Insurgent Numeracy

Primary school teaches you to count your fingers 1 through 10. This is the teacher's first treachery. Once this system is accepted, the numeric basis for fascism has already been established.

To accept 10 as one of a kind with numbers 1 through 9 is insidious. Its inclusion imports assumptions totally alien to the single digits. While its predecessors are free numerals, 10 chains two together in an ordered list, binding them rigidly. That such a different number is present can only be because of an adamant belief in iteration by additions of 1. The implication is an infinite linear ascent beyond 9; even if your fingers stop at 10, the numbers go on: 11, 12, 13...

It all goes sour from there. The number line is ideal for quantification. Through the rigorous maintenance of place-value, it becomes possible to keep track and separate individuals. Moreover, you can measure length, and by multiplying it with other lengths, space. From this, the state has already been summoned. It measures its space and declares it its land, and counts the interior as its subjects. How it does so is its own business. It may tally the votes of citizens, but it may also calculate logistics of extermination. It may measure its borders to protect its land or to lay claim to that occupied by others. In any case, the state now has the tools it needs for its substantiation: a land for its law, and individuals to impose it on.

Not all numbers are to blame for this. Single digits know nothing of authority. Though present (in shackles) in the infinite march of the number line, they precede it. The single digits are matter, engendered from the body of numeracy itself—manufactured as the substance of ordered numbers, but not so by default. Different base numeracies have different pools, but predominant numeracy, decimal numeracy, already installed on the human manual system, uses the following: 9876543210.

The exclusion of 0 is the other half of the problem, along with the inclusion of 10. The base matter of decimal numeracy is profoundly reliant on 0. Not only is it a component of numeral ordering and binding, as is clear even in the number 10 itself, but it forms the basis of all addition. You can't add anything unless you know to start with nothing; all the single digits of not only decimal, but all numeracies, arrange themselves on 0.

Thus, 1 through 10 is a system of order, whereas 0 through 9 is a system of conjunction, or addition. Addition in this sense is not the addition of the number line, which always moves up. Arbitrarily, consider 987. In conjunctive, or zeroed, numeracy, where the inclusion of a + is redundant, 987 = 24 = 6. In ordered numeracy, this would make no sense at all.

Zeroed numeracy has several such incommensurable implications. To the horror of the state, it is totally agnostic to place value and separation: 123 = 213 = [...]. It is insensitive to specific selections of matter: 543 = 633 = [...] = 12. Moreover, and perhaps most sinisterly, it both ends and begins in 0. What state mathematicians would identify as the greatest number, 9, has no effect on the ultimate decimal reduction of a zeroed number. 739 = 19 = 10 = 1, and 73 = 10 = 1. 98765 = 35 = 8, and 8765 = 26 = 8. Try it out; you will not find an exception. Both door and limit of decimal numeracy converges on utter numeric void.

Decimal numeracy's insensitivity to substance, which is specific, in favour of matter, which is indefinite, permits more than a single end. There is, of course, 9, which pairs with the implicit 0 of all addition into 9::0. Yet the same purpose is served by 8::1, 7::2, 6::3, and 5::4. These couples can be referred to as syzygies, permutations of indifference which are nevertheless different. 9::0 twins with 9 between it; 8::1 with 7; 7::2 with 5; 6::3 with 3; and 5::4 with 1. A multiplicity of annihilation.

There are three principal methods at play here. Ciphering reorders the numerals of a multi-digit number. Decimal reduction sums it downwards, ultimately to the point of reduction to a single digit. Zygonovism eliminates syzygies from additive numbers, haunted by the demonic equation 9 = 0.

These tools can be installed in orderly number-systems as an insurgent/insurrectionary/incendiary/anarchic meltdown; an anti-quantitative digital virus. Applied to the 1–10 number line, it exposes it as both beginning and ending in 1, the totalizing phallic symbol of the complete state. Castrating 10 and salvaging 0, it sets about contorting the number line. What ultimately emerges is a diplozygotic spiral moving through syzygies in an abyssal gyre. No cycle, no line, no point: only the hostile anarchitecture of numocosmic disregard.