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Show 22 immanent process that must remain "open and populous" to allow "signs and concepts to become ‘recognized'" (Lambert, 2014, p. 4) without being transcendentalized. Recognizing subjectivity as a pragmatic relation, rather than a consciousness, a sentient body, or the capacity to reason, pushes critics to withdraw humanist assumptions that have impaired our thinking about how rhetoric functions. Humanism, to put it bluntly, has stunted rhetorical traditions because it restricts critics to pre-assembled objects of study that assume human rationality is the centerpiece of subjectivity. Moreover, an unproblematized anthropocentric orientation lures critics into assuming human subjectivity is comprised of singular, reasonable, and civil behaviors. While decades of postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers have necessarily deconstructed the human subject, critics and theorists have since stalled in taking this thinking to the next level in attempting to reconsider how nonhuman forces have assembled new forms of agency. Comprehending the corporate subject from a networked orientation is useful because it encourages researchers to track the actions and consequences of corporations as reticulate entities without imposing humanistic assumptions about rhetoric and reason during criticism. From this perspective, critics are positioned as cartographers charged with mapping complicated relationships between human and nonhuman forces. This interdisciplinary, "cosmopolitical" (Latour, 2005/2007, p. 262) viewpoint observes no distinctions between nature and culture, and moreover, recognizes the ontological associations of human and nonhuman actor-networks (see Latour, 1984/1988) to determine how corporate subjects build or rupture relations within various assemblages that give them force. |
