Money and Calculation by Luigi Doria Massimo Amato

Author:Luigi Doria Massimo Amato [Massimo Amato, Luigi Doria, Luca Fantacci]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Calculating Life and Money as Resources

Luigi Doria

Introduction

The theme of calculation is becoming ever more prominent in the social science debate. This is a theme that is at the core of fundamental lines of modern social thought from Weber to Sombart to Simmel. Yet the issue seems now to be felt with particular intensity (and with renewed scientific attention, mixed with a certain uneasiness and overtones of philosophical interrogation) because of the ‘universality’ which calculation manifests in late modern societies.

One of the most important phenomena in the current calculative scenario is the fact that calculation tends to enlarge its scope, covering ‘objects’ – such as emotions, passions, identity, heritage and intellectual labour – which have historically been beyond its reach. Calculating the incalculable is a crucial task in contemporary societies and indicates a tendency towards including every dimension of human life in the domain of the measurable.

Scientific reflection, including studies on management, receives this impulse for measuring everything as a peculiarly unconditional demand. It takes the form of a calculative proliferation which resists any limitation, and accepts critiques only insofar as they lead to the proposal of more adequate (or more socialized) measurement.1

The wide interdisciplinary debate on the morphology, role and performativity of calculative practices, therefore, goes together with a more or less explicit interrogation of the very meaning and provenience of the imperative to calculate everything.

This chapter addresses the issue of universal calculability, starting with an interrogation of the relationship between calculation and mobilization. Can we assume, as suggested by a wide field of social thought, the unlimited commodification/marketization of life to be the driver and the end of unlimited calculation? Is it possible, in other words, to see the universality and the plasticity of calculation as the outcome of a transformation of social reality into a commodity or, indirectly, of the result of the subjection of social life to the logic of the market? Is it the mobilization of social phenomena in the sphere of commodity circulation that steers the movement of calculation? Or should we see calculation in the light of a different understanding of mobilization?

The hypothesis that I advance in this paper is that the morphology and the meaning of calculation in the social domain needs to be interpreted as constitutively related to a demand for a total and undetermined mobilization. The latter aims at more and more completely transcending any element of distinction, and avoiding any possibility of defining its ‘finalization’.

This phenomenon manifests itself in the contemporary socio-economic lexicon by the representation of development as a mobilization of calculable resources. At the core of the linguistic architecture of management and development, we find ‘resource’ as a ubiquitous key-word for an unlimited catalogue of (human, cultural, territorial, communicative) resources.

I argue that the unlimited calculation and mobilization of resources is a movement towards the obliteration of the dimension of measure. It is by interrogating this obliteration of limit and measure that I will try to clarify what is at stake in the project of calculating the incalculable.

With this

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