The Enumerative Institution

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Census enumeration, land use analysis, the measurement of labor inputs, and other instances of large-scale quantification are the preferred representational forms for bureaucrats, economists, developers, and politicians. Through highly-refined classification methods, unruly differences within a population are aggregated into discrete categories with parameterized attributes—the average, the median, the rate per 1000, the standard deviation. Such analytical tools are believed to reproduce everyday life and its social organization in a new and manageable form. The tabulated spreadsheet is the preferred map of speculation for numerous agencies, where the space of lived experience can be structured into an ordered grid, easily shaped by the current stakeholders and their varied agendas. Despite the claims of an increasingly precise demographic technique, these tools are haunted by a looming obscurity in their calculations; every mathematical aggregate creates a gap between representation (the “maximum likelihood estimation”) and the underlying reality it purports to represent—a gap commonly known as the Statistical Cover.

In 2012, The Enumerative Institution was established by the New York State Regional Council to spearhead a multi-year research project on the social uses of the Statistical Cover. Though long assumed to be a mathematical formalism with no real relevance to the fields of demography and public policy, it had recently become a topic of official interest after the publication of three critical reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO-11-154, GAO-10-452T, and GAO-10-430T). Across roughly seventy pages, the reports highlighted major mathematical issues in the enumeration techniques deployed by the U.S. Census Bureau, including the acknowledgement of the Statistical Cover itself. Specifically, they stated that beneath every statistical distribution is the condition of possibility for an infinite number of socio-economic systems, all of which would appear mathematically identical, once tabulated. Analysts speculating at the level of the spreadsheet could no longer make claims about the actual activities of the population it represented. Though the numbers were assumed to depict rather banal patterns of daily living and business as usual, one could not be mathematically certain that something radically different (yet statistically identical) was not being measured instead. More startling than the questions of accuracy, however, was the latent implication that the Cover could be purposefully exploited by citizens to hide alternative socio-economic arrangements. The GAO termed this potential phenomenon a “differential account,” and made specific recommendations for further research, ultimately concluding:

Moving forward, it will be important for the Bureau to identify how rapid changes in [demographic] technology and the public’s use of them may affect the effectiveness of its ef for ts to improve census accuracy, both overall and in terms of reducing dif ferential accounts.

(GAO-11-154, p. 13)

The Enumerative Institution’s initial findings confirmed, at least theoretically, that beneath the cover of statistical representation alternative societies were in fact possible and that the socio-spatial organization of these societies would appear mathematically identical to the more standard patterns of everyday life. Furthermore, this was found to be the case in every domain the census enumeration measures—the relationship between families and the sexes, the rate of population reproduction, the temporal structure of labor, the use of technology, the functioning of private space, the circulation of use-values and currency, and all other such metrics. On the surface, these findings appeared to discredit the specific techniques used by the Census Bureau, and the representational validity of large-scale quantitative measurements in general. The Institution, however, offered a different interpretation of their report. They highlighted the radical potential latent within the statistical cover. It showed how demographers assumed populations were not affected by—and actively responding to—their statistical representation, when in truth citizens were increasingly engaged with these categories and were finding new ways to repurpose them. The Census Bureau needed to account for the fact that they were providing people the raw material for producing their identities and understanding their own daily lives. Secondly, the Institution believed that the Cover created socio-spatial black boxes where an infinite number of experimental communities could be designed, enacted, and ultimately compared. Such studies would recover a foundational research agenda in the field of political economy—the original domain of demographic studies. They stated that “[an] empirical understanding of competing socio-economic models and the variety of forms collective life might assume when driven only by fundamental human desires” was conceivable.

The Enumerative Institution saw in itself the ideal organizational form through which these experiments could take place—namely, the legally-defined “institution.” With its managed organization of members, by-laws, material flows, relations to technology, and representational outputs, this formulation allowed society, city, community, and corporation, to all be confounded with each other. As a test case, it proposed that each of New York State’s 15,464 census block groups be treated as 15,464 such institutions—each with the goal of reproducing everyday life using an alternative socioeconomic structure.

In terms of practical methodology, the report again returned to disciplinary roots:

Seigneur de Vauban, engineer and advisor to Louis XIV, lamented in 1772 that one cannot know the city—the precise number of subjects; the true state of their wealth or poverty; what they do; how they live; their commerce and employment; if they are ill or well. The frustration of [demography] has been the same since. Though commonly understood as economically motivated, Vauban states that a true understanding of how people live would be of primary interest, thus betraying a desire to measure the organizational strategy of everyday life. Vauban was calling for an officially sanctioned taxonomy of this everyday life. Though subverted, the goal is still active within our Census Bureaus today and should be of renewed experimental concern.

Informed by the long history of typological analysis in the social and administrative sciences, the Institution established such a taxonomy, with thirty independent components. Each experimental social organization would embody some subset of these thirty features. Using over two hundred demographic and environmental indicators (and a multi-criterion optimization routine) all 15,464 NY block groups could be ranked based on their statistical potential for hiding the proposed community beneath their cover.

In the Institute’s first empirical study, five sites were algorithmically chose —360470052011, 360610203001, 360810489002, 360470420001, 361031699021. Observing only the sites’ statistical representations, a speculative ethnography was conducted to imagine the social and material relations, spatial processes, and “structure of feeling” within each of their “black boxes.” The results were recorded through interviews, reportorial field notes, and site plans.

Census Block Groups as Institutional Black Boxes

The census block group is the smallest scale at which full statistical data of a population is publicly reported. It is the boundary of the statistical cover. Beneath it, representations must resort to other forms of observation and reporting. The census block group is an aggregated abstraction. Regardless of underlying acreage or physical geography, the block group’s geometry is determined by the desire to contain 1000 to 3000 people with homogeneous socio-economic characteristics. It is an aggregate that produces space with many different distributions of physical and infrastructural features within its boundaries. Their differences are erased under the statistical representation. The desired population size of 1000 to 3000 people is consistent with many historic experimental communities and utopian project proposals in the last 200 years.

Black Box Enumeration

To enact a black box experiment, the Institution constructs an enumeration on the daily life typology that states whichfunctions of daily life must occur within the block group— and thus be subjected to experimentation—and which functions must occur elsewhere. These choices of inside and outside comprise a 30-dimensional binary code. For each of the 15464 block groups, over two hundred census fields are transformed, combined, and interpreted as Indicators of Programmatic Potential (IPP). These indices specifically highlight combinations of fields that suggest anomalous social or material conditions within the block group, and measure its appropriateness for enacting the proposed experiment along each of the thirty axes. An optimization procedure ranks and chooses one block group and offers it as the site for the enumerative experiment.

Indicators of Programmatic Potential

Ranking each of the 15464 block groups’ potential for experimentation along thirty components of the everyday life topology.

Enumeration One: Distributed Autonomous Institute

Enumeration 01 creates a full typological coverage distributed over five block groups. Each block group is chosen to internalize a subset of social and spatial practices. Independently, none are able to reproduce all of the needs of daily life. As a collective, they present an autarkic system of self management outside the standard patterns of daily life.

Enumeration One:Statistical Black Boxes

The five resultant sites are knowable only through their statistical representation. The underlying social and spatial organization remains concealed within the institutional black box. Their material and social processes can only be estimated by inspecting their statistics and typological enumeration—evidence of the fanciful within the banal. Each block group contains one of an infinite number of possible organizations that are statistically equivalent. Through renderings, site plans, citizen surveys, and ethnographic reportorial forms, daily life within the block group is hypothesized qualitatively and yet remains accurately within its statistical description.

360470052011 Basic Reportorial Form

Densely populated, 360470052011, is ironically a site of supreme social longing. Citizens here wilfully choose to exist without direct interaction—without their family, without property, and without a past. A number of citizens engage in intense acts of creation. This is not leisure but a rigorous self-sacrifice. The rest of the citizens pay to lease beds and quarters. Their existence is a retreat, a forfeiting. To them, the only solace comes in sound and vision. In these chambers, the community’s music and visual art is channeled and distributed. Weekly, there is a ceremony where citizens, mediated by technology, express their deepest desires face to face with a stranger. Never touching, never knowing each other, they are free to be anyone, to confess, to apologize, to recount. Inspired or distraught by these interactions the citizens return to their work attempting to get right with their craft that which they cannot correct with their words. The resultant pieces again circulate through the community’s chambers. As a test of the citizens’ devotion, food is produced in elaborate forms. (For six percent of the community, this food creation is their art.) The food is circulated through the community and each member is forced to choose between their work and their self-preservation. Should the latter win the citizen is asked to leave—to consume what he or she needs outside of the devoted community.

361031699021 Basic Reportorial Form

A site of basic autonomy, 361031699021 is self-sufficient in reproducing the most basic bodily needs. It is engaged in a constantly shifting but stabilized metabolism with nature—an adaptive, viable system. Here, citizens engage in the acts of production and learning. Though understood as being separately useful, “production” and “learning” are treated as the same. In 361031699021, people are educated on viable systems. This does not come from observation, voyeurism, or even abstract models. Knowledge is gathered through hands-on execution. The domain of knowledge is limited to food and basic biological needs. This is not with austerity, but with sensory playfulness. The citizens constantly engage in recreating the past as a way to learn it. No past knowledge is generalized or abstracted; it is merely documented as a series of exercises. They are understood as experiments in raw experience, without any particular lesson to learn. Only the senses guide. Despite the constant experimentation and strong engagement with technology, there is no notion of science. This would imply generalization and abstraction. Here, all experiments and knowledge production are incremental. They are for addressing immediate problems. The site’s dynamics are rigorously controlled and adhered to. This is not an exercise of social authority, but rather an acceptance that viable systems in relation to nature must be adaptive and finetuned.

As site conditions change in relation to climate, the needed system changes too. The idea of a “successful” configuration of technology and agriculture is limited to the one currently employed. And yet the exercises completed in the past are not seen as failures, as at one point they were solutions that worked, or they are solutions waiting for a future when they become appropriate. Nothing “useless” is useless. They are all documented, stored, and potentially repeated by a later student. Block 361031699021 is the fundamental spirit of the enumerative institution, in its base form. Given its high birth rate, it is where many children of the institute first learn the ethos of autonomy and free experimentation. As citizens leave the block, they apply this intuition of autonomy to increasingly complex social and material situations.

Conclusion

The liberating potential of statistical over-representation is not a struggle for legibility as so many proponents of “big data” claim, but rather, for new and productive strategies of obscurity. Likewise,

increasingly high-resolution measurements of the population and its resources do not result in an over-bearing surveillance system; instead, they generate an exhaustive pattern of statistical black

boxes across the American landscape. Within these black boxes, an infinite number of social and spatial experiments may take place— designed, enacted, and judged by the communities themselves. Our daily patterns and social relations may be freely determined while still aggregating, numerically, into the “Average.” To design this life, statistical representation becomes a new site constraint, a new boundary condition, and a potentially utopian closure within which radically new organizations of life may be modeled.