Here's a little extract from 'Number and Numbers' in Robin Mackay's
translation. It is from Chapter 0 (!) 'Number Must Be Thought'.

0.4. Number governs the quasi-totality of the 'human sciences'
(although this euphemism can barely disguise the fact that what is
called 'science' here is a technical apparatus whose pragmatic basis
is governmental). Statistics invades the entire domain of these disci-
plines. The bureaucratisation of knowledges is above all an infinite
excrescence of numbering.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, sociology unveiled its
proper dignity - its audacity, even - in the will to submit the figure
of communitarian bonds to number. It sought to extend to the social
body and to representation the Galilean processes of literalisation
and mathematisation. But ultimately it succumbed to an anarchic
development of this enterprise. It is now replete with pitiful enumera-
tions that serve only to validate the obvious or to establish parlia-
mentary opportunities.
History has drawn massively upon statistical technique and is -
even, in fact above all, under the auspices of academic Marxism -
becoming a diachronic sociology. It has lost that which alone had
characterised it, since the Greek and Latin historians, as a discipline
of thought: its conscious subordination to the real of politics. Even
when it passes through the different phases of reaction to number -
economism, sociologism - it does so only to fall into their simple
inverse: biography, historicising psychologism.
And medicine itself, apart from its pure and simple reduction to its
scientific Other (molecular biology), is a disorderly accumulation of
empirical facts, a huge web of blindly tested numerical correlations.
These are 'sciences' of men made into numbers, to the saturation
point of all possible correspondences between these numbers and
other numbers, whatever they might be.
0.5. Number governs cultural representations. Of course, there is
television, viewing figures, advertising. But that's 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,
conversely, whatever produces number can be culturally located; that
which has no number will have no name either. Art, which deals with
number only in so far as there is a thinking of number, is a culturally
unpronounceable word.
0.6. Obviously, number governs the economy; and there, without a
doubt, we find what Louis Althusser would have called the 'determi-
nation in the last instance' of its supremacy. The ideology of modern
parliamentary societies, if they have one, is not humanism, law, or
the subject. It is number, the countable, countability. Every citizen is
expected to be cognisant of foreign trade figures, of the flexibility of
the exchange rate, of fluctuations in stock prices. These figures are
presented as the real to which other figures refer: governmental
figures, votes and opinion polls. Our so-called 'situation' is the inter-
section of economic numericality and the numericality of opinion.
France (or any other nation) can only be represented on the balance-
sheet of an import-export business. The only image of a country is
this inextricable heap of numbers in which, we are told, its power is
vested, and which, we hope, is deemed worthy by those who record
its mood.
0.7. Number informs our souls. What is it to exist, if not to give a
favourable account of oneself? In America, one starts by saying how
much one earns, an identification that is at least honest. Our old
country is more cunning. But still, you don't have to look far to dis-
cover numerical topics that everyone can identify with. No one can
present themselves as an individual without stating in what way they
count, for whom or for what they are really counted. Our soul has
the cold transparency of the figures in which it is resolved.
0.8. Marx: 'the icy water of egotistical calculation'.3 And how! To
the point where the Ego of egoism is but a numerical web, so that
the 'egotistical 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 stop 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? And what sort
of innocent culpability can be attributed to these thinkers? 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 that the Subject might
be subtracted from it? And has mathematics simply stood by silently
during the comprehensive social integration of number, over which
it formerly had monopoly? This is what I wish to examine.




-- 
David Joseph Bircumshaw
**
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