action (Rogers 2003; Beirne 198 7 ). The entities that Tarde is dealing with are not
people, but innovations, understood as quanta of change with a life of their own.^13
This is why any 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 the brain, dreams like Alexander of conquering
the world, tries to multiply itself by thousands and millions of copies in every
place where there exists human beings and will never stop except if it is kept
in check by some rival production as ambitious as itself.
(Tarde, cited in Latour 2005: 15)Second, and notoriously, Tarde questioned the idea of society. Insofar as he was
willing to countenance the use of the word at all, it was to refer to the complete
range of entities that exist in association.
Tarde’s sociology is not a science of the social according to the categories
of sociology. It is an understanding of ‘associations’, of co-operation, with
no distinction made between Nature and Society. It is the sociology of atoms,
of cells, and of man. Tarde takes Durkheim’s premise that the social is a fact
and must be analysed as such and turns it on its head. ‘All phenomena is social
phenomena, all things a society’.
(Lazzarato 2005a: 1 7 )Necessarily, Tarde therefore places biological entities on an equal footing with
‘social’ ones, mixed together in many hybrid forms. Third, Tarde’s work is exactly
concerned with passions, passions transmitted, most particularly, through a
semiconscious process of mimesis (Leys 1993); feeling becomes a propensity to
engage in conduct considered ‘automatic’ and ‘involuntary’. In other words, Tarde
was a part of a long tradition of work on imitation-suggestion, which would
subsequently take in Freud, Prince, and Ferenczi, amongst others, as the very
ground and origin of psychic experience (Leys 2000). For example, in Psychologie
Économique Tarde produces a model of the economy in which bodies of passion
multiply as so many animations.^14 Fourth, Tarde’s is a material world, but one in
which there are passionate relationships with things and these passionate
relationships form a matrix of property, of things chosen to be interpreted as
affecting and centrally involved in person-making (Tamen 2001). Fifth, for all these
reasons, for Tarde space is key. But this is a particular kind of space, one which
continually questions itself by generating new forms of inter-relation. It is a space
which is as likely to value the indirect as it is the direct: it bears therefore some
relation to models of action-at-a-distance like those found in theology, spiritualism,
mesmerism, hypnosis, telepathy, immunology, epidemiology, and so on.^15
In other words, Tarde provides a gathering point for those who believe that the
term ‘society’ and the models of socio-cultural inscription which are its main
theoretical legacy are completely exhausted and who want to work instead with
a form of associationism which is regarded as the only way of following the
230 Part III