Abstract
1, 2, 3, 4. . . These are not mere black marks on a white background. It could be a jazz band about to begin playing, the tempo of a military march or the number of students that are missing from class this morning. 4, 3, 2, 1. . . and here we switch to the countdown prior to the launch of a space ship or the explosion of a bomb. So innocent, and yet so meaningful, so diffuse and yet so unquestioned. Indeed, if, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, according to the Prologue of the Gospel of John (v.1), ‘today there is mostly the number’, or more precisely a boundless ‘ocean of numbers’ (Ortoli, 2018, p. 7). The seemingly infinite quantification of virtually every aspect of human and non-human life into some form of statistic, percentage, ratio, metric, fraction or numeric value no longer comes as a surprise to us, now that the world seems to have disappeared into a mere reflection of statistics (Rey, 2016).