Doing the Undoing of Number: The Decimalisation of Currency and STS

• In Event: How Do STS Studies Translate Numbers: Economics, Markets Value/Valuation and Policy

Abstract

My paper explores media depictions of the decimalisation of currency in Australia, New Zealand, the UK in the 1960s and 1970s in order to think through some salient ironies of the relationship between number and what Helgesson and Muniesa (2013) term “the contingent circumstances that allow… for the construction of the objectivity of value.” In particular, it describes how number was undone and redone in a series of short films designed to prepare citizens for the transition from the Carolingian composite base-12 and base-20 framework of pounds, shillings, and pence to the now ubiquitous decimal money-number system. Focusing simultaneously on the framing of the logic behind this transition and the role of demonstrating new modes of doing number in its explication, I examine how the apparently objective and efficient functioning of number was made to stand in for the changing global political-economic topography that actually occasioned the shift to decimal money. Such a focus foregrounds the degree to which the relationship between number, value, and objectivity is contingent and historically specific rather than natural or necessary. While decimalisation was (and is) presented as the ultimate “no brainer,” the redoing of number it entailed was shot through with historical, material, and moral contingencies and specificities. Ultimately, this realization suggests that the questions we should be asking of the transition to decimal reckoning are less about the natural and inevitable unfolding of increasing objectivity, than of what needed to be trans-[formed/lated/figur]ed in the process.

Author

• Chris Vasantkumar, Macquarie University