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Show 25 actors. It also necessarily shifts assumptions about rhetoric away from the enticements of humanism that assume subjects are singular, human, rational actors that compel action through reason. Corporate subjects do not recognize reason; only force. And although they may not have sentient bodies or consciousnesses, they are nonetheless subjects intricately connected with various assemblages that give them force. As such, rhetorical critics must recognize the failures of humanism and begin to reconstruct our 21st century actor-networks in an age of communication dominated by corporate, rather than human actors. Indeed, corporate networks are so powerful that as the Anthropocene advances, it is an era dominated by industries rather than humans. The implications of understanding the subject as one belonging to multiple and ever-changing relations is important to contemporary understandings of rhetoric because the act of research becomes a process of assembling social relations from fragments and encounters rather than reducing objects, and rhetoric itself, to a form of representation. Corporations are assemblages that are always becoming. Understanding the corporation as a multiple, networked subject allows this cartographer to map events, relations, and alliances that corporate subjects use to exert rhetorical force and evoke social change within the assemblages that keep them alive. This necessarily overcomes the humanist assumption that subjects are singular, rational substances defined by their capacity to reason. Connections with the Rhetorical Subject A networked approach to subjectivity is useful for studying the rhetorical forces of corporations, and it also contributes to important conversations within the field of communication that have grappled with the rhetorical subject for the past few decades. |
