“In this fine and accessible book, Toews not only presents some of the key

themes of Tarde’s sociological program, but he also demonstrates how they

might be brought into conversation with contemporary debates. This includes
showing how Tarde’s work can serve to readdress questions of nature. By
combining historical examinations with present-day theoretical concerns, this
books offers an at once useful and important contribution.”
Christian Borch, author of Social Avalanche
Gabriel Tarde

This book presents the core ideas of early sociologist Gabriel Tarde and sug-
gests a new pathway for sociology based on his foundational work. Rejecting
anthropocentrism, Tarde highlights the contrast between the natural and the
artificial, uniquely emphasizing the positive significance of the artificial in an
age in which people have come to distrust it profoundly. Recovering Tarde’s
theory today in the context of contemporary as well as classical scholarship
and recognizing how it fits with such phenomena as quantum physics and
digital media, this book develops the concept of the cosmological imagination
as the context for a critical Tardian analysis of artifice that can bring together
what we know about our contemporary future-oriented global societies.
How we know the universe, our place in it, the place of other animals and
objects in it, our global socialities, our human claims of power and privilege
within it, are pointed questions Tarde asks as he wonders whether a future
temporality conducive to constant artifice has become our normal human
way of life. Considering our ambivalence about modern products and mod-
ernity in general, our thinking about the future, and our tendency to forget
what nature used to signify in its presentation of problems beyond our con-
trol, such as illnesses and epidemics, Gabriel Tarde: The Future of the Artifi-
cial demonstrates the reasons for which we need to return to Tarde’s work to
rediscover its relevance for public debate as we seek to think through the new
era and its societies in which culture and nature are no longer distinct.
This book will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with inter-
ests in our digital age, new sociologies of materials and objects, neomona-
dology, and the thought of Gabriel Tarde.

David Toews is a senior tutor and course coordinator in the School of English
and Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. He is the author of
Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

166 Max Weber and the Path from Political Economy to Economic Sociology
Christopher Adair-Toteff

167 Outlines of a Theory of Plural Habitus

Bourdieu Revisited
Miklós Hadas

168 Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics

Edited by Natalie J. Doyle and Sean McMorrow

169 Anatomies of Modern Discontent

Visions from the Human Sciences
Thomas S. Henricks

170 Critical Theory of Coloniality

Paulo Henrique Martins

171 Karl Polanyi and the Paradoxes of the Double Movement

John Vail

172 Nationalism and Hegemony

The Consolidation of the Nation in Social and Political Life
Michaelangelo Anastasiou

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David Jarrett

174 Making Citizenship Work

Culture and Community
Edited by Rodolfo Rosales

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Gabriel Tarde
The Future of the Artificial

David Toews
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982

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I refer here to the pure sociologist, who, through a necessary
although artificial abstraction, is distinguished from the nat-
uralist … they hear, in a certain way … the music without seeing
the orchestra.
Gabriel Tarde
Contents

Acknowledgements x
Prologue: Anti-Prediction xi

Introduction 1
1 The Rise of the Artificial 13
2 A Sociology of the Cosmos 28
3 The Artifice of the Self 40
4 Digital Mediation 56
5 The Return of Nature 70
6 Imagining the Future 82
Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future 98

References 104
Index 111
Acknowledgements

It has been many years – generations, really – since Tarde offered his system
of thought – and was shot down by his colleagues in the early days of
sociology. Thank you to them, I suppose. Flying in the face of received
wisdom, my first book, Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital
Media, was in fact a not-so-thinly veiled first attempt to deploy my own Tar-
dian ideas. In this book, I have tried to explain more explicitly why his ideas
were prematurely dismissed and why they are being revived, and to synthesize
his ideas in a manner that relates them to current global issues and structures.
While the current book was not originally intended as a companion to the
previous one, I see now that it kind of is. Not least, it has become obvious to
me that the acknowledgements in that book all apply equally to this book. I
would, therefore, say thank you, sincerely, cordially, and deeply, again, to all,
and I apologize for the many flaws my work undoubtedly still contains.
Prologue: Anti-Prediction

In an earlier time, we human beings liked to picture ourselves living long lives
in a rich world of our own making. We imagined travelling into space, land-
ing on other planets. We imagined getting to know other beings and living in
peace, or at least in a war aimed at peace, perhaps organized by some kind of
vast league of nations of which we could all be members. The word ‘we’ was
on lips everywhere, for behind it, in every mind, burned a public, collective,
incremental endeavour, an effort at colonizing, hierarchizing, and deploying
the world’s – and, more fictively, but seamlessly, the universe’s – peoples and
resources.
National agencies, corporations, vast bureaucracies, science fiction and
fantasy writers were deployed to undertake such work. What we predicted,
the we that was supposed to be doing the predicting, the methods of predict-
ing – these are all vastly less amenable to depiction in story form now, partly
because many of these forms of agency have diminished social functions,
partly because we trust stories – particularly colonialist stories – far less than
we used to, partly because our most important sciences, such as quantum
physics, can no longer be communicated in non-mathematical languages let
alone story-form representation. How we know the universe, our place in it,
our sociality in it, and our claim of power and privilege within it are all ripe
for a radical shift in perspective after the end of world pictures.
As the stories get less believable, the end is getting rockier. We now live in
the days of “mission accomplished” and “sharpiegate”, confronted at every
turn by “cultural Marxists” who have apparently given up on researching the
dialectics of culture in society to take up fomenting the supposedly “fake
news” of climate change (Heer 2017). Everyone knows, yet hesitates to admit,
that many of the latest offerings of “reality”, from Trump’s lies to Bolsonaro’s
bluster, are about salvaging the story forms of the “American dream” that
capitalism once created. Even seemingly benign tales of amazing new tech-
nological feats on offer from the few who are thriving such as Branson,
Bezos, and Musk are all about vaunting so-called private initiative, mobilized
to justify trillion-dollar efforts at imitating the days of thundering test planes
and searing deserts, making money out of the end days of gas and oil. They
make phrases such as ‘virtual reality’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ that once
xii Prologue: Anti-Prediction
added at least some real analysis to triumphalist sloganeering seem almost
quaint now. Not that long ago, the blending into scholarship of largely fic-
tional notions in popular culture still seemed acceptable as popular descrip-
tions of stepping stones to the future. Such faux-utopian tactics are now
deflated, punctured by a million pinpricks of dystopian visions of a dying
land, rusting infrastructure, all-out culture war, and an atrophied high mod-
ernist subjectivity.
But, alongside all this gun-slinging and high craziness, another, more sober,
collective, anti-predictive way of life is emerging. Gone are the naive days of
letting leaders lead and waiting for a coherent, coming future. Here are the
days of living in the future, all sorts of objects and people, global citizens,
embedded within it in some kind of new, imagined but consequential, puta-
tively democratic bond. The media that bring us information and entertain-
ment are explicitly social, in more than just name, thousands of conversations
among far-flung people taking place each minute. Technologies as smart as
we are receive our everyday respect, and what is different or outside the realm
of human understanding is no longer automatically pre-reflexively labelled as
alien. We are more humble as science continues to grow, a conjunction of
factors that warrants reflection.
A new project of understanding the future built on critical reflection will
not, however, be possible simply by taking up the modest space offered by our
new relations. Instead, we must seize the social space and expand it, and
stretch time into a new perspective. I offer a strategy of going back to the
original context of the foundation of sociology to see how we can adapt its
outlook to our new realities. We will continue to invite the more established,
classical sociologists into our conversation; after all, theorists such as Marx,
Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Bergson, Gilman, Dubois, Horkheimer, Adorno,
and others were all critical of the non-sociological mainstream. They light up
some of the dark sides of modernist social life in ways that are still sometimes
exemplary and useful. But we need more than ideas: we need a whole
reframing of sociology, a whole new theory of the social bond in the new
context of power in the cosmos. It is important work to find classical socio-
logical theorists and concepts that can help us in our project.
One thing we hear announced in this new future is a new relationship
between the human and the non-human. If I continue to use the term ‘we’ in
this book, it is not because I uphold the principles of the colonialist era in
which a universal subjectivity enforced victorious languages, passing off its
definitions of objects as complete, forever shutting out its misfits, raising up a
victor class of human beings coded as ‘white’, swallowing up all the colours,
suppressing and jailing minorities, and controlling all non-human objects. It is
rather because I reject the neoliberal suppression of collectivity and instead
aim to critically imagine a new era of sociality that you and I belong to,
indeed one to which this book is meant to contribute. This book is about
getting down to defining the kind of sociology that we – the world’s decen-
tralized, distributed, different peoples and objects, collateral damage of global
 Prologue: Anti-Prediction xiii
politics in the 20th and 21st centuries – will need in order to grasp this sea
change in the social attitude to knowledge affecting all of us.
I encourage everyone to get involved. There are many under-appreciated
classical sociologists who can help point the way; there is far more variety in
sociology than some schools, stressing their erstwhile successful methodolo-
gies, are willing to admit. For the past 20 years, I have been committed to
interrogating how the artificial and the future come together in the work of
Gabriel Tarde. This book is about him and is meant to help you on your way
to getting a new critical perspective on our contemporary social life. I am
interested in how this new distribution of socially oriented ideas and methods
in the world is influencing us, and how his concepts can help us sort this out.
Ahead of his time, Tarde’s work points to a new modality of living history,
inclusive of fact and fiction, inclusive of sociability and unsociability, inclusive
of the future and the heat of everyday life, one that anticipates many of our
conundrums and waits for a comprehensive critique.
Introduction

Like Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), I am interested in how sociology will be

conceived by those who see it as the key mode of grasping and understanding
a new life. While we have become used to sociologists offering us conclusions
they have narrowed down into a set discipline, Tarde’s ideas are quite different
and much more open-ended in principle. A philosopher by training, like so
many others who were involved in founding scientific pursuits in the 19th and
20th centuries, Tarde created his own, both normative and critical, sociology.
More of a whole paradigm guiding all the sciences than one discipline within
science, his sociology depicts a new way of life that is future-oriented and
inclusive of the non-human. I will argue that, in doing so, Tarde brings toge-
ther a number of aspects of these phenomena in an interdisciplinary way that,
despite being created more than a hundred years ago, can still provide fresh
illumination for us.
While getting to know a sociologist named Gabriel Tarde might seem
worthwhile in itself, the subtitle of this book, “the future of the artificial”,
bears some explaining. For centuries, some combination of sentience and
reason was supposed to be our thing – our one universal thing. For the
religions and arts, it demonstrated human superiority, a position just below
divinity. Science was, in due course, enlisted to support and justify what it
took to be a necessity. Some psychologists are still dancing in a veritable
garden of types of ‘intelligence’, one for every kind of experience, as Gard-
ner claims – musical, visual, linguistic, logical, bodily, interpersonal, intra-
personal, naturalistic, existential (1993). Biologists weigh in with the
materialist idea that intelligence is an imprimatur of their studies of the
brain. The very gift of birth, our human instincts are expected to reinforce
to each and every one of us, is the gift of intelligence, free and open-ranging
for any use in the world.
The popularity of this gift is not surprising if you consider that “the con-
cept of ‘intelligence’ is an abstraction from patterns of behaviour denoting
social approval” (Hardiker 1973: 392). This helps explain the counter-intui-
tive term ‘artificial’ that is applied to many recent efforts to promote and
extend intelligence. Adding ‘artificial’ to the loaded word ‘intelligence’ – one
can add it to almost any term – clarifies that it resonates not merely with a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-1
2 Introduction
special talent or commodity, but a whole new social world (Cassell 2019). To
be sure, artificial intelligence often evokes a utopian (or dystopian, depending
on your point of view) world of supposed perfection, or at least of vastly
improved accuracy (Sawa 2019). Such rhetoric often remains on the level of
the computer as a commodity. On this level, as in movies dominated by
computer-generated imaging, reality has been extended, virtualized,
enhanced – too complete to stimulate the imagination. But, on the other side
of the coin, things are far more interesting. Consider search algorithms, for
example: in one nervous stroke, our genius at enhancing reality has opened up
the freedom to openly imagine, picture, and contemplate the universe. To be
sure, companies have forced upon us their way of commodifying our own
searches and search results (Bilić 2016). But, does not the fact that this is still
a struggle only prove the point? Capitalism is powerful for sure, yet have we
not discovered in computing technologies a key capability of redefining the
mantle of reality for us?
Beyond the imperatives of capitalism, our invention of computing has
brought about unforetold new roles for artifice. Social media and social net-
works, for example, have been married to innovations in our ways of socially
interacting (Quan-Haase 2020; Toews 2018b). Art is more complex with new
computer-based techniques (Ornes 2019). Public health has become globa-
lized, helping to manage such challenges as pandemics (Elezaj 2018). How
could we grasp climate change without computer modelling, or engage in
global climate activism without digital media (Salama 2020)? One might be
ambivalent about such changes, and that is certainly fair and even right, but it
cannot be denied, at least, that the future is a site of struggle over how science
and technology will be done, and that such a struggle has begun to pose this
kind of question for us. How we redefine the nature and the role of artifici-
ality is the litmus test of the extent to which we show we can still live imagi-
natively and embrace creativity.
After reading Tarde, in his final book published just before World War II
and his family’s escape from France to England, Henri Bergson (1977) asked
a question: do we live in an eternal present forged by profligate, frenzied
exploitations of the earth, human beings, and other animals and stamped
with an ideology of a coming future that unleashes an unbridled churning out
of artificial presentations, promises to consumers of a new life that, in fact,
are never realized? Or do we live in the future, living and doing science asce-
tically in what we used to call nature, with objects now possessed only tem-
porarily, respecting them beyond our studies as otherwise unfathomable and
autonomous beings alongside of us, shaping and engaging with artifice for
passive and contemplative as well as active purposes, instead of treating
others in a domineering-activist way, expressing an agency that refuses to
define itself as overpowering the agency of other beings? Bergson’s ambit –
similar to that of this book – is that we are coming out of the former and
heading into the latter kind of life, of which there is every possibility that it
may eventually come to prevail.
 Introduction 3
Almost certainly, Bergson knew that his voicing of the question we are
posing was ahead of its time. The war and the post-war period continued the
regime of exploitation. How could he or anyone from those generations have
anticipated what we know about how digital media are speeding up the crea-
tion of new possibilities? We do not know if being ‘ahead of one’s time’ is
something that Tarde, for his part, considered as a young person. What we do
know about his life is limited, and not very revealing. He was born and raised
in Sarlat by his mother, then studied law in Toulouse and Paris. The Ministry
of Justice for France saw his value and retained him as an employee. He
began developing a theory of criminal responsibility. Building upon a series of
theoretical articles ostensibly about the psychology of criminals, Tarde’s book
Penal Philosophy (2010a), originally published in 1890, offers the first fully-
fledged theory of the self. Broadening his ideas to society in general, Tarde, in
the same year, published his major systematic work, The Laws of Imitation
(1903). He was promoted to Director of Criminal Statistics. This promotion
allowed him the latitude to develop his sociology and all the research tools
and networks he could hope for.
A young Émile Durkheim was among Tarde’s connections in this period of
his life. Later, in Suicide, Durkheim chose to advance his career by painting
Tarde as the author of a number of misconceptions about sociology, mainly
the error of individualism, a common shibboleth that Durkheim claimed he
was keen to disprove (Toews 2010). Durkheim’s straw man attack on Tarde
prompted a public debate between them, which is now a classic document in
the foundation of sociology and has recently been reimagined and published
(see Chapter 2). Not to be outdone, George Herbert Mead, too, unfairly
attacked Tarde as a “parallelist” in matters of mind and body (Mead 1967).
Below, we shall disprove this charge, while at the same time taking the
opportunity to consider some key critical points of comparison between
Mead’s and Tarde’s sociologies of the self. But much damage to Tarde has
been done. It is inevitable that, to some extent, we are still necessarily
embroiled in extricating Tarde from misrepresentations of his work.1
The challenge here is great, because, as hinted above, Tarde does not offer
merely an alternative sociology. He offers a fully formed sociology fitted to his
time and the phenomena he studies. Above all, he offers his sociology as a
new way to understand the scientific direction the world is taking (Toews
2013). As with any sociology, if we are to learn from it, we must find its
relevance in both the substance and the methods of our own lives. In Tarde’s
sociology, we find one of the first ultra-modern, scientifically centred accounts
of social life. But, with the rise of digital media and our vastly sophisticated
tools of copying and duplicating any information whatever, our new ability to
store it and exploit it as ‘big data’, we are a continuing part of a fundamental
social change that the original sociologist of imitation and innovation was the
first to identify and describe. Digital media, networked individualism, and the
network society are ways to describe this change, but it is more profound than
such terms can convey. Tarde’s sociology is meant to be a universal key to all
4 Introduction
of our ways of knowing all kinds of objects in the universe. Human beings are
such objects, but so are other things that we usually do not think of as subject
matter for sociology. Unpopular in a time when the world was embracing
fantasies about the exponential rise of human power, Tarde was already
moving beyond anthropocentrism. But there is much more to his thought
than even this.
Chapter 1 identifies concepts that can help us contextualize Tarde’s sociol-
ogy. The overall purpose of the sociological movement, from its beginnings in
the late 19th century until today, can be defined as a concerted attempt on the
part of many scholars to define a modernity conducive to human consump-
tion and production. For example, the most significant thinkers, Marx (1971),
Durkheim (1984), and Weber (1978), held that forms of artificiality in social
life produced by modern social structures such as capitalism have gradually
become endemic in human culture. As sociologists, their aim is to discern
within this supposedly counterproductive movement and/or to counterpose to
it ways of acting and thinking that can build upon a new critical awareness of
such constraints on human behaviour. Horkheimer and Adorno of the
Frankfurt School argued, even more pessimistically, that nature has been
betrayed almost to the point of no return (Cook 2014; Horkheimer and
Adorno 2007). Though they rejected any easy way of reviving the concept of
nature in its dichotomous relation with the artificial, they nevertheless accep-
ted the association of the latter with falsity (Cook 2014: 22), as did all of the
mainstream sociologists.
Tarde’s sociology differs from this received wisdom. Tarde proposes that we
accept a certain level of artificiality as normal, even as conforming to ‘laws’
(1903). He asks this not out of a sense that we are only human, as if artifici-
ality is a sign of weakness or of a medicine we need. As we shall see, artifici-
ality turned from a benign relationship to the world in the Middle Ages as
‘artifice’ into a symbol of destructive modern human exploitation of ourselves
and the land. I show how modern philosophers such as Rousseau (2006) and
Hobbes (1998) constructed a fundamental dichotomy between human artifice
and what they termed the ‘state of nature’. The latter, and thus the dichot-
omy, never really existed, however, except in their systems of ideas. Even-
tually, this was pointed out by thinkers such as Spinoza and Leibniz. In
particular, Spinoza (2018) argued that nature is merely a way of looking at the
substance of God from the point of view of the latter’s multiple modalities.
But what results from the interventions and clarifications of the philoso-
phers is, arguably, only a deepening and an entrenchment of the dichotomy of
artifice and nature. This is shown by the rise of the concept of culture. The
all-consuming nature of the dichotomy forecloses the smaller-scale notion of
artifice or simple creativity. As a result, people wondered whether culture is
rooted in the artificial or in nature. The modern concept of culture evolved as
a way of managing the tension this debate produces. Even today, the analysis
of culture is still frozen by this impasse between those who emphasize cultural
studies and the dramatic artifices we create in that context and those who take
 Introduction 5
a more mainstream sociological, naturalistic approach to cultures in societies.
The long history of this impasse shows that the analysis of culture cannot
lead us out of the dichotomy. Of necessity, one must look at both sides of the
equation and choose one side to critically develop. Nature typically functions
as an alibi preventing us from examining the creativity of our ways in the
world, in Tarde’s viewpoint. Take imitation, for example: it is typical for later
sociologists to claim it is a non-sociological aspect of human nature and thus
to ignore it. We are used to thinking of imitation as uncreative, but this is
untrue. Tarde (1903) shows how imitations are micro repetitions that produce
differences as they combine with other imitations. Novel combinations of
micro imitations are at the heart of our human way of acting, thinking, and
being in the world. For Tarde, as a sociologist, that means that the artificial in
forms such as imitation is by no means a form of alienation or distraction
from our true being. Tarde projects a future of imitation that today we fully
inhabit with our regimes of duplicating and copying virtually every bit of
information we can get our hands on in a system of social life we term ‘digital
media’ (Toews 2018b).
Chapter 2 is then aimed at describing Tarde’s principles of sociology. Tarde
offers ways of sociologically explaining all kinds of human behaviours that
are composed from various imitations, focussing, in particular, upon imitation
as it proliferates in urban environments (Borch 2005). This is not just out of
an interest in cities, or in imitation for that matter. Rather, I argue that
Tarde’s first principle is what I term ‘cosmological imagination’. In its
broadest conception, sociology is an investigation of the cosmos. The cosmos
is, of course, vast beyond all comprehension and includes all kinds of objects,
not just human beings. Among other things, refocussing the goal of socio-
logical analysis as the cosmos entails that sociologists must start dealing with
power relations in a manner that is non-anthropocentric. For his part in this,
Tarde (2012) crafts a kind of neo-monadology in which he thematizes pos-
session as a relation of power. Objects possess each other, resulting neo-
monadologically in changes in their viewpoints and qualities. Possessors have
more power than those possessed. However, the situation is fluid, as objects
frequently add and subtract possessions. The cosmos is riven with these pos-
sessive power relationships.
Understanding the cosmos is the aim of all scientists, Tarde holds (2000).
Having this larger aim expands our minds and perceptions to the far-flung cor-
ners of reality, and our knowledge never adds up to more than a limited under-
standing. In contrast, I will posit that the universe is seen as limited owing to
human limitations: as all that which human beings can know about the cosmos.
With this clarifying distinction in place, Tarde’s theory of power can recognize
the ambition of human mastery of the universe, while at the same time recog-
nizing the impossibility of mastering the cosmos. It is anthropocentrism in
sociology that presents a version of the notion of the mastery of the universe in
which human beings are equal to and successful at the task but should, morally,
restrain themselves from doing so. (There are arguments that complicate this
6 Introduction
situation with economic and other grounds, but eventually they come down to a
moral perspective on how things ought to be done.) In our Tardian scheme, as
we can see, a successful mastery of the universe is impossible. It has never taken
place; it makes little sense to argue against it. What is important is how posses-
sions of objects, often mutual possessions, shape the universe, but also the extent
to which they fail to shape the cosmos.
In contrast, Emile Durkheim, a contemporary of Tarde, sought to create a
sociological discipline that would exclude non-human objects from its subject
matter (Durkheim 1982). Durkheim’s sociology sought to establish the evo-
lution of the structure of human reality by examining the routines of human
action (1982). Tarde, pointing out that Durkheim thus has no way of
explaining change, suggests that Durkheim’s model of sociological explana-
tion fails to recognize the nature of repetition (Tarde and Durkheim 2010).
Repetitions exist for the sake of variation and difference, not vice versa (Tarde
2012). One must, therefore, attempt to interrogate repetitions to reveal the
differences that are hidden by them, in order to understand how change takes
place. Tarde holds that, while repetitions can explain certain behaviours one
observes in the universe, difference is behind each of them and thus captures
the ultimate reality of the larger cosmos (2012).
In Chapter 3, I dive deeper into Tarde’s sociology. Here, for the first time, I
examine in depth his theory of the self. His theory of the self has a good deal
in common with symbolic interactionist theory, yet George Herbert Mead
(1967) famously rejected Tarde as a ‘parallelist’ (someone who posits mind
and body as dual and impossible to bridge). I expose the errors made by
Mead in his discussion of Tarde’s sociology, but fortunately those errors do
not multiply in Mead’s own sociological ideas. I show how Mead’s model
(1967) remains an important standard of analysis of the self, one that it is still
fruitful to compare with Tarde’s model.
It is hard to believe that Mead did not read Tarde’s sociology enough to
realize that Tarde was not saying the things Mead has him saying. But I have
not found a reason to believe that Mead intentionally misrepresented him.
Essentially, in Chapter 1 of Mead’s seminal Mind, Self, and Society (1967),
Mead frames his sociology as a critical response to the position of paralle-
lism, the idea of which is that the mind and the body are separate and inter-
act either rarely or not at all. Parallelism is not really a position positively
held by any thinkers; it is just a way of making the claim that thinkers pre-
vious to Mead neglected to examine the interactions between mind and body.
Such interactions, Mead shows, are kind of the whole point of a sociology of
the self. By focussing on the forms of interactions rather than the content,
Mead is able to show how utterances prompt reflection on who is speaking
and launch actors into a conversation. Mead’s model of interaction is a
wonderful structure that accounts for identities and differences in the con-
struction and development of the self.
However, Mead disliked and put down imitation, feeling that it works pre-
cisely against the kind of interaction he described. This, of course, put him at
 Introduction 7
odds with Tarde, who was imitation’s sociological champion. But imitation is
an integral part of the kind of social interactions Mead was analysing. Cooley
(2013) showed that people often do imagine, stopping short of vocally
checking, what is being thought about us by others. This means that, when we
learn something from someone else, we learn it by imitating the other. Mead
admits that Cooley is describing something that does exist, but to him it
seemed like an uncritical practice. Mead’s model is based on feedback: that
we give and receive from others vocalized responses. He argues that vocali-
zation – speech – is necessary for a person to identify the source of vocalized
language sounds as being in either me or you, thus reinforcing the construc-
tion of the self as materially different from the other. Had they read Tarde
more extensively, Mead and Cooley could have realized that, when a person
imitates another person, each imitation tends to always be only a micro
aspect of the other (Tarde 1903). This means that we must combine imitations
to craft a coherent perspective. When we combine imitations, this, para-
doxically, has the effect of creating a new form of expression. For Tarde, then,
the basis of the self is not just that “I am not you therefore I am who I am”; it
is “I am you, I am him, I am her, I am them, I am many things and people, I
am a unique combination of all these, therefore I am me”. Over time, we each
develop a biography that, as we age and have more and more interactions,
gets more and more unique in personality and style.
Tarde’s concept of the “myself” describes a gradual process of becoming
an individual and is not premised on a punctual act of separation from
others (2010a). In this way, Tarde’s model fills an important void in the
symbolic interactionist theory of Mead: it is less about how we create
ourselves by saying we are not what others say and do and more about
how we create ourselves based on how we are attracted to what others say
and do, and yet still manage to develop from this our own original per-
sonality (Toews 2003). There is no fiction of action at all in Tarde’s model,
whereas Mead must project an idealized action of separation. In Tarde’s
model, there is no contradiction between being passive and being original.
This premise aids Tarde in his analysis of media. An important student of
Mead, Herbert Blumer, had argued that the cinema was corrupting youth
because it worked expressly against giving them a chance to interact with
one another (Blumer 1976). Others, since then, have made similar argu-
ments about television, and later about video games, computers, pop
music, and the internet. The classical symbolic interactionism (SI) theorists
all seemed to miss the important development of media. Yet media was
multiplying rapidly during the time when SI was emerging. The develop-
ment of sophisticated, different forms of interaction was significantly based
on society’s incorporations of various forms of new media. In contrast,
Tarde’s analysis, even predating as it does many of these developments and
these theorists, is nonetheless very suited to, and focussed upon, the effects
of media on communication and social interaction. He did not see the
latter as, in principle, corrupting at all, but merely as providing more and
8 Introduction
more points of attraction to others and thus more and more potential for
social interaction.
Chapter 4 presents an explicit and extended analysis of digital mediation
from the point of view of how Tarde’s theory anticipated this phenom-
enon. We can say that Tarde anticipated digital media because his human
sociology is based on the phenomenon of imitation and is, thus, eminently
suited to having digital media analysis incorporated into it. The main act
of digital culture, even more than spreading information, is what such
spreading presupposes, namely, the copying of information. In many ways,
this is just a technological way of doing what we moderns have always
done according to Tarde’s sociology: imitating others and, thus, partly
intentionally and partly unintentionally, creating ourselves. The possibi-
lities of doing so are now global.
We have converged socially around images of the future. I critically discuss
how Tarde’s conception of sociology produces in his thinking a complex
notion of the public. The public is an idea that is rooted in experiences of
social life evolving from those of modern industrial society to those of the
digitally powered network society. The latter is considerably more complex in
terms of social relations. Tarde anticipates it with a theory that, as I will
show, accepts both a generalized public involving everyone in a society and
the notion of plural publics. The generalized public was submitted to exten-
sive critique by Jürgen Habermas (1985a, 1985b). Habermas analyses the
context of social relations in modern capitalism; the public for him is all
about resistance to attempts on the part of capitalists to colonize the life
worlds of ordinary actors with for-profit media programming schemes.
Habermas argues that civil society is under threat from contemporary capit-
alism, which is choking us out of public spaces. His theory of the generalized
public, though, depends on a theory of social participation in communication
that I will argue is uncritically male-biased.
Of even more relevance here is that Habermas seems blind to the civic
sensibility of plural publics. Plural publics are a notion rooted in con-
temporary digital media scholarship and evolved as a way of managing the
complexity of social subjectivity in such times. With his emphasis on differ-
ence, Tarde’s sociology is conducive to this perspective (Toews 2013). His
analyses of urbanization demonstrate his commitment to understanding the
dynamics of complex social interaction and the multiplication of various
outlooks on civic practices created by the network structure of individualism
(Tarde 2010b). Tarde contrasts the notion of the public with the notion of
the crowd, arguing that their dynamic relationship explains much about how
movements in and out of various social situations produce and energize
social subjectivities (2010b). There is not just a complexity of publics; there
is a deeper dynamic of publics and crowds as well, which accounts to some
extent for the shape of such publics. I argue that social media, in our day,
are an extension of these dynamics. The vast majority of social media
interactions are unpolitical. When they do become political, it is because
 Introduction 9
there are social problems that actors discover they are sharing on which they
may have conflicting viewpoints. Action is not automatic in social life. It is
produced as a response to such conflicts, usually developing over a con-
siderable amount of time in which there gradually emerge debates and dis-
cussions that clarify divergent positions (Mills 2000). When an action is
taken, it does not have to pull together everyone in the generalized public,
though it may eventually do so.
In Chapter 5, I continue to develop the Tardian idea that a new sense of
artifice is emerging by examining the contrasting notion of nature. Artifice as
practised today is neither the impulse common in medieval times to go about
producing goods in an image of God, nor is it the sense of artificiality that is
endemic in modernized industry. Both of those configurations root artifice in
a power external to society itself. Take the artifice that is involved in doing
science. In the days of Kepler and Newton, hypotheses were announced and
investigated as a way of fleshing out the notion of a supreme creator that was
already accepted as given by faith. Later, science became an accessory to
electric technologies and industries, subordinate to the value of ‘progress’.
Bruno Latour (1999) describes how science is done today. It evokes a socially
open version of artificiality that is not closed around certain goals.
As I mentioned above, Tarde was always on the side of a sociology of what
motivates or attracts people, rather than Durkheim’s idea of basing sociology
strictly on how people are constrained by social factors. Continuing a line of
reasoning I began in previous work (Toews 2018b), here I argue that, much
more in line with Tarde’s vision, science continues to grow today because our
sense of artifice continues in, perhaps even purifies, our sense of wonder.
Artifice in this sense becomes the way that we practise our contemporary
sociality. This new sense of artifice is about an agency of people and objects
that need not hinge on direction from an external source of power. It is a key
part of the consciousness of living not for a coming future, but rather more
immediately and ascetically in the future.
Tarde works towards a position in which nature is no longer a category
that can sit neutrally in the background while at the same time stimulating us
with the motivation to understand it. Nature had power over us because it
was a daunting image that threatened to upset our system of seeing the world
through our sciences and artifices. For a long time, nature established limits
on our human power to master the universe. Modern science changed all
that, prying open the limits and asserting more and more human intervention
on the globe and beyond. Today, we do not perceive a nature that limits us,
and so, in this chapter, I ask, what is nature today? Nature used to be thought
of as external to us and, thus, beyond our epistemological frameworks. I
argue today that, as nature is no longer a set of external objects, it can now
enter the problematics of epistemology. But the analysis must shift to a phe-
nomenological approach in order to make sense of how nature affects us. As
our way of life is intimately intertwined with digital media, it is inevitably
through digital media categories that nature will have to be understood.
10 Introduction
Through the category of ‘big data’, I develop a phenomenology of
nature. As nature only properly makes sense as one side of a dichotomy
with the artificial, and as the term nature as such is hopelessly univocal, I
shift the terminology. Instead of speaking of approaching nature, I refer
instead to our ways of approaching the unknown. Essentially, I discover
an important dynamic: that the more we know through science, the more
the unknown increases, rather than decreases, in size. This is why we con-
tinue to grow in our interest in doing science, even though the inkling we
have that we will never be able to complete our knowledge is becoming
clearer and clearer to us as time goes on. Although we cannot master the
universe, we can maintain and increase our knowledge considerably, and
we have every reason to.
In Chapter 6, I return to the theme of the future. How can it make sense
to live in the future? Do we not always live in the present? In a sociological
analysis, the past, present, and future are meant to be thickly described as
touchstones of a social existence, not thinly described as purely temporal
factors. Living in the present, which was the high modern tendency, to a
considerable extent involved forgetting the past and glorifying (or, some-
times, vilifying) a future we found it motivating to live for (or to be against).
If we are to accept the idea of a fundamental continuity between the emer-
ging modern society of imitation and urban-style networks Tarde analysed
and the digitally mediatized infoscapes of today, then the idea of an alter-
native kind of temporal subjectivity suggests itself as a way of crystallizing
that whole thread of thought. The notion of replacing the presentist ideol-
ogy of living-for-the-future with the futuristic ideology of living-in-the-
future captures this change in temporal subjectivity.
Again, there is occasion here for comparisons between Tarde’s socio-
logical thought and that of others with similar or relevant concerns. I
examine such thinkers as Simmel (1949, 1972), Baudrillard (1983, 2005),
Goffman (1973, 1997), Deleuze (1995; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1996;
Deleuze, Guattari, and Massumi 1987), and Latour (1999, 2004) from the
point of view of contrasting their notions with the Tardian wonder of
enquiry. I then show how Tarde’s blend of fact and fiction works, antici-
pating much later developments in the counterfactual writing of history,
to produce a socio-philosophical interrogation of life in the future. Con-
trasting Tarde with other utopian and dystopian writers, I show how
Tarde’s unique approach is to incorporate both of these types of writing
into one story. Tarde’s “Fragment d’histoire future”, known in English as
Underground Man (2010), presents his philosophical and sociological
arguments all together in one imaginative story. I then compare his
approach to utopia and dystopia with the literature on cyberculture,
particularly drawing upon Fred Turner’s (2008, 2013) ground-breaking
work, arguing that the politics of a new elite in the 1960s brought toge-
ther a number of diverse kinds of people with a similar kind of vision. As
I go about doing this, I enlist the assistance of Karl-Otto Apel’s (1990)
 Introduction 11
analysis of utopianism in order to measure the importance of these kinds
of works. I then finish the chapter with some conclusions about Tarde’s
Underground Man.
****
All are welcome here, particularly students. At this point, I imagine you are
wondering what I would say if you asked me for one or two ideas that you
can profitably think about as you work through this book. Tarde shares with
the other foundational sociologists a firm sense that a good sociological
argument is multidimensional rather than moral. However, he diverges sub-
stantively from the mainstream, as you will see. In particular, he demotes
human ‘action’ from its status in most other sociologies as the key indicator
of power and agency. He replaces human action with his principle of ‘pos-
session’. Releasing him from the grip of anthropocentrism, this helps him to
analyse all kinds of objects. In doing so, I argue, the ultimate value of the
path that Tarde took is to have placed the quality of humility at the centre of
all the sciences, including the social sciences. I should point out that he does
not thematize such humility directly – it must be teased out from his texts –
but I do align with Tarde to a considerable extent because I share his view-
point on this question.
I also see as unique how I offer a sketch of a Tardian approach to episte-
mology. Every advance in scientifically learning about the universe creates
new questions and areas of what is unknown to us, to the degree that, at this
juncture of history, we have to admit that the unknown is increasing in size to
a much greater degree than the known. Tarde tends to think in terms of
greater or lesser magnitudes of meaning that can be measured as greater or
lesser magnitudes of power. If, after reading this book, you can grasp how
knowledge can be increased as much as we desire on the condition that it
must be decoupled from the tacit goal of mastery of the universe, you will
have gone a long way towards understanding the Tarde that I have tried to
present and how he can be useful to us today.
Take your time with this book – it poses a lot of questions. I hope to give
you the tools to think about his work with a sustained critical approach,
though I must admit this book really just scratches the surface of themes to
which, perhaps, you will eventually contribute in your own writing. Ideally,
you will see this book as representing an opportunity to think about whether
you would address these issues in the same way as he – or perhaps in your
own unique way. I would be happy if you could do either of those things.
Developing informed criticisms of Tarde is a worthy venture. Yet I would
encourage you to push further. Can you enter into the project of doing
sociological theory yourself and think about how you would do it, perhaps
differently than he would? Can one think about knowledge coherently, as
Tarde does, as something that expands and contracts with our ways of
knowing? Can one think about society – and do sociology – as something
that is not essentially meant to be focussed on human beings? As something
that is not essentially meant to promote ‘action’, but to delve into our lives
12 Introduction
more holistically? Have we really come to live in a future that prepares the
way for a rise of such values – and, if so, what would that mean? Has arti-
fice – the pursuit of making it, the pursuit of understanding it, in contrast to
the industrial version of the ‘artificial’ – in some way come back around to
inform our own times, as Tarde and Bergson suggest, in some new critical
way, perhaps in some way that is central to this new futural time orientation
of ours? What does engagement with the future, engagement with artifice,
mean for yourself and for the others around you?

Note
1 For an introduction to this theme, see the article “Gabriel Tarde” in The Wiley-
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (Turner 2017).
1 The Rise of the Artificial

Artifice once had a positive meaning. Human creativity – our ability to pro-
duce crafts to meet our needs and desires – was understood in medieval times
as artifice. Only in modern times have we seen a transition in the way we see
humanly created things: from artifice to the artificial. The artificial now gen-
erally refers to almost the opposite of artifice, including the things that human
beings produce that seem plastic, fake, or phoney. Indeed, as modernity
advanced from the 19th century into the 20th century, this dire, oppositional
meaning of the artificial only grew in importance to the point where it
became almost ubiquitous. As we shall see, Tarde grappled with this negative
consensus and proposed a way beyond it to a new meaning of modern arti-
fice, one befitting our open social lives and our preoccupation with the future.

From Medieval to Modern

In the Middle Ages, also known as the medieval period, people lived in small-
scale communities. Such communities were largely discontinuous from each
other. In Europe, and elsewhere, it was a deeply creative culture (Ingham
2015). It was common to see artificers: skilful people who were wise in the
ways of making things. On the other hand, these communities were com-
paratively closed. Though artifice was encouraged, we must remember that, in
the same context, there were many sins that were defined as such by the
community, and being an innovator was high up on this list of sins. This
would make little sense to a modern person, but at that time the distinction
between artificing and innovating was categorical. Within a medieval frame-
work, artifice is creativity that reinforces the strict codes of a society in which
craftspersons see themselves as doing God’s work. The medieval craftsperson
inserts many artifices within artifices, arches within more arches. It is a bit like
adding water to more water; it is all perceived to be to the glory of God.
Everything beyond that is to be feared and denounced. The presence of an
innovator who tries to imagine society otherwise cannot be tolerated, and
they are branded a heretic.
In these closed, repetitive communities, it is problematic to apply sub-
jectivity in a sociological sense to people as there is almost no scope for
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-2
14 The Rise of the Artificial
varying one’s thoughts over against received wisdom. In contrast, within a
modern framework, every person is expected to be guided by their own opi-
nion. From an early age, we become intimately experienced with produced
products and feel constantly and vaguely ambivalent about such a life, here
and there pronouncing positive and negative judgements as we go about our
daily lives (Berman 1988). The term artificial arises to describe this feeling of
ambivalence that our products are taking us away from a natural reality. This
is despite the fact that there are no products that truly are not made from
elements that occur in nature. Over time, industries are organized that for-
malize production and become indelibly linked with the value of progress as
well as worries about artificiality. Every commodity is tagged with an idea
that is much more about how things should be, about what more we should
have, than about how they are. Modernity introduces a subjective, opinio-
nated individual who desires progress yet is ambivalent about the artificiality
of products (Lash and Friedman 1992).
In contrast to the medieval person, the modern person seeing artifices that
are made and added to the world does not see being reproduced thereby a
single indivisible society. Rather, we see a double aspect of every product in
society: a benefit that we name progress and a cost that we name tradition.
Neither progress nor tradition really exists as such. They are ideological
frames. In the worlds of the Middle Ages, one could always experience new
things, unforeseen things, and beautiful or ugly things, all seemingly timeless
and eternal through the mystery of God (or, in some cultures, the gods in the
plural). Today, there is no longer any such thing as an ‘artificer’ who partici-
pates in society as we subsume all new behaviour under innovation. We are
used to viewing the modern products of innovation – the plastics, smart-
phones, fast foods, drive-in churches – as powerful in comparison with the
ways of what we imagine would have been a simpler, more organic or tradi-
tional past (Giddens 1991; Touraine 1995; Wagner 1993). Modernity elevates
innovation and to innovation it links power. The traditional, posited as over-
lapping with but distinct from modernity, is a mentality indicative of our
worries about whether we are moving too fast with our innovations, or indeed
too slow (Castells 2013).
Early modernity on the whole, though, was gradual. Like the medievals,
the early moderns were not yet concerned with discerning traditions – either
good or bad ones – in their lives. This took some time. The long, slow, early
modern period that began around the late 15th century is often thought to
have culminated when the movement known as the Enlightenment, in the late
18th century, challenged the world’s people to move into a higher modern
plane of consciousness. But, before industrialization could take hold in
Europe, monarchies had to set the stage for it by working to replace the
political localism of the medieval world. The various economic systems began
to integrate. Cities gradually emerged. Populations grew. Terrible local wars
that seemed to go on and on pitted supporters of relatively modern ideas
against resisters. Yet this period is also known for being an era of discovery,
 The Rise of the Artificial 15
geographically, in voyages undertaken around the world, and intimately, for
some, in the interior of the new Protestant self. Ironically, as industries arose
and the high modern period emerged, this is when traditions started being
commonly asserted. The concept of tradition often played a part in the for-
mation of conservative political views that were as much ideological as about
fears of the gradual disappearance of local authorities (Ingham 2015).
The medieval period was a time of comparative slowness. Yet it was also
infused with a speculative spirit that could fairly be described as aspirational.
Philosophers quite unafraid to imagine the totality of the world and indeed
the universe gradually turned the figure of God into a secular premise repre-
senting the ultimate in existential and knowledge supremacy. As science
gained a foothold and began to be consulted by such thinkers, a number of
concepts emerged to form new backstops to this kind of ranginess in their
thought, not least of which was the idea of the ‘state of nature’. At the cul-
mination of the early modern era, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2006)
made his famous argument for a social contract to guide human behaviour,
positioning his notion of a human ‘state of nature’ as key to that. We shall see
how the price of his argument is the introduction into his thought of a
dichotomy between the artificial and the natural.

Philosophy and the ‘State of Nature’

Rousseau’s argument rests on his notion of a ‘state of nature’ (2006). Rous-
seau imagines the state of nature at the origins of our lives as a promise of
bliss and harmony for human beings, in which we each start out in our rela-
tions with each other socially and politically, hypothetically at least, as free
blank slates. There is, of course, no way to empirically check if a state of
nature ever actually existed, Rousseau averred. Consequently, he thought,
philosophers can disagree about the content of the state of nature, seeing
human beings’ anthropology as being set in this way or that. What is impor-
tant, he put forward, is that the project of defining human nature ought to
take place as a way of setting a backstop for theorizing about the political
dimensions of subsequent, informed human reality.
A critical interrogation of Rousseau’s argument reveals facets of his think-
ing that are less original than they can sometimes seem. Indeed, the fact that
it is clearly impossible for anyone to have any evidence about a state of nature
means that the content of various conceptions of the state of nature concept
matters little. We should thus focus on its form, and the form of the state of
nature concept is what matters here for us to have a critical perspective. For
Rousseau, the form of the state of nature concept is that it is an ideal. A way
to measure time is implied by it. Rousseau wants to claim that, over time,
human beings have experienced certain changes in the way we live, and his
ideal of the state of nature is posited as a backstop to clarify such changes.
Over time, the changes he sees are essentially what we have termed the shift
from artifice to the artificial. For Rousseau, modernity gradually leads human
16 The Rise of the Artificial
beings towards complexity and artificiality and away from the possibility of
the kind of direct, uncomplicated artifice that characterizes a vastly more
rudimentary social life.
With a view of modern time as tending towards the artificial, then, Rous-
seau has projected backwards a timeless, non-artificial ‘state of nature’ in
order to support his view of modernity. In the content of his idealized narra-
tive, the state of nature is an ur-state, coming before all forms of human rea-
lity. However, on the formal conceptual level on which this is taking place, the
notion of the artificial precedes the notion of the ‘state of nature’. To be sure,
Rousseau is well known – and disarming – for pointing out that he cannot
prove the ‘state of nature’ ever existed and that he is positing it. But it is less
appreciated that the function of this concept is one that is produced first and
foremost by his ‘present-day’ view of modernity.
Thus, the ‘state of nature’ is a concept that is, from the point of view of
Rousseau’s argument, significant, but on its own it is not real. To some, this
might not seem like an important point, as Rousseau can be read on his own
as a political theorist simply trying to get people to espouse his imaginative
way of thinking. However, when one compares Rousseau with another phi-
losopher such as Thomas Hobbes, who had also had a concept of the state
of nature for human beings, a remarkable fact emerges. The content of
Hobbes’s (1998) notion of the state of nature had presented the opposite of
what Rousseau posited, with Hobbes famously stressing simple, brutish
characteristics as the true underlying nature of human beings. As such,
consideration of their philosophies on this level naturally produces a debate
between them. This has become, of course, a classic debate in political phi-
losophy. But, strictly on the level of form, a remarkable fact emerges: the
idealization of the state of nature is exactly the same, whether one is reading
Rousseau or Hobbes. The state of nature is posited as preceding present-day
times when, in fact, it is clearly a made-up concept that is fashioned only
during present-day times.
The goal here is, of course, not to find grounds for simply rejecting the
classical European political philosophers. We are reading them symptomati-
cally. And, when we do so, a further dimension of this comparison becomes
clear – namely, that any view of an emerging modernity from the point of
view of an ideal state of nature is also irremediably ideal. It is through this
that I believe we can gain a sense of the status of the nascent idea of the
artificial. The artificial is the lens through which both Hobbes and Rousseau
are seeing the world. Both thinkers are shaped by concerns about a nascent,
encroaching artificiality in human relations, yet neither is too concerned that
they may be drawing upon the very artificialities they want to trouble. As
Amos Funkenstein puts it, “with great vigor Hobbes set out to prove that
even though all human institutions – language, religion, law have their origin
in nature, they should nonetheless be understood as artificial constructs
through and through” (Funkenstein 2018: 332). Funkenstein is, of course,
confirming that the way Hobbes sees the present-day world is through
 The Rise of the Artificial 17
concepts that present artificiality. What he is missing is that the ‘origin in
nature’ that Hobbes posits is no more real than these present-day institutions;
in fact, Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ is just as much a product of wishful think-
ing, or at least arbitrary idealized conceptualization, as that of Rousseau.
These musings on early modern political philosophy reveal an important
fact: that not only are the artificial and the natural impossible to reconcile
into one category, they were designed to be irreducible to each other. It is with
this idea in mind that we must interpret the philosophical concepts put for-
ward by these thinkers. It is as if political philosophy, in this early modern
vein at least, must necessarily dichotomize the artificial and nature. From this
dichotomy separating the artificial and the natural that has been produced,
seemingly as a by-product but actually as a key mode of political theorizing,
what is generated is the abstract notion of a social contract. In fact, this
serves not much more than a project of political theorizing based on
assumptions about a relatively static early modern structure of society.
Few philosophers expressed this stasis as directly as Descartes when he said
that, “although I had expressly supposed that God had put no weight in the
matter of which [the earth] is composed, all its parts do nonetheless tend
exactly towards its centre” (Descartes 1968: 63). Critical of Descartes, Spi-
noza (2018) weighs in by claiming that God represents the absolute simple
substance, whereas the objects of nature represent simple things that, percep-
tible to human beings, form complexities that are relative to that which is
absolutely simple. The difference between Spinoza and Descartes is interesting
in this context. It consists of Spinoza’s assertion of the power of thinking and
acting from a contemplation in which the subject relinquishes mastery over
objects in order to climb to a higher plane of individuality over against Des-
cartes’s fear of error and the worldly power of the subject to act from an
impulse to mastery rather than contemplation – that is, to define and control
all objects. Whereas Descartes’s philosophy represents a closure of enquiry,
centring it on human culture and its interests and concerns, Spinoza main-
tains an openness in which human beings can, via science, commune with
nature just as they are communing with God. This alternative between Des-
cartes and Spinoza, between the closed and the open, will become important
for sociology in subsequent centuries.
Descartes (1968) sees the universe divided into a whole and its parts. Spi-
noza (2018) represents a more open approach to philosophy. Spinoza’s ‘geo-
metry’ is less of an attempt to control or master the universe, sidelining ‘God’
into a relatively passive creator status as Descartes tends to do. To the con-
trary, the concept of God is robust in Spinoza, but it is a philosophical con-
cept not a religious one, at least as religions were practised in the past and
present in his times. The figure of ‘God’ stands for the virtually simple within
the actually complex field of ‘Nature’, a conception of their relations that, by
the way, despite his mobilization of a concept of a supreme creator, is never-
theless eminently suited to a modern scientific epistemology. For what Spi-
noza (2018) is attempting to do is provide diagrams of the complex and the
18 The Rise of the Artificial
simple, in order to imbue his epistemology with an ontic–ontological distinc-
tion. This is the first time in early modernity that such an ontological strategy
is employed in this way. In Spinoza’s monistic thesis, ‘God’ is the simple,
while ‘Nature’ is the complex that is explained by and through the simple
(2018). Indeed, as Deleuze points out, nature in Spinoza is not an abstract
notion of ‘the whole’, but is rather seen as an individual (2001); this is derived
from reading Hobbes’s Leviathan, which Hobbes defines as an ‘artificial man’
(1998). As Spinoza will argue, “not many words will be required now to show
that Nature has no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but
human fictions” (2018: 111). Spinoza’s monism asserts a necessarily and irre-
mediably open subjectivity, while the Cartesian dualism is aimed at establish-
ing a mechanics of closure around the subjectivity in his figure of what can be
thought clearly and distinctly.
Whether the concern is discovering the nature of a political ‘social contract’
or seeking out an ontological basis for modern science, emerging in this phi-
losophical vacuum of knowledge about social life is, nonetheless, a proto-
sociological imagination. We see arising new debates over the role in the uni-
verse for human societies as they gain in knowledge and consistency. Such
debates will become subsumed into the notion of culture and its relativity: a
notion of culture emerging in such perspectives on the simples and parts of
the world that are supposed to gain meaning from the assertion of spirituality
among humans. Sociology will be founded on similar debates over open sub-
jectivity versus closed subjectivity. An important interpreter of Tarde, Henri
Bergson’s musings on open versus closed societies, for example, assume vital-
ity by taking from this contrast (1977).

Culture as a Workaround
The notion of culture starts to become important in early modernity pre-
cisely owing to the shortcoming of the philosophers in establishing whether
the artificial or the natural has priority. From the beginning of the birth of
culture as a concept, it is meant to reconcile and subsume the distinction
between the artificial and the natural. There is a gradual acceptance of the
artificial aspects of human culture. This acceptance, to be sure, is based on
models derived from the observation of nature, to the effect that “the
mechanization of nature became neither a reality nor a metaphor, but a
model and a paradigm” (Funkenstein 2018: 319). But, contrary to those
theses about culture that acquiesce to the idea of it as an irreducible and
ubiquitous human reality, in fact, the concept of culture from the beginning
is a workaround. Culture is a specifically human way of using the ambiguity
of symbolisms and expressions – concepts, words – to resolve or at least
stand in for the ontological impasse between nature and artifice. Inevitably,
as a result, culture taken as a priority for understanding human behaviour
among other things functions to solidify our ambivalence about the modern
as a project that creates more and more artificial products upon which we
 The Rise of the Artificial 19
rely. Through culture, sometimes we see the artificial as widening our possi-
bilities and, therefore, beneficial. Equally, through culture, sometimes we see
the artificial as cheapening the world and thus impoverishing us. And
indeed, in hindsight, are not all of those discussions of the ‘state of nature’
by thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau merely a prototypical reckoning
of these different sides of culture, as seen through the prism of fairy tales
about human origins and human values?
There are a variety of important factors to take note of here. First, the
search for ‘primitive’ cultures, though habitually futile, continues well into
high modernity. To be sure, anthropology eventually ends up largely aban-
doning the notion of the primitive, replacing it with ‘thick descriptions’ of all
forms of culture in contrast to relatively ‘thin’ philosophical definitions of
culture (Geertz 1977). In early modern philosophy, one could say that this
ambivalence about cultural origins and values is highlighted through its
attempt to erase the latter. But it is still prevalent.
Second, another factor that cannot be explained by high modern cultural-
ists who insist that culture is a purely human phenomenon is why, if non-
human objects lack culture (and this dilemma), they do not necessarily lack
artifice, or certain artificial ways of being and acting, as when we find certain
animals that act as if they are other animals. In short, much importance is
placed on symbols as a medium of human reality. We have to ask if symbo-
lism is doing too much work here (we will return to this theme in Chapter 2).
Culture is theorized as symbolic, but such theories cannot account for non-
human artifice.
Third – and most importantly for our discussion and appreciation of
Tarde – since artificiality in our human ways of being and acting keeps
arising again and again, this sets up imitation as something to be feared.
Modernist attempts to avoid imitation as an explanatory category (in Mead,
for example: see Chapter 2) show that this avoidance is seen by modernists
as the key to affirming the importance of originality in human culture as a
defence of free will. But such defensive posturing, apart from being arbitrary
and unnecessary, evinces a tendentious view of imitation. For, in contrast to
culture, which has, as we have seen, an unstated function of reconciling the
artificial with the natural, imitation in general, free from such suppositions,
is seen as radically, dangerously open. As artifice also has a function that
cannot be reduced to human culture, imitation and artifice must be pushed
into the background, lumped together, controlled, associated with all that is
extraneous to the privileged problematic of culture. Both modern imitation
and medieval artifice are postures alien to any ‘grand’ differentiation from a
subject and instead differentiate in a ‘little’ manner that troubles the con-
ception of the imitator and/or artificer as closed into herself in a manner
that is purely ‘natural’.
Thus, fourth, striving to avoid the premise of imitation having a deep
reality in human affairs, the modernist project of society, then, becomes
grounded in an alternative that purports to foreclose artifice as well. Artifice
20 The Rise of the Artificial
that goes beyond human affairs is excluded from any systematic considera-
tion so that the artificial can be confirmed as one option in a dichotomous
choice. The choice proffered is to go beyond culture in order to accept and
promote our human solidarity with all things that are artificial or with all
things that are natural. In the ineluctable absence of a strong concept of
culture, that is the choice that the modern notion of society represents. The
choice itself can go either way, as the artificial and the natural were both
originally constructed as ideals. This could well be part of what is at the
root of the conflict between social and political views of the world in our
time (another point to return to).
As a result, ‘natural’ has come to mean self-identical, whereas ‘artificial’
has come to refer to difference and differentiation. To be sure, when sociolo-
gists come on the scene in the late 19th century, they mostly accept Marx’s
critical proposal to transcend this distinction by means of concentrating on a
dialectic between materiality and ideality (2007). But sociologists have rea-
lized that Marx’s effort does not establish a materiality that does away with
cultural phenomena (Gramsci and Hobsbawm 2000; Lukács 1972). Influ-
enced by Marx but wanting to save some agency for culture, Simmel, for
example, put forward that sociologists tend to see cultural phenomena in
terms of a ‘tragedy’ in which cultural agency is diminishing (Simmel 1997;
Simmel, Frisby, and Lemert 2011). Yet long after, Simmel’s day culture keeps
returning as an issue, whether as consummating our connections or dividing
us. There is another alternative in Tarde: why assume that culture is tragic?
Perhaps the lack of effectivity and originality in modern societies as a trend
that is increasing can be explained differently: Tarde points out that there is a
whole category of imitative behaviour that can explain human behaviour
without having to separate human reality from the rest of the world, or
having to posit an ideal notion of nature (1903).

Future Considerations
For all the reasons I have given and will be giving in this book, I have adop-
ted a certain specific interpretation of Tarde’s oeuvre – namely, that his view is
that, if the concept of culture cannot help us out of this impasse at this junc-
ture of advanced modernity, the only sensible path for human beings is to
reject the natural life and to espouse the artificial life. The preponderance of
evidence not only in terms of pride in our feats of science and engineering,
but also in the artistic terms of our utopian narratives about modernity shows
that such a path is what most human beings would prefer anyway. A new kind
of culture can be based on the decisions, choices, losses, and gains we make
between one artificial path and another artificial path (really, paths of our
desires). If, then, instead of establishing a relatively closed society, properly
speaking, we can take part in an open-ended social life, what becomes of
nature? For Tarde, nature is no longer an alibi for, or a law or set of regula-
rities established by, we human beings (we shall further see Tarde asserting
 The Rise of the Artificial 21
this premise in Chapter 5). That is, it is no longer a neutral backdrop for our
actions. Tarde thus sets the stage for a rapprochement between the artificial,
representing competing human desires, and artifice, seen now as a key prin-
ciple involved in the agency operative in all object relations in the cosmos.
And, in doing so, Tarde’s thought establishes a more robust, thicker, more
liveable future of modernity. The modern modality of knowledge, science, can
now contract into the most micro of human relations and, at the same time,
extend outwards into the cosmos. As we shall see in Chapter 5, crucially, the
temporality of scientific research into such externalities is structured in a
manner a new phenomenology can indeed reveal and make sense of.
The notion of a future of modernity – that we are living in some sense in a
futural orientation – encourages us to compare and evaluate different artifi-
cial aspects of things. By positing a future for modernity in this way, rather
than condemning us to repeat the modernist past, is Tarde’s social thought
capable of improving upon the notion of the social and sociology? The first
thing Tarde’s thought represents is an acceptance of the value and the sig-
nificance of the artificial, thus placing us on a footing that allows us to
develop a comparative perspective on our human ways of thinking and being.
Instead of imagining that we must position society over against the artificial,
and that we have to stretch society around some social configuration that is as
close to nature as possible, we can take part in, and analyse, an open, infi-
nitely variable social life. This by no means entails an uncritical view of the
artificial. As a result of the artificial no longer being asserted to be on an
impoverished side of a dichotomy with nature, it becomes possible to com-
pare and evaluate different aspects of humanly created things with more
robustness and criticality than before. Artificiality – a new sense of artifice, in
fact – becomes linked with, and judged in terms of, the creativity we exercise
to make possible living such a life.
For example, malls are artificial ways of acting and being in our con-
temporary modern cultures. When one sees a mall, one might frequently
loathe it as a temple of consumerism. At other times, one nevertheless goes to
the mall, temporarily enjoying and making use of the convenience it offers.
One may see this as benign, but just as often one may hate oneself for doing
so as one feels as though one is succumbing to its phoney pleasures (Jackson
1996). Tarde’s thought in no way makes it more difficult to be critical of the
objective features of malls and their social roles. In fact, his thought makes it
possible to advance one’s critique of malls beyond this oscillation between
feeling virtuous and feeling as though one has a vice. No longer is there a
standard of nature by which we can measure our behaviour; no longer will we
act surprised by our desires and say things like “look how far we’ve come
away from what we should be”. Historical change has resulted in the under-
lying assumptions of “Marx’s cultural world” having been eroded and dis-
solved into little more than nostalgia (Poster 1990: 33). No longer is there a
standard, by extension from nature, of ‘human nature’ of the kind that Marx
assumed, in which the good for human beings is to be able to craft things and
22 The Rise of the Artificial
exercise our creativity while at the same time enjoying the things we possess
(Marx and Engels 1988). One can begin to critique a mall, and any other
objects and processes in our worlds, consumerist or otherwise, for the parti-
cularities of how it is actually working to produce a certain degree of a good
life, sometimes, for some and to destroy a certain degree of a good life,
sometimes, for others.

The Continuing Relevance of Marx

There can be better or worse aspects of malls, and we can and should take
note of that. We don’t have to abdicate from critiquing malls, or other ubi-
quitous objects of capitalist social life, in order to place them all within a
category of all that is corrupt, imagining an innocence of nature we have
supposedly lost. There is a deeper point here too. Take the alienation that
arises from our own power to labour and creatively make things (Marx and
Engels 1988). Contrary to Marxian theory, such alienation does not come
automatically with any employment under capitalism. It depends on the cir-
cumstances. A young person typically enjoys having employment; even at
bastions of mall capitalism such as McDonalds this is quite possible and even
frequent. As the years in one job or a string of similar jobs go on, of course,
one fairly quickly does become alienated. Certainly, this can lead to role dis-
tancing and all the experiential difficulties and problems of self-identity
sociologists have identified (Goffman 2013). This is not wrong. Rather, what
Marx leaves out is that one must become alienated, not just, as he posits,
become aware of being alienated. It is true that alienation and exploitation
occur all the time in people who are unaware of them taking place, but this
lack of awareness does not entail that they were always already alienated. No,
the first introspection that one undertakes in such a situation is to ask oneself
‘How did I get into this situation?’, ‘How did I become alienated?’, and ‘How
can I refresh my view of myself, the world, and others?’ It is possible, then,
that a person can begin a process of communication with others to determine
the extent of the problem and what can be done to revitalize themself. Such
provisional solutions may be collectively or individually based and
articulated.
As most sociologists are well aware, it is not necessary to accept all of
Marx’s premises in order to use Marx’s theories profitably to better under-
stand the issues of power involved in which some people expect and even
force, directly or more often indirectly, other people to accept lesser work so
that certain things can get done and profits can be made. Notwithstanding
Tarde’s own theory of power, which we will discuss in the next chapter, but
keeping in the Marxian vein for now, a Tardian approach can ask how a
person becomes alienated beyond just the fact of becoming employed. Marx
posits that becoming employed in a capitalist economy is the basis of
becoming alienated (Marx and Engels 1988). To be alienated from their
practices, their technology, their humanity, and other people, actors do not
 The Rise of the Artificial 23
have to do anything in particular other than accept employment; as such,
their working-class position is the basis for alienation as well as for collective
resistance (Marx and Engels 1988). I argue that Tarde’s sociology opens up
the possibility that the culprit is rather the pressure that modern society
places on individuals to eschew passivity and maximize activity even outside
work. Invariably, it does so under the shibboleth of ‘seeking happiness’.
Tarde’s critique of ‘happiness’ is not unusual, but it is helpful nonetheless:

If the wish for happiness were the only fundamental desire, we would see
each people, like each individual, once its circle of habits or customs were
traced, closing itself within it, forever. But, on the contrary, we see that,
through the insertion of new fantasies and new fashions, this circle tends
in general ceaselessly to expand itself, by deforming itself, in a fever of
continuous growth, in constant disquiet.
(Tarde and Toscano 2007: 637)

To constantly chase ‘new fantasies and new fashions’ is to embrace artifici-

ality in its most inhuman, modernist sense, linked with industrial exploitation.
A sensitive reader and ally of Tarde, Henri Bergson, expresses concern:

should not this very frenzy open our eyes? Was there not some other
frenzy to which it has succeeded, and which developed in the opposite
direction an activity of which the present frenzy is the complement? In
point of fact … throughout the Middle Ages, an ascetic ideal had pre-
dominated. … There was for one and all an absence of comfort which to
us is astonishing.
(Bergson 1977: 298)

Thus, to think of how Tarde approaches the artificial is to note that the term
artificial in its negative connotation is linked with the term active as ‘frenzy’,
a principle of behaviour deemed narrow and excessive.
For Tarde, ‘artificial’ is a designation placed on things that indicates their
value as products of activity. Artificiality and activity are intimately linked.
But not just human activity. The analysis really comes into its own when one
thinks of objects as a system of things. Here, as a framework, Marx’s thought
is helpful in that he identifies a system of things that, for human beings, often
seems more important to us than the reality of our labour and how we relate
to each other. In Marx’s thought, owing to capitalism, the system of things –
commodification – operates beyond the system of meanings that humans can
relate to, making people strive to keep up with its inhuman imperatives
(1971). Marx well recognizes the possibility here that human beings will fail in
this goal, losing their connection to power as a result, giving his thought an
accuracy as applied to numerous examples. However, Marx neglects to
acknowledge, on a more theoretical level, the necessity of the fact that all
humans must fail in this. Human beings, even those in the bourgeois class,
24 The Rise of the Artificial
cannot actually ‘succeed’ in a capitalist society. Even under the most action-
conducive of circumstances, we could never be active all the time, which is
what merging ourselves into the fantasy-like world of the system of things
would amount to.
One can be sympathetic to Marx’s egalitarian intent and parts of his ana-
lysis within certain frames of his viewpoint, yet fail to grasp that his premise
of human nature as somehow naturally craving constant full activity from our
birth is as characteristic of capitalist ideology as it is of the radically egali-
tarian utopia described in the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2007).
I still strongly recommend the latter to undergraduate students, but, unfortu-
nately for more sophisticated receptions, with the rise of the digital age, the
new ‘mode of information’ is far less conducive to action than it used to be,
relativizing the notion of action and undermining the traditional sociological
conceit of assuming people to be constantly in action (Poster 1990). In
Tarde’s thought, one finds a logical solution: the system of things is a pro-
duction as it is in Marx’s thinking, but it is a production that could never
outstrip, or be conceived as falling beyond, the levels of activity of objects,
somehow leaving certain human beings in a class of winners on top of the
world (Tarde 2012). For Tarde, there is no class of people who are victorious
over others simply by virtue of being more active than anyone else. There are
only classes of objects (including people) who possess more than others do. Of
course, it is a complete fiction that this is because of ‘all their hard activity’.

Conspicuous Activity
Today, many people do, of course, try to distinguish themselves with activities
designed to be as publicly conspicuous as possible, as if these are an alibi that
can draw attention away from, or in some way mitigate, their enhanced status
in society. Conspicuous activity in our behaviour might be able to hide the fact
that privileged positions are premised on exploiting and possessing the activ-
ities of others; class is always an important factor here. But it cannot change
that fact. Take a historical example: it was clear to first-hand observers that
even the mastery of slaves by slave-masters involves a control of the activities
of slaves in a manner that, oddly, results in a corrupting inactivity on the part
of the master which the master then attempts to cover with his various, highly
visible, ‘social’ activities. At least one observer at the time noted that the
conspicuousness of such activities of the latter had to do with an attempt to
process guilt without acknowledging it (Douglass 2003). This allowed slave-
holders to simultaneously benefit from, and conceal, the class structure.
I should note, of course, that it is unlikely that the impulse to conspicuous
activity is caused only by class structure, as historically there are regular
examples of class having effects that do not include it, as is testified by certain
kinds of recluses and curmudgeons among the ‘men of leisure’ of the past. In
addition, we should also note that activity is common among all kinds of
non-human objects. Animals are an obvious example, but so-called
 The Rise of the Artificial 25
‘inanimate’ objects are also in play here. Geological objects such as volcanos
are active to one extent or another. The fact that certain objects (from among
humans, animals, and/or other objects) have been associated with passivity
correlates with the fact that, at the same time, they have typically been con-
ceived as non-human. More often than not, slaves were conceived as non-
human by slave-holders in the American slavery system. As conspicuous
activity reinforces the notion that those who are capable of activities are in a
higher class, therefore, where class structure plays a lesser role in society, we
should find that conspicuous activity is diminished. Indigenous cultures in
which class structure is a much less significant phenomenon often include
stories about all kinds of objects that play different active roles in the world;
they do not seem all that worried about policing the distinction between
active and passive. They are often looked down upon, wholly unreasonably,
by self-entitled whites for not sharing the typical white European anxiety
about passivity and the accompanying tendency to be conspicuously active.
Conspicuous activity, then, is caused by a conjunction of class and
anthropocentrism typical of European and European-descended cultures.
Yet, along with many other historically European-derived aspects of our
societies, it has become a global phenomenon. In fact, conspicuous activity
is prevalent in today’s societies that are powered by digital media – and the
Tardian point of view affords an interesting purchase on this question. We
should ask: why, in this day and age, long after the demise of the grand
slavery systems and well after the rise of technologies that can do almost
anything for us, should one make a display about worrying about being
passive? Artificiality limited to humanity in the narrow modernist concep-
tion equals a capitalist vision of constant activity. A capitalist view of con-
stant human activity cannot present a regenerative view of artificiality such
as we find in Tarde’s theory. Any premise of increasingly unbridled human
activism (in the broad, not exclusively political, sense) is, in fact, an obstacle
to the Tardian revivification of artifice. Once one espouses the attitude of
engaging in activities just to show that one is active, anything can be a tool
to that end, and one becomes part of the problem. One can even believe that
artificiality pursued uncritically by ordinary people is just how one expresses
one’s membership in society. Buying things in malls can then dovetail into
this faux-value of society. Of course, simple reflection tells us that not only is
full, constant activity impossible, but the notion of it is inhuman, and I
would call pathological the constant striving to be seen as something that is,
in fact, impossible if it were not so common.
Inasmuch as Tarde’s thought resists accepting conspicuous activity as a
legitimate human value, contra Toscano we must admit that Tarde’s thought
is not presented as some kind of thinly veiled support for capitalism (Toscano
2007). Rather, as a critical response, Tarde broadens the concept of the arti-
ficial. It becomes not merely a designation of a system of things that are not
natural. Rather, it becomes a designation of the futurity of all kinds of things.
As such, artificiality is an expression of involvement in the world on the part
26 The Rise of the Artificial
of individual people, animals, and objects that essentially describes the culture
of being possessed by others, how one mingles with them, replacing the fiction
of being authentic and standing alone. Artifice for Tarde is sociality. Nor does
Tarde assume that human beings are the most active creatures in the world,
allowing them to occupy the top of a pyramid of class positions. By no means
is Tarde against employing the concept of class in sociology; it is just that his
cosmological imagination requires him to envision other kinds of power.
In Chapter 2, we will examine Tarde’s theory of power in greater detail. For
the present, let us note that Tarde’s theory of power is comprehensive, differ-
ential, and situational. It is not premised upon an anxiety to maximize
‘action’ and, thus, to play out a role that would purport to define humans as
the pre-eminent ‘actors’. To the contrary. And even for those sociologists who
wish to restrict themselves to studying human social life, which certainly is a
reasonable choice to make, Tarde’s critical thought can help because, after all,
roughly half of our time is bound up with not acting. With being what we call
‘passive’. Even a human sociologist must remember that we are objects too,
like any others, after all. As people who have grown up in a modernist
mindset, we try to move this measuring stick to maximize action over pas-
sivity. But the more we act, the more we control in this narrow framework,
the more new situations are created that potentially introduce a toxic, often
consumerist, kind of subject position.
Let me finish this discussion with the kind of example I know best: that of
a university teacher. It happens frequently that such a teacher has the
impression that her students are too passive. In the past, much of higher
education was offered as lectures. The average university teacher today is
conditioned to believe that this is insufficient. Ever-expanding consumerist
models of education tend to dictate that the utmost in activity is always what
is required. Such a teacher might respond by changing the course or class she
is teaching such that more activities are required of her students. I have done
this myself as it has become the norm in course delivery, even though I do not
see that it is particularly popular among students or effective in learning.
Some students engage in and benefit from the new activities. A large propor-
tion, if not the majority of students, are just going to walk through the
motions of the new activities. This points to an irony of the new activist
pedagogies: passivity is, in such circumstances, actually being boosted to a
higher level. Tarde terms this ‘sonnambulism’ (1903: 76). Applied to the
example, what the latter expresses is that there is here a qualitative change in
one’s students’ passivity in which their passivity actually becomes toxic. At
that point, such toxic passivity is often veiled with what I have termed con-
spicuous activity (for the most common motivation of conspicuous activity is
probably an undue fear of being passive). In the example, it is toxic to the
relationship between the teacher and her students. Prior to the new accelera-
tion of activities, student passivity in many instances could well have been, in
part, a needed or wanted breather on their part – just part of the rhythm of
student life, which, after all, can be intense at times. It had been indicative of
 The Rise of the Artificial 27
needed room for contemplation of the class materials, albeit a contemplation
or rumination that cannot be easily measured.
Tardian sociology shows that we cannot push ourselves beyond the given
situations, educational or otherwise, that we find ourselves in. We can only
change the situation itself. We naturally need to be careful that we actually
want the new situation, that it is working for us and not just for those who
would possess us. In the next chapter, we shall see that Tarde’s sociology puts
forward a theory of power that is centred on the phenomenon of possession.
2 A Sociology of the Cosmos

This chapter gives a sense of the baseline of Tarde’s unique conception of

sociology. I also argue that Tardian sociology is becoming more and more
relevant today. To be sure, this will take some adaptation on the part of the
current sociologist interested in his work – but it is adaptive work that is
today being facilitated, I will show, by certain intellectual movements, making
it more accessible than ever before. As an entry point into this discussion, I
will first present a description and analysis of Tarde’s debate with Durkheim
(Tarde and Durkheim 2010). It is paramount to understand that many of the
innovative paths that characterize Tarde’s sociological journey were bound up
with his criticisms of the sociological theories of his friend and sociological
nemesis, Durkheim. I will then turn to describing Tarde’s sociology in a more
stand-alone, positive light. Tardian sociological theory puts together in one
approach new developments such as a critique of anthropocentrism, a decen-
tring of human sociality and revaluation of objects, pluralism in the sciences,
the impact of digital media on knowledge via ‘big data’, and the futurity of
our contemporary global ethos. I aim to show that such a synthesis changes
what Mills termed the sociological imagination (Mills 2000), and that we can
benefit from a new kind of sociological imaginary that is, for the first time in
the history of sociology, open to the cosmos.

The Tarde–Durkheim Debate

The debate that took place between Durkheim and Tarde at the École des
hautes études sociales in 1903 (Tarde and Durkheim 2010) concerns the
nature of sociology. Durkheim excoriates individualism, painting Tarde as its
representative in early sociology. Tarde is rightly unhappy with this, as he
feels that Durkheim’s society versus individual distinction paints him as being
in an awkward and untenable position. He resisted being painted as a meth-
odological individualist. Yet, in other works, I have discussed similarities
between Durkheim and Tarde – and the comparison is significant (for an in-
depth discussion of similarities, see Toews 2010). Within the relatively narrow
range of mainstream sociology, it is possible to say that they are both talking
about the individual in the context of social reality, but simply looking at it
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-3
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 29
from different, macro versus micro, points of view. However, their differences
run deeper than that, particularly in their conception of science itself.
From his Monadology and Sociology (2012) and elsewhere we know that
Tarde’s concerns with sociology have to do with constructing a metaphysics
that can clarify and legitimize the scientific method in general. Sociology,
with its interest in associations, is a not a branch of science but rather repre-
sents growth in the main trunk: it is a key example of a new and clarified
understanding of modern science. Tarde’s view is that sociology is a unique
discipline, not in the sense of a closed or autonomous institution, but rather
in terms of having evolved a new and unique understanding of knowledge –
for example, such as statistics can provide – that focusses on the small differ-
ences that repetitions of social patterns and institutions bring about in a
manner that all the sciences can and must adopt (if this reminds you of
Deleuze, this is because he took this idea from Tarde; for further discussion,
see Toews, 2013, 2010, 2003). As for the general reality of society, Tarde
claims that he has been misrepresented by Durkheim as not believing in it. In
the debate he states, “I am far from challenging the concept of certain social
realities” that, “once formed, impose themselves upon the individual” (Tarde
and Durkheim 2010: 35). Turning scrutiny back to Durkheim, he argues that
Durkheim goes too far with his criterion of ‘external coercion’. Such a cri-
terion for social facts amounts to proposing “some sort of theory of emana-
tion” (2010: 31) similar to “scholasticism”, the “realism of the Middle Ages”
(2010: 34). Tarde wanted to establish a modern metaphysics that can clarify
and legitimize the scientific method.
In the debate, based on his view of science, Tarde manages to make Dur-
kheim admit that the latter’s individual versus society distinction is superficial
and potentially misleading. Durkheim accepts that this would be problematic.
But he believes his own version of sociology escapes this problem. Durkheim
holds that only if sociologists neglect Durkheim’s criterion of external coer-
civeness of social facts and the idea that society is sui generis will they mis-
understand him. In much of their professional animus towards each other
(apart from this, they were in fact friendly colleagues and knew each other
well), Durkheim purports that Tarde ignores how the “combination” of “new
phenomena” produces a reality “situated, not in the elements, but in the
whole formed by their union” (2010: 35). For Durkheim, wholes have analy-
tical priority, not elements. This is an interesting point, yet, for Tarde, it is
ultimately an untenable one. For Tarde, the scientific method has to be a
process of dismantling composites. This is in order to understand them by
separating them out into smaller and smaller elements. In turn, this produces
more and more refined analyses. In human perception, “we have a rare pri-
vilege, intimate knowledge both of the element, which is our individual con-
sciousness, and of the compound [or composite], which is the [assemblage] of
consciousnesses” (2010: 36). The composite should not be viewed as a “crea-
tion ex nihilo of something that previously did not exist” (2010: 37). More-
over, as individuals, we are socially real, but reality changes coloration when
30 A Sociology of the Cosmos
our methods of study change. Physically, our reality is chemical and atomic.
To hold that, because a collection of physical elements are housed in one
body, this ‘individual’ is suddenly “a new being … superior to the others”
(2010: 37) is at best an error of perception and at worst mysticism.
Seeking solid ground, then, Durkheim attacks Tarde for, in his view,
attempting to assert a methodological individualism over against Durkheim’s
focus on society (Tarde and Durkheim 2010). Durkheim claims that the social
fact of obligation is evidence that individuals could never have invented
society. Tarde admits that obligation is an important element of social rela-
tions. However, he offers a distinct interpretation of it and, along the way, a
distinct view of social facts. Facts, like obligation, mean nothing if they are
not understood as embedded in a situational context of interaction between
individuals. Tarde rejects the premise that obligations are absolutely basic,
simple facts in sociology. Just as importantly, for Tarde, there are other
situational factors, such as imitation, that just as persistently and vitally
influence social behaviour. As a result, we should not follow Durkheim in
believing that obligations are absolutely basic facts in the analysis of society,
and that this justifies sociology’s disciplinary exclusivity.
At this juncture, we can tease out from Tarde’s ideas a relatively new cri-
tical thought, one that is certainly distinct from Durkheimian sociology.
This thought is that phenomena such as obligations that bind people toge-
ther socially are attractive to sociologists such as Durkheim who wish to
establish sociology as a discipline with methods that are distinct from the
rest of science because they seem simple. They seem like absolutely simple
social facts. As such, it seems that upon them the rest of the edifice of
sociological theory can be erected. Interestingly, Tarde does not reject their
simplicity or the value of simplicity. To the contrary, Tarde acknowledges
that simple facts are significant; scientists of all kinds are always seeking
simplicity as a basis for building theories. But we can infer from Tarde’s
thought the tenet that simples do not have to be assumed to be absolute in
their simplicity. Instead, they should be defined as relational (Toews 2018a).
Relational simples must never be posited as sui generis facts that are beyond
falsification, replacement, or, at the very least, problematization and further
attempts at differentiation (Toews 2018a).
Along these lines, Tarde’s social ontology is relational and rooted in his
concept of difference (Toews 2013). Long before Deleuze, he was the first to
problematize difference in the context of repetition (Toews 2002). As we have
seen, Tarde argues that repetition is solely a vehicle for difference, not a phe-
nomenon in itself. If difference were to be conceived as abstract, it would
mean it has unnecessarily been conceptually divorced from repetitions. In
fact, Tarde unashamedly makes a bold claim: he asserts that ultimate reality
is difference, and that difference precedes the forms of repetition (Tarde 2012).
This is indeed a metaphysical statement on the part of Tarde. Yet, making it
more easy to understand and accept, the precedence of difference is what one
should realize is an analytical precedence. It makes little sense to claim that
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 31
difference can somehow substantively precede any sociological facts as there
is no such thing as ‘pure difference’. Furthermore, Tarde has no problem
acknowledging that repetitions are what the sciences seek out. Repetitions
exist. However, they should not be recognized and rethought as signs of
underlying realities, as that would beg the question of where they came from.
Rather, they are mechanisms for producing and diffusing, further and further,
more and more refined differences in the universe (2012). Scientific analysis,
pursuing repetitions wherever it can and producing methods that pulverize
things precisely in order to discover repetitions, not only produces knowledge
but also actively furthers this natural process (2012). Tarde thus holds that, as
scientists, we need to identify and categorize repetitions. However, sometimes,
in the course of science, our reliance on our concepts of them appears to
make repetitions precede differences, when in reality they do not.
This is the true nub of his dispute with Durkheim. Tarde charges that it is
illegitimate, and unnecessary, to isolate a form of repetition (such as obliga-
tion) and posit it as originary, because that tends to make one unable to
examine differences that are incompatible with the form of repetition that has
been posited. It is unscientific.

Tarde’s Conception of Sociology

Let us now turn to examining the kind of sociology with which Tarde coun-
tered his rivals. Tarde offers a general definition of modern society. Modern
society is “each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied
forms, of every other” in which “each citizen [is] at once the master and the
servant of every other” (Tarde 2012: 51). Clearly, his stress is on relations. His
approach to power is nuanced and contingent. There are here differences from
and similarities with other more mainstream sociologies. We shall see that
increasingly, over time, the differences relate to contrasts with early sociolo-
gists while the similarities relate to compatibilities with more current ones.
The strongest contrast is with one of the earliest sociologists – that is, Marx.
This is not for political reasons. Marx’s notion of human nature, in which we
are seen as fundamentally active and creative, is an ahistorical measuring
stick by which to judge whether historical human creativity is or is not living
up to human needs (1971). Tarde accepts only a part of this notion. Tarde
does agree that human beings are fundamentally creative, that this was as
much, if not more, apparent prior to the emergence of capitalism, and that
alienation and exploitation occur – I will return to discussing these points
below. He disagrees that human beings are meant to be fundamentally active,
and that passive behaviour is always a sign of slippage into these traps.
In addition, Tarde’s sociology differs markedly from the professionaliza-
tion of sociology promoted by Weber and Durkheim, particularly as con-
ceived by the latter (see, e.g., Durkheim 1982). One theme that is very strong
in his work, running throughout his oeuvre, is that Tarde sees sociology less
as an isolated discipline and more as a key framework informing all the
32 A Sociology of the Cosmos
sciences. The division between the social and physical sciences is situational
rather than categorical. Today, sociological professionalization is dominated
by the notion of the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination
has certainly been a successful and helpful concept as defined by Mills
(Mills 2000). In the tradition of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, sociological
imagination refers to an ability to see the agency, and the limits thereof, of
individual human actors as arising in the context of problems we need to
solve that require us to work collectively to institute and maintain human
societies, thus highlighting instances that demonstrate the agency of human
action (Mills 2000). Tardian sociology is compatible with Mills’s idea that
any sociological problem to be studied by sociologists is such that it is seen
to arise under circumstances in which local or personal problems become
public issues.
However, there are also significant differences between Tarde’s approach
and the sociological imagination. Tardian sociology resists the valorization of
action through which many sociologists have understood agency (see my dis-
cussions in Toews 2010 and 2018b). Moreover, his perspective is non-anthro-
pocentric, raising all objects to the plane of significance that human
behaviour enjoys in many other sociologies. I will discuss how he anticipates
the stress on the analysis of objects put forward in our time by the object-
oriented ontology movement (Harman 2017; Latour 2002; Meillassoux and
Badiou 2010).

The Cosmological Imagination: Power as Possession

Tardian sociology also includes a distinctive theory of power. By espousing
her distinctive approach, I argue that a Tardian sociologist adopts a cosmo-
logical imagination that she considers an improvement over the sociological
imagination. The cosmological imagination is an expanded, rigorously non-
anthropocentric version of the sociological imagination. It looks for agential
relationships between objects of all kinds, considered individually and
socially. By thematizing such relationships as possessions, as we shall see,
Tarde’s possessive agency does not have to prioritize activity over passivity
and is particularly good at avoiding positing relationships, stressing action as
the ultimate good for objects.
Tarde’s theory of power is robust and distinctive. Well before Foucault
offered his apparently novel and idiosyncratic method of identifying the var-
ious kinds of power relationships in all relations (1994), Tarde’s theory aimed,
similarly, to get at the specificities of power. The way Tarde conceives of
power is in terms of what he calls “having” or possession. Tarde’s possession-
oriented theory of power is non-anthropocentric. This is fundamentally
because “to exist is to differ; difference is, in a sense, the truly substantial side
of things; it is at once their ownmost possession and that which they hold
most in common” (Tarde 2012: 40). All the different things that we are
interested in as sociologists have possessive relationships with each other.
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 33
Such power-possessive relationships are thought of by Tarde in terms of
people, animals, and objects.1
Because action is not central in Tarde’s sociology, even inanimate objects
can be involved in possessive relationships. For Tarde, no objects are purely
inert. Everything is in flux at a molecular level; “all similarities and all phe-
nomenal repetitions are only intermediaries” (Tarde 2012: 41). As inter-
mediaries, all objects wield some modicum of power relative to other objects.
In Tarde’s conception, within this middle range of relations, objects have
power over each other by possessing each other. Possession allows for control.
It might be helpful to picture object relations here as being like those sets of
Russian dolls that fit inside each other, as long as we realize that, in Tarde’s
view, possession is also changeable, and the tables of power are frequently
turned. In Tarde’s sociology, there is plenty of occasion and room for analyses
of power dynamics among objects of all kinds. His theory of power does not
categorically imply that any particular kind of relationship is always already
alienating and exploitative.
Humans regularly desire to possess other people and things, and yet con-
flict, when they are at odds with each other, is historically contingent. For
Tarde, conflict is a regular feature of social life, but he stops short of the view,
very common today, that power conflicts are everywhere. Conflict, although
regular, is nevertheless not the ultimate meaning of the possession of each
other. In the Tardian perspective, conflict, acted upon, is the political (Toews
2018b). It gives rise to various formations of politics. Yet a point that few
seem to grasp is that social life, although riven with power relationships, is
much broader than politics (Toews 2018b). Tarde shares with Foucault (1995)
the idea that power and sociality are more basic than politics. However, for
Tarde, the social context is potentially much more explicit and far broader
than Foucault envisages: it is the basic context of all relations in the cosmos.

The Virtual Cosmos and the Actual Universe

To lend some robustness to the cosmological imagination, Tarde’s sociology
anticipates the notion in Bergson and Deleuze of a key relation between the
virtual and the actual, and, as a result, Tarde offers an approach that, since
the 1970s, many students of sociology have been keen to formulate yet have
not been able to do so very clearly or usefully. Through Tarde, let us try to
improve that situation. The virtuality of a broader, dynamic reality – a
cosmos – gains consistency through varied actions of possession. Possessions
reflect a dynamic in which the cosmos is constantly coming into being. But
this does not take place along one predetermined track that is realizing an
inevitable ultimate harmony. Similarly to how Rescher (1991) suggested that
each monad contains the whole universe, Tarde holds that each configuration
of power possession is an expression of a contingent map or vision of the
cosmos; “there is no better term than acquisition to express the formation and
growth of any being” (2012: 54). There is more than a passing resemblance to
34 A Sociology of the Cosmos
Leibniz’s monads here. Yet there is no pre-established harmony of the monads
in Tarde’s sociology. Nor are Tarde’s objects ‘windowless’, as Leibniz’s are.
They are contingent configurations of possession, accessible to scrutiny by
science, and change on a regular basis. The question is, how can we gain
perspective on these changes?
A solution that can help us understand Tarde is to posit the cosmos as
virtual. As virtual, it is never divorced from the actual universe. They change
together. A certain colour might dominate a pattern: a subtle change of per-
ception, changing the pattern, changing the colour, can happen with any
slight turn of a kaleidoscope. To borrow a metaphor from Bergson (1990): the
idea of a kaleidoscope provides a useful view of how changes in patterns
work. In a kaleidoscope, the virtual whole and the actual particulars change
together in an intimate and inextricable relationship; in Tarde’s sociology, the
virtuality of the cosmos is in a similar lockstep with changes in the actualities
manifested in the universe. The idea here is never to determine the totality of
the cosmos in some positivist reverie in which we imagine that the pursuit of
knowledge is coming to an end. Rather, there is no end to new perspectives.
Virtuality gains consistency and perspective in the relatively humanly acces-
sible range of phenomena in the universe through possession. Possessions are
consistent for a while but always eventually change, and thus the universe
changes. One can certainly establish middle-range consistencies in the phe-
nomena sociology studies, but it is never a question of establishing any kind
of permanent stasis.
Following this scheme of relations, when I use the term cosmos, then, I
am referring to a virtuality that is relatively simple, in contrast with the
perspective of the actual complexities it involves. In the same way, a forest
contrasts with the trees: they are inseparable yet distinct perspectives, one
capturing the relatively simple virtuality of the other, which, as a section of
highly complex actualities, would otherwise overwhelm one with all of its
minute details and differences. The virtual and the actual here are clearly
much better conveyed by the concepts of the simple and the complex, rather
than the whole and the part. Virtualities are not wholes, and the actual
details are not parts of a whole. This is the key to understanding Tarde’s
thought as a sociology. If the cosmos were merely an abstract possibility, the
cosmos would then be the whole of all the relationships of all the objects.
But it is not, because no real entity, ourselves included, could ever know
such a totality. It would not be real. Insofar as we do know the cosmos and
accept that it is real, what we know, given our fallibility, is never more than
an aspect of a reality that will always include an open-ended number of
things we will never be able to fathom. In contrast, we can say that the vir-
tual as a relational simple constantly changes in subtle ways as we turn the
kaleidoscope – that is, parsing out and trying to understand all the minute
details – of our perception of actuality.
The terms virtual and actual are clarified by the terms simple and complex,
which ought to replace our typical part/whole way of thinking (Toews 2018a).
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 35
The virtual is any simple perception, framed in a concept, that constantly
accompanies and helps to account for constantly shifting complex actuals.
For example, a ‘university’ is a simple in this sense. Yet, anyone who knows
universities in actuality knows they are highly complex and ever in flux.
Ontologically, the virtual and the actual are inseparable. The virtual changes
when the actual has changed to the point that it is incomprehensible without
a new concept. One can express this by saying that the virtual is relatively
passive in contrast to the actual, which is relatively active. This illustrates how
inseparable and crucial passivity is in the world. Take another example: a
passive behaviour such as prayer or contemplation is potentially helpful if it is
turned towards recognizing how actualities are taking shape – for example, by
meditating on a relatively simple formula or symbol in relation to a field of
actualities. But the difference here between the great monotheistic religions
and science is that, in the latter, which we are here developing, passive vir-
tuality is a simple rather than a whole or totality. The way of such religions is
to affirm an ultimate whole – that is, an undifferentiated God. In contrast,
science affirms an open-ended variety of relational simples – concepts – each
of which is subject to change. The virtual, as passive and simple, has the
important function of facilitating the deposition of concepts.
To be sure, passive practices such as contemplation or prayer have received
a reputation as being unhelpful, and that is because some have defined them
as trying to capture or set up some kind of single version of reality that is
supposed to be ‘higher’ than everyday down-to-earth reality. This is the mis-
leading notion of the virtual as a whole. To the contrary, the virtual does not
have its own reality, divorced from the actual, in which it could refer to
something other or ‘higher’ than the actualities its concept describes. We can
say we know universities if we know the actualities of universities, not just if
we know the concept of a university. Anyone who thinks they know a reality
purely from a concept is clearly heading down a path of scholastic-style error.
This is a very common error, however, that even the most sophisticated sci-
entists can make from time to time, when certain concepts turn into stum-
bling blocks preventing further insights into sets of data. For example, if a
scientist espouses an overly strong concept of ‘laws’ that she is trying estab-
lish, this may well blind her to the importance of certain shifting actualities in
her field of observation, actualities that may well be calling for a new, differ-
ent concept. More and more, it is important to recognize the significance of
such shifts and the way theories can co-exist with each other – that is, theo-
retical pluralism – as, today, phenomena such as quantum data are amenable
to different theories all at once.
In contrast to the cosmos, the universe, for its part, is the fluctuating con-
tingent collection of all the tangible things – the actualities – that human
beings have learned about the cosmos. The actualities are ever-changing, like
a kaleidoscope, precisely because the cosmos is virtual in relation to them in
the Tardian/Deleuzian sense. The virtual cosmos is always in a certain sense a
simple, but it is a relational simple rather than an absolute simple. With every
36 A Sociology of the Cosmos
turn of the actual kaleidoscope (i.e. with every distinct observation proce-
dure), one is both altering the complex set of objects included in actuality and
also potentially altering the relatively simple concept of the cosmos.
I will now turn to presenting a number of critical observations about
Tarde’s sociology with the aim of teasing out two key premises in his
approach: pluralism and relationalism. What do such premises have to do
with Tarde’s focus on the cosmos?

The Cosmos and Pluralism

To begin with, in a generalized, heuristic sense, we can say that nature is that
which science can understand in the cosmos. However, an important dynamic
must be recognized. The cosmos includes in its concept all that which can be
known, yet we must remember that, in the concept of the cosmos, the know-
able is alongside all that which cannot be known. Indeed, curiosity about the
latter is part of the reason why we are intrigued by the cosmos and try to
understand more and more of it. But our own hubris, expressed in positivism,
often makes us believe that, in principle, we can understand all of it. What
this perspective of hubris prevents us from seeing is that, as we understand
more about the cosmos, it is not at all the case that such advances entail that
we have less to learn as a result of advancing our knowledge. The fact is that
the more we learn, the more there is to learn. Knowledge is dynamic, with
benefits but also with costs. The cost of knowing one thing may be a blindness
to another thing, but more often the cost is simply that the stock of what we
do not know is ever increasing. We will return to this theme to explore it in
more detail in Chapter 5.
In contrast, sociological anthropocentrism – the normative value judge-
ment that proposes to elevate the positive over the negative of human beha-
viour – is fragile and narrow. Under the sway of this trend, everything
‘negative’ about human behaviour thus appears to one as less than human,
and such negativities become little more than fodder for a project of spinning
out definitions of humanity. The definition of humanity becomes inseparable
from attempts to delineate that of which the present day consists. This is a
narrow and fragile conception of sociology that surely cannot be fixed by
introducing into it more narrowness and fragility. It has thus become impor-
tant to separate the human from the non-human in a way that explicitly
refuses the prioritization of the one over the other. To learn more about
humans, it turns out we need to stop prioritizing the study of humans in a
manner that sees us as a privileged subject matter over against non-humans.
On the surface, this might seem counter-intuitive. But the construction of a
mythology of humanity that is supposedly rare and getting rarer as the world
supposedly becomes more artificial is not aiding any science. It ignores the
fact that we as humans are the authors of our artifices, and that our artifices
are only ‘artificial’ – that is, immersed in narratives about human mastery or
human failure – for us.
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 37
In the larger reality of our relations with other objects, our inventions that
possess and through our possession change objects are all potentially very
interesting markers of change in human culture. For example, our modern
transportation systems, which have historically identified fossil fuels as the
property of human beings, have justified through this presumption dramatic
reorientations towards certain materials and industrial processes in our
human economies and societies. Does it make sense to suppose that, as a
‘new reality’, modern transportation is instrumental in any knowledge we can
have of the universe, or is this just compounding an error of judgement rooted
in human hubris? With human realities ever undergoing change, we have to
embrace pluralism in our theories and methods. What is often overlooked is
that this is in fact not just owing to constant change. Rather, it is owing as
much to a truth that has taken some time to emerge through constant debates
but has nevertheless continued to emerge and take shape in the minds of for-
ward-thinking sociologists: the fact that pluralism sits uncomfortably with
rigid anthropocentric premises and positivistic pronouncements about human
reality. Pluralism of methods has a basis in a new view of plurality as a
needed, key ontological premise. Open methodological pluralism in sociology
is an important thing that we gain in exchange for losing anthropocentrism.

Tarde as a Relational Sociologist

For Tarde, then, social life is a category that includes all phenomena what-
soever. All phenomena, human and non-human, are involved in relations with
each other. Everything associates with other things. Sociality refers to this
basic relationality, which involves observation of both regular, boring, but
important, repetitions as well as unique, spontaneous, one-off events. Human
social life begins with observations based on individual psychology, our
wonder at the constancy of our desires, and so on, but is progressively dis-
mantled as such, ending up taking account of observations based on sociol-
ogy. This move from psychology as a coarse-grained view to sociology as a
refined view is Tarde’s basic strategy. By sociology, Tarde means scientific
analysis of relations involving either humans or non-humans or both together.
Like the associations of animals and objects, the social life of human beings is
both constantly different and repetitive. We examine the repetitions, whatever
they are, in order to see what differences they make. This is why Tarde
focusses upon repetition in human behaviour – that is, the constant and ubi-
quitous practices of imitation of aspects of others’ lives.
Thus, for Tarde, analysts of social life ought not to presume to know in
advance the meanings of social life, or even whether it is meaningful or not.
Durkheim, in Suicide (1997), berated Tarde for suggesting it is sufficient to
generalize from patterns of behaviour without discerning collectivity in such
patterns. Tarde rejects the idea of presuming to know the nature of collectiv-
ity in advance and argues that Durkheim misrepresents Tarde’s methodology
(Tarde and Durkheim 2010). A sociologist’s task is to discern patterns of
38 A Sociology of the Cosmos
behaviour that are producing differences. That is a different conception of
sociological work than merely establishing repetitions in patterns. Durkheim
failed to understand that repetitions are examined for the differences they
convey and disseminate into the world.
For example, a key pattern of behaviour in Tarde’s day was urbanization.
Most people, when they think of the rise of cities, think of homogenization.
For something to be homogeneous, its parts need never to clash or conflict
with each other; they need to be essentially all of the same kind. Images of
cities, particularly early modern cities, seem to be spaces where people all
look and act the same way. In Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times, we see
great swathes of workers marching to work in the streets. They all look and
behave the same. It is not hard to imagine that this used to happen to some
extent in real cities of that time. But two things are pertinent here. First, such
themes of homogeneity in city crowds were common in early artistic repre-
sentations of cities; later, as people came to understand cities better and
cinema became more aesthetically sophisticated, such representations went by
the wayside. Second, the representation of a group of people as the same – for
example, all wearing the same depressed or beaten-down look – belies their
differences beneath the surface, in their ideas, their imaginations, their out-
looks on life. A group of us could all wear the same thing to a funeral and
have the same sad look, but the funeral for which we have all made our
appearance the same is a relatively narrow, short, externally defined, and well-
defined function that is precisely supposed to be organized in a way that
deters us from viewing ourselves as individuals. It is a performance of
homogeneity, not actual homogeneity.
We perform these play-acting homogeneities and similarities all the time in
order to get along. To really produce true homogenization, people in cities
would have to imitate each other in a very strict manner. By this I mean one
person imitating every aspect precisely, or at least many aspects accurately, of
another person, and that person imitating another similar person, and so on
and so on. I would warrant that such overt, maximal, full imitation does not
take place in social life, nor has it ever done so. Most of the time, when there
appears to be imitation of this kind, it is actually explained by certain beha-
viours, which produce a degree of homogenization, that are dictated or pre-
scribed by organizations to which the individuals belong, such as the wearing
of uniforms. Generally, people only ever imitate certain aspects of each other,
out of various motivations of attraction, such as admiration or respect, but
also sometimes out of engagements involving hatred or fear. In addition,
people tend to imitate more aspects of people they know and fewer aspects of
people they are not acquainted with.
In cities, people tend to know more people than those in smaller towns and
villages do, but they tend to know this larger group of friends in more super-
ficial ways. In a city, one must let go of the notion of getting to know well
everyone you meet. Moreover, one must adapt to economic circumstances,
changing one’s personality and dress significantly to fit with the context of
 A Sociology of the Cosmos 39
social interaction. In short, one must be canny and able, from time to time, to
conform to social settings that expect more uniform or strictly functional or
professional behaviour and then switch back out of those roles very quickly in
different social settings. In order to do this competently in the city, it is
necessary to have the courage to develop oneself as an individual who is as
unique as possible, with a strong sense of self, or risk being lost at sea.
Cities promote imitation, but so do small towns and villages. Resemblances
between people in the latter are much deeper than in the former. What mat-
ters is that the kind of imitation changes. Cities promote the imitation of
fewer aspects of others, and they also promote imitation from observing
someone at a distance or their image in a newspaper or fashion magazine. As
history progresses through the 20th and 21st centuries, we take increasingly
smaller and smaller bits from other people to integrate into our own bio-
graphies. Indeed, with the arrival of the internet and social media, such imi-
tation has become vastly more subtle, variegated, and globalized. Today, it
might be possible to shock someone who lives next door to you in a very
dramatic way, if it were not for the fact that we are all so used to seeing imi-
tative behaviours on a regular basis. Innovation and uniqueness of personality
are perfectly compatible with the increased imitation activity that takes place
in cities and, latterly, on the internet.

Note
1 Henceforth, I will shorten this to just speaking of ‘objects’ on the understanding
that it includes people and animals.
3 The Artifice of the Self

As we saw in Chapter 2, with his example of urbanization, Tarde illustrates

the macro, and historical, view of the interactional complexities of the human
relation of imitation. In particular, he shows how imitation, with its high
degree of ubiquity in modern social relations, characterizes behaviour in a
way that is distinct from those in previous historical periods. In this chapter,
we dive deeper into Tarde’s more micrological theory of the self. One of the
ingenious aspects of modernity is the construction and persistence of indivi-
duality, into which theories of self are meant to provide sociological insight.
In examining Tarde’s theory of the self, we shall see that social networks and
Tarde’s imitations are two sides of the same coin. Individuals are agents con-
structed out of the conditions in which imitations flourish. In Tarde’s day, this
was in the vast increases of social and psychological stimulation of the cities
and the new dynamics of crowds and publics. In these settings, Tarde’s indi-
viduals are a result of many small imitations of different aspects of the beha-
viour of others. It is this multiplicity of micro-imitative sources that go into
the fashioning of the self that is key for network structure and for Tarde.
Complete individuals do not pre-exist such contexts. Nor does one individual
striving to consciously imitate every aspect of one other person fit the mould
of Tarde’s interest – this kind of one-to-one mimesis is derivative and goes
against the grain of network structure.

Tarde and Symbolic Interactionism

Lest one wants to jump to the conclusion that Tarde’s self is just a figure
constructed accidentally from multiple micro imitations, in this chapter I shall
dive deeper into how a deeper, more consistent self relates to social structures,
examining the extent to which Tarde’s concepts can aid us. We will be greatly
aided by Tarde’s book Penal Philosophy (2010a), the key locus of Tarde’s
theory of the self. In the context of a discussion of how to determine crimin-
ality, Tarde develops his view of the centrality of the individual in modern
societies and cultures.
As criminology, this book is at an early stage of the field. Tarde’s crimin-
ological contribution is less important than the fact that the problem as he
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-4
 The Artifice of the Self 41
frames it requires him to mount something close to a full-fledged explanation
of how modern individuals have agency given how they are imitatively con-
structed. In doing so, as we shall see, Tarde anticipates later developments in
philosophy from people such as Daniel Dennett (1989) aimed at explaining
how the self can be unified. Of primary interest to us in this book, however, is
how Tarde threads the theme of artifice – understood sociologically as a
practice – through his theory of the self, thus anticipating the school of sym-
bolic interactionism (SI), and particularly its founder, George Herbert Mead
(1967), and to some extent also the dramaturgy of Erving Goffman (1973).
As I will show, there is much to recommend an approach that builds con-
structive relationships between Tarde and SI. However, the limit of this is that
it is also necessary to understand that Tarde does not wish to circumscribe the
artificial with a theory of symbolism, but rather to use symbolism and its
sociological consequences to open us up to a larger critical discussion of
artifice. To focus exclusively on human work on symbols as the source of
human agency, as the SI theorists do, is to maintain the theme of ambivalence
about modernity; Tarde’s future orientation spurs him to examine artificial-
ities that go beyond symbolism and, thus, to put this ambivalence into a
larger perspective.
Founded in the early 20th century as a perspective by early sociologists
such as Charles Horton Cooley (2013) and George Herbert Mead (1967), and
later developed by numerous subsequent eminent sociologists such as Erving
Goffman (1973), Arlie Hochschild (2012), and Norman Denzin (2007), SI
strives to offer a more sociologically viable and complex explanation of the
self than the relatively static, foundationalist representations of subjectivity
philosophy had been able to offer. The key to SI’s success is these American
sociologists’ insistence on the interactive nature of the self and the importance
of social interaction for the development and performance of the self. Tarde’s
thought anticipates many of their themes, perhaps partly owing to Tarde’s
positive interaction with William James, one of the key pragmatist philoso-
phers who influenced the formation of SI. Another key philosopher even
more influential in its formation was George Herbert Mead.
Mead is the most important of the SI thinkers as he evolved many of the
key analyses of social interaction in this version of sociology. One of the key
points of comparison that we will need to acknowledge and understand in
this book is that Tarde falls short of providing a truly interactive theory
compared with Mead’s sociology. Yet we shall also see that Tarde’s theory
offers plenty of other insights and advantages that are compatible with SI.
Having said this, what is particularly interesting here for us, in the present-day
context of trying to understand why Tarde’s theories were largely abandoned
until recently, is Mead’s rejection of Tarde’s thought. Why did Mead perceive
Tarde’s thought as a threat rather than as a support? Readers of Mind, Self,
and Society (1967), with Mead’s encouragement, may remember its first
chapter, in which Mead raises possible objections to Mead’s nascent SI
approach aimed at establishing the importance of interactive theories over
42 The Artifice of the Self
relatively passive ones. Unfortunately, here he also disseminates erroneous
ideas about Tarde’s theory, particularly the notion that Tarde embraces par-
allelism rather than interaction between mind and body.

Tarde’s Three ‘Individualities’

The key texts in order to understand Tarde’s view of the self and its relations
with others and with society are Penal Philosophy (PP), as already mentioned,
and The Laws of Imitation (LI; 1903). LI is the overall key text of Tarde’s
oeuvre and cannot be ignored in any connection. Together with Monadology
and Sociology (MS; 2012), in LI Tarde provides his basic orientation to sci-
ence as a sociological study of objects in the universe. PP is where one can
find Tarde discussing the self directly and at length because it is oriented to an
examination of what changes the structure of penal institutions might need to
undergo, given the increasing value we have historically come to place on
modern individuality. At the time of Tarde’s writing, there were few robust
sociological theories of the self. In order to convey a criminological perspec-
tive centred on the individual, it was first necessary to mount as deep an
account of selfhood as he could. In this book, Tarde’s assertion of three
“individualities” represent aspects of the human self: biological, psychologi-
cal, and social. These layers – common to a number of theorists, including
Freud and Durkheim – eventually became a norm in sociology. Tarde is
expressing what we now take to be a fairly common premise when he puts
forward that, under normal circumstances – notwithstanding illness – all
three closely, continuously, and harmoniously interact with each other func-
tionally and structurally, as well as from a teleological perspective manifesting
what he terms a “sheaf of ends” (2010a: 116). Where it gets interesting is in
his analysis of each level and how they interact.
The biological aspect of the self for Tarde manifests the originality of each
person’s physical makeup. The uniqueness of each individual produced via
micro imitations cannot just start taking place in society in a biological void:
our biological processes prepare for this in advance. This is made possible by
the “slightest living variations” within the constant reproductions of our cells’
internal relations (2010a: 116). On this level, while of course we have already
begun to have sensations and perceptions about ourselves in a rough and
ready way, like children we do not understand them. We are not auto-
matically equipped to process sensations and perceptions in a manner that
lets us know much more about ourselves; the ways our bodies function are a
mystery to the ordinary person. The inkling that “the living individual is an
assemblage” awaits our engagement in the biological sciences to determine its
contours (2010a: 116).
We should pause to note that, for Tarde, science is not imagined to be
external to human beings, a projection on to the common universe of the way
some of us think. Rather, science is seen as an integral part of modern life
involving all human beings. To be sure, the detective work we apply to
 The Artifice of the Self 43
ourselves to determine the coherence of the assemblages that go into our
makeup is intuitive at first. It relies on “the connection of infinitely ingenious
secrets which … are transmitted until death with the direction proper to the
initial ovule” (2010a: 116). It is interesting to see a feminine term – the
ovule – posited at the origin of the biological self. By “secrets”, however,
Tarde is asserting something specific: that our bodies are objects like any
other objects, and the meanings of their internal workings as well as their
relations with other objects are amenable to science. At the same time, he is
acknowledging that, beyond our knowledge of them, all objects are ultimately
fathomless:

the attributes which each element possesses in virtue of its incorporation

into its regiment do not form the whole of its nature; it has other ten-
dencies … which come to it from its basic nature, from itself, from its
own fundamental substance which is the basis of its struggle against the
collective power of which it forms a part.
(Tarde 2012: 47)

As I argue throughout this book, the inherent limitations of our knowledge of

objects, roughly corresponding with the limits of what aspects of them we can
perceive, are an important premise in Tarde’s outlook. Indeed, here, Tarde
anticipates one of the key features of object-oriented ontology by more than a
century.
Intimately related to, but analytically separable from, the biological self is
the psychological aspect of the self. Tarde terms this the “myself”. Differing
from our biological features only by degrees, the psychological myself is also
an assemblage (2010a: 116). The psychological aspect of the self is simply a
progression from what we proto-scientifically learn from information about
objects (objects, here, include our bodies and other objects). As we all know,
the self is also the seat of the processing of the internal feelings we have about
ourselves. For Tarde, these internal feelings are based on the data our bodies
provide – “feelings of the body” (117) – but are distinct internal feelings. This
is the micro context for Tarde’s analysis. The myself connects states of con-
sciousness, both inward-looking (such as appetites) and outward-looking
(such as tastes), marshalling them together into an accessible subconscious, in
which merge together pertinent bits of information and impulses, sensations,
and perceptions.

Difference Is Not Rooted in Action

Let us look a bit deeper into these states of consciousness that arise from the
feelings of the body. It might seem obvious, but it should be noted that above
all they are dynamic. In order to flesh out this dynamic process, Tarde’s ana-
lysis utilizes the concepts of succession and simultaneity. Let us begin with
simultaneity. If and when these states of consciousness are simultaneous, this
44 The Artifice of the Self
subconscious embrace of oneself in the world informs action. The feeling of
being capable and poised to act is a feeling of agreement of these elements
based on this simultaneity of aspects of our experience – what Nietzsche
called “the feeling of power growing” (2005: 4). Action becomes possible in
these circumstances because this aspect of the self is ready to mesh with col-
lective meaning-making processes such as “the general system of opinions as
regards location, called space” or with “opinions as regards the naming of
things, called language”, as well as the mechanics of things such as instincts
and habits (Tarde 2010a: 117). For Tarde the myself, however, always remains
explicitly productive of, and accommodating of, personal difference. This is a
deduction that Tarde makes from a simple but compelling argument: an
awareness that action is a thing one can undertake and that one is presently
undertaking it (a factor rarely considered by other theorists) would not arise
without there first being in the actor’s psychology a primary feeling that one
is proceeding from being in some measure different from others and from the
world.
Such difference evokes a kind of mystery at the root of individuality. But it
is a scientific mystery that we can and often do have intuitions about. The
differences that the self evokes and proceeds from may be small, and in many
cases imperceptible, yet they are viable and crucial. In contrast, most main-
stream sociologists who followed from the work of Durkheim and Weber are
preoccupied with explaining action as such rather than its conditions (e.g.,
Parsons 1967). This is because they assume that power is only real where
action holds sway. Tarde too offers a scheme of how action is possible. How-
ever, few sociologists other than Tarde, if indeed any, have considered that
being ready to act does not exhaust our human psychology.
Tarde’s analysis is compelling, I would submit, because he does not stop his
theory of the self at outlining the conditions for taking action. One of the
unique aspects of Tarde’s analysis of the self is how he builds into our basic
human psychology an account of the phenomenon of non-action. There are so
many moments in a human life in which we are sentient, to one extent or
another aware of ourselves and the world, and yet we do not act. Prior to
modernity, such moments were recognized as moments of meditation, reflec-
tion, prayer, contemplation. In modernity, such moments tend to be deni-
grated or disregarded. Tarde is a rare creature: a modernist who fully
acknowledges such moments in a positive manner, rather than just leaving
them to nebulous guesswork, to a realm of the epiphenomenal, or to a pas-
sing pre-modern phase, as many thinkers have done. Tardian sociology is thus
premised on an interesting point: difference is not rooted in action, as non-
actions such as contemplation are as real as actions (Toews 2010).
In contrast to the simultaneity of aspects of the self, for Tarde, their suc-
cession is the proper seat of what he was the first to term repetition (Toews
2003). This allows one to examine actions alongside non-actions as they are
both repetitive. Repetitions also make identities possible. But Tarde, in The
Laws of Imitation (1903) and Monadology and Sociology (2012), argues that
 The Artifice of the Self 45
identities are constructed out of sequences of imperceptible differences. This
means that differences – often tiny, but nevertheless real – rather than the
identities of things we construct as our images of objects, are what we can
deduce as the primary stuff of the universe. This would be a merely meta-
physical and largely moot point if Tarde did not connect it with his social
psychology. To make this connection, Tarde’s analysis of action and non-
action must be, and is, on the level of form, not content. Anticipating Deleuze
by several generations, intimately and always produced on the level of form,
immediately, in every repetition, Tarde argues, is a variation, a difference that
is often very slight and frequently imperceptible without specialized observa-
tion (Toews 2003, 2013). Such variations are the seat of our realities.
In PP, Tarde applies this concept by noting that, when our states of con-
sciousness are successive rather than simultaneous, like everything else that
repeats, they reproduce close but always slightly varying duplications of our
images and memories. Tarde puts forward that this is what produces in us “a
thousand echoes of memories” and why the latter are “developed in a sort of
long discourse” (2010a: 117). Though Tarde certainly writes with flourishes and
with gusto, I should point out that, contrary to appearances, this is by no
means merely a poetic description. It is not a description of some unimportant
epiphenomenal side activity. Nor is it what is termed a base, meant as some
kind of abstract principle of unity. Rather, it is experiential, a stream of suc-
cessive experiences. And it is by no means perfectly static as, upon this plane of
experiences, ever-emerging changes and diversities in the world outside our-
selves buffet us with their constant “light modulations” (117). In a memorable
phrase, Tarde describes this event of non-action as “that sort of soundless
murmuring in the very depths [of ourselves] which is the continuous base of
consciousness” (117). This view of the elements of the self and the other objects
that surround it as successive will be significant here, as we shall see.
Finally, there is a third assemblage that is pertinent to the being of the self
that Tarde terms the “social individual” (2010a: 117). For Tarde, the social
individual is a node in a social network, “a connecting together of … states of
consciousness, beliefs, or needs, belonging to different persons and persons
who are influenced by one another” (117). The simultaneity of these states,
when it occurs, makes possible participation in religions, philosophies, sci-
ences, various callings, institutions of all kinds. From the synchronic per-
spective of simultaneity, the meanings of such callings and institutions of
social participation “agree in the majority of instances” (117). This is because
they represent a social “sanction of … [our] coordinations of thought” (117).
An open question here is whether there is a coercive, or at least constraining,
aspect of social norms – for example, traditions and customs – enforced by
means of these regularities. The root of the metaphor of structure is, of
course, the province of Durkheim’s sociology, which eventually became a
common view of the power of institutions to regulate our behaviour.
To get at this question, rather than merely assert that regularity exists,
Tarde points out that there is a successive side of these phenomena. And here,
46 The Artifice of the Self
also, Tarde invents a distinction that has since become de rigueur in attempts
in much later sociologies to bridge the micro and macro orders of meaning
and action – the distinction between settled and unsettled states of social
relations (see, e.g., Swidler 2013). Social relations often repeat themselves,
with their continuity giving our social relations a feeling of being relatively
settled. In contrast, in more unsettled times of crisis, such repetitions break
down. Tarde’s distinction between settled and unsettled is not categorical but
is rather one of degrees. In the grey middle, he paints a picture of a “confused
buzzing of conversations, of writings, of demands, of complaints” (2010a:
118). This is not to be confused with the political dimension of life, nor is he
referring to mere biological reactions to things. It is rather a realm where
various primitive contextualizations of vaguely relevant ideas and notions
emerge in expressions. Settled states of consciousness are indicative of rela-
tively unvarying successions and simultaneities of being, whereas unsettled
ones produce the potential for political discourse. In the vast middle dimen-
sion – let us call it social life properly speaking – there are always aspects of
each.

The Roles of Activity and Passivity

Social life includes both active and passive behaviours. Social behaviour is
passive – that is, not a function of actors’ efforts – not in the sense of a stasis.
Rather, inasmuch as people spread changes by here and there imitating
innovations, creating an ever-moving kaleidoscope of new perspectives on
phenomena along with an immediate awareness of and attraction to such
phenomena, social behaviour, while passive, can nevertheless be dynamic.
Because these passive processes are ever in flux and ever growing as popula-
tions expand, social life is much vaster and experientially much more neb-
ulous than political life.
Toscano, here, argues that Tarde is celebrating a thin version of social life
that is ripe for exploitation by capitalism (Toscano 2007). To be sure, as many
have noted over the years, consumerism and the commodity form can exploit
these processes, tailoring them to the profit desires of large actors and inci-
dentally creating for actors pathways of passivity that interrupt their ability to
deliberate over the kinds of changes they need or desire. Conflicts arising
between them over their relative positions in a capitalist society may then
multiply and get mixed with each other in a complicated, ossified way. How-
ever, there are other forms of action going on all the time. Capitalism does
not erase this much older and more common garden variety of action per se,
which continues unabated, falling outside the concerns of capitalist intrusions
on society, and draws from the passive-yet-dynamic processes of social life in
a frequent and fairly unrestricted way. One might term this the political
dimension of action, properly speaking. The political dimension takes, willy-
nilly, from the larger dimension of social life, addressing in the latter conflicts
that arise as a matter of due course. Resistance to capitalism may be
 The Artifice of the Self 47
admirable and even essential, as I in fact may believe it to be for political
reasons, but that need not occupy all of our thoughts on the question of how
to define social life in general.
Social behaviour can be, and often is, active where organization and resis-
tance to capitalism take place. The levels of such activity can be, and have
been, debated ad nauseam. But, no matter how politicized or over-politicized
we think we may be at any given point and place in history, it is important for
our understanding of the contrast between social life and political life to
remember that political life by no means always or constantly intervenes in
social life, nor, when it does, does it do so in any linear, predictable fashion.
Garden-variety conflicts of all kinds, as well as those that occur less fre-
quently, occur and are addressed all the time. Through discussion and debate,
we sort through such complications and eventually refine our thoughts into
known controversies. The vast in-between dimension of social life – indeed,
growing ever vaster as online social interaction expands – often remains
unchallenged and unexploited by the political dimension (Toews 2018b).
Though social life is thus generally passive, with its myriad processes of
innovation and imitation constantly taking place, it never stays still, frozen in
time according to someone’s beatific – or horrifying for that matter – image
of it. In Tarde’s view, the vast, passive side of social life is like a “dark back-
ground” (2010a: 118), an open-ended succession of rough and ready, partially
coherent, partially jumbled social interactions. Against this dark background
there emerge, from time to time, what we could call – extending the visual
metaphor – points of clear light. These points of light are the proper con-
tributions of individuals to society. “The genius of inventors and of innovators
of every kind” has the effect of standing “out in vivid relief, in revelations and
in creations depending upon one another” (118). These stand out because
they have a background against which to shine.
Not every half-developed idea or notion in this in-between realm of
non-action is transformed into political action; only a few are, and only
after they are worked on, through discussion and debate, by certain indi-
viduals in network-privileged positions. It is important, again, to remem-
ber that Tarde says these contributions to society are made in the context
of these social discourses considered as successive involvements. For,
despite the language of ‘genius’, the innovators who develop coherent new
ideas out of our social discourses are generally not celebrated as such in
perpetuity, if at all. Rather, most often, from the analytical perspective of
these successions, one can see how, “by means of imitation”, they have
typically “fallen one after another into the domain of the commonplace,
the traditional, and the customary” (Tarde 2010a: 118). For Tarde, all
social change is indeed illuminated by analysing the thick dimension of
these successions and how these successive elements, via the mechanism of
imitation, shake out – or “fall” – into the more regularly ordered social
institutions, thus appearing as elements eventually existing in simultaneity
with others.
48 The Artifice of the Self
Tarde’s model of the self anticipates contemporary theories of micro–macro
synthesis. As people navigate through the three individualities of Tarde’s
system, they develop through them. They are not static, nor do they simply
move randomly. This is in sharp contrast to Mead’s charge of parallelism.
Tarde in no way maintains a parallelistic version of a dualistic separation of
mind and body. What we have seen is a complex continuum of human life
that extends down into biology and up into politics through the intermediary
of a vast realm of open social life. The myself “has awaited, before being truly
hatched out, the heat of social surroundings” (2010a: 117). The individual
produced through the three levels “is more than a sum total, he is a living
unit” (128). From the point of view of someone looking for a rigid, static
definition of the self, Tarde’s solution is perhaps unconvincing: “the
‘myself ’ … is simply an interweaving, of information and of influences, a
place and at the same time a bond of instructions and of impulses, emanating
from all the neighboring cells” (127). Anticipating Daniel Dennet’s analogy of
the I as being like the president of the United States of myself (1989: 168),
Tarde notes that, to be sure, one can consider that “the ‘myself ’ is perhaps the
‘king-god’ of the brain” (2010a: 123). But Tarde is already more advanced
here than Dennet. Tarde clarifies that to make such an analogy is to go too
far as it creates a “hypothesis infinitely more mystical than all the mon-
adologies” (124).
The outcome of the development of the self is, rather, a fairly stable identity
in Tarde’s analysis. All three levels are necessary for a person to develop it. It
allows her to acquire such things as knowledge and ambition. On this ques-
tion of the unity and stability of the self, Tarde does not posit a particular
theory – anti-capitalist or otherwise – that shuts down its open-ended possi-
bilities. The area of subjectivity of the self that is most amenable to assump-
tions of unity and stability is, of course, the psychological dimension. In fact,
by describing a continuum of interrelated realms of human life, Tarde fore-
closes the possibility of stating a definitive mechanism of closure for the self
or, for that matter, a definitive, bounded scientific discipline, much against the
tendency of those who follow Durkheim’s paradigm.

Sociology as a “Solar Microscope”

Against the latter, Tarde here describes the relationship of sociology to psy-
chology as analogous to a “solar microscope” (2010a: 118). Sociology locates
tiny elements of our psychology and magnifies them, with its unique methods,
so that we can see their contours and relations as elements of a common
social life. The scale of degrees of our personal identities is reflected in the
scale of degrees of our social scientific methodologies. We need the latter in
order to fully develop our identities. Our identities are not determined.
Rather, we are guided by feelings relating to the other objects around us.
Sometimes we feel at sea among the objects of the universe and sometimes we
feel alone, isolated “deeply into mental alienation” (119). This is not a
 The Artifice of the Self 49
categorical divide, as Descartes described it (1968). Rather, Tarde describes a
“maximum” and a “minimum of identity, between which our existence oscil-
lates” (2010a: 119). In this way, Tarde’s definition of the self is deliberately
open. Its oscillation takes place throughout the three levels of our existence.
There can be exceptions, of course. Illness, for example, is an aspect of our
biology that introduces a discord on the biological level that also, at the same
time, intimately affects the other, psychological and social, levels of our being.
Illness, in this way, does more than just make us feel out of sorts; it can also
decrease our sense of identity in a manner that extends into and troubles the
more psychological and socially meaningful realms. Even when an illness is
perfectly hidden, often so that actors can continue acting without others’
opinions of them changing, all the same, even just this fact of hiding goes far
beyond the biological facts.
Why separate biology, psychology, and sociology from each other, with
boundaries policed by experts, when, just to understand our own lives, we
each have a vital need to appreciate their mutual influence and interplay? In
the early days of sociology, our instruments of measure and calculation were
relatively primitive. Thus, certain calculations eluded us, and it seemed
appropriate to delegate certain tasks to specialists. As Nigel Thrift (2004)
points out, today, we have invented computers and online computer networks
that make such tasks of analysis, barring interference from economically
interested parties, amenable to many more people than what once obtained.
Even if the goal of knowledge recedes before us as our distinctions get
more and more refined, because we have become convinced that knowledge
is something we can all partake in, we each feel a part of the process much
more than ever before. This is witnessed by such practices as using electronic
devices attached to our bodies to tell us about biological states that we then
use to modify our psychological and social states, or using media presenta-
tions to inform us about social relationships that we then process through
our psychological faculties and eventually translate into biological changes,
such as attempts to manipulate our appearance and even aspects of what we
used to think of as our basic biology, such as gender. Practices of biometrics
are examples of a fluid, yet calculable, relation between the three levels of
social development. A person who felt a maximum of identity at one point
in their lives can undergo not only a passive crisis, but also a more active
change. Indeed, certain of such paths of change are being mapped out and
becoming well known. For example, a person’s gender identity, which at one
time seemed to their parents to be relatively stable, may over time become
minimized in contrast with the reinforcing images that were previously
operative for them. They may then plan to change. This is possible because
“identity is only the minimal degree of difference and hence a kind of dif-
ference, and an infinitely rare kind, as rest is only a special case of move-
ment, and the circle only a particular variety of ellipse” (Tarde 2012: 40).
Thus, in our example of gender change, once the planned biological changes
take effect, the person’s identity starts to draw from different sources.
50 The Artifice of the Self
Eventually, it can (as one possibility at least) return to a more maximal state
in the ongoing flux of identity.
Instead of posing a parallel of mind and body, then, Tarde explains our
feelings of harmony and of discord between them by teasing out a distinction
of maximum versus minimum of identity, which is ever open to fluctuation
and change, whether the latter is conscious or subconscious. Mutual influence
can be seen to be taking place. However, there is an area of Mead’s theory
that is clearly more advanced than that of Tarde – namely, the area of spoken
and written interaction.

The Meadian Paradigm

In conversations, for example, ostensibly we enquire of others and learn more
about the intentions and meanings of each other’s utterances. But it is at the
level of form that Mead (1967) shows we can see how such conversations
initiate a reflection not just on such meanings, but also on who is speaking.
From this very important interaction, we each begin to develop a sense of our
own unique selves who see the world through our own distinctive lenses, yet
can share those lenses with others as we sort out who is saying what. From
there, we each develop a unique sense of self, which is distinct from our var-
ious identities. We gain identities by being audiences for our friends’ con-
versations in which they identify us as this or that. I gain an identity as a
hockey player by interacting with friends who accept that my actions are
those of a hockey player. They may spoil my identity, of course, but most of
the time they accept it, as they, too, must search for and gain acceptance for
their own identities.
Mead’s scheme is structured around a stimulus and response model (1967).
The speech and writing of a person produce stimuli – texts and sounds – for
others. Others receive these stimuli and wonder what they mean. Cooley
pointed out that they often simply imagine what is meant and adjust their
behaviour accordingly (2013). But Mead pointed out that what is just as reg-
ular, and considerably more consequential for human development, is when
the ‘audience’ actually take the step of leaving aside their status as such and
begin to ask the first person about the meaning of their utterances (1967). In
this case, the first person is also, thus, stimulated to consider the meaning of
her own utterances. What regularly happens is that she will not really know
precisely what they mean and will be forced to try again, and again, until they
communicate something.
Mead isolates the forms of spoken interactions in order to analyse personal
development (1967). For him, interested more in the forms of interaction than
its contents or messages, the key process this initiates is the process of realiz-
ing that “I am not this, I am not that” – that is, that there is a separation
acknowledged to exist between the person and the utterance or message. This
process of separation of form and content illuminates how the form of the
identity of the self (of the speaking person) is not to be assumed as fixed from
 The Artifice of the Self 51
birth. It is shown that, as we gain more and more interactions throughout our
lives, we are constantly developing throughout the whole arc, from birth to
death. And it can go one way or another. People with little interaction with
others do not develop as much. Popular people often receive more interaction
than unpopular people, and this has consequences, because the former have
more chances to develop than do the latter, often exacerbating inequalities
and hierarchies of various kinds.
Mead’s (1967) model of interaction is, thus, capable of explaining how we
gain a sense of self that unifies all of our various identities. I see myself in
terms of identities that I have acquired and lost over time. I have gained a
variety of such identities, from professor, to father, to racquetball player, to
Volkswagen owner. I have also lost a variety of identities. I am no longer seen
as a chess club player or a dodgeball enthusiast. My identities change, in their
most significant parts, as our ‘audiences’ – that is, our friends and associates –
change. As Shibutani points out, our reference groups are an important con-
text for such changes (1955). The peculiar power over us of the reference
group, for example, of people who have known us since early childhood – that
is, in almost as many contexts as we ourselves have experienced – has been
noted many times. However, much of our behaviour is in contexts that do not
overlap or overlap very little. In these cases, our identities that go along with
such contexts (e.g., hockey player, or uncle, or employee) tend to strengthen
among our associates in those contexts and, thus, strengthen for us. Under
many – perhaps most – circumstances, our associates believe in us as such,
and this encourages us to believe in ourselves as such. This happens to the
point where a crisis may later occur when, for example, a hospitalization, or
indeed just growing older, may force a change in our identity.
Mead prioritizes unity of the self; all the identities come together in one
biography. But, even in Mead’s theory, the unity of the self is premised on
differences of identity. What unifies our sense of self is not a particular set of
identities we have that, incidentally, may have developed into strong ones.
Rather, the unity of the self arises from the deduction we make more and
more frequently, as we interact more and more frequently, with people who
are more and more frequently different. This deduction that we gradually
make, as we gain wider and wider experience in this way, is essentially that we
begin to realize that “I am not her, or her, or him, or him, or anyone even
that is similar to me. Therefore, I must have a self that is different from all of
the others”. These others, however, all act within the contexts in which they
know me in similar ways towards me. Putting this all together, therefore, there
must be a true ‘me’ that is different from all of the identities that I depend
upon others for. In SI theory, this is the self, properly speaking. The self is
distinct from any particular identities. And, indeed, this jibes with what has
been described in novels and other art forms as the covert conversations I
have with myself and the unsubstitutable, irreplaceable nature of individuality.
What Mead’s theory is very good at demonstrating is that the unity of the
self is not automatic. Rather, it is developed, and this development is
52 The Artifice of the Self
contingent on the amount and quality of our interactions with others. Those
who are prevented from interacting with others are, thus, prevented from
developing and gaining a sense of a unified sense of self (see, e.g., Davis
1947). Education must be social as well as instructional. An image of a gre-
garious society maximizing its opportunities for all people for social interac-
tion of all kinds with unlimited kinds of other people is socially and
psychologically well explained by Mead’s theory. The fact that we can work
out an autobiography of all these different things we’ve done and different
things we’ve been to different people is external evidence of our internal
intuition. It has been demonstrated, in fact, that these are more than just
evidence or confirmation of the existence of the self, but are actually stimuli
that go into its long, multidimensional construction.
Focussed on a universal theory of the self, Mead recognized its historical
contingency (1967), yet did not foresee that we increasingly depend on inter-
action. The more we all grasp our fundamental dependency on our sociali-
zation, the more we act on it by giving ourselves and others more and more
open opportunities to travel and interact with each other, the more modern
we all become. We have become so modern, in fact, that we could not go
back in time to a previous historical setting without feeling considerable dis-
comfort, even pain, perhaps dire misunderstanding, or even death, at the
inevitable denials of ourselves that we would necessarily experience. To be
fair, he could not have predicted how the internet is a phenomenon that has
exponentially accelerated the numbers of opportunities we have to interact
with others around the globe. This is not by accident. It can be explained by
our desires and needs for ever more interaction with others, as the path that
we as ordinary people intuitively know as our only way of further and further
developing ourselves. Our minds develop in tandem as we need to write down
our thoughts for communication to others and learn to affect ourselves with
our own writings. Yet we sense, with all the justification in the world, that we
always need the stimulation of interaction with others.

The Blind Spots of SI: Media, Imitation, Difference

But are we correct in believing that mediated communication is as good as in-
person communication when it comes to the development of the self ? Inter-
estingly, the early and middle SI theorists, from Mead in the early 20th cen-
tury to Erving Goffman in the mid-to-late 20th century, all responded to this
question in the negative. For example, movies were arising as a popular form
of media during the time of Mead and, of course, exponentially expanding
during the time of Goffman. But these SI theorists actually held that film
representations were corrupting our sense of self rather than strengthening it
(Blumer 1976). They theorized that movies were undermining the conversa-
tion of the self with the self that led to the development of the internal sense
of self. Movies were getting us focussed exclusively on messages outside our-
selves. Of course, in respect of certain kinds of propaganda film, there is no
 The Artifice of the Self 53
doubt that certain filmmakers did try to bring this about, such that viewers of
their films would hail the ideology of the film and ignore their own critical
capacities. All propaganda works this way to one extent or another, and cer-
tainly the development of media can facilitate such nefarious projects. Even
more importantly, advertising works this way. But the idea that mediated
representations such as films and advertisements are processed by human
beings in a manner that is fundamentally different from, say, books or con-
versations is probably unsupportable. Yes, films do call out different kinds of
communicative process. But so does every form of media. The fundamental
fact that we are presented with information that we are unfamiliar with and
must interpret, knowing that there are other human beings behind these cul-
tural representations, remains the same.
We should also point out that, of course, one of the forms of commu-
nicative process that people suspicious of the cinema often point to is human
imitation. There have always been some people who have expressed reserva-
tions about imitation as a genuine communicative process, and, of course,
some who are downright afraid of it. But imitation is, of course, a normal
feature of everyday life. It tends to be denigrated by those who have not truly
considered how it works in social concourse. If imitation were always a matter
of one person trying to copy every aspect of one other person, certainly that
would go against our modern norm of the authenticity and originality of each
individual person. To the extent that such behaviour, resembling plagiarism,
occurs, that would be the case. But, as we have seen shown by Tarde, imita-
tion by humans as a normal social process is a completely different thing. It is
activated by settings of increasing urban density (or media sophistication and
popularity as we see today with the internet). What takes place here is the
copying of little bits of the behaviours of others. When this is done, those bits
cannot be traced backward to their sources. Rather, they go into the forging
of a distinctly new and original source: a person who looks to others to
fashion a social life that is attractive, exciting, and, above all, motivating of
further interaction. This kind of imitation is actually the other side of the coin
of innovation, as Tarde points out (1903). As such, it is a main process and a
main value shared among all different kinds of people in modernity. By
means of the processes of imitation, the formation of the self is actually
enhanced, not diminished, in terms of its originality.
The process of the formation of the self, then, in realizing the difference
between the self and identity, is the same, regardless of the form of media, as
long as the form of media is meant for communication between human
beings. Later on, some SI theorists did open up to analysing the media,
bringing SI closer to Tarde. Scholars such as Norman Denzin (2007) and
David Altheide (2006) realized that SI theory needs to take account of media
to show how media representations are processed by people, with a view to
the form of the self and its development. However, these scholars were
working in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and their students continue this tra-
dition of SI scholarship even today. They were by no means the first
54 The Artifice of the Self
sociologists interested in social interaction to bring media on board in their
analyses. Why was Gabriel Tarde, whose ideas were so amenable to media
theory, essentially ignored by generations of SI theorists? Why were his ideas
by and large ignored until the late 1990s?

The Dimension of Performance

It has been known for some time that Mead’s paradigm of SI is incomplete. It
is very good at explaining the consequences of in-person interaction. It falls
down when it attempts to account for the presence and function, in relation
to human social interaction, of media. The key here, however, is less the fact
of media per se and more to do with a neglect of something vital in human
social interaction that Mead missed: performance – the performative nature
of all social interaction. The identities we gather around ourselves as we
develop are not passive: they must be performed. Goffman (1973) develops a
whole complex analysis of utterances as performances. This analysis is, thus,
termed dramaturgical, on the model of theatre. We stage performances to
create and maintain our various identities. This means we don’t just speak to
others: alongside that, we perform an identity that fits with the utterance. I
want to be accepted as a policeman and so I perform my utterances with
criminals such that they take away not just meanings from my statements, but
a whole sense of who I am, or want to be. Criminals, for their part, respond
with performances as criminals, rooted in their intimate knowledge of the
criminal community they are part of. Goffman’s theory of dramaturgy
showed that a human social interaction performed in a certain way is quite
different, and has different results, from one performed in a different way. The
fact of the performance makes a difference in itself.
Performance realizes an interesting and crucial dimension of difference
(Goffman 1973). For example, a performance of an astronaut by one person may
be considerably less convincing than a performance of the same identity (astro-
naut) by another person, if the latter person uses dramaturgical techniques that
are more effective. For our performances of our identities matter. No identity is
free of the need for performance, and, therefore, no identity is free of the audi-
ences of others who watch our behaviour. We have audiences, and the audiences
have a say in how our performances are received. Because audiences, in turn, are
actors looking for acceptance from us who, in our turn, are their audiences, they
intuit that they are in the same boat, as it were; for this reason, any actor does
tend to want to accept the performance of any other actor, as Goffman pointed
out (1973). But they don’t have to. And, if there are options, they tend to go with
the option that works best for them or that they are used to.
Social movements seeking equality have used performance strategies to
boost our awareness of the challenges and realities of marginal identities. In
the 1960s and 1970s, when Goffman was doing his best work (1973), if an
astronaut was identified as a woman, this would not work for most people
nearly as well as it would if the astronaut identity was coupled with the
 The Artifice of the Self 55
identity of a man, preferably a white American (or Russian) male with a cer-
tain background and attributes, such as an interest in maths and engineering,
themselves often assumed to be male in orientation. As social change took
place, of course, options for neglected identities opened up. Things are quite
different now, because people – audiences for our performances – have been
educated, by our institutions and by our social movements.
One should also add that, since the 1960s, we have become, as a planet, much
better at realizing the usefulness of the media for presenting and reinforcing
identities. But an important point to make plain here is that we can never create
or occupy a field of perfect equality of identities. Such a field wouldn’t even really
make sense. Certainly, we may desire, agitate for, and perhaps realize a field of
equality of opportunities, rights, and/or resources on a political level where cer-
tain conflicts have given way to enlightened views over time. We have, in fact,
achieved greater equality on a variety of levels. But identities are always aspects
of people that run all throughout our general social lives, not just in, or even
primarily in, our political social lives. As I have argued above, and elsewhere,
political life is considerably narrower in actuality than social life (Toews 2018b).
Moreover, a person with an identity does not own or exclusively control that
identity; it is always, necessarily, constructed and performed as a social interac-
tion, with the audience and actor always working together. As a result, we all,
necessarily, as modern people, are free to have different opinions about each
other, even if such opinions are dismaying. This is not because some of us are
“just sexist” or “just racist” (though it can certainly seem like that), but rather
because we all, necessarily, have different sets of experiences upon which to base
our judgements. For a variety of reasons, education does not always reach
everyone in the way that we might like, and political divisions can harm our
collectivities by exacerbating the situation.
Mead indubitably has an important and still-viable micrological theory; it
is certainly one that we can affirm as having rightly won its centrality in the
sociology of the self. My goal in this chapter has been to present Tarde’s
theory of the self in a manner that illuminates its advantages and its short-
comings, but also points to certain strengths and weaknesses of the received,
Meadian theory. We have seen that Tarde’s theory of the imitative human self
does carve out a niche that was not at all rendered obsolete by Mead’s theory.
Contrary to Mead himself, in fact, it complements it. And Tarde’s theories
are rising in importance again today as we become more and more of a
media-oriented society. This consideration also helps to explain why Goff-
man’s stock rose in response to lacunas in Mead related to the performance of
the self, and why proponents of the sociologies of Mead and Goffman, and
the perspective of SI in general, can still learn from Tarde’s openness to the
ever-advancing media context of the self.
4 Digital Mediation

Although Goffman (1973) still embraced the paradigm of performance in

symbolic interaction, whereas Tarde, despite being an earlier scholar, empha-
sized the need to study the network structuring effects of mediated imitations,
artifice in social relations is a key underlying premise in both of their ways of
understanding the sociological theme of interaction. As we shall see in this
chapter, how artifice in social relations is formalized and extended by the
ever-developing and expanding media industries is key to understanding the
sociology of the self in the 21st century.
Digital media have changed the world, it is often thought, in just a couple
of decades. One has to turn to human-harnessed phenomena such as elec-
tricity to find instruments of change that have had such a universal effect.
Extending the analogy, one can see that, from a historical perspective, elec-
tricity and digital media are convergence enablers. Convergence enablers are
less about the arrival of a discrete technological innovation and more about
enabling many technologies to come together to progress (McLuhan and
Lapham 1994). Electricity enables every kind of technology to shift its sup-
plies of power from a panoply of natural sources to one kind of natural
source. Similarly, digital media enable every kind of media to shift their
methods of delivery from a variety of media formats to one kind of media
format. But, for all that, did digital media really come out of a purely tech-
nological vision?
To be sure, from the futural perspective in which we are all increasingly
anchored, it is clear that the homogenization implied here by the term con-
vergence is only apparent. We worry about losing certain familiar elements of
diversity. From our expanded methods of transportation and communication
that the oil paradigm made possible, to our attitudes of linking education to
vocational needs in our social systems, to our modes of accepting each other
as specialists in the modern economy, there are indeed diversities that are
gradually becoming defunct. But, despite this, identifying with the future
opens us to higher, less-oil-based diversities. The electrical kind of natural
source of power has clearly undergone an explosion of innovation, such that
we now have many options for sourcing it. Similarly, digital media have seen
an opening up of the possibility of offering unlimited different kinds of media
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-5
 Digital Mediation 57
platforms. Of course, the offering of all these options does not mean their
availability is to be conflated with actual and equal accessibility. Nor, by any
means, is it assumed here that each option represents an ethical source. Just
as, in past times, when sourcing steel and oil shrouded much of the world in
smoke and shady dealings, sources for our material welfare today can be
equally problematic (Taffel 2019).

The Affect of the Future and the Limits of Traditional Sociology

I would argue that, despite the global decline of high modern societies and
economies, configurations we used to associate with a coming future, our
feeling of the future has by no means withered along with them. In fact, it has
only intensified and become even more universal – oddly present. The future
has become an affect that every day we expect to encounter and even depend
on to make sense of our lives. An intimate feeling of constant change, con-
stant newness, has come to be felt as a necessity in our everyday life. Routine
used to be a norm that sociologists were naturally interested in. Now, change
is the norm, rooted in our new social, economic, technological, climate,
health, and political realities. I am putting forward in this book that this calls
for a new kind of sociological imagination, one that can gain shape and sub-
stance by being related to important precursors such as Tarde’s cosmological
imagination.
For many, it has taken a pandemic and several lockdowns for us to see that
we expect this intimate feeling of constant newness that drives and focusses
us. It has become very hard – and precisely hardest for those living in what
used to be called ‘advanced’ nations – to process the notion of staying still in
one place. We have come to associate our futural hubris with – and expect it
as an accompaniment to – the openness of society. This despite, and perhaps
even because of, the temporary inaccessibility of such things as pandemic
measures that belies the fact that many of these things are permanently inac-
cessible to significant parts of our populations, as we sociologists all know.
This affect of the future, dark and light by turns, we expect to be present now
every day – every minute – of our lives.
If we have lately, globally, converged socially around images and affects of
the future, it is not likely to be the normalization of sociology that took place
in the 20th century that will provide us with all the tools of analysis we will
need. The temporality of the future as a touchstone of our existence is indel-
ibly linked with the notion of unbridled choice. The neoliberal limbo that
foments this narrow notion awaits a critical discourse that can temper it and
inform people of much broader and richer social realities, along with all of
the many options that are good for our global societies. It is not the scholarly
rigour of sociology that is now standing in our way of understanding these
new realities, but rather the way that some sociologists have sought to belittle
and even, in some cases, to eliminate interdisciplinarity – the inter-
disciplinarity we now need. Many others have shown that sociology can be
58 Digital Mediation
methodologically pluralist and at the same time a vital form of critical
reflexivity.
Could sociology still fill its important role of getting us to see societies with
fresh eyes, this time perhaps giving up its pretensions to be nailing down
ahistorical theories of how humans behave, and instead embracing an under-
standing of how our roles and attitudes are deeply affected by the new sense
of ‘constant change’? I certainly believe so. Sociology once looked poised to
be a critical discourse that could organize our thoughts in all the disciplines
together to provide an open variety of solutions, often in resistance to capit-
alism. From the beginning, founders of sociology such as Weber (1978) and
Durkheim (1982) claimed that there is a need for a sociological discourse on
the historical meaning of modernity, as disciplines such as biology, psychol-
ogy, and economics were, though arising separately, now becoming more and
more integrated with a society-wide value placed on such modern novelties as
individuality. However, rather than imagine sociology as a critical discourse
using its abilities to critique this new intertwining of knowledge and values,
their approach was to bolster the disciplinarity of sociology by merely
reclaiming the social premises from these other disciplines. As a result,
sociology in the 20th century was normalized as merely one discipline among
others, each of which was looking for modern institutions with which to
integrate. Sociology did not fit this remit, as the study of people and society
lacked the focus of being limited to a definite, specific institutional basis.
Nor did the disciplinary normalization of sociology help sociology itself to
flourish. Tying itself to a disciplinary ethos, sociology as such was fated to
grow for a while but then, as the spirit of modern convergence and the gra-
dual change of one regime of modern diversity gave way to another, higher
regime of diversity, to fade into obscurity. This is testified to by the fact that,
kind of weirdly and much to the exasperation of ordinary, everyday sociolo-
gists, it is outside sociology that most of the methods of the study of the social
world have flourished. For some time, people have been looking outside
sociology for critical interdisciplinary discourses. As a result, in sociology
itself, often for defensive reasons, there is more and more a recognition that
its methods are, or at least ought to be, relational and plural: that it should no
longer be conceived as a discipline, but rather as a paradigm with an open-
ended variety of methods and subject matters (see, e.g., Dépelteau 2018).
Today, sociology is sitting at a crossroads. It is undergoing the pluralization
that goods such as electricity and digital media have undergone. But it still
needs lenses that can enable us as sociologists to recognize this fact and its
role in the new order. My suggestion is that sociology should no longer be
seen as merely a kind of content that is being facilitated by a convergence
enabler such as digital media. Rather, sociology should be rebranded as itself
a kind of convergence enabler. Which brings us around to why we are talking
about Gabriel Tarde. This is what sociology was for him. It was not supposed
to be a new discipline. It was supposed to be a discursive key enabling a cos-
mological imagination representing a new level of the sociological
 Digital Mediation 59
imagination, which all the disciplines would eventually understand as central
to their remits. Tarde offers a way forward: to infuse sociology with a cos-
mological imagination.

Digital Media as Continuity and Change

We have already noted in Chapter 3 that Tarde sees a relationship between
our institutions of the imitative/innovative self and our institutions of the
media. As we shall further see in this chapter, the key link here is the concept
of the digitally mediated social network. Tarde, of course, was not aware of
digital media, but the way he theorized imitation/innovation and linked them
with social networks is crucially relevant to them (Tarde 1903, 2000, 2011).
As we shall see, a part of my argument here will be that all the rhetoric of
change that is common today belies a neglect of important yet often unac-
knowledged continuities in the social world. These continuities require us to
look at the changes of the 20th century with Tardian lenses that can bring out
the contours of the rise of social media and the social network society, the
paradigmatic dynamic of imitation and innovation, and the transvaluation of
the artificial into a new view of artifice that underlies our apparent new
acceptance of intimacy with the future.
To develop our Tardian lenses in this manner to see digital mediation in
a clearer light, let us begin by examining the role of social media and the
social network society in a historical context. To begin with, in order to
adapt Tardian theory to the phenomenon of digital media, we need a more
complex theory of the public. As we shall see, a key concept will be the
distinction between the public and publics, the singular and the plural.
Through an examination of representative theories in the literature, I will
demonstrate how they refer to different aspects of the experience of social
life. I place them in a comparative historical perspective in which social
networks can be seen to emerge and develop alongside a singular sense of
public in the industrializing modern society of the turn of the 19th century.
I use this contrast to explain the rise of a plural concept of publics specific
to our era of multimedia powered by digital technology. I will argue that we
are currently living with a complexity that calls for both plural publics and
a generalized public. The generalized public, however, needs to be theorized
in a manner that is adapted to the specificities of our era of advanced
digital social networks – in particular, our relativized assumptions about the
social purposes of time and space.

Public and Publics

Digital media scholars mostly argue that public life today is, indeed, complex
and plural, representing a higher regime of diversity. Building on Benedict
Anderson’s (2006) concept of imagined communities, a number of theorists
today have developed an argument for the plurality of publics.
60 Digital Mediation
Representatives of identity theory (Fraser 1992), audience theory (Livingstone
2005), and political resistance theory (Warner 2005) have all converged on the
idea of public life in the plural. According to danah boyd, people are involved
intimately in widely varying global networks but, at the same time, “want to
be a part of the broader world” and want “opportunities to participate in
public life” (2014: 10). Public life has to now correspond with multiple audi-
ences of formats of media and communication that are themselves multiple.
Let me term this literature the contemporary consensus. The contemporary
consensus is that digital media and social networks have restructured the
times and spaces of public life to align with complex plural social networks.
At the same time, the theorists of the contemporary consensus acknowl-
edge the path-breaking work of earlier theorists, particularly critical theorist
Jürgen Habermas. From the 1960s through the 1980s and 1990s, Habermas
addressed the commercialization of communication that drives systems of
modern media (1985a, 1985b, 1991; Passerin D’Entrèves and Benhabib 1996).
Despite widespread docility and conformity produced by these systems, he
argued there were still forms of communicative action available for indivi-
duals and small groups in their ordinary, everyday life-worlds. Habermas
wanted to promote an image of the use of modern reason as still a viable
project of ordinary people, despite the fact that systemic rationalization had
largely imprisoned them (1988; Passerin D’Entrèves and Benhabib 1996). He
sought to salvage a dialectic of modernity between systems and the life-world
while remaining critical of powerful actors and encouraging of smaller ones
(Habermas 1988). Small-scale actors have become victims of systems-based
efforts to ‘colonize’ their local worlds of meaning, but Habermas also wanted
to assert that they are still capable of acting in concert with each other
(1985a, 1985b). He was unwilling to join the chorus stating that they had
become completely pacified.
It is this opening of agency that Habermas defends that makes him attrac-
tive to the contemporary theorists as a starting point for their own theories of
public plurality (see, e.g., Boeder 2005). Yet Habermas emphasized a singular
conception of the public (1991). This was partly owing to the fact that his
historical and philosophical sources stressed the singularity and universality
of public discourse (1988). They contrasted the public as a space of the open
use of reason over against private interests, which sought to use reason for
private purposes and, increasingly, for commercial gain (e.g., Kant 2009). The
public had developed a political coloration as the time and space of civil
society. However, Habermas was working at a time in which the era of
industrial modernity was gradually giving way to the digital era. Habermas
confronted an emerging mentality that was sceptical of the industrial-era
narratives of progress, which, as Jean-François Lyotard pointed out, was
rooted in social changes wrought by the rise of networked communication
made possible by linkages between personal computers (Lyotard 1984). Yet,
despite the changes in perception and reality taking place around him,
Habermas maintained his basic conception of a singular universal public,
 Digital Mediation 61
despite the fact that the action of publicness had moved on and become
associated with the social network revolution (Passerin D’Entrèves and Ben-
habib 1996).
One area that Habermas and the contemporary consensus have in common
is that their theories of the public and publics stress the theme of agency and
are both centred on the notion of participation. Following George Herbert
Mead (1967), Habermas’s view of participation is derived from an anthropo-
centric conception of communication. He assumes that communication is a
form of human action because he assumes that it essentially involves gestures
that are rich with symbolic, ambiguous meanings that place human beings
uniquely in a situation of interpretation vis-à-vis the world and others (1985a,
1985b). Historically, Habermas points out, these practices were developed by
privileged European men (1991). As the early European bourgeois classes
evolved in sophistication, they developed a concept of culture that enriched
their communication with literary traditions. In early modern times, culture
for them involved what Habermas calls the “world of letters” (1991). The
world of letters grew from philosophical and literary exchanges between
individual privileged men into a format that became popular in publications
of daily newspapers. Habermas idealizes this period as an era of liberal
openness which, however, was subsequently diluted by its own popularity and
profitability. The rise of culture beyond the control of privileged literary men
Habermas views exclusively as a product of commercialization, a rendering
passive or hollowing-out of the bourgeois public sphere. The problem with
later modern culture, in contrast to early modern culture, is that the later
period has plenty of superficial participation but lacks meaningful participa-
tion (Habermas 1991).
The theorists of the contemporary consensus are drawn to Habermas’s
historical and critical account because they share his concern about social
participation. If the public sphere is singular and universal, it is indeed
hollow. However, in contrast to Habermas, scholars have sought to mitigate
the charge that apathy is endemic in the public by pointing to interpretive
audience work involving all kinds of gender, racial, and class identities in the
context of commercialized as well as non-commercialized popular culture
(Bailey 2005; Bird 2003; Nightingale and Ross 2003; Sullivan 2012). This
interpretive audience work has been enabled to consolidate to form multiple
publics by means of digital media and social networks (Livingstone 2005).
The charge of passivity in the public is mitigated by the espousal of a general
normative assumption of what Jenkins calls a “participatory culture” driving
the formations of these publics (2006).
Notice, in addition, the ambiguity of the social and the political in both
Habermas and the contemporary consensus. Both, in fact, accept the location
of the public and publics in broader social life. Neither limits publicness to the
political. The contemporary theorists, for example, argue that some publics
are overtly political, while others are not. However, both Habermas and the
contemporary theorists nevertheless rely on vague suggestions that a kind of
62 Digital Mediation
political quality pervades the public and publics in the form of a civic sensi-
bility. Vivienne, for example, wants to conceive publics in the era of digital
media as spheres of “intimate citizenship” (2016). Yet there are arguably
plenty – perhaps even the majority – of publics based on social networks that
are far from being intimate and involve no civic duties, ones that involve, for
example, games and other forms of serious play (Toews 2008).
Elsewhere, I have argued that publicness is a theme of social life first,
before political life, preventing unhelpful conflations between them (Toews
2018b). For me, this means shifting away from the strategy of deriving pub-
licness from communication, particularly when the latter is conceived as
symbolic interaction. Symbolic interaction is important for the formation of
the self and identities. But, when applied to publicness, the theory of the
symbolic loads publicness in favour of the political. Moreover, not all aspects
of communication need be analysed in terms of symbolic interaction. There is
a need to turn to classical sociological theories of communication to get per-
spective on this question (Toews 2003). Some turn to Simmel’s theory of
social interaction, which does not prioritize the symbolic (Simmel 1972). But
Simmel still prioritizes participation (1949), and his ideas do not present
much trouble for the vague association of publicness with the political.

Tarde on Social Life, Urbanization, and Imitation

Gabriel Tarde’s classical theory provides a better perspective, one that can
help us to conceive with greater accuracy the sociality of the public, as well as
the communicative nature of publics as situated products of digital multi-
media. As we have discussed above, Tarde’s sociology was neglected in the
20th century. In part this is owing to the fact that he did not appeal to
ontology to assert the existence of either societies or individuals as a basis for
sociological disciplinarity (Toews 2003, 2013). Ontology seeks to establish
simple existents: ontological arguments assert a thing exists whether we have
knowledge of it or not. A science subordinate to ontology is a rare thing: it
must begin with the assumption that a range of behaviour is to be explained
in terms of the persistent repetitive presence of one particular thing whose
existence is beyond scientific question.
There is a dominant strain of classical sociology that tends to ontologize
society over against the individual it presumes psychology ontologizes. Yet
there were detractors to this view in the classical era who pointed out that
there are no two societies or individuals that are the same, either in space or
through time. Tarde was one of these detractors. He holds that difference is
the fundamental fact, not identity (2000, 2012). Any phenomenon that
repeats itself for our observation can be shown, with increasing computing
and observing power, to be, in fact, constantly different, constantly changing.
The unities and identities we think we see in phenomena are like necessary
fictions. All the categories of any science – even Newton’s laws of gravity –
have been necessary fictions, workable only within certain parameters. Science
 Digital Mediation 63
continues constantly to refine and rediscover phenomena, generally seeking
insights into smaller and smaller phenomena. Tarde pointed out that Leib-
niz’s version of the infinitesimal calculus affirms the premise that difference
always has priority over repetition, that repetition is for the sake of difference,
and not vice versa (Tarde 2012).
Without recognizing Tarde, in the 1960s and 1970s ‘postmodern’ scholars
began to advance the argument that ontology must be based on difference
rather than repetition (e.g. Deleuze 1995). While they made pointed argu-
ments that some took at face value as revolutionary many others struggled
with the coherence and transparency of their ideas. This is probably because
these thinkers did only a bit of empirical work, mostly working at a high level
of abstraction. They tended to conceive of history as strictly tied to the
moving target of the present; few of them problematized the status of a future
that was merging into a new experiential mode. Though to be fair, even if
they had employed more extensive and clear historical investigations to sup-
port their theories they could never have anticipated the significance of his-
torical developments such as digital media.
Tarde’s thought retrospectively fills in these historical lacunas in post-
modern theory, I would say even to the point where the term ‘postmodern’
can now be laid to rest as just a sign of a lack of historical understanding.
It is remarkable that although Tarde’s thought was relatively neglected in
his day, his thought is today becoming increasingly relevant, and the more
relevant it is, it is as if Tarde’s ideas are thickening postmodern theory to
the point where this term is now far too simplistic and misleading. Tarde
anticipated with clarity the need for science to go about its business in a
manner that stresses plural methods and concepts, an approach that sub-
stantiates the views of science of later thinkers such as Bruno Latour. In
today’s era of quantum physics we need the historical contextualization of
related theories and contributions to new theorizations that Tarde's theory
can provide. In a similar vein, Tarde is also increasingly relevant because
the paradigm of imitation has today come into its own in the era of digi-
tal media.
In Chapter 2 above, we have seen that a key pattern of behaviour in Tarde’s
day was urbanization. Let us now look at Tarde’s analysis more closely for
how his discussion of urbanization anticipates the phenomena of digital
media. As we saw, Tarde took note of the apparent uniformities one sees in
cities and showed how, beneath that surface, the concentration of people in
cities was actually producing diversity (1903). Cities were encouraging imita-
tion. But imitation was producing the possibility of unique personalities with
unique desires (1903). This is because, in dense circumstances, people imitate
many more others than they would otherwise. In rural pre-modern villages,
people would imitate many aspects of a few people, creating communities
based on resemblances, whereas, in modern urban environments, people were
imitating a few aspects of many people, creating differences. In cities, people
imitate small, sometimes tiny, aspects of the thoughts and looks and
64 Digital Mediation
behaviour of others, producing a unique inner combination in themselves,
despite the appearance of uniformity on the outside. Uniformity on the out-
side, repetition, cannot be taken automatically as a sign of a weakening of
desire or a general apathy, as uniformity frequently serves to make possible
new kinds of differences that later become more visible (Tarde 1903, 2012).
Modern cities prove this.
Imitation is most intense in crowd situations (Tarde 2010b). Crowds, in
urban environments, are intense, and people seek escape and solitude at
home. But the energy of crowds is unparalleled and keeps people wanting to
stay connected. In relative solitude, people read printed media – newspapers –
that describe ideas, arguments, issues, and events. This, for Tarde (2010b), is
the beginning of the public in the modern sense of the term. The public is not
understood as in contrast to the private, at all. It is understood as a refuge of
cool, responsible rationality in contrast to the heated irrationality of crowds.
The public of the newspaper audience is made up of relatively isolated indi-
viduals who are connected distantly by belonging to interest-based networks.
In fact, the public as such overspills the geographical boundaries of the city
into rural areas. But each of the networked individuals of the public has in
common an attraction to the city and its energy of crowds. Tarde describes a
dynamic of urban–rural linkage in which the public provides refuge from
crowds while, in turn, crowds re-energize individuals with new ideas and new
desires (2010b).
There is much that can be adapted here from Tarde for the present day.
Borrowing a term from Rainie and Wellman (2012), one could say that, for
Tarde, the public corresponds with “networked individualism”. The experi-
ence of crowds is the primal experience of urban modernity, but, in the era of
digital media, the city is transcended by the globe, and the crowd function of
providing energy is largely replaced, or reshaped, by social media. Social
media are not the same as an urban crowd, but they resonate with its func-
tion. A crowd energizes individuals with desires that are expressed as imita-
tion. Social media have a side to them that is like a crowd. But social media
also have another side, on which, behind passwords and privacy settings,
people constitute plural publics. These plural publics provide a safe retreat
from unbridled, raw social media and they extend the modern urban dynamic
of fostering the development of unique identities based on partial imitations.
In the social media age, the crowd and the public, the sociable and the unso-
ciable, are far more simultaneous than they used to be: this is the significance
of mobile technology. Imitation follows digital logic, the logic of the sharing
of copies of information, the unique combinations of which promote indivi-
duality despite superficial outward resemblances.
Tarde sometimes uses the metaphor of rays of imitations (1903). This
metaphor is meant to describe the fact that, while we get ‘notions’ from
others, we always get more than one at a time. Each notion is merely a
manifestation of a single trajectory of social interaction that traverses, and is
by no means confined to, individuals. They trace networks that are complex:
 Digital Mediation 65
there are always multiple instances of these trajectories taking place all at the
same time, accounting for the complexity of the individual. Instances of such
complexities take shape as an opposition between certain notions. This creates
a psychological conflict in a person’s mind: a psychological conflict is, in this
limited sense, an individual matter. But, one need only broaden the scope of
analysis just a bit to immediately see that, actually, such uncertainty or inner
conflict about any given notion only exists because other imitations have
produced other notions within us.
Facilitating super large volumes of sharing/imitation is the raison d’être of
the servers of social media platforms and the veritable logic of indefinite
multiple copying of digital media. Social media are, thus, in Tardian terms,
hubs and processors of social networks and, at the same time, stimulators and
processors of ideas and internal conflicts over ideas.
Tarde theorizes a “hesitation” in the choice between different imitative rays.
Such hesitations are the precursor of everyday experiences in our con-
temporary digitally fuelled societies. The end of hesitation, the resolution of
an internal conflict, is the precise point at which individuals and groups, no
longer uncertain about their position on a given issue, become at risk of
external and potentially violent combat with others who hold opposing views.
When this energy is directed towards the missions of bordered and externa-
lized institutions such as states, this can be dangerous, because such institu-
tions are not set up, as social media are, to handle such a volume of sharing
of internal conflicts. If this energy remains diffused in social networks, on the
other hand, it can be a productive energy, and conflict can remain under a
kind of diffuse, decentred control.

Aspects of Social Media: The Tardian View

Of course, not all media in the era of digital media are the social media of
intimate networks and peer-to-peer sharing. Digital media fundamentally
mean multimedia powered by digital technology. Broadcast media, as multi-
media, are still possible with the era of digital media. Thus, there is still room
for a concept of the generalized public. The generalized public is today, as it
was yesterday, made up of people who are seeking temporary refuge or dis-
tance from the crowd – that is, today, the social media of intimate networks
and peer-to-peer sharing. Not unlike the newspaper readers of Tarde’s day,
subjects of the generalized public are relatively isolated, though networked,
individuals. They are temporarily isolated in solitude, but normally they all
have in common the desire to re-energize themselves through acts of sharing.
The difference is that social media can satisfy this need in the absence of
crowd situations.
How do they do so? Social media have been studied extensively, but much
of the scholarship tends to treat them as a black box and tends not to relate
them to larger, relational questions such as those raised by the kind of ana-
lysis proposed in this book. This may be changing, however. Nick Couldry
66 Digital Mediation
has called attention to a recent turn in the literature towards a wider ques-
tioning of how media affect our lives (2012, 2015). Couldry calls for reflection
on “the type of ‘social’ now being constructed through social media” (2015:
1). To be sure, social theorists have, for some time, attempted to discern and
define the sociality in the term social media. Yet Couldry has in mind some-
thing else: not merely a normative discussion, but a broader engagement that
any informed and concerned citizen can be involved with – in short, a basis
for a political discussion about social media themselves.
Such reflection would, of course, be far from new. Steve Jones has argued
that the study of cyberculture in the 1990s was based on the twin pillars of the
works of Sherry Turkle and Howard Rheingold (Jones 1998). Both of them
explicitly promoted a broad-based political discussion of the institution of the
internet (Rheingold 1993; Turkle 2011). The political tenor of the discussion
extended to popular arenas as well. Around the beginning of ‘Web 2.0’,
readers may remember, Time magazine, in December 2006, named “You” as
the people of the year. Citing a “revolution” in the control of information, the
era of digital media, it asserted, is “about the many wresting power from the
few” (Grossman 2006: n.p.). To be sure, Time seemed uncertain about the
value of such a movement as, in its view, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of
crowds as well as its wisdom” (Grossman 2006). The example of Time’s arti-
cle shows that there is a tendency to sometimes confuse social ambivalence
about a technology with political engagement. This is indicative of a common
failure to distinguish between social life and political life. There is a need for
theories that can clarify this distinction and prevent unhelpful and destabiliz-
ing conflations between these categories. Elsewhere, I have argued that the
political should be understood not as co-extensive with the social, but as a
mode of action within the sphere of social life that is itself inclusive of both
activity and passivity; it would be a falsification of social life, and unneces-
sary, to expunge all passive, contemplative, or meditative – that is, non-
action-oriented – practices from it (Toews 2018b). The political activates
when conflicts emerge in social life and get expressed and externalized into
opposing viewpoints and camps.
At any rate, however one wishes to frame the distinction between the
social and the political, the distinction ought to be made and it ought to
make possible clarity on a key point. It should become clear that political
action, to be effective, needs specialized communication and the broadest
possible, inclusive, and engaged audience. Political action cannot be
expected to work randomly with an inherently diffuse and decentred range
of communication methods. It should have a base in one or two go-to
methods that all other methods can look to for coordination. What that
central method or methods will be will depend on the scale and nature of
the political campaign, but, assuming that most political campaigns are
trying to reach as many folks as possible, the central method of political
communication will usually need to incorporate a broadcast (or few-to-
many) mechanism of some kind.
 Digital Mediation 67
The aim should be inclusivity through the reach of this mechanism, yet
engagement is vital as well. How can the proponents of a political campaign
or debate promote engagement with its organization, issues, and platforms? It
is not helpful – and I would argue, on epistemological grounds, not even
possible – to posit a priori social participation as a norm in today’s complex,
digitally structured and networked societies and then use that to justify chas-
tising and provoking people into reluctantly acting (Toews 2008). Social par-
ticipation of this kind implies a social ontology, or at the very least a notion
of social unity of some kind. Such concepts are simply out of date. Tarde’s
thought, as we have seen, shows how they are completely unnecessary because
they rely upon illusory a priori notions about how our sociological imagina-
tions are formed. Difference is primary in science and in society, in the epis-
temology and methodology of modern science just as much as in the ethical
stances that are more and more being adopted in today’s post-colonial and
post-patriarchal visions of social interaction (Toews 2013, 2018b). One should
employ attraction to difference, not moral suasion, as a motivator in civic and
political engagement.
To this end, the dynamic of the generalized public, as analysed using Tar-
dian concepts as I have shown, is such that the generalized public should not
be idealized or romanticized as some particular form of social unit. To the
contrary, the generalized public is a concept of broad swathes of individuals.
Tarde’s generalized public comprises networked individuals formed by
public–crowd dynamics. As such, the generalized public is made up of net-
worked individuals who are ready to be politicized to some extent, not just of
any networked individuals who have social media memberships. Each indivi-
dual who comes to be a part of the generalized public has his or her social
condition of politicization in being pushed away from crowd behaviour and
unruly social media behaviour, which they experience at the same time as a
pull towards the presence and operation of digitalized broadcast media. Net-
worked and politicized individuals are those who have converged upon shared
problems of various open-ended kinds that they are all, each under their own
circumstances, confronted with.
Tarde’s generalized public is media rich. Far from being “the crowd”, as
Time would have it, such individuals have used media technology to retreat
from crowd phenomena. Such retreat from crowds is what ‘attraction to dif-
ference’ looks like in practice. Today’s homes, for example, are like televised
cocoons people have created to shield themselves from the banalities of the
crowd. Those who are used to thinking of television as the ultimate cultural
banality may find this a strange thing to say. But the fact is that television,
and high-production broadcast forms of media, all distributed digitally, pro-
duce food for thought in addition to, of course, their own forms of banality.
Yet these media-rich cocoons of individuals and small groups are the kernels
of the generalized public. The people in this proto-public realize that they
must act socially once certain circumstances and issues become repeated,
persistent problems, as informed by the news and as reinforced on social
68 Digital Mediation
media. Under such circumstances, they begin to see themselves as a general-
ized public and as potential civic actors.
Civic action, following from this, does not mean that people collapse
themselves back into the crowd. From our homes and cocoons, we may, of
course, rejoin crowds at times to re-energize ourselves. Sports and downtowns
and concerts and so on are all still desirable to many people, as the frustrating
global Covid-19 pandemic has abundantly illustrated. In contrast to such
activities, civic action – a meeting or a petition, for example – is action. It is
purposive, political action in the proper sense of the term. This is not to say
that the generalized public, as described here, is automatically engaged in
civic action. In fact, there is no such thing. Civic action has always required,
and continues to require, organization and mobilization if it is to translate
mere information and musings into externalized debates, well-formed judge-
ments, plans, and actions. At this point, however, social media cease to func-
tion merely as media of ambiguous social life and begin to function,
additionally, as a means of political communication. The advantage of using
social media for political communication is that they can then be effective via
the plural publics of social networks that they multiply on an ongoing basis,
regardless of politics.
A Tardian conception of the generalized public, then, as formed via social
media, has nothing to do anymore with a privileged white male viewpoint on
the world rooted in historical forms of domination, yet, at the same time, it
represents a step of critical distance away from the crowd. It accounts for
individuality, yet can contextualize individuality in terms of the structures of
contemporary mediatized everyday life: the unique sets of multiple publics
that are formed as a consequence of our specific social networks. It shows that
the public imaginary is not, in fact, an imaginary of participation but, to the
contrary, an imaginary of solitude. It highlights the cocoons of this fecund
solitude that we forge in order to feel true to ourselves and the meaningful
order of our small groups, yet it shows that we must also go into the great
‘outside’, where there is potential confusion and violence and crowds, in order
sometimes to re-energize and sometimes to act politically. It highlights the
importance of social networks in the era of social media, yet it provides an
illumination of dynamics that transcend networks and can move into the ter-
ritory of mass collective action.
Based on Tarde’s thoughts, I have argued that digital mediation, so domi-
nant today, represents less of a break with the past than one might think.
Without the benefit of knowledge of Tarde’s theory, the divide of the digital
era from the past seems like a gaping hole produced benignly and accidentally
by technological innovation. The most continuity most sociologists can see is
the continuity of capitalism, which always seems to be achieving a more
‘advanced’ state. For, from the point of view of today, apart from capitalism,
much of sociology’s traditional forms of micro and macro analyses, rooted in
Durkheim, Mead, Marx, Weber, and others, seem less and less relevant in the
 Digital Mediation 69
face of this supposed digital revolution, whereas Tarde’s theory appears more
and more fecund and apropos.
Tarde’s theory genuinely seems to be coming into its own in this new con-
text. Once Tarde’s theory is understood in terms of how it connects the past
and present in a manner that can take account of, but still go far beyond,
Marx’s mix of insights and shibboleths about capitalism, cleaving to the
comparative project of placing Tarde’s theories into context with other
sociological theories, the Tardian means to reviving sociology’s fortunes
should become clear to the reader. It consists of the fact that, while main-
taining a continuity of the theme of social networks that has not always been
clear, specifically with digital mediation, we, the people of the world, have
shifted from living in a dull, grey, and patient present while imagining a more
colourful, grandly different future to come. Instead, we now tend to live in
such a way that everything we do has less and less value for just being here,
occupying the here and now, making us feel we are inhabiting social groups –
families, clubs, institutions – of which we have no choice but to accept mem-
bership and make the best, hoping they might be different one day. More and
more, we value making small differences every day. We realize the strength of
our so-called weak ties (Granovetter 1973). We make constant alterations to
our new groups, adorning them with technological window dressing as well as
more substantive algorithms, to the point where they are better described as
social networks of which our memberships and login details proliferate to the
point of being innumerable.
5 The Return of Nature

Down through history, we have seen, of course, that what we call nature has
often failed to cooperate with the image we like to paint of it as passive and
dominated by human beings. Since the watershed year of 2020, with the
phenomenon of Covid-19, we have seen that the problem of the intransi-
gence of certain problems beyond our human control, such as illnesses and
epidemics, is still a live issue. Another important global crisis is climate
change. Although human beings do have the power, at least in theory, to
solve, or at least robustly mitigate, climate change, our ‘addiction’ to pol-
luting behaviours and excessive consumerism has shown that the challenge
is dramatically difficult. To a considerable extent, global capitalism has
presented an obstacle to reform.
To what extent does it make sense to speak of a ‘return of nature’ as a way
of understanding our current list of problems linked with such phenomena as
Covid-19 and climate? Can Tarde’s theorizations absorb or account for such
problems? How does his resetting of the problem of nature fare in these his-
torical conditions?

‘God or Nature’
Let me recap what we know so far about the term ‘nature’. In the Middle
Ages and before, nature was never a strong concept. The strong concept of
nature emerged in early modern times as a category that human beings cre-
ated when they realized that there are a lot of things currently beyond their
control in the fuzzy, all-inclusive realm of ‘things created by God’ that they
believed could, one day, be mastered by their emerging, modern, and power-
ful sciences and technologies. This is quite distinct from what had, prior to
then, been known as artifice, which had been simply a way of describing what
human beings, with the blessing of the class of priests, benignly add to the
universe with their sanctioned creativity (given, of course, by God). Nature is,
from the beginning, one side of a dichotomy with all that is created by, or
caused by the intervention of, human beings. When it is in this form of
dichotomy, it becomes known as artificial rather than artifice; artificial even-
tually acquires a negative connotation.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-6
 The Return of Nature 71
Thus, from this summary, we can extrapolate that, as modernity progresses,
in addition to being placed in a dichotomy with the artificial, images of
nature are distinguished from religious images of God’s creations. As scien-
tists gradually take over the description of images of nature, they are less and
less monitored by religious clerics. In the forging of the image of nature by
scientists, there are thus two main separations that take place, as it were,
behind the scenes. First, the dominant image that gets created over time is the
dichotomy between nature and the artificial and, thus, a separation of nature
from what is eventually called culture. The concept of culture, while useful
within certain sociological frameworks, is a vestige of humanity’s relationship
with what it terms the sacred.
The continuing problematic presence of ‘God’ in the work of early modern
scientists is described in Spinoza’s contrast between ‘God or Nature’. This
contrast perfectly describes the undecidability of the status, and in practice
also the interchangeability, of these terms. From a purely religious point of
view, there would not be much point to the contrast. For philosophy and the
new sciences, however, it deals with the issue handily, by elevating it to an
ontological distinction that is, at the same time, an epistemological distinc-
tion – namely, that between the simple (God) and the complex (Nature).
Much later on, this would mirror Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual
and the actual. One cannot have one without the other or, perhaps more
importantly, prioritize one over the other. To try not to see them in a hier-
archy as we are doing was a heresy in Spinoza’s time, which is probably why
he couched them in the abstruse philosophical language of substance con-
trasted with modes, but it seems to us that he was just being practical and
that he was on the right track. As Tarde will say:

Let us insist on this central truth … that in all great regular mechan-
isms … all the internal revolts which in the end break them apart are
provoked by a similar condition: their constitutive elements … always
belong only by one aspect of their being to the world they constitute and
by other aspects escape it. This world would not exist without them;
without the world, conversely, the elements would still be something. …
[The] collective is wider but no less deep than the element, but it is a
merely artificial being, a composite made up of aspects and facades of
other beings.
(2012: 47)

Every object has aspects that are unfathomable to us, no matter how much we
apply our sciences and imagine new sciences to try to crack them, and so on.
The price of understanding and accepting this unfathomability in its full
import – the price of admission for the new science – is to acknowledge the
simplicity of the object’s concept. This is what Leibniz termed its monad.
Leibniz, of course, tended to see this simplicity of the monad as absolute, but
Tarde will hold that this simplicity, like all simplicity, is in fact relational, as it
72 The Return of Nature
is contingent on ‘the composite’ – that is, on the artifice of the sciences that
aim to define it.
The power of simplicity comes into its own when simplicity is understood
as relational rather than absolute. For example, the contrast between human
nature and human history is a contrast between the simple and the complex
in this sense. For many years, it was sufficient to accept a theory of human
nature that was fairly simple, while at the same time it was acknowledged that
human history is very complex. As we saw in Chapter 1, the simple definition
of human nature was never absolute. It was relational. It rested for a long
time in the ‘state of nature’ paradigm of the political philosophers, but today
has moved on and has become transformed by the sociologists of the self.
‘Nature’, then, is a category rooted in a time when there held sway an
externalist ontology – that is, one that associates all reality with the figure of
a god, with an unsurpassable gulf separating the religious processing of reality
from the scientific approach to nature. As ontology shifted into Spinoza’s
paradigm, where the God principle is in service to science or knowledge
rather than strictly to religion, the virtual–God–simple versus actual–Nature–
complex distinction became an internal disjunction and the truly operative
distinction that in modernity most people tacitly accept.

A Return of Nature?
Does it make sense to refer to a ‘return of nature’ then? If this were truly a
coherent concept, it would refer to the return of an externalist or scholastic
version of ontology. That would be absurd. Representatives of the Frankfurt
School theorize a mastery of nature by the instrumental rationality of human
beings in modernity (Cook 2014; Horkheimer and Adorno 2007). As Hei-
degger showed, the mastery of nature in this sense was rooted in the mode of
science in depending upon representations of nature (1982). Human nature,
for example, is a representation of nature. As such, the representation is static
in contrast to the actuality of human life. As Heidegger put it, this stasis of
human subjectivity can be termed a ‘standing reserve’, trivializing human
existence (1982). In that case, a return of nature would entail, for science, a
deconstruction of human representation, which would be, at the same time, a
deconstruction of our static subjectivity. What emerges from Heidegger’s
analysis is that nature and human reality are images – images that are
believed – and, as such, are capable of influencing us in dramatic ways.
Nature is – was – an image. One should say images in the plural; however,
although the images are different in different cultures, they have a number of
common features. Another route we can take here for more insight is a his-
torical approach. For example, local historian Royce MacGillivray tells us
that one of the strongest myths binding the culture in Ontario, Canada –
where I lived for some time – is the myth of the pioneer. It will not surprise
anyone to learn that the notion of ‘pioneers’ is a mythologized notion; what I
want to focus on in this example is the corresponding inkling of nature that
 The Return of Nature 73
the first white settlers had. Through travel diaries and other sources, Mac-
Gillivray relates how the image of nature for the pioneers was a rich and
sometimes frightening one (1990). They had heard tales of slaughter by
people whom they perceived to be their existential foes, the ‘Indians’. I should
say that there are, and always have been, of course, many tribes of indigenous
peoples in Ontario; it is not necessary to go into details about them here, as
my example deals strictly with a perception on the part of the settlers that
explains how, for white people, the construction of the image of nature was
imbued with a certain problematic tenor.
As MacGillivray relates, the pioneers associated nature with the forest
(1990). The forest in the 19th century was vast and deep. The white settlers,
associating the forest with Indians and with death, slashed and burned the
forest around their properties as much as they could. Several generations
later, painters from the noted Group of Seven depicted Ontario as a ‘wild-
erness’. In doing so they erased the Indians from their painted images (Bordo
1993). Their selective idealization of the wilderness, celebrated as it has been
by Canadians, belies an underlying fear of nature and an attending sub-
limated fear of Indians. It describes a continuity between the white North
American pioneer settlers and the modern ideology of the people of Canada
that has continued well into the present day (Bordo 1993). Just as Indians
were dispersed in the genocidal residential school system, we Canadians took
the same strategy of dispersal to nature, dividing it up into artistic repre-
sentations and research specializations. The mastery of nature in Ontario was,
sadly, coeval with violent domination over Indians. Canadians have lately
been recognizing their past genocidal actions; we have yet to link those
actions with our everyday life back then. I would not be surprised to find that
the average white Canadian thinks of the deep forest with vague trepidation,
but has forgotten why, as MacGillivray suggests.
A ‘return to nature’ then, in the context of this example, means what? Does
it mean returning to the project of ‘mastery’ of the land and ‘mastery’ of the
indigenous peoples? Or might it be a part of the solution – that is, a return of
memory, a way to bring such destructive aspects of the past to bear in con-
temporary society? Any position that assumes white supremacy over nature
and indigenous cultures is surely foreclosed now, a complete non-starter in
today’s society. As I have argued, a concept such as nature works as a con-
trast in a dichotomy with another term, which in this case is the term artifi-
cial. The early settlers were still largely religious people who still saw their
existence and actions as clearers of the land, their primitive technologies and
agricultural market products as virtuous artifices; these soon became, and
today are, interpreted rather as artificial – that is, unnecessary desires rooted
in irrational fears. This is not hard for people today to understand, but the
myth of the virtuous pioneers nevertheless continues.
A ‘return to nature’ could mean that nature can breathe again after being
‘mastered’ by humans. However, was it ever really mastered? This in itself has
always been a myth, as the work of MacGillivray shows. Although the
74 The Return of Nature
metaphor of nature breathing again is not an unwelcome one, it would
necessarily mean doing more science, not less. Thus, instead of nature being
understood via a contrast with the artificial, nature now must be contrasted
with something else. In this book, I am presenting the notion that it can be
contrasted with the cosmos, in the manner of Tarde, to form a new cosmolo-
gical imagination. This would involve though, in fact, either a wholesale new
concept of nature or a rejection of the term. For these reasons, I think it is
better to explain this new concept using epistemological/phenomenological
terms rather than the straight sociological methods’ terms of the past. After
all, the first principle of our new reality in the era of quantum-informed sci-
ence and digital media has been the fragmentation and decline of the concept
of nature. To illuminate this point in the context of a global, digital media-
driven culture, it is useful to think about the figure of ‘big data’.

‘Big Data’
Before the notion of big data, it was ‘nature’ that used to be conceived as a
vast field of relatively passive objects. It was assumed that subjects were
human and active and, as such, could traverse and exploit the natural – the
‘untouched’ – field of objects at their leisure. What happens with digital media
is that all knowledge becomes subjected to digital mediation. The fact of
mediation is not new; every scientific discovery in the past – indeed, every
human attempt at knowledge – has been made through the mediation of
some factor or technology, from cave drawings to language to print media.
What digital media represent is, however, of a new, higher order. They repre-
sent a full-on transformation that places us as human beings alongside non-
human realities in a manner that puts little stock in principled boundaries
between us and the universe of objects. It is not just another form of ‘cultural’
mediation, such as, for example, the cinema. Film is influential, but it is
voluntary both in its production, in which images are chosen and brought
together by a director, and in its consumption, where genre and other pre-
ferences dictate who will see it. Its form is still generally of the broadcast or
one-to-many type. In contrast, digital media constitute a technology allowing
for the digitization of all information that used to come to us piecemeal via
each relatively separate form of mediation. This is not to say that there no
longer exist forms of mediation that do not enter into this digital process – for
example, older technologies such as vinyl record players, simple microscopes,
non-computerized cars, just to mention a few. The point here is that the latter
have been marginalized and/or supplemented by digital technologies and, as
such, no longer have much significance, other than nostalgia or, at best, the
kind of personalized historical experimentation of the hobbyist, in our
modern systems of knowledge.
Digital media scholars have argued for some time that the multimedia
modus operandi is key to understanding this new form of media as a whole
new paradigm of communication and representation (Baym 2010; Couldry
 The Return of Nature 75
2012; Hayles 2012; Jones 1997; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Toews 2018b).
Tarde’s sociology is compatible with this view; still, he encourages us look at
digital media in yet a new way. Historically, digital media offer second-order
mediation. They gather all the forms of mediation together and let them talk
to each other, with a layer of digital processing and accessibility. Focussing on
the possibilities for human social spheres such as entertainment and commu-
nication, such a change has appeared large enough. It has opened our eyes to
the possibilities of managing our lives in a model of networked individualism
via what we have come to call social media (Rainie and Wellman 2012). But
digital media, more fundamentally, change our ways of knowing and our
ways of being. There is a much bigger story of change here. As we shall see,
well before digital media arrived, Tarde’s sociological efforts were already
aimed at getting us to think of these larger changes, particularly about the
implications of our acknowledgement of the role of difference, as a bottom
line shared between ourselves and how and what we can know. Because his
analysis anticipates and fits so accurately with the rise of digital media, it fills
a void presented by the daunting notion of a natural world that sometimes
seems to be slipping away or inaccessible.
We need a language, then, that regrounds the older concepts of nature and
the artificial in the new realities, and this is one of the areas in which Tarde’s
sociology can be helpful. That being said, we, of course, must also adapt our
conceptualization to fit with our contemporary realities. What I propose is a
terminology that can highlight changes in our processes of knowledge, parti-
cularly in the status of the known and the unknown. This is necessary because
the rise of the era of digital media and social media has meant the fracturing
of the known and unknown aspects of what used to be called nature into two
incommensurable regions. More specifically, these regions are what I am
going to term the realm of the known unknown and the realm of the
unknown unknown. This analysis allows us to perceive the latter in greater
relief, and to show its importance in our new era, as we shall see.

The Known Unknown

The known unknown is the traditional subject matter of every science; in
order to know something scientifically, it is necessary to first be able to iden-
tify it as something that is in some precise way unknown. So far, this is an
ahistorical perspective on science, and, as such, the idea of a category of the
known unknown might seem unnecessary at best. Moreover, without
expanding the context, the further notion of a category of the unknown
unknown would appear as gibberish. Resistance to such analyses of science is
intrinsic to our makeup when we are used to seeing scientific knowledge as
all-inclusive of reality.1 The ahistorical perspective on science is actually our
default perspective. By this, I do not mean that we are used to thinking the
only way to know something is a scientific way of knowing something,
though this does come into play for some people obsessed with ‘truth’ in a
76 The Return of Nature
world of competing social media discourses. What I mean is that, when we do
science, we, the ahistorical appreciators of science, assume that there are no
barriers in principle – only temporary technical barriers – to its application to
any aspect of anything whatsoever. That there is a category of the unknown
that has remained and always will remain unknown to us as human beings is
anathema to the anthropocentrism loosely concealed by such assumptions.
At this juncture of history, we are moving away from our past ways of
doing science that tended to partake in a general presentism and anthro-
pocentrism. The mechanism of the fracturing of knowledge that I am refer-
ring to revolves around something that sometimes seems to be in itself
relatively benign, but, put together with these larger developments, is, in fact,
radical: I am referring to the storage of the data that are transformed by
digital technology into digital data. In the past, before digital media, the
storage of data was an afterthought of researchers and companies. What
mattered was method and conclusions. The data themselves were less impor-
tant, as it was assumed that new data would have to be gathered in many
instances in order to replicate a study. Today, data have a different meaning.
As we have all heard by now, the input of all knowledge into the workings of
digital technology – digitization – renders digital data as a vast pool.
Unpacking the notion of this pool of big data reveals some remarkable facts
in relation to our argument.
Superficially, the meaning of big data is triumphalist. On one level, it
implies that all of the knowable objects in the universe are now, at least in
principle, presentable to human subjects. This bears a superficial but distinct
resemblance to the older imperialistic conception of the human project of
scientific knowledge I have discussed above. However, in actual fact, such a
principle of the presence of the knowable in which ‘data’ could accumulate or
pool into a certain amount of stuff did not exist prior to digital media. It was
the presence of the knower, not the knowable, that many thinkers were con-
cerned to deconstruct. Heidegger, for example, spoke of the ahistorical, pre-
sentist ‘standing reserve’ that human beings were turning themselves into by
engaging in modern science (1982). But, as we went about doing science, we
conceived ‘nature’, too, as a benign and passive realm of things we know. We
saw it as a supplement or addition, willy-nilly, to things we do not know;
nature was our go-to place for everything familiar or scary, depending on our
choice of how to approach our interests and what to make of them.
As such, nature was an over-thought, over-mastered playground for our
human development. Our domination of it evoked control and progress. From
it, we extracted ‘resources’. Such ideas made sense in a time of relatively naive
optimism in which there prevailed the idea that, in principle, the universe
contains no mysteries that we cannot know. To paraphrase Kant: by analys-
ing any phenomenon, we can arrive at an understanding of it sufficient as to
moot any need to grasp it as a noumenon, or to imagine that it has noumenal
features that make any difference (1999). It was enough to understand how
the phenomenon mattered to us: any notion of what it is in itself was assumed
 The Return of Nature 77
to be impossible and, therefore, not matter. It is, of course, certainly correct,
by definition, that it is impossible to have any knowledge about the content of
noumena. But today, it is proving incorrect that the form of stuff that we
cannot know is somehow inert or does not matter. We thought that nature
would always be there as a passive backdrop against which our activities were
all the more, happily, conspicuous. It turns out that nature can itself be active
or passive, and that, in many instances (I stress many, not all, instances), we
will never be able to fathom why it does turn this way or that in direction, far
beyond our perception. To uncover such limits, to push them back if possible,
is precisely the dynamic and the challenge of which our motivation to do
science consists.
But science today is also pursued with the recognition that our epistemol-
ogies must shift with the variety of perspectives that are required to analyse
phenomena. Perhaps the paradigm of quantum physics has done the most to
make us realize that this kind of rough and ready perspectivism is an objec-
tive necessity, not just a subjective choice. Knowledge fluctuates and overlaps
with other knowledge, rather than growing in a straight line and accumulat-
ing into something that can be placed into one grand stockpile as the positi-
vists of the early 20th century imagined. One of the detrimental effects of this
is that the interests of knowledge have proliferated in a manner that is divi-
ded. In this context, the notion of big data has seemed to offer at least a
rough sketch of a potential unification of data. Yet, with few social science
principles guiding such a project of unification, the stockpiles of data have
continued to proliferate in a relatively divided manner and have been allowed
to do so in a way that is disconnected from any sense of a common project of
knowledge. As a result, there are now various stockpiles of data that rather
appear, sometime just on the surface, sometimes on purpose, incommensur-
able with each other. This does not trouble companies and capitalist enter-
prises of widely varying kinds, nor, also, non-profit organizations and
government departments – all the large actors that continue to grow and
proliferate – that have this stockpiling of data in common and use similar
computerized means of placing information in controlled repositories. This
has precipitated concern about the fairness of sharing information. We are at
almost the polar opposite of what Lyotard once envisioned with his notion of
“opening up the data banks” for human beings to share information with
each other (1984).
But the language of fairness and freedom of information, reasonable
though it is in the limited contexts of information-contingent political con-
flicts, refers back to a broad period in the 20th century when the con-
tingencies of the identities of individuals upon social systems seemed
relatively settled and channelled into social stratifications. Owing to digital
media, our social states of affairs as human beings – our classes, our iden-
tities, and so on – now operate in a system of flexibility and fluidity in open
conversations surrounding the new, guarded silos of information, rather
than in a sense of biographically determined status and imagined
78 The Return of Nature
permanence guaranteeing the meaning of information as a reflection of a
settled society.
So, although we seem to be stockpiling data in relatively closed systems
behind the backs of each other, and although this, indeed, creates possibi-
lities for control for the large actors capable of investing in such systems,
such control is at the same time undermined. It is undermined by the fact
that we are less likely now to see any particular bit of knowledge, contained
in such silos, as fixed in a manner that we might see as essential for our
individual development. Thus, while a social media company such as Face-
book is gathering information about me, if the underlying social supports
for my identities are now always changing, with such changes indeed pre-
cipitated by means of the very same social media providers and other mea-
sures of digital media, the information they gather is, in fact, less about ‘me’
than about a position or role in society I have temporarily occupied in my
journey through social media.
Thus, data collection and stockpiling are pursued largely by market
research wings of large organizations. But the new relativity of such infor-
mation in relation to our identities – the fact that our social lives are now
structured in a way that encourages constant personal change – makes it more
likely for each of us to see such information as less vitally constraining us
than the manner in which it used to be presented to us, by comparably large
actors, as authoritative and permanent. We are less likely now to see any
particular bit of knowledge about us as fixed in an authoritative and perma-
nent way because we have an intimation that its contingency and relationality
are at least as fundamental as any repeated patterns of our behaviour. As
some researchers put it, the era of big data is an era of mundane data (Pink et
al. 2017). The knowledge we think we need is always changing according to
our perception of our ever-new social situations. Thus, the various incom-
mensurate stockpiles of data shepherded by large actors have tended to
change from being seen as master keys to our relative freedoms and con-
straints to being seen as static, though always growing, pools of random
information about identities that we now tend to slip in and out of depending
on circumstances.
Thus, the era of data mining has emerged – but what does it mean?
Research used to have as its mission the bringing of the unknown into the
realm of the known unknown by tagging it with possibilities of meaning. For
example, in the early 20th century, anthropology was about discoveries of new
information about so-called tribes of people in places imagined as far-away
and the publication of such information in a public record of information
which could then be tagged and worked on. These were possibilities that were
seen as either confirming or troubling the status of the known as known. This
implied two steps of research: data collection and data analysis. In contrast,
data mining locates the known unknown available within the stockpiles of the
known. More and more, it is assumed that every bit of information that is
stockpiled in various silos is, as such, known in terms of its relatively
 The Return of Nature 79
meaningless ‘metadata’, but awaits the data mining that will pull it up into a
new context of meaning. Much creativity of research now relates to con-
ceptualizing different approaches to data mining in ways that open up new
knowledge about the known (Russell 2011). In this way, the paradigms of big
data and data mining have presided over the transition of the known
unknown into a pool of data that implies that the unknown is present there
along with the known.
This mediation of big data undermines the notion of the known unknown
as a projected external sphere we call ‘nature’. The notion of nature as such in
our imaginations used to always exceed what we know. It provided a space of
the unknown that served as an inspiration and a template for mapping out
our surroundings. Today, we have various growing silos of relatively unpro-
cessed data into which we dive for ever more refined and plural bits of
meaning. As I alluded to above, much of the attention focussed on the para-
digm of big data is oriented to understanding, from various political, eco-
nomic, and social points of view, the advantages and disadvantages of such
new forms of knowledge. Little, if any, attention has been given to under-
standing the basis of this new relativity of knowledge, which has a tendency
to leave the world’s peoples in a state of unproductive conflict over the various
kinds of labels one can attach to and detach from these knowledge bytes. The
older standards of social science tend to be unhelpful in providing the criteria
demanded by ordinary people for seizing control of ‘their knowledge’, as
social science itself becomes more and more oriented to the pluralization of
knowledge imprecisely implied by the term ‘big data’. Anything exceeding
what we know, such as ‘nature’, has disappeared into big data.

The Unknown Unknown

The known unknown, then – the traditional subject matter of science – as we
have seen, has found a new location in big data. Created in this way is an
opportunity for science to make use of all sorts of data that have been opened
up and made shareable by digital media, along with, of course, a new politics
of access to data. In Tarde’s view, the vocation of science is not just to pro-
duce knowledge, but, in doing so, to refine knowledge (Toews 2018b: 100).
Once access to data is gained, such refinement can progress, at least in prin-
ciple, in a hypothetically unlimited manner. But this is only one part of the
story of how our understanding of knowledge has changed. If our analysis is
left here at this level, it is difficult to see how science is becoming increasingly
distanced from the goal of mastery. What we need is to understand the con-
text of science not just in our own lives and in the pools of data we are
creating, but in the universe generally. In particular, it is important to under-
stand the limits of what we can actually pool together as big data.
In one sense, big data are unlimited in terms of what kinds of information
and how much information can reside there. But this does not entail that our
pursuit of knowledge continues to partake in an image of being unlimited in
80 The Return of Nature
general. Science can and does refine knowledge it finds in big data, but this
begs the question of its limits. For big data are precisely worth problematizing
as they create an opportunity to understand the limits of knowledge – speci-
fically, how the nature of the limits of knowledge has changed from being
deposited in our makeup as human beings to being located in the universe
itself. This is where the concept I am invoking of the unknown unknown can
now play a role.
The known is all that we can understand within scientific frameworks. The
known unknown refers to the pools of data that we are constantly preparing
for further scrutiny and hopefully further understanding. The unknown
unknown would, from older perspectives, or narrow practical perspectives,
seem like an obscure and unnecessary category to append to such an analysis.
But it is vital.
The unknown unknown as a category arises not from any conception of a
lack of positive knowledge, or from any sense in relation to positive knowl-
edge. But it does have a provenance. Its provenance lies in what philosophers
in the early modern era referred to as God. Such philosophers, such as Leib-
niz (Rescher 1991) and Spinoza (2018), regularly evoked the notion of God in
their systems of thought. These were not religious people, certainly not in the
facile ways that we have come to associate with being religious. Nor was the
‘God’ they invoked any longer specifically the God of monotheistic religions.
The notion of God continued in their thought, not as an imprimatur of a
religious culture such as Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, but rather as a
needed premise for a dawning scientific age. It was needed as a concept of all
the knowledge that lies beyond what human beings can possibly fathom.
Down the road of history, it later seemed to modernists that doing away with
such a premise would present no obstacle to the scientific pursuit of knowl-
edge continuing unaffected. Yet this was a perception of such modernists that
stemmed from a misunderstanding. A formal notion of the ‘beyond’ of
knowledge had in no way been put forward, by thinkers such as Leibniz, as
such an obstacle. Simply put, it was a useful premise for circumscribing the
totality and infinity of the universe without actually limiting the latter, which
would make such terms absurd. God was more of a supplemental sign that all
knowledge, once gained, would mean something. As Leibniz put it, far from
putting a damper on scientific pursuits, to the contrary, knowledge that God
exists is “the beginning of science” (Leibniz 1989).
As the thinkers of object-oriented ontology have more recently put forward,
there are humanly unfathomable aspects of every object (Harman 2017). But
such thinkers tend to miss one of the key effects of this fact. This is that,
because every advance of our knowledge creates new, more refined objects to
place under our microscopes, all that falls into ‘what is unknown amidst the
unknown’ must actually be, in a rudimentary way, a field. That is to say, it is
the field of the unknown unknown, rather than the accessible field of the
known unknown. We human beings had, as it were, placed ourselves in
charge of the latter. In contrast, the field of the unknown unknown cannot be
 The Return of Nature 81
circumscribed by us. Rather, to the extent that we are active in pursuing
knowledge, we can conceive the field of the unknown unknown as being in
constant flux. This flux is a function of our activism in doing science. The
principle is a simple ratio: as the field of the known unknown – or ‘big data’ –
grows, so, proportionately, grows the field of the unknown unknown.
That the identification and recognition of the growth of the unknown
unknown do not defeat us, demoralize us, or extinguish our thirst for scien-
tific knowledge – that science has, in fact, never experienced such healthy
growth as it is experiencing today – is a rather stunning fact that is worth
dwelling on. The idea that knowledge pursuits above and beyond what we
need in daily life should be structured scientifically has always drawn for
sustenance from extra-scientific notions of what we want to achieve with all
of this knowledge. Much of this kind of motivation has, of course, been
washed out in the context of capitalist societies that tend to encourage rela-
tively petty notions of what can be attained: TV-bolstered images of human
superiority over the alienation of space, and stories of that kind, have been
popular ways of appealing to our hubris. Even the few of us in the main-
stream of society in the 20th century who were becoming scientists and did
not watch films or TV tended to draw for motivation on utopian images of
perfect knowledge and perfect societies, sometimes in limited ways – for
example, medical scientists imagining the eradication of illness.
I mention these facts because the motivation to do science, I am claiming,
is now changing to fit with the dawning upon us of the reality of the intract-
able field of the unknown unknown. What is it changing to? We are not going
to return to the early modern past, when it seemed sufficient to draw for
motivation upon the idea that, as scientists, we are seeking to engage in a
project of knowledge in order to better commune with the mind of a god.
Why do we keep pursuing science, even as we know that utopias are only part
of a ‘culture’ we developed that will always shepherd us back, again and
again, into the context of humanly concerns about human moralities and
human entertainments? That we continue to take science seriously, while at
the same time we more and more eschew the idea of utopia, may well be
related to the notion that we are, in fact, now inhabiting the future. As Tarde
reached the end of his career, he realized that his question was precisely this.
We shall broach it in the next chapter.

Note
1 I am aware that, recently, there have been various popular reactions against science
that take such resistance a step further into the political realm, but, for my own
purposes here, I am leaving them aside.
6 Imagining the Future

From the beginnings of the modern age, writers have produced utopian stor-
ies in which are offered visions of the future. In utopian stories, there is
always a lament that a current social system does not work for all because it
encourages egoism or what H.G. Wells called “Individualism” (2009). This is
frequently a reaction to a perception that anarchic individuals or groups are
at work identifying their own empowerment with the good of society. Fol-
lowing the model set by Plato’s Republic (1991), utopian writings present
counter-narratives that respond by re-politicizing the social field, highlighting
orderly possibilities over chaotic individualistic realities, and presenting
descriptions of a utopian land that function as thinly veiled suggestions for
future political reforms. As we shall see, Tarde offers a model that has
advanced a step further: a playful fictional representation of utopia and dys-
topia brought together. Critically playing with Plato’s model, Tarde brings
them together. He brings them together into a future that is less about a
promise of attaining the Good as it is simply about carrying on our social
lives while weaning ourselves from the projection of an exploitable external
nature.

Utopia and Reality

In order for people to produce and consume utopian (and dystopian) stories,
they of course need to use their imaginations. Pessimistically, against this,
Jean Baudrillard has proposed the daunting idea that people today may have
ceased to be able to imagine society otherwise than the way it happens to be
in the present (2005). There is a growing common tendency to formulate a
view of society as flatly artificial and conflate this perceived homogenized
social terrain with the necessity of ongoing practices in society. Here, the line
between what is posited as simulated and what is real is blurred rather than
highlighted. The collective process of imagining society as a whole is dis-
connected from the panoply of images that we find on offer in the media
marketplaces. Similarly to how the writing of computer code has become the
province of experts and fragmented along market lines, the power of imagin-
ing is thus deposited into the control of production specialists; the rest of us
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-7
 Imagining the Future 83
are not expected to join activities seen as the fiefdoms of highly trained spe-
cialists working in fragmented silos.
When Baudrillard notes that “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor
survives it”, he is pointing out the problem of any concept of using the media
to create an evidence-based model that would mirror human life (1983: 2).
The fact is that, as human beings, we tend to devote ourselves so completely
to our worlds of meaning, whether ostensibly factual or counter-factual,
that – without a theory of how we cross between cultures – we tend not to
relate the sources and outcomes of our worlds to any other context, seeing
our behaviour in a rough and ready way as autochthonous. How would we be
able to tell if any given world is real or not, let alone our own?
Erving Goffman had to a large extent already anticipated this problem.
In his essay “Fun in Games”, Goffman frames the question as how to
discern “what people do to ensure easeful interaction” (1997: 129). His
focus is the complicated concept of fun. Fun is not mere frivolity; for a
microsociologist, it produces and is driven by meanings that, in many
instances, participants take deadly seriously. We know there are many
games that are fun but are only fun if taken seriously, such as chess, for
example. The meanings of a game like chess are not purely meanings
produced and maintained in-game. Such meanings, references to kings and
queens and so forth, come from well outside the context of chess. Often,
as a result, they are able to enhance fun by being able to evoke more
serious situations and contexts with which we develop our minds. More-
over, they revolve to a great extent around the concern of ensuring that, in
the game, the social relationships and activities of the game are well
structured. By well structured, Goffman argues, the players are thinking of
well structured in game terms. But, by fun in games, Goffman means any
social structure that, even if serious, has the potential to promote euphoric
interactions among its human participants. How to allow for spontaneous
interactions within an account of action as socially purposive action is
answered with the concept of engrossment or immersion. Immersion in a
fun activity, of course, depends on whether it really is fun for the actors
involved, but, from this angle, fun is not entirely subjective. Fun is also
constructed on the basis of how immersed in a game we are able to get.
The artifice that allows for full immersion in a game is not much different,
if at all, from participation in a society; a circular relationship obtains.
Science is affected by, and benefits from, the new sense of artifice that ani-
mates our societies. In our new practical future, theorists of science are
increasingly finding themselves in a position to recognize this. In What Is
Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze presents us with imagery of scientists “plunging”
into chaos, “cutting” and “slicing” from it, “bringing back” significant signs
of the world, prized variables with which to construct a marbled topography
of references and functions, the tableaux of what some will eventually call
modernity, but existing primarily to join up again and again with their friends
and rivals, the artists and philosophers, on planes that are like rafts, “the rafts
84 Imagining the Future
on which the brain plunges into and confronts the chaos” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1996: 210). The chaos is an ocean waiting to be discovered.

The Power of Utopian Thinking

For Tarde, fiction is used to highlight the distinction between what is simu-
lated and what is real in a manner that activates the imagination and connects
it, in the minds of audience members, with the images that are produced. In
classical utopias and dystopias, fiction has always been close to non-fiction
and to the sciences that inform the latter. This can already been seen in Sir
Thomas More’s attempt to counter social disorder with detailed political
policy in his nominally fictional Utopia (2003). More’s Utopia proposed a
puritan politics complete with detailed descriptions of the necessities of effa-
cing individuality with communal clothing and living techniques. His ideal
society aimed to produce an agriculturally rooted community that could
maintain a steady equilibrium. Set against popular images of decadence and
corruption of his day, the idea of such a land seemed tantalizingly possible.
Utopian and dystopian writing crystallized into a genre in the very early
modern era. As later centuries unfold, however, the future tends more and
more to reflect the developing state of scientific and technological progress.
Contra More, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (2010) held out a promise of a
crisp and clean socio-technical system based on modern science. As technol-
ogy comes to the fore in the utopian imaginary, a tension arises as to what
measure of democracy should be included in the technocratic governance of a
progressive utopian polity. There are no elections in H.G. Wells’s A Modern
Utopia (2009), though the leadership, the highly knowledgeable “creative
class”, is open to volunteers.
Wells’s A Modern Utopia is an interesting example, because it highlights the
pro-democracy narrative found commonly in more recent utopias. It high-
lights how this involves not a seamless suture of technology and democracy,
but rather an open tension between them. Wells’s book has, of course, all the
typical features of utopian writing. Though nominally fictional, it performs a
serious thought experiment aimed at real-world enlightenment. The main
challenge of the utopian imagination is to dispel any tendencies to hold on to
comfortable illusions of blissful personal disconnectedness. Adventurers are
transported to a planet, Utopia, and discover that it duplicates Earth in all
respects, including its inhabitants, who are doubles of the people at home.
The device of the parallel world enables the author to discombobulate his
characters, as if to shake away distractions that prevent us from perceiving the
world as a whole.
A key to the power of utopian thinking is that it pulls all the disparate
technologies and various strands of life together into one coherent reflection.
To utopian writers, classically, the aim is to hold open the promise of a sus-
tainable political system that promotes the social and economic good for
everyone. Collective consciousness is key. Yet, in modern utopian writing such
 Imagining the Future 85
as that of Wells, rather than through class struggle, social and political gains
are made technologically. The earthlings visiting Utopia in Wells’s book
notice that “there appears to be no limit to the invasion of life by the
machine” (2009: 111).
To be sure, what is, for H.G. Wells, a natural consequence of the political
development of human life forms the point of departure for many dystopian
narratives that lament such prevalence of technology as an intrusion. Four
years after its publication, E.M. Forster (this was the age of manly double
initials), sought to counter the success of A Modern Utopia with The Machine
Stops (1997). Predicting technologies such as instant messaging and the
internet, Forster depicts humans beings as inevitably consigned to a world of
purely virtual communication, forced to live on a kind of machine life sup-
port with only traces of first-hand experience of the world. A generation later,
George Orwell’s well-known totalitarian nightmare, 1984 (1961), was also
modelled as a dystopian inversion of Wells’s utopian visions.
Utopian and dystopian narratives share a bottom line: the idea that the
natural state of human beings is to be interconnected, and that this is best
conveyed by imagining that we are living in a future temporality. Utopian
(including dystopian) stories are not so much fictional as counter-factual. In
this respect, they can be distinguished from myth. A myth is a unifying belief
of a society that, strictly speaking, does not correspond to actual reality – for
example, Hobbes’s warning about regressing to a “state of nature” or Rous-
seau’s notion that modern people devised a “social contract”. In contrast, a
utopian, counter-factual story represents a way to defamiliarize and scruti-
nize – often to better re-enact – such beliefs.
Such a narrative strategy is not always offered intentionally. In one scene
in A Modern Utopia, Wells’s characters meet their “Utopian selves”. We get
no significant description of an example of such an alter ego. Wells has his
narrator demur that such description would be so “personal” that “the
conversation would contribute nothing to a modern Utopia. And so I leave
it out” (Wells 2009: 276). As if to explain this omission, Wells’s narrator
cavils that “neither my Utopian double nor I love emotion sufficiently to
cultivate it” (2009: 286). The self in conversation with the self is almost
wilfully ignored, as if any self-dialogue of unfulfilled desires or musings, of
anything that might indicate an internal dissociation, would undermine the
larger thought experiment. The dissociation must remain external, a plane-
tary differentiation. The reason for this seems to be that Wells believes it can
help him present us with strictly positive, clearly formulable thoughts. It is
as if, for him, the ‘Utopian self ’ is merely a faithful mirror that verifies
exactly back to the thinker what the narrator – whom Wells elaborately
entitles “The Owner of the Voice” – thinks, no more and no less (2009). No
explanation is given for why the Utopian self is “better” other than that he
is “rather taller” (2009: 286). The intimate curiosities of the self in con-
versation with the self are deemed irrelevant not just to the plot, but to the
very idea of Utopia.
86 Imagining the Future
Utopian writing highlights the precarious representation of the collective as
well as the individual. By jogging us with a leap of time and world, the future
becomes a fantasy/science fiction counter to the present, what Wells calls “a
sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand
and imaginative narrative on the other” (2009: 8). Utopian and dystopian
writings often represent a reaction to a perceived problem of the social isola-
tion of modern individuals, as is perhaps most clearly presented in Orwell’s
1984. Typically, all bets are placed on the virtues/vices of the macro, politi-
cized view of society that utopian/dystopian worlds can provide.
We are contextualizing Tarde’s rapprochement between utopian and dysto-
pian thinking. In recent times, while ostensibly the focus of non-fictional
scholarship, cyberculture has been the theme of a story about living in a
sophisticated, all-seeing, electronically connected democratic age similarly led
by innovative individuals and groups. We shall see that, though it is couched
in terms of scholarly analyses of digital media, the theme of cyberculture
shares in the tradition of utopian narrative of politicizing the social field.
Embedded in it is a narrative of utopian democracy, though it has received
dystopian treatments too. A brief detour into such territory will help us fur-
ther to situate Tarde.

Cyberculture and the Politics of a New Elite

In what sense is scholarship on cyberculture utopian? Utopian stories are
fictional, and cyberculture scholarship is non-fictional. Yet, as we have seen,
utopian and dystopian narratives have always represented imaginaries that
are close to reality. Both utopian stories and cybercultural analyses, respec-
tively, strive to provide realistic depictions of society in a macro perspective
that gather in and highlight the political implications for the future. Howard
Rheingold established cyberculture studies in his seminal book The Virtual
Community (1993), researched primarily in the 1980s and published in 1993.
In Rheingold’s framing, the study of cyberculture is an examination of how
“the future of the Net is connected to the future of community, democracy,
education, science, and intellectual life” (1993: 6). Into his narrative he weaves
a cautionary perspective, citing Forster’s vision of an anti-human hyper-rea-
lity (1993: 299). While emphasizing utopian possibilities, Rheingold effec-
tively tempers his optimism by incorporating the vigilance of the dystopian
view. Rheingold’s work stands out as foundational for contemporary cultural
scholarship because he extends his vision to a popular framework. His work
represents a translation of ‘cyber’ into an everyday language that enabled the
field to make a transition from an elite concern in the 1950s and 1960s to a
programme of study open to communication students in universities.
The narrative of utopian democracy was, prior to the Rheingold era of
cybercultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s, a product of concerns of elites.
As a product of conscious, energetic, self-reflective thought on the part of
highly educated actors, the narrative of utopian democracy in its early years
 Imagining the Future 87
was consciously and carefully crafted. The historical work of Fred Turner, in
his two volumes, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2008) and The
Democratic Surround (2013), examines the self-understandings of a variety of
actors who were instrumental in creating the internet and social media as we
know them today. He places them in the context of cultural currents that
contributed to these phenomena. In particular, he analyses the link that was
forged between computing and futuristic, electronically connected commu-
nities. This link is essentially a political imaginary.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture introduces a narrative of utopian
democracy that a group of American technocrats developed in the 1960s and
that eventually propelled them to promote personalized networked computing
as akin to a social, economic, and political revolution. The composition of
this group is as fascinating and novel as the technology they devised. Turner
describes “the coming together of former counterculturalists, corporate
executives, and right-wing politicians and pundits” (2008: 8). The US mili-
tary, with its demand for systems of command and control in the World War
II era, was instrumental in inventing the first concepts of cyberculture. The
first inklings of this notion emerged from military engineers who had created
a system of communication for their own purposes. From this context, spur-
red by proponents such as Norbert Weiner, emerged a rhetoric of systems and
information to which was attached the buzzword cybernetic.
Subsequently, throughout the 1950s, as the military information manage-
ment infrastructure was being created in new organizations such as air
defence, this relatively free and open, albeit elitist, model of democratic col-
laboration teased the minds of vast numbers of computer systems engineers.
In the 1950s, C. Wright Mills wrote about a “power elite” that emerged in
America, a technocratic class of powerful men who had disproportionate
access to control of the new information infrastructure (1959). The 1960s
counter-culture saw the rise of a new elite in America. The counter-cultural-
ists were those who argued for egalitarianism and democracy through pro-
found lifestyle changes, contrasting sharply with the civil rights protestors,
who made up the minoritarian tradition known as the New Left. The New
Left accepted a more traditional, party-based politics that resisted embracing
the personalized and culturalized notion of politics of the counter-culturalists,
who eventually acquired the name ‘hippies’ (Turner 2008).
Why does it make sense to call the 1960s counter-culturalists elites? What
was their vision? Turner describes a movement that partook in some of the
excesses that the caricature of ‘hippie’ described, but that far transcended the
latter in the immediately post-hippie days of communalism. A principled
hedonism, the “new communalism” represented a new imaginary of “a new
nation, a land of small, egalitarian communities linked to one another by a
network of shared beliefs” (2008: 33). These were concentrated around social
entrepreneurs who derived a new philosophy from the cybernetics of the cold
war era – that is, “those who turned toward technology and mind as foun-
dations of a new society” (2008: 33). Poet Richard Brautigan spoke of
88 Imagining the Future
fashioning “a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined
back to nature” (Turner 2008: 38). Philosophers of the new age of informa-
tion, such as John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller,
fomented an extraordinarily productive theoretical enterprise that engaged
emerging technomystics such as Brautigan and Stewart Brand.
A key theme running through such efforts was the exaltation of a new,
unarmoured kind of collective unity conveyed by metaphors drawing from
notions of indigenous tribes and villages. To these ends a new kind of infor-
mation processing and synthesis became perceived as the only viable means in
an age of fragmented bureaucratic documentarism. Following Fuller, Brand
viewed this information processing as necessarily accomplished via an indivi-
dual capable of being unendingly open to all kinds of inputs. The LSD con-
sciousness-raising movement of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters lent a
sense of self-discovery as an important ingredient in the process of trans-
cending the blinkers imposed by the surrounding bureaucratic society. A
vogue for techno-tribalistic multimedia performances became a vehicle for the
new communalist social entrepreneur to produce the first networked commu-
nity (Turner 2008).
The Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL,
became Stewart Brand’s contributions to a new social awareness in which a
cybernetic view of the world was paramount. John Cage was surrounding “his
audience with sights and sounds that might free them from allegiance to more
authoritarian modes of communication and … political systems” (Turner
2008: 7). But, internationally, a good deal of American soft patriotism was on
offer. An American ideal of individualist consumerism was presented in mul-
timedia exhibitions at the Brussels World Fair and the American National
Exhibition in Moscow. Against this, an offshoot of Cage’s group, known as
“Us company” or USCO, staged the first “be-in” in 1966, rapidly followed by
the massive “Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park in 1967. Groups of coun-
ter-culturalists around the world subsequently adopted experientialist theories
and methods of “semiotic democracy” (Turner 2008: 6) that had been created
by the cold warriors of a previous generation.

Digital Ideals
As the world and the new communalists rounded into the 1970s, the military-
connected research institutes of computer science on the West Coast con-
nected with the counter-culture through Stewart Brand, who got their nascent
gaming and personal computing movement national coverage in Rolling
Stone. Via the inspiration, offices, and social network of the Whole Earth
Catalog, hippie-cum-entrepreneurial computer engineers parlayed their
research into the inventions of the internet and the PC. Technological
advancements and cultural imperatives combined to bring about the first tel-
econferencing-style electronic community known as the WELL. Journalists,
such as Kevin Kelly who would later found Wired magazine, promoted the
 Imagining the Future 89
cybernetic movement and its commercial applications and carried forward its
narrative of utopian democracy. “In all of these ways, members of the Whole
Earth network helped reverse the political valence of information and infor-
mation technology and turn computers into emblems of countercultural
revolution” (Turner 2008: 238).
After Howard Rheingold’s 1993 book The Virtual Community came out,
promoting the WELL and championing the new narrative of cybercultural
utopian democracy, social relations in the digital era were redefined. A net-
work of social relations powered by computerized communication is defined
in 1990s cyberculture scholarship as a revolution in sociality brought about
by the phenomenon of traceable connections enabled by digital technology.
Steve Jones worked to frame and organize cybercultural studies to fit within
the critical remit of academia. In his introduction to the next generation,
Cybersociety 2.0 (1998), he wrote,

we continue to face a predicament: How do we attend to the social, eco-

nomic, and political connections impinging on us, the connections we at
once desire (e-mail, telephone, fax, democratic participation, business,
etc.) and that nurture our character as public beings and also despise (for
they take up more and more of our time and energy and fragment priv-
acy and self among a variety of publics)?
(Jones 1998: 7)

If all information can be digitized, any and all connections – social, infor-
mational, whatever – can in principle be discovered via the digital traces they
leave. To many, this is overwhelming. The future perspective embedded in the
term cyberculture produces within it an ominous sense of cultural excess, and
to this day the academic social sciences have been navigating a region of
study that journalists such as Rheingold had likened to a “frontier” (1993).
In cybercultural studies, there is a theoretical limit inherent in the like-
lihood that digitized information could, by itself, never be a sufficient onto-
logical basis for a universal epistemology of the computer age. But this
theoretical limit is understood more as a derivative aspect of the intrinsic
practical limit to this project of discovery: the technical pace of digitization,
which Rheingold saw “coming at a titanic and accelerating rate” (1993: 104).
The limit of the revolution of sociality is our willingness to put everything
into speeding up digitization, in order to create a real, virtual, parallel world
of ‘information’. Rheingold is fundamentally optimistic: “the Net is not only
Internet. You could shut down all the hosts on Internet today and millions of
people would still find ways to exchange e-mail and newsgroups” (1993: 109).
Less sanguine about the possibilities of keeping what Wells termed “The
Owner of the Voice” intact, Mark Poster argued that “electronic culture pro-
motes the individual as an unstable identity, as a continuous process of mul-
tiple identity formation and raises the question of a social form beyond the
modern, the possibility of a post-modern society” (1990: 398).
90 Imagining the Future
Cybercultural studies may position themselves ontologically as modernist
or post-modernist, narratologically as utopian or dystopian. In every case,
cybercultural analyses must, and do, make assumptions about future states of
affairs that will have arrived on a direct pathway from the present mode of
information – so much so that the boundary between the future and the pre-
sent is largely obscured, with the future taking over as the ideal temporality of
social life.
The sociologist Karl Mannheim once argued that the utopian impulse,
wherever it occurs, is an antidote to ideology, as notions of the future present
a challenge to conformity in the present (1955). A sociological analysis of
digital media, in his view, would have to have normative, utopian dimensions
in order to have a perspective that can observe the social media industry with
a critical eye. It may, indeed, be true that industry analysts are too invested in
their material to be impartial. However, it would be far from accurate to
suggest that the analysis of cyberculture takes place only in sociology and
communication departments. In fact, scholars of all kinds addressing cyber-
culture presuppose, if not highlight, digitization as an ideal type of action.
Such scholars would object, with some justification, that there is a difference
between the ‘ideal’ of a utopian story, which has a normative connotation,
and the notion of ‘ideal’ as employed in a form of scholarship, which is only
establishing a type or pattern of behaviour. Yet I suspect this divide between
fact and norm is not as neat and simple as it seems. Digitization is more than
merely the rendering of analogue information into digital form. It proceeds
on the assumption that information in digital form represents an expansion of
the possibilities for human communication about our experiences in the
world. It is not very far to go from there to say that this is as it should be.
Rather than settle this question empirically, which is probably impossible
anyway, it is more pragmatic to extend a certain latitude to scholars of
cyberculture. Karl Otto Apel discusses the relationship between commu-
nicative ethics and utopia (1990). He draws a distinction between “effusive”
intellectual visions of utopia and what he terms “the anthropological function
of utopia, i.e. the utopian intention in its most general sense” (1990: 47). The
writings of Wells and Forster are of the “effusive” variety in that they are
based on artful speculation, the goal of which is at least partly entertainment
(Apel 1990). Yet there is a kernel of the general utopian intention in them
that is shared with more fact-based forms of argument. This is because, Apel
claims, in order to develop valid thoughts and positions, it is necessary for we
human beings to “anticipate counterfactually an ideal form of communica-
tion and hence of social interaction” (1990: 35). Utopias are argumentatively
and counter-factually structured.
Note here that Apel’s argument relies on a version of the communication
imperative. Apel’s version of the communication imperative takes a step away
from the naturalism of the evolutionary theory that informs symbolic inter-
actionism and towards a more conditional state of affairs. For Apel, this takes
a form that I would write as the following: “If we become committed to
 Imagining the Future 91
building a world together, we then become obliged to agree on how we will do
so, and to employ as our tool of communication argumentative deliberation”.
This is eminently an action-oriented vision of political process: a future-
embedded way of life. The symbolic interactionists had argued that we will
naturally develop democratic forms of communication and institutions such
as the League of Nations for resolving our conflicts. Apel concurs, but, fol-
lowing Habermas, substitutes for naturalism an ethical theory of commu-
nicative action. In this view, the means to the end of democracy is
communication, which has to be conceived as deliberate action, as grasping
and holding the attention of people whose argumentative discourse with each
other has to be construed, at least in part, in utopian terms.
What is essential here is that, for us, Apel clarifies a key point: it is in the
political sphere of action that fact and norm come together as mutually
implicated. Wells emphasizes how his Utopian citizens solved “the problem of
combining progress with political stability” (Wells 2009: 299). They solved
dilemmas such as class struggles by unleashing technology into social life; they
see “no limit to the invasion of life by the machine” (2009: 111). Baym puts
forward that

we don’t know what the future holds for our relationships. But when I
look at how quickly and effectively people took over networks of digital
signals that were never meant for sociability in the service of our need to
connect, I am optimistic that we will navigate our way through innova-
tion without losing hold of one another.
(2010: 155)

There is nothing to fear from the deepening and spreading of technology in

social life for the notion of living in the future, because these movements
could never transcend the anthropological ‘need to connect’. The notion of
human social unity overrides even any meanings technological innovations
may have had in the past. Indeed, Hans Jonas points out that the modern
utopian orientation to time involves stripping the past “of its independent
validity and at best making it the vehicle for reaching the promised state of
things that is yet to come” (Jonas 1985: 17). Utopia involves “conceiving
everything past as a stepping-stone to the present and of everything present as
a stepping-stone to the future” (1985: 17).

The Social Network

It may be objected that the concept of cyberculture is an out-of-date concept,
and that post-1990s scholarship has been rooted in the concept of the net-
work society. The term cyberculture, with its ‘cyber’ debt to models of infor-
mation systems control and its notions of communalism and semiotic
democracy, might flag a post-modern extension of the modernist politics of
utopia – does it apply today? Certainly, the concept of cyberculture is still
92 Imagining the Future
relevant and used by many scholars (Silver 2005). I will also argue that the
newer notion of social network is, in its own way, a utopian notion and con-
tributes to the narrative of utopian democracy.
The terms ‘social network’ and ‘network society’ can be used inter-
changeably. They apply to all scholarship on the digital media age that puts a
stress on social networks over against the traditional conception of commu-
nity as a group. Some scholars interpret this post-group sense of community
as a logical solution to what Giddens called the modern mechanisms that
disembed actors from contexts of local action (1991). ICTs are such dis-
embedding mechanisms. In this view, represented by Manuel Castells (2009a,
2009b, 2009c) and Barry Wellman (1999; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Wellman
and Frank 2001), the social network provides for the need to connect socially
and can meet the full range of social needs. Groups as a concept fundamental
to society and politics have been superseded because they are simply too
static, too slow, and their members are together generally out of a sense of
social obligation rooted in proxemics and are often ethically lax, too pre-
occupied with the myth of the group to be sensitive to one another’s actuality.
Like the tribes of the ancient past, they are too inflexibly rooted in their tra-
ditional places of dwelling. Their politics are consequently too myth-centred
and ultimately oriented to avoidance of one another and exclusion of those
individuals who don’t conform to the central myth. Networks are more truly
socially supportive of the project of individuality and individual freedom. For
Wellman, democracy and network societies are not only fully compatible in
principle: in fact, social networks are required as a step on the way to a full
development of democracy (Rainie and Wellman 2012). Castells also mixes in
a warning of the potential for dystopia in the form of informational control at
the level of globalization that could propel network societies too far in the
direction of social inequality (2009c).
Other network-oriented scholars stress an interpretation of social networks
as assemblages. Assemblages are collections of human and non-human actors
that produce singular effects, but do not meet universal social needs. Assem-
blages are not conceived as conditioned a priori by social needs or functions.
The notion of assemblage, represented by José van Dijck (2013) and Bruno
Latour (2007), is rooted in a critique of modernist epistemology’s pretensions
to have transcended the vitality and discipline demanded of topos – that is,
the singularly specific contours created when unique sets of (human and non-
human) actors combine. An assemblage is, in a way, a community or asso-
ciation of these actors, but it transcends the group, in this view, because
membership in a group promotes a false metaphysics of social unity. Van
Dijck employs assemblage theory in a critical mode. She puts forward that the
use of social media is transforming networked sociality into something less
like a network and more like a platformed sociality, a way for elite industry
leaders to engineer “the sociality in people’s everyday routines” (2013: 12).
Comparative analysis of the big, successful social media platforms shows how
new norms associated with sharing, friending, liking, trending, and following
 Imagining the Future 93
“managed to gain a dominant meaning” (2013: 175). Her critical vision is
considerably dystopic, echoing Weber’s image of the “iron cage” of modern
rationalization (Weber 2001). For Van Dijck, social media sites turn the social
network into a labyrinth of “walled gardens – locking in users” (2013: 167).
Contextually, the preoccupation with the intersection of information,
control, and culture that has given rise to the notion of cyberculture
makes the latter distinct from the social morphological questions that gave
rise to the network society paradigm. Accordingly, they have developed in
theoretically and methodologically divergent ways, perhaps with Van
Dijck’s critical assemblage theory occupying a middle ground. The key
background concern that permits the classification of all these approaches
together under the social network concept is their rejection of the solidary,
territorial grouping as a basis for understanding society and culture. Well-
man criticizes mainstream sociology for posing a false alternative accord-
ing to which the modern tendency towards differentiation and
specialization must lead either to the loss or the salvation of communities
(1979). The criterion for this false alternative had been the sense of soli-
darity of the members of communities. He argues that the analysis of
network ties in modern social environments supports a third alternative:
that community, as he puts it, is “liberated” (1979). That is to say, a
community can be strong without traditional solidarity. Networks can be
seen as differentiated (cutting across, as it were, societies transversally) yet
effective in producing contingent social unities in the form of maintaining
psychologically, economically, and socially supportive social ties. In the
conclusion of Networked, written with Lee Rainie and representing a cul-
mination of Wellman’s theoretical contributions to date (Rainie and Well-
man 2012), two fictional, counter-factual scenarios are presented, one
utopian, the other dystopian. No doubts are contemplated that the world
is heading in one or the other direction, and that the ultimate destination
is a governing metaphor of society as a “networked operating system”
(2012: 302). “The Triple Revolution – in social networks, the internet, and
mobile connectedness – will change but never end” (2012: 302).
On the assemblage side of the social network equation, Bruno Latour has
criticized utopian thinking (2004). Latour is committed to a doctrine of
radical symmetry, which is the idea that, when one is describing associations
in an actor network, one should not attribute a privileged perspective to any
item – human, animal, machine, rock, whatever. There is no fundamental
distinction between nature and culture; consequently, phenomenology is a
misguided project, as human intentionality is not a necessary filter for con-
structing reality. His problem with utopian thinking is that it implies that a
bifurcation of “man and nature” has long characterized the world, and that
utopia represents a state of affairs in which a final convergence is attained
(2004: 59). As there is no such bifurcation, utopia is simply “nowhere” (2004:
5). “Ancient prejudices” keep us from seeing the assemblages that always
“already exist everywhere” (2004: 163).
94 Imagining the Future
On the other hand, Latour admits that politics requires that we differentiate
the past from the future, albeit “no longer through detachment but through
re-attachment” (2004: 195). Like a computer needing to be rebooted to clear
the obstacles to its progress, the future is the “re-starting” of the present
(2004: 195). Politics becomes a “political ecology” in which humans and non-
humans all share together in a rediscovery, a reaffirmation, of the topoi of
immediate familiar surroundings. Latour claims, “we want to institute the
common world so that it will last” (2004: 152), meaning to imply that the
dream of attaining a future utopia has effectively justified the environmentally
destructive methods that take place in the present.
There are some considerable difficulties here. It is hard not to see Latour’s
formulation as, at best, aporetic and, at worst, unintelligible, as his claim
consists in proposing that a common world that actually does exist ought to
exist. This can be interpreted charitably as aporetic in a Leibnizian sense, if
one accepts that work must be done to raise awareness and build this
common world into the best of all possible worlds, with the proviso that one
must admit, with a rather deflationary but ineliminable parallel logic, that this
‘best world’ is simply whatever world exists at the moment. This is only
intelligible if one admits that a kind of utopian thinking is here preserved
rather than done away with once and for all. One must admit that not
everything is being done to raise this awareness. As Latour himself says, the
common world is, indeed, “still to come” (2004: 225). Extending the meta-
phor of parliament, he puts forward that a “common house” must be con-
ceived that can accommodate the voices of humans and non-humans, “a State
of law in the reception of propositions, which finally makes the sciences
compatible with democracy” (2004: 234).
Latour thus misses the important distinction that Apel makes regarding
utopian thinking. Utopian rhetorics of the effusive variety do dramatize an
alienation between the past and the future in a manner that constructs the
future as a magical state of affairs and serves to blinker us with its promise of
plenty. But, as we have seen, the narrative of utopian democracy evokes a
political imaginary that is firmly focussed on the futurity that is already at
hand. In this vein, there is a participation in this narrative and, indeed, in my
view, a salutary call in the assemblage version of the social network for
eschewing the subjectivity of human mastery over the world, and for gaining
fidelity and attention to the ecology and actual contours of our relationships
with all beings, human and non-human. Though more radically ecological
than Wellman’s version of the social network, nonetheless the two versions of
the theory, as democratic, are quite close politically.
As Apel (1990) showed, it is in political thinking that fact and norm, nature
and culture converge in discourse. Has the network society concept served to
transcend utopian/dystopian thinking? Not in the sense that the latter involves
pointed counter-factual analysis that highlights a programme of political
awareness. It has clearly not transcended Apel’s deep anthropological sense of
the utopian disposition in democratic political thought. Both versions of the
 Imagining the Future 95
social network concept, however, are of course distinct from Apel’s vision in
the sense that they go beyond the model of communicative deliberation to
provide us with further tools – in particular, a very useful analysis of the
methods of democratic politics as necessarily involving ICTs and engaging
with deep ecology.
The kind of political thought that utopian perspectives propel forward
in modern culture centres on the enablements and constraints afforded by
advances in communication. In contrast to the classical utopian vision of
Plato (1991), with his notion of the strong philosopher-leader, modern
utopian writings stress the satisfaction of needs and desires with techno-
logical solutions. The relationship between the genre of utopian writing
and scholarship on cyberculture and social networks is a relationship that
proves instructive, as it highlights a common political preoccupation
operating in the background of these forms of thought. Such scholarship
has become distant from Platonic classicism, the puritanism of More, and
indeed the rugged fantasies of H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster, because it
adheres to a narrative rooted in concerns for utopian democracy.

Bringing It All Home: Tarde’s Underground Man

As we saw in Chapter 3 above, conflict is where political discourse develops
and thrives. As I have argued, however, the political is never more than a part
of a much broader, plural, and open sociality. Wishing to present a sociology,
not a political theory, Tarde’s approach to utopia and dystopia is, thus, to
emphasize the broad changes in sociality that can be captured in the utopian
and dystopian imagination. Nor should it surprise us that he embraced both
scientific and literary approaches to sociological study, as if to anticipate, and
offer a tangible rebuttal of, contemporary concerns that simulation has
eliminated our perspective on such issues. Bringing utopia and dystopia
together enables us to discern, with both fun (see my discussion of Goffman
above) and serious analysis, what is meant by living in the future. As we shall
see, this is the key to understanding the import of Tarde’s fictional novella of
1905, the English title of which is Underground Man (2010c).
Written at a mature stage of his thought, in Underground Man, Tarde
describes a society of the future whose members “live in a state of habitual
excitement maintained by the multiplicity of our relations” (2010c: 114). In
Tarde’s science fiction fantasy, human history has been marked by two
epochs, divided by a catastrophe in which the sun was extinguished. The end
of the solar epoch above ground is characterized by Tarde’s painting of an
exaggerated and dystopian portrait of a society roughly resembling the con-
temporary modernity of the European fin de siècle. The post-solar epoch is
depicted as a future in which the human species is forced to live underground,
away from the frozen barrens of the planet’s surface and in close proximity to
the heat of the Earth’s core.
96 Imagining the Future
Tarde’s fictional society flourishes owing to the society being regrounded in
artifice. In Underground Man, the solar epoch is fundamentally corrupted by
industrialization and bureaucracy and all the social problems identified by the
classical sociologists – for example, the alienation described by Marx as
paradigmatically pronounced in the producer–consumer relation. For Marx,
this included alienation from our species-being – that is, from nature. In
contrast, the post-solar, underground epoch sees a society that lives on under
circumstances of “the complete elimination of living nature” (Tarde 2010c:
111; italics mine). Instead of representing the end of civilization or increased
alienation as a result of this pure artificiality of living conditions, Tarde
describes a society that flourishes. As he puts it,

the problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if
committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself. … The problem was to
learn what this humanity would do when restricted to man, and obliged
to extract from its own resources … all its pleasures, all its occupations,
all its creative inspirations.
(Tarde 2010c: 111–112)

The possibility of the exploitation of natural resources is radically eliminated,

and men and women are left to their own devices. The result, in Tarde’s alle-
gory, is the acceleration of human inventiveness out of necessity to a critical
point at which a revolution in human history occurs (allegorized as the
movement underground) in which innovation is not just a modification of
nature, but is rather purely artificial and, at the same time, the seat of all
social relations.
This new, post-solar, post-natural modernity should be, in essence, the
nightmare of Plato, but Tarde imagines it – somewhat cheekily – as marked
by the universal usage of the Greek language. It is marked by a vanquishing
of all utilitarian activity. It is a utopian vision in which social relations are
grounded in “the relation of the artist to the art-lover” (Tarde 2010c: 122). To
get a sense of Tarde’s philosophical insouciance here, it is useful to recall that
Plato’s (1991) utopian vision of the just society had all artists banished from
the ideal republic. In a virtually direct reversal of Platonic epistemology,
Tarde describes a society happy to live with only memories of the sun, a
society happily ensconced in their “halls of mysteries”, savouring “the silence
and solitude, of this profound peace, the sequel to so many tempests” (Tarde
2010c: 139–140). In a parallel reversal of Platonic justice, Tarde actually ele-
vates to pre-eminence the artist, along with his “dilettante double”, the art-
lover (Tarde 2010c: 122). Regrounding society in artifice produces a critical
sense of futurity.
Hand in hand with the utopian vision of Tarde is a new asceticism. Tarde
contrasts the ideal of sociability in the old modernity with that of the new. In
the old modernity, the ‘social ideal’ was twofold: to “seek amusement or self-
satisfaction apart and to render mutual service” (Tarde 2010c: 122). In his
 Imagining the Future 97
new, modern utopia, the social ideal is “to be one’s own servant and mutually
to delight one another” (Tarde 2010c: 122). Tarde thus grounds the future of
sociability in the unsociability of the one who can be his or her own servant.
The sheer delight of the fictional actors mirrors the creativity of the theorist-
writer. Tarde thus eschews the idea that sociability will always conform to the
schizophrenic homo duplex model of obligation of service to each other
punctuated by escapist consumerist amusements.
Individualism is always rooted in collectivism. On the eve of World War II,
Bergson warned that “humanity must set about simplifying its existence with
as much frenzy as it devoted to complicating it” (1977: 307). Salvation for
humanity, in the tradition of Tarde, requires a new modernity that cannot
help but extend the spirit of innovation. As Bergson put it, humanity can
continue to exist and flourish in circumstances in which the constraint of
nature has been nullified “only if a powerful equipment supplies him with the
requisite fulcrum. He must use matter as a support if he wants to get away
from matter. In other words, the mystical summons up the mechanical”
(1977: 309). Jump to 1972, and we find Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedi-
pus, in a darker but similar mood, beginning to recount an emerging psy-
chology of “the body without an image … this imageless, organless body, the
nonproductive”, to which “every coupling of machines, every production of a
machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable” (1983: 8–
9). Asceticism, then, when nature is no longer an effective counterforce of
value; pure production, when, in the new reality, with no background-nature
as alibi, every moment is either an invention or an imitation. Here is
announced the end of the sociality of high modernity, but not of all social
need per se. For Tarde, when we escape from our old lives, when we become
modern, when we move into the future, we escape all together.
Conclusion
The Reality of Life in the Future

We made the distinction between artifice and nature hundreds of years ago.
We made it because it helped us to make sense out of the notion of reality.
Perhaps, in modernity, we have forgotten that the demand for reality was first,
the distinction second. Reality – in the grainy everyday here and now,
eschewing the promises of hidden worlds of meaning that religions, for
example, were spreading – was becoming more and more a live issue as the
scientific revolution progressed. For example, as religion was more and more
separated from science and its pursuits of knowledge, we have come to have
faith that the natural world is real. This we all tend to readily accept. Yet we
are often somewhat suspicious of the omnipresence of natural reality as such
a notion can lead to a relatively uncritical celebration of the status quo of the
known world. It leads to suspicions that science is no more than a discourse
telling us in inscrutable terms what we already know, setting up a kind of
paywall to access the universe. It seems, somehow, quietist, oriented to
diminishing our supposed exuberance, our belief in an increasingly valued
role of human activity.
But, consider the many sociological functions of religion. It is indubitable
that religious discourses have entered into our consciousness, almost since
time immemorial, as a way of cognitively processing the many lacunas of our
existence. As a sociologist, I will leave aside the question of whether such
discourses of religion, in one form or another, are necessary or needed. What
I think is sociologically relevant that we can note is the sense in which pro-
blems of instability in the dichotomy between narrative and fact – for exam-
ple, the prevalence today of debates over ‘truth’ – reveal instability in the
more general distinction between artifice and nature. Tarde is by no means
against artifice or narrative as a version of artifice (if it is even possible for
anyone to be ‘against’ such things). Aspects of our lives such as artifice and
narrative help us, or at least have helped us immeasurably in the past, to
process reality. But, because that took place, it is not just a case of, like
Durkheim, insisting that religious narratives, therefore, evoke the existence of
society, and that people just need to realize this and that is what sociology
does. Durkheim is not wrong to observe that such a sociological revelation
has helped people to process the reality of society in modern life, but our era
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-8
 Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future 99
of digital media in a stage of modernity far more advanced than what he
could see reveals an important fact to all of us in our everyday lives. It reveals
that it occurs because narrative is an artificiality that we can and do spin
together in different, more and more jarring ways. Our supposedly socially
binding narratives we now see can be jarring and productive of conflicts and
incommensurabilities.
In today’s globalized world, we know that narratives in no way inevitably
lead us to social unity – in fact, sometimes quite to the contrary, they can
provoke conflicts. We no longer hear a given narrative expressed and auto-
matically tell ourselves ‘this is the way things are’. Today, we realize that
reality could be otherwise. This is because, with more and more multiple
forms of media informing us on every subject, we now tend to see a ‘media
production’ embedded with advertising and market interests and slot it into
the realm of artificiality. Often, with capitalism still structuring such produc-
tions, we see this as more sophisticated than our past ways of life that relied
on relatively fixed narratives, yet potentially untruthful, worthy of suspicion.
Artificiality is, thus, reasserted as the binary opposite of nature. And, with the
reassertion of artificiality, all the disadvantages of such a proposition, all the
echo chambers and increasing trivialities and apparent vicious relativism,
rush back to create problems for us.
To escape this, I am wagering it is possible to distinguish between arti-
ficiality as such and a new sense of artifice that might reorient people to
their new digital media societies. Using the ideas of Tarde, we can show
how a new sense of artifice can mean processing life via the meanings that
everyday artificialized media productions provide (I want to use the term
‘bombard us with’; think of social media, for example) in a way that
actually functions, not as much to mitigate any anomie that we might feel
about the inner goings on of our societies, as to help us to emotionally
and cognitively handle the apparent arbitrariness in the many flexible
boundaries of today’s computer-networked social life. Artifice today is
rooted in a recognition of the boundless proliferation of versions of things
made possible by digital media. Anything in digital culture that handles
and sorts the myriad duplications and versions that digital media so fluidly
and voluminously bring into being – the photo repositories, social media
platforms, search engines, all the various servers of ‘big data’ – can be
understood as part of the processing of artifice.
In the digital era, the processing of artifice in working with almost infinite
multiple artifices and duplications of artifices highlights the fluid possibilities
all artifices represent. This functions to help us process and manage the
superfluidity of today’s everyday life, helping us realize that we produce more
and more unknown aspects of objects as we go about nailing down bits of
knowledge about them. All these aspects of objects that are produced in the
process of learning anything about them, as we go about using finer and finer
instruments and concepts, we eventually have to admit amount to proof that
we honestly do not know and cannot know any objects fully.
100 Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future
This new subjectivity reaches outward while acknowledging its limitations.
The era of positivism, of expecting our knowledge to eventually exhaust the
universe is finally coming to an end. But the potential of replacing positivism
with vicious relativism is tempered and bridled by the critical reflection –
which it is part of the mission of this book to help us with – through which
we can grasp that it is our attempts to know as much as we can that end up
always increasing, rather than reducing, the size of the unknown. Acceptance
of this is the path to a sustainable mode of humility on a globalized, digital
mediatized planet, because it encourages us to expand our sciences while at
the same time making us realize that everything we learn about the universe,
despite always increasing, will always be limited and contingent. This is what
it means to live in some manner – potentially a healthy manner that benefits
each other and the Earth – with a sustained futural orientation. Our suste-
nance, through ever-expanding sciences and technologies, can eschew the
motivation to master the universe.
This is my conclusion about what Tarde’s sociology ultimately teaches us
and why we are able to recognize this teaching now, at this stage of history
and not before. Maximizing our human sphere of influence via the strategy of
knowing as many objects as possible (i.e. science) leads, ironically, to the
creation of ever-vaster areas and plenitudes of objects that we do not and
cannot know. As I shall relate below, this is no fictional story. It is not itself a
narrativization. It is a part of reality, reality that has always existed, but that
now incorporates a process. So, we need to expand the concept of reality to
accommodate it. That is what is going on with this idea of ‘the artificial’
being embedded in a future-oriented temporality in which we actually see
ourselves living, as represented by new narratives of utopia and dystopia. The
days of the old narratives of utopia, when utopias were premised on an opti-
mism about an imagined total human society and could work very simplisti-
cally on even the dullest imaginations, are over. As the rise of dystopias
shows, there is a humility to be learned here, one that would have been filled
in the past by being humble in the face of a god (and then: which god?), but
this time it is one that we are learning to apply to ourselves and the other
objects in the universe. We are moving into living in an era that is socio-
logically more advanced than ever.
This goes some way towards explaining why, in the first place, we humans
have introduced to nature a contrast with artifice. Imperfect as it assuredly is,
a contrast such as this nevertheless inaugurates a rudimentary critical path of
understanding. This is why it has been so prevalent. It introduces questions
about the status of the concept of reality, recognizing a need for flexibility in
terms of a definition thereof. On the simplest level, this comes initially from
noticing that the artificial, while at one time becoming more and more pre-
valent, always somehow seemed less real than what we can find in nature.
Such a recognition increases the scope of our questions, fostering a kind of
sophistication necessary for modern science to proceed. But the distinction
ultimately does raise more questions than answers. What Tarde realized,
 Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future 101
which few – if any – others did, is that these questions point in the direction
of sociology for answers. For, more than nature, and certainly more than any
even older religious notions, the artificial is attuned to our hyperactive
modern ways of life. Such ways of life, indeed, go hand in hand with the
increasing value we place on the concept of reality. Reality becomes some-
thing we not only want to know but value highly.
Thus, we have come to assume that the notion of reality, and this attending
relationship between the natural and the artificial, is important and think that
gaining a critical purchase upon such ideas is essential. This was accom-
plished some time ago, is a salutary development, and continues to be part of
our job as social scientists. Having said that, however, we are seeing that
reality can, and has undergone, change. Spurred, in part, by the requirements
of quantum physics, it has complexified to include not just the set of what we
can know, but also – in a humbling turn – the new recognition that I am
arguing for in this book, that there exists a set of what we cannot know, and
that these two sets are not just sitting benignly side by side but are actually
closely related to each other. As the magnitude of the one set – the know-
able – grows, so does that of the other – the unknowable. And this latter set of
the unknowable is always in flux, expanding as we go about our scientific
pursuits, declining as we neglect science. This is particularly so if you think of
science as a product of ways of analysing nature through the prism of artifice:
an analysis that changes nature, too, as it analyses. In this book, I try to show
you how Tarde’s thought implies this and how much it matters. Much rests
upon the category of artificiality.
What is artificiality? To make sense, artificiality has always needed con-
siderable work of explanation. It is the particularly modern term of the two,
much more suggestive of constant change than nature is. Normally, with
artificiality, we have a concept that, for many, implies that, by taking from,
and contrasting our paths with, a benign scape of nature, we have created
ourselves and our extensions of ourselves. A concept that implies that we have
formed – more than a world, more than a culture – indeed, something we are
no longer sure we find attractive: a powerful human realm. I ask: in escaping
from this hubris embedded in the term, are we not now, partly by choice,
partly by circumstances, lost – to risk replacing one tendentious term with
another – in our vastly darker and denser populations of people and things,
all the borders merging, no longer able or willing to distinguish between any
such dual terms, resigned to accept that “what happens happens, and that’s all
there is to it” (Baudrillard 2005)? Is ‘artificiality’ not merely a quaint tag that
we people used to put on things that seemed different – better, or worse –
from the ‘nature’ we wanted or expected? Are we not beyond artificiality?
One thing I know: the present cannot help us. The present, itself now lar-
gely defunct, is a concept of safety, of normality. How often do you really
take all the present conditions of time and space in which you are supposed to
be embedded and limit your attempts to know yourself and others to these
extreme localities? In a world saturated with future considerations, we might
102 Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future
pay lip service to this, but can never do it. For to talk of ‘living in the present’
implies a ‘normal’ relationship with historical time. It implies an unpro-
blematized reality-space. It implies business-as-usual. But how can we live in
such a way when our societies expect each of us to live according to a future
conception of ourselves and of the world, to live in a digitally conditioned
way that anticipates the latest ‘updates’ on everything? We simply cannot.
Trying to do so is to propose to drop out of modern society. As moderns, we
deeply believe in the dictum that a thing or a self is defined never by itself,
always by something else, the lessons of avoiding tautology supposedly
imprinted forever in our makeup. As such, we were destined to embrace
digital media, as we indeed have so wholly.
The present could never be a leading concept in an era of digital media
such as ours. The real, underneath our era of digital media and because of
it, has changed. Virtuality, metaphoricity are our modes of being. Working
on a desktop means resting one’s eyes on wood, steel, rare elements from
exploited workers; equally on plastic, pixels, light. Materials, energies, ideas,
perceptions: any ‘assemblage’ will do. As we have for centuries, we want to
know more.
But now we chat with friends, family, with anyone, manipulating strange,
scheduled goals. Such a ‘networked’ reality could indeed diffuse our knowl-
edge searches, seeming to mean anything. But what is sure is that, while
networks are real, we do not live in any particular network. By this I mean
that particular networks are merely virtual expressions of networked acts
that are never determined by surrounding life circumstances and are, thus,
never measured as dispositions in a lived present. Reality is different for us
today. Reality for us today is never unmediated. We give it names such as
‘virtual’. When one possesses images of value, anything in our digitized
world that matters, one possesses digitized data. Digitized data do not exist
in the kinds of relationships that governed older objects such as the rela-
tionship between singular instances and memberships of categories. The old
relationship of the particular and the universal is no longer a vital one. We
don’t compare and contrast something with what we consider to be a gold
standard form of such a thing; the ‘good’ for us is not the enlightenment of
a Platonic epistemology. In the world of digital media, singularity, defined
as one single instance of something particular, while somewhat rare, is per-
fectly possible and less important than other things rather than more
important, for being rare. Today, an image, viewed as one instance, is con-
sidered to be a poverty of samples. Generality, for its part, consists not in an
approximation of a variety of instances to one privileged model, but rather
in numbers that add up to a range of near identical duplications of each
other. Possession today is in the context of networks that obtain when these
data sets, including many duplications and near duplications, are articulated
in describing a network relationship.
Like seeks like. Possession is the use or enjoyment – some kind of incor-
poration – of one thing by another. In the past, we tended to think in
 Conclusion: The Reality of Life in the Future 103
anthropocentric terms, and possession usually meant human ownership of
something. And ownership was a unique relationship, rather than what it is
today: control over a network. Today, ownership, subsumed by network
priorities, has been relativized. Possessing the things we know makes us
unable to adapt to new unknowns; so we have to learn to replace our pos-
sessions with other possessions on a more frequent basis, or allow ourselves to
be possessed by objects that might take us further than we can go ourselves.
Digital images and objects are widely shared, and ownership is only one
weapon among many in battles for control. Control is the key battleground,
and political conflicts tend to be centred on desires and beliefs rather than
simply money and territory. With the rise of digital social networks, the latter
are still important, but they have been subsumed into the nouveau ideological
battles of our day.
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Index
action 6–7, 9, 24, 32–3, 60–1, 83, 90–2;
how Tarde resists valorizing 11, 21, 26,
32–3; and difference 43–6; as civic/
political 46–7, 66, 68; 91
active and passive behaviors 25, 46–8
activism 2, 25, 81
affect 52, 57–9
agency ix, 2, 9, 11, 20–1, 32, 41, 60–1
alienation 5, 22–3, 31, 48, 81, 94, 96
anthropocentrism 4–5, 11, 25, 28, 32, 61,
76, 103; sociological anthropocentrism
32, 36–7
artifice 2, 9, 19, 25, 41, 56, 59, 72, 83, 96,
98–101; medieval meaning 4, 13;
modern transition to the artificial 9,
15–16; contrasted with innovation 14;
as creativity we exercise 21, 70; as
sociality 19, 26
artificial and artificiality 2–4, 12–25, 70,
96, 99–101; and intelligence 1–2;
dichotomy with nature 4, 9, 98, 98;
and culture 20
asceticism 96–7
assemblage 29, 42–3, 45, 92–4, 102
Baudrillard, Jean 10, 82–3, 101
Baym, Nancy 74, 91
Bergson, Henri x, 2–3, 12, 18, 23,
33–34, 97
big data 3, 10, 28, 74–81, 99
biology 42, 48–9, 58
Brand, Stewart 88
capitalism ix, 2–4, 8, 22–23, 25, 31,
46–47, 58, 68–70, 99;
Castells, Manuel 14, 92
class, and class structure x, 23–5, 27, 61,
84–5, 87, 91
collectivity 37, 63
colonialism x, 67
communication 7–8, 22, 50, 52–3, 56,
60–2, 66, 68, 74, 75, 85–91, 95
composite 29, 71–2
conflict 20, 33, 65, 79, 95
conspicuous activity 24–7, 77
consumerism 21, 46, 70, 88
convergence enablers 56–8
Cooley, Charles Horton 7, 41, 50
cosmological imagination 5, 26, 32–3,
57–9, 74
cosmos x, 5–6, 21, 28, 33–7, 74
counter-culture 87–8
crowds 8, 38, 40, 64–8
culture ix–x, 4–5, 8, 13, 17–8, 26, 37, 61,
71–2, 80–1, 93, 95, 101; electronic
culture 89; digital culture 99; nature and
94; as a workaround 18; and cultural
studies ; the limits of 19; as tragic 20
cyberculture 10, 66, 86–91, 93
Deleuze, Gilles 10, 18, 29–30, 33, 45,
83–4, 97
Dennett, Daniel 41
Denzin, Norman 41, 53
Descartes, Rene 17, 49
difference 5–6, 8, 17, 20, 29–34, 37–8,
43–5, 49, 51–4, 62–4, 67, 69, 75
digital media 2–3, 8, 28, 59–61, 65–66,
74–79, 90, 92, 99, 102; as a system
of social life 5, 9, 25, 62–63; and
digitization 74–6, 89–90; in historical
context 56, 58, 59, 64, 75, 86, 99
diversity 45, 56, 58–9, 63
Durkheim, Emile x, 3–4, 6, 32, 37–8, 42,
44, 58, 63, 68, 98; debate with Tarde
28–31
epistemology 9, 11, 17–8, 67, 89, 96, 102
112 Index
fake news ix
Forster, E.M. 85, 90, 95
Foucault, Michel 32–3
Frankfurt school 4, 72
future x–xi, 1–2, 5, 20–21, 41, 81–86,
89–91, 94–97; waiting for versus living
in the future 9–10; as a way of life 56,
100–102; as a feeling of newness and/
or constant change 57–59, 69
Giddens, Anthony 14, 92
Goffman, Erving 10, 22, 41, 52, 54–6,
83, 95
Habermas, Jurgen 8, 60–1, 91
happiness, Tarde’s critique of 23
hesitation 65
Hobbes, Thomas 4, 16–9
Hochschild, Arlie 41
humility 11, 100
imitation 3, 5–10, 19, 30, 37–42, 46–7,
52–6, 59–65, 97, 100; metaphor of
“rays of 64–5
immersion 83
individuality 3, 8, 17, 22, 28–30, 32,
37–40, 44, 51, 53, 58, 61, 77, 82, 84,
89, 97; and modernity 14, 23, 60; as
networked individualism 3, 64–5, 67,
75, 92; the three aspects of 42–3, 48;
and Tarde’s concept of the ‘myself ’ 7;
and Tarde’s social individual 31, 41,
45–7, 62–4, 68; of nature 18; and the
public 67; H.G. Wells’s ‘Individualism’
82; in utopian writing 86, 88
industrialization 14, 96
intelligence 1–2
internet 7, 39, 52–3, 66, 85, 87–9, 93
James, William 41
Jonas, Hans 91
Jones, Steve 66, 75, 89
Kesey, Ken 88
Latour, Bruno 9–10, 32, 92–4
Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm 4, 71, 80
Marx, Karl x, 4, 20–4, 31–2, 68, 96
mastery 5–6, 11, 17, 24, 36, 72–3, 79, 94
Mead, George Herbert 3, 6–7, 19, 41,
48–55, 68
media x, 7–8, 49, 52–6, 59–60, 64–8, 74,
82–3, 99
Mills, C. Wright 9, 28, 32, 87
modernity x, 4, 9, 13–26, 40, 58, 60,
64, 71–2, 80, 83, 90–1; 95–9 and
ambivalence 41; and non-action 44;
and imitation 53
monadology 29, 42, 44, 48
More, Thomas 84
multimedia 59, 62, 65, 74, 88
myth 85, 92
narrative 16, 84–9, 92, 94–5, 98–9
nature 2, 4–6, 9–10, 14–8, 19–21;
phenomenology of 10, 75–81; as the
actual contrasted with the virtual ‘God’
in Spinoza 70–2; and positivism; return
of 70–81; strong concept of 71
neoliberalism x, 57
neo-monadology 5; and the virtuality of
the cosmos 33–4
network society 3, 8, 59, 91–4
Nietzsche, Friedrich 44
non-action 44–7
objects x, 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 17, 19, 22–6,
28, 32–9, 42–3, 45, 48, 63, 74, 80,
99–100, 103
object-oriented ontology 32, 43, 80
Otto-Apel, Karl 90–1, 94
parallelism 6, 42, 48
Plato’s Republic 83, 96
pluralism 28, 35–7
political, the 14–5, 33, 46–7, 61–2, 66,
72, 81, 85–6, 89, 91, 95
positivism 36, 100
possession 5, 11, 27, 31, 32–4, 37, 102–3
Poster, Mark 21, 24, 89
power ix, 4–5, 9, 11, 17, 22–23, 44, 56, 66,
72, 82, 84, 87; in the cosmos x, 26, 33;
and modernity 14, 101; Tarde’s theory
of 5, 26–7, 31–33, 43; comparison to
Nietzsche’s concept of 44
public ix, 2, 24, 32, 40, 59; the generalized
public 8–9, 59, 65, 67–8; as plural
publics 8, 59–60, 64, 68
reality ix–x, 2, 5–6, 14–20, 23, 28–37, 45,
54, 57, 60, 72, 74–5, 81–6, 93, 97–102
reference groups 51
relational simples 30, 34–5
relational sociology 37–9
repetition 5–6, 29–31, 33, 37–8, 44–6,
63–4
Rheingold, Howard 66, 86, 89

role distancing 22
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4, 15–9
science ix–x, 9–10, 15, 17–8, 20, 28–32,
62, 67, 70–4, 76–9, 84, 86, 94, 98,
100–1; and the unknown 10, 36, 75,
79–81; new modality of 1–2, 9, 11, 21,
34–5, 42–5, 83
self 3, 6–7, 15, 39, 40–55, 59, 62, 72, 85,
89, 102
settled and unsettled states 46, 77–8
Shibutani, Tomatsu 51
Simmel, Georg x, 10, 20, 62
simples 17–8, 25, 30, 34–6, 62, 71–2;
relational simples 30, 34
social facts 29–30
social interaction 7–8, 39, 41, 47, 52,
54–5, 62, 64, 67, 90
social media 2, 8, 39, 59, 64–8, 75–6, 78,
87, 90, 92–3, 99
social networks 2, 40, 45, 59–62, 65,
68–9, 88, 91–5, 103
social ontology 30, 67
sociological imagination 18, 28, 32, 57, 67
sociology x–xi, 1, 3–4, 6–11, 17–8, 21–3,
26–8, 41–4, 58, 62–3, 69, 75, 93, 95,
100–1; Tarde’s critique of Durkheim’s
model of 6, 45, 28–34, 36–7, 59, 98; as
Index 113
a ‘solar microscope’ 48; disciplinarity
of 49, 55, 57–8, 68
sonnambulism 26
Spinoza, Benedictus 4, 17–8, 71–2, 80
succession and simultaneity 43–7
symbolic interactionism 6–7, 40–41, 56,
62, 90–91
Thrift, Nigel 49
Turkle, Sherry 66
Turner, Fred 87–9
universe ix, 2, 4–6, 9–11, 15, 17–8, 31,
33–7, 42, 45, 48, 70, 74, 76, 79–80,
98, 100
urbanization 8, 38, 40, 62–5
utopia, and dystopia x, 2, 10–11, 20, 24,
81–2, 86–97, 100
Van Dijck, Jose 92–3
virtual and actual 33–5, 71–2
virtual and virtuality ix, 2, 17, 33–6, 85,
89, 102
Weber, Max x, 4, 31–2, 44, 58, 68, 93
Wellman, Barry 64, 75, 92–3
Wells, H.G. 82, 85–6, 89–91, 95
white x, 25, 55, 68, 73