Balance Sheets, Justice, and Power
Balance Sheets, Justice, and PowerIt comes as no surprise today to find out that the language of balance sheets is a language of power. But balance sheets were a form of power in their very origin; moreover, their language also defined justice.
Mary Poovey points out that double-entry bookkeeping was invented by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, two years after Columbus landed in America. Pacioli was also an architect; in fact he invented the master bedroom. The master's bedroom served two interrelated purposes: it was the master's office, where he balanced his household and business accounts. And it was the conjugal bedroom. His wife was allowed to enter only for conjugal relations, which were indirectly related to his business. The master's bedroom, then was the spatial nexus of his privilege and power.
Double-entry bookkeeping had more than just instrumental value in maintaining businesses and households; it became a form of writing that was verifiable and that concluded with a balanced account that guaranteed reliability, trustworthiness, and justice, with everything being in its proper, or natural, place.
Significantly, Pacioli was a friend of the architect Leone Battista Alberti, who invented perspective painting, which subjected everything in the frame to a privileged point of view and was made to seem natural. Alberti was influential in bringing double-entry bookkeeping into the university system—the discourse of which influenced the plain style of Enlightenment thought and became central to the development of capitalism, as well as science. It formed the basis of the power wielded by big business today.
While native ledger artists may not have known this history, they understood the power of writing and written records, or ledgers, whether they contained balance sheets, treaties, land divisions, maps, or congressional records. Recording their history in the language of their traditional pictographs on these ledgers has been an act of resistance and a performance of sovereignty.
Mary Poovey, A History of Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.