In the Air of the Natural History Museum: On Corporate Entanglement and Responsibility in Uncontained Times
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In the Air of the Natural History Museum: On Corporate Entanglement and Responsibility in Uncontained Times Lilian Moncrieff1 Accepted: 21 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. Keywords Anthropocene · Corporate responsibility · Materialism · Natural history
Introduction This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in uncontained times. The latter term (uncontained times) expresses the interest of the author in thinking corporate law and governance for the world impacted, * Lilian Moncrieff [email protected] 1
School of Law, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
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over generations, by industry, commerce and globalisation and for the epoch of the Anthropocene.1 This is where material migrations of human affect and activity, and their cumulative impact on nature and people, have become as pertinent (normatively, politically, operationally, economically) to businesses and the future of corporate institutions as the linking up of regions, organisations, technologies and markets.2 Mounting anthropogenic entanglements create a situation where there is ‘a constant conceptual traffic between Earth history and world history’, and the interconnection of ‘events that happen on vast geological scales—such as changes to the whole climate system of the planet—with what we might do in the everyday lives of individuals, collectivities, institutions, and nations’ (Chakrabarty 2018, p. 6). Historia
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