The historical meaning of inequality as a bond of domination and subjection at the centre of the vertical political architecture of modernity has been replaced by reference to quantitatively expressed distributive differences. This paper examines the role of the poverty threshold in reconfiguring the welfare field and establishing a binary syntax; the spread of spatial artefacts inscribing unequal positions into space through separation; and numbers that provide the language for measuring the distance between positions. Quantification matters in instrumental and expressive terms: together with tools for knowledge and action, it also provides visions. Further, the vision expressed in the quantified distance that frames inequality corresponds to the dream of a domination free from any bond with the dominated, being cognitively and morally indifferent to it.
Inequality is a subject that is being talked about a great deal these days. Large quantities of data and figures provide us with unequivocal evidence of the huge disparities—in income, wealth, and so on—that characterize contemporary global capitalism. This trend towards polarization is all the more evident when we view it from a historical perspective, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has so masterfully done. The figures speak eloquently, but what do they refer to? What do we mean exactly, by “measuring inequality”?
It is a well-known fact that over the course of modern Western history in general, and of capitalism (and anti-capitalism) in particular, the notion of inequality has acquired a relational meaning that refers to power relations between unequal people. It could be argued that the history of the construction of this meaning began with the long struggle against the “high/low” dualism of the mediaeval Christian tradition through the process of secularization.1 And in this process we might recognize a crucial turn in the “symbolic form” of the Modern Perspective, which provided the cognitive tools for linking the “high” and the “low” together and endowed this link with a political character, through Machiavelli and then Hobbes especially.2 The French Revolution, which reciprocally gave equality a political status, also represents an important moment. Then, of course, Hegel’s Herr und Knecht Verhältnis (Master–Slave Dialectic) shaped the framework within which inequality meant a bond of domination constituting both the dominator and the dominated, that conferred an intrinsic dynamism on the social order. There followed the rise of capitalism, from Marx onwards. The capital/labour relationship came to be the main point of reference for inequality, associated as it was with exploitation and the private appropriation of socially produced wealth. For more than a century, inequality became the central critical issue in the labour movement and in the anti-capitalist—and indeed anti-imperialist—conflicts.
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My aim in this chapter is to show the shift in the semantic field of inequality that has taken place over the last forty years or so. Owing to this shift, the meaning of inequality as a (historical) bond of dominationand subjection is being obscured. In the current discourse on inequality and its magnitude, the (political) reference to power relations has become weaker and weaker, and inequality as defined by quantification now tends to designate a distributive difference, a gap, a disparity: a distance, and no longer a tie.
To this end, I will, in the following, identify some crucial steps in this semantic shift within the changes that have affected the vocabulary of welfare in Italy (but under pressure from Europe) over the course of some forty years. I will dwell in particular on the dispositif of the threshold—first of all the poverty threshold—and on the multiplication of thresholds in the field of welfare. I will look at the influence that the syntax of the threshold has exerted on the reconfiguration of this field, and draw some conclusions regarding the effects on the semantics of inequality—two in particular.
In the first place, “threshold” is a spatial metaphor which particularly shapes social spaces with divisions and separations. This made me focus on space and analyse the spread of space-based technologies of separation in the current governance instrumentation at both local and global levels. Here, I will identify the dynamics of inscriptions of inequality in space, and the emergence of a “spatialized” configuration of the term. “Inequality translates into distance”, as Richard Sennett (2006, p. 55) argued. Once inscribed in space, this distance, especially the one between privileged and deprived people, represents the negation of any relationship between them, and all the more so one of domination.
Furthermore, the syntax of thresholds is fundamentally numerical, quantitative, and calculistic. Distances correlate to measurements: they acquire reality to the extent that they are measured. My investigation into the semantic shift from inequality to distance involves numbers. Inequality, being shaped by quantification and measurements, designates the alignment of unequal positions along a linear sequence. Being flattened out, it loses its political significance. Paradoxically, the spotlight on quantitative data illuminates in the tiniest detail how enormous the imbalances are, but the quantitative format reduces inequality to a linear variance, and obscures vertical power relations.
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On the way, quantification will emerge as a part, albeit a salient one, of a wider process of symbolic change in which inequality is being reconfigured as distance. In this process, as we will see, words and spatial choreographies come into play together with numbers, as well as interweavings, assonances, and interdependencies amongst these symbolic registers. This perspective on quantification involves two choices of a methodological nature. Here, firstly, I will look at quantification through the influence that it exercises when conferring meanings to the issues it applies to, that is, by analysing numbers as a language—a (situated and historical) “langage du rapport à la réalité”, as Desrosières has put it (Desrosières, 2008, ch. 2). Secondly, quantification is framed within a broader context in which various other languages are at work, so that an investigation can be made of its role (its format and uses) in the symbolic institution of society in a given historical-social context: as part of a “thought style”, to use Mary Douglas’s (and Ludwig Fleck’s) expression.3 When seen from the—indirect, and from the outside, so to speak—perspective adopted here, quantification acquires a significance that is as expressive as it is instrumental: together with tools for knowledge and action, it appears to provide visions as well.
In my conclusions I shall propose some hypothetical remarks about the visions implied by the quantification of inequality, as they seem to express the dream of a domination free from any link with the dominated, morally indifferent and cognitively ignorant towards her/him.
Words: The Semantics of Poverty and the Syntax of the Threshold
The political history of inequality to which I referred above culminated in the development of the welfare states in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. They were the expression of the commitment to reinforcing the social bases of democracy after the devastating experiences of totalitarianism, world wars and mass slaughter, as Alain Supiot has shown in his masterly reconstruction (2010; in a similar vein see also Ken Loach’s movie “The Spirit of ‘45”). Moreover, this development was also stimulated by the challenge posed to European countries by the Soviet Union’s collectivist model. Thus labour regulations and systems of social protection were instituted, through different institutional architectures and to different degrees, in the period known as the “Trente glorieuses”. The welfare state emerged as a political compromise—a deal—between capital and labour (as was still being argued in the literature of the 1970s, for example by Ian Gough [1979]). And the issue of inequality developed within a framework of collective responsibility that called for a redistribution—firstly in relation to labour—not only of goods but also of powers.
The “crisis of the welfare state”, officially announced in Italy in the early 1980s, opened a period of welfare restructuring (which is still under way, whether presented as “reforms” or as “modernization”). At that time, my theoretical interests focused on the forms and conditions of institutional change, which I investigated in relation to both the cognitive and normative dimensions, and my main area of research was welfare institutions and policies. It was in this field, therefore, that I began to look more closely at the changes in the vocabulary of welfare used in Italy at both local and national level, from the 1980s onwards, and broadening my focus to include the European Union’s social programmes as a crucial source (De Leonardis, 1998, 2000).4
Shifting Words
I pointed out that certain words had fallen out of use in the current language of the welfare arenas, whilst new ones were being adopted without encountering any significant resistance. After all, the new words expressed good intentions: “the fight against social exclusion”, for instance—how could anyone object to that? As I explored these shifts, I noted (1) the speed of the change and the apparent self-evidence of many of the terms in circulation, with no need for explanation or justification; (2) the sappy rhetoric that dominated discussion; and (3) the reiteration of certain lines of argument that were virtually identical in the various contexts, one highly authoritative source of this being Europe (the European New-speak). This suggested to me that the welfare arena had been subjected to a massive investment in language whilst at the same time “conflicts over the vocabulary” (Fraser, 1989) had attenuated.5
We do things with words, as John Austin reminds us: all the more so when they are being used in the official language of a policy or a regulatory system, and therefore have normative force. From this perspective, I focused on the emerging words related to the semantic field of inequality that redefined welfare problems and goals and accompanying discussions on the institutional architecture of welfare (see Fig. 5.1).
Fig. 5.1
Examined semantic shifts
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The map (see Fig. 5.1) sums up in an impressionistic fashion the semantic shifts I noted.6 I paid special attention to the term “poverty”. After its eclipse in the golden age of the welfare state, where the term denoted a residual phenomenon, “poverty” reappeared in Italy as a category during the 1980s and acquired a central position in the vocabulary—at least as much as in reality. As I pointed out then, “as the subject of poverty acquires increasing significance in welfare policies, it triggers a change in their vocabulary […] [P]overty becomes the central framework that shapes policy choices […] no less than scientific research” (De Leonardis, 2000).
In the semantics of poverty, “needs” replace “rights” as the main referents to identify persons vis-à-vis institutions and policies. Indeed, as the issue of poverty came to the fore, references to rights as essential attributes of (social) citizenship dwindled away, and virtually disappeared from the discourse. The term “needs” took their place, and was aligned with the “means” to satisfy them (and the relative “means tests”) provoking an overall reconfiguration of the semantic field of welfare. Moralization and quantification were emerging together as the main drivers of this reconfiguration.
Moralization
As regards moralization, it could be noted that the needs/means pairing was leading to defining and evaluating welfare issues more in moral than in political terms, more in the vocabulary of judgement on personal responsibility than in that of the law regarding the rights one is entitled to. After all, we already know that this is the role that the category of poverty has played in the moral order of capitalism in general and in the history of labour regulations in particular, since the “primitive accumulation” laws against vagrancy, and then recurrently. The moralizing significance of the poverty issue came into play, for instance, in relation to the urban plebs of Haussmann’s and Hugo’s Paris representing the “question sociale”. Poverty was seen as being associated with moral degradation, criminality and vice, and approached as the matrix of the “classes dangereuses” (Castel, 1995, quoting Chevaliers). The moralizing mark of poverty crops up again and again in the labour movement’s battles for social rights, and particularly when the category of the “unemployed worker” was being constructed. Looking at Britain in the early 1930s and 1940s, Noel Whiteside (Whiteside, 2015; but see also Salais et al., 1986) accurately identified the place occupied by “the opprobrium heaped onto the idle poor”, whose “demoralization” was assumed to threaten Britain’s economic performance (Whiteside, 2015, p. 153). Together with “[…] free enterprise and […] the efficacy of financial instruments to address risk”, this moral stigma constitutes that liberal “collective faith” which is implied in the moral order of capitalism. “All features”, Whiteside (2015, p. 153) opportunely adds, “that have proved extremely durable”, as shown by the moralizing process of welfare in Italy promoted by the poverty issue from the 1980s onwards. Once again, at its core lies the great divide between the deserving and the undeserving poor, making access to welfare benefits dependent upon assessment of the recipients’ deservingness.
It is precisely here, in the assessment operations, that the complementary drive of quantification comes into play in the semantics of poverty reconfiguring welfare matters, values and policies. The deservingness principle operates a division between claimants, which must be justified on scientific grounds promising objectivity. The (moral) judgement on the claimant’s deservingness requires scientific evidence grounded on proofs and tests.7
The Threshold
The key tool for scientific assessment and measurement of poverty is the threshold, the poverty line dividing the poor and the not-poor. The scientific division it establishes intersects with the moral division between the deserving and undeserving poor. Fixing the threshold is an integral part of the very definition of poverty, as well as of the policy instrumentation in this area. In the widespread debate on the definition of poverty that developed during the 1970s, issues concerning the categorization of poverty were bound up with both measurement and justice issues, concerning criteria and choices: What indicators are pertinent? Indicators related to income, consumer baskets, or “necessities” taking up Rowntree’s budgetary approach again? What components should be included, with what scales of equivalence? Whether and how should temporal variations be considered, or the size of the household, or poverty perception, and so on? Discussions hinged on what criteria and what tools should be adopted for determining the poverty threshold, in other words how and where the line should be drawn, how to determine the standard below which life is lived in a condition of poverty.
Of special interest in this respect is the distinction between an “absolute” and a “relative” notion of poverty, which opposed Amartya Sen to Peter Townsend, both key figures in this debate.8 It was Townsend who, basing the determination and measurement of poverty on the notion of “relative deprivation”, dictated the terms of the issue, also in the vocabulary of Europe.9 Sen has criticized the “relative” definition of poverty arguing that “ultimately poverty must be seen to be primarily an absolute notion” (Sen, 1983, p. 158). There is, says Sen, an “irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty” (Sen, 1983, p. 159), which becomes visible from the perspective of capabilities. Capabilities themselves are absolute, if we mean by this term the universal value of the eminently human quality of agency they assess: what constitutes “a derived and variable element” are, instead, the commodities necessary for this quality to flourish. In other words, the determination of poverty based on capabilities raises a question of universal absolutes, whilst taking “a relative form in the space of commodities” (Sen, 1983, p. 161). “Even with exactly the same absolute shortfall […] a person may be thought to be ‘poorer’ if the other poor have shortfalls smaller than his. […] Quantification of poverty would seem to need the marrying of considerations of absolute and relative deprivation even after a set of minimum needs and a poverty line have been fixed” (Sen, 1979, p. 293).
This argument underpins the proposal of compromise Sen advances (Sen, 1983, p. 161): “There is no conflict between the irreducible absolutist element in the notion of poverty (relating to capabilities and the standard of living) and the ‘thoroughgoing relativity’ to which Peter Townsend refers, if the latter is interpreted as applying to commodities and resources”. This proposal, which was rejected by Townsend at the time, was eventually taken up again in an operation that closed the controversy: The Copenhagen Declaration, emerging from the 1995 UN Summit, where Townsend was again a protagonist, makes room for the “absolute poverty” sustained by Sen, and interprets the compromise he proposes by establishing a “two-levels definition”. Does this mean everything is settled? Not really. The fact is that in this outcome, the term “absolute” has changed meaning and consequently the compromise in question does not fully correspond to Sen’s intentions and reasoning. Here, the term “absolute” defines the manifestation of poverty in extreme forms consisting in “severe deprivation of basic human needs” (UN, 1995, para. 19). “Absolute” has become a synonym of “severe”. Assuming the existence of an “absolute poverty” has made it possible, in this official context, to take into account Sen’s perspective on poverty in cross-national measurements and comparisons. At the price, however, of a banalization that makes it equivalent to the lowest level on the scale of poverty, that of subsistence.10 It should, however, be remembered that Sen himself was perfectly clear:
The characteristic feature of ‘absoluteness’ is neither constancy over time, nor invariance between different societies, nor concentration merely on food and nutrition. It is an approach of judging a person’s deprivation in absolute terms... rather than in purely relative terms vis-à-vis the levels enjoyed by others in the society. (Sen, 1985, p. 673; first emphasis added; second emphasis in original)
Thus, absoluteness defines not so much a type or degree of poverty but an approach, and specifically an approach that does not consider comparisons to be exhaustive for the purpose of defining poverty. Which is precisely the claim of a relativist approach.11 The “absolutist” core Sen insists on has nothing to do with its comparative aspect: it is politically determined. The “absolute” opposed to the “relative” by Sen in this definition calls into play a third term to which the relativities of the comparisons are anchored: terms of reference fixed through political compromises on conflictual issues about ends and values. In the comparative perspective on poverty, the terms of reference are instead determined from within, and emerge from the comparisons themselves. The acceptable level of poverty—expressed in the poverty line—is established by means of comparisons between the poorer and the less poor.
Even absolute poverty, banalized as we have seen, has become congruent with this comparative logic. In the end, it is the relative approach that has prevailed, and fixed a comparative frame for the whole set of categorizing, research, measurements, rankings etc. for determining poverty, which meanwhile has continued to develop. This, then, is the format for knowledge that condenses into the figure of the threshold and constitutes it as the central informational basis—Sen’s “informational basis of judgement in justice”12—on which policy choices in the field of poverty and welfare are based.
Visibility and Obfuscation
Framed by the threshold, attention is focused on what is happening around the borders, and on how to measure marginal differences, variations, transitions, and suchlike, with important consequences for the definition and treatment of poverty. Here, we draw once again on Sen, who discussed this in his latest book co-authored with Drèze on India (Drèze & Sen, 2013, see specifically ch. 7). On the one hand, attention focusing on thresholds entails a bias towards targeted, differential responses to poverty or inequality issues, which tend to fuel “extremely divisive” effects, segmentation, and dynamics of “exclusion and divisiveness” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 191).
On the other hand, in this way attention is diverted from the substance of the issues, from what is happening below, beyond the poverty line. Concerning the poverty line that was officially established in 2011 in India, Sen and Drèze (2013, p. 189) point out that the ensuing public debate has concentrated on the threshold and the dire level that was established, whilst “missing the main point”: The fact that, “even with this low benchmark, so many people are below it – a full 30% of the population, or more than 350 million people” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 190). In other words, “the terrifying yet hidden nature of mass poverty – its enormous size – has been quite lost” (ibid.), and, as a result, completely ignored. The threshold is a device that fixes a measurement of poverty. And this measurement, a number in fact, whilst giving poverty great public visibility and attention, equally seems to produce effects of obfuscation. From studies on quantification, we are already aware of this type of effect and, in general, of the selective nature of numbers in giving an account of the phenomena they measure. In the case in question, the measure of poverty shaped by the threshold obscures other crucial information on poverty itself—including, of course, other quantitative data (amongst which the percentage of people who do not have a toilet available: around 50%). From Drèze and Sen’s arguments in the following chapters, the impression is given that what is obfuscated and neutralized, is “the grip” of the inequality between “the privileged and the rest” in India today, its enormity, its “outrageousness” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 279). And “the dominance of the privileged” in terms of voice in public reasoning (Drèze & Sen, 2013, ch. 9) is fortified by a systematically diverted attention creating “blind spots” on social failures that are as invisible as they are serious, like the blind spots that are indeed created when attention is focused on the poverty line.
The threshold constitutes a key device for responding to the need, mentioned above, to give scientific grounds to the definition of poverty. By providing measurement criteria and the resulting standards it makes such definition a correlation of its measurement (specifically in comparative terms, as we have seen). As I noted at the time, when reasoning on the growing popularity of this category in the field of welfare, “the bureaucratic passion for categorisation […] is being replaced by a computational passion that translates all the issues into terms of measurement” (De Leonardis, 2000, p. 95). I shall now add that the poverty line appears to be a central syntactical element for this translation, precisely because it is a line that establishes a binary code—in/out, above/below, yes/no, 1/0—as a basic frame for public knowledge and action. In this way the poverty line aligns the category of poverty—both in its cognitive and normative values, both as a public issue and as the object of policies at all levels of governance—with its quantitative format.
We shall return later to the paths opened up by this investigation, in order to examine the role played by quantification in reconfiguring inequality. To conclude here the argument on the semantics of poverty, we must look back again at the association between the quantitative format established by the threshold and the equally powerful drive of moralization. And we must emphasize the fact that dynamics of division are triggered by both the moral divide between the deserving and the undeserving poor, and the numerical separation enacted by the line’s binary code. All in all, the semantics of poverty, when observed at close quarters, implicitly denies the promise that had justified the centrality of the “poverty issue” in the welfare field in Italy. Poverty supposed to be an all-encompassing notion overcoming the—widely criticized—category-based welfare system, was as such surrounded by a universalistic aura, whereas a non-universalistic regime of justice was starting to be established just through the category of poverty. A justice which, according to the quantitative parameter of poverty, subjects the welfare claimant to judgement, weighing up needs and means, selecting and awarding prizes and punishments. In the tangle of moralization and quantification a sort of “bookkeeping justice” is to be glimpsed, weighting the benefits granted against the contributions that people make to society understood as a “shared venture”.13
Spatial Choreographies: From Inequality to Distance
The figure of the threshold encourages us to follow another line of investigation into the semantic change in inequality and the role played by quantification: “Threshold” is clearly a metaphor, and a spatial one as it draws a dividing line—in/out, above/below, etc.—according to a binary code. Coming across a spatial metaphor at the heart of the knowledge infrastructure on poverty might not be so important, were it not for its assonance with a more general trend towards forms of “spatialization” in the governance of social issues. All the more so since dividing and separating—as the poverty line does—appear to be, as we shall see, a quite common tendency enacted by these forms.
On the subject of space, space and power, and space as a fundamental lever of governance, a vast body of research is available. Accumulated throughout the history of the disciplines devoted to it,14 this patrimony has extended its ramifications into the whole corpus of the social sciences. And from Foucault onwards it has been re-investigated and amplified. Because of its symbolic power shaping social organization and conferring an order on it, space emblematically represents a technology of governance that acts indirectly and “at a distance” (Miller & Rose, 1990).
What we learn first and foremost from this background is the basic, preliminary indication that “space” is not “place”, as Gieryn (2000, p. 489) has noted. Space is to be “more properly conceived as abstract geometries (distance, direction, size, shape, volume) detached from material form and cultural interpretation […]. Space is what place becomes when the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values are sucked out” (Gieryn, 2000, p. 465).15 We should therefore consider firstly that the generative potential of space operates on the territory in the same way, that is by abstraction, as a map does; and secondly that the language of this abstraction is a mathematical, or more precisely geometrical language, once again the language of numbers. As I anticipated, this must be taken into account first and foremost when investigating the current processes of “spatialization”, i.e. the diffusion of spatial frames in addressing social matters, in both cognitive and normative terms, and the growing recourse to space-based technologies in governance at both global and local (city) level.16
Well in advance Foucault (2001) noted these trends postulating that whilst, “[T]he great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history […] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (Foucault, 2001, p. 1571).
The “network society”, investigated and outlined as an emerging social order by Manuel Castells, is the most meaningful expression of spatialization. The network is indeed a geometric figure, the abstract space of a collection of points with its own mathematical laws, which is characterized, Castells maintains, “by the preeminence of social morphology over social action” (Castells, 1996, p. 469). Thus, in my investigation of the semantic changes in “inequality” I will now look at space, spatialization and space-based governance instruments, shifting the focus from words to symbolic artefacts of a spatial nature. My aim is to explore what meanings these artefacts confer on inequality. The analytical background I shall use as a basis comes from research on urban policies, territorial governance, and the transformations that are affecting European cities, mainly.
Cities, which are obviously the preferred environment for space-based policy instruments (first and foremost those based on architecture and urban planning) appear to be affected by two opposing and simultaneous spatial drives. On the one hand, as Françoise Choay argued in her studies of history and anthropology in architecture (Choay, 2006, p. 10), spatialization driven by globalization constitutes an expansive drive that acts upon the extension of the city and produces urban sprawl and thus its disarticulation (and its replacement with the urbain). On the other hand, the opposite move towards concentration, which insists on circumscribing the local—the neighbourhoods, typically, in order to control them or increase their value—equally tends to fuel separation, segmentation and disarticulation in a different form.
It is this latter shift that is of interest here. It has its origins in and is fuelled by the issue of “urban (in)security”, whose vocabulary of motives was provided by the “fear of the Other”. This issue reached Italy (from the Anglo-Saxon world) during the 1990s, establishing itself in public discourse. It marked the beginning of the intense season of policies for urban security, which since then have become a major lever of governance in cities, not only in Italy, and are constantly updated (today also due to the terrorism alert). It has also been noted that in this way problems and solutions are reframed, with attention being shifted from the “social” issue of security, an issue to do with welfare, to its “civil” significance, an issue to do with law and order, and from social protection to police protection.17 In this frame, whether it is a matter of managing a deprived urban area, of fighting “degradation” by means of “urban décor”18 interventions, or of preventing social disorder and criminal behaviour by means of surveillance devices, all these policies operate through space-management and space-based instruments. Security is above all territorial, being translated into “securitized territories”. And, in its turn, the territory, its borders and identity are increasingly marked by the question of security as the crux of the relationship between citizens and institutions. In the governance of the city (and not only) “territory” becomes a keyword which, whilst giving recognition to the everyday life contexts of people and to local communities, transfers on them the semantic density that the term has accumulated in reference to state sovereignty and its inner security issue.19 It is in the territory that governance operates by means of area-based instruments, borders, partitions, “quadrillage” (grids), and so forth, and thus it is there that clues are to be found to the processes of spatialization, which also affect inequality.
In fact, there is much talk of “territorialization”, particularly following in Foucault’s footsteps and revealing how powerful it is in the digital and globalized world, just when the virtual is being freed from any spatial bond (see for instance Paul Hirst, 2005, part 3). Anyway, territory and territorialization have become a common yardstick for all policies on social matters—including welfare (Bifulco, 2014), in line with the emphasis placed on the “local” by European policies and programmes. And it is above all in relation to places and spaces, areas, zones, districts, and the like, that policy issues are defined. Even the people’s status as citizens—and possibly citizenship itself as a status—is now more directly anchored in their own (local) territory, so that the model of citizen is now provided by the “inhabitant” active in his or her own neighbourhood, as was noted in France by Cathérine Neveu (2011) and Jacques Donzelot (2009).
Territory and territorialization contain the promise of a governance that is closer to the citizens, the promise of a privileged arena for enhancing political participation and democracy. There are experiences and some evidence that give credit to this promise,20 but these are far from questioning the “territory’s” prevalent semantic frame I have just outlined, its intrinsic link to the theme of security and the spatial separation it activates. All in all, on observing forms of territorial governance globally, it can clearly be seen that they tend to produce “exclusion” or “expulsion” (Hirst, 2005; Sassen, 2006, respectively), by making wide use of borders and separations. And we are well aware, with reference to the local scale of governance, that relating people to a given territory may equally be a source of stigma and denied citizenship, as, in the case of France, the young banlieusards perfectly know.21 In our cities22 the signs by which the territory is marked, consisting of borders and separations, may be slight, yet the well-known phenomena of “relegation”, “urban segregation”, and the like are important signals and allow us to glimpse drives towards a spatial concentration of homogeneous populations in distinct urban areas. In many of the world’s big cities actually, these trends are much stronger, and give rise to spatial concretions of the polarization between privileged and deprived urban populations, such as gated residential communities or luxury areas, on the one hand, and “difficult areas” or slums, on the other. In these forms of spatial inscription of unequal populations significant traces of a “spatialization” of inequality may be detected (Bricocoli & De Leonardis, 2015). Of the space-based technologies employed by territorial governance, many bear the same marks: barriers, enclosures, sensors, checkpoints, (also private) armed police, off-limits areas, fences, walls and, yes, moats. Open spaces, such as public green areas, should also be included in this list when they are designed to create a buffer zone that protects a middle-class residential area from the disorder of the city, and so should the “by-pass roads” that make it possible to skip areas of urban misery, ignore them, and live separate lives. These dynamics of division that slice the city into segments tend to eliminate places, opportunities and reasons for meeting and exchange, and for conflict between unequal populations.
The binary logic of separation finds its most drastic expression in the “walls” that have started to proliferate everywhere, especially as the preferred solution to the threat posed by migratory flows in our globalized and hyper-connected world. The barrier between Mexico and US is the most famous and the longest, and the Israeli “Wall” separating Palestinian people is considered a prototype (Weizman, 2007). In Europe, too, migrants are kept outside its boundaries, as we have had to recognize, and—at its Southern boundary—the armed Mediterranean Sea is now performing a similar function, paradoxically. Starting from Wendy Brown (2009) who first gave an account of the phenomenon, the literature has emphasized several features of this device.23 Although it is adopted as a quick and easy tool of governance, a ready-made solution, its effectiveness has already proved to be highly dubious. Such barriers perform more of a “theatrical function” (Brown, 2009, p. 122), and what they stage is, in fact, separation. Whilst the walls of total institutions (such as asylums or prisons) which have been familiar in our modern landscape for so long, segregate people for taking charge of, and treating—re-educating, punishing, etc.—them, these new walls produce a separation only, by enacting a spatial division on a territory into two abstract spaces, without any people being taken into charge whatsoever. Through and around these “walls of separation”, the powers exercised and the operations performed are directed towards impeding, driving away, rejecting, turning back, establishing a distance, avoiding encounters and denying recognition.24
Walls set up a powerful choreography for global inequality. Through spatialization, inequality no longer designates a bond between unequal people, but rather a distance that suspends or denies any relationship between them. “Inequality translates into distance”: it is appropriate to recall here what Richard Sennett (2006) argues when discussing how the chain of command changes in the “new capitalism”, and observing the enormity of the distances between top managers and workers in the globalized company. “There is nothing like a relationship between a Thai shoe-sticker and a Milanese fashionista; they transact, […] rather than relate” (Sennett, 2006, p. 55). The translation of inequality into distance, says Sennett, goes hand in hand with the “divorce between command and accountability” (Sennett, 2006, p. 57). To this power, being expressed in a denied bond, and therefore de-responsibilized, corresponds the form of subjection that Sennett himself had described as “the bond of autonomy” (Sennett, 1980). This form of domination consists in the denial of any bond whatsoever with the dominated, resulting in both cognitive ignorance and moral indifference to him/her.
Numbers: Measuring Inequality
What “distance” is—that is the length of a line between two points—may be known and recognized by measuring it. Here we finally focus on the role played by numbers, intended as a language, in the reconfiguration of inequality. As I stressed at the beginning of my discussion, this is the language by which inequality is mostly represented nowadays. In the meantime, however, somewhere along the analytical path followed up to now, the innocence of an objective, neutral description of the phenomenon attached to its measurement has evaporated. We have traced the spread of quantification that goes along with changes in the lexicon of welfare and the grip of the quantitative format on the basic cognitive tools for defining issues and governing them. The measurements of inequality now appear to be involved in a more general reframing, in which inequality is being translated into distance. In which numbers, like words, acquire relevance and demand to be observed for what is made with them, i.e. their performative potential in fabricating a reality. They are “an engine, not a camera” (MacKenzie, 2006), to take up a meaningful image summing up a crucial interpretative key in studies on quantification.25 And it is in this perspective that we shall proceed to investigate the role of numbers in resignifying inequality, and observe how their virtues are exploited.
Numbers provide the synthesis of a plurality of components, factors and aspects of inequality. Thanks to their parsimony, and the economizing function numbers perform in describing (and assessing), it is simply by means of a few well-constructed figures that the quantitative format provides a precise account of the magnitude of a phenomenon. At the same time, thanks to the related standardization, many qualifications may be translated into figures. And the issue may be split and multiplied into a plurality of inequalities referring to the widest possible variety of assets—inequality in income, wealth, education, health, access to the internet, etc.—and placing one next to another in a linear sequence, from life expectancy at birth to the freedom to choose how one dies.
Nonetheless, we first have to consider that within this multiplicity the same cognitive format is reproduced, made up of quantification, measurements, comparisons, ratings and rankings. As far as inequality is concerned, figures tell us a great deal about variations, distances and unevenness between different positions, but very little about power relations between them. Numbers enact a binary logic, as we have already seen, and are directed to making (horizontal) comparisons rather than talking about (vertical) conflicts. More importantly, it should be considered that the economizing function of numbers is primarily performed on words, qualifications and arguments.26 And we must ask ourselves what effects this parsimony has on the density of the semantic repertoires that noun “inequality” has accumulated and sedimented, and on its inner contentious meaning. Quantitative data save on qualification and argument, on plural interpretations and representations, on voices and conflicts over vocabulary.
The quantification that establishes what is to be considered relevant knowledge with regard to inequality guides a process of abstraction which—in the same way as space acts on place—“sucks out” plurality, contingency and subjectivity, impoverishing the symbolic repertoire for expressing modes and reasons in talking about inequality. The figures on inequality—so precise and well-founded on the authority of science—efficiently carry out their task of conferring objectivity, the “mechanical objectivity” grounded on calculus and expressed in a “matter-of-fact” format. And of course these are very important results. Nonetheless, when objectivation is exerted on the issue of inequality it comes with high costs. The great variety of other forms of knowledge about inequality is absorbed or replaced by numbers and ends up being neutralized. Costs are high in terms of the naturalization of the inequality issue, with the risk that “an ontological naturalness or essentialism […] takes up residence in our understandings and explanations” concerning this issue (Brown, 2006, p. 15). As far as it is framed by measurements, inequality also becomes exposed to the effects of their performative potential I have just recalled, when these are taken as a metric for rating operations and assessing performances. This is an aspect that deserves investigation, remembering the research on rankings and the reactivity (or feedback) they produce in the field they measure and order, and more in general the way these types of quantitative instruments function in the “governance by numbers”.27 Indeed, with figures on inequality, their descriptive function may end up being replaced by, or incorporate performance indicators. This is plain to see especially in the area of statistics, comparisons and rankings between countries, as when inequality figures are included in the set of indicators used to evaluate the performances of a country targeted for aid programmes.
In Ousmane Sidibé’s contribution on the subject in this volume, the country is Mali, and the indicators to be improved concern inequality in education. The example shows that, under the pressure of ranking (and the incentives correlated to it) an enormous effort is made to raise the rates of education, attaining a numerical objective which, however, obfuscates substantial quality issues of education itself. This is a case in point for the “governance by numbers” where one can see how the inequality issue is being treated within a management by objectives system, formatted by the latter’s instrumentation and dynamics, and how widespread practices are for “pushing up the numbers”, even by cheating.28 The outcome in terms of a real reduction of educational inequality is, to say the least, dubious. In any case, the issue of inequality, as it is incorporated into the set of global governance control tools to produce “adjustments” and “alignments”, undergoes distortion. Not only is its meaning set as a problem of disparity, a quantitative gap, a distance between positions aligned along a distribution curve, hence losing its relational grounds, its reference to power relations, but it may also happen that inequality itself, as expressed by numbers, becomes a tool for control, discipline and subjection.
The lesson I draw from this case concerns another aspect of the more general reconfiguration of inequality. This paradoxical twist in the meaning of inequality has been made possible by its reshaping and treatment as a matter for management, in accordance with the managerial style of dealing with problems. More precisely, inequality appears to fall within the category of problems that are there to be “managed” instead of being “solved”, which Sheldon Wolin identifies as a salient trait of the “managed democracy” (and its “domestication”, Wolin, 2008).
However, we also know that numbers may well provide people with strong arguments against power. In the case of inequality figures, too, numbers give phenomena visibility, a visibility grounded on scientific evidence. Inequality, being expressed in the measurement of distances, looks like a “matter-of-fact” issue, and it is in this format that it acquires visibility. It is thanks to this visibility they confer on situations being measured, that quantitative data, their construction and use have often been, and still are, crucial matters at stake in claims for recognition, in political struggles, and in the making of “collectives”.29 Can we say that the same thing is happening today with the figures on inequality?
In a way, yes, it does seem that here, too, figures provide arguments for denouncing disparity and representing a collective, particularly around the polarization they make visible: typically, the “our 99%” against the richest “1%”, is a main argument of the “Occupy” movement. The quantitative framework does help denounce an imbalance of power that has grown to the limits of disproportion, giving rise to public protest and collective action. Nonetheless, this power imbalance that numbers highlight appears, in its very disproportion, to be simplified to the extreme, and void of qualification. That 99% remains an aggregate as vast as it is indeterminate, corresponding to, following Robert Castel’s (2003) metaphor, a “collection of individuals” sharing a statistical position only, rather than a “collective” of political subjectivities. Whilst attention is focused on the disproportion, the question of what connects the two poles remains obscured. Here again, the issue of inequality is represented more in the form of a gap than of a bond. And as far as domination is concerned, it appears to be a matter of unbalanced quantities. Even when polarization is critically traced back to the new capitalism—as done by Piketty in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Piketty, 2014)—the tendency is to forget Marx’s famous warning on how easy it is to pass off capital “as a thing” rather than as the “social relationship” it really is.
Conclusions: The Dream of an Indifferent Power
As scholars of semiotics well know, and as Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (2007) also teaches us, the meaning of a word has a history that can only be investigated in relation to other words. Inequality is no exception, as it immediately recalls a dense constellation of words and related meanings.30 Of this constellation, the portion analysed here, however limited in time and place, has provided several leads to explore how the meaning of the word “inequality” has been changing—in a nutshell, it is being translated into “distance”—and what role has been played by quantification, or more precisely by the language of numbers. During this investigation the latter, as a langage du rapport à la realité, has come into play together with the language of words and that of spatial artefacts. And I have shown how these languages contribute to reconfiguring inequality as a distance “from”, instead of a tie “between”.
As far as it is framed as a question of distances and measurements, inequality is captured in a quantitative format. Within this format the vertical configuration, which anchored inequality to burning issues of power, politics, and institutions, is being obfuscated, and inequality appears in the normalized format of a quantitative variance flattening out along a horizontal line. It is established by a comparison between linear positions and intended merely as a matter of plus or minus, more or less, yes or no, according to a binary code. Even though figures can be multiplied, cross-compared and updated in real time, the picture remains flattened out on a one single level. Figures only relate to other figures, whilst the third term that links them tends to disappear. We might say that, because it is only acknowledged as relative, and not as relational, inequality has lost its absolute—that is, its societal and political—dimension (much like Sen’s “absolute poverty”). It is worth noting that similar flattening effects of quantification come to light in the making of the “new calculable global world” that Laurent Thévenot discusses in his contribution to this volume, by analysing certification standard setting concerning palm oil. His account, from the perspective of the “smallholders”—farmers and rural communities—involved in the “participative” procedure, vividly shows how in this latter the arguments are both formatted for making things calculable and expressed in a horizontal arena that conceals the (rather obvious) “power imbalance between parties”. Any third term between these parties is lacking, aside from the so-called “third parties”, whose impartiality appears highly dubious. In that case, too, Thévenot argues, domination bonds get obscured by the “juxtaposition of ‘stakes’ in a horizontal dialogue around the round table”.31
In any case, those flattening effects are the mark left by quantification on the semantic field of inequality. However, we should also reverse our view and look at what mark is left on quantification by its involvement in this field and in the more general resignification process affecting inequality. As we have seen, from the vantage point of the inequality issue, quantification is being highlighted in relation to ruling powers, especially those powers that are expressed, since Hobbes, in naming, as well as, obviously enough, in counting. “Depoliticization” may be a first interpretative key when considering that, in quantifying inequality we have seen a power engaged in fabricating a reality without seeming to do so. Of course, as I have already recalled, quantification can also keep political struggle alive, both when it is a matter of constructing data and when these data coagulate political arenas and subjectivities. But the case of inequality bears a quite different mark, as we have seen, which suggests placing quantification amongst the drivers of the depoliticization of political choices characterizing, according to Wendy Brown (2006, 2015) the neoliberal discourse.
Indeed, the issue of inequality, which has for a long time been the crux of political struggles and compromises on the social order, appears to be caught in the grip of the “discourse of depoliticization” as intended (see Brown, 2006, ch. 1) as a discourse that “eschews power and history in the representation of its subject” (Brown, 2006, p. 15),32 emptying it of political significance. In the end, inequality is transformed, as we have seen, into a problem to be “managed”, a terrain on which to apply a managerial logic. “Inequality becomes normal, even normative” (Brown, 2015, p. 38). According to this interpretation, numbers are involved in depoliticization since they provide a language for the economic metric which is at the core of the neoliberal spirit, and for generalizing it within “spheres and activities heretofore governed by other tables of values” (Brown, 2015, p. 21). By providing the “dissimulation of the normative work they do” (Brown, 2015, p. 135), numbers contribute to vanquishing “the already anemic homo politicus”, being replaced by “homo oeconomicus” (Brown, 2015, ch. 3).33
Our focus on the inequality issue confirms that the quantitative format can be extremely efficient in eschewing power matters in the issues it shapes. But what kind of power operates through the dissimulation provided by numbers in the case in point? As we have already seen the translation of inequality into distance corresponds to a power being exercised through that distance: not only in the sense of “governing at-a-distance”—something we already know numbers may contribute to—but rather in the sense of “keeping at a distance”. Numbers provide dissimulation to a power that denies any form of bond with its own object/subject. A domination, I argued or rather conjectured, being enacted through an indifference which takes the form of both ignorance on the cognitive side, and irresponsibility on the moral side.34 The issue is now how the language of numbers reframing inequality is involved in corroborating this indifference.
We already know how much the neoliberal “bureaucratization” (Hibou, 2012) exploits the performative role of quantitative data in renovating and enhancing the archetypal indifference of the bureaucratic command.35 As Supiot (2015) shows, the automatisms of the governance by numbers replicate in digital form the long-lasting mechanistic utopia of the homo automata, freed from any subjectivity. But the crux of the matter lies in the very virtues of numbers, as we have seen them at work configuring inequality as distance. We have seen how the science-based operations for sparing on words and qualifications, and for “mathematization” (Ogien, 2013) transfigure inequality into an abstract picture. The abstraction that the language of numbers is able to achieve results in a rarefied reality. The latter appears, at the same time, in the spotlight of scientific evidence, and cleared from any other form of knowledge and language, of view and experience, and even of data. It is precisely thanks to the capacity of numbers for abstraction, and thus to the abstract and rarefied picture of inequality they provide, that the inner contentious meaning of inequality, as a power issue, is being sucked out, and may be ignored by the powerful. The “skilled ignorance” grounded on the quantified inequality goes hand in hand with the moral innocence that the reference to destiny or chance (like in a gambling game) in its turn authorizes.
To sum up, the powerful machinery of numerical abstraction transfiguring inequality would seem to support the dream of a power that dominates by pretending to be both cognitively and morally indifferent. But there is a disproportion, here, disturbing the dream. This is the disproportion between the rarefied picture of inequality that numbers achieve—objective, precise, and complete as it claims to be—and the density of the silenced social knowledge on inequality, the related immense sufferings, and the anger growing around it. This disproportion reveals that this dream is just a dream. And when the abstract reality of the quantified inequality grows to the point of irreality, the dream of indifference appears coupled with obtuseness.
Notes
1.
See Carlo Ginzburg (1986) on the history of S. Paul’s precept “noli altum sapere, sed time”.
2.
Carlo Ginzburg (1998, p. 180) shows the political implications of Perspective in the Dedication of Machiavelli’s Il Principle. As for Hobbes, the focus is on the Leviathan’s frontispiece in both Gamboni’s and Schaffer’s contributions in Latour and Weibel (2005, pp. 162–202).
3.
Fleck (1983 [1935]). But I am especially referring to the re-elaboration by Mary Douglas in the framework of her cognitive approach to institutions (Douglas, 1986, 1996).
4.
Here, I examined the arguments and justifications put forward in welfare policy arenas, especially those in normative texts, deeds and administrative acts.
5.
The word “labour”, too, was (and still is) under a process of redefinition subverting its historically sedimented meaning (Salais 2007).
6.
It is worth recalling here the “eclipse” of the elite issue from social theory and discourse that Mike Savage and Karel Williams (2008) show to be an effect of, amongst other factors, the quantitative turn of sociological research on stratification and inequality from the mid-1970s onwards. As national sample surveys were unable to highlight the small group at the top, “elites thereby flipped from view” (Savage & Williams, 2008, p. 3). And at the same time, inequality was defined “not as a set of social relations, but as a graduated hierarchy” (Savage & Williams, 2008, p. 5).
7.
It is worth pointing out here that a dual semantic matrix of the noun “evidence” converges on poverty, i.e. not only a scientific frame, but also a legal one, where it is the police who provides the evidence constituting the information on which legal judgement is based. The combination is evoked by the images of the “war on poverty” in the USA, drawn for example from the classic “Regulating the Poor” by Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven (1971). I recall the image of the social worker, popularly known as “social police”, who visits the home of the single mother applying for benefits in order to check that she is not hiding a husband under the bed. A different perspective on the legal frame was developed by Carlo Ginzburg, recalling Peirce, to illustrate his historiographic approach (Ginzburg, 1986, pp. 159–193).
8.
These two qualifications imply two different semantics of poverty, as well as two different grammars of justice. I refer to only a few aspects of this difference here.
9.
“Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns and activities” (Townsend, 1979, p. 31). The European Commission’s definition, adopted in 1984, is similar in tone: “The poor shall be taken to mean persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member State in which they live” (EEC, 1985).
10.
In the meantime, the vocabulary of needs has been reinforced and they have become candidates for the role of “absolutes” in the place of capabilities (Doyal & Gough, 1991).
11.
The comparative element is, indeed, part and parcel of the relative concept of poverty, according to which it is only possible to judge whether or not someone is in poverty in relation to other people.
12.
As for this crucial question in Sen’s capability approach, see Salais, in this volume. See also Salais (2009) and De Leonardis et al. (2012).
13.
I am quoting David Schmidtz, a representative of neoliberal discourse on welfare (Schmidz & Goodin, 1998). It is worth noting that something similar to a “bookkeeping justice” seems to underpin the social credit card system instituted in China today, that Tom Lam analyses in this volume. He shows it to be a crucial government’s technology to “economize society” and establish a “credit fundamentalism” in pursuing the official dream of a “harmonic society”.
14.
As for architecture just consider the inner political substance of Vitruvius’ and Alberti’s “ars edificandi”. On geography see the political history of the cartographic reason so wonderfully summarized in Brotton (2012).
15.
Gieryn refers, amongst others, to De Certeau: in this case “place” translates the French term “lieu”. See also Gregory and Urry (1985).
16.
A “spatial- or topological - turn” has also involved social sciences since the 1980s.
17.
Following Robert Castel (2003) who points out how this frame–of civil more than social security–benefits from, and in turn feeds, the ghost of “les nouvelles classes dangereuses”.
18.
In Italian, the corresponding term “decoro” maintains a double meaning, as it refers to both (aesthetical) decoration and (moral) dignity.
19.
Whose genealogy Foucault has reconstructed in his lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Foucault, 2004). See also Sassen (2006).
20.
Also in the light of some case studies I carried out myself (see Bricocoli et al., 2008).
21.
Donzelot (2006). On the related ethnicization of social conflict see Castel (2009).
22.
The reference is to Europe, as I said. More generally, it should be remembered how different the history of cities in the US is, marked as it was at its very beginnings by “racial” issues and connected dynamics of spatial compartmentalization that are constantly being renewed.
23.
See Brown (2009) in her study on today’s “porous” states’ sovereignty. See also De Leonardis (2013) and the research literature discussed there.
24.
According to Saskia Sassen (2014), it is “expulsion” rather than “inequality” that better corresponds to the “predatory” capitalism, which she now sees emerging. “Repulsion” instead is, according to Serge Paugham’s recent research with colleagues (Paugham et al., 2017), the common attitude towards the poor amongst the urban élites in Paris, Sao Paulo and Delhi. The aesthetics of these barriers is eloquent testimony to this. Their sheer crudeness transmits brutality, and the hubris of an act of mere force: Consider by contrast how beautiful the Otto Wagner Steinhof Spital in Vienna is. See also Christopher Payne’s rich repertoire of the American asylums (Payne, 2009).
25.
The image has been taken up by Espeland and Sauder (2016) to study rankings and their social effects, especially in terms of “reverse engineering”. On the performative role of quantitative data in general see the concept of “rétroaction” (feedback), regarding statistics (Desrosières, 2011), that of “reactivity”, regarding commensuration and ranking (Espeland & Sauder, 2007; but see also Espeland & Stevens, 2008), whilst on performance indicators see the Salais’ image of the inverted pyramid, in this volume.
26.
On the economizing function, see Guter-Sandu and Mennicken’s very rich discussion in this volume, where quantification gets involved in “economizing the social” in three different ways: curtailing, marketizing and financializing. However, I am looking at this a bit differently. As far as “to economize” may be also intended as the reframing process of “the social” according to (mainstream) economic thinking, also that “parsimony” the latter predicates and the numbers perform so well, is to be taken into account. It’s about cognitive economy as well. The two classical essays by Sen (1977) and Hirschman (1985) still represent a relevant background for this question.
27.
Here I am quoting the title of Alain Supiot’s Lectures at the Collège de France, 2012–2013 (Supiot, 2015), in which he shows how quantification gives rise to a new normativity in which the rule of law is being dismantled and the law itself reduced to an instrument of–he argues–“total market” laws.
28.
On similar cases in Africa see also Boris Samuel (2016). On the “government by objectives” see Thévenot (2015).
29.
As we know from historical studies especially on labour statistics (notably by Robert Salais) as well as from research on statactivism (Bruno et al., 2014). An example for statactivism, which also is relevant here as it concerns measuring poverty, can be drawn from Appadurai’s account on the mobilization of the inhabitants of the slums in Mumbai (now in Appadurai, 2013). When the city government, prompted by this mobilization, wanted to do a statistical survey on their living conditions, they claimed the statistical tools as their own by undertaking the survey themselves and deciding how to measure these conditions. However, see Boris Samuel, in this volume, on some of the limits of statactivism.
30.
It would certainly have been appropriate to explore the opposite notion of “equality”, as it also was subjected to dynamics of resignification, along with the changes in the words of welfare discussed in the first section of this chapter. One could note that, on the one hand, the noun “equality” was used less and less, or was treated as an equivalent of “homologation” (versus “difference”) so that it acquired a negative meaning; and that, on the other hand, the semantic field of equality was breaking up into a plurality of synonyms or substitutes. One of these words is “parity” (parità, parité), which I mention here, because it seems to provide a fertile terrain for studying quantification. “Parity” demands that things be placed on the same level, as peers, it implies a comparative approach, and is correlated to measurements, rankings etc. (as typically the gender parity index). All in all, there is some contiguity to be seen here, with the flattening out we observed in the reconfiguration of inequality as distance. The opposite of parity is “disparity”.
31.
Quite obviously, this convergence does not imply that flattening effects, occurring in such different contexts, are intrinsic to quantification, which on the contrary can well be a road for voices to travel up vertically (and “en généralité”). Rather, the two opposite moves in which quantification is involved may help to clarify the difference between the two modes of quantification—“statistics” or “governance-driven quantification”—that Robert Salais has identified in his contribution to this volume (see also Salais, 2010).
32.
“Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it” (Brown, 2006, p. 15).
33.
Perhaps, in order to clear the ground of any impression of ideological criticism, it should be remembered that this line of interpretation has a history. In this respect, it is sufficient to recall certain astute observations made by Werner Sombart (2006 [1906]) during his trip in the US. The account of this trip (dating back to 1905) revolves around the question: “Why is there no socialism in the US?” Sombart identifies one of the answers in the American “passion” for figures, or more precisely in the general recourse to quantitative metrics in assessing people and objects. Thus “bigness” has an absolute prevalence in evaluating and appreciating “greatness”. Sombart also argues that it is money that, in the end, constitutes the term of reference for these metrics, more precisely money “in the specific capitalist form” (versus Simmel). In the framework of justification theory, see also its comparative-cultural developments in Lamont and Thévenot (2000) on the relative salience of the market as a principle of evaluation in the American (versus French) polity. Similarly, see also Supiot’s (2015) research on the historical-cultural matrix of quantification associated to the rise of the “total market”.
34.
If one follows Richard Sennett 2006, this indifference, seen as a way of exercising domination, and the divorce between command and responsibility it rests upon, may be considered as a salient feature of the culture of the new capitalism. However, this indifference also recalls to me other, disparate, images. First, we might search for the origins of this orientation in “the revolt of the elites” (and “the betrayal of democracy”, Lasch, 1995) or in that sort of “class struggle from the top down” that Luciano Gallino (2012) has identified in the dynamics of Italian capitalism since the late 1970s. Second, from the perspective of recognition (starting out from Honneth) indifference towards the “other” may correspond to a lack of recognition, to an identity not imposed–by the “naming” power–but rather denied (De Leonardis, 2013). Third, this indifference of the ruling powers seems complementary to the subjection standing from the threat of, or the condemnation to “uselessness”, that is the condition of potential or actual “surnuméraire” in the book-keeping of working, and of living as well, to pertinently quote Robert Castel (2009) once again. Fourth, this indifference of power also looks contiguous with today’s cynicism grounded on (both cognitive and moral) relativist positions (Sloterdijk, 2013).
35.
Since Webers’s “sine ira et studio” disposition corresponding to the bureaucrat’s “honour” (see Herzfeld, 1992).
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