12 The problem, of course, is that so little of Tarde’s mainstream work is available in
English, most notably Social Lawsand Underground, and some edited collections.
13 Such a viewpoint has some obvious disadvantages, of course, which I will have to lay
aside for now. In particular, it tends to privilege change when one of the most striking
things about cultural systems is their resistance to change, without which a ‘ratchet
culture’ could not exist. ‘If the meme was the full story of culture, cultural change as a
whole would be as rapid as fashions in clothes or pop songs’ (Levinson 2005: 3 4 ). It
patently is not.
14 Thus, for example, the market becomes an imprint of the passions, not a rational,
calculative plane.
15 These models all bear a resemblance to Law’s (200 4 b) model of ‘fire’.
16 We need to do this not just on theoretical but also on political grounds as a means of
understanding how the envelope of understanding develops as a series of choices about
what makes a collective.
17 This is a theme I have taken up in a number of papers (e.g. Thrift 2001).
18 In so doing, Sloterdijk follows an increasingly common argument that an engagement
with place, explicit in Heidegger’s later work, informs Heidegger’s thought as a whole.
What guides Heidegger’s thinking, in this interpretation, is a conception of philosophy’s
starting point as our finding ourselves already ‘there’, situated in the world, in ‘place’.
Heidegger’s concepts of being and place are therefore inextricably bound together.
19 Thus Sloterdijk retains Heidegger’s radical emphasis on the recently discovered notion
of the environment, as circumstances being adjusted to accommodate the entity in their
midst.
20 In bringing forward this formulation, Sloterdijk is making a similar move to those
approaches based on joint action that have become increasingly common, as well as the
renewed emphasis by Heideggerian scholars on Mitseinand Mitwelt.
21 It is important to note that in this paper I will be taking embodiment to be a linked,
hybrid field of flesh and accompanying objects, rather than a series of individual bodies,
intersubjectively linked. I take the presence of objects to be particularly important
because they provide new means of linkage (Zielinski 2005) – new folds, if you like.
22 In turn, it is worth remembering that the dynamic range of sensory nerves is startlingly
poor: for example, they usually fire at no more than about 200 impulses per second,
compared with, say, the 15 log units of variation of intensity of light that the eye can
deal with. So consciousness of whatever kind always comes heavily pre-treated (although
all manner of tricks of information compression help to overcome some of the limited
channel capacity of the sensory nerves to the brain).
23 For example, it is possible to write about the history of facial expressions like the smile
(Trumble 2003) because media have been invented which can transmit these
expressions.
24 Thus, imitation has proved to be the rarer and cognitively more demanding ability in
animals than trial and error.
25 There is, of course, a lively debate in the cognitive sciences and primatology about what
exactly is meant by mind-reading (so, for example, some would have it that it requires
the construction of full-blown beliefs about others’ cognitive states, for example,
something I think unlikely). And equally how far it stretches (so, for example, some
apparent mind-reading might consist of sophisticated behaviour programmes). But, as
Sterelny (2003: 65) puts it, though imitation may not always be a ‘theory of mind task
... it is a cognitively sophisticated one’.
26 It may even be, following Tarde, that memory and habit are forms of imitation: ‘engaged
in either, we in fact imitate ourselves, instead of another person: memory recalls a mental
image, much as habit repeats an action’ (Potolsky 2006: 116).
27 This is fairly easily disproved. See Göncli and Perone (2005).
28 For Girard, although mimetic desire is distinctly human it arises out of non-human
capacities for imitation.
276 Notes