ABSTRACT
One of the most challenging points of the controversy on the status of the social, which Tarde and Durkheim sustained one century ago, concerns the place that each gives in their sociologies to the notions of difference and identity – and, by extension, to the notion of relationship. Whereas, for Durkheim, we begin life in a simple state of sameness and we grow into increasingly complex states of otherness, for Tarde we begin as we finish, as we live, that is, different, since “difference keeps differencing” (“la différence va différant”; Tarde 1999a: 69), since difference is something that has the unique capacity to take itself as a target or as an object of change. This point is crucial, directly affecting the ways each thinker has chosen to define society and to practice sociology, the former arguing that the social is a special – that is to say, transcendent – domain, the latter that the social is immanent to relations of association. As Tarde claims, “those final elements at which all sciences arrive, the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom, were final only to the eyes of their particular science; even themselves are composites” (Tarde 1999a: 36). Against those who take for granted the identity of the collective or the composition of the social – as Durkheim did for example in his Suicide – Tarde argues that we must follow the associations, the movements of composition themselves.
This chapter experimentally deploys Tarde’s intuition that the social is association, gauging its effect on an ethnographic field in which I have been working for many years: drug use. Trying to articulate Tarde’s intuition ethnographically, this chapter suggests that it is not enough to ask “why do people use drugs?” and “what is the meaning of drug use?”; nor can we be content with the answers that are presented when these questions are put forward, answers usually premised on “error,” “lack,” or “weakness.” Following Tarde’s intuition, it is possible to propose other questions: “what happens with practices like these?,” “what kinds of experiments are users and drugs engaged in?” This allows us to consider other answers, answers that point to the existence of events (the “high” of drugs), events that, in turn, bring to the fore paradoxical agencies of self-abandon, for which substances are indispensable mediators. This chapter proposes that the “high” event is neither a by-product of users’ subjective fantasies, nor a by-product of substances’ objective determinations, but rather a modality of (in)action such as those present in the paradox of passion or in “deep play.” Finally, it suggests that rather than asking who controls the “high,” we should ask whether the “high” occurs or not, or, following Tarde, whether or not there are alter-a(c)tions.
