The early 20th-century French sociologist and philosopher Gabriel Tarde was an important critic of Durkheim's ontology of the social. Tarde developed a microsociological and ontological critique of the philosophical problems of resemblance and of variation underlying Durkheim's comparative sociology. Recently, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Éric Alliez have begun to revisit Tarde and to develop a theme of the significance of Tarde's thought as a harbinger of postmodern theory. This article examines Tarde's theories in the light of (...) this new reception. It is shown that Tarde draws heavily from Leibniz's theory of the quantitative continuity of qualitative singulars in order to critique Durkheim's statistics-based social realism. While some key limitations of Tarde's critique are exposed, it is argued that Tarde finds a way to remain faithful to statistical sociology as a project even while calling radically into question the qualitative unity of the social. (shrink)

This article argues that while modes of scholarship stressing structural insights into the digital divide and ethnographic insights into online communities each give us important information about current uses of the internet, for the sake of a unified social justice principle it is necessary to interpret these forms of knowledge in terms of what could be. Marx’s formula ‘the development of each as a condition for the development of all’ is put forward as the principle of a socially-just internet actualized (...) from the ground up. It is argued that the most rapidly emerging and important form of constraint upon ‘the development of each’ is the for profit online social media industry in which moments of human communicative creativity become packaged as commodities for commercial purposes. Creative, cultural agency becomes an imposition rather than a liberation as represented in the industry ideology. It is argued therefore that groups that use the internet for serious play – the use of avatars in virtual worlds is discussed as an example – present us with a form of online subjectivity that is rising in importance as a form of cultural agency inasmuch as the play component is premised upon the rejection of pre-packaged forms of agency. Support for a socially-just internet would thus mean supporting the online communities formed in this process. Thus the argument is put forward that the importance of serious online play groups is not due to their potential for forming communities per se but is rather due to their potential for resisting the imposition of agency. Inasmuch as online communities in the midst of such groups can bolster that goal, they can represent the development of human capabilities in a way that expands the theme of social justice. (shrink)

En plusieurs endroits de son œuvre, à la fois dans ses écrits théoriques et ses œuvres de fiction, Tarde revient sur le thème du futur. Dans Monadologie et sociologie, il émet l’hypothèse qu’en raison de la façon dont la science moderne « pulvérise » l’univers, le futur est susceptible de représenter une forme plus élevée de diversité. Tarde soutient que cette destruction et cette création, en se répandant dans la société, impliqueront la fin de la sociabilité normale et la venue (...) d’une nouvelle ère dans laquelle la misanthropie, réévaluée, acquiert un sens nouveau. Tout se passe comme si, pour Tarde, l’insociabilité deviendra un principe positif et nécessaire dans l’ère future des plus grandes diversités. Dans cet article, je développe les conséquences de la futurologie tardienne sur une socialité fondée sur la différence en les rapportant au développement de la science. (shrink)