Editorial

At a moment when intellectual commentary regarding the fractured and partial character of society has, in some quarters, become increasingly general and abstract, this issue of Theory & Event documents an important counter-movement. Some theorists are addressing the notion of fracture in ways that undermine the most generalized critiques in various ways.

Kirstie M. McClure’s “Figuring Authority” traces the rise of statistical science as an element of political knowledge and judgement in a way that might well be called a genealogy of statistical science or a reminiscence of a time when statistical knowledge was understood as partial rather than complete. Studying the inaugural issue of Journal of the Statistical Society of London, published in 1839, McClure examines the claims of statistical science at a time when the relationship between statistics and political knowledge was “explicitly justified rather than taken for granted as a matter of course.” The date of that publication, so close to the period of many of Foucault’s cases, contributes to the sense of an emerging modernity. At its inception, the Journal felt the need to comment explicitly on the authority of its statistical contents, implying a “recognition that neither the authority of individual subjects nor that of the Society itself is sufficient to guarantee the accuracy or impartiality of the data produced by the inquiry.” At this point of emergence, it still had to be stipulated “that facts are always generated from a particular perspective or social location.” As opposed to other recent historical studies, McClure’s essay specifically places this emergence in a political context. The authority of statistics, now so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, had a recognizable political style as well as an identifiably fragmentary quality when it emerged.

A separate introduction to the feature “On Flaws” links this current interest in the fragmentary to contemporary poetics, as reported in Ann Lauterbach’s recent talk and Nancy Love’s essay.