On the Company's Bounded Sense of Social Obligation

The chapter that you are about to read routes through demise and expulsion, sweatshops and distressed ecologies, to say something about the harms, repressions, and tragedies that lurk in the recesses of corporate networks. It uncovers parts and existences that corporate costings repeatedly leave out, and that form into deposits and accumulations of neglect under the surfaces of law. A critical feature of these sub-surface deposits is that they are depleted in their ability to generate obligations, an effect traced to the company’s bounded and managerial mode of interaction with the world. The chapter problematises the length of time that some existences spend in this state of disregard; governance is struggling to look after existences at the far-flung reaches of corporate networks and assemblages. But time also marks out the chapter’s journey towards new methods for reaching under law’s sub-surfaces. These draw together critical thinking about law and governance with thinking about the ‘legacy’ of corporate organisations, human and non-human accumulations of scale that reach into ‘the geologic’.The chapter uses this notion of legacy and the geologic mode to give existential meaning and force back to forgotten existences, and to introduce a new formula for corporate obligation.