ABSTRACT
Alberto Toscano points out that Gabriel Tarde’s theory of somnambulism and imitation lent itself readily to a sort of empowering pacification. The social then was a sort of somnambulistic state, a not quite conscious state of suggestive imitation. ‘Tarde suggests that people are not split between rational choice and irrational desire, but act according to a semiconscious imitation that mingles the two’. Quite the contrary, for Tarde the forms of imitation are orientations towards temporal flows. Even despite the association with the crowded assemblies that Tarde thought had ripped the nineteenth century apart, he argued that ‘it is the deep logic of imitation that can turn men into obedient creatures, into a “nation of copyists”’. Invention was generally speaking the remit of the individual who stands out from the heaving surges and eddies of social imitation. In Tarde’s social theory, society drops away, being replaced instead by the immanent forces of imitation, invention and opposition.
