La imagen como conteo y el valor performativo de las cifras La representación numérica de la violencia

Abstract

For over a decade, authors such as Michael Friendly and Alain Badiou have critically pointed out the centrality of numbers within the representation of all aspects of contemporary material reality. Violence, in particular, has come to be quantified in several ways, and to be communicated and narrated through statistical visualization strategies already familiar to everyone. Talking about the ‘number of victims’, ‘survivors in total’, ‘how many massacres’, among many others, seems to be a normal, even preferred way to account for violence in its multiple forms. Far from denying the value of statistics within certain contexts, this text seeks to question this increasingly widespread tendency to account for violence only through numbers and numerical representations. Following a reflection on the relationship between figures and images, I propose a critical approach towards numerical representations, highlighting how images have assumed the logic of numerical counting, directly or indirectly. Using the case of the Colombian conflict as a starting point, the text intends to open the possibility of a non-numerical count through images, and to imagine what other forms of counting can be produced and deployed, without reducing the violence to a numerical problem.