A response to The Harper Review’s Winter 2026 proposition, “The party is over.”
Dear editors,
After the zenith of human prosperity has been realized, when manual labor has been made superfluous by technology, the great Asiatic-American-European confederacy has achieved political peace and linguistic unity, and the spinning, neurasthenic “progress” of the Christian era is complete… the sun will go red and then indigo and pale blue and then it will die. Some will watch the solar apoplexy from the completed tower of Babel, some will freeze overnight, and to survive, the rest of us will burrow into the warmth of the earth. The party will start underground.
This is the premise of Gabriel Tarde’s fable Fragment d’histoire future (1896), later republished in English as Underground Man. Tarde used this highly creative science fiction form to generate and illustrate his sociological theory. He was a contemporary of Émile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, and their intellectual debate shaped the formative years of the field. Whereas Durkheim advocated a sociology of large-scale collective forces and norms which regulate the individual, Tarde believed in a “microsociology,” where social structures emerge from chains of individual expressions of desire, spreading preconsciously through social encounters like currents in a network.
In other words, Tarde’s uncanonized theory of sociopolitical life follows the laws of the party.
Tarde uses the image of human life restarting in a system of interconnected tunnels to illustrate a social space made of flows of belief and desire. The tunnels are small; you can only meet one person at a time. Without overview, there is no relational comparison: nobody is taller or wealthier or more beautiful. The limitations of the tunnel allow the “real social bond” between individuals to appear “in all its vigour and purity.” All social exchanges become focused and intrinsic; specifically, for Tarde, they must take the form of invention, imitation, or opposition. Like meeting someone in the dark in a loud, sweaty party, desire manifests as heat, closeness and intensity—all that matters are passions.
In the strange utopian romp of Underground Man, the logic of the party becomes the basis for a new aesthetics for humanity. Architecture, for example, consisting of only interiors, takes on a distinctly social beauty. Where aboveground buildings suffered from a “misplaced individuality,” tunnel buildings are described as free and wanton; they “are only an extension and ramification, one of another, an endless continuation.” Love and sex, too, are refashioned in the logic of the tunnel. People, like buildings, are beautiful when they extend themselves. Because the ultimate act of extension is making art, tunnel men are only attractive to tunnel women if they are generative artists, pushing out the walls of the tunnels in frescoes, bronze statues, and epic poems in an “apotheosis of love.” By becoming purely social creatures, “all sorts of vulgar wants no longer hinder the progress of the truly human faculties … every one is born a sculptor or musician, philosopher or poet.”
Though it is not yet the year 2489, and we haven’t yet faced total ecological catastrophe, our social reality is unmistakably a network of channeled connectivity. We have phone sex, we repost Instagram stories in chains of invention, imitation and opposition, and ninety-five-percent of international data is transmitted as pulses of light by fiber optic cable-tunnels deep under the sea! Gabriel Tarde has a utopian view of the kind of communality that emerges out of total immediate connectivity. Our social life, like that of Tarde’s troglodytes, is a “party” of the always-extending network, and we should be unafraid to burrow, and let our desires flow through.
Troglodytically,
Zoë Feigelson
Image: Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti, The Walnut Tree in Benevento (The Witches’ Sabbath), watercolor on paper, circa 1816 (private collection).