Mathematics, capitalism, and total society

Mathematics, capitalism, and total society Jack Dikian November 2023 “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” (Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, 2009.) Schmidt’s statement above is a sign of the “knowledge society” we live in today. It presupposes a society where everybody follows the letter of the Law, a complete society where there is no place for “misbehaviours”. You should only do what is supposed to be known. In the horizon lies the idea of a total society, each one in their own place, causing no friction, no alarm, doing only what the other knows. Mathematics presents an exemplary case of science and society’s dreams of totality; in the way it seeks in its endeavours to tame the subject of its investigations. It is this untamed student—that talks, screws teacher’s plans, refuses to learn, etc, that becomes obliterated in biosocial research (and, for that matter, also in the great majority of mathematics education research. I argue that this obliteration is already at play as a real abstraction in the capitalist mode of production. Something happens in the daily life of people that makes them prone not to consider such an un-sutured subject. This negativity of the subject (and the truth that encompasses it) thwarts any endeavours to completely map subjectivity. This feature is not dear to capitalist mechanics, which requires an increasing codification (commoditization) of reality to thrive. Nothing can be outside the radar of capital’s movement. Mathematics, being the archetypical case of a fly-by-wire science that is, of a science where significant efforts are made to obliterate any traces of subjectivity, is concomitant with the capitalist drive towards automation and totality. In capitalism, all is possible, as long as it is registered within the space of commodity exchange. A person becomes possible from the moment it can be registered. It is easier to register a person through quantification (including biodata) than through speech, after all, while biodata can be quite aseptic and “analysable”, people’s speech is often incoherent, contradictory, and muddled. Lived experience becomes unrecognizable in a world of micro-temporal biometric data that circulates and is absorbed at rates well below and above the bandwidth of human consciousness. Biometric data thus seems to offer a swift way to bypass human life for the sake of capitalism. As said before, capitalism works better without humans. Perhaps this explains the success that more than human theories are experiencing today. I don’t say reject the relevant insights that biosocial research and new materialism bring into mathematics education. I am also for a curriculum that was less concerned with procedures and more with creativity providing students with the opportunity to engage with the new virtual spaces of concepts, for the reanimation of ossified mathematics concepts, or rethinking learning as “an indeterminate act of assembling various kinds of agencies rather than a trajectory that ends in the acquiring of fixed objects of knowledge. In thought, one cannot but agree with these ideas (which are not entirely new). The problem arises when one starts to think about the concrete circumstances that need to be met so that these thoughtful changes can become a classroom reality. We know well how mathematics education research tends to create a picture of school mathematics at odds with the reality of schools, and how its results have little impact on schools. To ask the question of actualisation implies confronting the research discourse with the real of schools. While the former is (usually) rational, schools’ organisation tends to be “irrational” and against teachers and researchers’ better knowledge. I suggest that it is only by positing schools against the background of capitalist economics that one can understand this resistance to change. It is the fact that schools need to produce failure that colours many of the students’ difficulties usually identified by the research community as “cognitive”, “sociocultural” or “more than human” impediments. In short, I am pleading for the return of the primacy of the economy, not to disregard all the important insights of research around the postmodern and new materialist concerns, but precisely to create the conditions for the more effective realisation of them.