Demographics

The word further is the hinge. Demographics operate on people who have already been objectified, so the division is a second operation performed on a population that has stopped being treated as individuals, and what it produces is not description but new endogroup identities available for coercion. Marsh connects this to what happens to the negative image, which incorporates sublated reflectors and everything else cast outside as an indistinguishable mass. The individuality of the negative image is denied, and its members live and die as big round numbers, as populations and demographics, and as the rejections of the endo-ideal. Her examples are the adjectives that have become nouns: the Poor, the Elderly, the Homeless. Each names a category rather than anyone in it, and each is available to be addressed, managed or blamed as a unit. The same machinery runs at the other end of the scale, since dominant social demographics are produced deliberately in the way hereditary emperors and religious leaders are produced, which is why elite demographics cannot be educated alongside everyone else. Being counted is therefore not neutral in this framework. A category that can be counted can be assigned an identity, and an identity can be given an endo-ideal and a negative image of its own.

Demography is an established discipline measuring populations by birth, death, migration and composition, and its categories underpin public health, planning and electoral analysis. The critical literature is substantial and largely agrees with part of Marsh's point. Ian Hacking's work on making up people holds that classifications bring into being the kinds of person they purport to describe, Michel Foucault's biopolitics treats population management as a modern form of power and census historians have documented how racial and ethnic categories were constructed rather than found. Marsh's version is more instrumental than any of these. Hacking's classifications have looping effects that nobody intended, while her demographics are created in order to be coerced, which converts a side effect into a purpose.