Predictable worlds: On writing, accountability and other things

The article examines the forms in which writing is entangled with the project of predictability and accountability, so essential to contemporary systems of production and administration. The analytic predisposition of writing helps in decomposing the synthetic totality of organizational tasks and thus in creating the requirements for their visibility and immediate inspection. Writing, together with the individual interiorization of its rules and procedures, helps to produce accountable versions of organizational actors. However, different systems of writing differ in their ability to help in the construction of predictable worlds. An attempt is made therefore to distinguish between numerical, verbal and pictorial or analogic systems of writing and notation, and to connect them with the construction of predictable worlds and the accountability of organizational actors.