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Gabriel Tarde
The Future of the Artificial
David Toews
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eBook - ePub
Gabriel Tarde
The Future of the Artificial
David Toews
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About This Book
This book presents the core ideas of early sociologist Gabriel Tarde and suggests 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 andrecognizing 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 modernity in general, our thinking about the future, and our tendency to forget what nature used to signify in its presentation of problems beyond our control, such as illnesses and epidemics, Gabriel Tarde: The Future of the Artificial 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 interests in our digital age, new sociologies of materials and objects, neomonadology, and the thought of Gabriel Tarde.
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1 The Rise of the Artificial
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177982-2
Artifice once had a positive meaning. Human creativity – our ability to produce 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 generally 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 artifice, 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 comparatively 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 framework, 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 subjectivity in a sociological sense to people as there is almost no scope for varying one’s thoughts over against received wisdom. In contrast, within a modern framework, every person is expected to be guided by their own opinion. 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 formalize 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, opinionated 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 participates in society as we subsume all new behaviour under innovation. We are used to viewing the modern products of innovation – the plastics, smartphones, fast foods, drive-in churches – as powerful in comparison with the ways of what we imagine would have been a simpler, more organic or traditional past (Giddens 1991; Touraine 1995; Wagner 1993). Modernity elevates innovation and to innovation it links power. The traditional, posited as overlapping 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, 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 formation 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 representing 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 culmination 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). Rousseau 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 relations 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 important, 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 thinking 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 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, Rousseau has projected backwards a timeless, non-artificial ‘state of nature’ in order to support his view of modernity. In the content of his idealized narrative, the state of nature is an ur-state, coming before all forms of human reality. 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 philosopher 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 philosophy. 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 symptomatically. 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 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 thinking, 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 forward 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, Spinoza (2018) weighs in by claiming that God represents the absolute simple substance, whereas the objects of nature represent simple things that, perceptible 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 Descartes’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 maintains an openness in which human beings can, via science, commune with nature just as they are communing with God. This alternative between Descartes 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. Spinoza (2018) represents a more open approach to philosophy. Spinoza’s ‘geometry’ 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 contrary, the concept of God is robust in Spinoza, but it is a philosophical concept 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 nevertheless eminently suited to a modern scientific epistemology. For what Spinoza (2018) is attempting to do is provide diagrams of the complex and the simple, in order to imbue his epistemology with an ontic–ontological distinction. 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 irremediably open subjectivity, while the Cartesian dualism is aimed at establishing 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 philosophical vacuum of knowledge about social life is, nonetheless, a proto-sociological imagination. We see arising new debates over the role in the universe 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 subjectivity versus closed subjectivity. An important interpreter of Tarde, Henri Bergson’s musings on open versus closed societies, for example, assume vitality by taking from this contrast (1977).
Culture as a Workaround
The notion of culture starts to become important in early modernity precisely 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 sol...