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Show 17 then moves into a discussion about the uses of Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze's new materialist ontology for understanding how corporations have emerged as rhetorical and argumentative subjects. Poststructural Perspectives: The Case for a Networked Orientation The concept of subjectivity has its own history, and this researcher could run through how some of the great philosophical thinkers since the Enlightenment - Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze - have comprehended this term to demonstrate that the debate over what counts as a subject is far from settled; however, at least since, if not before, Derrida's (1966/1993) lecture La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines, at Johns Hopkins University, it has largely been assumed, at least within poststructural currents, that subjects are no longer rational actors with full intentionality. The subject is a trace, an epistemic invention, an element of articulation, an assemblage… Unfortunately, poststructural philosophers and communication researchers have undertheorized or failed to predict the recent emergence of corporations-as-subjects. To fill this gap in research, this dissertation hopes to better understand how corporations function as possible rhetorical actors and agents of social change. This may also better inform us about our own [human] subjectivities and the society in which we live since corporations, with no human bodies and no souls, are the perfect models for pushing forward poststructural commitments that assume subjectivity is a decentered accomplishment. Critics have many tools for this endeavor. It can be understood that subjectivity is a trace that is never stabilized (Derrida, 1982), a retreating social invention (Foucault, |
