Scott Beauchamp
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Contact
  • Blog
An Aggregate of Last Moments

quantifying vitality

7/19/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Progressive reformers thus were about nothing if not channeling potentially explosive energies into conventionally productive practices. The question arises: How does one express this relationship between vitality and containment, control and release? We can reject duality at the outset, and other, more appropriate words quickly come to mind—dialectics, ambivalence, coexistence, blending and merging. The two entities become one, but not quite. There is still room, as Simone Weil observed in her penetrating exploration of human consciousness, for “a sort of dialogue between the continuous and the discontinuous”—between computation and continuity, numbers and flow. But the dialogue can turn into territorial warfare.15
​

Perhaps the best way to show the uneasy cohabitation of those two modes of thought in one mind is to examine the most influential quantifying vitalist, the Yale economist Irving Fisher. More than anyone else, Fisher brought the emerging science of statistics into the arena where political economy and public policy meet. Fisher pioneered not just in categorizing people but in monetizing them, body and soul. He moved statistics from mere counting to cost accounting and cost-benefit analysis. Everything had its cash value; money could be used to measure the value of anything.
Here.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Scott Beauchamp

    Writer - Critic - Poet - Editor

    Archives

    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly