number as participant-comparison part 1

The next four posts are written to develop some momentum into thinking number as a participant comparison. The interest in comparison comes from a recent seminar called Comparative Relativism (Original link in Danish and English link) hosted by IT-University of Copenhagen (September 2009) papers from which are to be published in Common Knowledge in 2011.

So here goes …

Common uses of number present it as a universal comparison, able to match (or perhaps reduce) any thing no matter how nebulous and indeterminate, nor how indescribable it might otherwise be. This number is evident in some recent headlines … ‘The U.S. in Afghanistan: The Longest War’, ‘Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 Surpasses Exxon Valdez’, ‘BP’s share price plunges as clean-up costs mount’, ‘Size of Spill in Gulf of Mexico Is Larger Than Thought’. In the articles we read that in June 2010, the US led war in Afghanistan reached 104 months, surpassing its 103 month war in Vietnam, that the oil spill might destroy 195,000 jobs in Louisiana and has been going to 58 days. Despite the oil spill seeming ‘larger than thought’ these articles clearly demonstrate that there is nothing larger than thought when thought has number as its disposal.

These understandings of wars and oil has number working as what Stengers calls an ‘equivalency-producing machine’. This number is an imposed comparison in that there is no negotiation regarding the terms under which the comparison is made. In much writing about the sciences and scientific methods it is assumed that number is not imposed because measuring ‘natural’ objects, concerns and disasters is simply knowing them through their self-evident properties: length, width, surface area, time, causalities and so on. When it comes to disasters of a more social colour comparison becomes more explicit but only as the comparative relevance of a variety of already measurable entities. Is a war best measured by the properties of length; its start date and end date? Does espionage priori to hot conflict count as warfare? Does all conflict count as war, for example colonial invasion and occupation, and its resistance? These question are more often than not about which properties (duration or causalities), and what object (war on foreign soil or conflict in general), not number as comparison itself. Even when a concern is not obviously social or natural numbers still work: the Gulf of mexico can be measured by its job losses, ecological losses, profit losses, credibility losses, and of course oil losses.

The imposition of comparison here is not ‘putting’ a number on something, but rather concealing the terms on which the comparison is imposed. The concealed terms are that the very nature of reality is such that different objects, number and oil for example, can be compared. When number is a cognitive tool, an abstract object of the mind, and objects of our knowledge are things in the world such as oil, the condition on which they can be made equivalent is that they share a common way of being: they are all discrete objects that are defined by extensive properties. This in turn characterises knowledge as the description of these properties. That these objects are discrete and their properties extensive means that number is the exemplary measure of extent, and can make a comparison whether the objects are deaths of soldiers, barrels of oil, or ballot papers.

But there is another understanding of comparison: the active and interested comparison suggested by Isabelle Stengers, or its reworking as the participant-comparison by Helen Verran. In this case comparison ‘has the character of an event.’ As a very brief pulling together of Stenger’s contribution – Comparison as a Matter of Concern – and the responses to it, a participant-comparison emerge when a particular difference becomes relevant and of concern to a collective. Participant-comparisons create relations, they are material, have a mutuality, are continuous, and are agents in the collective goings on. Participant-comparisons are active and interested in that they are directed towards achievement. However, what is to count as the achievement is not given at the outset, but is rather is the explicit problem which is activated by the difference proposed by the comparison. Hence, the question of the terms of the comparison are never backgrounded but remain part of the work of comparison itself.

So how might we understand number as such a comparison? Is it always quantitative? Does number always determine value as an extensive property of an object (an amount of money or an area of surface)? Does number always presuppose objects as metric, defined by discrete properties? How would we investigate questions?

• Stengers, Isabelle, (2011) ‘Comparison as a Matter of Concern’, Common Knowledge, forthcoming.
• Verran, Helen (2011) ‘Comparison as Participant: A Response to Stenger’s “Comparison as a Matter of Concern”’ Common Knowledge, forthcoming.