as they do non-conscious perception, dissociation, suggestion and suggestibility,
and social influence as forming a part of a stream of thought, rather than a threat
to the boundaries of an individual. Though Tarde was of his time, he was also an
original in his emphasis on understanding imitation as a process of snowballing
mimetic desire, as reverberating circles of influence, rather than as simple mechanical
copying, and on his insistence that imitation formed a basic process of social life
that was governed by laws of regularity which could be attributed to the action of
invention. For invention itself was also considered as a social process by Tarde, one
which determined which ideas spread – and which did not.
Interestingly, Tarde provides another kind of link to the past in the present in
that, along with Bergson, James and others, he was involved with the Institute of
Psychical Research in Paris, established in 1900 (Blackman 2001), which investi-
gated all manner of psychic phenomena as semiconscious capacities to be affected,
including mesmerism, hypnosis, trance, telepathy, mediumship, and so on. This
is hardly a surprise: the history of early psychology was bound up with the new
‘continent of the unconscious and the peninsulas of neurosis and hypnosis’ (Peters
1999: 91) as expressed through phenomena like these. For Tarde, imitation was
akin to these kinds of phenomena in that it involved dissociation within which
suggestion could thrive.
Tarde made dramatic use of the findings of the new science of hypnotism,
especially in the work of Hypollite Bernheim, to support his theory by classing
imitation, defined as ‘the action at a distance of one mind on another’ or
the ‘quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive
plate of another brain’, with somnambulism and hypnotic suggestion. As
he declared in a characteristically stylish formulation, ‘I shall not seem fanci-
ful in thinking of the social man as a veritable somnambulist.... Society is
imitation and imitation is a kind of somnabulism’. And: ‘The social state, like
the hypnotic state, is only a form of dream, a dream of command and a dream
of action. To have only ideas that have been suggested and to believe them
spontaneous: such is the illusion of the somnambulist and also of the social
man’.
(Leys 1993: 2 7 9)That formulation is interesting on three grounds, First, it links directly
to semiconscious automatisms about which I will have more to say later. ‘Both
the somnambulist and the social man are possessed by the illusion that their ideas,
all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous’ (Tarde 1962: 77 ).
Second, it also suggests an impulse to explain phenomena like the spread of ideas
as flow phenomena when they have so often been argued to be simply a function
of institutions, not least because the self itself arises from an unconscious imita-
tion of others (Potolsky 2006). Third, it can be argued that it foreshadows
the way that phenomena like hypnotism have provided a fund of images for the
redemptive and diabolical features of mass communication – from the telegraph
on – which lives on in numerous, often unacknowledged forms. For example:
232 Part III