1a. Qualified quantitative geography

The rapprochement of humanism and structuralism on the one hand, and quantitative and qualitative approaches on the other hand, has not addressed an implacable difficulty which continues to haunt both spatial science and ʹcriticalʹ human geographies. That difficulty concerns the ontological and ethical status of numbers, and their relationship to concepts, events, and sensations. The paper engages with this difficulty through a combination of theoretical and literary writings, most notably Woody Allenʹs film Deconstructing Harry, Samuel Beckettʹs play Not I, and Derridaʹs work of Dissemination. Insofar as ʹoneʹ lacks consistency -- by disavowing difference, alterity, and innumerable numbers -- its deployment is invariably unbecoming, repressive, and ill-mannered. The ethical response is to divine ʹanother way of working with numbersʹ, as Derrida once intimated; to prevent some ones from taking hold. The outcome is a form of poststructuralist geography that takes flight from all kinds of pointillism. After an opening scene that lays out the general setup of quantification and its qualification, the first section of the paper employs the notion of a soft ontology in order to prepare the way for ʹanother way of working with numbersʹ that is occasioned by a sensitivity towards the ontological buzzing and solicitation that accompanies processes of subjectification, objectification, identification, and enumeration. The paper concludes with an affirmation of a ʹdisturbing geographyʹ that leaves everything in perpetual suspense.