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Show 13 risk out of democracy" with Manichean proselytizations and outright propaganda schemes that seemingly perform Harold Lasswell's (1938/2013) contention that "despondent" politicians must "bamboozle and seduce in the name of public good" and "preserve the majority convention but dictate to the majority!" (pp. 4-5). As pertinent as these conclusions may be to our political reality, they fail to address the complex networks that comprise corporate subjectivity and rely on oversimplified, outdated modes of thinking that assume subjects are singular, rational beings capable of surfing through political truths and lies in a moral sense, contrary to the argument made in Nietzsche's (1873/1982) essay, "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (emphasis added). Rhetoric and politics have entered a sea-change, and critics interested in understanding how corporations work are somehow in unfamiliar territory if stripped from the moral hammers and humanistic impulses used to make sense of corporate political action. The advent of corporate subjectivity, after all, is a rhetorical phenomenon that exceeds many of the lessons instructed by academic grandfathers, such as Jürgen Habermas (1991), who concluded in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that the public sphere must continue to advance the Enlightenment project of reasoned debate so that the bourgeois public can maintain "private autonomy" against the "mass media-dominated public sphere" (p. 216). Critical-rational debate, he said, is key to keeping business barons and private interests from refeudalizing the transformations of the public sphere with luring "plebiscitary agreements" that risk turning political arenas into a "staged or manipulated publicity" (p. 232). This neo-enlightened, universal pragmatic path to new, and hopefully better, historical transformations, though, has failed |
