Topic: contagion, islam, bbc news
THEORY BEYOND THE CODES
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############## Special Issue: In the Name of Security ###############
===================================~Tony D. Sampson~
INTRODUCTION: FOUR INTERVENTIONS
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Log on to the internet or visit a militant Islamic bookshop and
within a few minutes you will find enough inspiration in CDs,
ranting sermons, DVDs, for a hundred suicide bombs. It swirls
across the Islamic world as an expression of rage against the
West for the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and for
Western dominance of the world economy... It is only when the
vast majority of law-abiding Muslim societies reject the
cultural virus of suicide bombing and cease to glorify it that
this plague will burn itself out. [1]
In this so-called age of networks, human communication is, it seems,
increasingly redefined as a media virus. In the military rhetoric of
former CIA operative, Robert Baer (above), it is indeed difficult to
tell apart the medium from the virus. The greatest information
network of all, the internet, has become, as Baer tells us, part of a
"deadly virus" that spreads radicalization far and wide by way of a
somewhat mysterious, "inspirational" connection with the societies it
infects. Even old ways of doing communication are becoming part and
parcel of this swirling viral media ecology. The fearsome biological
analogies and medical metaphors Baer, and other propagators of the
War on Terror, readily exploit are nonetheless part of a far wider
and potentially divisive epidemiological social paradigm. In computer
network security, for example, there is a comparable (and interwoven)
War on Viruses which has transformed the internet into an
immunological network infrastructure that defines to a great extent
what you can and can't do online. [2]
Significantly though, not all media viruses are dependent on fear and
anxiety. In marketing circles, specifically those dedicated to
digital networks, virals and memes are the buzzwords of choice. The
success of ~YouTube~ videos and social gaming on ~Facebook~ are, for
example, measured in terms of a virality based on joyful encounters,
sometimes verging on obsessive and compulsive engagement. Indeed,
network scientists and marketers claim to have learnt lessons from
observing biological and digital viruses: lessons that some claim
exceed mere analogical or metaphorical relations and point toward new
universal models of contagious social influence and infectable
consumer mood. [3] Evidently, the problem for communication theory is
how to approach the many dimensions of the universal media virus.
Intuitive as it may seem, its virality lacks substance. It is like a
noise that contaminates the binary opposites of the established
communication model without prejudice. In the age of networks,
senders and receivers and information and meaning are all susceptible
to contagion.
Recently however, in network theory, the notion of *microbial
contagion* has offered a refreshing alternative to established
communication theory insofar as the non-human microbe is reckoned to
be synonymous with the network humans connect to. To be sure, it is
the microbe that links up the individual nodes of the network
transforming them into a collective social body. [4] Yet,
problematically the microbe may not go far enough in terms of
grasping the virality of communication. It certainly shares a lot in
common with Baer's deadly virus in as much as it relies on an
indistinct and divisive biological analogy to explain how nonhuman
virality connects to an intensely human social medium.
This essay presents four interventions intended to redirect
theoretical attention away from the medical discourses that underpin
microbial contagion theory. [5] Although ostensibly discrete, each
intervention is intended to probe the analogical artifice between the
human and nonhuman by way of a Tardean monadological understanding of
"social form" composed of emotional vectors and affective contagious
encounters. The first intervention concerns what it is that spreads
through infectable social media. Here both Gabriel Tarde's refusal to
analytically separate psychological and biological realms from the
wider social-physical world (of which they are both a part), and a
more recent neurological understanding of the political unconscious,
come together to foreground the importance of shared feelings in
determining social influence. Yet, although *feeling fear* seems to
be endemic to recent politically motivated contaminations of a
population, there are other much-overlooked affects, like love, which
are equally catching. Secondly, the essay confronts the deterministic
thinking which seems to underline decidedly mechanistic
interpretations of what spreads. This is equally evident in the
analogical focus on microbes and memes as it is in a tendency in
network theory to award agency to an emergent collective social
consciousness.
The third intervention questions the validity of the network as an
appropriate epidemiological diagram when evidently its
standardization of space through nodes and edges tends to freeze out
the temporality of epidemic events and accidents. This is, I contend,
a "diagrammatic" problem at the center of contagion theory which can
be interestingly re-approached via Tarde's insights into economic
crisis and celebrity culture. Lastly then, the essay focuses on a
distinctive Tardean trajectory evident in contemporary capitalist
business enterprise which looks set to exploit consumer mood and
guide intention by targeting the mostly unconscious neurological
absorption of human and non-human affective contagions.
These four interventions draw upon a resuscitation of crowd contagion
theories dating back to the late nineteenth century. Such a revival
is not without its problems, not least because of the negative
notions it attaches to social collectivity, conformity, obedience and
vulnerability. However, unlike the extreme conservatism of his
contemporary, Gustave Le Bon, in a series of publications, Tarde
forwarded an epidemiological diagram which arguably provides a much
clearer understanding of social relation outside of the reductive
limitations of organic social category, and at the same time probes
between the artifice that divides biological and psychological
phenomena from social theory. [6] In these texts Tarde sets out an
approach that would go on to greatly influence Gilles Deleuze and
Bruno Latour (among others). But as I aim to show in my work, he is
much more than a mere footnote to assemblage and actor network
theory.
1. WHAT SPREADS?
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Feeling Fear
Although positioning microbial contagion as a distinctly non-human
affair, Eugene Thacker suggests an intriguing and perhaps
purposefully indistinct human relation to it insofar as he draws our
attention to how "we humans" *feel* about becoming infected. [6] The
most apparent of these feelings is triggered by our contagious
encounter with the microbe, which tends to "elicit" the negative
emotions of "fear" and "anxiety". [8] As Thacker seems to infer,
contagion is generally grasped within a medical discursive frame as a
horrendous conflict between human and nonhuman agencies.
Contagion and infection are more than mechanisms of antigen
recognition and antibody response; they are, as our textbooks
tell us, entire 'wars' and 'invasions' continuously fought on
the battle lines of the human body. [9]
These are, it would appear, fears and anxieties induced by a sense of
invasiveness of what spreads beyond the battle lines into
non-biological contexts. Reminiscent perhaps of Michel Foucault's
earlier observations on how the space of plagues and epidemics (like
leprosy) opened up new disciplinary territories that would further
exclude the nonhuman from the human world, [10] this current exercise
of biopower seems to carry forward discursive epidemiological power
into new and as yet uncharted corners of social cartography. To be
sure, the emotional responses to these unwelcome incursions by the
microbe are increasingly exploited by the defenders of network
sovereignty -- particularly in the rhetorical terms used to describe
the threat posed by the cultural and biological viruses of the
terrorist cell.
There is, as Thacker argues elsewhere, an Agambenian "zone of
indistinction", or biopolitical continuum, at play in the rhetoric of
the War on Terror, which exceptionally merges the language used to
describe the terrorist with that used to describe the microbial
virus. [11] But there is perhaps nothing new in such myth making. It
is certainly a central plank of a much older ideological critique
that recognizes how culture is often strategically turned into
nature. [12] Nonetheless, are these transmissions of fear and anxiety
adequately explained by a semiotic model of communication, based as
it is on the spreading of false beliefs conjured up by images, words
and ideas? How does this old approach, which in effect divides up
culture and nature, account for an inherent social vulnerability to
suggestion beyond resorting to a fuzzy state of false consciousness?
It would seem that the emotional openness to repetitive and ever
converging transmissions of statements of this kind exceed mere
ideological productions of myth. Indeed, would not belief (and how it
can spread) need to be reconsidered, *ahead of ideas*, as the
bringing on of mostly insensible and unconscious responses intended
to trigger deep seated fears, anxieties, panic, and insecurity? Is
this not a neurological contamination that exposes the mind to an
entire valence (fearsome and joyful) of affective encounters that
herald the idea?
So as to further deliberate on the affective and contagious qualities
of what spreads I want to briefly introduce three thinkers who help
to frame an alternative to ideological models of transmission. The
first, George Lakoff, (a cognitive scientist) focuses attention on a
neurological understanding of how the political mind can be tapped
into and activated. The second, Teresa Brennan, presents a theory of
affective transmission that rethinks the relation between culture and
nature by removing the pretence of the divide that separates them,
and focuses instead on an *intersection point* wherein what is
socially encountered, and biologically responded to, meet. Finally, I
turn to Tarde's late nineteenth-century social contagion theory which
similarly locates the human condition somewhere in between deliberate
volition, biologically motivated mechanical habits and the
self-spreading of desires and social invention. Importantly, all
three are advocates of a concept of social subjectivity that is not
closed or self-contained, but is instead open to contagious
suggestibility of others.
A Neurological Unconscious
To begin with, I want to acknowledge George Lakoff's neurological
understanding of a mostly unconscious political mind. Lakoff
describes a mind made vulnerable to outside political manipulation
through appeals to emotional markers, which can trigger feelings
(including those related to infection) already contained in
neurological bindings, or what he calls the *metaphorical frames* of
the mind. [13] Following the prominent work of neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio in the mid 1990s, as well as "accepting" the fairly recent
mirror (or empathy) neuron hypothesis, [14] Lakoff points to the
absorbency of *somatic markers*, which can be persistently activated
so as to provoke the "right" feelings and emotions, almost to order.
[15] So, for example, following 9/11, the much repeated video images
of The Twin Towers falling played alongside rhythmic utterances of
"Islam" and "extremism" evokes fear in the neural circuits of a mind
that *empathizes* (shares in the feeling) with what it encounters via
its sensory system. [16]
To fully grasp how the neurological unconscious might work, we need
to firstly register Damasio's contra-Kantian (and Cartesian) argument
that our reasoning and decision-making processes are not as purely
cognitive as we may think they are. In fact, Damasio's somatic marker
hypothesis persuasively argues that "emotions and feelings may not be
intruders in the bastion of reason at all; they may be enmeshed in
its networks." [17] Secondly, according to neuroscience, our
understanding of how feelings get passed on need no longer to be
informed by an unknowable empathic transmission. The location of
so-called mirror neurons supposedly points to the brain processes
behind the sharing of feelings and mood. Mirror neurons are said to
be the equivalent of human-to-human "wireless communication," and
have been linked to innate imitative human relations occurring
between infants and adults. [18]
It is the porous volatility of the political mind to the feelings and
suggestions of others (up close and mediated over distance) that
leads to an important question for contagion theory: *is it not what
"we feel" about what spreads that becomes the most effectual
contagion of all?* If this is indeed the case, then the contagious
encounter is not exclusively explained by the unique merging of
linguistic terms strategically relating human to invasive nonhuman
worlds, but instead reveals a multisensory intersection point
*in-between* what have traditionally been regarded by much of
academia as separate social and biological domains. Arguably, unlike
the horrors of the microbial metaphor, this force of contagious
encounter is not at all biologically determined. The spreading of
fear is instead an intermingling of affective social phenomena and
hardwired biological responses that activate and adapt each other.
At very least this appeal to cognitive neuroscience may help to
provide a more graspable process by which *infectable* humans
encounter the "living" horrors of the microbial world. Communication
theory should, in any case, pay close attention to a similar
neurological concentration apparent in political psychology,
marketing, and product design where the affective priming of
experience is fast becoming endemic to the study of social influence
and methods of persuasion. [19] Accordingly, what spreads is
understood to pass unconsciously through the skin into the
viscerality of human experience, guiding automatic behavior, before
it moves *upstream* to the conscious reflective mind and sense of
volition. The strategic convergence of the epidemic and suicide
bomber can still be grasped as Thacker puts it, in the "innovative
ways" human beings have developed by which to "live through
microbes". [20] Here, however, we have a process no less that begins
for the most part by a contaminating encounter with an event. It is
the manifestation of affects in this encounter which move upstream,
activating mostly unconscious feelings of horror, before they
intersect with the *downstream* flows of a neural circuitry loaded
with manipulable and biographical emotional content.
It is this seemingly ready-made, yet highly absorbent and adaptable
circuitry that is, Lakoff claims, tapped into by political
strategists, so that, for example, the repetition of the images and
the utterances of the War on Terror reinforce and activate negative
conservative neurological bindings rather than acting to challenge
and change the way people think. [21] Significantly, for Lakoff, the
idea that the political mind is openly vulnerable to suggestion in
this way (and potentially prone to passing on such suggestions via
neuronal transfers) confronts the unyielding artifice erected and
maintained by the same Enlightenment aficionados Damasio identifies:
that is, an abrupt separation between somatic experiences and the
evolutionary hardwiring of a self-contained and rational mind. But as
the subtitle of Lakoff's political mind thesis argues, "you can't
understand 21st-Century American politics with an 18th-Century
brain." It would seem that the Enlightenment artifice between
contaminating emotion and pure reason disintegrates at the point
where what is socially suggested, and biologically responded to,
intersects: *an encounter between upstream flows of affect and
downstream biological responses*.
The Transmission of Affective Contagion
In her analysis of the decline of nineteenth century crowd theory,
Teresa Brennan notes the ominous implications of what replaced it.
The cognitive turn in the twentieth century not only re-concentrated
enquiry on the rational minds of a self-contained individual, but
also bisected biological and sociological explanations of collective
social interaction. [22] The theory of the self-contained individual
stresses, as such, that it is an evolutionary hardwired and conscious
cognition that determines human agency rather than natural phenomena,
like emotions, feelings and affect. For Brennan however, what spreads
(affect) turns such a crude dichotomy on its head by significantly
placing social encounter ahead of biological adaptation. Despite the
prevalent "prejudice concerning the biological and the social" and
the "belief in [a subject's] self-containment" that obsessed early
social scientists' interest in how collectives respond to each other,
Brennan argues that the biological and the social are irrevocably
blended together. [23] Contagion is, like this, "a simple affective
transfer" discerned by permeable individuals in rooms and other
affective atmospheres of encounter. [24] She compares it to
entrainment whereby a person's affects can contaminate another,
pulling or pushing them along in rhythmic synchronization.
Importantly, affective transmission does not originate in the
biologically hardwired drives of the individual. To be sure, the
porous self is nothing like the inward looking ego (only thinking of
itself). [25] On the contrary, the affective transfer is always,
from the outset, *social*. But this encounter is not social in the
sense of the term accepted in mainstream sociological
categorizations. The encounter comes from out there in the affective
atmosphere, and can as such, spread from person-to-person, entering
into the skin and *hacking* into the evolutionary drives.
Viral Love
Importantly then, the biopolitical intensity of what spreads through
affective atmospheres should not be limited to negative transmissions
of fear. There is a need to consider a far wider valence of virality
contaminating the social mood. [26] Love, or viral love as I call it,
might even be regarded as more contagious than fear. As Brennan
contends, love as an affect is very different to negative affects
which require an independent medium of transmission. Love, in
contrast, is both affect and the medium through which the affect
travels. [27] Viral love is in this sense both virus and viral
environment enfolded into one communicable space.
Whether or not viral love is in fact a more powerful contaminator
than fear is not really the focus here, but as a concept it usefully
brings together the notions of neurological unconsciousness and
affective contagion with the seminal contagion theory set out by
Tarde in the late 1800s. As Tarde claimed, the most ingenious and
potent of political strategies appeals not to fear alone, but also
the desire to love and be loved in return, and the potential to
contagiously pass on those loving feelings to others to imitate.
According to Tarde, it is the "power of belief and desire..." of the
"love and faith" of the social somnambulist (a neurologically
unconscious social subject by any other name) that produces
"obedience and imitation." [28] In other words, the somnambulist
succumbs to emotional appeals to his sense of fascination,
attraction, allure and absorption, and a tendency to become
distracted by the animations of his environment. Viral love may well
be compared, as such, to a contagious social neurosis, or mass
attention deficit disorder, but it is not feared like a microbial
disease. Despite being mostly unconscious of its affects, the
somnambulist is not controlled or panicked into submission by
epidemics of fear, but willingly engages with the faith and hope
inspired by his joyful and mesmeric encounter with love. [29] Social
obedience is partially guided then by "unheard-of expenditures of
love and of unsatisfied love at that." [30] Significantly, these
investments in love made by religious and political institutions of
power, Tarde claims, satisfy a "persistent need of loving and
admiring," requiring the raising up of "new idols... from time to
time." [31]
So who are the new idols of viral love on the contemporary political
scene? Well, in contrast to the microbial contagions of the GW Bush
administration and its appeal to the political unconscious through
the cold emotionless channels of advisors like Cheney and the fear
mongering of Rumsfeld, Lakoff notes how Obama's campaign of hope and
change managed to empathically tap into the infectable emotions of
many US voters. This was certainly a contagion befitting the age of
networks. From the outset, Obama's election campaign team made the
best possible use of the intimate features of Web 2.0 applications to
spread activism through joyful encounters experienced predominantly
*at-a-distance*. On ~Facebook~ you can become Obama's friend (one of
nearly 9.5 million to date). You can find out that he enjoys
"basketball, writing, spending time w/ kids" and what his favorite
music, books and TV shows are. Yet, it is the Obama team's
pre-election use of ~Flickr~ that best illustrates the empathic
virality of political love. [32] For it signalled the new president's
intention to sidestep the formality and distance of Cheney and
Rumsfeld, and instead intercept, through these networks, the
affective flows of those voters disillusioned by GW Bush. Of course,
Obama is a powerful orator, using rhetorical skills as old as
Aristotle, and that should never be underestimated, but the
emotionally charged and intimate pictures of his family on the eve of
his election spread through global media networks like a firestorm,
painting a mood and stirring up a worldwide love contagion. What is
important to stress here is not necessarily a dualistic relation
between fear and love, but a political element of communication that
exceeds the semiotic realm of effect. These are haptic images that
quite literally *touch* the eye. As one ~Flickr~ user's comments
perfectly capture the empathic transmission flowing from these
images: "I love this shot. You can feel the butterflies in their
stomachs as they are watching the returns." [33]
The events leading to the election of the first black US President
were certainly marked by a global outpouring of love. In this sense,
Obama's love contagion seemed to attune itself to a positive flow of
the love of difference. As Tony Negri suggested shortly after Obama's
election, behind this great victory may well be traces of the great
struggle of the multitude, certainly in terms of its positive role in
the globalization of the issue of race. [34] Yet, viral love can be
capricious too. Whether or not Obama can truly live up to the
expectations of the multitude project, and deliver the spontaneous
democracy it desires, is of course highly questionable. Perhaps the
short lived virality of this example of a *love of difference* has
already been subsumed into what Michael Hardt has identified as the
dictatorial counter forces of a *love of the same*. [35] Certainly,
as I write, Obama's contagion is already oscillating uncontrollably
between unrequited love and a love gone bad.
To conclude this section, what spreads might be considered using a
term Nigel Thrift adapts from both Brennan's theory of affect and
Tarde's original thesis. *Affective contagion* re-stresses the
'involuntary precognitive nature' of what is passed-on. [36] What
spreads enters into the porous neural network of outlier relations
that connect the self to the other (and other things) via the
communicable media of the skin, as well as the intimacy of social
networks. Again, this is not an exclusively biological or social
contagion, as traditionally understood. What spreads, as both Brennan
and Thrift point out, is what passes through an intersection point or
artifice. [37] Significantly, what spreads is passed on, not just
through fear and anxiety, but via passions, obsessions, and other
empathic transfers that are equally catching. What spreads certainly
has the capacity to capriciously affect (and become affected) across
the valence of positive and negative feelings. What spreads can be,
in other words, a fearful or joyful mesmeric encounter between
indistinct social and biological worlds. It is an encounter that
triggers empathic contagions that spread through adaptive atmospheres
of affect and imitative entrainment. As Brennan elegantly puts it,
"[m]y affect, if it comes across to you, alters your anatomical
makeup for good or ill." [38]
2. THE MECHANISM INDEPENDENCE OF CONTAGIOUS SOCIAL ENCOUNTER
------------------------------------------------------------
The idea that social encounter is interwoven with biological
adaptation is of course controversial. Before venturing further
into Tarde's contagion theory it is therefore necessary to grasp
the importance of the intersection point he sets up between
social and biological contexts and clearly distinguish it from
deterministic thinking.
Using Tarde to Avoid Biological and Social Determinism
While it is noteworthy that Thacker has cautiously approached how the
abstraction of contagion is transformed into non-biological contexts,
such as the meme, viral marketing and computer viruses, [39]
microbial contagion is still at risk of falling into a similar
deterministic trap. Indeed, it is perhaps too often the case that
social and cultural contagion theorists look to biological and
medical discourses for their sole inspiration. The problem being that
the analogies and metaphors made between the virality of genetic code
inheritance, cultural imitation and digital replication inform a
markedly biologically determined mechanism of infection. Like this,
memetics is exemplary. It plays fast and loose with a universal
biological referent and attempts by its advocates to claim Tarde as a
forefather of the meme are deeply misleading. [40] To be sure, a
Tardean "epidemiological" diagram can be clearly differentiated from
the deterministic logic of the neo-Darwinian meme/gene analogy, and
its claim to be the definitive biological force shaping social and
cultural fields. [41]
Since being fleetingly introduced in the closing chapter of Richard
Dawkins' bestseller _The Selfish Gene_ in 1976, the genocentric
evolutionism of the meme/gene analogy has gone on to be a highly
influential, albeit controversial explanation of how culture spreads
through a population. Accordingly, the meme virus is a unit of
imitation which determines the evolutionary invariance and survival
of the ideas that spread through a population of minds. It follows
that a population of minds will passively absorb the evolutionary
mutations directed by the meme in order to both survive and provide a
better medium of propagation for the future survival of evolved
memes. It is, at its extreme, part of a claim that everything from
the mind to communication technologies like the internet are the
outcome of memetic units constructing a more efficient communicable
environment in which to self-spread. [42]
This is not to say that memetics does not begin with an interesting
premise. Like Tarde, to some extent, it points to the often
unconscious transmission of what spreads through infectable
populations. Nonetheless, what is considered to spread becomes a
wholly mechanistic and self-contained evolutionary unit of imitation.
[43] As Brennan convincingly argues below, the neo-Darwinist adopts
an essentialist position that neglects to engage at all with the
capacity of affects to occur outside of the genetically formed
individual.
[According to neo-Darwinism] [t]he individual organism is born
with the urges and affects that will determine its fate. Its
predisposition to certain behaviors is part of its individual
genetic package, and, of course, these behaviors are
intrinsically affective. Such behaviors and affects may be
modified by the environment, or they may not survive because
they are not adaptive. But the point is that no other source or
origin for the affects is acknowledged outside of the individual
one. The dominant model for transmission in neo-Darwinism is
genetic transmission. [44]
To be sure, in both biological and non-biological contexts, the
neo-Darwinian paradigm negates the creative potential of chance
encounters by grossly inflating the status of a deterministic code
mechanism. By analogy it attributes the same high level of agency to
the fidelity, fecundity and longevity of the genetic package as it
does to the passive passing on of a competing idea. Memetics crudely
consigns, as such, the by and large capricious, unconscious and
imitative transmission of desire and social invention through a
population to an insentient surrender to a self-serving code. [45] As
Brennan continues, "the critical thing about it here is that its
proponents ignore the claims of social and historical context when it
comes to accounting for causation." [46]
While Tarde's epidemiological diagram and the biological determinism
of memetics are demonstrably incompatible, it is equally important to
distance him from social determinism. What composes the historical
forces of the social is all too often accepted as a given. So, before
thinking through the social context of contagion theory, it is useful
to stress the discernible differences between Tarde and the intrinsic
determinism of the Durkheimian social paradigm apparent in notions of
social epidemiology. [47] What concretely distinguishes Tarde from
Durkheim is the latter's attempt to render all things psychological,
biological, and neurological categorically distinct from the social,
while the former marks their inseparability. For example, in their
"momentous debate" at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903,
Durkheim reportedly made a particular issue of how the social
sciences needed to make its subject matter separate from these other
phenomena. As he puts it elsewhere:
[T]here is between psychology and sociology the same break in
continuity as there is between biology and the physical and
chemical sciences. Consequently, every time a social phenomenon
is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may rest
assured that the explanation is false. [48]
So how did Durkheim consider social emergence? To begin with, his
notion of "dynamic density" aligns him to particular theories of
social complexity and collective emergence very much at odds with a
contemporary reading of Tardean microsociology. In short, dynamic
density is a process of social emergence that increases by way of the
growing number and frequency of individual connectivities. By way of
his influence on Talcott Parsons' functionalism, Durkheim has
subsequently been claimed by a number of other authors as an early
pioneer of systems theory and cybernetic approaches to the social,
including notions of swarm, collective, and distributed intelligence.
[49] So while Durkheim's social theory points to the downward
causation awarded to social facts and collective representations,
both of these concepts are considered "~sui generic~." That is, they
emerge from out of a relation with their own social kind. Social
emergence is thus independent of psychological and biological factors
and derived instead from a social consciousness emerging from the
dynamic densities (connectivities) made between individuals. [50]
Dynamic density is, incidentally, an account of social agency that
can be linked to current network theory where there is also a heavy
emphasis placed on the agency of collective behavior emerging from a
network of individuals. [51] The synergy here is not precise, but
worthy of note nonetheless. For Durkheim society is "not at all the
illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being" others
consider it to be. On the contrary "the collective consciousness...
is the consciousness of the consciousnesses." [52] The organic glue
that brings social collectives together (makes it conscious, as such)
is founded in the collective consensus of individuals. Similarly, in
network theory, individuals become "individuals of a different sort."
It is, as such, the localized level of "consensus-building" that
links the individual "to the swarm as a whole." [53]
In lieu of Durkheim's concentration on a conscious social category
arising from out of associative individual densities, devoid of
biological or psychological content, Tarde's diagram comprises of
mostly unconscious flows of desire, passion, and imitative radiations
of muscular, as well as cerebral activities. In sharp contrast then,
Tarde's society of imitation does not fall back on collective or
individual representations. It is not at all about pure association
as it concerns the disassociated connectivity (unconscious
association) of a social somnambulist. Like this, Tarde's social
becomes an assemblage of relationality composed of self-spreading and
mesmeric imitative waves or flows. [54] What comes together does not
occur by way of a collective consciousness pushing down on the
individual, but is instead the "coherent" outcome of "desires that
have been excited or sharpened by certain [social] inventions," which
imitatively radiate outward, point-to-point, assembling what appear
to be the logical arrangements of social form, like markets, nations
and cities. [55] What radiates outwards are neither social facts nor
collective representations, but the microrelations of shared
passions, thoughts, conversations, beliefs, feelings and affects
which pass through porous self/other relations in all manner of
contagious environments, including corporate, economic and political
arenas. [56] What comes together "socially" in these Tardean spaces
is neither genetically subject-bound nor obligated to the wisdom of
collective consensus, but is rather the outcome of an
infra-individual relation that spreads below consciousness. The
social, according to Tarde, is a vital force that self-spreads,
radiates and vibrates out from capricious mechanism-independent
social encounters with events and accidents.
3. WHAT DIAGRAM?
----------------
Networks?
So beyond deterministic thinking, what kind of diagram can be used to
study the force of these encounters in contemporary contagious
environments? Is it, as Galloway and Thacker propose, the nodes and
the edges of the technical network? [57] Well, in part yes. Network
fever is indeed all-pervasive. Nevertheless, in ontological terms,
the network diagram has certain explanatory limitations that need to
be considered. Galloway and Thacker's own dissatisfaction with the
graph theories of network science, for example, point to a tendency
to attribute unfettered and apolitical naturalness to what are in
effect asymmetrical topological spaces. [58] Yet, these limitations
seem to be further heightened by the spatial homogeneity of temporal
considerations. Although Galloway goes on to interestingly locate the
event in the "emergence of the networked form of mediation" in
itself, [59] we should perhaps not altogether ignore the opinions
expressed in network science which openly acknowledge that these
topological spaces, standardized by nodes and edges, tend to freeze
out the temporality of what just occurred (the event). [60]
This solidifying effect is not only a problem in the nodes and edges
of network science, but in other theories of the network too. Despite
drawing on Tarde as a "thinker of networks" [61] to support the
agency to objects, a distributed personhood, and emphasize invention
over cognitive reflection, actor network theory (ANT) is weakened,
Thrift contends, by a tendency to sustain "effectivity." [62] The
problem with ANT is that it neutralizes the intensity of events,
giving precedence to "steely accumulation" over "lightening strikes,"
and "sustained strategies" over "sharp movements." [63] In fact,
being able to map *what just occurred* -- the shock events and
accidents of present-day contagious spaces, like those recently
experienced in the economy or fame obsessed cultural milieus
introduced below -- is of central concern to contagion theory. One
important challenge then is to find an appropriate abstract diagram
that better assimilates these temporal considerations. [64] Indeed,
what Tarde provides (and here the influence on Deleuze is made clear)
is an epidemiological diagram that exceeds a mere network of
relations (technical or otherwise) and points instead toward a far
more complex array of events and contagious assemblages of desire and
social invention.
The Events of Financial Contagion
There are, it seems, legitimate reasons to suggest that the spreading
of the recent financial crisis is linked to the growth of automated
networks and so-called algotrading. [65] However, beyond the
technological diagram there is another way to approach financial
contagion. That is to utilize what Massumi calls the *networkability
of events*. Like this, the temporal movement of the event is not
simply limited to network connectivity and distribution, [66] but is
instead inextricably coupled to the manifold components of
assemblages such as those that compose the current turmoil in the
economic system. The passing-on of financial contagion through these
economic assemblages, for example, is of course greatly influenced by
the digitalization and networking of financial information. Post-big
bang electronic circuits have played a major role in speeding up and
automating economic events and contagious spillovers. However, as
Massumi proposes, the "medium of communication" of events and their
subsequent contagions, is not the technology. [67] It is rather the
events' *movability*: its displacement, communicability and
relationality.
It is useful at this point to refer to Tarde's much earlier account
of times of boom and bust so as to more concretely stress the
significant role of the event in emergent economic relations. Tarde
presents an economy assembled around the repetition of periodic
events, but always prone to the occasional monstrous aperiodic shock
event or accident. So as to explicate how these events affect the
economy, he makes a clear distinction between two kinds of contagious
desire. [68] The first are "periodically linked desires." Organic
life, Tarde noted, "need[s] to drink or eat," clothe itself to ward
off the cold, and so on. [69] These necessary desires related to
survival become interwoven into the repetitious and mechanical habits
of day-to-day events. However, when such desires become economically
appropriated by social invention, they become "special"
desire-events, and can as such, take on an imitative and spontaneous
"life" of their own. According to Tarde, these are "capricious,
non-periodic, desires" [70] for things like fashion and fame that
organic life seems to passionately aspire toward, and imitate, mostly
unaware of the mesmeric and magnetic attraction they generate. On
occasions, the intensity of these passions build anomalous financial
bubbles, which continue to contagiously grow until they inevitably
burst, spilling over into the wider economy. [71]
Along these lines, Thrift, and more recently Latour and Lepinay, have
pointed to a revival of a Tardean political economy founded on the
eventful passing-on of contagious desires, passions, glories, and
intoxications. [72] Like this, the current financial crisis
demonstrates how the "reach and complexity [of imitative radiations]
has expanded inordinately since Tarde's time, allowing them undreamt
of generative powers." [73] The expansion of these flows of desire
and imitative social invention is accordingly linked to the growth of
an economy driven by "new socio-technical platforms," including vast
electronic networks and automated modes of trading, which not only
increase the fluidity and rapidity of financial information, but also
"power up" the communication of desire via "conversations" and
"hormonal splashes" spreading through the imitative meshwork of
financial media. [74] Nonetheless, the networkability (and
unpredictability) of the present-day economy, and its intimate
coupling to fluctuations in the market mood, is a distinctly social
phenomenon of a Tardean order. Although the economy can appear to be
a "logical arrangement" of events organized around predictable
network distributions, the backdrop by which desire becomes
appropriated by social invention is merely "capricious and
accidental." [75]
The Accidents of Contagious Fame
Another way by which to effectively trace the accidents of contagion
in Tarde's diagram is to consider how it accounts for the spreading
of fame for those individuals "fortunate" enough to encounter
ingenious ideas. Tarde's study of the nineteenth-century equivalent
of celebrity worship argues that fame is seemingly generated by small
deferential social groups, before it becomes more widely dispersed
into a public that "does not know its hero personally," but
nevertheless feels the same "fanatical, impassioned and devoted
admiration." [76] Yet, this jump from the respect of the few to the
emotionally charged adulation of the many (again, mostly
*at-a-distance*) is explicitly linked by Tarde to the spontaneity of
encounter with complex "currents of imitation." One person's fame is,
it would appear, an accidental unfolding of the events of their
eventual glory. A point Tarde reinforces in _Economic Psychology_
when he argues:
One can see... what is accidental about glory. Given equal
natural genius, a man will or will not encounter ingenious
ideas, depending on whether the elements of these ideas are or
are not brought to him by the intersecting currents of
imitation. And, given an equal ingeniousness of discovered
ideas, they will make him illustrious or obscure depending on
whether they do or do not encounter a public which desires them
and is disposed to welcome. [77]
Although this account ingeniously points to an infectable desiring
population as a necessary precondition for an epidemic of influence,
it also draws attention to a particular criticism of how Tarde
contends with the accidentality of what spreads. As Thrift points
out, Tarde may well have overestimated the accidentalness of
contagion, and negated, as such, the capacity for increasingly
mediated encounters of imitation-suggestibility to be "consciously
and carefully steered." [78] While Tarde successfully grasps "the
power of imitative processes in the mediated environments" of his
time, [79] he tended to...
See these mediated processes as spreading like wildfire, like
mobs all but out of control, or as currents pushing up against
each other in a fluid dynamics in which ascendancy could be all
but accidental. [80]
What Tarde seems not to have anticipated is the capacity of current
corporate and political agencies, working with PR strategists, media
experts, technologists, network scientists and so-called
neuromarketers, to produce the necessary mood environments ripe for
capturing the accidents of desire in social inventiveness, and making
populations readily infectious. In present-day spaces of consumption
there is, Thrift argues, "an ever-growing multiplicity and difference
of celebrities and notorieties buoyed up by persistent media
attention." [81] Celebrity is endemic to a media engineered desiring
machine marketers and politicians compete with each other to plug
into. This is a Tardean machinic diagram defined by "a potent
combination of technology and genre, imitation and hormone," [82] and
the reproduction of infra-individuals readily primed to desire and
pass on the inventions of celebrity hype to others.
To conclude this section there seem to be at least two diagrammatic
alternatives to choose from. The first regards the diagram as Tarde
seemed to, as all but accidental. The social somnambulist is merely
an unconscious conduit through which the capricious currents of
imitation flow. What spreads either catches on or simply dies,
depending on the chance encounter with the logical contests and
oppositions of imitative radiation. The second option is not however
as straightforwardly non-accidental as it is perhaps inferred above.
On the contrary, it stresses how spontaneous events can be captured,
measured, primed and organized, even made to look like an accident or
chance encounter, so as to dip below conscious awareness and become
more readily absorbed into the neurological unconsciousness. This
last option has weighty implications for the future of human agency.
4. VIRAL AGENCY: IN BETWEEN SPONTANEITY AND DICTATORSHIP
--------------------------------------------------------
The Tardean Social
The problem of human agency appropriately comes to the fore in
Thacker's microbial contagion theory. Again though, careful attention
needs to be paid to such questions concerning viral "life" and its
seemingly counter relation to human life. These two vital forces are,
it must be said, too often located on either side of the
aforementioned artifice that divides social and biological domains.
This artificial separation certainly reinforces the idea that there
are "unknown" biological mechanisms functioning outside of, and
independent of, the social field. Yes "we humans" do encounter a
whole host of nonhuman and human biological agencies mostly unawares
(viruses, pheromones, hormones, feelings, affects etc.). But that
does not make such agency-free infectious encounters discrete from
the social. As Tarde prophetically argues, the social is, for the
most part, an involuntary association with all manner of affecting
agencies that drift in and out of a somnambulistic disposition.
Indeed, *everything is a society*. The agency of others, and the
agency of other things, intertwines, as such, with an impression of
our own volition countered by an insensibility to the way our desires
are excited and appropriated into social inventions, and how we
become part of a repetitious and imitative rhythm of life.
Importantly, human freewill and biological inclinations are regarded
by Tarde as inseparable. As he puts it:
Nothing... is less scientific than the establishment of this
absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary
and the involuntary, between the conscious and unconscious. Do
we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to
almost mechanical habit? [83]
Neuromarketing
Over a hundred years later and Tarde's notion of the inseparability
of voluntary and involuntary behavior is becoming central to
biopolitical endeavors to organize consumptive labor. Just as Thrift
argues that the contemporary exercise of biopower evident in network
science closely follows a Tardean trajectory, [84] the so-called
neuromarketing expert claims to be able to measure the inseparable
and anesthetized degrees between conscious and unconscious
consumption. Drawing on recent inventions in neuroscience to inform
such business enterprises, the neuromarketing expert claims to be
able to gauge the spontaneous flows of consumer passion for services,
brands and products. With ready access to advanced emotional
recognition software and affective dataflows collected from the "user
testing" of consumption experiences increasingly delivered online and
through mobile devices, these highly qualified experts endeavor to
prime environments for future purchase intent. Blending eye tracking
software with electroencephalography (EEG) and galvanic skin response
(GSR), companies like Berkeley based _NeuroFocus_ not only measure a
consumer's cognitive attention and memory retention, but claim to
directly tap into what a consumer "feels about a product." [85] The
combination of eye movement with the measurement of electrical
activity in the brain, heart rate, and skin temperature to
effectively record a user's emotional arousal during consumption,
supplants the subjective inaccuracies of older marketing techniques
of self-reporting, like questionnaires, surveys and focus groups.
Another innovation from the Danish company, iMotions, flags a distinct
Tardean turn in market research technology. Distinct from slightly
older methods that tended to measure either *voluntary attention*
(bodily gestures, orientation, voice intonation, eye contact and
evasion, and nervous responses) or *involuntary inattention*
(increases in heart, pulse and breathing rates, and body temperature
and sweating) the Emotion Tool claims to tap into the relation
between the two. It targets, as such, the space in between the
*implicit*, unconscious part of the brain (the limbic system), which
is widely recognized as being hardwired to the nervous system and
physical reactions, and the *explicit*, conscious system (the frontal
cortex) associated with cognitive attention. It is the somatic
memory, physical responses and emotions of the implicit system that
are supposed to prime or guide the explicit system. [86] As the
developer of the Emotion Tool claims:
It is now generally accepted that emotions dominate cognition,
the mental process of the ability to think, reason and remember.
Therefore, there is a rapidly increasing interest in methods
that can tap into these mostly subconscious emotional processes,
in order to gain knowledge and understanding of consumer
behavior. [87]
The Emotion Tool tracks facial expressions, particularly those that
occur around the eyes, the amount of blinking, the duration of the
gaze, along with pupil dilation to measure emotional engagement. It
further incorporates an algorithmic assessment of two dimensions of
the emotional responses captured by the technology: *emotional
strength* and *affective valence*. The first gauges the level of
excitement an external stimulus provokes in the consumer, the second,
measures the feelings that follow the stimulus -- the degree of
attraction or aversion that an individual feels toward a specific
object or event. Scores are calculated from a range of pleasant,
unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. High scores are
defined as "affective," low scores "unaffective."
Neuromarketing ushers in new methods of persuasion designed to
sidestep the cognitive realm of visual representation and tap into
the implicit, unconscious affective systems of consumption. Over and
above focusing on what a consumer cognitively consumes in terms of
visual attention (assumed to be atop of the Kantian hierarchy of the
senses), neuromarketers measure the streams of affect the user
somatically absorbs in the atmosphere. As the enthusiastic CEO of
NeuroFocus puts it, a combination of techniques helps the marketer to
go beyond conscious consumer engagement with a product and actively
seek out what unconsciously attracts them.
Absorption is the ideal because it signifies that the consumer's
brain has not only registered your marketing message or your
creative content, but that the other centers of the brain that
are involved with emotions and memory have been activated as
well. The latest advances in neuroscience have revealed that all
three of these key elements -- attention, emotion and memory
retention -- are essential to the formation of what we call
"persuasion"- which in turn means purchase intent. [88]
This inherently Tardean appeal to the indivisible neurological space
between volition and mechanical habit suggests that "subliminal
advertising," as Thrift notes, "does work." [89]
Resistance to Imitation?
Indeed, the biopolitical and biophilosophical implications of these
many attempts to contaminate mood by appealing to the intersection
point at which social encounter and biological hardwiring meet are
far reaching. With a similar focus on contagious empathic transfers,
particularity those established in echoic relations with objects of
art, Barbara Maria Stafford makes, as such, a radical intervention
into the old dichotomy between rational freewill and ideological
false consciousness. [90] By noting how the imitative relation with
the other begins entirely with the involuntary encounter, she
combines the mirror neuron hypothesis with an implicit Tardean
perspective. This is perhaps how humans co-exist with nonhuman
agents. Not so much by way of the battle lines of microbial warfare,
but through the contamination of mood. Markets, marketers and
politicians are, it seems, beginning to fathom out how to more
effectively recognize and reproduce affective atmospheres able to
ripen the social mood and make it ready for capricious contagious
overspills. Horrendous as these neurological contagions may seem to
be, the potential to discern spontaneous epidemic flows of affect, to
educate the senses, and become decontaminated from empathic and
mesmeric transfers, at least provides a possible path of resistance
to the horrors of such a dictatorship. There are indeed a number of
authors who have approached the subject of counter-contagion and by
way of concluding this essay I will briefly refer to the various
ideas put forward.
The question of how to resist imitation-suggestibility is of course
complicated by Tarde's insistence that what spreads contaminates the
entire affective valence of the emotional landscape. So while Teresa
Brennan and Michael Hardt have forwarded love as a way of learning to
feel the sensations of others and discern the negative affect of a
love gone bad, [91] the virality of a Tardean love seems to evade the
affirmative power of loving attention. Viral love can, like a
hypnotist, steer unconscious desires and fascinations, guiding
attention and influencing beliefs and decision-making processes by
way of visceral contamination.
Nonetheless, Thrift points to a potential resistance movement
actualized from within the biopolitics of imitation: a social
invention organized around the very "speed and imitative capacities"
of the networks that function otherwise to denigrate democracy. [92]
What this infers is a counter politics of imitation that spreads not
by way of love, but similarly through sympathy. [93] We might
consider here attempts to trigger counter-contagions in the shape of
vigils, gathering protests, online petitions, and campaigns and fund
raising. Yet, once again, Tarde's skepticism concerning
counter-imitation needs to be noted.
In counter-imitating one another, that is to say, in doing or
saying the exact opposite of what they observe being done or
said, they are becoming more and more assimilated, just as much
assimilated as if they did or said precisely what was being done
or said around them... there is nothing more imitative than
fighting against one's natural inclination to follow the current
of these things, or than pretending to go against it. [94]
In short then, in becoming an adversary, one simply becomes more
associated in the assemblage of imitation. This is how, Tarde
contends, in the process of nonverbal communication, opposing facial
expressions do not simply oppose people, but unconsciously associate
them in an assemblage of imitation and counter-imitation.
One way in which we might become disconnected from this associative
chain is through the suppression of empathy and refusal to engage in
the transmission of affects, emotions and feelings of others. But of
course Tarde does not accept the Kantian proposition of apathy. Such
a break in communication with the outside word is regarded as
impossible. On the contrary, in order to break from these associative
chains he makes a crucial distinction between counter-imitation and
non-imitation. [95] In sharp contrast to sympathy, empathy, and
indeed apathy, Tarde's non-imitation is achieved through pure
antipathy. This is not therefore a disconnection or non-social
relation, but is a non-imitation of, and thus anti-social relation
with a "neighbor who is in touch." [96]
What Tarde proposes as an alternative seems to counterintuitively
reject Hardt's love of difference as a way to achieve spontaneous
democracy insofar as he offers a distinctly cognizant "refusal . . .
to copy the dress, customs, language, industry, and arts which make
up the civilization of [this or that] neighborhood." [97]
Non-imitation requires a constant assertion of antagonism,
"obstinacy," "pride," and "indelible feelings of superiority," that
empowers and produces a "rupture of the umbilical cord between the
old and the new society." [98] It involves a declaration that all
other societies are "absolutely and forever alien," and an
undertaking to never reproduce the rights, usages, and ideas of any
other society. It is indeed non-imitation that Tarde contends purges
the social of the contagions of the other. It is only after this
purge that old customs can be replaced by truly new fashions. For
Tarde then, it is the long term maintenance of non-imitation which
ensures that those who wish to resist the contagions of the present
political climate will in a moment of spontaneous revolution "no
longer find any hindrance in the way of [their own] conquering
activity." [99]
To be continued...
Notes
----------------
[1] Robert Baer, "This Deadly Virus: in a searing analysis of the
wave of suicide bombings, former CIA agent Robert Baer warns Britain
of the grave dangers ahead," ~The Observer~, August 7th, 2005.
[2] Jussi Parikka, _Digital Contagions. A Media Archaeology of
Computer Viruses_, (New York, Peter Lang, 2007), 93-96.
[3] Clive Thompson, "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" _Fast Company
Magazine_, February 1st, 2008
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.
html (accessed 13th July, 2010).
[4] Eugene Thacker, "Cryptobiologies," _ArtNodes: E-Journal on Art,
Science and Technology_, 6 Nov, 2006
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/6/dt/eng/thacker.html (accessed on 29th
June, 2010).
[5] This article is based on an earlier response to Eugene Thacker's
position paper forwarded to the _Exploring New Configurations of
Network Politics_ conference held in Cambridge in March 2010. See
Eugene Thacker, "On the Horror of Living Networks," posted to the
*conference* website,
http://www.networkpolitics.org/request-for-comments/dr-thackers-
position-paper (accessed on 29th June, 2010).
[6] Gustave Le Bon, _The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind_ (New
York, Dover, 2002); Gabriel Tarde, _Social Laws: An Outline of
Sociology_, trans. H.C. Warren (New York, London, Macmillan, 1899),
Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, trans. E.C. Parsons (New
York, Henry Holt and Company, 1903); and Gabriel Tarde, _Psychologie
Economique_, (Paris, Bibliotheque de Philosophie Contemporaine,
1903). Part of _Psychologie Economique_ is translated by Alberto
Toscano in _Economy and Society_, issue 36 no. 4, November, 2007.
[7] Eugene Thacker, _Exploring New Configurations of Network
Politics_.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Michel Foucault, _Madness and Civilization: A History of Sanity
in the Age of Reason_ (London, Routledge, 1989), 3.
[11] As Thacker argues, "[i]n this regard nothing is more exceptional
than the inability to distinguish between epidemic and war, between
emerging infectious disease and bioterrorism." Eugene Thacker,
"Living Dead Networks," _Fibreculture: Internet Theory, Criticism,
Research_ 4 (2005).
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue4/issue4_thacker.html (accessed
on 29th June, 2010).
[12] Roland Barthes, _S/Z_ (London, Cape, 1974).
[13] George Lakoff, _The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand
21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain_ (New York,
Viking, 2008).
[14] Ibid., 39-40.
[15] Ibid., 28.
[16] Ibid., 41.
[17] Antonio Damasio, _Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain_, (London, Vintage, 2006), xxii.
[18] Mirror neurons are located in the area of the brain called f5
which fires in response to the affects of others. Mirror neurons fire
more effectively in face-to-face encounters, when there is a need to
comprehend, or "mind read" the "intentions of others," but they
amount to more than simply recognizing a face. On the one hand, they
lead to the automated copying of emotions, like joy, sadness or
distress. On the other hand, they fire following the avoidance of
face-to-face contact, as people tend to do when lying, or following
the interruption of stable emotional signals through surprise, shock
and a failure to predict. See Barbara Maria Stafford, _Echo Objects:
The Cognitive Work of Images_ (Chicago, University of Chicago Press),
75-81.
[19] David Patrick Houghton, _Political Psychology: Situations,
Individuals, and Cases_ (London, Routledge), 143-154. Dr. A. K.
Pradeep, "Persuasion: The Science and Methods of Neuromarketing,"
industry whitepaper published on NeuroFocus website (September, 2007)
http://www.neurofocus.com/pdfs/NeuroFocusWhitePaper_Persuasion.pdf
(accessed 29th June, 2010).
[20] Eugene Thacker, "On the Horror of Living Networks."
[21] Lakoff, 56.
[22] Teresa Brennan, _The Transmission of Affect_ (Ithaca, London,
Cornell University Press, 2004), 62-63.
[23] Ibid., 49.
[24] Ibid.
[25] As Deleuze infers, it is best not to confuse affect with such
phantasy. Gilles Deleuze, _Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews 1975-1995_, (New York, Semiotext(e)), 102.
[26] See Tony D Sampson, _Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of
Networks_ (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, due 2012).
[27] Teresa Brennan, 32.
[28] Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, trans. E.C. Parsons (New
York, Henry Holt and Company, 1903), 80.
[29] As Tarde puts it: "[i]t is a great mistake to say that
populations are controlled by fear alone... [I]n spite of frequent
epidemics of panic, hope is certainly more catching than terror."
Ibid., 196.
[30] Ibid., 202.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Obama images archived at:
http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/sets/72157608716313371/
(accessed on 29th June, 2010).
[33] Specific Obama image and flickr user comment archived at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/3008254887/ accessed
on 29th June, 2010).
[34] Global Project, "Behind this victory, the great multitudinarian
struggle," an interview with Antonio Negri, ~Global Project~ website,
http://archive.globalproject.info/art-17685.html, translation
archived at:
http://anomalia.blogsome.com/2008/11/06/negri-obamas-victory-the-
multitude/ (accessed on 29th June, 2010).
[35] Michael Hardt, "Love as a Political Concept," a lecture for the
European Graduate School, 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioopkoppabI (accessed 2nd September
2008).
[36] Nigel Thrift, _Nonrepresentational Theory:
Space/Politics/Affect_ (London, New York: Routledge, 2008), 139.
[37] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," paper presented at the Social Science and Innovation
Conference at the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), London, UK,
February 11th, 2009), 8.
http://www.aimresearch.org/uploads/File/Presentations/
2009/FEB/NIGEL%20THRIFT%20PAPER.pdf (accessed on August 3rd, 2009).
[38] Teresa Brennan, 74.
[39] Eugene Thacker, "Living Dead Networks".
[40] Paul Marsden, "Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the
Laws of Imitation," _Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of
Information Transmission_, 4 (2000)
http://jomemit.cfpm.org/2000/vol4/marsden_p.html (accessed on
December 10th, 2007).
[41] Richard Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_ (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1976).
[42] Susan Blackmore, _The Meme Machine_ (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1999).
[43] Ibid.
[44] Teresa Brennan, 74.
[45] This all contrasts starkly with Tarde's critique of the
Darwinist emphasis on a biological form of struggle and opposition at
the expense of cross-breeding and hybridization. See Bruno Latour and
Vincent Antonin Lepinay, _The Science of Passionate Interests: An
Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology_ (Chicago,
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009), 36. Moreover, even critics from within
memetics point to a failure to locate an equivalent code mechanism at
work in cultural environments. As Dawkins argues, unlike the gene,
the meme has yet to find its Crick and Watson. See Richard Dawkins
cited in Susan Blackmore, xii.
[46] Teresa Brennan, 74.
[47] See a similar discussion in Tony D Sampson, "Error-Contagion:
Network Hypnosis and Collective Culpability," in Mark Nunes (ed.),
_Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures_ (New York,
London, Continuum, 2010), 239-240.
[48] Emile Durkheim, _The Rules of the Sociological Method_ (New
York, The Free Press, 1982 [1884, 1895]), trans. W. D. Halls, 129.
[49] Robert Keith Sawyer, _Social Emergence: Societies as Complex
Systems_ (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005),
1-9, 63-124; Elias L. Khalil and Kenneth Ewart Boulding (eds.),
_Evolution, Order and Complexity_ (London, Routledge Taylor & Francis
Ltd, 1996); Jennifer M. Lehmann, _Deconstructing Durkheim: A
Post-Post-structuralist Critique_ (London, New York, Routledge,1993),
129; N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), _Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction_ (Oxford, New York,
Berg, 2006), 377.
[50] Robert Keith Sawyer, _Social Emergence: Societies as Complex
Systems_, 105.
[51] Eugene Thacker, "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes: Part Two,"
_CTheory_ (2004) http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=423
(accessed on 29th June, 2010).
[52] Emile Durkheim, _The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life_,
trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1915),
444.
[53] Eugene Thacker, "Networks, Swarms, Multitudes: Part Two."
[54] As Deleuze and Guattari contend, Tarde's associations had
nothing to do with either collective or individual representations,
but pertain instead to a flow or a wave. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ (London, New York, Continuum, 1987),
218-219.
[55] Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, 109.
[56] Nigel Thrift, _Nonrepresentational Theory:
Space/Politics/Affect_, 220-254.
[57] See further discussion in Tony D Sampson and Jussi Parikka,
"Learning from Network Dysfunctionality: Accidents, Enterprise and
Small Worlds of Infection," Conference Proceedings, ISEA 2010 RUHR:
16th International Symposium on Electronic Art.
[58] Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, _The Exploit: A Theory
of Networks_ (Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press,
2007), 27.
[59] Alex Galloway's position paper for the Exploring New
Configurations of Network Politics conference
http://www.networkpolitics.org/request-for-comments/alexander-r-
galloways-position-paper (accessed 8th July 2010).
[50] Duncan Watts, _Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age_
(London, Vintage, 2003), 50.
[61] Bruno Latour, "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social," _The
Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences_,
Patrick Joyce (ed.), (London, Routledge, 2002), 117-132. Version at:
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/082.html (accessed July
09).
[62] Nigel Thrift, _Nonrepresentational Theory:
Space/Politics/Affect_, 110.
[63] Ibid., 110-111.
[64] It is Deleuze who notes the importance of finding the
appropriate abstract diagram. A diagram that can both exercise a
force (or many forces of relation) on the social field and display
these relations between forces that determine features and functions
apparent in the field. Gilles Deleuze, _Foucault_ (London, Athlone
Press, 1988), 36, 34-44.
[65] Sean Dodson, "Was software responsible for the financial
crisis?" ~The Guardian~, Thursday 16th October, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/16/computing-software-
financial-crisis (accessed 12th July, 2010).
[66] Brian Massumi, _Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation_, (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002), 86.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Gabriel Tarde, "Economic Psychology," translated by Alberto
Toscano, _Economy and Society_, 36(4), November 2007, 633.
[69] Ibid.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Capitalism has a long history of such bubble building events.
See for example Sadie Plant's account of Tulipomania in the 1630s in
her Foreword to _The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies
From the Dark Side of Digital Culture_, Jussi Parikka and Tony D
Sampson (eds.),vii-x.
[72] Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay, _The Science of
Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic
Anthropology_.
[73] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," 3.
[74] Ibid.
[75] As Tarde puts it: We see specific desires that have been excited
or sharpened by certain inventions or practical initiatives, each of
which appears at a certain point from which, like a luminous body, it
shoots out incessant radiations which harmoniously intersect with
thousands of analogous vibrations in whose multiplicity there is an
entire lack of confusion... The order in which these inventions or
discoveries appear and are developed is, in a large measure, merely
capricious and accidental; but, at length, through an evitable
elimination of those which are contrary to one; another (i. e., of
those which more or less contradict one another through some of their
implicit propositions), the simultaneous group which they form
becomes harmonious and coherent. Viewed thus as an expansion of waves
issuing from distinct centers and as a logical arrangement of these
centers and of their circles of vibration, a nation, a city, the most
humble episode in the so-called poem of history, becomes a living and
individual whole. Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, 109.
[76] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," 19.
[77] Gabriel Tarde, "Economic Psychology," 620.
[78] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," 18.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Ibid.
[81] Ibid., 18-19.
[82] Ibid., 18.
[83] Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, xi.
[84] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," 24.
[85] Dr. A. K. Pradeep, "Persuasion: The Science and Methods of
Neuromarketing."
[86] Jakob de Lemos, "Measuring Emotionally 'Fuelled' Marketing,"
_Admap Magazine_, Issue 482, April 2007, 40-42.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Dr. A. K. Pradeep, "Persuasion: The Science and Methods of
Neuromarketing."
[89] Nigel Thrift, "Pass it On: Towards a Political Economy of
Propensity," 22.
[90] Barbara Maria Stafford, _Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of
Images_, 76-77.
[91] Teresa Brennan, _The Transmission of Affect_, 23; and Michael
Hardt, "Love as a Political Concept."
[92] Nigel Thrift, _Nonrepresentational Theory:
Space/Politics/Affect_, 253.
[93] Ibid.
[94] Gabriel Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_, preface to Second
Edition, xvii
[95] Ibid., xix.
[96] Ibid.
[97] Ibid.
[98] Ibid.
[99] Ibid.
Acknowledgements:
----------------
Special thanks to the editors and reviewers at _CTheory_ for their
helpful, informed and constructive commentary on the first drafts of
this essay. I wish to also thank Jussi Parikka for his comments on a
very early version. Absolutely no thanks though to Lord Browne, N
Clegg, V Cable, D Cameron and G Osbourne for their endeavours to
decimate the universal right to higher education in the UK. Shame on
you! *You said cutback, we say fight back.*
----------------
Tony D. Sampson is a London-based academic and writer. He is the
co-editor (with Jussi Parikka) of _The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn
and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture_ (Hampton
Press, 2009), and is currently completing a book on this subject
titled _Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks_
(University of Minnesota Press, due 2012).
_____________________________________________________________________
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