New Neural Pathways…
Tarde contends that every animal, like every human ‘reaches out’ to the social life to satisfy their innate capacity to imitate (Tarde 1903, 67). This is Tarde’s ‘sine qua non of mental development,’ a precondition of all social life which predates language (Tarde 1903, 67). As he puts it, ‘[t]he adaptive capacity of cerebral functions, the mind, is distinguished from other functions in not being a simple adaptation of definite means to definite ends’ (Tarde 1903, 67). The adaptive mind is ‘indeterminate’ and depends more or less on the chance ‘imitation of outside things’ (Tarde 1903, 67).
Prior to a late twentieth century neuroscientific understanding of a hardwired imitative capacity which may have evolved initially to help animals improve physical movements and eventually became available for more complex functions like language, Tarde located the social mind in an ‘infinite outside’ or ‘outer world’ of imitation-repetition (Tarde 1903, 67). Mutual examples are not simply imitated by way of top down, internalized cognitive processes of the mind, but also filter through the noncognitive sharing of feelings, sensations and emotions. These are reciprocated magnetisms that form part of a ‘universal nature’ – a ‘continual and irresistible action by suggestion upon the… brain and muscular system,’ (Tarde 1903, 67) which spreads through the social environment.1
Significantly, discursive formations do not simply disappear from bodily movements, reflexes, and contagious transmissions. On the contrary, discourse is transmitted along with the prediscursive emergences of faces and stances. There is nonetheless an analytical requirement to map the changes in connectivities of prediscursive spaces and explore contemporary Tardean mediascapes, like the Internet, which as Thrift argues “act as new kinds of neural pathways . . . forging new reflexes.”(Thrift, Non-representational Theory, 236).
1. taken from a talk I presented in Hamburg last year. I am now working on a journal article expanding on Tarde’s notion that the brain has an innate capacity to imitate.
VIRALITY 