Part 5: A View to a Kill? Counter Accounting and the Potential to Leverage Violence for Change

David Yates - Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Management School, University of Sheffield

Capitalism fully accounts for the pleasure principle in its attempts to cater for the consumer’s desire to avoid pain, and too, avoid the consideration of pain, exploitation and suffering of others. Marketing processes are set up to exploit this, tapping into both symbolic and imaginary orders of the subject in order to cultivate desire for products and services by integrating them with subjective identities. Packaging and advertisements hide the means by which the products that they market are produced. Images of rolling hills, fields full of crops and the sun rising over idyllic scenes shield the consumer from often poor conditions in which livestock live, or the enormous amounts of waste that are produced.

Slavoj Zizek, in his 2008 book Violence provides a typically subject-orientated ontological view on violence, postulating a typology of violence in three forms:

• Systemic: that which ‘hides behind the curtain’ of ideology, married to the symbolic and imaginary orders and therefore is accepted and that it cannot be easily ascribed to a single, particularisable, and visible perpetrator.

• Symbolic: that contained within language and accounting for the other, derived from the reductionist nature of language, our capacity to use it, and the multiple meanings and interpretations associated with the ‘languaging’ of the physical and social realm.

• Subjective: violence easily ascribable to a perpetrator as the source, the initiator of the violent act, e.g. a protestor throwing a brick at a line of police officers.

The question then arises as to how to not only raise awareness of such suffering and exploitation that is present within our consumptive lifestyles, but also how this can be mobilised to have meaningful, material effects that promote a more socially just, less exploitative mode of being for all. In essence, utilising Zizek’s typology, how can the ‘curtain’ of both symbolic and imaginary elements that hides violence be pulled back, to reveal not only the violence behind our ideologically constructed existence (one based on consumption and desire), but connect with the viewing subject on a level that prompts a change in behaviour and action (essentially subjectivising such violence that was previously an unseen component of systemic practices associated with production and reconnecting them to consumption).

Enter Counter Accounting

Counter accounting is a practice by which mainstream narratives and accounts are challenged, where another account of the same underlying activity is given. The need for counter accounts relates to the inability of one particular account to fully represent the ‘Real’ of what it claims to account for. This can be for a multitude of reasons, for example (inter alia), the limitation of the linguistic and symbolic form that the account takes, or, in some cases, deliberate omission and underrepresentation of undesirable elements in the phenomena being accounted for. For example, a balance sheet (an element of mainstream accounting) is linguistically and symbolically designed to show the shareholder’s wealth in a particular organisation, but cannot account for the means by which that wealth was acquired, nor political and social issues that were encountered along the way. Other, arguably more extreme forms of manipulation involve misinformation, misdirection, greenwashing and gaslighting through dominant narratives that seek to promote vested interests and maintain the status quo, along with the systemic violence that is associated with it.

Counter accounts can take many forms. For example, video footage has been utilised extensively in activists attempts to expose illegal or unethical practices in a variety of industries. Action by pressure groups and activists itself forms accounts and raises awareness of issues, for example work carried out by Greenpeace highlighting the damaging effects of fossil fuel production and consumption. More formal counter accounts can be formulated following research by both citizen scientists and institutional actors (for example, the pressure group Independent Sage during the pandemic), and then raised to offer alternative narratives and challenge irresponsible behaviour.

The question that follows then is how effective counter accounts are in influencing productive and consumptive practices, in order to promote a more socially and environmentally just society? A recent paper considered whether counter accounting practices can promote the level of change that they have previously been ascribed to within academic research, challenging established narratives of counter accounting practices possessing ‘emancipatory potential’. Extant academic perspectives have been accused of overselling the potential for counter accounts to achieve this on scales large enough to effect material change, with the term ‘emancipatory’ or ‘emancipation’ proving contentious for those who desire more radical change as opposed to that which simply proposes comparatively moderate reform of extant systems, and not addressing the fundamental issue at the heart of the unjust practices (capitalism itself). An example of this (continuing the theme of mass animal and meat production) could be the case of Agriprocessors Inc. where a PETA-led investigation unearthed graphic and illegal animal cruelty involved in the slaughter of cattle. Despite this, and following the winding up of the company in 2008, the new operator of the plant was in trouble not long afterwards, this time for inhumane behaviour of workers toward poultry birds.

So what potential do counter accounts have in enacting positive change? Here I’d like to argue that counter accounts are able to enact change when they possess two key elements:

• They work at the subject level of social aggregation (i.e. individuals and small groups),

• They expose violence in an unadulterated, unmediated (as possible) form.

Utilising Zizek’s framework for violence to explain this, counter accounts with the two characteristics mentioned above are able to penetrate not only the image-heavy imaginary world in which we are subjected to (as espoused within marketing practices) but also, the symbolic, engrained belief systems that fortify extant practices against scrutiny and change. Hence the need for discomfort, the collapse of these two orders (symbolic and imaginary) provokes change at a subject level, invoking the pain and suffering and potentially tying it to the consumptive activity to which it links. Essentially, previously masked, systemic violence is forced into the realm of the subject, both through perpetrator and viewing subject (consumer).

The issue with the above operation of course is how to scale up for change on a level that can have positive, material effects? Individual changes in behaviour, beneficial as they may be are not enough to address the grand challenges that the world currently faces. However, with the continued exposure of violence associated with production and consumption, through counter accounting, and on an increasing scale, there exists some potential to challenge this. Even if this originates from smaller ‘acorns’ of support and change, the potential for growth and eventually, larger challenge to the violence associated with production (and consumption-intensive lifestyles) can manifest. The question is, with an increasing fragile ecological and sociological environment, do we have the time to let such acorns grow into the mighty oaks that are required for material, large-scale change?