Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity

by Steven Connor

How do we really think about the world? We may use words to tell stories about it or draw pictures to represent it, but one thing we do far more than either of those is make calculations of the things that are in it—and to do that we use numbers. Numbers give shape and texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream, and do, a fact that Steven Connor explores in this qualitative assessment of the quantifiable. Looking at how numbers play a part in nearly every aspect of our lives, he offers a fascinating portrait of the world as a world of numbers.
            Connor explores a host of thought-provoking aspects of our numerical existence. He looks at the unexpected oddities that shape the loneliest number—the number one. He looks at counting as a human phenomenon and the ways we negotiate crowds, swarms, and multitudes. He demonstrates the work of calculation as it lies at the heart of poetry, jokes, painting, and music. He shows how we use numbers to adjust to uncertainty and chance and how they help us visualize the world in diagrammatic ways, and he unveils how numbers even help us think about death. Altogether, Connor brings into relief an aspect of our lives so ubiquitous that we often can’t see it, unveiling a rich new way of thinking about our existence.
 

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2016

About the author

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm going to be honest, I didn't finish this book. It started out great. There were a couple of very compelling chapters about thinking with number, which defended "quantality" as a legitimate and interesting mode of observing the world against the condescension of more qualitatively minded humanities. It also made me very curious to learn more about the work of Michel Serres, who figures heavily in the beginning.
Then the book quickly became just an accumulation of literary references, as the author works his way through the canon to show how literature and philosophy has variously considered quantification over the centuries. This soon wears very thin, because the importance of the insights gradually diminish behind a fog of relentless quotations and names, which just seem to be thrown together with only the vaguest sense of organization. The book's argument becomes somewhat fuzzy and repetitive, and reading it becomes tedious and unrewarding.
I'd still recommend reading the first two chapters if you're interested, but don't bother with the rest.