0.1. A paradox: we live in the era of the despotism of number, thought is submitted to the law of denumerable multiplicities, and yet (or rather precisely in so far as this default, this failure, is nothing but the obscure obverse of a submission without concept) we have at our disposal no recent, active idea of what number is. The question has been the subject of immense intellectual effort, but for the most part the significant achievements of this labour belong to the beginning of the twentieth century: they are those of Dedekind, Frege, Cantor, and Peano. The factual impact of number brings with it only a silence of the concept. How can we understand today Dedekind’s question, posed in his 1888 treatise, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen [“The Nature and Meaning of Numbers”]? What purpose numbers serve, we know very well: they serve, strictly speaking, for everything, they provide the norm for everything. But what they are we don’t know, or we repeat what the great thinkers of the end of the nineteenth century – no doubt anticipating the extent of their future domain – said they were.
0.2. That number reigns, that the imperative must be: "count!" – who doubts this today?
0.3. Firstly, number rules our political conceptions, with the currency (consensual, even if all politics of the thinkable is enfeebled) of suffrage, of opinion polls, of the majority. Every "political" assembly, general or local, municipal or international, voting-booth or public meeting, is settled with a count. And every opinion is measured by the standard of an incessant enumeration of its advocates (even if such an enumeration makes of every fidelity an infidelity). What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross- references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical exegesis.
0.2. That number reigns, that the imperative must be: "count!" – who doubts this today?
0.3. Firstly, number rules our political conceptions, with the currency (consensual, even if all politics of the thinkable is enfeebled) of suffrage, of opinion polls, of the majority. Every "political" assembly, general or local, municipal or international, voting-booth or public meeting, is settled with a count. And every opinion is measured by the standard of an incessant enumeration of its advocates (even if such an enumeration makes of every fidelity an infidelity). What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross- references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical exegesis.
0.4. Number rules over the quasi-totality of the "human sciences" (even if this ciphered alibi can scarcely hide the fact when we speak here of "science", what we have is a technical assemblage whose pragmatic basis is governmental). It is overrun by the statistical data of the entire domain of its disciplines. The bureaucratisation of knowledge is firstly an infinite excrescence of numbering.
0.5. Number governs cultural representation. Certainly, there is television, viewing figures, advertising. But that is not the most important thing. It is in its very essence that the cultural fabric is woven by number alone. A "cultural fact" is a numerical fact. And inversely, whatever produces number can be assigned a cultural place; that which has no number will not have a name either. Art, which has to do with number only insofar as there is a thinking of number, is a culturally unpronounceable word.
0.6. Obviously, number governs the economy, and it is there without doubt that we find what Louis Althusser called the "determination in the last instance" of its supremacy. The ideology of modern parliamentary societies, if they have one, is not humanism, the rights of the subject. It is number, the countable, countability. Every citizen is today expected to be cognizant of foreign trade figures, of the flexibility of the exchange rate, of the developments of the stock market. These figures are presented as the real through which other figures are processed: governmental figures, votes and opinion polls. What is called "the situation" is the intersection of economic numericality and the numericality of opinion.
0.7. Number informs our souls. What is it to exist, if not to assert oneself through a favourable account? In America, one starts by saying how much one earns, an identification that has the merit of honesty.
0.8. Marx: "the icy water of egoistic calculation". And how! To the point where the Ego of egoism is but a numerical web, so that the "egoistic calculation" becomes the cipher of a cipher.
0.9. But we don’t know what a number is, so we don’t know what we are.
0.10. Must we stick with Frege, Dedekind, Cantor or Peano? Hasn’t anything happened in the thinking of number? Is there only the exorbitant extent of its social and subjective reign? To what extent does their idea of number prefigure this anarchic reign? Did they think number, or the future of generalised numericality? Isn’t another idea of number necessary, in order for us to turn thought back against the despotism of number, in order to subtract the Subject from it? And has mathematics assisted only silently in the comprehensive socialisation of number, of which latter it had previously held a monopoly? This is what I wish to examine.
(Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers)
