Abstract
This chapter aims to present an integrated vision of infinitesimal difference basic grammar in social theory. Concepts such as social field, social force, assemblage, molecular change, dromology, and cartography are analyzed. This integration is the result of the paradigmatic articulation we have intended to carry out between some of the most important works of Tarde, Deleuze, and Foucault. This constellated reading enables us to affirm that we can talk about a distinctive (meta)theoretical approach which is still under formation, an approach where the developments of other authors we have only mentioned transiently as Bergson, Gurtvich, Latour, and De Landa can be included.
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Notes
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“With the inadequate name of will, Schopenhauer spent his life studying one of these two terms, Desire, and if instead of trying to prove that wanting is the fundamental substance of every being, animated or inanimate, he would have confined to show that desiring is one the fundamental aspects of all animal or human souls, he would not have found anyone who objected him. That was the indisputable nucleus of truth that, hidden in the bottom of his great hypothesis, made it plausible for so many spirits. But, it is worth pointing out that, if he had wanted, he would have had exactly the same reasons he had to objectify to infinity the will – let’s say desire –, to objectify to infinity the judgment – let’s say the belief. A system over this base remains to be constructed: warning for architects” (Tarde 1895d: 35).
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At the climax of this argument, Tarde (1895d) would write many years after postmodernism that science is a social belief like any other.
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Deleuze and Guattari identify at least two theories of desire in Lacan: one connected to the lack produced by language in the subject (the subject would be then a subject of that lack), and the other one linked to the so-called object-caused of desire or little object a. The last one is interpreted by Deleuze and Guattari as a virtual object which is active though it is always displaced in respect of itself and impossible to localize in an identifiable place. In this regard, the quote in The Anti-Oedipus is the following: “Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two poles: one related to ‘the object small a’ as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond both any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the ‘great Other’ as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 27).
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The reorientation in Foucault’s approach to power relations is clear in statements such as these: “Power is, ultimately, less related to the confrontation between two opponents or to the engagement of one over another one, than to the government […]. Then, the proper mode of relating of power should be searched neither alongside violence and war nor alongside the contract of the voluntary nexus (that, in the best case, can only be instruments). Instead, it should be looked for alongside that singular mode of action, neither warlike nor legal, that is the government” (Foucault 1994a: 237). In this sense, the government “is a set of actions over possible actions. It works on a field of possibilities where the behavior of subjects who act inscribes: it incites, induces, deviates, facilitates or hinders, extends or restricts, makes things more or less probable and, on the brink, compels or impends absolutely. But it is always a manner of acting over one or many acting subjects, insomuch they act or are susceptible to act. An action over actions” (Foucault 1994: 237).
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Tonkonoff, S. (2017). The Reason for Being of the Finite. In: From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55149-4_6
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