monitor, count, assess and manage’ (J. Scott 1998: 81-82). In other words,
number tends to cast the world reciprocally in its image as entities are increasingly
made in forms that are countable. Number performs number. As importantly,
in Euro-American cultures at least, it also performs a notion of a terrain and
population existing in a ‘similar and immovable’^5 abstract space which has had to
be slowly and laboriously built up, one which assumes that there are fixed reference
points, cardinal dimensions, and the like (Hatfield 1990).
It could be argued that by the middle of the twentieth century most of the
building blocks of contemporary developments had already been put in place. All
that was left was to implement them – thereby producing a tightly constrained
and ordered world of calculation in which potentially every thing and every
location (the two increasingly becoming interchangeable) could be given a number
and become the subject of calculation, and in which each calculation could
potentially be redone several times a minute. This task was able to be achieved
because of a number of contributory factors but principally because of the spread
of the interfaces and defaults of computer software which both encapsulated the
new possibilities and acted as a vehicle for them (Thrift and French 2002).
Whatever the cause, the world has become increasingly one in which a numerical
flux becomes central to activities, rather than incidental, giving rise to more and
more ‘flow architectures’, to use Knorr Cetina’s felicitous phrase.
In a timeworld or flow-world...the content itself is processual – a ‘melt’ of
material that is continually in flux, and that exists only as it is being projected
forward and calls forth participants’ reactions to the flux. Only ‘frames’, it
would seem, for example, the frames that computer screens represent in a
financial market, are pre-supposed in this flow-world. The content, the entire
constellation of things that pass as the referential context wherein some action
takes place, is not separate from the totality of ongoing activities.
(Knorr Cetina 2003: 4 )In other words, in a world in which numerical calculations are being done and
redone continuously, so that static representation becomes subordinated to flow
(not least because ‘the image, in a traditional sense, no longer exists’ (Manovich
2001: 100)), the nomadologic of movement becomes the natural order of thought.
The world is reconfigured as a global trading zone in which network forms, which
strive for co-ordination, are replaced by flow forms which strive for observation
and projection.
Like an array of crystals acting as lenses that collect light, focussing it on
one point, such mechanisms collect and focus activities, interests, and events
on one surface, from whence the result may then be projected again in
different directions. When such a mechanism is in place, co-ordination and
activities respond to the projected reality to which participants become
oriented. The system acts as a centering and mediating device through which
things pass and from which they flow forward.
(Knorr Cetina 2003: 4 )96 Part I