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A review of Lukas Verburgt's Flows, Fluxes and Monads: the Conceptual Madness of Experimental Social Ontology
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This article was downloaded by: [Taylor University]On: 09 May 2014, At: 07:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
ParallaxPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20
Flows, Fluxes and Monads: theConceptual Madness of ExperimentalSocial OntologyLukas Verburgtaa University of AmsterdamPublished online: 21 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Lukas Verburgt (2014) Flows, Fluxes and Monads: the Conceptual Madness ofExperimental Social Ontology, Parallax, 20:1, 114-117, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.865327
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.865327
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cally and media studied from a subjective
perspective might be, and they never specify why
or how individuals might appropriate evil media
stratagems to take part in a larger oppositional
movement. They offer only two sparing maxims to
guide any opposition to what they call con-
temporary societys stupidity flow (p.166).
Always bear in mind, they write, that making a
machine do something you dont want to do
yourself [ . . . ] shifts the initiative and the operative
focus of control (p.15), and even more impor-
tantly, each new form of structuration and
mediation of the world generates its own kind of
collateral damage (p.123). Other than these
advisories, the book is purposefully strategic, not
prescriptive. It demonstrates that the materials
and processes to fight and with which to fight are
all around, ripe for the kind of dialectical
appropriation called detournement.
Difficult introduction aside, Evil Media is an
invigorating book. Its deft witticism and disturbing
insights invite double- and repeated-dipping
alone, to be sure, but ideally with discussion
partners. Evil Media deals one of the stronger blows
in recent years against grey medias evolving brand
of media studies cum management theory (p.168).
It turns scholarly focus back to media philosophy
and gestalt. Its ending represents a formidable
wake-up call to readers who are economically
privileged enough to have enmeshed themselves in
their media products and processes. Becoming
more fully connected, in the sense of materially
linkingmore andmore knowledge resources, within
and without an organisation, Fuller and Goffey
write, does not of itself suffice to make anyone or
anything smarter, even if the broader availability of
information within an organisation is an important
prerequisite to making informed decisions (p.169).
Are they correct in implying that contemporary
media users are turning into Flauberts Bouvard
and Pecuchet (p.169), two technocrats who
tirelessly mistake the compilation and accessibility
of information for its content, context and
consequences?10 Time will tell, but so will deeds.
As Zygmunt Bauman has written, [t]o be moral
does not mean to be good, but to exercise ones
freedom of authorship and/or actorship as a choice
between good and evil.11 As Fuller, Goffey and
Google know, evil is as evil does.
Notes
1 Google Company Webpage, Ten Things We
Know to Be True ,www.google.com/about/
company/philosophy. [04/09/13].
2 Google Investor Relations Webpage, Code ofConduct ,www.investor.google.com/corporate/
code-of-conduct.html. [04/09/13].3 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007).4 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967],
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 1994).5 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
[1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland:
PM Press, 2012).6 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans.Jonathan Cape (New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 1972).7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life[1980], trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).8 Julian Assange, The Banality of Dont be
Evil, New York Times (June 1, 2013) ,www.
nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-
banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html. [04/09/
13].9 Wikileaks About Webpage, The importance of
principled leaking to journalism, good govern-
ment and a healthy society,www.wikileaks.org/
About.html. [04/09/13].10 Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet [1881],
trans. Mark Polizotti (Normal: Dalkey Archive
Press, 2005).11 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in
Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p.4.
q 2014 Jennifer StobColgate University
E-mail: [email protected]://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.865326
Flows, Fluxes and Monads: theConceptual Madness of Experimen-tal Social Ontology
Tony D. Sampson. Virality: ContagionTheory in the Age of Networks.(Minneapolis and London: University of Minne-sota Press, 2013)
Tony D. Sampsons Virality is one of the first
articulate attempts to experiment with Gabriel
Tarde, rather than summarily theorize the status
of this nineteenth-century sociologist as a fore-
father of actor-network theory.1 For Sampson, to
experiment with, or resuscitate, Tarde means to
loosely combine it with a Deleuzian-inspired
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event-philosophy and to relate it to recent
research in neuroscience, marketing, epidemiol-
ogy, group psychology and (social) network
studies, all the while eschew[ing] the organiz-
ational capacity of linguistic categories [which]
tend to block [ . . . ] conceptual freedom (p.4).
This results, for example, in Sampsons character-
ization of Virality on page 5 (!) as exploring a
continuous space of encounter that is full of
multiple monadic singularities, located in an
epidemiological [ . . . ] world of things [ . . . ]
emotions, sensations, affects and in which a
continuous generation of neurophysiological
ecosystems [is] boosted by the cultural ampli-
fiers of [ . . . ] commodities [ . . . ] such as caffeine,
sentimental novels and pornographic works
(p.5). Some pages later the reader is kindly
requested not to take such conceptual madness as
metaphorical, but rather as ontological.
If this is a beautiful example of misplaced
concreteness, it must be seen as the argumentative
core of Virality for what Sampson aims at is to set
up two kinds of virality against each other; on the
one hand, the molar (representational, organiz-
ational, discursive, analogical and metaphorical)
virality of biopower and, on the other hand, the
molecular (non- or subrepresentational, acciden-
tal, happenstance, flowing, desiring and ontologi-
cal) virality of small, unpredictable events (pp.5
6). Although these are both part of the same
monadological process of (deterritorialized, mol-
ecular) becomings turning into (territorialized,
molar) beings and vice versa Sampson, on a
methodological level, does not deal with them as
such. His central goal in Virality is not only to
indicate that where the molar kind of virality
explains the process from the (Durkheimian)
viewpoint of the territorialized beings, the
molecular kind of virality does so from the
(Tardean) viewpoint of the deterritorialized
becomings, but also to argue that this second
approach is a better explanation. Firstly, insofar as
it is not a representative image of the social but
actually captures the vibratory events [that]
spread out and connect everything to everything
else (p.7). Secondly, because it somehow exceeds
the hegemonic symbolism of (bio)capitalism
connected to the molar virality of the Durkhei-
mian.
The first chapter provides a provocative, albeit
somewhat sketchy, account of Tardes social
ontological framework as developed in his The
Laws of Imitation, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology
and Monadology and Sociology. Sampson emphasizes
that it is impossible to understand Tarde on the
basis of the Durkheimian categories of macro
(institutions) versus micro (individuals) insofar as
Tarde was concerned with currents, waves and
vibrations of belief and desire that function as the
pre-individual forces constituting the subject. At
this level, existing below (infra) the cognitive
awareness (p.20) [original emphasis], it does not
make sense to make a distinction between either
individual and social or social and biological;
the beliefs and desires, governed as they are by
three social laws (imitative repetition, adaptation
and opposition), are both non-conscious, anti-
habitual and infra-psychological. For example,
in the case of internet hypes or fashion it is not the
subject who enter[s] into the network [ . . . ] but
the imitative ray that [ . . . ] makes the agent part of
an assemblage of relationality (p.29) [original
emphasis]. That is why Tarde famously argued
that society is imitation and imitation is a kind of
somnambulism and why Sampson speaks of an
hypnotic magnetism that exerts control over a
mostly unconscious monadic social space (p.27).
In direct opposition to the twentieth-century
Durkheimian separation of sociology from psy-
chology and biology, Sampsons Tardean social
ontology is premised on the eclectic mixture of
these domains. That is also to say that it wants to
end the Durkheimian social or, for that matter,
refuses to begin with it as Deleuze once put it.
For Tarde, as for Sampson, sociology is the
Baroque science of a pre-social, pre-biological,
pre-psychological chaos from which social actors
and social wholes arise on the basis of processes of
individuation and actualization.
Chapter two is devoted to critiquing the
contemporary neo-Darwinian attempt to, first,
biologize this chaos and, second, algorithmatize
these processes on the basis of the meme or gene.
Sampson uses the example of a viral video posted
by Lonelygirl15 to show that the molar
metaphor of the mechanistic memetic algorithm
a modern combination of Darwins theory of
natural selection, Mendels study of biological
inheritance and Spensers (sic) application of
evolutionary theory to civilizations is unable to
explain what spreads. His main point is that this
metaphor negates the creativity and novelty of
chance-encounters in favour of a deterministic
evolutionary code (p.78). More problematic are
Sampsons claims that the neo-Darwinian position
is an analogy, whereas the Tardean position
pertains to how things are and that where the
meme does not exist, the flowing and vibrating
beliefs and desires undeniably do. This is a
consequence of Sampsons experimental, rather
than comprehensive, reading of Tarde; he forgets
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that Tarde was first and foremost interested in
using statistics as a measure of belief and desire
and as a demonstration of the imitative power
from which they result.2 For instance, in his essay
Quantification and social indicators of 1897
Tarde wrote that social statistics must never lose
sight of their special mission, which is to measure
as exactly as possible, by all the direct or indirect
means at their disposal, the imitative propagation
of a belief or desire.3 Although Sampson is,
perhaps, justified in noting that the imitative ray
is not [ . . . ] reducible to a unit [and] is not intrinsic
or essential [but] insubstantial or inessential (p.87)
[original emphasis] he leaves the argumentative
force of the statement that unlike the assumed
substance of the [meme], the incorporeal [imita-
tive ray] has a distinct ungraspability (p.95)
totally unexplained. It seems somewhat preposter-
ous to claim that the meme, as an explanatory
metaphor, must be rejected in favour of an
ungraspable, unknown, unknowable and perhaps
even not-yet realized phenomenon. In this context,
the reader may also despair when Sampson
proposes that the imitative ray is to be grasped
[ . . . ] in a topological diagramming of tendencies
and understood as a degree of freedom that is yet
to come (p.88). Again, to allude to Deleuzes
Whiteheadian adage, must not the abstract itself
be explained instead of used as an explanation?
In the third chapter, Sampson does examine the
issue of diagramming the imitative ray of belief
and desire when he discusses the contemporary
notion of a network. As in the case of the neo-
Darwinian position, the image of the network
space is criticized not only for its apolitical
naturalness and capacity [ . . . ] to become a
tyranny as constraining as any hierarchical chain
of command, but also for its tendency to ignore
the occasional and chaotic overflow of aperiodic
events (p.98). At this point, Sampsons focus of
attention shifts to the status of these accidental
events in the work of Tarde. More precisely,
Sampson asks whether accidents themselves define
the social or whether accidents can be influenced
so as to redefine the social. This topic, when
suitably fleshed out, would be of major import-
ance, for instance, to the further development both
of chance as an explanatory element (rather than
as a residue) in social theory, as well as of the
connection between a relational ontology of the
pre-individual and actor-network theory.4 Samp-
son, however, merely notes how small, rare, non-
periodic and random factors (of affect) play an
important role in financial markets (and economic
bubbles), but leaves it at that at least as far as
the theorization of chance is concerned. Following
Nigel Thrift, Alberto Toscano5 and Laurent
Mucchielli6, Sampson goes on to accuse Tarde of
political conservatism for overestimating the
importance of accidentality and ignoring the
fact that (neuro)marketeers are capable of guiding
spontaneous events and making them look like an
accident of chance encounter [by dipping] below
conscious awareness (p.117).
Viralitys political message presented in chapters
4 and 5 seems to be that this Tardean ability to
hypnotize the unconscious may be transformed
into a molar spreading of fear by corporate and
political (neo-Con) persuaders. Although it is
stated on the back cover of the book that for
Sampson such abilities are not necessarily a
positive or negative force, he directly opposes a
capitalist terror contagion to the transformative
potential of revolutionary love (p.144). Sampson,
thus, writes that [i]n contrast to the microbial
contagions of the neo-Cons, and their appeal to
the political unconscious through the cold,
emotionless channels of advisors like Cheney and
the fearmongering of Rumsfeld, Obamas cam-
paign of hope and change managed to emphati-
cally tap into the infectable emotions of manyU.S.
voters (p.155). These conclusions, however
attractive and justified they might be, raise serious
doubts about both the neutrality of Sampsons
account as well as the necessity of grounding them
on the basis of a Tardean-Deleuzian monadologi-
cal ontology as such. But, obviously, the hunch of
this new ontology is to pulverize the world of
positivist Durkheimian conservatism by spiritua-
lizing the dust of monadological progressiveness.
The thoroughly political aim of Virality is to think
up new ways in which [ . . . ] exercises of biopower
can be discerned, resisted [and] escaped or the
potential for revolutionary countercontagion can
be actualized (p.159).
This is at the same time the greatest merit and the
biggest weakness of Virality. Although there is
much that speaks in favour of attempting to
question capitalism by understanding its foun-
dations and functioning better than it does itself, it
is doubtful whether Sampson manages to prevent
this goal from completely intruding on his
presentation of a new social theory that explains
how society comes together. Sampson does
provide the initiative for a full-blown Tardean
microsociological worldview, but too much in
Virality rests on dubious claims about the reality of
its, sometimes amazingly, abstract terminology
vis-a`-vis the metaphors and analogies of the
positions it rejects. This is most prominent in the
central opposition between the molar virality of
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neo-Darwinian theories of memetics and themolecular virality of Tardes imitative ray;
where the first is dismissed for the fact that the
meme is lacking, the second is advocated because
of its ungraspable incorporeality. The statementthat Sampsons virality is as established as that of
the meme only adds to this utter confusion.
Notes
1 See, for instance, the essays in Matei Candea,
ed., The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and
Assessments (London and New York: Routledge,
2012); David Toews, The New Tarde: SociologyAfter the End of the Social, Theory, Culture &
Society, 20 (2003), pp.8198; Bruno Latour,
Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social
,www.bruno-latour.fr/node/181. [4/2/2013].2 See Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and Social
Influence: Selected Papers, ed. and intr. Terry
N. Clarke (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1969), Part V.
3 Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and SocialInfluence, p.229.4 On the issue of chance in social theory see, for
instance, Mike Smith Changing Sociological
Perspectives on Chance, Sociology, 27 (1993),
pp.513531 and Vilhelm Aubert, Chance in
Social Affairs, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Philosophy, 2 (1959), pp.124.5 Alberto Toscano, Power of Pacification: State
and Empire in Gabriel Tarde, Economy and Society,
36 (2007), pp.597613.6 Laurent Mucchielli, Tardomania? Reflexionssur les Usages Contemporains de Tarde, Revue
dHistoire des Sciences Humaines, 3 (2000), pp.161
184.
q 2014 Lukas VerburgtUniversity of Amsterdam
E-mail: [email protected]://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.865327
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