
Heaps of ruining textiles lie in a clothing graveyard (Figure 1). The items, made through significant effort and environmental cost and then abandoned, imply a decadence to c21 consumer capitalism. Codes, diligence plans and disclosures by the companies grow in reach and complexity, after the optimism of governance, but still the ruin rises. Such is the image of a predicament that I would form and interrogate under the supervision of Emilios Christodoulidis and Scott Veitch, at University of Glasgow, when writing about corporations. It has continued to inform our conversations and exchanges in the years since.
Embed from Getty ImagesI always had a feeling of holding tight to the images, doing this research. Our conversation was driven to treat these predicaments of capitalist modernity – producing (to) excess, piling up ruin far from the centres of commercial decision making – as discontinuities at risk of getting lost (which is ironic, since this particular site is visible from space).[1] An image or window onto ruin could fix things that lay somewhere between the abyss and the concept of ‘governable’ risks. It offered a memory against the calculative assault or silencing that people can face when trying to get the attention of actors governing the spaces, when the calculations imply measurement or usefulness but, also, breaking down (of meaning, perspective and other self-descriptions).
A recent case in the English High Court, ClientEarth v Shell plc (2023),[2] involving a carbon major and climate mitigation measures, reminds us that the institutions for the responsible governance of companies approach measurement and meaning in exactly this way. Harms are measured from the perspective of the costs and benefits generated for the company, purposed by the satisfaction of the members, and can be isolated accordingly. The court is critical of an attempt by the petitioner, an environmental NGO, to impose what the court calls ‘absolute’ or ‘further duties’ on the board of directors, concerning the rate of carbon emissions reduction. The proposal (for more defined corporate obligations) demonstrates ‘insufficient regard to the way in which the legislature has formulated general duties’ for directors, to measure and weigh up risk themselves (the May judgement, at para 25).
Indeed, in a statement bearing on whether companies can be ‘enlightened’ about much apart from financial risk, the court characterises the ecological concerns of the petitioner, acting in their capacity as a minority activist shareholder, as ‘ulterior in motive’ potentially (ibid., para 64). Shareholder actions undertaken in the name of the company are expected to be (pursued for reasons) ‘derivative’ of that company’s interests, which are economic in nature. Thequantity (corporate interest) is adorned with force or ‘capital letters’, as the c20 philosopher Simone Weil once described the ‘relentlessness’ of ‘accumulating useless ruins’ behind mysterious economic machinations and oligarchies (Weil, 1977, p269-70).
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The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture by Christodoulidis (2021) perfectly contextualises the lack of earthly perspective or commentary.
The book provides a critical appraisal of (c21) market constitutionalism and its framing of the legal systems and pluralities that are meant to balance calculative exposure in the post-national and post-regulatory state. Christodoulidis analyses the limits being set on political constitutionalism by the demands of global market-based decentralised spontaneous learning (including efforts to develop corporate ‘reflexivity’, above). He observes floundering in the capacity of governments, lost to the cause of market making, if not greater immersion in a post-political condition, as more societal conflict is transferred to the market (ie, as enterprise, consumer, employment, investment or contractual choices) and to the law courts (in complaints or petitions that relate to the same).
Christodoulidis’ writing also takes us towards the thickness of the silence in Figure 1. The clothing dump speaks to the ‘historical unfolding of constitutional formations’ in play at a given time and an ‘aporetic’ dimension that ‘throws the political into relief’ (Christodoulidis, 2021, pp 157- 158). We detect another order of reflexivity (‘the élan that runs within the constituted as its highest possibility’, ibid. p. 157). Maybe, also the bridge to a ‘revolutionary tradition that could prevent us from identifying with the forms of “closed universalism that has made the West blind to its own history”’ (ibid., p158, citing Pierre Rosanvallan).
It is (perhaps) because so many of our encounters with this horizon are currently distressing – involving injury, ruining and breaking down – that Christodoulidis also turns to Simone Weil (referred to above and in the quote, leading this series) (ibid., pp. 43-71).
Weil is prepared, through her social activism (teacher, trade unionist and scholar) and attraction to tragedy to look for human resilience and possibility in the most remote of places.[3] She is serious and concerned about the ‘force’ that production and also abstract categorisations (not least price and profit) can exercise over lives, victims and victors, causing and spreading affliction (i.e. modifying and deforming the human spirit and turning beings into things). Christodoulidis’ reference in the quote is to Weil’s thinking and concern for a ‘reflexivity that endows life with grace’ (Christodoulidis, 2021, 53). It proposes (with Weil) that we respond to (patterns of) oppression by transforming expectations and practices in (how we give) attention, ‘to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident’ (Weil 1952/2001, p. 105), when ‘the spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any other criterion than efficiency’ (ibid., p. 140).
It is logical to think about attention in this context as curating resistance, since many of Weil’s actions had that particular quality (e.g. of going against the grain, resisting authority, acting on conviction and encouraging others to do the same). But, the point that I want to explore in this comment is about Weil’s deep and patient understanding of what we can also see clearly in Figure 1, certain incidents of ‘dead’ labour, the surplus of the surplus, brought to a point of inertia and exhaustion for the lack of connecting purpose or will.
Such a scene connects in Weil with necessity, a consequential domain underlying ordered action, and a ‘limit’ or ‘gravity’ to how humans pursue their life projects (or exercise power). Competitive forces involving powerful actors, Weil observes, extend these limits ‘farther and farther’, beyond what it is possible to control, laying waste to resources and provoking reactions that the commanding parties ‘can neither foresee nor deal with’ (Weil, 1977, p. 144-5).
Alternatively, the silence of seeping polyester connects with the attention that Weil gives to the aftermath of force and affliction. Her inquiry tells us about the spirit of the people entangled with a ruin (e.g. the workers involved in high-volume garment production, the communities exposed to the toxins that flow from goods already categorised as unsuitable to municipal landfill).[4] For Weil, force robs the individual power of refusal. It robs, too, the legitimacy of systems that offer to construct consent by acting (or ordering) over the silence, against which she advises, ‘Never to think of a thing or being we love but have not actually before our eyes without reflecting that perhaps this thing has been destroyed or this person is dead. May our sense of reality not be dissolved by this thought but made more intense’ (Weil, 1952/2001, p. 14).
If there is some labour in this point, about what wrinkle-resistant sheets made of petroleum (polyester) unfold, it is because this action (unfolding) is hard to insist upon in a neoliberal economy of satisfactions. Technical categories employed across the productive process for measuring meaning (eg, price, ROI) take up active regulatory positions in the post-political era, keeping (economic) ‘force and civilisation’ on ‘the same side’ (Weil, 1952/2001, p. 152).
Such is ‘accursed’ (Weil) in the sense that the categories can create distaste for meaning and the revolutionary tradition identified (‘the democratic thinking of democracy’, Christodoulidis, 2021, p. 157). Silence can fall over whole stratas of effect that fail at the level of ‘first order contestability’, insofar as economic and political structures seem to coincide in a governance according to corporate interest, or the company assumes ‘a sombre zeal in piling up useless ruin’ (Weil 1977, p. 270).[5]
The pattern is worrying, amidst the predicted growth of the fast fashion industry in coming years (from a global market size of USD 60.50 billion, in 2022, to USD 179.5 billion by 2030).[6] Corporate responsibility laws, for their part, mainly stick to the (first order) self-assessment powers earlier cited. The institutional focus is on processes that dramatise companies ‘tackling the issues’ (ie, policies, plans, statements), effectively and ineffectively (both can deter truth), whilst the courts insist that challenging corporate actions involves close engagement with the terms of corporate promises (not the harms experienced). This led most recently (November 2024) to the overturning of a decision against Shell on climate mitigation measures in the Netherlands (where the appeal court refused to support a % by which Shell must reduce group emissions, rolling back again from ‘absolute’ or ‘further’ obligations).[7]
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‘Some efforts are always accompanied by the (false) negation of our inner wretchedness’, says Weil, ‘with others the attention is continually concentrated on the distance between what we are and what we love’ (Weil, 1952/2001, p. 106). Weil distinguishes attention, in this context, from what is available to the individual, through law and the democratic process. ‘Words of the middle region,’ Weil says in ‘Human Personality’, ‘such as right, democracy, person are valid in their own region, which is that of ordinary institutions;’ but ‘above these institutions’ and the breakdowns by force and measurement that they install (above), ‘others must be invented for the purpose of exposing and abolishing everything in contemporary life which buries the soul under injustice, lies and ugliness’ (Weil, 1977, p. 338-9).
In the same essay, Weil suggests that we need to learn to distinguish between the different tonal ‘cries’ of justice (‘why am I being hurt?’) and of rights (‘why has somebody else got more than I have’) and, then, ‘as gently as possible, to hush the second one with the help of a code of justice, regular tribunals, and the police. Minds capable of solving problems of this kind can be formed in a law school’ (Weil, 1977, p. 334).
Hush the second one: Weil reverses the order of noise and quiet, definitive of the neoliberal era, just as Christodoulidis helps us to see a regenerative politics and law in Figure 1. Weil also distinguishes her demotion from large-scale planning (‘the great beast’) and a revolution in productive forces, in case it means that people already bearing affliction are pushed towards more force or exposure (Weil, 2001, p. 40, oppression as ‘founded on the factory organisation and not the system of property’).[8]
Weil’s insistence is that we might ‘endeavour to introduce a little play into the cogs of the machine that is grinding us down’ (Weil, 2001, p. 114), separating ‘what belongs of right to man, considered as an individual, and what is of a nature to place weapons in the hands of the collectivity for use against him, whilst at the same time trying to discover the means whereby the former elements may be developed at the expense of the latter’ (ibid., p. 116).
The ideas probe some tentative (controversial?) parallels with an early J.M. Keynes, sceptical about (the truth of) ‘general rules’ (capitalist and socialist) and the command of laissez-faire, where it establishes a religion of productive forces (1926). But it is Weil’s understanding of affliction (loss and grieving) that arguably brings a different order of reflexivity (ie, kind of attention) to Keynes’ corresponding insistence that we ‘apprehend the character of the misfortunes against the further extension of which it must surely be our duty to seek the remedy, if there is one’ (Keynes, 1919, p. 65).
Action over the ‘disgusting morbidity’ (Keynes, 1930, p. 6, Weil has ‘lethal absurdity’, 1977, p. 271) of the ‘money-motive’ had wanted to lift up public life (transform values) and create (amongst other things) prescience for ‘impersonal’ piles of affect (‘every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is touched with a responsibility towards all human beings’, Weil 1977, p. 320).[9] But, it gets lost (more war, more machines, the science of probability, etc.), keeping a religion of productive forces active over c20, and the loss of (concrete) meaning coveted by corporate interests, capitalised (as C, I) in c21 (textiles are put on a tanker and shipped to a desert).
In the present, we look at the textile dump (Figure 1) and think about the necessity of companies not dumping or over-producing, and about what action we need to take, as individuals and collectively. We look at company reports and at statements that suggest things are being ‘managed’, and many will feel unmoved; the links are not always apparent, a vision for the future (nature and society) delegated and deferred.
A crude simplification of where we are (for sure). But, it is intended to contradict the sentiment that unwinding abstractions is the risky option, when we are looking at miles of ruined things; or that we could not labour better over corporate obligation, with a revolutionary legal philosophy. Christodoulidis and Weil here offer to assist. If such sounds like commonsense, the institutional promise goes (exactly) against the way that things presently are, bound to a view of the world (and of law and attention) that tends towards endless calculation, underwritten by rubbish piles and excess.
Lilian Moncrieff is a Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London
Bibliography
Christodoulidis, E. (2021). The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture. Cambridge University Press.
Keynes J. M. (1919). The Economic Consequences of the Peace. MacMillan & Co.
Keynes, J. M. (1926). The End of Laissez Faire. Hogarth Press.
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Keynes J. M. (1930). ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, accessed at Yale Department of Economics Publications, at www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf ).
Weil, S. (2001). Oppression and Liberty. Routledge Press.
Weil, S. (1952/2001). Gravity and Grace. Routledge Press.
Weil, S. (1977). The Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panchias. David MacKay Company Inc.
[1] Bartlett, J. ‘Chile’s Atacama Desert has become a fast fashion dumping ground.’ National Geographic, March 5 2024, accessed on 21 December 2024.
[2] Reported judgements for Client Earth v Shell plc and the directors [2023] EWHC 1137 (Ch) (the May judgement); [2023] EWHC 1897 (Ch) (the July Judgement); [2023] EWHC 2182 (Ch) (November 2023).
[3] Gustave Thibon’s ‘Introduction’ to Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1952/2001), outlined at pp vii to xxxvii, captures Weil’s story and sense of personhood.
[4] ‘Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers.’ (2021, 8 November). Al-Jazeera News. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert-dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers (Accessed 21 December 2024).
[5] The popular mind ‘imagines the machinations of economic interests’, Weil, 1977, p. 70.
[6] Zion Market Research. (2024). ‘Fast Fashion Market.’ Retrieved from: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/fast-fashion-market (Accessed 21 December 2024).
[7] Milieudefensie et al (Milieudefensie) v Royal Dutch Shell (Court of Appeal of the Hague), English Translation, ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2024:2100, at https://tinyurl.com/3cwx7hr9 (accessed 21 December 2024), at 7.81.
[8] Outlined in ‘Critique of Marx’, Weil, 2001, pp. 38-53.
[9] Weil, 1977, p.322-3 on reaching the ‘impersonal stage of attention’; relating public life to a higher good, pp. 330-334; Weil on economic law and convention, p. 279..
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