ABSTRACT

Adopting numbering practices is central to ‘business-like’ public organising. These practices were primarily critiqued for their more-than-technical, normative character. This paper expands the critique of numbers in governance by considering numbers’ epistemic consequences in public sector work. Drawing on Whitehead’s philosophy of aesthetics and an ethnography of enumeration inside a public agency in England, the paper argues that enumeration techniques, when relying on accounting categories and used within a ‘business-like’ public sector, end up enacting knowledge objects that are aesthetic in kind. Numbered entities taken as performance evidence (metrics, rankings) end up (a) part of a project of enunciation, (b) opaque for conceptual interrogation, and (c) attuned to through bodily affect. Such characterisation makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises ‘aesthetic enumerated entities’ as a way of understanding instrumental knowledge in organising. Second, it extends our scope of engaging with the aesthetic by going beyond conceptualisations focused on art or beauty.

摘要

采用编号做法是“商业化”公共组织的核心。这些实践主要因其超技术、规范的特征而受到批评。本文通过考虑数字在公共部门工作中的认知后果，扩展了对治理中数字的批判。借鉴怀特海的美学哲学和英国公共机构内部枚举的民族志，该论文认为，当依赖会计类别并在“类似商业”的公共部门中使用时，枚举技术最终会制定具有审美意义的知识对象实物。作为绩效证据（指标、排名）的编号实体最终会 (a) 阐述项目的一部分，(b) 对概念审讯不透明，以及 (c) 通过身体影响进行调谐。这种表征有两个贡献。第一的，它将“美学枚举实体”概念化为理解组织中工具性知识的一种方式。其次，它超越了专注于艺术或美的概念化，从而扩展了我们参与审美的范围。