Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

182 I. Munday
might talk of 20 bags of potatoes or 20 people shot for insurrection – the number 20
finds itself in different contexts in which it will resonate in different ways. Moreover,
throughout the rich history of language various numbers have become ‘significant’.
There are plenty of examples of this, some of which involve numbers in combination,
some of which require (or perhaps do not require) explanation. Let us list
some: 13 (unlucky for some) 666 (the number of the beast), 69 (I am not sure if this
has resonance outside Britain, though the pervasiveness of English suggests that it
might), 99 (red balloons), 9/11, 6,000,000 (Jews killed in the Holocaust), 10 (the
number usually worn by the best player in an international football team). Certain
numbers take on a moral status. An ethical significance attaches itself to some of
these numbers, notably 666, 69 and 6,000,000. Moreover, one of the numbers is a
statistic (we’ll come back to this shortly, though we might note that 6,000,000 is
usually written as six million as though there were something obscene about using
polynomial/positional notation here).
Now, clearly, the numbers used above are iterable, they will find themselves in
all manner of contexts in which their previous contexts will necessarily play some
sort of role. Moreover, they gained their performative force from being repeated.
One cannot mention 6,000,000 anything without thinking about the Holocaust. If
the number 69 appears in the national lottery this will provoke a degree of smirking
and general titillation around the country. The number 999 is the British number
of the emergency services but turn it on its head and ... even the most confirmed
atheist may look over her shoulder just to make sure that a little red man with a tail
and horns isn’t standing behind her.
Though numbers are iterable, they are iterable in a very specific way. Moreover,
they are not iterable in the same way that other kinds of word are. When we looked
at what can happen with the number/word 20, we must note that the fact that 20 can
take on a different resonance is due to the words that surround it. The iterability of
20 here has nothing to do with the word/numeral itself. Moreover, the ‘meaning’ of
20 does not change at all. In the case of 666, assuming one is not (too?) superstitious,
the meaning that is attributed to it has nothing to do with where it has been before.
In contrast let us take a word like ‘queer’ which has come to denote homosexuality.
Of course there is nothing about the word itself that relates to homosexuality, its
passage from an insult expressing moral disapproval (homosexuality here is supposedly,
strange, unedifying and unnatural) to being reclaimed by the gay community
whereby the transgressive image of homosexuality is celebrated, reflects the complexity
and richness of the iterable life of the word. Even apparently ‘functional’
words like ‘both’ ‘and’ either and ‘or’ express an extraordinary richness if one considers
the role they have played in explaining deconstruction. This sort of richness
cannot apply to numbers. In his chapter, Standish (see Chapter 14, this volume)
captures what is at stake here when he notes that numbers are untranslatable.
... there is the peculiar place of numbers in contemporary natural languages. Numbers, it
seems, can appear in translations of texts in a way that is entirely without loss or distortion,
and in this respect they are unlike the (more obviously) linguistic aspects of those texts.
But in a sense this is to say that they cannot be translated at all – given that all translations
between natural languages do involve loss and distortion in some degree. To some, this