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Show 24 In the end, this researcher, or the Actor Network-Theorist (ANT), hopes to create a picture of sorts, or a map, that may inform researchers about how a particular network functions. To visualize Paris, Latour and Hermant create a "sociological opera," or a "panorama for adults," that sees Paris through a digital software program that allows users to encounter Paris one scene at a time. Paris, after all, is a network, and because this network is invisible from afar, Latour and Hermant engage in a creative art project that takes in the city fragment-by-fragment. Latour (2005/2007) has called this a "slowciology" because it is at times painfully slow to construct networks based only on encounters. This methodology gives a whole new articulation to what Michael Leff (1990) calls "close reading." In sum, attempting to visualize corporations, and their networks, all at once, with presuppositions about how their rhetoric and politics ought to work, within universal contexts, is a simple injustice that violently reduces corporations to a humanist structure of representation that fails to see how they actually work. Like the Derridean signifier, corporate subjects are both present and absent. They are present in that they are recognized by the Supreme Court as constitutional subjects, they are friendly neighborhood subjects in local communities, and use image events to stabilize or rupture social relations; yet, they are also absent in that they do not have organic bodies that stay in one place at once. They are networked across the world and they are always on the move. Corporate subjectivity, it seems, relies on a carefully managed politics of (in)visibility. The corporate subject's play of presence and absence is critical for understanding how networks sustain relations that have made corporations powerful, multiple rhetorical |
