💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › john-zerzan-numb-and-number.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:39:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Numb and Number Author: John Zerzan Date: October 2013 Language: en Topics: technology, computers Source: Retrieved on October 29th, 2013 from http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/numb-and-number
The digital age is pre-eminently the ultimate reign of Number. The time
of Big Data, computers (e.g. China’s, world’s fastest) that can process
30 quadrillion transactions per second, algorithms that increasingly
predict—and control—what happens in society. Standardized testing is
another example of the reductive disease of quantification.
Number surpasses all other ideas for its combination of impact and
implication. Counting means imposing a definition and a control,
assigning a number value. It is the foundation for a world in which
whatever can be domesticated and controlled can also be commodified.
Number is the key to mastery: everything must be measured, quantified.
It is not what we can do with number, but what it does to us. Like
technology, its intimate ally, number is anything but neutral. It tries
to make us forget that there is so much that shouldn’t or can’t be
measured.
Fifth Estate published my “Number: Its Origin and Evolution” in Summer
1985, just as the digital age was gaining traction following the
personal computer explosion at the beginning of the 80s.i The quickening
(anti-) pulse of technological change over the past 30 years has been at
base a mathematization. Social life in the post-community era is
detached, disembodied, drained, statistical. Its core is administration,
just as the essence of number is calculation. “Mathematical thinking is
coercive,” disclosed British philosopher J.R. Lucas.ii Number totalizes;
in mathematics, ambiguity is anathema. The technoculture obeys these
norms, and we dance to its tune, its code: number.
But there are some who applaud the new, always more arid reality. And
postmodernism wasn’t the nadir of thought, after all. Alain Badiou
denies that the Techno Age brings more and more nihilism and mediocrity.
Mocking Heidegger’s critique of the ascendancy of technology, he
declares that there’s not enough of it!iii
Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), empty and ahistorical, somehow
installed him as arguably the biggest star of philosophy in the West.
Number and Numbers (1990) is his follow-up hymn to estrangement.iv
Mathematics is philosophy, is being, in a formulation as hideous as it
is astounding. Fellow Marxist-Leninist and postmodern/speed freak/pop
culture clown Slavoj Zizek proclaimed Number and Numbers
“breathtaking…[it] announces a new epoch in philosophy.”v Zizek is
correct, but only in a thoroughly negative sense. Michel Foucault
evidently didn’t see Badiou coming when he held that “theory is by
nature opposed to power.”vi
Number implies a relationship and that relationship is precisely that of
power, as with capital, but more primary. Communists like Badiou (and
Zizek), needless to say, have never taken the trouble to oppose power. A
footnote by Andrew Gibson is revealing. Badiou had told him “that he has
no liking for James Joyce. One suspects that there is simply too much
world there for him.”vii Too much uncontrolled world.
Number is a form of being for Badiou. What’s more, “mathematics is the
infinite development of what can be said of being qua being.”viii That
is, mathematics is already philosophy; ontology is actually mathematics.
Postmodernism elevated liberal doubt as its response to anyone who could
imagine a condition outside alienation and subjection. It worked in a
negative vein (e.g. Derrida) to undermine any grounds for hope. Badiou
promotes a positivity that works toward the same end. For him, politics
is the possibility of a “rupture with what exists.”ix But he grounds
this positive hope, his “rupture,” in what couldn’t possibly be more a
part of alienation and subjection. Badiou translator Jason Barker notes
correctly that “Badiou’s canonical politico-philosophical reference
point is Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.”x The
Stalinist Althusser supported the French Communist Party against the
workers and students of the May ’68 uprising. As Badiou freely admits,
“there is no theory of the subject in Althusser, nor could there ever be
one.”xi Two communists joining hands against the individual, against
liberation. What is “seemingly phrased in strictly mathematical
language,” as Bruno Bosteels sees it, “is imported from the realm of
militant politics.” Specifically the Marxist-Leninist versions of such
categories, such as “normality, singularity, and excrescence.”xii Even
more specifically, Maoism.
Francois Laruelle finds that Badiou’s “enterprise has no equivalent in
the history of philosophy,” a fusion of Platonist mathematicism and
Maoism.”xiii “Thought” at its most nakedly authoritarian on every level.
Platonism vis-Ă -vis math means that numbers are independently existing
objects. But numbers are not out there, somewhere, to be discovered;
they are invented, as Wittgenstein, for one, grasped quite well.
Invented to meet the needs of complex, unequal societies. Counting,
accounting, a growing obsession that began with domestication and
civilization, has reached the point, according to Ellul, where
“everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical
treatment must be excluded.”xiv
We can count and measure only the lifeless because such processes
necessarily exclude what is living. The noted 19^(th) century
mathematician Gottlob Frege proclaimed “the miracle of number” but also
stated that “the highest degree of [mathematical] rigor…is at the
furthest remove from what is natural.”xv As Thoreau put it succinctly,
“Nature so abhors a straight line.”xvi
Philosopher of science Keith Devlin is wrong to aver that numbers “arise
from the recognition of patterns in the world around us.”xvii They arise
because they are necessary for running a certain kind of society;
numbers have only an imposed relationship to what is found in the world.
Math historian Graham Flegg makes a similar error when he asserts,
“Numbers reveal the unity which underlies all of life as we experience
it.”xviii The “unity” in question did not exist before it was produced,
with the invaluable assistance of number.
In Badiou’s nonsensical formulation, mathematics is “the history of
eternity.”xix It is considerably saner to notice that the development of
math is intimately involved with the development of the whole of
civilization. On the heels of domestication (and its progeny, private
property), grain needed weighing for sale, and land needed surveying for
ownership—and soon enough, for taxation. Geometry, after all, is
literally “land measurement.” Organization and engineering certainly
required the services of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, to enable
the first two civilizations in the West.
It is no coincidence that it was the Babylonian/Sumerian civilization,
the first real empire, which first developed the idea of written
numbers.xx Number is key to large-scale management and mobilization;
numbers and empire have gone hand in hand since earliest times.
Babylonian arithmetic was “fully articulated as an abstract
computational science by about 2000 B.C.,”xxi about 2000 years before
the famed “classical” mathematics of the Greeks.
“All is number,” announced Pythagorus, who thereby founded a religion,
it should be added. Plato, a Pythagorean, composed the soul from seven
numbers in his Timaeus. And in India as well as in Greece, certain
exacting ritual requirements were specified by geometrical exercises
intended to avert suffering at the hands of the gods.xxii Nor has this
form of idealism died out; the 20^(th) century mathematician-philosopher
L.E.J. Brouwer regarded the universe as “a construction of the
mathematician.”xxiii
It was the wealthy, aristocratic Plato who famously asserted the
ontological primacy of math, which Badiou unreservedly seconds. A
corollary is that for Plato, the first upward steps out of the cave
towards wisdom begin with mastery of the arts of number. This put
thought on the path of representation and mathematical objectification.
Mathematics’ more concrete, everyday role—to serve the needs of
power—makes this path the history of oppression, rather than Badiou’s
“history of eternity”.
Badiou approvingly quotes the German mathematician Richard Dedekind to
the effect that “man is always counting.”xxiv Of course it is
well-established that in most primal communities people use only “one,
two, many” as the limit of their interest in number. In a recent
example, Daniel Everett, referring to his years in Amazonian Brazil,
concludes that “the Piraha have no number at all and no counting in any
form.”xxv
Let us also add a qualification about the use of numbers. Ethnographer
W.J. McGee judged that aboriginal people “commonly see in numbers
qualities or potencies not customarily recognized by peoples of more
advanced culture.”xxvi The association or coloration used with numbers
means that they had not yet lost their sense of the uniqueness of
everything, every event. This is still present with early terms of
measurement. The units––such as the yard, the foot, the pound––were of
human size and reference, and local relevance, until mass long-distance
civilization took over.
Negative numbers came of age in the latter half of the Middle Ages. They
were of inestimable assistance with larger financial transactions in
which there might be net losses. At this time international banking
greatly expanded, giving math a new value.xxvii Well before Galileo,
Copernicus, and Descartes provided the Faustian underpinnings for
number’s cardinal role in dominating nature, math had already become
essential for merchants, cartographers, imperial navigators, bankers,
and others.
The Scientific Revolution, chiefly of the 1600s, largely revolved around
the spirit of number. In 1702 Fontenelle observed that the “geometric
spirit” is required if order and precision are to be established.xxviii
This spirit bloomed with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Knowledge for him is
mathematical knowledge. Necessary and a priori, already always present,
number is central to all the categories of our cognitive process. The
new prominence of the mathematical infected society at large.
Enlightenment thinkers spoke of a comprehensive “geometry of politics,”
a “social mathematics.”xxix
In his Description of New England (1616), Captain John Smith asked
native individuals how many fish they caught, in order to more
accurately gauge the level of potential plunder. He found that “the
Savages compare their store in the sea to the haires of their heads,”xxx
most likely an unsatisfactory report. Obsession with a mathematical
orientation was present in North America early on but was not pervasive
until the 1820s, according to Patricia Cohen. Her A Calculating People
focused on “the sudden popularity of numbers and statistics in
Jacksonian America.”xxxi
Counting consists of assigning words to things. The first counting
symbols were, in fact, the first writing. At this early stage many
cultures expressed letters and numbers by the same symbols. Aleph, for
example, expressed both the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the
first of the ordinal numbers.xxxii Spengler pushed the connection much
further, wondering whether with number one finds “the birth of
grammar.”xxxiii
Measurement, like counting, deals with just one aspect of the object it
is measuring and assigns a number to that aspect. This abstracting move
is basic to the universal standardization of life inherent in
globalizing civilization. Of course, there is and always has been
resistance. But in the words of psychologist S.S. Stevens, “Given the
deeply human need to quantify, could mathematics really have begun
elsewhere than in measurement?”xxxiv In a similar vein, John Henslow
found that “measurement is what defines humanity…is what distinguishes
the civilized from the uncivilized.”xxxv
Growing social complexity and the all-encompassing integration required
by modern domination means more and more measurement. It is as
ubiquitous as it is imposed. “A deeply human need”––or the dynamic of
ruinous civilization? There is no civilization without measurement, but
there is life outside civilization—and ultimately, perhaps only outside
civilization.
The prevailing view is that knowledge is limited without measurement,
that we can’t really grasp something unless it can be measured. The word
“grasp” is telling; it belongs to the language of control. To control,
dominate, and hold nature in our grasp, for example: the lexicon of
domestication. Is this really a way of understanding? What is lost when
we only measure? Does this approach not take us away from a more
intimate knowing? Traditional indigenous people do not “grasp” in their
knowing.
A small instance from the realm of “fitness”: e-devices with their apps
for measuring bodily performance as a function of various rates: breath,
pulse, etc. A way of externalizing and objectifying our own bodies, of
losing touch with ourselves and our senses.
This is part of the growing technification and concomitant deskilling,
hallmarks of the digital age. Ironically, this movement does not produce
greater proficiency in numbers. Numeracy, in fact, is in decline.
Computers have replaced cash registers; retail clerks have no need to
make change, and many don’t know how. A friend, when asked for the time
by a teenager, pointed to a nearby clock. The teen couldn’t tell time
from a clockface, only a digital readout.
Inevitably asked for a definition of time, that always elusive question,
Einstein replied that it’s what a clock measures. The correspondence
between measurement and time has been much discussed; but in what does
the measuring of time consist?
Plato found an intrinsic connection between time and number, but that
only reminds us that we can’t be sure what kind of things time and
number are. Aristotle claimed that things are in time the way what is
counted is in number, as if that clarifies matters much.
In the 3^(rd) century A.D. Plotinus asked, “Why should the mere presence
of a number give us Time?”xxxvi Which is suggestive, in terms of how
time stakes its claim, and prompts a closer look at timekeeping itself.
Consider 7^(th) century Bedouins in what is now Saudi Arabia. Though
pastoral (and therefore domesticators), they had a very minimal sense of
time. Along came Mohammad, who unveiled time as part of a new religion.
Five compulsory prayer times regulated each day. All our days, said the
Prophet, are numbered, just as math-guided industrial processes would
regulate and number them a millennium later.
For the Mayans and others in Mesoamerica, a focus on time and number
mirrored a preoccupation with order and rule. Bergson’s durée, or lived
time, was an attempt to step outside of imposed, identically numbered
time. But the bond between time and number has continued and deepened,
as domesticating reality commandeers more and more places and lives on
the planet.
“There is no way we can escape from numbers,” concluded Graham
Flegg.xxxvii Philosopher Michel Serres agreed: “Wherever the road of
mathematicity was opened, it was forever.”xxxviii The same unending
servitude is consecrated by Badiou, who stakes thought itself on number.
But we may imagine what could emerge when the counting and measuring and
timing is over, by our own ending of it. Imagine what could emerge only
in such a world.
The “elegance” of math? Much more akin to the coldness of advanced
civilization. Political theorist Susan Buck-Morss expressed this with
great eloquence: “The social body of civilization is impersonal,
indifferent to that fellow-feeling that within a face-to-face society
causes its members to act with moral concern.”xxxix Face-to-face, where
there is little or no need of counting.
Dedekind said that numbers “are a means of apprehending more easily and
more sharply the difference of things.”xl What difference could he have
been referring to? The written numbering systems of the ancient
Egyptians, Hittites, Greeks, and Aztecs were structurally identical,xli
and this congruence pointed toward the global homogenization so strongly
underway now.
A hollowed-out mathematical order is that of closed-off coldness,
indifference, cynicism. The rise in the incidence of autism is one sad
aspect among many; it may be worth noting that a disproportionate number
of math students and theorists have received a diagnosis of autism.xlii
Number trumps quality and qualities; meanwhile Badiou bases his
authoritarianism on the deepest grounding for massification and
estrangement. Healthy individuals avoid such brutalist “thinkers.” The
2^(nd) century physician Galen provides a cautionary tale: “It has often
happened that people have talked happily with me, because of my work
among the sick, but when they discover that I am also an expert
mathematician, they avoid me.”xliii