During the century XVII, in the European Enlightenment, the search and application of new mathematical methods to describe the world and the universe, changed not only our perception of nature but also the perception of the human being and his capacities. The *calculus* appears as a mathematical method to describe physical activity. In an age full of ambiguities and contradictions, divine power and creation dissipate in human hands. The division that separates astrology from astronomy is an example of the way in which the laws of the universe were sought, in the divine and scientific dimensions. The *calculus* thus becomes a capacity of the 'genius', astrologer, astronomer or philosopher. If, initially, this methodology stood out as a science of change, more specifically, in the calculation of the movement of celestial bodies, later, its principles would be applied to social and human bodies. The Newtonian *calculus* would be explored along with Adam Smith's principles of the market and division of labor to describe the economy and the social world. From a governmentality perspective, it is not just a description, but a constitution, a form of government that establishes ways of working, conduct and forms of life.
The *calculus*, rigor, objectivity and reason established became a *fetish*, achieving accuracy exacerbated its own function and applicability. The Calculus Monument, begun in 1791 by Gaspard De Prony, and condenses this paradigm very well. Originally conceived as a government commission for the cadastre of France, it was never to be used for that purpose. Financial costs and changes in the metric system would impede its applicability, but not its monumentality. Gigantic logarithmic tables were calculated by human computers from different social classes. Craftsmen joined mathematicians, in the words of De Prony: "quite singular gathering of men who had had such different existences in the world". A large part of the tasks are carried out by hairdressers unemployed by the fall of the monarchy and its aristocracy. Thus, calculating is no longer a task of 'geniuses' and a high capacity of the mind, on the contrary, it appears to be a 'universality', the possibility of being done by anyone, which relegated it to disrepute as a human faculty. However, the layers present in the Calculus Monument are multiple, more than a set of human calculators, a hierarchical system was established, a form of government inspired by the division of labor, in which repetitive and mechanical tasks are performed by workers from different lower classes. If these types of tasks are mechanized then, eventually, a machine could perform them. It is inspired by the work of De Prony and the respective division of labor that Charles Babbage builds his "difference machine". A new competitor for human computers appears then in the form of a mechanical machine.
In the calculus monument, the tasks performed by the lower classes are basically reduced to additions and subtractions. It is very likely that these workers, devoted to repetitive and mechanized tasks, had no idea of the meaning of their task and the device in which they found themselves. It is also true that this is the place between alienation, emancipation and revolution. Calculation, intelligence and work are a swamp of tensions during the Enlightenment that also dialogues with artistic practices. Lorraine Daston, in Enlightenment Calculations, after having situated calculation and intelligence in the Enlightenment, struggles with the connection between work, mechanics and the prevalence of an encyclopaedist commonplace in these discourses:
"Here d'Alembert repeats a commonplace: skill, the knowledge of the hand, and habit, the enemy of reflection, had long been opposed to intelligence and deliberation, and intimately associated with manual labor. Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth had likened the unconscious art of nature to the habitual performances of the musician or dancer and explained:
We account the Architects in every thing more honourable than the Manuary Optificers, because they understand the Reason of the things done, whereas the other, as some Inanimate things, only Do, not knowing what they Do: the Difference between them being only this, that Inanimate Things Act by a certain Nature in them, but the Manuary Optificer by Habit."
The craftsman is sometimes the figure found to exemplify the one who is tied to the mechanical and repetitive task, devoted to the unconscious art of nature. This doing without knowing what one is doing as an anathema to the craftsman, equated simultaneously with the natural and the mechanical, was also the way of imagining a mental operation as mechanizable and, consequently, a machine that could replace this mental operation. This mechanical mental operation is not without its correspondence with savage thought. Far from the imagination of the time, the Calculus Monument seems to carry a certain prophecy of the mechanization of the mind.
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