stop making sense

More thoughts about numbers, inspired by a true friend, in the course of a stroll down on Front Street, and then through the Village and Cabbagetown. On the one hand, there appears to be a narrative that separates 1+1 from 2. '2' just is, taken solely and completely as a conceptual entity. It needs nor demands no examination. But 1+1 tells a story of progress; it is linear, and progressive. How do we get from the narrative of 1+1 to the non-narrative of '2'?

Since as far as I can see, numbers have lavished a specific social privilege. They fashion the seal of genius. The prodigy is always a prodigy of numbers: the miraculously gifted mathematician, the divine mark of prodigy. Not to mention the unconditional emphasis put on numbers in the scientific and political arenas (is not a 'good' politician a person of numeric know-it-all?). But why has number always constructed and defined genius? What else has number revealed or concealed? And why does number invariably seem to situate itself outside of human discourse?

One point in favour of the primacy and independence of number (from human discourse) seems to be that number is based on the concept of station and sameness. Number has to be the same, always--it cannot change. This is apparently why number earns grounding where interpretation or language does not. Language and words, as we know, clearly evolve. But the classical idea (indeed the only idea) of number is that it does not: number cannot, since to evolve would be to lose its only definitive quality, sameness of identity. In short, a number that changed wouldn't be a number at all. It would be nonsense. '2' always has to be '2', and this is why the matrix of number and calculation 'works'.

At the same time, the idea that number is a system of sameness goes hand in hand with number as a priori, or at any rate, fixed, Transcendental, Platonic, Logical, yadda-yadda-yadda capacity. But in fact if we think of number as a product of human discourse, as a consequence of the arbitrariness of the sign, we are forced to see that it is not so different from the character of apparently otherwise 'interpretation'. Nietzsche himself suggested this, and de Man took it up in Allegories of Reading. The concept of number, the system of arithmetic, geometry, etc., are systems that have been designed by us--and hence are systems with definite scopes. They only compute within their given, assigned laws--possibilities of conditions. They indeed may have infinite, inconceivable figurations--but these too are conditions embedded within their logic of occupation. One way to boil this down, or another way to perhaps name the problem, would be to ask: is the number '2' singular? Viz., is it a single entity? How could it not be? And yet, how could it be? At what point, and why, does math value the alleged singularity of '2', over its heterogeneity? And if it does not, then how could we even talk about the concept of '2', which already calculates and accounts for its dissimilarity? I have been rushed, but I hope this gets the ball rolling for future thoughts.