7. Humanism and Realism

In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to offer a few brief suggestions as to how the Tardan theory might usefully inform contemporary debates. I have particularly in mind the themes of humanism, or anthropocentrism, and realism. In fact I take these as essentially a single problematic, in so far as realism is defined as holding that reality is independent from human cognition or experience.³² This is one area where Tarde's theory seems to find considerable contemporary resonance, since it has become clear that the critical project of decentring humanism, whether or not one agrees with its ultimate goals, holds considerable promise as an analytical tool, and may find valuable support in the theory of pansocial ontology. One concern here, however, is that, as critics of post-humanism have been quick to argue, the erasure of the boundary between humans and non-humans may work less to humanize the non-human than to dehumanize the human, that is, less to extend the field of personal and moral relations from the human to the non-human than to legitimize impersonal and amoral relations to human others. Traditional organicist sociology, with its frequently authoritarian sympathies, would be a case in point. Tarde's theory does little to calm these fears, and much of it can be read in either direction. The analogy between social and natural law, for example, may be seen as an extraordinary expansion of the possibilities of social transformation beyond the wildest dreams of the utopian socialist tradition, but it could equally be taken as a counsel of despair for any struggle against injustice, which may as well seek to overthrow the law of gravity.

In any case, and aside from such abstract moralizing, the always two-sided nature of pansocial thinking means that Tarde cannot be regarded as unequivocally post-or anti-humanist. It is clear that his theory responds to the desire to situate human concerns and viewpoints within the vastly greater sweep of organic and inorganic nature, and thus to make possible a genuinely realist metaphysics. At the same time, however, it explicitly makes the human the measure of all things in the sense that inter-human social relations constitute 'the relation par excellence' (p. 94), the paradigm and framework for the system as a whole, for all that Tarde claims the analogical argument does not rest on specifically human facts (pp. 18ff.). Moreover, although Tarde does not posit a deep qualitative chasm between humans as cognizers and users of representational thought and a non-human reality devoid of these capacities, there is still a consequential quantitative difference. The possessive relation of the mind to the objects of its thought is in general not reciprocated, and thought enjoys a 'special dominion over the world' (p. 55). The reason for this is that possession by physical means is inevitably limited in extent; even the most massive celestial bodies can only bring so many others within their field of action. In the realm of organic life this is less true, as witnessed by the capacity of microscopic organisms to destroy physically much greater ones through infection. Cognitive representation, however, goes beyond even this in allowing the possession of any entity at all, transcending any requirement of physical presence. That is, the primacy of human societies in the theory is not merely a question of expository convenience, but reflects an inescapable fact about the place of humans in reality.

Thus, if, as argued above, the world should fundamentally be seen as a contest of theories, this contest does not take place on a level playing field; some elements and societies have considerable advantages. Moreover, this ontological fact about human beings resonates with the primary argument for accepting pansocial ontology, namely its foundation in our immediate sense of our own being—in, finally, our being human. The monadological theory, then, post-humanistically points to the contingency of its own development out of the situatedness of a text written by and for human beings. At the same time, however, as an ontology of ontologies, it elevates this contingency of theoretical elaboration to the principle of reality itself. In terms of realism, and by way of resurrecting one of its long-buried adversaries, Tarde's theory is ultimately less realist than it is social constructionist—not, of course, in that reality is socially constructed, but in that it is socially constructing, the broken surface of an ocean of sociality which far exceeds the human and yet is one with it.

Notes

32. This definition is not entirely uncontroversial, but it saves a certain amount of time.↩