Embarrassingly, it is yet again via Anne Galloway that I come across another excellent cultural studies-esque blog: Steven Shaviro’s The Pinocchio Theory. What sent me there was an interesting quote Anne posted from a piece in which Shaviro introduces us to a 19th Century French sociologist called Gabriel Tarde, a contemporary of Durkheim, and all but forgotten until unearthed by Deleuze and Latour. That post is here. Here’s a bit of it, just so you can see why Tarde may in fact (re)emerge as the Next Big Thing in intellectual fashion:

The guy is so brilliantly wacko that I’m amazed that he was ever taken seriously as a sociologist. He’s more a crazy metaphysician of social (and other) forms of organization, than someone who has anything concrete to say about any actually existing society of his time.

Basically, Tarde opposes the metaphor of society-as-organism that has been widespread in political and social theory ever since the Renaissance (and for all I know, before that as well). Instead of comparing human societies to biological organisms, we should rather compare organisms (and inorganic entities as well, for that matter) to societies. The human body is a society of cells; the cell a society of chemicals and organelles; organic chemicals are societies of simpler molecules, and so on down as far as we can go (and we can go a lot further down now than was the case in Tarde’s time). Star systems, atoms, and sand grains on the beach are no different from human societies.

Tarde denies the existence of higher-level entities (like “society” according to Durkheim). This is an atomism not just of composition, but of organization. There is no such thing as social laws and regulations, social norms, social impositions. There are only power relations among individuals. Certain individuals impose on others; certain individuals are imitated by others. Social coherence is merely the result of imitation on a mass scale, together with raw power impositions.

Interesting stuff, and how resonant with the sociobiology/mimetics/evolutionary tangent that is all over the cultural studies map at the moment. Cos poststructuralism is soooo five minutes ago. (tongue firmly planted in cheek)