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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 3.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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Date: 2020-05-06 12:15:47+00:00
From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.811: on the uses of arithmetic
I've been reading the discussion of the passages Willard has quoted from
Jacqueline Rose's "Pointing the finger", which is a discussion of Camus' The
Plague occasioned by and oriented toward the current pandemic, which has
prompted a sharp increase in sales of the book. My initial response was that the
two passages are standard-issue anti-math rhetoric based as much in (perhaps
willful) ignorance as anything else. I've now taken a brief look at the
passages in context and I'm not quite so sure.
The first quoted passage takes up much of the first paragraph from the essay
while the second passage is from the end of the third paragraph. Here's much
of the intervening second paragraph:
> In Camus's novel, it is only when men start dying, as opposed to hundreds of
rats, that the public begins to understand. And even then, only slowly. The
announcement of 302 dead citizens in the third week of the epidemic does not
speak to the public imagination: "The plague was unimaginable, or rather it
was being imagined in the wrong way." As Camus had put it in his composition
notebook of 1938, the people are "lacking in imagination ... They don't
think on the right scale for plagues. And the remedies they think up are barely
suitable for a cold in the nose. They will die (develop)." Perhaps, some
people in the novel suggest, not all these deaths are attributable to the
plague. What would be the average number of deaths in a week, they ask, for a
city of this size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost
exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their
earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such
thinking shouldn't be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when
it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with disaster. Denial,
or defence, is integral to how the mind behaves under pressure.
It seems to me that that limits the scope of and so somewhat softens the effect
of those astonishing 3rd paragraph sentences that Willard quotes: "Mathematics
flattens. It is a killing art. Counting humans, alive or dead, means you have
entered a world of abstraction, the first sign that things have taken a
desperate turn." At that point Rose exploits and ambiguity in the meaning of
âto count" and moves from "determine the total number of" [quoting from the
dictionary on my computer] to "be significant" -- "Of course counting can
also mean the exact opposite. If someone counts, they matter, with the further
implication that they can be held answerable for their own deeds. Not to count,
on the other hand, is to be overlooked or invisible" I found that
transition a bit jarring/deceptive when I first read it, and still do.
So, as Willard quoted them, those words are tendentious nonsense. As Rose uses
them, they may tend in that direction, but they're part of a larger argument,
one I've no more than glanced at.
Do people use numbers in magical ways, in dangerous ways. Sure. But that's
true of language itself, as we all know. Are numbers abstract? Sure. But so are
words. One could even argue that perception itself is abstract. The eye
doesn't see all, but only what it is capable of seeing, and so with the ear,
and the nose.
So that's one thing. But those passages, as Willard quoted them, reminded me
of the ending of an essay that Johanna Drucker published in DHQ, Humanities
Approaches to Graphical Display, a few years ago.* This example also involves
the spread of disease.
Drucker was arguing that humanists couldn't use the same realist conventions
for graphical display of numerical data as social and behavioral scientists use
but instead must invent conventions that acknowledge and even (somehow) depict
the observer-dependent nature of observation. While that seems plausible enough,
I found her execution deeply problematic. She developed the argument through a
series of examples. In each case she'd first present a standard or
ârealist" visualization (often of charts and graphs) and then follow it with
by her humanist revision and augmentation. While some of her cases were obvious
enough, I found others unintelligible. Not only were the diagrams strange, but
her explanatory prose (in captions and body text) was inadequate. I simply gave
up on trying to make sense of them.
The thing is that, with one exception, none of these was a real example. She
didn't take her standard visualizations from real work that either she or
someone else had done. She just made them up. In a way that's OK, but it does
mean that none of these examples was anchored in a real investigation. The only
context they had was the one Drucker gave it in her article.
Her single real example was in the her conclusion and it was the well-known
mid-19th century map on which Dr. John Snow plotted cholera deaths on a map of
London. She notes that the map led officials to a water pump that was the source
of the infestation. And thenâ¦
It was sufficient to that purpose, adequate, but we could revisit that map and
use it to express other factors. Who are those dots? Each individual had a
profile, age, size, health, economic potential, family and social roles. In
short, each dot represents a life, and none of these are identical. Many
demographic features could be layered into this map to create a more complex
statistical view of the epidemic. That is neither subjective data nor a
subjective display. But what if we take the rate of deaths, their frequency, and
chart that on a temporal axis inflected by increasing panic. Then give a
graphical expression to the shape of the terrain, that urban streetscape, as it
is redrawn to express the emotional landscape. Then imagine drawing this same
streetscape from the point of view of a mother of six young children, a recent
widow, a small child, or an elderly man whose son has just died.
Well yes, we could try to do any or all of those things (building on earlier
parts of her discussion), but to what end? And by the end of the paragraph, just
what is she talking about? By the time we get to that last sentence it seems to
me we're talking about a movie about the epidemic, not a map. The goal is
quite different from Snow's, and one little obvious value in locating the
origin point of the disease. We're in an entirely different kind of universe
of representations. It's as though all visualizations are more or less of a
piece, namely, visualizations.
No form of representation can give us the world in all its richness and
complexity, not sensory perception, not words, not numbers. We need them all.
And we need to exercise care and judgment in using them, otherwise we'll be
lost.
Bill B
*Johanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, Digital Humanities
Quarterly, Volume 5 Number 1, 2011,
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html
> On Apr 30, 2020, at 4:02 AM, Humanist wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 811.
> Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
> Hosted by King's Digital Lab
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2020-04-30 07:55:14+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty
> Subject: on the uses of arithmetic
>
> Jacqueline Rose's "Pointing the finger"*, a review centred on Camus' The
> Plague, has much more worth our attention than her thoughts on the uses
> of counting, as follows, but these seem particularly relevant to what
> many of us do with a machine that makes juggling numbers so compelling:
>
>> When trying to track the spread of a virus, tallies... are always
>> approximate and imperfect, but knowing this appears to make no
>> difference to their quasi-sacred status. It is as if intoning numbers
>> according to the same recognisable formula, however scary, allows us
>> somehow to feel on top of a situation which everyone knows - and not
>> just because of government incompetence - is out of our control...
>> [A]t the very moment we appear to be taking the grimmest reality on
>> board, we might also be deluding ourselves. Counting is at once a
>> scientific endeavour and a form of magical thinking. It can be a way
>> of bracing ourselves for and confronting an onslaught, and at the
>> same time a doomed attempt at omnipotence, a system for classifying
>> the horror and bundling it away...
>>
>> Mathematics flattens. It is a killing art. Counting humans, alive or
>> dead, means you have entered a world of abstraction, the first sign
>> that things have taken a desperate turn. Of course counting can also
>> mean the exact opposite. If someone counts, they matter, with the
>> further implication that they can be held answerable for their own
>> deeds. Not to count, on the other hand, is to be overlooked or
>> invisible...
>
> Comments welcome.
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> -----
> *London Review of Books 42.9 for 7 May 2020, online at
> (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger).
>
>
> --
> Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/),
> Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
> London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
> (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org)
Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com
917-717-9841
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
http://www.bergenarches.com
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