25 September

Tarde was almost unique because he didn’t believe that there was any difference between big things and small things. And as part of that he didn’t think standardisation of things - McDonalds in every town, the spread of the same fashions, languages, music etc. - was a bad thing at all. He saw those as the way *differences* between things spread, not a way that some apparently lovely complex local thing was being wiped out. He would have loved pop music. “The speech of men, each with a different accent, intonation, and timbre of voice and gesture: this veritable chaos of discordant heterogeneities is the social element. But at length, general habits of language emerge from this confused Babel, and are formulated as grammatical laws. In their turn the latter serve, by bringing into relation a greater number of speakers, only to throw into relief the particular individual turn taken by their ideas: another kind of discord. And they succeed all the more in the diversification of minds to the extent that they are themselves more fixed and uniform.”