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Show 69 and consequences of our corporate brethren. Corporations, although disembodied and soulless, are not imaginary actors that emerge from thin air. They are real by the forces of their social relations within legal, cultural, and political assemblages. And they are accountable to legal, public, and nonhuman stakeholders. Distinguishing corporations as subjects also has a hopeful element to it because critics can theorize conditions that "unplug" (see Latour, 2005/2007, pp. 204-218) corporate subjects or speculate ways to wield corporate forces for productive purposes. This is especially true once we recognize that these actors have not always had unlimited charters to do as they please. Corporate subjectivity is a contingency, not a necessity. As such, the networks that keep corporations alive can come to an end, or they can become resourceful alliances for hybridized social movements.13 Even Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, not to mention the U.S. Climate Action Partnership mentioned in Chapter 1, have built alliances with corporations to achieve their goals (see Greenpeace, 2010; Herrick, 2014). Simply stated, corporate subjectivity can be destroyed, tamed, or disciplined. 13 This author acknowledges that corporate networks can themselves be considered social movements since they are capable of forcefully initiating social change. This is similar to David Zarefsky's (1977, 1980) point that President Johnson's "War on Poverty" demonstrates that social movements do not always involve insurgent counter-publics fighting against the establishment. While Zarefsky used Johnson's campaign to advance a skeptical position about social movement studies, this author would argue that the War on Poverty is also an example of a corporate social movement since the USFG is itself incorporated. Privileging antiestablishment social movements, is after all, a moralism, and to better understand how human and nonhuman actor-networks initiate social change, social movement studies need not wither, as Zarefsky suggests, it just needs to be broadened. Governments, corporations, and publics are not purified organizations; they are what Latour calls "hybrids," and they are all capable of building alliances that create social change. Even tropical storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, can be considered social movements since they establish new social relations between wind patterns, water, trees, houses, and entire communities. To realize this, critics just need to widen the scope of what counts as the "social." |
