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Month: October 2023

To no longer be loyal as consumers

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Sold on life

If we are loyal to a way of life, we are also loyal to the form our lives take to be so oriented, as it is demonstrated in what we do. The bond we make arranges our lives, orders it so as to conform to what is expected. We give each other credit for disinhibiting the way, as taking it up proves the ideal we share has legitimacy to be oriented to life the way we are. The form becomes the given for the way life can be entertained through the choices it allows. To make good on, is always in reference to the form presupposed as any difference in styles of life, even “aberrant” ones does not diverge in any way from the form as the significance of preferences or values as it is always secondary. To question the “production process“, how our actions produce the form of life is to reveal their contingency. A disjunction, or disjointedness arises in our very life when we start to question the way of life beyond the styles entertained, beyond the production of want to the form that gives it legitimacy. To be sold on life, this way or that ensures the apparent differences conceals a homogenising effect. The disjointedness is necessary to see through what our loyalty presupposes.

When there is a fracture, or margin that separates our lives to create rivaling doubles that fight over “life” we picture what life could be, entertain it otherwise than being in our everydayness. We consume ourselves on our dreams in the holding pattern of our way, to picture it through the form of life is qualitatively different or divergent as it is a question of what we do to maintain our loyalty, the process of our becoming bound. If through this questioning we realise the way of life and so the form of life is not befitting, then this disjunction is the becoming of a dark precursor to action that breaks the form to reveal what has never been. An emergent form of life from a chrysalis as the action is beyond what is is expected of the way of life handed down. It severs with the past, so makes any claim of the past on the future redundant. What would become the order of this arrangement? What would we do to demonstrate the loyalty presupposed is no longer a given? How would our actions differ, what difference would complicate everything, make life difficult, especially for those that presuppose the form of life will not change so as to maintain an order? These are questions we explore through the form of life and what Enterprise Good offers.

Can our economy social?

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Newspeak for the consumer

Can the economy be social when the existential of time is enframed as an economic good in order to secure it against the very relationality of this economy, that claims what the social is? How can the “social economy” as a term do justice to the aspirations of people, when the understanding of the economy, focuses on goods and services rather than the product of the form of life the market for our time produces? It is often touted as a way of framing “solutions” for issues that are non-for-profit. Yet if profit is always derivative profit, so monetary so completely disregards the originary or the benefit of the “existential arbitrage” our way of life entails, then solutions offered are the basis for managerialism pure and simple. It becomes a way of defining the aims of corporate social responsibility, that champions corporatism in all its varying guises. Responsibility here is to manage the effect of an entity in reference to the social it defines. And how does corporatism define the social? If its principle modus operandi is an opportunity defined by a market then the social is newspeak for the consumer, though the way the social is defined by CSR is always supplementary to this, even if it has the pretence to be otherwise. The stakeholder spruiked to replace the shareholder, is a way of saying there is interest to maintain the way of life never questioned so broaden the engagement from shareholders to stakeholders to allow “shared value creation” whereby competing interests are dealt with through what is shared in preserving the current way of doing things. So if the social is supplementary it is subordinate to the principal activity of seeking a return on the form of life presupposed for there to be such a thing as “responsibility”. We could say the ultimate responsibility of “corporate social responsible” is to maintain the form of life presupposed, as it is never the domain of questioning when the social they are responsible for is framed this way.