Tension between calculation and classification as a dynamic of social exclusion

Abstract

As the formal logic informs us, calculus and algorithm are two faces of the same coin. Nevertheless, algorithm suffers a forcing of calculus’s properties when it deals with irreducibly ontological entities trying their formalization through the classification. If, on one hand, the requirements of calculus produce classification, on the other hand, they shock against this one. In the contemporaneous economic dynamics, calculus tends to exclude from the productive processes the rigidity of classification (and the subjects involved in it), but it promotes the classificatory logic in the market and public services. Obsolete in the productive life, classification is requested in the private life, and it inserts the individual who is socially disqualified into a mechanism that confirms and amplifies at every single moment the negative value of his condition.

Key words: social inequality, poverty self-reproduction, recursivity of the social processes.