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Show 19 "meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility" (p. 169). To Foucault, then, the subject is always in relation with current modalities of knowledge and power; as such, subjectivity is individualized insofar as the forces of power consider the subject both productive of and conducive to the state's strategies for homogenization. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1966/1994) makes the important point that the human subject is a recent invention, and that the time may come where the subject is "erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (p. 387). Even though Foucault spent his entire academic career thinking through subjectivity, he unfortunately did not live long enough to discuss the possibility of corporations as subjects that have surpassed the episteme of the Classical Age of Man. He focused on human subjectivity not because he was a humanist, as some, such as Blair and Cooper (1987) would believe, but because his questions of power and knowledge involved human networks of relations. Foucault's philosophical orientation is a foundational theoretical component to this dissertation; however, his work does not provide enough tools to study how corporations function as rhetorical subjects of social change because corporations have redefined both the body and the mind that were central to Foucault's analyses. Yet, if we read Foucault as a cartographer, we can see that his work is the starting point for a networked orientation developed by Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. These philosophers provide what Foucault lacked: a vocabulary for understanding the human and nonhuman relations as they actually exist. In other words, they provide an ontological shift that sees the world as it is: an assemblage of forces, relations, and |
