ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to illustrate how numerical devices operate as governmental technologies and how they are linked to the assemblage of traveling expertise. It considers how such devices are processed as part of regional development and also illustrate how they help bestow policy publications with a form of science modality. Thus, numbers and calculative techniques are examples of governmental technologies that operate intertwined with political rationalities as a particular domain is being instated as a governable terrain. In sum, marking and commensuration can be understood as two ends of a spectrum for the functions of numerical devices when they are mobilized as governmental technologies. While all numbers as governmental technologies ‘do’ something in terms of marking and commensuration, and while they all have the properties of mobility, stability, and combinability the ordering function of numerical devices makes them reactive, or using a term and concept more at home in the governmentality literature, they have properties that make them performative.
