The New Politics of Numbers

Abstract

Numbers do things. They highlight and obscure. They integrate and disaggregate. They mark and measure. They represent and intervene. They tame and inflame. They structure people’s interactions. They create new objects and new kinds of people. They possess a power that hides itself. They are rhetoric that is anti-rhetorical. What all of these features of numbers share is that they express a certain agency. They perform.The agency of numbers is not the same as human agency. It is not the creative human action that invents numbers and finds new uses and contexts for them. But it is agency, nonetheless, because numbers order and make possible specific kinds of cognition and action and preclude others. For example, numbers make it almost impossible not to compare the entities that share a scale. In doing so, numbers give rise to extraordinary amounts and kinds of comparisons. Our understanding of what is shared and what is unique requires comparison. Numbers make it possible to reduce complex, diverse information into a ‘sense-able’ sequence. Once we know a number, it is difficult not to think in terms of quantity, whether this is time, distance, price, or some other unit (an exception constitute phone numbers, or street addresses). Numbers produce hierarchy where more is typically better than less. Difference is in degrees, not kind.