Networks of corporate subjectivity: Southern Pacific, Rio Tinto, BP and the rhetorical emergence of the corporate subject

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23 Networks, though, are not always visible. At least not from a distance. As Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998/2006) explain in "Paris, Invisible City," networks can only be encountered as fragments, in bits and pieces, never all at once. To do otherwise is to impose a theory of society (such as "the public sphere") onto an Aristotelian substance without actually listening to the objects that have constructed the network. This requires researchers to become cartographers who dutifully map the empirical relations that constitute what is called the social. Rather than beginning criticism with preconceived notions about what the social already looks like, cartographers are led by the motions of objects in relation to configure how they create networks that do things in the world. Cartographers follow networks. To understand events such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission from standpoints that presuppose a representation of the social is a failure to listen, and trace, what corporations do to make their subjectivity work as an assemblage. In "Paris, Invisible City," Latour and Hermant (1998/2006) state, One only needs to follow these humble mediators, these despised intermediaries, to find the chains through which the dead holds the living….We think we live in a stable and constant world and have difficulty remembering the work needed to stabilize those constants. Here again, we need to replace the full by the empty, the continuous by the discontinuous, surfaces by fine networks, the given by the obtained, the inert by the active, the cold by the hot, the real by the virtual. We don't live in disciplined and regulated societies, in which only individuals add their little margin of disobedience and unruliness. We live among irreducible entities bound by no particular measure - except, sometimes, the fine line of a costly standardization whose luminous course makes their trails easy to track. As in those amusing Gestalt drawings where children look for a hidden object, there's a sudden inversion of form and content. (p. 80) Following networks thus begins research without assuming society ought to function in a certain way. Said otherwise, it avoids assuming that the social operates on some structure of verticality, as a representation of something else. Rather, the world is flat, and both Deleuze and Latour offer tools for discovering the world as it functions pragmatically.