Telling by Numbers Narrative Threads and the Craft of Accounting

The ‘digit’, from the Latin digitus, can be a number or a finger. This essay explores the changing relation between the two. Both numbers and fingers, once enrolled in practices of manual bookkeeping, have succumbed to a process of datafication that has led not only to the detachment of numbers from the hand and its workings, but also to the contraction of the fingers’ field of operation to their tips, under the command of the intellect. The skill of the bookkeeper of old, working in an economy where everything given or received is a datum, lay in an ability to tell. As in any craft, telling is not divorced from the hand but enacted in a zone of hapticality, of mutual attention and response, in which numbers and words are not articulated but performed. Yet with the regression of the hand, fingers come to serve as instruments of optical rather than haptic perception, in a process of digitisation that culminates in the electronic screen. With the advance of digitisation, we have forgotten how to inhabit the page. For the sake of generations to come, we need to relearn to do so, reuniting hand and mind in the practices of fingerwork.