Afterword

6. The Ontology of Ontologies

At this point, however, there appears to be a potentially serious methodological impasse. As I have argued, the individual monads' universal visions in their pure state are only imperfectly reflected by the forms taken at an aggregate level, where the elements must either be subsumed, or fundamentally remake themselves, in the process of shaping the forms. Hence, the types of explanation which are possible at the two levels will be very different. Our understanding of the individual element will flow naturally from the unique vision towards which it tends, but, precisely because of this, will be almost entirely inapplicable to reality, since the latter is composite in nature. Conversely, our understanding of the aggregate, while pragmatically more useful, will inevitably be highly imprecise.²⁹

If so, this implies that explanations which are fully coherent are likely to be truthful only in highly unusual cases, such as the extreme rarefaction of Crookes' 'radiant matter' state (p. 44), and conversely, that explanations which are adequate to the facts are unlikely to be coherent. Theories of highly general application (e.g. Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of natural selection) will always ipso facto be highly selective and partial, and, Tarde argues, doomed to failure in the very long run. To be sure, at an intermediate level, it is possible to gain some knowledge of macroscopic phenomena, but only because these phenomena are generally dominated by a leading element. However, such knowledge is partial and provisional, comparable to the knowledge we can gain of a society from official statistics; because it is dependent upon a particular ontic régime, it will be valid only until the latter's demise. Tarde thus exactly inverts the Aristotelian picture of scientific explanation as moving from the particular to the general. Rather, he argues, adequate explanations always move from the general to the particular, from aggregates to the elements which constitute them.

Now, while this may well be methodologically productive in specific contexts, it seems to rule out a priori any theory or explanation which claims even minimal generality. Any such theory, as outlined above, will be inevitably inadequate because it cannot escape its complicity with the movement by which the leading elements occlude the subordinate ones whence their power derives, and hence fails to see past the particular configuration to the critical potencies which germinate within it. Moreover, ontological theories, which claim to be universal explanations, would present the most egregious examples. In particular, it is hard to deny that Tarde's own theory makes highly general claims about the nature of reality, and should itself be ruled out by its own epistemological stringency, hence becoming caught in a performative contradiction.

The solution to this issue presented in Tarde's other texts³⁰ is that the heterogeneity of the elements is compatible with the existence of large-scale repetition, and that it is these repetitions that form the basis for scientific generalization. These repetitions do not simply reflect the structures of the aggregate, but are rather present already at the elementary level. Nonetheless, within the reading developed here, this response is ultimately unsatisfying. The repetitions of the elements would seem either to be only a temporary alignment of avidities, such that the epistemological issue remains unaddressed, or to be premised on a substrate of structures or behaviors which would then be the true basis of the elements, albeit a basis of the nature of a quantity or an event rather than an entity.

A rather different resolution is suggested, if not explicitly set forth, by MS itself. The key would lie, again, in returning to the universalizing tendency of the monads. The enterprise of explanation could then be seen as akin less to the process of aggregate formation as empirically observed, than to the universal visions present within each element. In that case, the scientific or metaphysical theories we develop to explain reality would not be foreign to the elements, but on the contrary, would be profoundly continuous with the cosmic plans which form their own most intimate reality. Each element has, and in some sense is, an ontological theory of its own. Thus, Tardean metaphysics could be described as an ontology of ontologies: the universe is woven from the theorizing activity of its innumerable elements.³¹ What nonetheless remains inescapable in the epistemological paradox, and must be negotiated at each stage, is that the universal drive to dominate both blinds such theories to the truth of the dominated reality, and at the same time reflects the more basic truth that that reality is itself fundamentally determined by its own drive to domination, which is also a vision of how the universe ought to be. To return from the general to the particular is the goal of knowledge only because it brings more clearly into focus the particular's own knowledge of the general, and not, as the reductionist would argue, because it unveils the mute, brute truth behind the general and beyond knowledge. Our understanding of reality is ultimately reality's understanding of itself.

Finally, the ontological activity of the elements, and the combination of fundamental kinship and mutual misdirection which joins the theorist with the universe theorized, are also key to reconciling the two central theses of the priority of the element over the aggregate, and the priority of the relation between them over both its terms. The element is prior because the universal is contained within it, in a reflection which can only be discerned confusedly in the aggregate; but the relation is prior because the impulse to the universal, in which the whole being of the element ultimately consists, must pass through the aggregate (and indeed is doomed never to transcend the aggregate, be it on an astronomical scale). In this sense, the forgetfulness of theory only responds to the forgetfulness of reality, and first and foremost, that of the reality of the theorist herself. The essential occlusion and obscurity which infect any knowable macroscopic order are the obverse of the knower's own desire to possess the known, a desire of such strength that it always outweighs and eclipses the counter-desires which ultimately make it possible.

Notes

29. We might relate this point to the Leibnizian problematic summarized by Deleuze in the form of a critique of the Cartesian principle of the ‘clear and distinct’: ‘a clear idea is in itself confused; it is confused in so far as it is clear’ (Difference and Repetition, p. 213, original emphasis). MS, however, goes further: the conflation of the distinct-obscure (the elements) which gives rise to the clearconfused (the aggregate) arises not only from an epistemic lack, but ontologically, from the interrelations of the elements themselves—which arguably also calls into question Deleuze’s own, fundamentally structuralist, solution.↩
30. See Social Laws, ch. I; The Laws of Imitation (Les Lois de l’imitation), ch. I. In general, it should be noted that the sharp ontological contrast in MS between element and aggregate is greatly softened in Tarde’s other works, which are accordingly much more sanguine regarding the intelligibility of aggregative processes (e.g. imitation). Some readings would attempt to reconcile the texts by seeing the self-actualisation of the monads as simply of a piece with the formation of aggregates (thus E. V. Vargas, ‘Tarde on drugs, or measures against suicide’, in Candea, The Social after Gabriel Tarde, cited above), but this seems to go against the grain of MS. As Toews hints, MS may in this respect be ultimately irreconcilable with Tarde’s sociological works (D. Toews, ‘The renaissance’, cited above).↩
31. This insight is more likely to be familiar to the contemporary reader in the context of the social sciences, where one might think of ethnomethodology’s accounts of meaning-making practices, or of Viveiros de Castro’s insight that ‘doing anthropology means comparing anthropologies’ (E. Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3-22). The possibility of an ontological redeployment of such ideas is, I think, one of the most interesting directions signposted by MS.↩