Conference Review

Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the social

14-15 March 2008

A momentous debate concerning the nature of sociology took place between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903. At the heart of the 2008 conference Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the social was a reenactment of this debate between one of sociology’s most famous founding fathers and his recently rediscovered contender. On the evening of Saturday 14th of March, in Corpus Christi College’s McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bruno Latour became Gabriel Tarde to Bruno Karsenti’s Emile Durkheim, as the debate took place once again, under the watchful arbitration of Simon Schaffer. As the lights came up and the applause faded, the audience, 150 strong, and the actors came together in a critical discussion of the power and limits of the Tardean revival which is currently sweeping the social sciences and humanities.

Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in 19th century French sociology: a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. But whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the 20th century, Tarde’s sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist, a metaphysician. Yet Tarde, for whom ‘every thing is a society and every science a sociology’, is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as “an alternative beginning for an alternative social science”.
The reenactment of the debate came at the end of a day of conference papers and group discussions, bringing together anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and others from Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. The opening panel, ‘Durkheim reconsidered’, proposed a re-appraisal of Durkheim’s classic The Elementary forms of Religious life, in the light of the neo-Tardian revival. Engaging respectively with pentecostalism, colonial flag-worshiping and race concepts, panellists Joel Robbins, Ricardo Roque and Karen E. Fields, with their discussant James Laidlaw, found that Durkheim had unsuspected depths for those who were prepared to look beyond the habitual straw-man figure the venerable sociologist has become. The second panel brought together multiple ethnographic perspectives on Tardean analytics, from Amerindian criminality (Praet) to indian God-makers in Madras and road-builders in the Andes (Harvey/Venkatesan), while Georgina Born and Karen Sykes each in a different way reassessed theoretically and ethnographically Tarde’s concept of ‘imitation’.

The second day opened with a panel exploring Tarde’s ‘interpsychology’ through papers on somnambulism and magnetism (Van Tuinen), crowds (Brighenti) and drug use (Vargas); a panel with a strong Deleuzian flavour which prompted much discussion of the links between the forgotten 19th century sociologist and the recent ‘affective turn’. The afternoon proposed an exploratory extension of the Tarde-Durkheim debate into the methodological, theoretical and political issues facing 21st century social science. It brought together Bruno Latour, Andrew Barry and Robert Layton in a discussion of Durkheim and Tarde’s respective legacy when it comes to methods for tracing the social and rendering it visible, from statistics to the self-generating networked maps of online databases, and the prospects for sociology as an experimental science; Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov proposed a methodological and political re-examination of the category of the social through the work of contemporary russian social theorist and anarchist activist Maxim Kuchinski; Alberto Corsin-Jimenez and Tim Jenkins considered the power and limits of commensurability, proportion and comparison in social theory.

Acting as a discussant for this panel, Marilyn Strathern’s final comment tied together, not only the afternoon, but the whole conference, in a deft balancing-out of the ‘traps’ set by Durkheim and Tarde, respectively, for contemporary social science: if the latter allows us to do away with the individual-society apparatus which has become the hallmark of the former’s sociological legacy, he in turn springs on us the trap of detail and the infinitesimal, as though things could be singular, particular, infinitesimal on their own. More than a balancing act, Strathern’s comment itself acted as a ferment, the productive surplus that emerges – as Tarde himself might have wished it – from the encounter of two different theoretical worlds.

And so with the conference itself. Starting from the premise of re-enacting a century-old debate and balancing out its outcome, the conference’s greatest strength was in fact in the surplus. This surplus teemed throughout the discussions and exchanges after each panel, overflowed into the tea-breaks and lunchbreaks; onto the sunny front court of St Catherine’s college, and late into the night in the courtyard of the Eagle pub; it left participants buzzing with excitement and debating in a common if rather outlandish language, one forged over two days of what was, by common admission, a most exhilarating event.


Conference organiser:
Matei Candea
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

 

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