Responding to my comments on the RPA, Peter Gratton offers his own thoughts on the conference and the notion of the world here; and then on the question of calculation here. He does the latter through some quotes from Dominique Janicaud’s book Powers of the Rational. I haven’t read it yet, but will do.

Peter mentions my comments at the RPA on bodycounts. I’d debated writing a paper a few years ago called ‘Should we do body counts?’ which I never did. The recent debates about the Wikileaks material made me think of it again, and I said a few things in my RPA talk about the violence of reducing a human life, with its past, family and connections to ‘one’, and seeing that as equivalent to another human life, which is also ‘one’, and the violence that is done in counting. Of course, there is another kind of violence first, but the point was whether the response to that should be a form of calculative violence, of demanding or undertaking body counts. I may come back to this argument sometime.