WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2024
VICTOR FERRAO
Is there a relationship between politics and numbers? Is politics founded in our ability to measure or count? These questions are very important because we in India are facing an important predicament today. We are facing elections which are all about numbers.
There are several surveys that are doing the number crunching. Several are managed and far from the real measure of our political conditions. Some have even disappeared from the mainstream channels when it was found that the numbers do not favour the ruling benches.
The Supreme Court has outlawed electoral bonds. It is also opening the question of massive corruption greeted as the biggest scam of independent India by some right thinking Indians. Politics is deeply numerical. Enumerating, holding something to account is profoundly political.
It has its impact on the number game of our democracy. ‘Is baar char sau paar’ is the slogan of the BJP yet speaking against these numbers we have its critics who say , ‘Is baar char sau haar!’
From abstract geometry of understanding a territory (demarkable, controllable, calculable space), to the numbers and statistics that measure our economic, demographic and health parameters, etc, politics is definitely a game of numbers. Numbers offer patterns and repetitions that give us insight into politics as well as open new possibilities to become political. To be in politics is to be calculable. Today, we have come to the politics of the crowd. Large groups come to the streets and generate politics. This is why a term multitude is being used to understand this crowd politics. We, in Goa, have seen these politics of the multitude around the raging conflicts centred on Chhatrapati Shivaji in recent days.
Unfortunately, democracy is infected by identity politics, which is centred around one identity or nation, religion or leader. Differences are subsumed into a single body. The reigning politics has massified the majority community as one and has identified the minorities as enemies. Real politics, therefore, becomes a thinking against this mode of counting the nation as one by fragmenting it. Such is the politics that counts people as same and views otherness as insignificant.
Politics today brews through the politics of calculation. Hence, politics is generated through speaking against numbers. At this point several people among us are waiting to speak against the numbers put into the public domain after the secrets of the electoral bonds are revealed in response to the order of the Supreme Court.
Politics is produced by speaking against numbers by us as beings-in-the-world as well as beings-in-the-polis. Thus, speaking is political. Both Aristotle and Martin Heidegger from the West agree that it is language that makes us political. It can orient us to think politics as a polemos (polemics).
Within this struggle, Heidegger sees politics as overdetermined through its relation to calculation. Heidegger taught us that the Greeks did not have the notion of space. They had the notion of place (Khora).
He indicates that it is Rene Descartes who abstracted space and manifested that it is measurable, therefore, controllable. This means space lends itself to be dominated. We have to credit Descartes to let us do mathematics through abstracted symbols as all mathematics before him was done is words.
Heidegger, however, sees the reduction of the world to calculability and measurability as a malaise that gave us modern (science and) technology. He steadily came to see Nazism as a symptom of that malaise. This itself gives us an insight into how the demographic anxieties of the upper castes in India and that of Goans in Goa are milked for political hay by BJP and RGP respectively.
Demographic anxieties generate politics of hate of Hindutva as well as hate politics of RGP. But will Goans make their vote count against the number of MLAs that switched side in Goa? Will the corruption that mars the renovation of Kala Academy be counted as we come out to vote?
We humans are calculative beings. We measure, reckon, design, plan and execute. With the mapping of space, we are also able to map values, measure their growth in our lives, homes and our societies. We do map the present from the point of the delivery of the promises of the government. Thus, the political becomes moral.
Non-delivery of the promises is then enumerated and is called to accountability. Thus, speaking against the government becomes speaking against its numbers by which we calculate its performance.
The abstraction of space and its divisibility, measurability, controllability enables us to extend it and further abstract it and use it to present important elements of our society and life that can be thus being spacialised divided, measured and used politically. Thus, numbers become the way of exposing the geometry of governance and architecture of development undertaken by our government.
For instance, idiocy of our Smart City, Panjim is before us for all people to see. Governments either hide or manipulate numbers so as to be not found out. But there are still several numbers that are glaring in our eyes. The rising prices of fuel and essential goods, growing numbers of jobless youth, growing gap between the rich and poor, etc, are all calling us to speak against the numbers and make our vote count.
We can indeed condense and crystallise politics as an art of speaking against numbers. Numbers here are not just mathematical numbers. (Mathematicism is more than numericism). Numbers in this context are a form of abstraction. They stand for the measurable, the calculable, the valuable. Perhaps, almost all politics today has become a politics of numbers in the above sense. This is why we have the challenge to measure and calculate what will be our future and accordingly vote. This means we will have to employ calculative understanding of our everyday affairs to do politics.
We measure the state of affairs of our society and rate it as failed and thus, speak against numbers. In other words, we claim that the measurements of the different elements in our society do not reach the required standards. This is a different order of measurement. It is not reducible to numbers of mathematics (numericism).
In a very deep sense, therefore, all politics is a politics of speaking against numbers. Numbers or measurements are behind or underneath, or in front of our politics. Understanding the politics of numbers, will make us embrace emancipative politics. We will understand the language of politics and will be able to speak the same with courage of conviction. Can we, therefore, make our vote a way of speaking against number? Can we make our vote count?
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher attached to St Francis Xavier Church, Borim, Ponda)
