EXCERPT Start in the State (it insists): organicist technospecialism, pedagogic authoritarianism, and territorial sectorization that culminates in mass innumeracy. Irrespective of its configuration as educational crisis, the suppression of popular numbering practices is both result and presupposition of institutionalized mathematics. State-culture—however modern or even postmodern—is modelled upon an ideal despotic voice (Logos). The word from on high drafts the signifying chain, with all its essential features: unique enunciator, semantic interiority, consecutive signs, formally anticipated conclusion, global application, and interpretative redundancy…