4.2 Kafka and Felice

Für mich ist der Sonntag wenigstens seit 1 ½ Monaten ein Wunder, dessen Schein ich schon Montag früh beim Aufwachen sehe. Das Problem bleibt, die Woche bis zum Sonntag hinzuschleppen, die Arbeit über diese Wochentage hinzuziehn und wie ich es auch anstelle, Freitag geht es gewöhnlich nicht mehr weiter. Wenn man so Stunde für Stunde einer Woche verbringt, selbst bei Tag nicht viel weniger aufmerksam als der Schlaflose in der Nacht und wenn man sich so in der unerbittlichen Maschinerie einer solchen Woche umschaut, dann muß man wirklich noch froh sein, dass diese trostlos sich aufbauenden Tage nicht zurückfallen, um von neuem zu beginnen, sondern dass sie glatt vergehn und endlich zum Aufatmen der Abend und die Nacht beginnt. 

[“For me, Sunday, at least for the last one and one half months, has been a miracle, whose light I see shining when I wake up on Monday morning. The problem remains, how to drag through the week until Sunday, pulling the work through these week days and however I arrage it, by Friday, usually, it no longer seems to work. When you go hour by hour through the week, being as attentive by day as the insomniac is at night, and why you look around you in the unrelenting machinery of such a week, you really have to rejoice that these comfortlessly piled up days don’t collapse and begin all over again, but that they smoothly pass and finally you can begin to breathe out in the evening and the night.”]

The piled up days, piled up by the “relentless machinery” of time, are, at one and the same time, the product of the person who is looking around in this machinery and the trap of the eternal return, a trap that is just barely avoided by the fact that the days pass “smoothly”. Kafka, in this passage, has brought together the Bergsonian sense of the infinitely substitutable time of matter – the time that is, theoretically, always repeatable – and the time of the assembly line, the accidents of which form one of the constant sources of his concern for the last three years, ever since he joined the Arbeiter- Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt fur das Konigreich Bohmen and began to investigate claims for workman’s compensation.

The letter is dated the letter of October 27, 1912. It is one of the hundreds sent to Felice Bauer, the woman he met on  August 13, 1912, at his friend Max Brod’s house.  Franz Kafka is thirty years old at this point – although he doesn’t look it. He has been promoted to the post of Concipist at the Anstalt – which means that he, as a lawyer, draws up papers concerning cases of accidents for his firm, pursues employers, and sometimes gives talks or writes articles on the prevention of accidents at the workplace. Felice is also in a fairly modern profession – she works in the gramaphone division of the Carl Lindstrom Company in Berlin as a supervisor, under whom there is a pool of secretaries.

Like coins, people have more than one side. Unlike coins, they often have even more than two sides, although eventually most people can be grasped by the head or the tail. Felice B. seemed to grasp Kafka, in the end, as a man with a white collar job and a part owner of an asbestos factory. However, as the abundant flow of letters show, he was a writer – a writer to his very fingernails. Felice B. is harder to grasp, since we don’t have her letters. And there is something irresistibly symbolic about this, because she was working for a company that was pioneering records and Dictaphones – capturing the oral without the pen or the typewriter. Ideally, that is. Kafka is in fact very inquisitive about the “parlograph” at the same time that he admits that he sees it as an obscure enemy. On  the 13^th, when he meets Felice, he is engaged in his extra-office life, bringing his friend Max Brod, a manuscript for the first of Kafka’s works to be published in his lifefime.

simultaneity 4.1: EWG in Nietzsche and Kafka

When Nietzsche came down from the mountains of Sils Maria in 1882 and wrote the first four books of the Gay Science, he was filled with a rare, unifying vision that had sprung itself upon him and completely turned around his mood. As any moraliste knows, the mood is a cognitive tool  – it is by the mood that one judges certain intangible but real changes in the world. No barometer is complex enough to allow us to judge our historical moment, with its different forms of existence that are set  loose in the quotidian and bump against each other as though in a fair; with its obsessions and routines, its shifting matrixes of exchange, its speeds. Thus, Nietzsche wrote his book with this mood like a muse on his shoulder, and revealed, shyly, like a great secret, in the fourth book, his inspiration and great idea. It was of course the doctrine of the eternal return, announced – as though balancing the lightness of the title of the book – as the heaviest weight, das grösste Schwergewicht.  The dramaturgy here is along the lines of the great philosophical coups de theatres, from Socrates’ death to Descartes’ dream: thus, it includes a demon.

“What if, one day or night, a demon slinks up to you in your loneliest loneliness and says: your life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again, and countless times again; and there will be nothing new in it, and instead, every pain and pleasure and ever thought and sigh and all the unspeakably smallnesses and greatnesses of your life must return to you and everything in the same series and succession – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again – and you with it, dust speck of specks!”  [My translation]

The eternal return of the same enters the literature of the late nineteenth century through many doors. Nietzsche’s is the most famous. In the early twentieth century, it enters with a bit less gravity – in fact, as a slapstick routine, performed by a po faced clown. The clown, here, is not Chaplin but Kafka, the place is in an early letter to Felice Bauer, his future fiancé, but the setting is surely Modern Times, the office version:

Simultaneity 3: the accident

It is a very bad career, but only a bad career gives the world the light that a not perfect, but still good writer wishes to produce, although unfortunately at any cost. Naturally, too, such people, observed from the outside, seem to wander everywhere, I could tell you about some of them, me of course included, but they are not in the least remarkable than through the work of illumination in rather good novels. One could say, that these are people that emerged a bit slowly from out of the previous generation, one can’t demand that everybody should follow the regular leaps of the times with the same regular leaps. But if one once gets behind in one’s march,  one will never catch up with the march of the crowd, obviously, yet even if the step left behind soon begins to look like one could bet that it was not a human step, one would lose. Imagine the view from a running horse in a track, if one could keep your eyes on it, the look of a horse springing over the hurdles, which surely shows one the most external, actual, wholly true nature of the race. The unity of the stands, the unity of the living public, the unity of the surrounding region in a specific time, etc., but even the last waltz of the orchestra and how one loves to play it nowadays. But if my horse turns around and doesn’t want to jump and goes around the hurdles or even breaks out and becomes spirited inside the arena or throws me off, naturally in appearance the collective view has won. There are gaps in the public that some fly over, and some fall in, hands wave here and there as by every possible wind, a rain of fleeting relations falls on me and it is easily possible, that some onlooker feels  it and is sympathetic to me, while I lie on the grass like a worm.

- Kafka, letter to Director Eisner, 1909

On June 6, 1885, F.R., a railroad conductor, was involved in a train accident in which the train derailed. The walls of the baggage car that he was in at the time caved in, and he was barely able to escape, after which he lost consciousness. However, when he regained consciousness he discovered that not much time had elapsed, and he was able to help drive the train to the next station. After that incident, however, he suffered “pains in the left thorax and back, flickering and colors in his vision. Also intervals of weakness of memory, fear and a racing heart.” These effects occurred when he was working, and he even once lost consciousness. He went to an eye clinic, but there was found no pathological damage to the eye.

J.R., a clothcutter in a factory, was involved in an accident in March, 1885, when he accidentally grasped a driver belt (which turned 80 times per minute and was carried by it up to the area between the belt and the ceiling, where he pressed his hands and head firmly against the ceiling to resist being sucked in by the belt and crushed. A worker held onto his legs while another worker rushed to turn off the machine. J.R.’s clothing was torn off, he suffered burns all over his body, and he experienced immediate shock. After a week he began to feel a hammering in his temples, his eyes would film up, and he had dizzy spells. He also began to forget things and to say “nonsensical things’.

R.V. was working in a wood finishing factory. On  June 18, 1886, his sleeve was caught by a bladed rotating machine used for planing wood. The rotating maching went at a speed of 2000 to 3000 rotations a minute. His right arm was twisted around it, but he was balk to use his free left arm to grasp an iron cart. The rotating machine ripped the shirt from his chest and shoulders, but this allowed him to free his arm. He saw that he was uninjured, but he felt fear to the extent that his entire body shook. Two days later his arm showed marks of being severely scraped up and swollen, with blood red, painful bruises. He worked six more months, essentially using only his left arm, while he took to medicating himself for the pain he felt in the right through alcohol.

All of these cases – and some thirty nine more – appeared in Hermann Oppenheim’s book, Traumatic Neuroses, which was a salvo in the long battle concerning medicine and politics that was the result of the accident insurance legislation that had been passed by the German parliament. Bismark publicly expressed his fear of the gains being made by the socialists, and to counter them, he began a process of reforming industrial relations, a key piece of which was workman’s compensation insurance.

Germany was soon followed by Austria. In the meantime, these matters were being debated in the United States and Britain. Wherever they were debated, the question of what to do about injurious effects that seem disproportionate to their causes. And thus, nosology was pulled by the nose into the class war.

In the United States, this war was fought, firstly, around the railroads. Eric Michael Caplan’s article about ‘Railroad sprain” – the symptoms that arose from the trauma of railroad accidents – follows the trajectory of the report of these injuries from their first description in John Eric Erichsen’s On Railway and other injuries, in 1866. The politics of the industrial accident in the U.S. followed a typically bifurcated path: while the courts generally found against claims made by workmen for injuries, they were much more sympathetic to passengers – for of course passengers were more likely to belong to the respectable class. They could even be judges. Thus, a diagnostic war was waged over whether ‘railroad spine” – whiplash – and other seemingly psychogenic illnesses were real or not. Real diseases are those with physiological causes, while those traumas that were psychogenic – well, courts and doctors tended to put them to the margins, close to overt fakes and malingerings.

Herbert Page,  a surgeon who worked for the London and Northwest Railroad, produced the most interesting theory. Page took up the idea of neuromimesis, first articulated by the French psychologist, Paget, to suggest that “fright itself… was capable of eliciting neuromimetic symptoms by way of some willful hypnotic state.” [396]  And, slyly, Page suggested that there was evidence for the neuromimetic hypothesis:  “The existence of a certain amount of control is shown moreover by the disappearance of the mimicries, when all cause for their representation is removed. The matter of compensation as we have seen, exerts in many cases a very favorable influence on the symptoms of nervous shock.”

This is an argument that continues to break out on various fronts to this day. Certainly the railroad companies, at the time, were losing in courts – juries tended to believe accounts of injuries from people like themselves, so that surveys showed plaintiffs winning 70 percent of the time. This became a chronic source of irritation to the stockholders of railroad companies. 

Railroad spine and other “traumatic neuroses” were caught in a set of rather confusing forces. For one thing, while  it might be very well to say that the injured were actually under hynpnotic suggestion, what this meant, in effect, was extending hysteria from women to men.  At the same time, there was a general suspicion of any explanation that relied on psychological factors – it went against the materialism of the times. The pressure from the population through the courts was one of the pressures that made industries reluctantly adopt state regulations for injury, in fact, as the costs could be controlled and predicted, then.

Because the way the sides are marked does not correspond to a clear battle between the ‘progressive” and the “regressive”, it is easy to misunderstand the context here. Hermann Oppenheim’s career is a good example of the casualties to which a ‘regressive’ materialism is heir.

Oppenheim is now a semi-forgotten figure. Although he was one of the founders of neurology as an independent discipline in Germany, he ran into a solid wall of hostility in World War I from neurologists, many of whom had been his students, when he maintained that that soldiers traumatized at the front were suffering a real material injury that was signaled in post-traumatic symptoms. The neurologists, seeking ways of sending traumatized soldiers back to the front as quickly as possible, were invested in the psychogenic explanation. Like the Railroad surgeons, these neurologists represented, from one point of view, the progressive side of according reality to psychological factors – but they came to that point of view for the most regressive of reasons: money in the one case, nationalism in the other.

Andreas Killen has pointed out that Oppenheim’s career as a neurologist, which began in the 1880s, coincided with the new importance of interpreting seemingly unaccountable pains and symptoms: ‘Arguably the most important factor in this disease picture was the accident insurance law itself. The law compensated work related neuroses within strictly defined limits. Entitlement to benefits was made contingent upon proof of direct causal connection to an accident.”

Oppenheim re-asserted the importance of material cause – that is, the material displacement of neurons – against the French school of suggestion, led by Charcot.  The shaking experienced by truck drivers, firemen, steelworkers, textile mill roller operators and the like had unexpected effects not because there was variances in the degree of suggestibility of different people, but because there were different degrees of material stress that were put upon the neural system.  That system was hooked into the emotions felt.

On the basis of the comparative analysis of his “observations”, Oppenheim presented as their common symptom the fact that the initiatory accident or injury always “had to produce a strong psychic emotiom or lead to them.” Oppenheim expressly refered to the fact that the symptoms of the traumatic neurosis occurred independently after the event, even though the patient laid claim to compensation,  grounding this forensically important affirmation with his unilorm clinical experience.  Oppenheim described a central problem of all the victims as ‘disquiet, excitement, fear and terror”, and more, a “hypochrondrial-melancholic mood, anxiety and finally an “abnormal sensitiveness” (Oppenheim, 1889) The anxieties mostly manifested themselves as panic attacks with agoraphobia, through which obsessive petty fears and compulsions can manifest. On the basis of their ‘intensified sensibitivity” the patience are extremely inclined to “pull back from society into solitude.”

Oppenheim was never clear about how, if the basis of these neuroses was changes in the microscopic configuration of the cerebellum – his guess – they could, as symptoms, feed back into the disease. This is an ontological paradox that didn’t worry Oppenheim, but in the end, it left him behind – having no place in his etiology for the psyche, he, in a sense, failed to explain the evolution of these disorders.

The industrialized experience of accident is one of the great social symptoms of the felt divide between organic time and vehicular time. Heidegger, in the 20s, speaks of how a background comes into view when there is a break in the routine – he uses the example of a missing or misplaced tool. The example that comes into view in the late nineteenth century when the tools were the toolusers – and what is embodied is something missing, filled in by pain. If in fact neuromimesis was happening, what was being imitated? For Page, fear was imitating real organic diseases, diseases that occurred in organic time. The accidents, however, shook the unconscious frame of the users of the industrial system – their assimilation of the eternal return of the same. That eternal return of the same is the metaphysical heart of the simultaneous, considered as a form of social time. Its poet is Kafka, an industrial accident insurance man. 

Simultaneity 2: Bergson and the industrialized experience

In the first chapter of Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson takes up one of his most celebrated themes, durée, and refines it in response to his further thought on the matter since he had first exposed his idea in données immédiates de la conscience, in 1888.  In reading Bergson now, one can’t help but be struck by the metaphors of unwinding, unreeling, and tracking that go through his discourse on time. That metaphoric is usually associated with film, and it is with good reason that Deleuze turned to Bergson in writing his two books about cinema. However,  I’d like to make the case  that it goes back to what Schivelbusch has named the industrialized experience – the experience of speed on the railroad – and that underneath the surface of Bergson’s philosophy of time we have an image of the dualism between the vehicle and the driver or passenger, which is part of a larger dualism between industrial automatism and the worker.

That sense of the vehicularity of matter in which the organism is placed begins with a description of the continual changes we as consciousnesses are subject to. “This is to say tht there is not an essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state… precisely because we close our eyes to the incessant variation at ech psychological state, we are obliged, when the variation becomes so considerable that it imposes itself on our attention, to speak as if a new state were juxtaposed to a prceding one. The latter is supposed to remain invariable in its turn, and thus so on, indefinitely. The apparent discontinuity of psychological life thus depends on the fact that our attention is fixed upon it by a series of discontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we believe that we perceive, in following the broken line of our attention, the steps of a stairs.” [2-3 – my translation]

Compare this to the analysis in chapter 3 of Schivelbusch’s The Railroad Journey. For Schivelbusch, the exemplary industrialized experience was riding on a train, since even the first, primitive trains could achieve speeds that were more than three times that of stagecoaches. In other words, railroads introduced a completely inorganic mode of travel on a mass scale, and in doing so accustomed people to an inorganic form of speed. Schivelbusch quotes authors from the 1830-1850 period who were quite aware of what was happening, putting it in terms of ‘shrinking space” or, paradoxically, of expanding the individual’s capacity to reach distant spaces. This was put in contrast with the fact that the shrinking and expanding did not affect the actuality of things. “Yet by a sort of miracle,” says the Quarterly Review article [from 1839, which Schivelbusch is citing], after describing the shrinking process, “every man’s field is found not only where it was, but as large as ever it was.”[35] Indeed, after reading Schivelbusch’s abundant citing of articles of this type, one understands why Einstein’s popular essay on relativity used the example of the railroad train, as the trope was already long in the popular consciousness.

If we consider that Bergson’s theme of durée was also colored by the industrialized experience, then we can see further into the metaphor and metaphysics that grounds it. Evidently, from the first, Bergson draws a line between organic time – which is irreversible – and artificial time – the time of matter – which is reversible. These are not accidental results of the duality between the two, but go to the heart of their different temporal regimes:

“From the survival of the past [for the self] results the impossibility for a consciousness to traverse the same state two times. However much the circumstances may be the same, it is not on the same person that they operate… … This is why durée is irreversible. We cannot re-live a single bit, for it would be necessary to efface the memory of all that followed.” [6]

Bergson’s framing of organic time results in his re-discovery of the new: “But an intelligence, even a superhuman one, could not foresee the simple, indivisible form which gives these abstract elements their concrete organisation. For to foresee is to project into the future what one has perceived in the past, or to have represented for a new assembly later, in a new order, already perceived elements. But what has never been perceived, and is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable.”

Contrast this regime of the irreversible and the truly new with the regime of the material, which is how sameness enters the world:

“Now, we say that the composite object changes by the displacement of its parts. But when a part has quit its position nothing stops it from retaking it. A group of elements which has passed a state can thus always return, if not by itself, at least by the effect of an exterior cause which puts everything back into place. This is the same as saying that a state of the group can repeat itself as often as one wants and that, in consequence, the group never grows old. It has no history.”

An aging without growing old is the fate to which the mechanical, the artificial, composite matter, is consigned – whereas growing old and having the property of novelty is the seemingly contradictory state imposed upon the organism. True novelty and true age are properties of the ‘passenger’ within the vehicle of matter. The vehicle can reverse, but the passenger, inherently, cannot.  And so the two move together, but move in different worlds. As Schivelbusch puts it about the train passenger:

‘What was experienced as annihilated was the traditional time-space continuum, which characterized the old transport technology. Organically embedded in nature as it was, that technology, in its mimetic relationship to the space traversed, permitted the travellor to perceive that space as a living entity. What Bergson called the durée (duration of time spent getting from one place to another on the road)  is not an objective mathematical unit, but a subjective perception of time-space.” [36]

Schivelbusch, I think, wrongfoots himself by putting the matter in terms of the broad subject/object theme – rather, the irreversibility, or entropy, of durée points to a certain deep reversal of our expectations: for the illusion is all on the side of the vehicle, in that it seems from the vehicle’s standpoint that the eternal return of the same is the law and the prophets. On the other hand, the illusion of reversibility becomes, in the industrial experience, the tempo of human life. The ideal of non-aging, the ideal of the assembly line, the ideal of the vehicle, the ideal of interchangeable parts, all are imposed on the human: human novelty is supplanted by artificial news.  This is one of the great characteristics of the simultaneity principle behind Tarde’s publics.

‘… the railroad did not appear embedded in the space of the landscape, the way coach and highway are, but seemed to strike across it.” [37]

a form of social time - simultaneity

In the twentieth century, sociologists and marketers gave Tarde’s publics a variety of names: sub-cultures, worlds, demographics, constituents, etc.

However, the important thing is that the public and these publics form out of the same principle – the subordination of haptic space to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by a social mode of temporality – simultaneity – that Tarde mentions in connection with the news. News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, an important movement is captured. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern for cultures exogenous to Europe blinded him to the effect of modernity within Europe, and America, where we witness another allochronic effect having to do with the new. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch.

When Lyotard, in the Postmodern condition, speaks of the collapse of the meta-narrative that has sustained modernity, the master narratives of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, he is really signaling the triumph of this particular social form of time – simultaneity – over other forms – notably, that of history and cyclical time. The news, one could say, destroyed history and the forms of memory associated with it. But far from being a new phenomenon, post-modernity has always been the threat inside modernity – it is a pole in the latter’s dialectic. Simultaneity, embodied in the effect of the sphere of circulation upon those of its agents that branched off to produce the media industry, has long been the construction principle that drives newspapers and magazines, and drives the internet and the social network.

 

the crowd and the public

In Antonine Albalet’s Souvenirs de la vie Littéraire there’s a portrait of Gabriel Tarde from his Paris years. Tarde arrived in Paris late – he was 51 when he found a post at the Ministry of Justice and moved there. By this time he had become famous in the world of criminology, even though he did not have institutional backing; rather, he’d become famous for his ideas while still living in the provinces – in Sarlat, in Dordogne. Albalet’s portrait captures Tarde in around 1895, when he was becoming celebrated in the broader circle of Paris intellectuals who were associated with certain magazines and coteries. Tarde was now on the course that would take him to the Chair of Philosophy at the College de France, when he was chosen over Bergson in 1900. However,  he died shortly thereafter - in 1904 - and thus never did leave his footprint on any particular institution. He didn't have successors, or Tardians, the way Bergson had Bergsonians.

Tarde spent his fifties in the Paris that Proust writes about, the Paris of Salons and the uneasy mixtures that came about when various aristocracies – Bonapartist, Orleanist, traditional – came into contact with rich bourgeois professionals. As it happens, both Proust and Tarde were fascinated by the formation of “circles” and of conversation. Albalet catches that aspect of Tarde in his portrait. He first met Tarde through Henri Mazel, a social psychologist, who frequented the circle of the symbolists around Jean Moréas, who included, at the time, André Gide.

“It is through Mazel that I knew the philosopher Gabriel Tarde. They often came to the Café Vachette together [This café was where the symbolists met. It was located on Rue St-Michel, on the left bank], Mazel with his air of a smiling joker, Tarde with the silhouette of the conductor of a gypsy orchestra: large, thin, an artistic air, long dark hair in a weeping willow cut, a small moustache and sparkling eyes bying his spectacles. This philosopher had passed almost all his existence in Sarlat, the Perigordian town where he was born, where he married, and where he exercised, time out of mind, the office of a juge d’instruction. The descendent of an old family, Gabriel Tarde counted among his ancestors a canon who played a role in the Renaissance Papal court, upon whom he had published a pamphlet which he always listed in his works, while he suppressed a book of stories and poems. Tarde, in fact, was only a stranger in sociology; professional psychologists never figured in his world than at a secondary level. Above all, he loved beautiful poetry. He had written a lot of French and Perogordian verse. A feebleness of vision obliged him to restrict his reading. Tarde only read good authors. A phrase of Taine’s had led him to discover Cournet, who oriented his ideas towards social philosophy. As for his habits, Tarde remained young at heart; he loved balls, dinners, cicles, the theater and the cafes. A charming conversationalist, he didn’t hesitate to take the floor and to deliver himself of all kinds of fantasies of the most ticklish improvisation.” [174]

Tarde’s journey from the provinces to Paris in his life has been symbolically reenacted in his afterlife, where he seems to be perennially forgotten and rediscovered. The last two big rediscoveries were in the sixties, when Deleuze mentioned him in Difference and Repetition (claiming that he was a great disciple of Leibniz and a philosopher of difference)  and in the 1990s, when Bruno Latour saw in him an ancestor of actor network theory.

I am not so much concerned with Tarde's view of difference, or his theory of imitation, except in as much as it surfaces in his book, Opinion and the Crowd, which appeared in 1901. The consists mainly of three large essays which had first been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and Revue de Paris – which were not specialized sociological journals, but signalled Tarde's niche in the larger world of Parisian intellectuals, not in the world of academia. However, as these works are connected to the great theme that is at the heart of all of his work – the theme of imitation, and they also take on board themes that traverse Tarde’s work in criminology, a word is in order.  Tarde figured  among a group of criminologists – perhaps the best know of which, today, is Lombroso – who were applying certain notions having to do with disease and psychology – the notions of contagion, epidemic, hypnotic suggestion, in Tarde’s case – to the phenomenon of crime. There was a perception that Europe was undergoing a crime wave – and an uneasiness that there was a whole criminal class that existed just below the surface of bourgeois life.

Tarde didn’t embrace pseudo-Darwinian theories of degeneration, but he did find, in crime, an exaggerated instance of social dynamics that he believed operated throughout society. Crime, by being outside of the norm, gave us a certain laboratory insight into what the norms, submerged in our daily life, were about. When we turn to Tarde on crowds and the public, we find some of the same themes reworked. In particular, the metaphor of contagion helps him separate crowds from publics, and leads him to certain characteristic insights.

The crowd, according to Tarde, is centrally dependent on physical proximity, or haptic space. For Tarde, proximity is not a contingent fact about individuals in a crowd, but rather the fact that roots these individuals in a larger natural history. Physical proximity in a crowd tends to dissolve the historic human quality of the individual, and release his animal nature.  Unlike Canetti, who in Crowds and Power confounds, to an extent, publics and crowds (under the notion of the invisible crowd), for Tarde the crowd is a natural event and the public is a social one:

In the lowest animal societies, association consists principally in a material aggregate. As one ascends the tree of life, the social relation becomes more spiritual. But if individuals are distanced to the point that they cannot see each other, of if they remain apart for a certain very short time, they cease to be associated… Thus, the crowd here presents something animal. Isn’t it a bundle of psychic categories essentially produced by physical contact?  [9]

The spiritual or intellectual portion of association  comes about in the play of proximity  that, while still operating under Hesiod’s “talk”, individuates the sense of belonging. Tarde, in the 1890s, naturally turned to newspapers and ‘circles’ for his examples, fished among celebrities, fashionmakers, writers and politicians.

“When we submit, all unawares, to that invisible contagion of the public of which we form a part, we tend to explain it by the simple prestige of actuality. If today’s newspaper interests us to this point, it is because it only tells us the latest facts, and it would be the proximity of those facts, and not at all the simultaneity of their knowledge by us and others that impassions us by the report.  But analyse this sensation of actuality that is so strange, the growing passion for which is one of the refined circumstances of civilized life. What is reputed to be the “news”: is it only what is taking place? No, it is everything that inspires a general interest in current events, even if it is an old fact. Everything about Napoleon has been in the news these last few years; everything fashionable is news.”

Tarde, here, approaches the moment that we saw figured in Works and Days: the source of talk is, mysteriously, based in itself. What marks the famous or the infamous is not, firstly, the deed, but the talk about the deed.  News, as Tarde points out, makes new what it reports, even if it is old.

Tarde did not have, as Marx and Simmel did, a firm and, as it were, external sense of modernity. He was, as Deleuze puts it, a pioneer in the exploration of ‘micro-sociology.’ It is this that helps him see that the public – this self-identifying crowd form that forms around abstracted physical proximity and identifies with a certain form of social time – the new, which authenticates itself as a simultaneous experience – required tools that would coordinate that experience. Thus, until the appearance of the printing press in the West, Tarde claims, there was no real public or publics. And thus no real public or public opinion.

The public, in Tarde’s view, is a sort of phylogenetic extension of public opinion, and thus, the different publics are different phylogenetic extensions In the 1890s, conversation in Paris was being tracked not just by Proust, but by Tarde, both of them trying to understand the diffusion of commonplaces and opinions – but in Tarde’s case, his background was a small town, Sarlat, in which the voice of the public was much more easily tracked and fixed. For what was said among the town’s visible elite soon made the rounds – a social fact that was picked up and used by the great realist novels, as for instance in Lucien Leuwen, or in many of Balzac’s studies of the ‘provinces’. Here the circle – half crowd, half public – was more visibly at work, and more visibly stratified – between the receptions given at the house of the bourgeois rich, the circles of the Catholic pious, or the cafes that had their clienteles and newspapers – one for the military officers, one for the liberals, one for the royalists, etc. How opinion became ambient, in these cases, was easier to visualize, took on a human face.

 

public opinion - a prehistory

P.S. is a 42-year-old man who has been affected by

paranoid schizophrenia since the age of 20. At the

onset of his psychosis, he was trying in various ways to

compensate for his difficulties in getting in touch with

other people. He had no secure ground to interpret the

others' intentions. He lacked the structure of the rules

of social life and systematically set about searching for

a well-grounded and natural style of behavior. For

instance, he was busy with an ethological study of the

"biological" (i.e., not artificial) foundation of others'

behaviors through a double observation of animal and

human habits. The former was done through television

documentaries, the latter via analyses of human interactions

in public parks. An atrophy in his knowledge of

the "rules of the game" led him to engage in intellectual

investigations and to establish his own "know-how" for

social interactions in a reflective way. – Giovanni Stranghellini, At issue: vulnerability to schizophrenia and lack of common sense (2000)

Consensus omnium, common sense and public opinion all exist as separate tracks through the intellectual history of the West – and each trail can be superimposed upon the other.

Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the days of the seasons.  The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.’ This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible.

The plausible concerns the heart of Oehler’s theme. As he points out, Plato’s antipathetic stance regarding opinion – endoxe – is countered by Aristotle’s respect for it. “The positive value of generial opinion is, as well, the ground for Aristotle’s preference for commonplaces [Stichwoerter]. It is said that in the peripatetic school, under his direction, a wideranding collection of commonplaces was made.” Furthermore: “… This preference of Aristotle … rested on the materr of fact that in commonplaces the infinitely rich experience of many races was documented in a unique way in brief and trenchant formulas, which is the way the Consensus omnium expressed itself.” [106]

If the pair pheme/kleos presides over the objects of the news, the commonplace presides over the form. It is the style of the cliché, the proverb, the wisdom of mankind – the conventional wisdom of the moment. The duality of fame and infamy, expressed in cliché, is precisely the form of ‘betise’ that a certain school of modernist writers – Flaubert, Bloy, Peguy, Kraus, Tucholsky, Mencken, Orwell – took as their ultimate enemy, even if for some, the wisdom of mankind was what was traduced in the press, rather than simply represented there.

In Oehler’s account, it was not Aristotle, however, but Cicero who transformed the semiotic of ‘talk”. Before Augustine, Cicero interiorized the commonplace as common sense – equating ‘the agreement of the people” with “a law of nature.” After Cicero, the idea of the universal consent of the people moves into the political order as a legitimizing technique – ironically, according to Oehler, Augustus, who ordered Cicero’s murder, took up his idea of the ‘universal consent of the people’ and made it one of the properties of the emperor.