Creative Destructions: Gabriel Tarde’s Concept of a Passionate Economy

Abstract

This paper traces the connection between and performativity in the light of Gabriel Tarde's concept of economics. At the start of the twentieth century, Tarde formulated a theory of economic process as an innovation process that is driven by constitutive disruptions. Tarde conceived as a moment of separation that nevertheless creates connections, associations and translations between actors. Born from disruption, these temporary, fragile alliances between actors are fomented by their irrational, subjective desire for the new. Tarde anticipates what Schumpeter some years later described as destruction, but explains the innovative power of psychologically, relating it to the passion of the actors who follow a philosophy of possession.Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Gabriel Tarde described as a process of innovation that is driven by disruptions. Although the concepts are not fully coterminous, he was anticipating what Joseph Schumpeter would elaborate under the label of destruction between 1911 (The Theory of Economic Development) and 1942 (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy).1 This chapter will show that at the beginning of the twentieth century, across a broad disciplinary and interdisciplinary front in both arts and sciences, a manner of experimental thinking developed that saw disruption or as a constitutive component of systems and organisms, which themselves were now regarded as dynamic and open towards their environment. This way of thinking is based on knowledge practices that I would like to call 'performative': it is assumed that only in concrete (that is, experimental) practice - in action - does the object of study come into being, and that this object does not point to something 'behind' it, to some 'essence' or 'book of life,' but constitutes itself solely within the research process and in relation to its environment, and must continually be re-produced with the help of various materials, artefacts and signs. Emphasis is placed on the dynamic character of the processes of producing knowledge, which are powered by disruptions and irritations to the status quo.After this historical contextualisation, I will focus on Gabriel Tarde's concept of the economy in order to describe more specifically the destructive dynamic of economic processes that inheres in I hope to show that since the early twentieth century, ideas of innovation that may from today's perspective be called 'performative' have considered a 'destructive dynamic' to be constitutive of the vitality of economic processes - which thus become processes of knowledge generation. Tarde, especially, developed a concept of innovation that combines psychology, sociology and economics in a manner currently attracting new interest, for example in the course of discussions on the loss of consumer and investor 'confidence' as a fundamental economic factor.Tarde' s theory of innovation stands at the beginning of debates about the meaning and significance of creative in economic processes, but it also differs fundamentally from subsequent explanatory models in its 'psychological' orientation on the passions of actors. The reason for this discontinuity must be sought in the dearth of attention to Gabriel Tarde' s work from the 1920s on, both in his own discipline of sociology (due to the dominance of Emile Durkheim) and in economics (economics having separated off from sociology in the early twentieth century).2 It was only his rediscovery by Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour that enabled a recognition of the importance of Tardean thinking for sociology and economics.3The singularity of Tarde' s concept of creative lies in his understanding of the economy as a process of innovation that is based on destruction. Here, is not simply an impulse, a resistance or opposition by the new; it takes on multidimensional functions. …