The Dynamics of Possession
Content
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
1
The
Dynamics
of
Possession
An
Introduction
to
The
Sociology
of
Gabriel
Tarde
The final version of this text was published in D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium , Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008 Didier Debaise (Translated by Arnaud Coolsaet)
Does sociology require metaphysics? This question pervades Gabriel Tarde’s (18431903) work, and places him in fundamental opposition to the founders of modern sociology, in particular to Emile Durkheim. What Tarde tried to do, and what makes him remarkably relevant today, was to give social sciences the metaphysics they required. As I will show here, he attempted to open the field of sociology to realms—notably the physical and biological— that seemed closed to it. Tarde’s metaphysical system is organized around the concept of possession. As early as 1898, in Monadologie et sociologie, Tarde speaks of possession as a “universal fact”. This does not refer to a primary category of being—a category from which, through a process of increasing complexity, it would be possible to derive the whole of more complex forms of experience. In my view, on the contrary, it signifies the giving of a maximal extension to the concept of possession. It can thereby be possible to follow both the common lines that characterize the physical, the biological and the human forms of existence, and to become sensitive to the specificity of each of these paths. With respect to the questions that crossed sociology in regard to power, domination and coercion processes; to the analysis of the modes of establishment and organization of groups; to the research into the individual or collective foundations of societies—in each case, Tarde’s metaphysics should enable the substitution of these questions with those of another order: In a given situation, is the possession unilateral or symmetrical? Does the possession tend to amplify and intensify or,
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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on the contrary, to loosen and break down? In what ways does it spread and how far does its grip reach? A new monadology By introducing ‘phenomena of possession’ such as sleepwalking, hypnotic practices, imitative influence, or social magnetism as immaterial but constitutive principles of societies, Tarde faces a major problem. The notion of possession seems to be wrapped up in a number of anthropological, social and religious connotations that overdetermine its essence. Does it not inescapably refer back to either the active sense of the use of a property, be it material or spiritual; or to the passive sense of an object or individual captured by others or put under their spell? Does it not presuppose something else – object or subject – prior to its existence, that would be its medium? Is possession not by definition secondary to a being, whatever may be its role? On my view, the main reason for which the metaphysics of possession are necessary is as follows. It must allow, firstly, the subtraction of the sociological surveys from an implicit ontology – which is all the more effective as it remains in the background. According to this ontology there should exist media – objects, individuals or groups – that are clearly identifiable to the social dynamics. Second, it has to be able to construct a minimal definition of possession that can hold (necessarily) for all forms of existence—physical as well as biological and social. It is in Leibniz that Tarde finds the main conditions for the metaphysics of possession. He sees in Monadology (1714) the beginning of a movement of dissolution of classical ontology (notably the identity of “being” and “simplicity”), which would, in a still implicit and unthinking form, find its most obvious confirmation in today’s science. "The monads, daughters of Leibniz,” writes Tarde (1999: 33), “made a long way since their father. By various and independent paths, unnoticed by scientists, they sneak into the heart of contemporary science.” A new alliance between philosophy and science would then become necessary. This alliance would at the same time endeavor to clarify the idea of the “infinitely small” and try to unfold it inside vaster domains – vaster than those that can be granted by specialized sciences, and introducing it within their determined fields. This is so because “it is not only chemistry, which while progressing, seems to lead us towards the monads. It is also physics,
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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natural sciences, history and mathematics themselves” (ibid: 34).
Science inherits this
process of dissolution of any ontology that presents itself as the ultimate term of an investigation of the forms of being. Even the ultimate terms of a particular science are only relative to a provisional perspective inherent to this science: “[T]hese last elements to which each science ends up—the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom—are only ultimate in the eyes of their particular science” (1999: 36). The question is thus to know how far this dissolution can reach. “From elimination to elimination, where will we end up […]?” Tarde’s answer is unambiguous: “[T]here are no means to stop on this slope to the infinitesimal, which becomes, surely very unexpectedly, the key to the entire universe.” (199: 37). The infinitely small differs qualitatively from the finite on which ontology was built. The beings that compose it go to infinity in an increasingly imperceptible fashion, forming a continuous bundle wherein no parts, limits, distance or position can be distinguished. Consequently, there is no reason for us to talk of ‘being’ anymore, but rather of infinitesimal agencies and remarkable actions, inside a finite movement. “[T]hose would then be the real agents, these small beings whom we say are infinitesimal. Those would be the real actions, these small variations of which we say are infinitesimal.” (1999: 40). The monadconcept becomes purely functional in Tarde, producing a variation or a difference inside a continuous movement. It is an agency of variation that goes ‘differing,’ that is to say, that has step by step repercussions on the whole universe, although according to variable degrees of intensity. Hence, this is how we can understand a principle that we have to place in the centre of these metaphysics: “To exist is to differ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different.” (1999: 73). The souls of the world Maintaining that the ‘agency of differentiation’ is the most characteristic and most common property of the monads, Tarde takes up another requirement of Monadology, namely, the monist one. Too often monism is confused with some kind of Platonism and opposed to pluralism.[1] When Tarde asserts that there are no two identical monads (he takes over the principle of indiscernibles); that reality is composed of “a swarming of innovating individualities, each one sui generis marked by its own distinctive seal, recognizable in
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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thousands” (1999: 65); and that these even go differing;—he is without a doubt heir to a kind of pluralism. This is much like Leibniz himself, when he claims that “[i]n nature there are never two beings which are perfectly alike and in which it is not possible to find an internal difference, or at least a difference founded upon an intrinsic quality.” (1714/1989: section 9). The difference is not a matter of shape or individuality of the monad – these would permit comparison and thus the distinction from others – but of its characteristic movement (“appetition”). It is here that monism takes its full-fledged sense. We can try to define it in the following manner: the dynamic principles are valid for each monadic existence, but the ways in which they are involved inside a particular monad pertain to the singularity of the latter. There is thus a homogeneity of principles and a plurality of ways of existence. As Tarde (1893: 33) says: the monads presuppose “the discontinuity of the elements and the homogeneity of their being”. Tarde is not the only one in the 20th century to attempt to link an existential pluralism to a kind of ontological monism or univocal nature of being. A similar tendency can be found in philosophers defining contemporary monadology in their own way—such as A. N. Whitehead, E. Souriau, G. Simondon and G. Deleuze.[2] Each of them takes up the Leibnizian idea according to which the dynamic principles operating in the individuation of beings are the same for all, but actualizing themselves in different manners. For instance, in Process and Reality, wherein Whitehead defines “actual entities” (which correspond to the monads), he writes: They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. (1929: 18) In regard to this distinction, monism, according to Tarde (1999: 44), can be understood in three different ways: (1) we can consider “movement and consciousness, for instance, the vibration of a brain cell and the corresponding state of mind, as the two sides of a same fact, and we delude ourselves in this reminiscence of the antique Janus”; (2) it signifies that a more fundamental reality could be the “common source”, but we then only win “a trinity instead of a dualism”; or finally, (3) (and this is the position to which Tarde commits himself) we state “that matter is mind, nothing else”. How then does this kind of
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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monism distinguish itself from a kind of subjective idealism that would state that matter is only representation or idea? Tarde does not claim that matter is a product of the mind, but that it is already, so to say, mind from the inside. After “having reduced the universe to powder” monadology has, according to him, “spiritualized its particles” (1999: 55). The process of dissolution previously described leaves no other possibility than “spiritualizing” these agency-nodes, or remarkable points, of which the universe is composed. Thus Tarde does not state that the universe is a representation, but rather that it “is composed of others souls than mine, basically similar to mine” (1999: 44). This universal psychomorphism is therefore not a negation of matter—which becomes an effect among others of the agencies of the soul.[3] It is only opposed to every kind of materialism that would claim that the dynamic principles could just be like matter and could be derived from it. Matter appears as an effect, a phase, or even as a mode of regrouping inside the multiplicities of agencies of mind, operating one over the other. Although Tarde does not attempt to make these elements coherent in a theory of possession, we can nevertheless bring out three fundamental principles for these metaphysics: (1) the process of dissolution, which allows us to subtract the possession of any prior reality of which it would be dependent, that is to say of any first ontology. Beyond the possessive agency, there is nothing; we only find a “pure void”; (2) this possessive agency is an individuation principle[4] that applies to all beings; it signifies that this action is both what beings have most in common (the universal fact) and what defines their difference (the ways of possession); and (3) the possessive agency should not be confused with the action of ‘taking possession’ of an object by subject. This would lead to a reduction of the dynamics of power to simple power relationships. Instead, the agency is essentially immaterial and inductive, which is pointed out by notions such as “influence”, “sympathy”, “imitation”, “attraction” and “magnetism”. The powers of possession Having brought these principles out, we can deepen the question and ask: What is a ‘possessive agency’? Tarde’s monism forces us to ask the question on the level of the only “existing” realities, namely the souls. It is soul that possesses and is possessed; it is soul that forms these dynamics of possession at the origin of societies. We would misunderstand Tarde’s panpsychism if we interpret it as the resurgence of a kind of spiritual or religious
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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substantialism. The word “soul” has for him an exclusive technical sense; according to the interpretation I would like to give here, it defines the point of intersection between two possessive powers: belief and desire. From very early on, Tarde was interested in these two “powers of the soul”, in which he saw the source of all social and psychological phenomena. Already in his first philosophical article, La croyance et le désir (1880), he writes: “At the bottom of internal phenomena, whatever they are, the analysis pushed to the limit will never discover more than three irreducible notions: belief, desire, and their point of application, pure sense.” (1880: 290). He further adds, “the two first notions are the forms or the innate and constitutive powers of the subject”. They appear as the native powers of all faculties—memory, perception and imagination. By their compositions and relations, belief and desire produce the more complex forms of experience of the subject. They do not limit themselves to the constitution of the subject whatsoever, but unfold themselves externally in the relations with others subjects, and become, by growing complexity, the “cement” of societies: Can we deny that desire and belief are powers? Does one not see that in their reciprocal combinations, passions and intentions, they are the perpetual winds of history, the waterfalls making political mills turn? (1999: 50) However, these relationships of belief and desire, primarily put down at the psychosocial level in Tarde’s first texts, cannot be the paradigm of the forms of possession. They presuppose relations of belief and desire of a wholly different dimension. To be precise, they presuppose more constitutive, microscopic or infinitesimal relations of which they are often only the perceptible manifestations. In his article La croyance et le désir, Tarde posed them on the “macroscopic” scale because his inquiry concerned the faculties and constitutions of the subject. However, the passage to monadology, which will be required for the technical analysis of the emergence of the subject and of the social phenomena, forces him to transform the concepts of belief and desire. What he is interested in, from Monadologie et sociologie onward, and what mainly concerns us, is the quest for a minimal, microscopic, agency of connection between desire and belief. The difference, as Deleuze and Guattari write about Tarde,
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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is not at all between the social and the individual (or inter-individual), but between the molar domain of representation, being collective or individual, and the molecular domain …where the distinction between social and individual loses all meaning. (1987: 267) This minimal point is what Tarde calls a soul. We can say that everywhere there is a soul there is a connection between a desire and a belief. Reciprocally, each point of encounter of a desire and a belief is a soul, a micro-variation. When his inquiries were only concerned with the ways of constitution of the subject, Tarde was understandably inspired by Hume’s empiricism and by Fechner’s psychophysics. Yet it is once again in Leibniz that we have to look for the technical terms whereof belief and desire derive. We can only be struck by the resemblance between Tarde’s and Leibniz’ definitions of the soul. Indeed, Leibniz writes in Monadology (section 19): “[i]f we are to give the name of Soul to everything which has perceptions and desires (appetites) in the general sense which I have explained, then all simple substances or created Monads might be called souls…”. For Leibniz the soul is essentially defined as a relationship of perceptions and appetitions. This is why it can be applied to all realms and not only to consciousness. Furthermore, these Leibnizian concepts are in close correspondence to Tarde’s “belief” and “desire”. Let us start with the first of these terms: What is a perception for Leibniz? It is “[t]he passing condition, which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unit or in the simple substance […]” (ibid: section 14). To perceive is to ‘enfold’ a multitude of other monads. The choice for the term ‘enfold’ here is fundamental for the resumption Tarde can provide of it. It shows well that the monad only covers a multiplicity; that it confines itself to link other monads together within a given perspective. However, each monad maintains its peculiar existence, being driven by reasons and aiming at its own ends. In this very particular sense, the concept of belief is for Tarde a perception. It is the link that takes place inside the monad between the realities it encompasses—its possessions. The belief is in this sense not identifiable with some content or other; it is only a power to link, immanent to the monad, to the multiplicity composing it at a specific moment. What then is appetition—the second term—for Leibniz? It is “[t]he activity of the internal principle which produces change or passage from one perception to another…” (section 15). The object of appetition is thus perception, probably a still virtual perception but nonetheless real to the extent that it is pressing inside the monad—without which it
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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would of course have no existence at all; it would only be an abstraction empty of meaning. The appetition is not general; it does not determine a common end to all beings, that by the same token would define a uniform tendency of the universe. However, it is situated inside such a perception with the aim of such change of intensity. Everything takes place as if each perception was crossed by a superior dimension, an aim immanent to it, but casting it beyond itself and taking it towards a new perception. Certainly this “desire cannot always fully attain to the whole perception at which it aims, but it always obtains some of it…” (ibid). The desire, which thus corresponds to appetition, is the possessive agency of the monad aiming at appropriating others: “the possessive action from monad to monad, from element to element, is the only fertile relationship.” (1999: 91). For Tarde a monad only exists at this price; its possessive agency melds with its being. We will not, therefore, ask what are the reasons for this propensity of the monad to appropriate others, because this would presuppose possible ends beyond those set as ultimate by Tarde: “[W]hat every being wants is not to be appropriated to others but to appropriate others” (1999: 89). ‘Desire’ expresses this tendency for expansions using innumerable means to capture and to hold temporary alliances, or to seduce in order to maximally encompass other monads.[5] The expansion limits of the monad are never internal; they come from resistances, limits and shifts imposed by other existing monads, who are likewise busy working to extend their domination. They inter-limit themselves just as they inter-capture themselves. A whole microscopic theatre of wars, conquests, betrayals and pacifications is thus played for each monad—a drama that multiplies itself to infinity. It is from this perspective that a radical distinction between Tarde and Leibniz imposes itself. We will not find in Leibniz this notion of warlike avidity that animates Tarde’s metaphysics. The Leibnizian monads are centers of expression that presuppose the universe; or else, as Deleuze writes (1995: 68): “[t]he world, as the common expression of each monad, pre-exists to these expressions”. Certainly, the universe “does not exist outside of what expressed it, outside the monads themselves; but these expressions refer back to what is expressed as a requisite for their constitution”. Refusing every influence of the monads, Leibniz made “of each of them an obscure room where the whole universe of other monads depicts itself in reduction and under a special point of view.” (1999: 56). There is nothing surprising then in Leibniz coming back to the question of communication between the monads and eventually
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
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adopting the idea of a vinculum substantiale—a ‘substantial chain’ that linked the monads together.[6] In Tarde, to the contrary, the universe exists only at the price of a multitude of these conflicts, in the bosom of which the monads “aspire to the highest degree of possession; their gradual concentrations as a result.” (1999: 93). They compose of one another, influence and metamorphose through their encounters. The individuation of beings does not come from a universe to its expressions (the monads), but from possessive agencies to gradual concentrations, thus giving birth to the more and more complex forms of the universe. These two Tardean powers, belief and desire, articulate the smallest and the most elementary, as well as the tallest and most massive. They define different but inter-dependent schemes of possession, which can be characterized by two movements, namely contraction and expansion. At the same time in which the monad expands, integrating others with the purpose of dominating them, it contracts, enjoying its own existence. To each desire there correspond new beliefs and each belief tends to acquire a larger intensity, which carries it beyond itself. The singularity of the monad should be situated in this movement, by which it makes the experience of itself, out of the whole of its actual and virtual possessions. The origin and mode of existence of societies We can now return to the initial question: How does the introduction of the monadology and the possessive relations permit Tarde to reconstruct a concept of society cleared of its anthropological limitations, and that extends at the same time to all kinds of associations, whether they are physical, biological, technical or human? I noted that the monads, by their reciprocal desires and beliefs, form gradual concentrations determining levels of membership that we can link to collective dynamics of possession. Monads, being only bundles of possessive agencies eager to posses others, are in turn objects of possession themselves. So, because of the reciprocity of possession, they transform mere aggregates into societies. They are at the same time active and passive—the powers to posses and to be appropriated. The emergence of societies has this price to pay. It supposes the active collaboration of all the monads involved—even in their repulsions and oppositions—in bringing into existence this collective-being, which is nothing else than the consolidation of their bounds.
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that 10 Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
To the question “What is a society?” Tarde’s answer is of extraordinary simplicity: it is “the reciprocal possession, of extremely varied kinds, of all by each.” (1999: 85). Through this the concept of society acquires a new extension that allows Tarde to say, “any thing is a society, any phenomenon is a social fact.” (1999: 58). From inert matter to social organizations, we find the very same logic that spreads at different scales, and thus inside new boundaries, inside new relations of reciprocal possession: [S]ince the accomplishment of the simplest, the most banal, the most uniform social function through centuries; since, for instance, the a bit regular overall movement of a procession or regiment demands, we know it, so much prior lessons, so much words and efforts, so much mental energy spent almost on pure loss—what mental, or quasi-mental, energy spread in streams is then not needed to produce these complicated maneuvers of simultaneously accomplished vital functions, not by thousands, but by billions of different actors, each of them, we have reasons to believe it, essentially selfish, each of them mutually as different as are citizens of a vast empire! (1999: 52) These are the multiplicity of operations by which wanting, avid beings produce, through their encounters and by ways of convergences, oppositions or alliances—the bounds of which will hold them, as long as they are able, in a common history. The likeness between monads is for that matter the poorest kind of membership to the same “concentration”. They rather join together and communicate by the disparity of their ends and tendencies. The reciprocal possession is not only spatial; it is also, simultaneously, temporal. It is regrettable that Tarde did not explain at more length these temporal dimensions, which appear to be potentially so fruitful. However, if we take up the thread of what I have described about the ways of existence of the monads in their reciprocal interactions, it is possible to redraw these temporal relations. This is justifiable especially since Tarde seems to use the concept of imitation to make the current relations of the monads correspond directly with their past. “There is, in fact, as properly social only the imitation of compatriots and forefathers, in the broadest sense of the word.” (1999: 81). Therefore, the dynamics apply as such to the past; which is at the same time the subject and the object of the possession. The past is what presses in the conflicts that enliven the monads and what continuously transforms itself according to the current dynamics. We thus find again, under similar forms,
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that 11 Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
in the relations of the monads to the past, the microscopic theatre of wars, alliances, and mobilizations that were described earlier. Every possession of a present monad by another echoes inside the whole past, according to varying degrees of importance. These go from the simplest indifference to complete transformation—not directly of the past events themselves, but of their importance and their sense. In a word, the desires and the beliefs of the monads tend to prolong their grip directly in two directions—horizontally and vertically; their struggles are played on two profoundly overlapping and simultaneous fronts. To the extent in which it only takes into consideration the minimal relation of a monad to another, the definition of societies—the mutual agency of possession—is somewhat of a metaphysical fiction. This fiction justifies itself, however, as the minimal requirement for speaking of a ‘society’. Societies as we know them—rocks, the cells of an organism, the bodies of individuals, political and religious institutions—are entangled societies, crossed by a multiplicity of others. The relationships we know are not those described by the monadic stage, but those that become established between complex arrangements involving monads and encountering other concentrations; in other words, societies linked to other societies. How do we go then from the individual possession to these massive sets of uncountable numbers of “different actors” that are cells, processions or regiments? Tarde explains it by gradual concentrations that form true substantial beings: [A]ny harmonious, profound and intimate relation between natural elements, creates a new and superior element, which in turn cooperates to the creation of another higher element; on each level of the ladder, from the phenomenal complexities of the atom to the self, passing by the more and more complex molecule, by the cell or the ‘plastidule’ [organic molecule] of Haeckel, by the organ and eventually by the organism, we count as many new beings as new unities… (1999: 67-68) Contrary to Leibniz, mutual possession creates a “harmony” that is not preestablished but emergent; and as such, every being finds itself involved in new relations of desire and belief on a higher level. This level is neither reducible to some end—towards which the entities making part of it would tend—nor to its components. Its existence is literally characterized by shaping, through its new interactions with other societies, the milieu to which the monads that gave birth to it will be connected. Technological objects display
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that 12 Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
this process clearly: “The invention of iron, the invention of the motor power of steam, of the piston and of the railway, so many inventions that seem foreign to each other and that made common cause in the locomotive.” (Tarde 1999b: 122). Taking up the expression of Gilbert Simondon, we may call it “a process of concretization” by which the locomotive becomes a new harmony maintaining in itself the steam engine, the piston and the iron.[7] The locomotive in turn is then involved in new relations to the rail, the navigation system, the freight, and the passengers; all of them forming their new milieu of existence according to specific paths. We find at the level of societies the same powers animating the monads: they are pervaded by “belief” (consolidation) and “desire” (amplification of movement), “unceasing tendency of internal small harmonies to exteriorize and to progressively amplify.” (Tarde 1999b: 107). The metaphysics of monads rejoins here a form of radical empiricism, one of the emergence and consolidation of societies that form, by their interactions, the multiplicity and order of nature that composes our immediate experience. The sociological monadology of Tarde opens us up to a new program of investigation and research on experience, thereby linking up the more unperceivable dimensions—one of micro-desires and micro-beliefs to the more organized and massive forms of social existence. This whole program, which I propose to call a speculative empiricism or metaphysical empiricism, still remains to be completely constructed; but Tarde gave the first impulses to it, and it remains relevant to this day.
NOTES: [1] On this subject, see the very important distinctions between "ontic pluralism", "existential pluralism", "ontic monism" and "existential monism" used by E. Souriau in Different Modes of Existence, University Presses of France, 1943: 4-5. [2] This interpretation proposed by A. Badiou, in Deleuze: The Clamor of Existence (Paris, Hatchet, 1997), on the philosophy of Deleuze, to know that the univocal nature claimed by Deleuze would relate back to a form of underlying unity of the being, seems to rest on a quid pro quo. In fact, it implies a disregard of this monadological tradition, according to which the ontological monism becomes a
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that 13 Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
requisite (and not a foundation) of a form of ontic pluralism. This is the whole question of a new approach to individuation that would simultaneously maintain the monist requirement, according to which the dynamic principles to the work are, in reality, valid for all forms of existence, and the principle of the indiscernables, that is here in question. [3] The panpsychism of Tarde is not unrelated to the spiritualism of Bergson. On this topic, see the excellent work of P. Montebello, The Metaphysical Other: Essays on Nature Philosophy: Ravaisson, Tarde, Nietzsche and Bergson (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2003). [4] See M. Combes, Simondon: Individual and Collective (Paris, University Presses of France, 1999). [5] This idea of an "interested" and "eager" activity of the monad comes close to the definition that Whitehead promotes: "Whether or not it contributes to the general interest, life is a theft" (1929/1978: 190-191). [6] On the subject of the theory of the vinculum substantiale, see M. Blondel, A Historic Enigma: The 'vinculum substantiale' and the Preliminary Sketch of a Superior Realism (Paris, Gabriel Beauchesne, 1930); A. Boehm, Leibniz’s ‘vinculum substantiale’ (Paris, Vrin, 1938); and C. Fremont, Being and Relation (Paris, Vrin, 1981). [7] Cf. G. Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Paris, Auber-
Montaigne, 1969). [8] I refer the reader to my book, A Speculative Empiricism (Paris, Vrin, 2006).
1
The
Dynamics
of
Possession
An
Introduction
to
The
Sociology
of
Gabriel
Tarde
The final version of this text was published in D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium , Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008 Didier Debaise (Translated by Arnaud Coolsaet)
Does sociology require metaphysics? This question pervades Gabriel Tarde’s (18431903) work, and places him in fundamental opposition to the founders of modern sociology, in particular to Emile Durkheim. What Tarde tried to do, and what makes him remarkably relevant today, was to give social sciences the metaphysics they required. As I will show here, he attempted to open the field of sociology to realms—notably the physical and biological— that seemed closed to it. Tarde’s metaphysical system is organized around the concept of possession. As early as 1898, in Monadologie et sociologie, Tarde speaks of possession as a “universal fact”. This does not refer to a primary category of being—a category from which, through a process of increasing complexity, it would be possible to derive the whole of more complex forms of experience. In my view, on the contrary, it signifies the giving of a maximal extension to the concept of possession. It can thereby be possible to follow both the common lines that characterize the physical, the biological and the human forms of existence, and to become sensitive to the specificity of each of these paths. With respect to the questions that crossed sociology in regard to power, domination and coercion processes; to the analysis of the modes of establishment and organization of groups; to the research into the individual or collective foundations of societies—in each case, Tarde’s metaphysics should enable the substitution of these questions with those of another order: In a given situation, is the possession unilateral or symmetrical? Does the possession tend to amplify and intensify or,
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on the contrary, to loosen and break down? In what ways does it spread and how far does its grip reach? A new monadology By introducing ‘phenomena of possession’ such as sleepwalking, hypnotic practices, imitative influence, or social magnetism as immaterial but constitutive principles of societies, Tarde faces a major problem. The notion of possession seems to be wrapped up in a number of anthropological, social and religious connotations that overdetermine its essence. Does it not inescapably refer back to either the active sense of the use of a property, be it material or spiritual; or to the passive sense of an object or individual captured by others or put under their spell? Does it not presuppose something else – object or subject – prior to its existence, that would be its medium? Is possession not by definition secondary to a being, whatever may be its role? On my view, the main reason for which the metaphysics of possession are necessary is as follows. It must allow, firstly, the subtraction of the sociological surveys from an implicit ontology – which is all the more effective as it remains in the background. According to this ontology there should exist media – objects, individuals or groups – that are clearly identifiable to the social dynamics. Second, it has to be able to construct a minimal definition of possession that can hold (necessarily) for all forms of existence—physical as well as biological and social. It is in Leibniz that Tarde finds the main conditions for the metaphysics of possession. He sees in Monadology (1714) the beginning of a movement of dissolution of classical ontology (notably the identity of “being” and “simplicity”), which would, in a still implicit and unthinking form, find its most obvious confirmation in today’s science. "The monads, daughters of Leibniz,” writes Tarde (1999: 33), “made a long way since their father. By various and independent paths, unnoticed by scientists, they sneak into the heart of contemporary science.” A new alliance between philosophy and science would then become necessary. This alliance would at the same time endeavor to clarify the idea of the “infinitely small” and try to unfold it inside vaster domains – vaster than those that can be granted by specialized sciences, and introducing it within their determined fields. This is so because “it is not only chemistry, which while progressing, seems to lead us towards the monads. It is also physics,
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natural sciences, history and mathematics themselves” (ibid: 34).
Science inherits this
process of dissolution of any ontology that presents itself as the ultimate term of an investigation of the forms of being. Even the ultimate terms of a particular science are only relative to a provisional perspective inherent to this science: “[T]hese last elements to which each science ends up—the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom—are only ultimate in the eyes of their particular science” (1999: 36). The question is thus to know how far this dissolution can reach. “From elimination to elimination, where will we end up […]?” Tarde’s answer is unambiguous: “[T]here are no means to stop on this slope to the infinitesimal, which becomes, surely very unexpectedly, the key to the entire universe.” (199: 37). The infinitely small differs qualitatively from the finite on which ontology was built. The beings that compose it go to infinity in an increasingly imperceptible fashion, forming a continuous bundle wherein no parts, limits, distance or position can be distinguished. Consequently, there is no reason for us to talk of ‘being’ anymore, but rather of infinitesimal agencies and remarkable actions, inside a finite movement. “[T]hose would then be the real agents, these small beings whom we say are infinitesimal. Those would be the real actions, these small variations of which we say are infinitesimal.” (1999: 40). The monadconcept becomes purely functional in Tarde, producing a variation or a difference inside a continuous movement. It is an agency of variation that goes ‘differing,’ that is to say, that has step by step repercussions on the whole universe, although according to variable degrees of intensity. Hence, this is how we can understand a principle that we have to place in the centre of these metaphysics: “To exist is to differ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different.” (1999: 73). The souls of the world Maintaining that the ‘agency of differentiation’ is the most characteristic and most common property of the monads, Tarde takes up another requirement of Monadology, namely, the monist one. Too often monism is confused with some kind of Platonism and opposed to pluralism.[1] When Tarde asserts that there are no two identical monads (he takes over the principle of indiscernibles); that reality is composed of “a swarming of innovating individualities, each one sui generis marked by its own distinctive seal, recognizable in
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thousands” (1999: 65); and that these even go differing;—he is without a doubt heir to a kind of pluralism. This is much like Leibniz himself, when he claims that “[i]n nature there are never two beings which are perfectly alike and in which it is not possible to find an internal difference, or at least a difference founded upon an intrinsic quality.” (1714/1989: section 9). The difference is not a matter of shape or individuality of the monad – these would permit comparison and thus the distinction from others – but of its characteristic movement (“appetition”). It is here that monism takes its full-fledged sense. We can try to define it in the following manner: the dynamic principles are valid for each monadic existence, but the ways in which they are involved inside a particular monad pertain to the singularity of the latter. There is thus a homogeneity of principles and a plurality of ways of existence. As Tarde (1893: 33) says: the monads presuppose “the discontinuity of the elements and the homogeneity of their being”. Tarde is not the only one in the 20th century to attempt to link an existential pluralism to a kind of ontological monism or univocal nature of being. A similar tendency can be found in philosophers defining contemporary monadology in their own way—such as A. N. Whitehead, E. Souriau, G. Simondon and G. Deleuze.[2] Each of them takes up the Leibnizian idea according to which the dynamic principles operating in the individuation of beings are the same for all, but actualizing themselves in different manners. For instance, in Process and Reality, wherein Whitehead defines “actual entities” (which correspond to the monads), he writes: They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. (1929: 18) In regard to this distinction, monism, according to Tarde (1999: 44), can be understood in three different ways: (1) we can consider “movement and consciousness, for instance, the vibration of a brain cell and the corresponding state of mind, as the two sides of a same fact, and we delude ourselves in this reminiscence of the antique Janus”; (2) it signifies that a more fundamental reality could be the “common source”, but we then only win “a trinity instead of a dualism”; or finally, (3) (and this is the position to which Tarde commits himself) we state “that matter is mind, nothing else”. How then does this kind of
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monism distinguish itself from a kind of subjective idealism that would state that matter is only representation or idea? Tarde does not claim that matter is a product of the mind, but that it is already, so to say, mind from the inside. After “having reduced the universe to powder” monadology has, according to him, “spiritualized its particles” (1999: 55). The process of dissolution previously described leaves no other possibility than “spiritualizing” these agency-nodes, or remarkable points, of which the universe is composed. Thus Tarde does not state that the universe is a representation, but rather that it “is composed of others souls than mine, basically similar to mine” (1999: 44). This universal psychomorphism is therefore not a negation of matter—which becomes an effect among others of the agencies of the soul.[3] It is only opposed to every kind of materialism that would claim that the dynamic principles could just be like matter and could be derived from it. Matter appears as an effect, a phase, or even as a mode of regrouping inside the multiplicities of agencies of mind, operating one over the other. Although Tarde does not attempt to make these elements coherent in a theory of possession, we can nevertheless bring out three fundamental principles for these metaphysics: (1) the process of dissolution, which allows us to subtract the possession of any prior reality of which it would be dependent, that is to say of any first ontology. Beyond the possessive agency, there is nothing; we only find a “pure void”; (2) this possessive agency is an individuation principle[4] that applies to all beings; it signifies that this action is both what beings have most in common (the universal fact) and what defines their difference (the ways of possession); and (3) the possessive agency should not be confused with the action of ‘taking possession’ of an object by subject. This would lead to a reduction of the dynamics of power to simple power relationships. Instead, the agency is essentially immaterial and inductive, which is pointed out by notions such as “influence”, “sympathy”, “imitation”, “attraction” and “magnetism”. The powers of possession Having brought these principles out, we can deepen the question and ask: What is a ‘possessive agency’? Tarde’s monism forces us to ask the question on the level of the only “existing” realities, namely the souls. It is soul that possesses and is possessed; it is soul that forms these dynamics of possession at the origin of societies. We would misunderstand Tarde’s panpsychism if we interpret it as the resurgence of a kind of spiritual or religious
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substantialism. The word “soul” has for him an exclusive technical sense; according to the interpretation I would like to give here, it defines the point of intersection between two possessive powers: belief and desire. From very early on, Tarde was interested in these two “powers of the soul”, in which he saw the source of all social and psychological phenomena. Already in his first philosophical article, La croyance et le désir (1880), he writes: “At the bottom of internal phenomena, whatever they are, the analysis pushed to the limit will never discover more than three irreducible notions: belief, desire, and their point of application, pure sense.” (1880: 290). He further adds, “the two first notions are the forms or the innate and constitutive powers of the subject”. They appear as the native powers of all faculties—memory, perception and imagination. By their compositions and relations, belief and desire produce the more complex forms of experience of the subject. They do not limit themselves to the constitution of the subject whatsoever, but unfold themselves externally in the relations with others subjects, and become, by growing complexity, the “cement” of societies: Can we deny that desire and belief are powers? Does one not see that in their reciprocal combinations, passions and intentions, they are the perpetual winds of history, the waterfalls making political mills turn? (1999: 50) However, these relationships of belief and desire, primarily put down at the psychosocial level in Tarde’s first texts, cannot be the paradigm of the forms of possession. They presuppose relations of belief and desire of a wholly different dimension. To be precise, they presuppose more constitutive, microscopic or infinitesimal relations of which they are often only the perceptible manifestations. In his article La croyance et le désir, Tarde posed them on the “macroscopic” scale because his inquiry concerned the faculties and constitutions of the subject. However, the passage to monadology, which will be required for the technical analysis of the emergence of the subject and of the social phenomena, forces him to transform the concepts of belief and desire. What he is interested in, from Monadologie et sociologie onward, and what mainly concerns us, is the quest for a minimal, microscopic, agency of connection between desire and belief. The difference, as Deleuze and Guattari write about Tarde,
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is not at all between the social and the individual (or inter-individual), but between the molar domain of representation, being collective or individual, and the molecular domain …where the distinction between social and individual loses all meaning. (1987: 267) This minimal point is what Tarde calls a soul. We can say that everywhere there is a soul there is a connection between a desire and a belief. Reciprocally, each point of encounter of a desire and a belief is a soul, a micro-variation. When his inquiries were only concerned with the ways of constitution of the subject, Tarde was understandably inspired by Hume’s empiricism and by Fechner’s psychophysics. Yet it is once again in Leibniz that we have to look for the technical terms whereof belief and desire derive. We can only be struck by the resemblance between Tarde’s and Leibniz’ definitions of the soul. Indeed, Leibniz writes in Monadology (section 19): “[i]f we are to give the name of Soul to everything which has perceptions and desires (appetites) in the general sense which I have explained, then all simple substances or created Monads might be called souls…”. For Leibniz the soul is essentially defined as a relationship of perceptions and appetitions. This is why it can be applied to all realms and not only to consciousness. Furthermore, these Leibnizian concepts are in close correspondence to Tarde’s “belief” and “desire”. Let us start with the first of these terms: What is a perception for Leibniz? It is “[t]he passing condition, which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unit or in the simple substance […]” (ibid: section 14). To perceive is to ‘enfold’ a multitude of other monads. The choice for the term ‘enfold’ here is fundamental for the resumption Tarde can provide of it. It shows well that the monad only covers a multiplicity; that it confines itself to link other monads together within a given perspective. However, each monad maintains its peculiar existence, being driven by reasons and aiming at its own ends. In this very particular sense, the concept of belief is for Tarde a perception. It is the link that takes place inside the monad between the realities it encompasses—its possessions. The belief is in this sense not identifiable with some content or other; it is only a power to link, immanent to the monad, to the multiplicity composing it at a specific moment. What then is appetition—the second term—for Leibniz? It is “[t]he activity of the internal principle which produces change or passage from one perception to another…” (section 15). The object of appetition is thus perception, probably a still virtual perception but nonetheless real to the extent that it is pressing inside the monad—without which it
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would of course have no existence at all; it would only be an abstraction empty of meaning. The appetition is not general; it does not determine a common end to all beings, that by the same token would define a uniform tendency of the universe. However, it is situated inside such a perception with the aim of such change of intensity. Everything takes place as if each perception was crossed by a superior dimension, an aim immanent to it, but casting it beyond itself and taking it towards a new perception. Certainly this “desire cannot always fully attain to the whole perception at which it aims, but it always obtains some of it…” (ibid). The desire, which thus corresponds to appetition, is the possessive agency of the monad aiming at appropriating others: “the possessive action from monad to monad, from element to element, is the only fertile relationship.” (1999: 91). For Tarde a monad only exists at this price; its possessive agency melds with its being. We will not, therefore, ask what are the reasons for this propensity of the monad to appropriate others, because this would presuppose possible ends beyond those set as ultimate by Tarde: “[W]hat every being wants is not to be appropriated to others but to appropriate others” (1999: 89). ‘Desire’ expresses this tendency for expansions using innumerable means to capture and to hold temporary alliances, or to seduce in order to maximally encompass other monads.[5] The expansion limits of the monad are never internal; they come from resistances, limits and shifts imposed by other existing monads, who are likewise busy working to extend their domination. They inter-limit themselves just as they inter-capture themselves. A whole microscopic theatre of wars, conquests, betrayals and pacifications is thus played for each monad—a drama that multiplies itself to infinity. It is from this perspective that a radical distinction between Tarde and Leibniz imposes itself. We will not find in Leibniz this notion of warlike avidity that animates Tarde’s metaphysics. The Leibnizian monads are centers of expression that presuppose the universe; or else, as Deleuze writes (1995: 68): “[t]he world, as the common expression of each monad, pre-exists to these expressions”. Certainly, the universe “does not exist outside of what expressed it, outside the monads themselves; but these expressions refer back to what is expressed as a requisite for their constitution”. Refusing every influence of the monads, Leibniz made “of each of them an obscure room where the whole universe of other monads depicts itself in reduction and under a special point of view.” (1999: 56). There is nothing surprising then in Leibniz coming back to the question of communication between the monads and eventually
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adopting the idea of a vinculum substantiale—a ‘substantial chain’ that linked the monads together.[6] In Tarde, to the contrary, the universe exists only at the price of a multitude of these conflicts, in the bosom of which the monads “aspire to the highest degree of possession; their gradual concentrations as a result.” (1999: 93). They compose of one another, influence and metamorphose through their encounters. The individuation of beings does not come from a universe to its expressions (the monads), but from possessive agencies to gradual concentrations, thus giving birth to the more and more complex forms of the universe. These two Tardean powers, belief and desire, articulate the smallest and the most elementary, as well as the tallest and most massive. They define different but inter-dependent schemes of possession, which can be characterized by two movements, namely contraction and expansion. At the same time in which the monad expands, integrating others with the purpose of dominating them, it contracts, enjoying its own existence. To each desire there correspond new beliefs and each belief tends to acquire a larger intensity, which carries it beyond itself. The singularity of the monad should be situated in this movement, by which it makes the experience of itself, out of the whole of its actual and virtual possessions. The origin and mode of existence of societies We can now return to the initial question: How does the introduction of the monadology and the possessive relations permit Tarde to reconstruct a concept of society cleared of its anthropological limitations, and that extends at the same time to all kinds of associations, whether they are physical, biological, technical or human? I noted that the monads, by their reciprocal desires and beliefs, form gradual concentrations determining levels of membership that we can link to collective dynamics of possession. Monads, being only bundles of possessive agencies eager to posses others, are in turn objects of possession themselves. So, because of the reciprocity of possession, they transform mere aggregates into societies. They are at the same time active and passive—the powers to posses and to be appropriated. The emergence of societies has this price to pay. It supposes the active collaboration of all the monads involved—even in their repulsions and oppositions—in bringing into existence this collective-being, which is nothing else than the consolidation of their bounds.
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To the question “What is a society?” Tarde’s answer is of extraordinary simplicity: it is “the reciprocal possession, of extremely varied kinds, of all by each.” (1999: 85). Through this the concept of society acquires a new extension that allows Tarde to say, “any thing is a society, any phenomenon is a social fact.” (1999: 58). From inert matter to social organizations, we find the very same logic that spreads at different scales, and thus inside new boundaries, inside new relations of reciprocal possession: [S]ince the accomplishment of the simplest, the most banal, the most uniform social function through centuries; since, for instance, the a bit regular overall movement of a procession or regiment demands, we know it, so much prior lessons, so much words and efforts, so much mental energy spent almost on pure loss—what mental, or quasi-mental, energy spread in streams is then not needed to produce these complicated maneuvers of simultaneously accomplished vital functions, not by thousands, but by billions of different actors, each of them, we have reasons to believe it, essentially selfish, each of them mutually as different as are citizens of a vast empire! (1999: 52) These are the multiplicity of operations by which wanting, avid beings produce, through their encounters and by ways of convergences, oppositions or alliances—the bounds of which will hold them, as long as they are able, in a common history. The likeness between monads is for that matter the poorest kind of membership to the same “concentration”. They rather join together and communicate by the disparity of their ends and tendencies. The reciprocal possession is not only spatial; it is also, simultaneously, temporal. It is regrettable that Tarde did not explain at more length these temporal dimensions, which appear to be potentially so fruitful. However, if we take up the thread of what I have described about the ways of existence of the monads in their reciprocal interactions, it is possible to redraw these temporal relations. This is justifiable especially since Tarde seems to use the concept of imitation to make the current relations of the monads correspond directly with their past. “There is, in fact, as properly social only the imitation of compatriots and forefathers, in the broadest sense of the word.” (1999: 81). Therefore, the dynamics apply as such to the past; which is at the same time the subject and the object of the possession. The past is what presses in the conflicts that enliven the monads and what continuously transforms itself according to the current dynamics. We thus find again, under similar forms,
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in the relations of the monads to the past, the microscopic theatre of wars, alliances, and mobilizations that were described earlier. Every possession of a present monad by another echoes inside the whole past, according to varying degrees of importance. These go from the simplest indifference to complete transformation—not directly of the past events themselves, but of their importance and their sense. In a word, the desires and the beliefs of the monads tend to prolong their grip directly in two directions—horizontally and vertically; their struggles are played on two profoundly overlapping and simultaneous fronts. To the extent in which it only takes into consideration the minimal relation of a monad to another, the definition of societies—the mutual agency of possession—is somewhat of a metaphysical fiction. This fiction justifies itself, however, as the minimal requirement for speaking of a ‘society’. Societies as we know them—rocks, the cells of an organism, the bodies of individuals, political and religious institutions—are entangled societies, crossed by a multiplicity of others. The relationships we know are not those described by the monadic stage, but those that become established between complex arrangements involving monads and encountering other concentrations; in other words, societies linked to other societies. How do we go then from the individual possession to these massive sets of uncountable numbers of “different actors” that are cells, processions or regiments? Tarde explains it by gradual concentrations that form true substantial beings: [A]ny harmonious, profound and intimate relation between natural elements, creates a new and superior element, which in turn cooperates to the creation of another higher element; on each level of the ladder, from the phenomenal complexities of the atom to the self, passing by the more and more complex molecule, by the cell or the ‘plastidule’ [organic molecule] of Haeckel, by the organ and eventually by the organism, we count as many new beings as new unities… (1999: 67-68) Contrary to Leibniz, mutual possession creates a “harmony” that is not preestablished but emergent; and as such, every being finds itself involved in new relations of desire and belief on a higher level. This level is neither reducible to some end—towards which the entities making part of it would tend—nor to its components. Its existence is literally characterized by shaping, through its new interactions with other societies, the milieu to which the monads that gave birth to it will be connected. Technological objects display
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this process clearly: “The invention of iron, the invention of the motor power of steam, of the piston and of the railway, so many inventions that seem foreign to each other and that made common cause in the locomotive.” (Tarde 1999b: 122). Taking up the expression of Gilbert Simondon, we may call it “a process of concretization” by which the locomotive becomes a new harmony maintaining in itself the steam engine, the piston and the iron.[7] The locomotive in turn is then involved in new relations to the rail, the navigation system, the freight, and the passengers; all of them forming their new milieu of existence according to specific paths. We find at the level of societies the same powers animating the monads: they are pervaded by “belief” (consolidation) and “desire” (amplification of movement), “unceasing tendency of internal small harmonies to exteriorize and to progressively amplify.” (Tarde 1999b: 107). The metaphysics of monads rejoins here a form of radical empiricism, one of the emergence and consolidation of societies that form, by their interactions, the multiplicity and order of nature that composes our immediate experience. The sociological monadology of Tarde opens us up to a new program of investigation and research on experience, thereby linking up the more unperceivable dimensions—one of micro-desires and micro-beliefs to the more organized and massive forms of social existence. This whole program, which I propose to call a speculative empiricism or metaphysical empiricism, still remains to be completely constructed; but Tarde gave the first impulses to it, and it remains relevant to this day.
NOTES: [1] On this subject, see the very important distinctions between "ontic pluralism", "existential pluralism", "ontic monism" and "existential monism" used by E. Souriau in Different Modes of Existence, University Presses of France, 1943: 4-5. [2] This interpretation proposed by A. Badiou, in Deleuze: The Clamor of Existence (Paris, Hatchet, 1997), on the philosophy of Deleuze, to know that the univocal nature claimed by Deleuze would relate back to a form of underlying unity of the being, seems to rest on a quid pro quo. In fact, it implies a disregard of this monadological tradition, according to which the ontological monism becomes a
Didier Debaise – The Dynamics of Possession – D. Skribna, (ed.), Mind that 13 Abides. Panpsychism in the new millenium, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2008
requisite (and not a foundation) of a form of ontic pluralism. This is the whole question of a new approach to individuation that would simultaneously maintain the monist requirement, according to which the dynamic principles to the work are, in reality, valid for all forms of existence, and the principle of the indiscernables, that is here in question. [3] The panpsychism of Tarde is not unrelated to the spiritualism of Bergson. On this topic, see the excellent work of P. Montebello, The Metaphysical Other: Essays on Nature Philosophy: Ravaisson, Tarde, Nietzsche and Bergson (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2003). [4] See M. Combes, Simondon: Individual and Collective (Paris, University Presses of France, 1999). [5] This idea of an "interested" and "eager" activity of the monad comes close to the definition that Whitehead promotes: "Whether or not it contributes to the general interest, life is a theft" (1929/1978: 190-191). [6] On the subject of the theory of the vinculum substantiale, see M. Blondel, A Historic Enigma: The 'vinculum substantiale' and the Preliminary Sketch of a Superior Realism (Paris, Gabriel Beauchesne, 1930); A. Boehm, Leibniz’s ‘vinculum substantiale’ (Paris, Vrin, 1938); and C. Fremont, Being and Relation (Paris, Vrin, 1981). [7] Cf. G. Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Paris, Auber-
Montaigne, 1969). [8] I refer the reader to my book, A Speculative Empiricism (Paris, Vrin, 2006).
