Zoubida Afoutni
email: zafoutni@univ-reunion.fr

Rémy Courdier
email: remy.courdier@univ-reunion.fr

Franc ¸ois Guerrin
email: francois.guerrin@cirad.fr

A Multiagent System To Model Human Action Based on the Concept of Affordance

Keywords: Situated action, affordance, emergence, multiagent system

This paper presents a model to represent situated action in farming systems. The basic idea is to invert the classical vision of action that stipulates that action is a consequence of a decision process and a plan. We consider action as mainly dictated by a situation created by the interaction of the actor and his/her environment. Hence, action is a process that emerges from this situation. Thus, in this paper we treat the question of how to model action as an emergence process from the situations created by actors and their environment? For this, our model is based on multiagent system as well as on the affordance, emergence and stigmergy concepts (this paper emphasizes mainly the first two).

INTRODUCTION

Human action is the driving force of many systems, such as farming systems. Understanding these systems, namely with the aim of providing management support, requires a representation of human action as close to reality as possible. Thus we propose here a model to represent human action, taking into account explicitly its spatial and temporal dimensions. Our conception of human action is based on the theory of situated action [START_REF] Suchman | Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication[END_REF] which assumes that a realistic representation of action should not extract it from its occurrence situation nor reduce it to a pre-constructed plan. A defining feature of this theory is the concept that all resources required for action are located in the actor's environment. The latter is able to perform the appropriate action at any time, through the observation of his/her local environment. Thus it is the actor's environment that, in some way, dictates action, while the actor is performing it. This work is based precisely on the idea that the choice of the action to be performed, interrupted or cancelled is not the responsibility of the actor but rather of its environment. To implement our model we used a multiagent systems (MAS) modelling approach, along with the concepts of affordance, emergence and stigmergy. The first two concepts were used to represent action at an individual level. The concept of stigmergy is used to represent action at a collective level, specifically the indirect coordination between actors mediated by marks left in the environment. As this paper is focused on the representation of action at the individual level, therefore the coordination mechanisms will not be discussed [START_REF] Afoutni | Modelling situated action based on affordances and stigmergy[END_REF][START_REF] Afoutni | Coordination of activities: application of some concepts and formalizations to agricultural systems simulation[END_REF]. The choice of MAS was natural because it allows one to implement explicitly everything related to human activity and, as we will demonstrate, to situated action as well. Indeed, an action is performed by an actor embodied within a space. Its location limits his/her perception and therefore all actions that he/she can achieve. The MAS approach allows us to design our model using multiagent basic concepts: Agent, Environment and Interaction. Moreover, since we consider the actor's environment plays a crucial role in determining action in time and space, the environment must embody all the information needed for the actor to perform the appropriate actions. The concept of affordance [START_REF] Gibson | The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Resources for Ecological Psychology[END_REF]) is an elegant solution to implement our idea. Indeed, according to Gibson, an affordance represents a set of actions offered to an actor by the objects in his/her environment at a given time and location. This concept has been developed in various works to determine that affordance is rather an emergent property of the pair actor-environment [START_REF] Stoffregen | Affordances as properties of the animal environment system[END_REF][START_REF] Chemero | An outline of a theory of affordances[END_REF]. The concept of affordance is closely related to the notion of situation defined as a set of resources and constraints with which an actor interacts [START_REF] Afoutni | Modelling situated action based on affordances and stigmergy[END_REF].

Since the objects in an actor's environment are an integral part of the situation he/she encounters, defining a mechanism that could detect these affordances will lead to representing situated action. Wishing to answer the question: how can we detect affordances in the actor-environment system, we focused on the concept of emergence which is a promising way to model affordances. This paper is organized in three sections. The first section introduces briefly the concept of affordance followed by the relationship between affordance and emergence. The second section presents our model of representation of situated action. The third section is dedicated to the experimentation of the simulation model, and we conclude this work by a discussion.

AFFORDANCE AND EMERGENCE

The concept of affordance has its roots in the work of the psychologist Koffka [START_REF] Koffka | Principles of Gestalt psychology[END_REF]. However, Gibson improved this concept for his work on human direct visual perception [START_REF] Gibson | The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Resources for Ecological Psychology[END_REF]. The hypothesis of direct perception outlines that there is no need of a symbolic representation of the environment in the actor's mind nor an inference mechanism to extract the meaning of his/her percepts. Instead, any solicitation from the environment is perceived as an affordance directly by the actor. For example, a rigid horizontal surface affords an actor to walk; a chair affords a person to sit while it affords an ant to climb. However there is no consensus on " where is exactly the affordance in the pair actor-environment ", although there is unanimity that affordance is an emergent property of the actor-environment system [START_REF] Luyat | Les affordances: de James Jerome Gibson aux formalisations récentes du concept[END_REF][START_REF] Stoffregen | Affordances as properties of the animal environment system[END_REF]. According to these authors, affordances exist only in the pair actor-environment, as the fruit of their interactions. This suggests that emergence can only be observed by an higher level than the actor-environment interaction's level. An affordance is thus not reducible to only one element of the actor-environment pair. We find similarities between this notion of affordance and the concept of emergence. The latter states that a system exhibits emergence when there are phenomena (properties, structures, behaviours, etc.) that arise from the interactions between the entities of the system at the "micro" level and become visible only at a "macro" (higher) level. Emerging phenomena are characterized by their novelty compared to the system's individual entities [START_REF] Wolf | Emergence versus self-organisation: Different concepts but promising when combined[END_REF].

Thus, since an affordance is a property originating from the pair actor-environment and since it is re-lated to an actor, the latter is capable of detecting this affordance and exploits it. Hence, the actor plays a double role. It is an element of the system leading to the emergence of the affordance as well as the observer who is able to discover this affordance through its knowledge on the system, as the work of [START_REF] David | See emergence as a metaknowledge -A way to reify emergent phenomena in multiagent simulations[END_REF] suggests. These authors present the idea that experts are sometimes able to discover or observe an emergent phenomenon in some areas. This discovery would not have been possibly done by other people who do not have the necessary metaknowledge of the expert's domain. David et al. proposed to define emergence as a meta-knowledge and a methodology for detecting and reifying emerging phenomena on which we have based our work. Our model exploits all these concepts. However, according to our conception, an action is dictated by the environment and not by the actor. Thus we consider that the meta-knowledge which allows one to discover an affordance must be specified relative to the spatial environment.

THE MODEL

Our model is based on the idea that a multiagent system has an environment composed of a set of non-autonomous entities called environmentalentities, representing actors and passive entities of the studied system. The environmental-entities are located in a physical space in which they interact. This environment is controlled by a set of abstract agents called place-agents. Each place-agent is responsible for the entities operating in a well-defined area that we call place. The place-agent's role is:

• to observe within its perception field (its own place and neighbourhood) the environmentalentities and their interactions in order to detect and reify the possibly emerging affordances as well as to select and trigger the appropriate actions on the place it manages;

• to coordinate with other place-agents hence giving indirectly a consistent behaviour to the entire system.

This model therefore proposes to reverse the traditional view of MAS where the real-world actors are usually represented by "agents" (in the computerscience meaning) whereas the other system entities are represented as "objects of the environment". For us, the real-world actors are represented by nonautonomous entities the role of which is to perform the actions dictated by the place-agents.

We present the model in four parts: environment, affordance, representation of action and agent architecture.

Environment

The environment is composed of environmentalentities as well as the physical space where they are located.

Environmental Entities

Environmental-entities represent the "actors" and all kind of passive objects of the studied system. An environmental-entity is characterized by a dynamic state and processes representing their internal dynamics. We distinguish two environmental-entity types: passive-object and actuator. A passive-object represents an entity that can only undergo an action. In the case of agricultural systems, a passive-object can be a stock of fertilizer, a plot, a tractor, etc. An actuator is an environmental-entity which possesses all mechanisms to implement an action but not the initiative capacity to undertake it which is the place-agents' role. Thus, an actuator may be a combination of an actuator with one or more passive-objects. For example, the action of ploughing can be done by the actuator "farmer-tractor-plough". If "farmer" is an actuator per se, the particular action of ploughing needs to combine it with "tractor" and "plough" otherwise considered as passive-objects. This environmentalentity characterization allows one to differentiate between entities that perform action from entities that undergo action. This helps answer a question related to action "who performs action? " The answer is the pair actor-environment likely to making affordances at some time and some place to emerge. Therefore, environmental-entities differ from agents by their lack of ability to take the initiative of acting (for actuators) and even to act (for passive objects). Definition 1. An environmental-entity is a situated entity that carries information useful for the emergence of affordances. It is capable to execute or undergo an action, with internal processes that can modify its environment. It is characterized by the lack of autonomy and faculty of perception.

An environmental-entity e is characterized by:

• id e an unique identifier represented as an alphanumeric chain; • A e a set of actions that it can perform or undergo:

A e = {a e 1 , a e 2 , ..., a e n }; • E e a set of variables that model its state: E e = {e f 1 , e e 2 , ..., e e n };

• D e a set of functions that calculate the evolution of its internal state: D e : E e → 2 E e ; • I f a set of functions that connect one of its state at a time t with the list of actions it can perform or undergo: I f : E e × t → A e • p e (t) a place where it is located at time t.

Spatial Representation

Representation of situated action necessarily involves the explicit representation of space. Thus, the physical space is where the environmental-entities are located. For example in agriculture, space is the set of land plots, buildings, equipment, roads, streams, etc. that compose the farm. The space in the model is a two dimensional Euclidean space. Each environmental entity is characterized by its position defined in a coordinate system. Space is regarded as continuous even if the environment is managed by place-agents. Each place-agent controls only a portion of space (its place) characterized by a vector of coordinates (see figure 1). Each place can have any geometric shape. Therefore the space composed by a set of places of equal sizes, with the same geometric shapes, is a discrete space (as mostly used in MAS); otherwise it is an irregular space as our model gives the modeller this possibility (see figure1). • id p an identifier of the place; • v p a vector of coordinate points that specifies the geometry of p; • id g an identifier of the agent managing the place p;

The space P is a set made of the union of all elementary places p i .

The affordance Model

Definition 3. An affordance is an emergent property, which can be detected at a macro level using metaknowledge held by agents-places that control the portions of the physical space (called "places") where environmental-entities are located.

Modelling affordances as emergent phenomena leads us to adapt the mechanisms involved in the detection and reification of emergent phenomena [START_REF] David | See emergence as a metaknowledge -A way to reify emergent phenomena in multiagent simulations[END_REF].

Detection of Affordance

The detection of affordances by place-agents consists in observing at all time the states of all the environmental-entities located on the place they manage or their immediate neighbourhood making the list of actions that can be performed or dealt with by them. This observation allows place-agents to build a set of facts K that represent the knowledge embedded in their environment and to discover affordances.

A fact is characterized by the 3-uple (environmental-entity, state/action).

After building K, we need to analyze this set to discover potential affordances. We use a set of functions R Φ called affordance revealing functions. Every function's argument is the set K of facts and its output is a set of potential affordances.

R Φ = { f : K n → Φ} , n ∈ N (1)
Where Φ is the set of emerging affordances.

Reification of Affordance

The affordance detection phase outlines new affordances that will be used by the agent:

• to select one or more actions to perform;

• to improve the system with new knowledge that did not exist originally.

The second point is the key advantage of reification. Detected affordances will be reified into the environment through what we call a structure of affordance, characterized by: (i) the affordance (i.e. a possible action) (ii) the actuator(s)/passive object(s) causing the detected affordance. Reification of affordances is subject to a set of conditions that specify whether an affordance can be reified and when it should be removed from the environment. Indeed, a structure of affordance may become invalid when the current state does not match the conditions that create this affordance. Reification allows us to create knowledge in the system. The structures of affordances allow the agent to discover thereafter other affordances that could not have been detected with the basic entities (actuators and passive objects) of the system. The structures of affordances also mimic a memory embedded in the environment that can be used directly by an agent when the configuration of the environmental-entities located on its place has not changed between two simulation time steps.

Representation of Action

In this paper, we consider action as a noninstantaneous dynamic process, whose execution is constrained by the perceived conditions in the agent's environment. Thus, an action has a start date and end date and a duration. It may be interrupted or cancelled if the conditions necessary for its continuation no longer exist. An action may be in different states: running, interrupted, canceled. Definition 4. An action is a dynamic process invoked by an agent, executed by an actuator, which can be undergo by a passive-object, characterized by a starting date, an ending date and a duration, conducted in a place of the space. It possesses a state and a priority.

Dynamic State of an Action

Our model is based on the representation formalism of action presented in [START_REF] Guerrin | Dynamic simulation of action at operations level[END_REF]). An action a is represented by a binary function of time (t), space (P) an environmental-entity (E) and constrained by a set of conditions C a (t, p, e):

S a (t, p, e) = 1 0 if else C a (t, p, e) (2)
p is the place where action is running, t the current time, e the set of environmental entities involved in the action. C a (t, p, e)) is a logical proposition depending on time and space. When this proposition equals 1, it means that the current situation allows the execution of action. Otherwise, three cases are possible:

(i) the current state no longer allows the continuation of action (e.g. the current date value is greater than the end date), then the action will be definitively cancelled (ii) the current situation corresponds to the situation for the termination of an action, then the end date of action will be calculated (iii) the current situation requires the interruption of action. Thus, an action a is represented as a dynamic process defined by a succession of time intervals.

Action Temporal Bounds

The starting and ending times (t -,t + ) and the duration (τ a (t)) of an action are also functions of time, determined by a condition P ± a .

t ± a (t, p, e) = t if P ± a (t,p,e) t ± a (max(0,t-τ a )) else (3)
When the condition P - a (t, p, e) (resp P + a (t, p, e)) is satisfied it can trigger the corresponding action and calculate its start (or end) date, otherwise the value t ± a is identical to its value at the previous time step.

Agent Architecture

Physical space and environmental entities are managed by a set of place-agents. Each of them is responsible for managing actions on its assigned place (figure 2). These actions are induced by the environmental-entities and other conditions observed on its place through detected affordances. Thus, the detection of affordances, the selection and update of the state of action as well as its place's state are the main duties of any place-agent.

Perception

When a place-agent perceives an environmentalentity, it may arise two cases:

• the environmental-entity e perceived is on the place managed by the place-agent g;

• the environmental entity e perceived is on the place managed by a neighbouring place-agent g .

In the first case, it could lead to trigger an action by the actuator bearing the capacity of performing it. In the second case, since a place-agent does not have the right to trigger an action with an actuator that is not on its own place, this could lead to initiate a behaviour of coordination with the neighbouring agent. Hence, we define two boolean perception functions: Perc e and Obs e .

Perc e (g, e) =

1 if e on place of g 0 else (4)

Obs e (g, e) = 1 if e on neighbouring place of g 0 else (5) Once the environmental-entities that are perceived by a place-agent are identified, the place-agent needs to collect facts potentially leading to the emergence of an affordance. A place-agent can thus perceive only the facts necessary to allow the emergence of affordances corresponding to the actions that could be performed on passive-objects or performed by actuators located on this place. The facts perceived by a placeagent should be restricted by a set of filters Filtre K . These are functions that specify for each agent the facts at the environmental-entity's level that it can perceive. These filters are defined by:

Filter k : G × E → K (6)

Detection of Affordances

The perception phase allows a place-agent to acquire information on its local environment which represents all the facts. These facts may concern the information collected at environmental entities' level or about the general state of the environment. The facts from the environmental entities will allow the agent to help affordances to emerge using the affordance revealing functions R φ .

Selecting an Action

Once the list of affordances has been built, the placeagent needs to select one or more actions which can run concurrently. This selection is based on both preconditions necessary for triggering actions P ± a and the priorities assigned to actions.

When priorities are assigned a priori they are fixed and do not change during the simulation. But they could be dynamically assigned based on certain time-varying parameters. For example, some actions in the agricultural system cannot be performed outside of their earliest and latest completion dates. These actions become urgent when their end dates at the latest approach. The priority of an action is known using a function Priorite a that returns an integer.

The end of the selection phase of action is marked by the calculation of its starting date, using the equation (3).

Triggering an Action

After selecting an action and calculating its starting date, the action will be triggered at the concerned actuator's level. Concretely triggering the action consists in bringing to '1' its state and in triggering processes implemented at the environmental-entities' level representing the effects of this action on the environment.

Checking During an Action

Given that action depends on a situation, its course is influenced by the evolution of this situation. Thus, the place-agent may be required to suspend, cancel or terminate the current action. This phase consists in checking at the beginning of each simulation cycle if the conditions of action's execution are still valid. If they are no longer valid, there are two cases:

• the place-agent interrupts its action;

• the place-agent notes that the conditions for completion of action P + a (t, p, e) are valid. It calculates the ending date using equation (3) and informs the environmental-entity concerned the end of action.

CASE STUDY

Implementation

A prototype of the proposed model has been implemented using the simulation platform AnyLogic (AnyLogic, 2010). AnyLogic can simulate models based on multiple modelling approaches: discrete event simulation as well as systems dynamics and multi-agent systems. It is based on the object-oriented language Java. Regarding the multi-agent approach, AnyLogic offers two types of entities: Agent and Ac-tiveObject. ActiveObject can be understood as objects in object-oriented programming. The behaviour of objects (i.e. any entity of the model) can be implemented using state charts, simple functions, data flow diagrams, activity diagrams, etc.

Description of the Simulated System

Figure 3 gives an overview of the simulation of a model based on a GIS map with two farms. Farm 1 is made of 4 plots and 1 livestock building. Farm 2 is made of 3 plots.

The simulation aim is to represent the actions executed at the farm level concerning the livestock (e.g. emptying manure stocks) and crop cultivation of carrots and potatoes (e.g. ploughing, fertilization, etc.).

Modelling of the Simulated System

Environment

The environment is made by the physical 2-D space as well as all environmental-entities. In this model implementation, the physical space is actually partitioned into regular square-shaped cells although it is considered as continuous. Passive-objects are the stocks of manure, of fertilizers, the crop plots, etc. Actuators are the entities that can perform actions such as the farmer, the farmer and his tractor equipped with plough or other tools, etc.

Agents

We have three types of agents: plot-agent, buildingagent and road-agent. The distinction between these three types is based on the actions that can be performed on the place controlled by every type of agents. For example, plot-agents have the ability to "fertilize the soil" but not to "empty the manure stock" (in fact to order relevant actuators to do that for them). But the latter action can be ordered by the livestock-building-agent. Thus, the type of agent constrains its perceptions and therefore all the facts K that can be constructed at each simulation time step.

The affordance revealing and reification functions are based on the type of agent. Consequently, emerging affordances on a place p correspond to the actions that can be performed on p. Each agent is assigned a place to manage, as shown in figure 3 on the cell grid representing space in this example.

Output

The graph 1 in figure 3 shows the evolution of the manure and livestock feed stocks that are located at the places managed by the livestock-building-agent. The behaviour of these two entities was implemented using the data flow diagrams shown on figure 3.

Graph 2 shows the actions running in farm 1 (soil disinfection).

Graph 3 shows the actions running in Farm 2 (ploughing). These graphs illustrate the actions performed in the agricultural system simulated. They show that the implemented MAS based on our conceptual model can simulate in a consistent manner a set of two farming systems without using any planning process. Although the capability of the model to account for the coordination of actions (namely implicit coordination based on stigmergy) has not yet been demonstrated here, this first result is a preliminary proof-of-concept of our model.

DISCUSSION

Our paper focuses on situated multi-agent systems [START_REF] Weyns | Environment as a first class abstraction in multiagent systems[END_REF]. One key-aspect that characterizes situated MAS is the role of the environment. Several functions are assigned to it: structuring entities within the system, communication and coordination between agents, etc.

We have shown that using the concepts of affordance and emergence allows us to create a 'smarter' environment for the agents using the knowledge carried by actuators and passive objects. The affordance detection mechanisms allow emerging actions of agents to be performed in time and space. Reification of these affordances as 'structures of affor-dances' provides the agents with a memory of past affordances. This avoids agents to recalculate their affordances at the next simulation step when nothing has changed in the meanwhile. Thus, it allows the modeller to add in the simulation scenarios as many actions as necessary without affecting the design of agents and the environment represented in the model. Indeed, we only have to inject new affordance revealing and reification functions to modify the simulation scenarios. Therefore a modification of the studied system does not imply its global destabilization nor restarting its whole design.

One model feature lies in the fact that the decision of the action to be performed is attributed to the environment through the concept of place-agents. Each place-agent manages a part of the physical space specified by a place where environmental-entities may be located be they mobile or static. This is in perfect harmony with the theory of situated action which states that actions are mainly determined at each instant by the situation in which the actor is. Hence, no overall strategy or central plan is necessary. Several other advantages can be dragged out from such a representation: the ability to simulate complex activity systems, to process both parallel and sequential actions and interactions, to account for interruption and resumption of actions, delays, etc.

Our prototype allowed us todate to validate the proposed concepts on a simple case study. To make it more useful to agronomists, the next step is to validate the model on more realistic complex situations. Moreover, the proposed conceptual model has been designed on a level of abstraction independent of the field of agricultural applications. We also plan to test our approach in other areas involving human actions.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Partition of continuous space into places

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: The relationship between the layer of agent and the environment

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Simulation interface of the prototype implementing our action conceptual model using the AnyLogic platform.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Dr. Yassine Gangat that helped significantly to improve the English text of this article.


Samuel Trainor

From défrichement to déchiffrement: the linguistic cultivation of rural France in the nineteenth century and the aftermath of traductologie

niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

It would be almost paradoxical. It is an evocation in French of a lost dialect; and it is a generic contradiction (an elegy for poetic language), rhétorique qui fait l'impossible avec le sens. There is also something dépaysant, something 'outlandish', about it. It is written using the In Memoriam stanza of Lord Tennyson 2 . A form, not of the troubadours, but of Victorian pastoral elegy. And it contains the Wordsworthian image of an old, illiterate and patoisant peasant as the locus of poetic memory:

je n'oublîrai pas Vos poétiques idiomes, Tant qu'il restera dans nos champs Quelque laboureur centenaire Qui de l'adisias ordinaire Salûra de loin les passants, (Tarde 1879 : 245) These are 'our fields', in French (nos champs): fields of la patrie. And the 'poetic idiom' of the Muses is also French. The poet was initiated into it by the rebarbative toil of learning French: "Plus tard, quand je sus le français, / (Et j'eus de la peine à l'apprendre) / J'étais grand ; survint l'âge tendre, / Je fis des vers, j'en pâlissais !" He blanches at the memory. Yet he implies the idiom of the Muses survives only in the memory (in memoriam itself) and only in so far as an old peasant, who cannot speak French, lives on in the French fields to say not au revoir, not adieu, but the Occitan adisias, both adieu and au revoir to those who pass by on their verges: a clear antinomy in French, but in both Occitan and the Tennysonian memory, it is the only way for the present, focused on the past, to address the future. How might such a problematic subject of French culture mark 2 Tennyson rejected suggestions that he had copied the form from the minor seventeenth century poet Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Edward Herbert, George's elder brother). See Christopher Ricks's headnote to In Memoriam in The Poems of Tennyson (vol. II), London, Longman, 1987, p. 311-12. The first stanza of the French renaissance rondel was often an octosyllabic envelope quatrain, but no evidence is forthcoming that this had an influence on Herbert, even as English ambassador to France in the 1620s. Besides, Herbert made much more use of the Italian quatrain. Tarde probably picked the stanza up from Sully Prudhomme, and Sully Prudhomme is more likely to have been influenced by Tennyson than Charles d'Orléans.

out a new 'field' of enquiry? In his address to the inaugural symposium of the Congrès International de Sociologie in 1894, Tarde says:

[C]herchons avec toute la précision désirable, mais sans prétendre pour la science qui nous est chère à une autonomie absolue, les limites du champ qu'elle est appelée à défricher. [START_REF] Samuel Trainor Tarde | les Deux éléments de la sociologie[END_REF][START_REF] Tarde | La logique sociale[END_REF] : 63) 3 We might well remark on the similarities between such a carefully pruned statement of intent and the problematic demarcations of translation studies. The same pastoral metaphors apply. Michel Ballard, for example, introducing an essay by Guy Bocquet revisiting this recent history, says: "il esquisse, entre autres, les débats autour de la dénomination et de la délimitation du champ" (2006 : 8) And

Bocquet's own foundational discourse could not sound more Tardean:

La naissance d'une science suppose l'établissement des critères de sa démarcation par rapport aux sciences plus anciennes. L'existence et les limites d'une science sont bien souvent question de conjoncture […], jamais personne n'a pu sérieusement affirmer que l'acte de traduire, l'opération traduisante, fût lui-même scientifique : l'acte de traduire est un phénomène social […]. Cela n'empêche nullement qu'on puisse étudier ce phénomène selon les principes qui fondent les sciences dites du réel, qu'elles soient physiques ou humaines, et dont l'objet est d'observer et de décrire un phénomène 4 .

For the hired-hand English translator, however, the immediate problem in Tarde's mission statement is its last word -défricher -which seems to demand a bit of extra spade work.

It is a word that would have come as no surprise to contemporary readers. In particular, those who had been schooled (as Tarde had) in French grammaire in the provinces during the nineteenth century would naturally accept that clearing and cultivating a neglected field, however thorny a task, was a worthy vocation, Nicolas goûta ces (conseil). Les (arbuste), les (buisson), les (plante) nuisibles disparurent grâce à ses travaux. En peu de temps il se procura un champ qui ne lui coûta que des (sueur), mais pas une obole, et qui, l'année suivante, lui donna une récolte suffisante pour le dédommager amplement de ses (peine). (Larive et Fleury, 1871a : 11) 6 Samuel Trainor

The benefits to be reaped from this toil were abundant. The élèves paysans would glean not only the rules of the regular plural -s, a simple difference between written and spoken language, a clear Lockean sense of property and territory, a moral lesson about the value of an honest day's work, a reminder of the economic importance of agricultural industry, and so on, but crucially they would also learn to uproot whatever hardy remnants of their local baragouin were still entrenched in the semantic field of (indigenous) flora and replace them with a rich crop of French vocabulary: a real lexical cornucopia harvested from the more cultivated and productive language of the urban bourgeoisie.

The linguistic self-hatred engendered by the defamiliarisation of the local plants and arable crops so intrinsic to the rural milieu is a point that contemporary commentators did not overlook. Sonia Branca, for example, tells us that:

Aurouze [Jean Aurouze, Lou prouvençau à l'escolo (Diéu : Empremarié Prouvençalo, 1907)] évoque la honte qui saisit les écoliers occitans incapables de parler de ce qu'ils connaissent pourtant bien, des plantes de leur pays : dès qu'il faut s'exprimer « en français », ça devient toute une affaire : Lis enfans s'asséton dins la classo. La leiçoun coumenço. Se vai parla de boutanico. Sus lou tabléu negre lou mèstre a marca en francès : de faióu, de pese, de civado, d'esparset, etc. sera pas empacha, dirés, lou brave escoulan, pèr parla de tout acó : vint cops dins l'estiéu, aqueli recordo i'an passa entre man.

Mai, lou vaqui que noun muto ! Resto nè, bouco badanto, cabesso vuejo. Aqueli mot francès revihon pas dins sa memóri lou mendre souveni, e li causo que pénso en prouvençau se véi que lou paure li pou pas espremi dins uno lenguo qu'es pas dins sa naturo, ni mai dins soun usage. (Branca, 1979 : 57) 7 Renée Balibar, who unearthed a treasure trove of early grammatical exercises by future writers like Charles Péguy from the Exposition universelle (Paris, 1878), implies that the eradication of such natural lexis from rural dialects was a 7 "The children take their seats in the classroom. The lesson begins. They are going to talk about botany.

The teacher writes on the blackboard in French: henbane, sweetpea, oats, honeysuckle, etc. The hearty rural pupil would not previously have had any problem talking about these things; he can remember touching them with his hands twenty times over the summer. But now he's lost for words. He is dumbfounded, his mouth wide open, his mind a blank. The French words awaken no memories of any sort in him because he thinks in Provençal and the poor child cannot express these ideas in a language which is unnatural to him, and which he certainly never uses." (My translation)

deliberate and systematic concern of the textbooks used in the école nationale.

Larive and Fleury, for example, were so intent on instilling quasi-Linnaean taxonomies of national vocabulary that they even dabbled in an implausible kind of cognitive prescriptivism that sought to reverse-engineer dictionary definitions as something akin to semantic categorical imperatives: Les règles du bon sens sont intimement fondues avec les règles de la syntaxe dans la moindre pratique du bon français. (Balibar, 1985 : 255) The overarching intention, of course, was not principally to eradicate "possible" responses as they might be expressed in French, but to set up French as a fixed, stable, unitary code (for both communication and thought) which should replace the local dialects precisely because its semantic paradigms were universally inductive in this way and therefore immune to the plurality and relativism, the seemingly endless quibbles and variations, the patois brought to these semantic fields.

«
Such extreme logocentrism will always undermine itself. Despite propounding a tidy-minded precision that implicitly likens accurate language to a well-tended market garden, the verges of the Nicolas vignette ("LE CHAMP") are overrun by its own prolific metaphors: 'Le cultivateur … entama sur-le-champ une conversation', 'Nicolas go û ta ces conseils' (my emphasis). This is, to take a clipping from Deleuze, a vivacious rhizome.

It goes almost without saying, then, that Nicolas's work is analogous to the pupil's, and the cultivateur's words to the teacher's. (Notice that Nicolas is not Samuel Trainor allowed to speak and the cultivateur addresses him as tu.) Just as the pupils of the écoles rurales were brought up to value literal défrichement, they also had implanted in them a recognition of the value of a metaphorical intellectual défrichement. It was a cliché, and one they were repeatedly called upon to copy down:

Le paysan tel que je l'ai connu, avait un profond respect pour le sol en jachère ;

[…] il refusait de s'apercevoir que cette terre qu'il appelait au repos se mettait à produire d'elle-même […] d'épais ajoncs et même un arbrisseau tel que le genêt […]. [L]'oisiveté est tellement contre nature, que partout où elle règne, elle nuit. Les champs, pas plus que l'homme, ne sont faits pour elle. Dans l'homme, elle produit les pensées stériles, dans la terre, les plantes sauvages ou malsaines. Rien n'est plus agité qu'un homme oisif, et la terre livrée à ellemême se couvre d'une végétation désordonnée, plus fatigante à enfanter que des moissons bienfaisantes 8 .

The linguistic analogy is blatant and perennial. As a means of carrying out just such a purge of their local dialects, pupils were made to note: l'urgente nécessité de purger complétement le champ des racines envahissantes, entrelacées en tous sens, qui sont vivaces, très-rustiques, et extraordinairement difficiles à extirper et à détruire, lorsqu'elles s'en sont exclusivement emparées après s'y être paisiblement multipliées pendant plusieurs années. 9

The idea of the dictée, then, was to sow the seeds of standard French in the arable land of a newly marked out ésprit national which struggling pupils would probably have been baffled to learn was more fatigued by indolently generating the vivacious wildflowers of its local dialects than industriously cultivating the national staples and delicacies of an alien French grammar. And we should note the verb that is used: enfanter. The earth (la terre) is the mother of the plants, and she is tired of giving birth to weeds; she can be re-energised only by being cultivated at the behest of the cultivated French landowner, aware, from his reading in French, of modern crop-rotation techniques.

8 Le Comte de Falloux, "Le paysan d'autrefois et d'aujourd 'hui" (in Heuzé, 1867 : 93-4) Samuel Trainor How in the école maternelle would the painful labour of reproducing this kind of thing have related to a pupil's idea of what he would have learned to call his langue maternelle 10 ? More to the point, how would such a conception have affected his socio-linguistic relationship with his own mother? For Tarde, the budding psycho-sociologist from the provinces, these would have been salient questions. And they were questions linked to key sociological changes in late nineteenth century France.

Principal amongst these changes was a burgeoning urban population and a relative decline in food production. Inevitably, perhaps, this resulted in a form of Malthusianism which (unlike Malthus himself, who was faced with a different geographical reality in Britain) routinely proposed défrichement as a solution:

La cause de la cherté des substances alimentaires réside […] dans l'impuissance radicale, absolue, de la terre actuellement cultivée, de produire, même dans des circonstances ordinaires et malgré les efforts les plus énérgiques de l'homme, proportionnellement aux besoins sans cesse croissants d'une population dont le développement, en France, a dépassé, depuis longtemps, le niveau des moyens de subsistance. (Vignau, 1859 : 5) The solution was not only to be an expansion of the land actuellement cultivée but a complete overhaul of farming, which would replace the various parochial rural mindsets, seen as holding back any such expansion beyond the traditional 'level of subsistence', and institute a fully integrated national system based on the bourgeois principles of trade, science and rational organisation. In short, the défrichement was both (literally) territorial and (figuratively) social.

Key to this process was the rationalisation of the trades and professions.

Local French vocabularies of work and social roles had to be fundamentally altered for this to occur. Eugene Weber's seminal study of the modernisation of rural France [START_REF] Weber | Peasants into Frenchmen : the modernization of rural France 1870-1914[END_REF], for example, places a good deal of emphasis on one of the basic terminological dichotomies of the Nicolas anecdote above: the simple 10 "qu'il me soit permis de m'étonner qu'il faille faire des exercices si douloureux pour apprendre une langue qu'on nomme maternelle et que ma mère m'apprenait fort bien seulement en causant devant moi. Car elle parlait à ravir, ma mère!" Anatole France, 1885, Le livre de mon ami, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, p. 137. Samuel Trainor replacement of the term paysan with cultivateur. This was initially instigated by the simple fact that paysan had become an insult:

[T]he word peasant itself became a term of contempt, to be rejected as an insult or accepted as an expression of humility, but in either case to be shed for a more honorable label at the first opportunity. And indeed an English traveler of the 1890's found the word falling into disuse: "just as soon as he can, the peasant becomes a cultivateur!" (Weber, 1976 : 7) This was not merely a euphemistic change of job title (such as 'grave digger' becoming 'bereavement excavator'), but symbolic of an entire socio-economic paradigm shift, involving a process of territorial commodification:

The sociologist Robert Redfield makes a distinction between the peasants for whom agriculture is a way of life, not a profit-making enterprise, and the farmer, who carries on agriculture as a business, looking on land as capital and commodity. In those terms, through much of the century, most French men who worked the land and many who owned it were peasants, maintaining the old ways, producing without worrying much about the market, relying above all on the natural productiveness of the land. It would be late in the century before a significant proportion of them tied their production to the needs of the market, because it would be late in the century before the market became significant and accessible to them. (Weber, 1976 : 117) It is telling here that Weber ties the concept of 'accessibility' to that of 'significance', or perhaps even 'signification'. Self-evidently a national lingua franca broadens the geographical scope of trade, and therefore renders the socalled 'internal' market more accessible, but a subtler effect of this paradigm shift is its replacement not merely of signifiers but of the ideological modes of signification. One of the most obvious results was a national reclassification of the rural métiers which tended both to undermine locally specific trades (along with the words describing them) 11 Crucially, these trades were also identified by the standardisers as stubborn bastions of local dialect vocabulary that needed to be brought into linguistic line if their methods were to be rationalised and subordinated to the bourgeois arts and sciences. One of the first French-patois bilingual dictionaries written for use in the national schools puts it succinctly in the introduction:

Le patois n'étant guère parlé que par des villageois ignorant les sciences et les arts, il renferme les mots qui se rapportent aux travaux agricoles ou manuels, aux différentes professions exercées à la campagne par l'ouvrier et l'artisan (Pétin, 1842 : ix) This paradigm shift can not be exemplified any better than by the semantic and social change that was imposed upon the word culture. A term that had once been Derrida was convinced of the shadowy importance of this reification in the history of an internal colonialism that went hand in hand with linguistic standardisation:

Toute culture est originairement coloniale. Ne comptons pas seulement sur l'étymologie pour le rappeler. Toute culture s'institue par l'imposition unilatérale de quelque « politique » de la langue. La maîtrise, on le sait, commence par le pouvoir de nommer, d'imposer et de légitimer les appellations. On sait ce qu'il en fut du français en France même, dans la France révolutionnaire autant ou plus que dans la France monarchique. Cette mise en demeure souveraine peut être ouverte, légale, armée ou bien rusée, dissimulée sous les alibis de l'humanisme « universel », parfois de l'hospitalité la plus généreuse. Elle suit ou précède toujours la culture comme son ombre. (Derrida, 1996 : 68) Merely by being able to use the word culture in this way, I would suggest, Derrida Arnold first used the word 'culture' in this way:

[C]haracter without culture is […] something raw, blind, and dangerous: the most interesting, the most glorious peoples, are those in which the alliance of the two has been effected most successfully, and its result spread most widely. This is why the spectacle of ancient Athens has such profound interest for a rational man; that it is the spectacle of the culture of a people. (Arnold, 1861b : xliii-xliv) This is an implicit eulogy of the French education system, of course. As such, it is hardly unique in Arnold's work. In England and the Italian Question (1859), he makes clear that he considers the successful dissemination of linguistic 'culture' to be the "bright feature" of French civilisation: "her common people can understand and appreciate language which elsewhere meets with a response only from the educated and refined classes." (cit. Trilling, 1949 : 162-3) There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, -motives eminently such as are called social, -come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and preeminent part. [START_REF] Arnold | Culture and Anarchy, and other writings[END_REF](Arnold, [1867] ] When a man sees life under the aspect of a distinct and illuminating idea, all things become interrelated and it is no step at all from the investigation of Homer to the investigation of elementary schools. Before the lectures on Homer, Arnold had been sent on a pedagogical tour of France… (Trilling, 1949 : 178) Most importantly, Arnold's approach to translation was implicitly concerned with the figurative défrichement he had no doubt witnessed in the teaching of French grammar. Compare, for example, his pithy summary of Homeric style16 with the introduction to the prescriptivist chapter on style in the Larive and Fleury second year grammar:

The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:-that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble. (Arnold, 1861a : 9-10) Les principales qualités du style sont : la noblesse, la correction, la précision, le naturel, la clarté, l'harmonie et la concision. (Larive et Fleury, 1871b : 286) They are not only similar in (self-referential) style and content, but they are both obviously concerned with 'clearing confusion.' This is culture applied to written language. Samuel Trainor In response, Newman unpacked the implicit territorial analogy, redolent of the rather hackneyed opposition of French and English styles of landscape gardening: "Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild Beauty is not to be confounded with Elegance: a Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees." (Newman, 1861 : 5) Arnold's approach to translation, then, was firmly rooted in an idea derived from French culture, which was itself derived to a very great extent from translation. The French language taught in the école nationale, for example, was implicitly the result of a standardisation project that had Latin version as its foundation stone. Think, for example, of the role of the belles infideles in the creation of the Académie franç ise ɑ and, in turn, of their translations of Cicero in the cultivation of the idea of culture. In a broad theoretical sense, even by the early eighteenth century, standard literary French had come to be considered as the universal language of translation. It had replaced Latin precisely because it had assimilated into itself, by translation, everything that Latin could say. It was this process that had made French what it was: a language that rendered clear and broadly accessible to a modern rationalist society what had previously been obscure and impenetrable to all but an elite. Julie Candler Hayes provides us with Claude-Pierre Goujet as an example of an early proponent of this metanarrative:

Goujet takes for granted that "content" can be extracted and transferred from one language to another without significant loss […]. The reflection on the advantages of reading in translation leads Goujet to announce the second motivation for offering his project: "To honor our nation by displaying its literary riches; by demonstrating that there is no aspect of literature, science, history or the arts that has not only been carefully cultivated in France, but treated in our language". Looking back to French literary glories of the previous century, Goujet proclaims that French has taken the place of Latin as "the universal language of Europe". French has incorporated the riches of other languages into itself, both through translation and through creative emulation […] Goujet's historical consciousness is intimately linked to his desire to set forth rules and systems […]. The gradual articulation of such rules indicates the arrival of French as an international language, as a machine through which everything may be translated. (Hayes, 2009 : 238-9) Samuel Trainor But it was not just a matter of theory. The grammar exercises in the provincial primary schools were the practical offshoots of the version exercises in the lycée.

Renée Balibar tells us :

Lorsque les textes des lectures, exercices, exemples de grammaire et de rhétorique, étaient enseignés dans les petites classes des lycées, c'était comme préparation à des études franco-latines. Leur caractère artificiel était ouvertement rapporté à l'apprentissage de la traduction.

[…] Les mêmes textes une fois transférés dans l'enseignement monolingue ont changé d'aspect.

[…] Leur apparition semblait inconditionnelle, leur pouvoir d'expression absolu, leur logique indiscutable. L'immense majorité des Français qui ne pouvait penser ni au latin ni aux langages maternels pour faire ses devoirs, recevait le français des manuels comme une seconde nature, ou plutôt comme le seul langage naturel, le premier naturel, de la communauté française. (Balibar, 1999 : 284) More than this, as strange as it might sound, the version exercise -the translation of a text into prescriptive standard French prose -had actually been maintained in the monolingual primary school and had retained some of the pre-eminence it enjoyed in the Latin-centred lycée as a mechanism and a trope of cognitive transformation. As such it was perhaps even more analogous to défrichement than the other grammar exercises:

Parmi les devoirs rassemblés à l'Exposition [universelle de Paris] de 1878, beaucoup s'intitulent bizarrement pour un Français d'aujourd'hui, « traduction », « traduction en prose » : ce sont des transformations d'énoncés pris dans Boileau, La Fontaine, Rabelais, et récrit dans « l'ordre direct », c'est à dire dans l'ordre requis par la théorie grammaticale : sujet -verbecomplément d'objet -complément circonstanciel. (Balibar, 1999 : 280) With the advent of the Third Republic, however, the natural superiority of French (Branca, 1979 : 61) Lhermite, going by his nom de plume, Savinian, became identified as the leading light in the so-called "Savinian method": a didactic strategy which, as Jacques Chaurand explains (Chaurand, 1985 : 342), insisted upon initially teaching rural primary school children in their native dialects, rather than in French.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the project of nationalist défrichement had been abandoned by this switch to pedagogic déchiffrement. On the contrary, it was the dialects and not French that were to be 'deciphered', and the basic idea was to render the process more effective. Even in the most sentimentally pro-dialect statements, the goal of making the French territory more Samuel Trainor productive is implicit. Maurice Barrès, in his prefatory letter to Savinian in the bilingual edition of La Lionide, says:

Sous le prétexte de faire des citoyens français, chaque jour on détruit ce qu'il y a sans doute de meilleur chez nous, nos petits paysans. On entend partout se plaindre que nos campagnes sont délaissées. Peut-il en être autrement ? On s'attache comme à plaisir, à relâcher, à briser tous les liens qui rattachent aujourd'hui l'enfant -et, demain, l'homme à sa terre.

(Barrès in Savinian, 1911 : xi) What is more, the reason for the increased efficacy of this method for disseminating a pure form of standard French was conceived in terms that were specifically linked to a new interest in translation theory. Specifically, the desire was to reduce linguistic 'interference'.

[L]es deux systèmes doivent coexister parallèlement et intégralement sans interférer. D'un côté on corrige les gasconismes pour faire plus français, de l'autre on vitupère contre les francismes pour conserver plus purs gascon ou provençal. L'hostilité à l'égard du français régional est explicite chez Charles Brun qui écrit qu'en dehors de la méthode savinienne, l'enfant « n'arrivera à posséder qu'un 'français régional', c'est-à-dire, en somme un patois » (Chaurand, 1985 : 343) In fact, even Bréal hints that the whole point of the version exercise is to extract the pupil from his local culture. A kind of cultural translation of the individual, which seems benign when referring to the study of Latin, but which, when transferred to the study of French by patoisant students, carries serious colonial implications along precisely the lines Derrida suggests:

Le profit inestimable qui réside dans l'étude d'une langue […], c'est qu'elle dépayse l'esprit et l'oblige à entrer dans une autre manière de penser et de parler. Chaque construction, chaque règle grammaticale qui s'éloigne de l'usage de notre langue doit être pour l'élève une occasion de réfléchir. (Bréal, 1872 : 164) (my emphasis)

The dépaysement that Bréal refers to, however, is implicitly supposed to pre-empt a repaysement, if you like, a synthetic reconstruction of a new mental pays -on the same lexical terrain as the old one -in the act of recreating a text. These kinds of statements hint at the influence of an embryonic translation theory with both cultural and epistemological elements. One might even be tempted to suggest that there is an analogical link being made here between an implicit deverbalisation (for the sake of reverbalisation) and an implicit défrichement (clearing terrain for the sake of cultivation).

Finally, the late nineteenth century saw the innovation of at least five new academic subjects in France, all of which were reliant on a marked increase in

Aftermath 17

Some questions need to be asked. Why has European translation studies had so little to say about the internal delimitations of linguistic territorial boundaries? By which I mean to say, why does it pay relatively so little attention to 'translations' between so-called 'variations'? How, in turn, does this relate to the subject's own conceptions of the internal and external limits of its own research field? Why, for example, did Antoine Berman never explore the question of the internal étranger in any detail, despite the fact that at the same time as researching l'Epreuve de l'étranger (1984) he was translating Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen : the modernization of rural France (1983) -a text which, as we have seen, focuses very heavily on the project of territorial transformation pre-empted by aggressive linguistic standardisation policies in rural schools? This seems a particularly strange oversight when we consider how readily Weber seems to employ arguments related to cultural translation theory:

A word calls up an image, or a whole covey of images, and there can be serious problems of adjustment when a word familiar in one's own speech carries quite different connotations in another-as was the case, among others, with the word rentier, which in the south denoted not a man who drew a rent and lived on it, but a man who paid it. Even on the level of sheer practicality, difficulties of mental adjustment may arise when an object endowed with a particular gender or personality in one frame of mind has to be given another in translation. Gaston Bonheur cites a striking illustration of this problem involving the river Aude. In the local patois the river was treated, not as an object, but as a person. The article was accordingly never employed in referring to it: one went to Aude, or said that Aude was high, that Aude growls, and so forth. A whole mentality had to be bent for a small article to be added. Small wonder children and adults both had difficulty in coping with a language that was not only alien in itself but also represented an alien vision. (Weber, 1976 : 93) (my emphases)

Comparing the underlined parts of this extract with the corresponding parts in (tout un groupe, for example, would have been slightly closer), the French sounds much more cold, flat, abstract and scientific.

The second phrase, 'one frame of mind,' has become une langue. Weber's principle preoccupation in this passage is to hammer home a culturalepistemological point (possibly linked to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). It is very important that the French translation waters down the rhetorical effect of the repetition of mental references in this sentence whilst tidying up the logic.

'Accordingly never' is both categorical and an explicit claim that the language differences were the direct result of an extant cultural personification, (i.e. the local 'frame of mind'). The French pratiquement jamais introduces a weakening modality and does away with the explicit causal anaphora. The translators appear to want generally to dilute the rhetoric and specifically to correct Weber's categorical assertion.

'Bent' replaced with changement and the addition of au nom de la rivière involve what Berman elsewhere calls clarification 18 . The language is both less markedly metaphorical and less elliptical.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, 'coping with a language' has become employer une langue. This is a very deformative bit of (meta)translation. The choice of verb badly skews the connotations attached to its thematic object ('a language' / une langue), which is implicitly the target language of the present translation: Standard Metropolitan French. The connotations of the original verb Samuel Trainor are clearly negative: any object of the verb 'to cope with' is implicitly problematic and potentially threatening; whereas any object of the verb employer is implicitly useful and potentially valuable. The reader therefore infers from the original that the 'difficulty' arises from the problematic language (French), whereas the French version implies that the plural difficultés arise from problematic local language cultures which render people incapable of properly using a useful tool.

Not only does this translation flatten out the rhetorical effect of the original with a generally more measured and modalised approach, but crucially it also undermines the reflexive (metalinguistic) elements (like 'a whole covey of images').

The most worrying aspect is its implicit desire to correct Weber and to overturn the relatively negative portrayal of the French language in the original, to the extent that it reads like a deliberate act of ideological naturalisation on the part of the translators, one of whom forged a career (and almost defined a discipline) based on denouncing precisely this kind of thing. 'translation' might be propagated beyond the standardising institutions -and more generally to inform our understanding of translation as a mimetic sociological mechanism -we would be well advised to look back at the work of Gabriel Tarde: a man who, after all, had first-hand experience of its mind-bending effects.

19 Tobacco production is a particularly clear case of capitalist land use. Clearing forests for tobacco plantations was highly prevalent in the Dordogne department where

3

  My annotated translation[START_REF] Samuel Trainor Tarde | les Deux éléments de la sociologie[END_REF]) of Tarde's foundational essay in Sociology (a critique of Durkheim's les Règles de la méthode sociologique) is based both upon the edition cited in the bibliography below and on the original conference paper, published under the title "la Sociologie élémentaire" in Annales de l'Institut International de Sociologie, Vol. 1, edited by René Worms, 1895, Paris, V. Giard & E. Brière.4 Guy Bocquet "L'histoire d'une démarche épistémologique" (inBallard (ed.), 2006 : 28) even a patriotic duty. Generations of them, for example, would have practised weeding errors out of their formations and pronunciations of plural nouns, in what was often their second language, by multiplying the grammatical fruits of the following vignette: LE CHAMP Mettez au pluriel les noms entre parenthèses. La cabane [clusado] 5 du pauvre Nicolas était batie sur un terrain couvert de (bruyère) [brujo], de (genêt) [balaja], d'(ajonc) [roundal], de (coudrier) [nosilhiera], de (ronce) [roume], d'(épine) [fisson] et de (buisson) [randau / golatge] de toute (sorte). Il semblait que ce terrain ne dût jamais produire ni (légume), ni (fruit). Un jour qu'il faisait une chaleur excessive, justement à l'époque des (moisson) [medatge], Nicolas s'était étendu à l'ombre d'un de ces (buisson) [golatge]. Vint à passer un paysan conduisant une charrette attelée de deux (boeuf) [brau]. Cette charrette était remplie de magnifiques (gerbe) de blé. Au bruit que firent les (roue), Nicolas leva la tête et ne put s'empêcher de regarder avec des yeux d'envie le rustique équipage. Il ne se décida qu'avec peine à saluer le paysan. Le cultivateur, sans faire attention aux (coup) d'oeil envieux de Nicolas, entama sur-le-champ une conversation : « Il ne tiendrait qu'à toi, lui dit-il de voir ton terrain produire des (épi) aussi beaux que les miens, des (légumes) superbes, des (centaine) de (botte) [plejon] d'un foin odorant et d'excellente qualité. Coupe ces (arbuste) [aubrisson] et ces (buisson) [golatge] qui encombrent ces (friche) [chauma / pelada], mets le feu à ces (ronce) [roume] et à ces (genêt) [balaja], à toutes ces (plante) inutiles ; répands-en les (cendre) à la surface de ton champ et commence à en labourer un peu tous les (jour). Quand tu n'en remuerais chaque fois que quelques (mètre) carrés, tu parviendras à nettoyer promptement ta propriété. » « Alors ensemence-la en (céréale) [grana], en (graine) [semnida] fourragères [poledo], en (légume) ; plante des (pomme) de terre [potato], des (carotte) [racina], des (navet) [rabissa], des (haricot) [monjon], des (fève) [fava], des (artichaut) [artrichau] ; puis attends le résultat de ton travail ; le temps de la moisson arrivera pour toi comme pour nous, et tu ne maudiras plus ton sort. »

  employed almost exclusively to refer to a process of crop production (and Samuel Trainor metonymically the crop produced), was now being increasingly used within the acrolect to mean the abstract result of an exemplary education in the arts and sciences. This totemic reification (a seemingly quite deliberate shift from the Ciceronian literary metaphor of 'cultivation' to what Lakoff and Johnson have called a cognitive metaphor 'we live by' 12 ) was seen to be precisely what distinguished the educated urban classes from the peasantry (hypocritically enough, considering the etymology), and therefore precisely what the instituteurs were seeking to 'institute' in the école rurale. They were bringing culture to the paysans and thus both being and creating cultivateurs.

  proves his point. Raymond Williams's analysis of the reification of 'culture' during this period of the nineteenth century, in "The Idea of Culture"(1953), is a foundational discourse in English cultural criticism to match Tarde's foundational critique of Durkheim's reification of le fait social in "Les deux éléments de la sociologie" 13 . Williams famously identifies Matthew Arnold as the writer who fixed this analogous 'elevation' of 'culture':Arnold, one might say, performed the final act of abstraction […] [Culture and Anarchy] offered the thing in itself. But whatever the exact provenance, the decisive change is clear; in the nineteenth century the word had become the Idea […]. ['Culture'] became in the nineteenth century the focus of a deeply significant response to a society in the throes of a radical and painful change.(Williams, 1953 : 244) Williams's early essay remains exemplary, but his doubts about the 'exact provenance' of the reification of 'culture' are justified. Even within Arnold's work he misses the real source of this 'final act of abstraction'. It was actually in the introduction to an official report on the French provincial school system that

  was called into question by a new generation of comparative linguists. Chief amongst the relativists was Michel Bréal, translator of Franz Bopp and the pioneer of French Semantics. Bréal presented an explicit vision of 'l'école qui tienne au sol', Samuel Trainor and debunked the widespread notion that local dialects were debased versions of French: Bréal, comparatiste, professeur au Collège de France et membre du Grand Conseil de l'Instruction Publique, publie en 1872 Quelques mots sur l'Instruction publique en France : dans cet ouvrage […] il revient sur les patois. […] Bréal y voit « des dialectes non moins anciens, non moins réguliers que le français proprement dit, lequel, pour avoir été le dialecte de l'Ile-de-France, est devenu la langue littéraire de notre pays. » (Branca, 1979 : 22) Such a vision led to the introduction of a teaching practice in provincial primary schools which replaced the latent influence of Latin and the strange monolingual translation exercises with actual bilingual translations from local dialects into French, which were explicitly modelled on Latin version. Branca tells us: [Les provençalistes] vont alors tenter d'orienter dans un sens nouveau cet enseignement comparé. […] Il faut […] trouver un exercice qui fournisse un modèle, un appui aux élèves et une norme de correction au maître. Un exercice surtout où les élèves soient obligés de mener une recherche active. Aurouze songe à la version, qui permet de comparer deux langues et de regrouper tous les exercices autour d'un texte. […] Le plus célèbre de ces provençalistes fut Joseph Lhermite […]. Il avait publié en 1876 une anthologie des poètes provençaux qui devait servir de recueil de versions pour l'enseignement du français en Provence. En 1911 parut La Lionide, poème en langue provençale, préfacé par Mistral et Barrès et destiné à servir d'épopée à usage scolaire.

  But Weber's argument still manages to snake its way through the French terrain. Enforced translation of the local dialects into French produced a normalisation of cognitive geography. Seen in the historical context of a new unifying, transformative, expansionist and capitalist 19 vision of land-use, the deliberate dépaysant 'bending' of a mentality can literally be called territorial translation. To understand the psycho-social mechanisms via which such a

  and to impose a new bourgeois hierarchy of occupations. Just as they had done for the vocabulary of the natural world, school textbooks went to pains to inculcate this new paradigm of work. This meant that Samuel Trainor the examples in the grammar books made reference to working activities of which the authors had little knowledge: It was very clear from the textbooks what sorts of trades the pupils were supposed

	La plupart des textes racontaient un univers rural, « le travail aux champs et à
	l'atelier » avec un vocabulaire technique -, univers et vocabulaire dont citadins
	et bourgeois n'avaient aucune expérience immédiate. De leur côté les
	travailleurs ruraux, les artisans et ouvriers des villes communiquaient entre eux
	localement dans des situations et des langages qui ne figuraient pas tels quels
	sur le manuel. (Balibar, 1985 : 267)

11 See

Weber, 1976 : 225.

to envisage for their future and that they were not only to be named in French, but taken from a strict, centralised French taxonomy. The same repetitive inductive method imposed a definitive activity for each métier as had imposed a definitive quality to each element of the natural world :

Remplacez le nom propre d'homme par le nom commun du métier exercé par cet homme. Ecrivez : le meunier a moulu le blé.

Philippe a moulu le blé. -[…] Edmond construira une charrue. -André réparera les colliers des chevaux. -Edouard extrait d'énormes pierres de sa carrière. -[…] Félix a abattu les arbres du petit bois.

(Larive et Fleury, 1871a : 4)

  13 Crucially both essays mentioned here hinge upon what I call an accusation of 'reification'. Neither writer uses the term, however. Tarde would obviously not have known it. Instead, what he sees as Durkheim's unjustifiable 'elevation' of social facts 'to the status of resurrected Platonic Ideas', he refers to as an 'ontological illusion'. Williams, on the other hand, an avowed Marxist who had much in common with commentators like Lukács and the Frankfurt School (even Althusser) who used analogous terms extensively, nevertheless avoids what he probably considered a bit of continental neo-Marxist jargon and not suited to his project to bring left-wing cultural criticism into the sphere of traditional English literary scholarship. Samuel Trainor And in the infamous essay that Williams cites, Culture and Anarchy, Arnold comes as close as possible to a calque of the French défrichement when expounding the 'grounds' of his notion of culture:

  réduire le désordre humain et de soulager la misère humaine, la noble aspiration à laisser le monde meilleur et plus heureux que nous ne l'avons trouvé -mobiles qui méritent éminemment d'être appelés « sociaux »tous y entrent comme faisant partie des bases de la culture, et comme en constituant la partie principale et pré-éminente.[START_REF] Arnold | Culture et anarchie (trad[END_REF](Arnold, [1867] ] : 61) The spoonerism of défrichement as déchiffrement is not included here merely as a bit of whimsical deconstructionism. The two words coincide in the Tarde essay whose translation prompted this study: 'Il y avait, avant Champollion, force lois ou maximes égyptiennes qui n'étaient plus pratiquées ni connues depuis des milliers d'années, mais dont les formules étaient gravées en caractères hiéroglyphiques au fond de tombeaux gardés par des sphinx […] quand Champollion ou ses disciples eurent déchiffré ces normes de l'ancienne Égypte, est-ce que ce déchiffrement a eu la vertu de les faire revivre ?'[START_REF] Samuel Trainor Tarde | les Deux éléments de la sociologie[END_REF][START_REF] Tarde | La logique sociale[END_REF] : 69)15 There is plenty of work available, byBallard and others, which problematises Venuti's account of Newman vs Arnold as 'foreignizing' vs 'domesticating' translation. (See, for example, Ballard, 1992 : 243). Newman's (very English) ballad form can certainly not be considered more 'foreignized' than Arnold's blank hexametres. It simply makes more sense to understand their debate to be over two different modes of mimetic fidelity. For my part, I would only seek to lend my support to Trilling's observation that Arnold's approach to translation was heavily influenced by his admiration of French literary culture. Samuel Trainor subject and an object of translation). In his essay about Tolstoy in the Fortnightly Review (1 July, 1887, p. 785), for example, he makes it clear that he considers French literary translations superior to their English counterparts: 'work of this kind [in this case the translation of Anna Karenina] is better done in France than in England.' Secondly, Arnold's views on classical translation were specifically influenced by his experience of the French provincial school system. Lionel Trilling points out that this unlikely overlap of the grandiose and the elementary poses no problem for a thinker so infused with the French idea of culture:

	The translation has certainly cleared some of the confusion, or rather 'reduced'
	some of the 'disorder' of Arnold's unruly sentence. Where this specific phrase is
	concerned, however, it has completely eradicated what I think is Arnold's implicit
	allusion to the psycho-social 'clearing' (défrichement) of the provincial masses
	which he witnessed in the écoles rurales in 1861. As we have seen, part and parcel
	and Lionel Trilling spent a good deal of his doctoral thesis tracing Arnold's
	francophilia (Trilling 1949 [1939]), but I would go much further even than Trilling
	and suggest that Arnold was such a proponent of French culture (and specifically
	of the French idea of 'culture') that he actually allowed it to have a 'cultivating'
	influence on his English prose.
	By far the strangest phrase, however, is 'clearing human confusion'. Why
	'clearing'? It has a self-deconstructive lack of clarity. The extant French translation
	of this sentence is instructive:

: 59) (my emphasis)

Perhaps this is a case of déformation professionnelle, but this sentence reads to me like a rather unidiomatic (ironically what Venuti might call 'foreignized') translation, rather than a piece of 'transparent' English. Even in learned Victorian prose, which had a tendency for the syntactically Latinate, phrases like 'the desire for removing' (instead of 'the desire to remove') and 'motives eminently such as are called social' (instead of 'motives that are considered/called eminently social' or simply 'eminently social motives') are formal oddities. The former construction is a common 'overcorrection' in French translations into English. The latter is a particularly obscure bit of pseudo-synthetic syntax: the kind of thing one might expect to result from a Latin version exercise in the lycée. I have no hesitation in confessing I would correct them both if a student presented them to me in a thème class. Is it too much of a leap to suggest that Arnold is actually thinking, at least partially, in French? The influence of Sainte-Beuve on Arnold is often mentioned, C'est une conception où entrent tout l'amour de notre prochain, les élans qui nous poussent à agir, à secourir, à faire le bien, le désir d'éliminer l'erreur humaine, de of this process was the attempt to impose unitary, stable French paradigms whose inductive semantics would 'clear human confusion'. Simply put, for the francophile Arnold, 'culture' implied défrichement.

2. Déchiffrement 14

But what precisely does all this have to do with translation studies? Sticking with Arnold, for a moment, but without wishing to revisit in any great detail the careworn debate with Francis Newman about the translation of Homer 15 , two points can be made about Arnold's embryonic traductologie. Firstly, his general approach to translation was typically influenced by French culture (itself both a 14

  translation activity between European modern languages, namely Comparative Linguistics, Semantics, Stylistics, Anthropology and Sociology. I would argue that these are the direct antecedents of contemporary Translation Studies. There is an almost circular line of causality involved: increased intertranslation of European scientific discourses leads to an increased interest in metacultural and metalinguistic fields of study, which in turn leads to European Translation Studies.

  Un mot évoque une image, ou un groupe d'images, et on peut rencontrer de sérieuses difficultés quand un mot familier dans votre propre langue comporte des connotations toutes différentes dans une autre ; c'était le cas, par exemple, du mot rentier, qui, dans le Sud, ne désignait pas un homme qui avait une rente et en vivait mais celui qui devait la payer. Même au niveau de la pure pratique, des problèmes d'ajustement mental peuvent surgir quand un objet doté d'un genre ou d'une personnalité particuliers dans une langue en reçoit d'autres par la traduction. Gaston Bonheur en cite un exemple frappant à propos de la rivière Aude. Dans le patois local, la rivière n'était pas traitée comme un objet, mais comme une personne. On n'employait pratiquement jamais l'article défini à son propos : on allait à Aude, on disait qu'Aude était haute, qu'Aude grognait, et ainsi de suite. Il fallut un changement de mentalité total pour qu'on ajoute un petit article au nom de la rivière. Il n'est pas étonnant que les enfants et les adultes aient eu des difficultés à employer une langue qui n'était pas seulement étrangère en elle-même, mais qui présentait aussi une vision du monde étrangère.(Weber, 1983 : 143-4) (my emphases)To treat the underlined phrases one by one: the first, 'a whole covey of images,' is an emphatic, colourful and pointedly 'rural' noun phrase which sets the tone for a rhetorically charged paragraph. The central word is cognate with modern French couvée: 'a batch of eggs'. The French is much less commonly used in such a figurative way, of course, but un groupe d'images is a very diluted translation, which fails to capture the reflexive effects of a word which itself calls up a whole covey of images. Especially in the absence of an intensifier like the original 'whole'

Berman and Géniès's French version, we might be led to conclude that not only did Berman have a blind spot to this kind of 'internal foreignness' on a historical level, but on a practical level he also seems to have been inclined (hypocritically enough) to eradicate such internally problematic aspects when actually translating into French:

  Tarde was raised. The colonialist nature of this enterprise was made explicit in pamphlets with titles like: Projet d'établissement de colonies agricoles pour la culture du tabac sur le sol français, pour occuper des enfants abondonnés et les classes pauvres de la société ; moyens économiques pour arriver à défricher les landes et les bruyères, par Michon fils, Paris : impr. De N. Chaix, 1849.

The words in square brackets are Périgourdin Occitan translations taken from[START_REF] Colas | Voyage en linguistique, ou Explication sur la préhistoire du Périgord et du Sarladais, recherches sur les noms de lieux ou d'hommes du Périgord et dictionnaire des mots patois périgourdins[END_REF]. They have been included to show how Gabriel Tarde might have named these things as a child.

Larive and Fleury was the standard French grammar primer of the Third Republic. There were 229 reprints between 1871 and 1953.

G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, 1980, Metaphors we live by, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press.

Ironically, this is precisely the passage Lawrence Venuti cites as evidence of Arnold's 'domesticating' approach(Venuti, 1995: 107-20).

Etymologically, 'aftermath' refers to the second crop of hay (the arrière-foin) that grows in late summer after the first mowing. (cf.Trainor, 2011 : 102-3.)