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Show 6 As such, this researcher is led to believe that the stasis of the "corporate personhood" debate can only be overcome if critics approach this topic from a pragmatic perspective that asks how corporations have become so successful at rhetoric, politics, and argumentation, rather than a humanist orientation that imposes moral judgment unto the corporate subject for violating rational paradigms of rhetoric and argumentation. Moral outrage may be productive for rallying anticorporate social movements, but it is not enough to understand how corporations work as agents of social change because corporations exceed humanism, and its moral impetuses, and move both rhetoric and politics beyond the misleading lure of "intentions" when trying to understand rhetorical force. Humanism's sanctimonious devotions to reason, subjectivity, and morality have failed rhetorical criticism, and to chart this brave new world of "corporate personhood," criticism must leave humanism behind and begin to think differently about what counts as a subject. A new perspective is needed, and this dissertation offers a networked orientation to determine how corporations build relations, alliances, and networks within three particular assemblages that give corporations force: the legal arena, the community, and visual contexts. In doing so, this researcher is positioned as a cartographer who will create a panorama of corporate encounters that avoids reducing corporations to a structure of representation. To begin this project, this opening chapter introduces the corporate subject and accomplishes three tasks. First, it identifies the corporate personhood thesis as a theoretical problematic and discusses why the stasis of this debate matters to rhetoric, political communication, and continental philosophy. Next, it situates this complicated issue in three bodies of literature to demonstrate its contributions to |
