plato’s ascent from the cave of illusion. What he commits to instead is a going-under that speaks more of Zarathustra’s descent or of Frued’s downward journey into the unconscious. It is in this focus on the actual and material, in this turn away from the heavens, that Tarde’s debate with Durkheim assumes its Nietzschian character (it is no accident that Gilles Delueze and Bruno Latour, the thinkers most responsible for Tarde’s recent resurgence, are devout readers of Nietzsche). Tarde’s affinity to Nietzsche is represented here in these passage from Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
Basic Error: to place the goal in the herd and not in single individuals! The herd is a means, no more! But now one is attempting to understand the herd as an individual and to ascribe to it a higher rank than to the individual - profound misunderstanding! ! ! Will To Power # 766
For Nietzshe as with Tarde, the ‘basic error’ is ‘understanding the herd as an individual’ which is the same as conceiving of society as an organism or a unity. And to ‘place the goal’ in this false unity, to furthermore ‘ascribe to it a higher rank’ is for Nietzsche a dangerous proposition. What he means when he says that “the herd is the means” is that, despite not being the reality of social life, the representation of social relations in the form of social unity (ie. Durkheimian sociology) is a means by which to achieve an end that is always already political.
[1] Nietzsche: Modern socialism wants to create the secular counterpart to Jesuitism: everyone a perfect instrument. But the purpose, the wherefore? Has not yet been ascertained. Will to Power # 757
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