Entropic Path (2020)

 The institutionalization of numbers did not come into existence alone but was born with the development of precision instruments, the “disaggregating" of a social domain, the prognosis of mortality for insurance companies, the economy of labor, and the calculus of fatigue and productivity of the industrial body. These numerical formations that were delivered by systems of calculation subjected the black/non-white/non-human, gendered, and working-class body--albeit unequally-- to the racializing surveillance of statistical law, biological ordering and, subsequently placed their vital capacities under surveillance. Numbers became figures of authority and the epistemic scientific objects that interpreted their calibrations were embedded in the scientific imagination. 

Entopic Path illustrates how the social implications of the science of work, the invention of the spirometer, the discovery of entropy and conservation of energy, the institutionalization of statistics, and the research of fatigue, all contributed to the creation of categories of difference and determined values of “vitality” with the use of measurements of capacity.