Population

Two operations are named and the second is the one ordinary usage hides. People are objectified, which removes their individuality, and they are possessed, which assigns them to the endo-ideals of an endogroup. A population is therefore not a neutral count of the people in a place but a description of who owns them. That is why the word appears in Marsh's account of the negative image, whose members live and die as big round numbers, as populations and demographics, and as the rejections of the endo-ideal. Demographics is the same operation performed again on an already objectified population, dividing it into new endogroup identities available for coercion. Once the framing is visible the ordinary usage is harder to read innocently. Political representatives are segregated by land mass and speak for populations they possess in exactly this sense, and the language of managing, controlling and protecting a population is proprietorial language. The framework's alternative is the user group, defined as the entire population which will be affected by an action, including nobody who is not, which sounds similar and is the opposite. A user group is defined by the action and constituted by exposure to it, so it changes with the decision and contains no one by default. A population is defined by who claims it and persists whatever is being decided.

Demography uses population as a technical term for a defined group under study, and Foucault's biopolitics describes the emergence of population as an object of governance in the 1700s, arguing that the category itself made new forms of administration possible. James C. Scott's work on legibility documents states reshaping people to make them countable. Marsh's definition converges with Foucault's historical claim and states it as a definition rather than a genealogy, which makes the possession explicit where the critical literature generally treats it as an implication of the category.