This task of characterising number as a comparison may seem unfamiliar. We don’t usually think of number as a comparison. As in the previous post, we merely accept that accept that number does comparison, and can do so with almost anything. According to Mary Poovey, this is because number epitomises the modern fact (1989: 4). Modern facts, writes Poovey, ‘simultaneously describe discrete particulars and contribute to systematic knowledge’ (1989: xii). In the language of textual analysis she uses, number simultaneously describes (discrete particulars) and interprets (through contributing to knowledge). The reason number wields this incredible ability of simultaneous description/interpretation is because number use presupposes that all entities are discrete particulars whose properties are extensive and thus in their purest form are measurable: that all entities in their most pure form are numbers.
Comparison is a response to the sheer multitude of the world, in that it proposes ways as which the world holds itself together. In other words, it proposes what things go together (literally compare) and which things do not. Number as ‘modern fact’ is a comparison in that it says the world goes together because essentially, everything is a number. It is the sheer mind boggling character of number as this comparison that you experience when listening to popular physics discussions that effortlessly move from a torch and cut cardboard, to thunderstorms, to computers, to consciousness, the beginning of everything – and of course the equations for each one.
The reason why number is not usually recognised as a comparison (and why popular science writers can write about ten dimensional space and the beginning of the beginning) is because it denies itself as a comparison. Number is a comparison which denies its own nature. In other words, number proposes itself as not a comparison by arguing that it is comparable to everything in the world. Such numbers are comparison as imperium, as said before ‘equivalency producing machines’. As a response to the question ‘what goes with what in our collective world’ number refuses to acknowledge and therefore negotiate the very terms upon which any comparison, any ‘being together’, is to be achieved. They are the foundation of all possible comparison.
- Poovey, M., (1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
