Accounting, a philosophical object?

Interview by Apolline Guillot.

Let’s be honest: there are sexier topics than accounting. Doesn’t it just involve recording data, like a cash register?

Clément Feger: Not at all! The word “accounting” is misleading: it doesn’t just count, it also classifies, it makes visible whole sections of reality, and passes over others in silence. In this, there is both an ontological and subjective dimension to accounting. In the South of the US, at the time of slavery, a very sophisticated accounting system forecasted the number of abuses inflicted on slaves – with thresholds of violence not to be exceeded in order to “guarantee the goods” –, what types of slaves we had to breed to ensure good performance, etc.

So what would be a good definition of the profession?

C. F.: We talk about accounting from the moment someone systematically categorises and records things in order to structure forms of responsibility and reciprocity in a social whole, by setting certain goals. Accounting therefore goes far beyond the strictly economic domain! Let’s take a concrete example, analysed by Paolo Quattrone in his article “Accounting for God” (2004): among the Jesuits, there was an accounting of sins, traces of which were found in Sicilian communities from the 16th century. When a new member joined a community, he would do a spiritual exercise and have to write down the sins he would commit during the day. In the evening he took stock of the sins he had committed or not, to compare reality with the promise he had made before God. When the weekend came, he reported his progress to his masters.

Alexandre Rambaud: Basically, accounting is always the intersection of a regime of responsibility and a regime of action. They create a common language, readable by all stakeholders, which allows everyone to recognise their responsibilities and undertake various actions.

‘Accounting serves as a collective memory’

—Alexandre Rambaud

This coupling between responsibility and action is also a political game: whoever holds the purse has the power, right?

A. R.: Originally, it was less a political need than an anthropological one. From the moment a multitude of people with diverse interests begin to live in the same place and share resources, there is a need to know who is doing what. Accounting serves as a collective memory, because it records past exchanges and commitments beyond what a brain could retain. It’s a factor of human cooperation, of the stabilisation of our societies, like law, for example.

C. F.: It’s not for no reason that accounting originated in the transition from the Palaeolithic period to the agricultural and urban societies of the Neolithic, at the time when stocks of wheat, livestock, and foodstuffs appeared to be managed outside the clan and over longer periods. The appearance of accounting in Mesopotamia is concomitant with the complexity and hierarchy of social, productive, administrative and religious systems. The works of Denise Schmandt-Besserat clearly show how at its beginnings, around 8000 BC, accounting still took the form of small tokens which could also represent units of working time. And so fixed quantities of activity were symbolised to streamline collective action – and this even before actual numbers were invented!

‘Accounting has a very strong stabilising effect, which goes beyond capitalism alone’

—Alexandre Rambaud

This means that, against all expectations, accounting actually precedes the invention of numbers!

A. R.: Yes! Chronologically, but also conceptually, the question of calculation comes after everything else. We cannot put numbers on the world without having determined, by convention, what we must represent, what has value or not… This is why accounting has a very strong stabilising effect, as an institution, which goes beyond capitalism alone. Any religious, state, or social institution that wants to last must have strong accounting. Moreover, the study of Buddhist accounting in Thailand shows that the latter had the function of perpetuating a certain relationship with the world. Some authors have therefore used the term “cosmology of accounting”.

Is capitalism, basically, just another cosmology of accounting?

A. R.: Yes, capitalism is consubstantial with a form of accounting which appeared at the end of the Renaissance, namely among Italian merchants. At the time, it was about putting the world in order, classifying what separated subjects and objects. Gradually, the spirit of capitalism has turned everything – apart from the subjects holding capital – into a new class of assets, that is to say, things which can be controlled, objects which provide and create value… These merchants also began to use interest rates: productivity became more widespread, it became predictable. All this, by extension, gave rise to the idea of ​​continuous progress.

Too often, we reduce capitalism to a socio-economic notion, a mode of organising work. But in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis showed that capitalism, Marxism, and liberalism come from the same modern imagination, which is based on this idea that the world is separated between subjects and objects. By deciding that nothing will be “subjective” outside of the individual, we decide that everything else can potentially be objectified, quantified, and exploited. The earth, the forest, the sea: everything is a productive resource.

‘We can invent environmentally friendly accounting systems which offer new representations of non-human entities’

—Clément Feger

In defiance of environmental limits…

C. F.: Of course, this simplistic division of the world into subject-object, nature-culture, has had perverse effects. The challenge today is to understand that accounting is perhaps best positioned to manage this, because we can invent environmentally friendly accounting systems which offer new representations of non-human entities and our reciprocal relationships with them – as long as accounting remains in its place, that is to say, that it doesn’t seek to replace reality, and that it merely accompanies our collective interpretation of reality, so that we can better organise ourselves in the face of current challenges…

A. R.: Over time, the number has become confused with the norm. Numbers are an instrument which serves to coordinate and structure an action, but it’s not what governs this action. For a long time, numbers were simply a human factor in telling something complex!

Can businesses really make room for this complexity? Emmanuel Faber, head of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), seems to doubt it, given his recent column in the French newspaper, Le Monde…

A. R.: What bothers Emmanuel Faber is the direction that the accounting standardisation of European sustainability is taking, as it encourages a “double materiality” analysis. A financial materiality analysis only takes into account the positive and negative impacts on a company of its economic, social, and natural environment. A dual materiality analysis also includes the reverse impact of this financial materiality, by taking into account the negative or positive impacts of the company on its economic, social, and natural environment.

‘It’s not because it has made it possible to automate decisions in alignment with a simplified vision of the world, in which only profit counts, that accounting is interesting’

—Clément Feger

C. F.: Emmanuel Faber affirms that one of the strong limits of dual materiality is the entanglement of numerous actors around the same environmental entity. He takes the example of the pollution of a river: it causes different concerns depending on the actors in relation to it, who will count different things depending on their respective issues. The municipality will count decontamination costs, an NGO will count protected species, the fishing association will count the preservation of its favourite species, etc. Faber denounces the impossibility of a common denominator and therefore of a stable materiality, unlike the one which governs the financial markets – the only credible one in his eyes.

But it’s quite the opposite! It’s not because it has made it possible, in past decades, to automate decisions on the basis of stabilised financial metrics  – which we no longer even question, and in alignment with a simplified vision of the world, where only profit counts – that accounting is interesting. What makes it a powerful lever in the face of environmental challenges and their complexity is, on the contrary, that it can enable private and public actors to better explore, interpret, discuss, negotiate and decide on the connections and responsibilities of each, with regard to the environmental concerns that are emerging everywhere. With all the tensions that this implies! This is where we must reconnect with the eminently political dimension of accounting.

➤ Find the second part of this interview: “Accounting, an ecological lever ?”

Picture © Ave Calvar / Unsplash