Bruegel's The Census at Bethlehem and the Visual Anticensus

Abstract

IN THE NINTENDO GAME Populous, the sides compete to outpopulate and thereby destroy each other. If this sounds like a cute reference to popular culture, it's meant instead to suggest that what we have now is a populational culture, one in which nonrational pictures, metaphors, and stories about populations (not exactly the same as classes, masses, crowds, and so on) are as important as the words and statistics found for them. Two awkward and opposed phrases-demographic reason and demographic iconography-might suggest the components of this theme. In the standard model of what we now call statistics and words, or and notions, as E. A. Wrigley writes, spiral around and criticize each other to produce reliable demographic reasoning. Analysis and synthesis, numbering and classificatory naming, alternate.' Picturing-let alone a poetics of counting-has little or no part in this. Though it's a cliche to debunk statistics, or to notice that the numbers on great issues (genocides, homelessness, how many species become extinct per year) can be wildly discrepant, turning statistics into dialogue, and though there are less well-known discords inside population studies (about the relative primacy of categories like age structure, labor migration, or gender relations), public emphasis still protects demography from skepticism, seeing it as a brand of descriptive neutrality and rationality, not of imagination. Graphs and pictures are only assists. The phrase the iconography of demography, besides being comically ugly, doesn't seem to refer to anything real. But the word population(s)-again not simply coextensive as a logical category with crowds, nations, classes, or even masses-has in contemporary rhetoric become the default term for groups in general, seemingly a more neutral term than class or the people, though it conceals major unacknowledged iconic, historical, and linguistic forces. In Anglo-American culture, for example, because of the conflict, which partly hides affinities, between Thomas Malthus and the romantics who hated him (but often shared his taste for sublimely indefinite images of large groups), population imagery remains partly late romantic in its tones. A catchphrase like population explosion, with its repeated plosive ps, has its own romantic metaphorical character. From one angle a form of late romanticism, the postmodern is-this definition is polemical and will be implicit throughout this article-the displacement of class thinking and passions by seemingly benign (often