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Flows, Fluxes and Monads: theConceptual Madness of ExperimentalSocial OntologyLukas Verburgtaa University of AmsterdamPublished online: 21 Jan 2014.

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cally and media studied from a subjective

perspective might be, and they never specify why

or how individuals might appropriate evil media

stratagems to take part in a larger oppositional

movement. They offer only two sparing maxims to

guide any opposition to what they call con-

temporary societys stupidity flow (p.166).

Always bear in mind, they write, that making a

machine do something you dont want to do

yourself [ . . . ] shifts the initiative and the operative

focus of control (p.15), and even more impor-

tantly, each new form of structuration and

mediation of the world generates its own kind of

collateral damage (p.123). Other than these

advisories, the book is purposefully strategic, not

prescriptive. It demonstrates that the materials

and processes to fight and with which to fight are

all around, ripe for the kind of dialectical

appropriation called detournement.

Difficult introduction aside, Evil Media is an

invigorating book. Its deft witticism and disturbing

insights invite double- and repeated-dipping

alone, to be sure, but ideally with discussion

partners. Evil Media deals one of the stronger blows

in recent years against grey medias evolving brand

of media studies cum management theory (p.168).

It turns scholarly focus back to media philosophy

and gestalt. Its ending represents a formidable

wake-up call to readers who are economically

privileged enough to have enmeshed themselves in

their media products and processes. Becoming

more fully connected, in the sense of materially

linkingmore andmore knowledge resources, within

and without an organisation, Fuller and Goffey

write, does not of itself suffice to make anyone or

anything smarter, even if the broader availability of

information within an organisation is an important

prerequisite to making informed decisions (p.169).

Are they correct in implying that contemporary

media users are turning into Flauberts Bouvard

and Pecuchet (p.169), two technocrats who

tirelessly mistake the compilation and accessibility

of information for its content, context and

consequences?10 Time will tell, but so will deeds.

As Zygmunt Bauman has written, [t]o be moral

does not mean to be good, but to exercise ones

freedom of authorship and/or actorship as a choice

between good and evil.11 As Fuller, Goffey and

Google know, evil is as evil does.

Notes

1 Google Company Webpage, Ten Things We

Know to Be True ,www.google.com/about/

company/philosophy. [04/09/13].

2 Google Investor Relations Webpage, Code ofConduct ,www.investor.google.com/corporate/

code-of-conduct.html. [04/09/13].3 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2007).4 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967],

trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone

Books, 1994).5 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

[1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland:

PM Press, 2012).6 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans.Jonathan Cape (New York: Farrar, Strauss and

Giroux, 1972).7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life[1980], trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1984).8 Julian Assange, The Banality of Dont be

Evil, New York Times (June 1, 2013) ,www.

nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-

banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html. [04/09/

13].9 Wikileaks About Webpage, The importance of

principled leaking to journalism, good govern-

ment and a healthy society,www.wikileaks.org/

About.html. [04/09/13].10 Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet [1881],

trans. Mark Polizotti (Normal: Dalkey Archive

Press, 2005).11 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in

Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p.4.

q 2014 Jennifer StobColgate University

E-mail: jstob@colgate.eduhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.865326

Flows, Fluxes and Monads: theConceptual Madness of Experimen-tal Social Ontology

Tony D. Sampson. Virality: ContagionTheory in the Age of Networks.(Minneapolis and London: University of Minne-sota Press, 2013)

Tony D. Sampsons Virality is one of the first

articulate attempts to experiment with Gabriel

Tarde, rather than summarily theorize the status

of this nineteenth-century sociologist as a fore-

father of actor-network theory.1 For Sampson, to

experiment with, or resuscitate, Tarde means to

loosely combine it with a Deleuzian-inspired

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event-philosophy and to relate it to recent

research in neuroscience, marketing, epidemiol-

ogy, group psychology and (social) network

studies, all the while eschew[ing] the organiz-

ational capacity of linguistic categories [which]

tend to block [ . . . ] conceptual freedom (p.4).

This results, for example, in Sampsons character-

ization of Virality on page 5 (!) as exploring a

continuous space of encounter that is full of

multiple monadic singularities, located in an

epidemiological [ . . . ] world of things [ . . . ]

emotions, sensations, affects and in which a

continuous generation of neurophysiological

ecosystems [is] boosted by the cultural ampli-

fiers of [ . . . ] commodities [ . . . ] such as caffeine,

sentimental novels and pornographic works

(p.5). Some pages later the reader is kindly

requested not to take such conceptual madness as

metaphorical, but rather as ontological.

If this is a beautiful example of misplaced

concreteness, it must be seen as the argumentative

core of Virality for what Sampson aims at is to set

up two kinds of virality against each other; on the

one hand, the molar (representational, organiz-

ational, discursive, analogical and metaphorical)

virality of biopower and, on the other hand, the

molecular (non- or subrepresentational, acciden-

tal, happenstance, flowing, desiring and ontologi-

cal) virality of small, unpredictable events (pp.5

6). Although these are both part of the same

monadological process of (deterritorialized, mol-

ecular) becomings turning into (territorialized,

molar) beings and vice versa Sampson, on a

methodological level, does not deal with them as

such. His central goal in Virality is not only to

indicate that where the molar kind of virality

explains the process from the (Durkheimian)

viewpoint of the territorialized beings, the

molecular kind of virality does so from the

(Tardean) viewpoint of the deterritorialized

becomings, but also to argue that this second

approach is a better explanation. Firstly, insofar as

it is not a representative image of the social but

actually captures the vibratory events [that]

spread out and connect everything to everything

else (p.7). Secondly, because it somehow exceeds

the hegemonic symbolism of (bio)capitalism

connected to the molar virality of the Durkhei-

mian.

The first chapter provides a provocative, albeit

somewhat sketchy, account of Tardes social

ontological framework as developed in his The

Laws of Imitation, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology

and Monadology and Sociology. Sampson emphasizes

that it is impossible to understand Tarde on the

basis of the Durkheimian categories of macro

(institutions) versus micro (individuals) insofar as

Tarde was concerned with currents, waves and

vibrations of belief and desire that function as the

pre-individual forces constituting the subject. At

this level, existing below (infra) the cognitive

awareness (p.20) [original emphasis], it does not

make sense to make a distinction between either

individual and social or social and biological;

the beliefs and desires, governed as they are by

three social laws (imitative repetition, adaptation

and opposition), are both non-conscious, anti-

habitual and infra-psychological. For example,

in the case of internet hypes or fashion it is not the

subject who enter[s] into the network [ . . . ] but

the imitative ray that [ . . . ] makes the agent part of

an assemblage of relationality (p.29) [original

emphasis]. That is why Tarde famously argued

that society is imitation and imitation is a kind of

somnambulism and why Sampson speaks of an

hypnotic magnetism that exerts control over a

mostly unconscious monadic social space (p.27).

In direct opposition to the twentieth-century

Durkheimian separation of sociology from psy-

chology and biology, Sampsons Tardean social

ontology is premised on the eclectic mixture of

these domains. That is also to say that it wants to

end the Durkheimian social or, for that matter,

refuses to begin with it as Deleuze once put it.

For Tarde, as for Sampson, sociology is the

Baroque science of a pre-social, pre-biological,

pre-psychological chaos from which social actors

and social wholes arise on the basis of processes of

individuation and actualization.

Chapter two is devoted to critiquing the

contemporary neo-Darwinian attempt to, first,

biologize this chaos and, second, algorithmatize

these processes on the basis of the meme or gene.

Sampson uses the example of a viral video posted

by Lonelygirl15 to show that the molar

metaphor of the mechanistic memetic algorithm

a modern combination of Darwins theory of

natural selection, Mendels study of biological

inheritance and Spensers (sic) application of

evolutionary theory to civilizations is unable to

explain what spreads. His main point is that this

metaphor negates the creativity and novelty of

chance-encounters in favour of a deterministic

evolutionary code (p.78). More problematic are

Sampsons claims that the neo-Darwinian position

is an analogy, whereas the Tardean position

pertains to how things are and that where the

meme does not exist, the flowing and vibrating

beliefs and desires undeniably do. This is a

consequence of Sampsons experimental, rather

than comprehensive, reading of Tarde; he forgets

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that Tarde was first and foremost interested in

using statistics as a measure of belief and desire

and as a demonstration of the imitative power

from which they result.2 For instance, in his essay

Quantification and social indicators of 1897

Tarde wrote that social statistics must never lose

sight of their special mission, which is to measure

as exactly as possible, by all the direct or indirect

means at their disposal, the imitative propagation

of a belief or desire.3 Although Sampson is,

perhaps, justified in noting that the imitative ray

is not [ . . . ] reducible to a unit [and] is not intrinsic

or essential [but] insubstantial or inessential (p.87)

[original emphasis] he leaves the argumentative

force of the statement that unlike the assumed

substance of the [meme], the incorporeal [imita-

tive ray] has a distinct ungraspability (p.95)

totally unexplained. It seems somewhat preposter-

ous to claim that the meme, as an explanatory

metaphor, must be rejected in favour of an

ungraspable, unknown, unknowable and perhaps

even not-yet realized phenomenon. In this context,

the reader may also despair when Sampson

proposes that the imitative ray is to be grasped

[ . . . ] in a topological diagramming of tendencies

and understood as a degree of freedom that is yet

to come (p.88). Again, to allude to Deleuzes

Whiteheadian adage, must not the abstract itself

be explained instead of used as an explanation?

In the third chapter, Sampson does examine the

issue of diagramming the imitative ray of belief

and desire when he discusses the contemporary

notion of a network. As in the case of the neo-

Darwinian position, the image of the network

space is criticized not only for its apolitical

naturalness and capacity [ . . . ] to become a

tyranny as constraining as any hierarchical chain

of command, but also for its tendency to ignore

the occasional and chaotic overflow of aperiodic

events (p.98). At this point, Sampsons focus of

attention shifts to the status of these accidental

events in the work of Tarde. More precisely,

Sampson asks whether accidents themselves define

the social or whether accidents can be influenced

so as to redefine the social. This topic, when

suitably fleshed out, would be of major import-

ance, for instance, to the further development both

of chance as an explanatory element (rather than

as a residue) in social theory, as well as of the

connection between a relational ontology of the

pre-individual and actor-network theory.4 Samp-

son, however, merely notes how small, rare, non-

periodic and random factors (of affect) play an

important role in financial markets (and economic

bubbles), but leaves it at that at least as far as

the theorization of chance is concerned. Following

Nigel Thrift, Alberto Toscano5 and Laurent

Mucchielli6, Sampson goes on to accuse Tarde of

political conservatism for overestimating the

importance of accidentality and ignoring the

fact that (neuro)marketeers are capable of guiding

spontaneous events and making them look like an

accident of chance encounter [by dipping] below

conscious awareness (p.117).

Viralitys political message presented in chapters

4 and 5 seems to be that this Tardean ability to

hypnotize the unconscious may be transformed

into a molar spreading of fear by corporate and

political (neo-Con) persuaders. Although it is

stated on the back cover of the book that for

Sampson such abilities are not necessarily a

positive or negative force, he directly opposes a

capitalist terror contagion to the transformative

potential of revolutionary love (p.144). Sampson,

thus, writes that [i]n contrast to the microbial

contagions of the neo-Cons, and their appeal to

the political unconscious through the cold,

emotionless channels of advisors like Cheney and

the fearmongering of Rumsfeld, Obamas cam-

paign of hope and change managed to emphati-

cally tap into the infectable emotions of manyU.S.

voters (p.155). These conclusions, however

attractive and justified they might be, raise serious

doubts about both the neutrality of Sampsons

account as well as the necessity of grounding them

on the basis of a Tardean-Deleuzian monadologi-

cal ontology as such. But, obviously, the hunch of

this new ontology is to pulverize the world of

positivist Durkheimian conservatism by spiritua-

lizing the dust of monadological progressiveness.

The thoroughly political aim of Virality is to think

up new ways in which [ . . . ] exercises of biopower

can be discerned, resisted [and] escaped or the

potential for revolutionary countercontagion can

be actualized (p.159).

This is at the same time the greatest merit and the

biggest weakness of Virality. Although there is

much that speaks in favour of attempting to

question capitalism by understanding its foun-

dations and functioning better than it does itself, it

is doubtful whether Sampson manages to prevent

this goal from completely intruding on his

presentation of a new social theory that explains

how society comes together. Sampson does

provide the initiative for a full-blown Tardean

microsociological worldview, but too much in

Virality rests on dubious claims about the reality of

its, sometimes amazingly, abstract terminology

vis-a`-vis the metaphors and analogies of the

positions it rejects. This is most prominent in the

central opposition between the molar virality of

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neo-Darwinian theories of memetics and themolecular virality of Tardes imitative ray;

where the first is dismissed for the fact that the

meme is lacking, the second is advocated because

of its ungraspable incorporeality. The statementthat Sampsons virality is as established as that of

the meme only adds to this utter confusion.

Notes

1 See, for instance, the essays in Matei Candea,

ed., The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and

Assessments (London and New York: Routledge,

2012); David Toews, The New Tarde: SociologyAfter the End of the Social, Theory, Culture &

Society, 20 (2003), pp.8198; Bruno Latour,

Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social

,www.bruno-latour.fr/node/181. [4/2/2013].2 See Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and Social

Influence: Selected Papers, ed. and intr. Terry

N. Clarke (Chicago and London: The University

of Chicago Press, 1969), Part V.

3 Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and SocialInfluence, p.229.4 On the issue of chance in social theory see, for

instance, Mike Smith Changing Sociological

Perspectives on Chance, Sociology, 27 (1993),

pp.513531 and Vilhelm Aubert, Chance in

Social Affairs, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of

Philosophy, 2 (1959), pp.124.5 Alberto Toscano, Power of Pacification: State

and Empire in Gabriel Tarde, Economy and Society,

36 (2007), pp.597613.6 Laurent Mucchielli, Tardomania? Reflexionssur les Usages Contemporains de Tarde, Revue

dHistoire des Sciences Humaines, 3 (2000), pp.161

184.

q 2014 Lukas VerburgtUniversity of Amsterdam

E-mail: l.m.verburgt@uva.nlhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.865327

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