[P2P-F] Tarde et al

Mon Jan 17 07:11:39 CET 2011

thanks Richard,

the author's conclusion indeed suggests exactly that:

"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."

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Richard Carlson <rcarlson at olypen.com>wrote:

> Michel
>
> I liked the recontextuaization of Tarde, because all these early 20th
> century thinkers like Tarde, Bergson, Aurobindo et al need to be re-read in
> light of the present. In Aurobindo's case we recontextualize his yoga, in
> light of rapid cultural evolution, to demonstrate
> that certain practices of yoga, stripped of their reactionary Hindu or new
> age context can be used as practices to resist the appropriation of
> attention by the global machinery of consumption. Indeed if one reads
> Aurobindo in context his yoga, can not really be separated from a liberation
> practice that was also evolved as a resistance to colonial occupation.
>
> Similarly when, the author of this article and people like Stiegler and
> others following Foucault express a need for constructing practices or
> "inner technologies"  as a resistance to the contagion streaming through
> neo-liberal networks of global capitalism, that capture attention by
> employing the neuro-marketing of consumption, the need arises to develop
> practices that help to re-appropriate attention and resist conditioning by
> either markets or political ideologies.  In the context of "phd" (aka
> Post-Human Destinies) we have suggested that -contrary to its appropriation
> by fundamentalist Hindus or new age philosophers like Ken Wilber-
> that integral yoga when practiced with a critical eye toward the contagion
> of markets and ideologies can be used as an effective inner-technology to
> facilitate liberation from their consumptive demands.
>
>
> Rich
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 15, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> Dear Richard,
>
> thanks for this forward, I am aware of Tarde's work mostly through the
> reading of Maurizio Lazzarato (in French), and though I find it interested,
> I do not use it much, I guess I'm still much more of a
> structuralist-oriented thinker,
>
> but please keep forwarding such items,
>
> I'm particularly interested in the 'yoga of resistance', can you tell us
> more? and what is 'phd'?
>
> Michel
>
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Richard Carlson <rcarlson at olypen.com>wrote:
>
>> btw. do you know Gabriel Tarde, there is an excellent article by Tony
>> Sampson on network/contagion social theory that puts him into current
>> perspective visa vie Durkheim, Deleuze, Thacker, Hardt and other while
>> exploring the often unconscious transmission of what spreads through the
>> affective feedback loops of infectable populations, - what intrigues me is
>> that the resistance methods he explores at the end has interesting
>> intersection points with what on "phd" we have begun calling the yoga of
>> resistance
>>
>> "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]<http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675#_edn54> 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] <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675#_edn55> 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]<http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675#_edn56> 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"
>>
>>
>> *Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks*
>>
>> http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675
>>
>>
>> ~r
>>
>
>
>
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