Abstract
This article investigates links between the final scene—the milkshake scene—of P. T. Anderson’s film, ‘There Will Be Blood’, and a commercial advertisement for the sale of oil, which relies on a milkshake drinking analogy. The comparison probes a tension between the aspiration for capitalist economic growth and the self-regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Business figures committed to the practice of CSR struggle with the possibility that deeper, systemic forms of violence inherent in market competition supersede their attempts at installing more responsible cycles of economic exchange. A risk remains, all the while, that social and environmental concern of the kind expressed in CSR is only able to acquire ‘value’ in the market, a relational or ‘dialectical’ system of exchange, where it meets contrasting cycles or events in the market: the value of alternatives (e.g. ‘going green’) is predicated on pre-existing products or earlier cycles of marketisation. The article discusses difficulties that CSR creates in terms of making interventions and raising conflict with corporate actors, and a tendency for the system to leave inert, exposed or abandoned, those that try. The capacity of CSR to eradicate the more vicious shadow of capitalist markets is challenged in the article. There is no release, the author argues, in a concept that is so essentially dependent on market mechanisms and on competitively motivated (ex)change.
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Notes
The milkshake concept Anderson extracted from a transcript of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Senator Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California. During the testimony the Senator used the analogy of drinking a milkshake to explain to the hearing how oil was extracted from adjoining lands. See Foundas (2008) and Bowles (2008).
Stage Direction.
The term ‘enlightened’ is central to how CSR is institutionalised in the UK, as the pursuit of ‘enlightened shareholder value’, or ESV, whereby company directors are bound to promote the success of the company for the shareholders benefit as a whole, but in doing so, must have regard to a non-exhaustive list of wider factors, including the long term, company employees, suppliers, the impact of activities on community and the environment. See, s172 Companies Act 2006 and for an overview of ESV in the UK, Keay (2007).
Social and environmental reporting is a key aspect of market-led CSR. By asking companies to report on social and ecological impacts, a market relative to the CSR performance of companies is operationalised: the information is supposed to allow members of the public to choose knowledgeably between products and services on the basis of social and environmental criteria. See s417 Companies Act 2006 and for an overview, Villiers (2006).
The purchase of products or services with a view to achieving non-economic goals (social, ecological or political); ‘buycott’ as a form ‘positive political consumerism’. See Micheletti (2003, p. 50).
The power to deepen and extend the markets is attributed to the ‘discontent’ here, rather than the ‘disinterested’ masses (the group usually accused of deepening consumption); ‘conscious raising’ and ‘raising of the unconscious’ is the source of extended productivity for Baudrillard. See Baudrillard (1994 p. 86, 2007, pp. 33–77).
On the parallels between Agamben and Baudrillard, both identifying a seeming slide into the ‘inhuman’ see Coulter (2005).
On the multiple trajectories according to which life is valorised and non-valorised in market society, see, reading Agamben, Barkan (2009).
Agamben is emphatic: ‘law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exception: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it’ (Agamben 1998, p. 27).
The same figures also appear in Simulacra and Simulation, where they are figures ‘marked out no longer worthy of our justice but only of our affection and social charity,’ and ‘no longer worthy of our punishment and death but only of experimentation and extermination’. Baudrillard (1994, p. 135).
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Moncrieff, L.M. The Molotov Milkshake: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Market. Law Critique 22, 273–293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9092-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9092-3