| OCR Text |
Show 15 Thus, while some may ask how Citizens United affects the status of our deliberative democracy and critical-rational debate in the "public sphere" (Bohman, 1997; Fraser, 1990; Goodnight, 1982; Gross, 2005, 2012; Habermas, 1991), this researcher asks how our corporate political landscape informs rhetorical critics about the philosophical concept of subjectivity and posthuman rhetoric. Returning to a version of Michel Foucault's question, "what is the subject," Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is an important point of confrontation for addressing a key obstacle that stands before thinking anew: humanism. To be a subject an actor must not necessarily be human, and even though many believe that Citizens United catered to corporate interests and rang the death knell of deliberative democracy, the Supreme Court actually employed a logic of humanism that assumed constitutional subjectivity is a matter of being a "person." The Court also made its "reasonable" decision on the evolutionary logic of stare decisis, which dates back to an "accidental" 1886 ruling that assumed corporations are persons entitled to constitutional <equality> in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Simply stated, the Court does not have a vocabulary to understand corporate subjects because corporations exceed their humanistic assumptions about what counts as a subject, and the failure to address the lingering problematic of humanism since 1886 is telling about the force of its philosophical orientation. Corporations are indeed created by humans, but they are also outright entities. As nonhuman creatures with no bodies, minds, or souls, corporations are subjects entitled to a host of constitutional rights. They have the right to free speech, including political, commercial and negative speech; the freedom of religion; the freedom from unreasonable |
