ABSTRACT
Both counting and not counting can function as strategies of containment. Counting begins with the recognition of difference and concludes with the eradication of difference. Not counting also begins with the recognition of difference but marks difference as error and discards it. When William Thornton, MP for York, spoke out against the attempt to initiate a census in 1753, he expressed disbelief that there existed “any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the human species so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make” such a proposal as a census (Cobbett’s 15:1318–19). This is a curious charge in that the only “set” criterion used for a census is whether the counted subject is an “individual of the human species,” a seemingly self-evident category that, as discussed in Chapter 1, has proven to be not so self-evident after all. While a census would appear to be a democratic act, fulfilling Thornton’s hyperbolic fear that “all distinction” would be “destroyed by universal coercion” (Cobbett’s 15:1324), in actuality some distinction was produced by the failure to count some segments of the population. Of much greater importance to the production of distinction was the fact that the census was never simply an enumeration of the people, but it was also simultaneously a classification of the people sorted and arranged in massive tables under ever-proliferating and ever more specific headings. Classification produces the modern phenomenon of the abstract statistical person and makes difference readable only through the categories themselves.
