Figuring Crime: Quantifacts and the Production of the Un/Real

John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

Nothing rings with more authority to South African ears than a crime statistic. It is the music of our spheres: what the sound of an accordion is to a Marseilles sailor, or the jaunty plinkety-plunk of the banjo to a Louisiana woodsman, so is the rhythmic, measured refrain of a crime statistic to a South African.

—Darrel Bristow-Bovey, “Metamorphosis a Painless Escape from Mind-Numbing Questions”

In an address to the national parliament in 1999, Nelson Mandela voiced an old cliché, a deep truth from both the heart of modernism and the fraught history of numbers in South Africa. “Figures,” he said, “are meaningless in the context of people’s concrete experiences.”1 But, in the contemporary world, the opposite may be true: figures render large abstractions concretely meaningful to personal experience, speaking with authority about the connection of human beings to otherwise incomprehensible phenomena. Being assertions of the real, they fill the space between the unknowable and the axiomatic, imagination and anxiety. Viewed thus, the statistic is a medium of communication and a species of commodified knowledge, one whose value and veracity accumulates as it circulates. Part fetish, it has also become a term in the ordinary language of being.

The rise of contemporary Western perceptions of society, Ian Hacking (1990: 1 – 5) has famously argued, was closely tied to the “avalanche of numbers” produced, publicized, and deployed for purposes of governance by nineteenth-century states (cf. Canguilhem 1989). The obsession with counting and with calculating probability, he suggests, had profound epistemic effects. For one thing, “society” itself “became statistical.” For another, the appeal to lawlike regularities began to replace other kinds of causal explanation, such as “human nature,” in making sense of and acting upon the world. Which, in turn, made rates of “deviancy” — of criminality, suicide, madness, illness — especially salient. To wit, post-Enlightenment ideas of the social, the moral, the normal, and the rational owe a lot to the crime statistic, a fact made evident in the actuarial underpinnings of a lot of early detective fiction. Take, for example, Edgar Allen Poe, a fine organic anthropologist with an explicit interest in the “public mind.” In common with many writers of good mysteries, Mark Seltzer (2004: 561) observes, Poe often invoked numbers in the interests of sociological realism; for him, “the death of God” left us with mathematics, “the death of Satan” with forensics. The Victorian impetus to quantify deviance, in both realist fiction and social science, presupposed a rulegoverned social order whose positive outlines were most visible in the negative, in lawlessness and vice. It was these “social pathologies” that would become the urgent object of sociology and social engineering (cf. Hacking 1990: 118).

So much for Euromodernity, in which, from the first, the very idea of governance depended on statistics, the “science of [a] state” ( Rose and Miller 1992: 185). Wherein lies the significance of crime statistics at the dawn of the twentyfirst century? How do they figure, so to speak, in an age in which foundational assumptions about society, citizenship, and order are called into question, in which social engineering is ever more suspect, in which the discourse of deviance is deeply discredited, in which government and public alike appear more concerned with personal security, suffering, rights, and risk than with social pathology — and in which the ontological status of the state itself is a matter of argument?

The Neo South Africa, like most nation-states today, produces its own avalanche of numbers. The tide of statistics made publicly available by the police service is swelled, in this age of neoliberalism, by the ever more statelike exertions of nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. Those figures feed a thoroughly modernist “lust for precision” ( Hacking 1990: 5), a fervid faith in the panacea of probability, and a populist sense that countering disorder begins with counting it properly. It is hardly surprising, then, that the crime statistic has taken on unprecedented sovereignty in this postcolony. It has not only become diagnostic of national health. It is also a discursive currency by means of which government speaks to its subjects, citizens speak among themselves, experts speak to everypersons, everyone speaks back to government — and the media mediate all the incessant talk, adding their own inventions, inflections, inflations.

Three things are especially noteworthy about the rising sovereignty of the crime statistic in this context. And about the pivotal place of quantifacts — statistical representations that make the world “factual” — in its public discourses. All of them are critical to our broader theoretical concerns here.

The first is the paradox of dis/trust: while crime statistics constitute a widely cited measure of social order, they tend also to be distrusted, due largely to their susceptibility to abuse. They are, in short, at once a fetish and the object of a lively hermeneutic of suspicion. The second has to do with alienation and intimacy: counter to the commonplace that numbers displace visceral experience into the realm of pattern and probability — vide Mandela’s observation — it is arguable that they do just the opposite here. As they circulate and are mediated, these statistics reduce a mass of faceless incidents, disturbing things that happened elsewhere, into the objects of first-person affect: fascination, revulsion, pain. The third thing arises out of the phenomenology of figures: for all the ambivalence with which they are regarded, crime stats are treated here not as a representation of reality, but as a reality in themselves (cf. Urla 1993). Rates, rankings and ratios, incidences, aggregates and probabilities—all serve in distinct ways to congeal social facts.

In this excursion into the criminal anthropology of South Africa, then, we explore a more general brace of questions: What, exactly, is it that crime statistics make real? How do they take on a public life? By what means do they convert the abstract into the intimate, tertiary knowledge into primary experience, quantity into quality? And why is it that they have become so much more than the tools of criminologists and reformers, so pervasive a public passion, so deeply inscribed in narratives of personal being, so vital to the construction of moral publics, so integral to debate about democracy, freedom, security, human rights? Conventionally framed as value-free facts, these numbers seem to be taking on ever more political heft as the modernist state deregulates the functions of governance, as control over the means of violence is rendered ambiguous, as a culture of “popular punitiveness” gains credence ( Bottoms 1995; Haggerty 2001: 197). As they do, and as citizens and communities claim more responsibility for their own welfare, modes of producing and deploying crime statistics themselves proliferate. Which — as we intimated a moment ago and shall see in some detail — sets in train processes whose effects, often unremarked, are deeply implicated in remaking the postcolonial nation-state, the nature of its governance, and citizenship within it. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

Sovereign Statistics: The Alchemy of Numbers

There is a sense in which numbers have a certain dread authority. We are all the children of Pythagoras, after all, who said that nature is nothing but numbers.

—Dennis Overbye, “In the Realm of Numbers, There’s No Room for Error”

Critical readings of the history of the industrial revolution and the rise of democracy return repeatedly to the dangerous alchemy of numbers. At work in processes of commodification and bureaucratization, they suggest, was the power of arithmetic to abstract value, to turn people into ciphers, to alienate humans from their essence and experience. Claude Lefort (1988: 18 – 19), for one, argues that the paradox of the modern idea of “society” is that it can never be made real: far from materializing “the people,” institutions like universal suffrage turn citizens into statistics as “number replaces substance.” Georg Simmel (1978: 297n444) thought differently. For him, money was the currency of counting. And while it served to reduce distinction and weaken personal ties, it also enabled the commensuration of difference—and the rise of a society of morally interdependent, self-sufficient persons, in which the individual becomes real in relation to the impersonal mass. Novel modes of accounting, in other words, enable the production of new qualities, subjects, sensations. Even as rationalization proceeds, the traffic between quality and quantity constantly gives rise to new forms of meaning and value.

The contentious life of the crime statistic in South Africa makes plain that enumeration is never a mere flight from substance: measurement is always mediated by historical conditions as numbers are made to signify in various ways. Some of those ways — the idiom of the actuarial state, the principle of majority will — have long been integral to the scaffolding of democracy, sui generis; shades here of Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and much of the history of liberalism. Others are more specific. Thus apartheid South Africa tried to legitimate itself by dis-counting, literally, large sections of the population; its opponents used statistics, from land distribution through poverty datum profiles to mortality rates, to argue against “unrepresentative” rule. More recently, activists striving to persuade the state of its responsibility toward the homeless and HIV/AIDS sufferers have advocated “emancipatory” enumeration ( Robins 2003: 259 – 60).2 Indeed, in the “new modernity,” Ulrich Beck’s (1992) “risk society,” where personal destiny is read in figures, improving one’s chances requires improving the odds ( Crawford 2004: 522). Even in colloquial terms, the quality of life is calculated in relation to the law of large numbers: “I want government to provide more security for people like me,” an elderly rural man told us in 1999, “before I, too, become a statistic.”

While the truth-value of numbers has been a focus of bitter debate between the “hard” and “soft” sciences, there have also long been efforts to grasp the statistic as a social construction ( Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963; Poovey 1998). One influential development of this concern has been inspired by Foucault’s analysis of enumeration as a means of governance ( Cohn 1987: 224; Anderson 1991: 163; Appadurai 1996); another emerges from science studies ( Haggerty 2001: 53; Rose 1999), which have examined the production of various modes of calculation as “artifacts” yielded by the interplay of actors, institutions, and technologies ( Latour and Woolgar 1979; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Each of these approaches offers insight into the nature of crime counts in postapartheid South Africa; each has limitations. Thus we might ask, à la Foucault, why measures of lawlessness and victimhood have become so salient in defining populations, overlaying class, race, and political disposition. Yet, pace Foucault, it is equally necessary to take note of the rich array of new political sites and styles that have arisen in response to criminal accounting on the part of the state, forms inadequately grasped by the notion of governmentality as all-purpose social regulation. Similarly, in charting the tortuous life of numbers, there is much to be gained from tracing the manufacture and circulation of statistical artifacts in the science studies mode: in this instance, by following the argument that rages about official crime tallies, about their implications for the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of rule — itself a fractal drama in which government, the media, citizen-subjects, and others conjure the meaning of normality and emergency, state and nation. At the same time, as we shall see, this argument bears the imprint of larger forces than can be grasped from the perspective of science studies, with its stress on the contingent outcomes of actor networks.

But let us begin our excursion into the criminal anthropology of the “new” South Africa with the numbers themselves. In so doing, we enter the concrete world of quantifacts inhabited by its citizens, into the paradox of dis/trust with which statistics of state are negotiated, into the intricately scaffolded reality that crime counts make of life here.

Excursions into the Un/Real: Counting Crime in the Postcolony

From within the country, crime rates are seen as anything from dire to catastrophic — and, by many, as rising.3 An American study conducted in 2004 found that 81 percent of the population take lawlessness to be a “serious threat to democracy.”4 Well, how bad is it? How awful a picture is painted by the numbers? In order to answer the question, we suspend disbelief for a moment and draw a synoptic, quick-and-dirty portrait, courtesy of the Criminal Information Analysis Centre (CIAC) of the South African Police Service (SAPS) — with commentary and complementary counts from critical criminologists and nongovernmental research organizations. Our figures are for 2002.5

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Notes

This essay is drawn from a forthcoming book, The Metaphysics of Disorder, that examines the interplay of crime, violence, and the state in postcolonial South Africa.

1. See www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/speeches/1999/sp0205.htm.
2. Steven Robins (2003: 339, 354) cites an anonymous document circulated by the People’s Dialogue, a South African NGO that “services” a local grassroots housing organization connected to a global slum dwellers’ network. Titled “Some Notes on Enumeration,” this text questions Foucauldian notions of governmentality, in particular the idea that such technologies inevitably buttress state surveillance and bureaucratic control. Enumeration, it argues, can be used to make dispossessed people visible to the state, people who otherwise become ciphers of plans, norms, “things.”
3. See Ted Leggett’s (2004b: 6) summary of the recent SA Reconciliation Barometer and the National Victims of Crime Survey: South Africa 2003 ( ISS 2004; also cited as Burton et al. 2004).
4. SeeWashington Post 2004. The study — a poll of 1,715 blacks; 612 whites; 364 “mixed race”; and 265 Indians — was done jointly by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University.
5. At the time of writing, most recent official data come in two forms: the “Annual Report of the National Commissioner of Police for 2002 – 3” ( SAPS 2003), and those posted on line by the CIAC. The latter, in turn, are given for the financial year (to March 31, 2003) and the calendar year (to December 31, 2002). As they are more detailed, we use the CIAC figures here — and, for convenience, take the calendar year. Note that a moratorium on crime statistics was imposed in 2000 – 2001; we discuss it below. Those cited here are postmoratorium.