ABSTRACT
Quantifying and numberifying social life is central to modern society – a core technology that links the macro to the micro, the state to the individual, parts to wholes, allowing comparisons and agglomerations that underpin our contemporary political economy and imagination. Yet, numbering is normally considered an innocent worldmaking practice, rather than a technology that changes the very meaning and experience of life. The chapter focuses on how our understanding of zero has changed from the infinitesimally small to an absolute nothing – a pure silence, void, vacuum; and then, in turn, how this void is rendered into concrete immersive social experiences such as unemployment. By exploring the part numberifying plays in the technologisation of the social, particularly the performativity of the dangerous concept of zero, perhaps we can envisage new cosmologies where we are more careful about allowing individuals to dwell to long in the abyss.
