Statues and Statistics: Classifying and Measuring as Violent Modes in the Exercise of Power

Abstract: To readers of Of Grammatology , to anyone aware of how apartheid was dealt with in the administration of pre-1990 S. Africa, the relation between classification and violence will seem obvious. I want to suggest that though this may be illuminated by a time of European uprisings and warfare—the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, which is hardly surprising, these also provoke profound changes in administrative tools, in particular, the procedures used for classification. I suggest these changes are based on what could be called a concept of the neutral—which at the time was called “the average man.” It was from this that classification could be conducted. I then pick up on an administrative problem—how to raise and number an army by conscription, and in particular how to reckon the probable number of draft dodgers—and talk, briefly, of a statistician, the Belgian Quetelet (1796–1874), who provided a kind of solution. In Quetelet’s reckoning, the problem evinces an intriguing connection to the question of the measurement of human beings—how tall, how broad, etc., and how do the individual measurements relate to the complete set. When thought of as a group of proportions, are these measurements unreliable or stable, do they form a reduced set of possible variations? Can they be relied on for classificatory purposes? The history of the mass measurement of human beings is thus related to the management of armies (cf. the procedures of Frederic I of Prussia, father of the one called “The Great”). I then relate the work of Quetelet to possible violence, in relation to what Freud, after the anthropologist Ernest Crawley (1867–1924), called the “narcissism of small differences.” I shall examine this in relation to demographic method more generally, emphasizing how measurement seems to involve the flattening of difference. In this perspective, Quetelet discovered a set of stabilities in human life which seem highly disquieting— the percentage of suicides for instance within a society—, yet his methods once developed allowed the possibility of, for example, managing Covid.