ABSTRACT
‘As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know is which peasants, in which regions of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May ’68: those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216). As an indication of Tarde’s political sympathies, Deleuze and Guattari’s association between the work of Tarde and May ’68 is misleading: Tarde, the judge and liberal imperialist, was more concerned with the problem of how to monitor and govern the desires of the populace than with how to foster them (Toscano 2007). Yet this reference to Tarde’s text, The Social Laws, is instructive, nonetheless, in indicating his approach to the question of sociological method. Tarde was preoccupied, as Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks suggest, with the importance of quite specific movements or variations in social life, their timing and location, how to ‘catch them in the act’ (Alliez 2004: 52). In this chapter, I follow Tarde’s interest in finding methods that would be adequate to his conception of the task of sociology. One of the difficulties that he confronted, I argue, is how to produce evidence of the processes of imitation and invention that he saw as central to understanding the phenomenon of variation. What methods were available for those concerned with the study of the kinds of micro-social variations that were at the heart of Tarde’s sociology?
