In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows one to revisit Gabriel Tarde’s (1843-1904) social theory that entirely dispensed with using notions such as individual or society. Our argument is that when it was impossible, cumbersome or simply slow to assemble and to navigate through the masses of information on particular items, it made sense to treat data about social connections by defining two levels: one for the element, the other for the aggregates. But once we have the experience of following individuals through their connections (which is often the case with profiles) it might be more rewarding to begin navigating datasets without making the distinction between the level of individual component and that of aggregated structure. It becomes possible to give some credibility to Tarde’s strange notion of ‘monads’. We claim that it is just this sort of navigational practice that is now made possible by digitally available databases and that such a practice could modify social theory if we could visualize this new type of exploration in a coherent way.

In this paper, written in the outmoded style of a “manifesto”, an attempt is made to use the word “composition” as an alternative to critique and “compositionism” as an alternative to modernism. The idea is that once the two organizing principles of nature and society are gone, one of the remaining solutions is to “compose” the common world. Such a position allows an alternative view of the strange connection of modernity with the arrow of time: the Moderns might have been future-centered but there is a huge difference between the future of people fleeing their past in horror and the “shape of things to come”, that, strangely enough, now appears suddenly in the back of humans surprised by their ecological crisis.

Even though Tarde is said to have had a literary view of social science, he himself was deeply involved in statistics (especially criminal statistics) and took an essentially quantitative view of social phenomena. What is so paradoxical in his view of quantification is that it relies not only on the aggregates but also on the individual element. The paper reviews this paradox, the reason why Tarde was son intent on finding a quantitative grasp for establishing the social sciences and relates the type of data Tarde envisioned with the peculiar new types of information available today in digital formats, datascapes that might vindicate many insights that seemed so odd at the time of Tarde. (see also 82)

For twenty years a systematic philosophical project has been pursued on the side: that is, to compare each of the ways in which truth production are being defined in the European tradition inside which philosophy has developed. Thus, to the analysis of networks that has been the main object of publications so far, another feature has to be added: the “key » in which each type of network is able to spread, this key defining for each “mode of existence » the felicity and infelicity conditions necessary to grasp it. It is this philosophical project that aims at providing a positive philosophical anthropology of the moderns in place of the only negative argument, proposed so far, that “we have never been modern”. The lecture offers an alternative intellectual biography and a sketch of the philosophy to be published later.