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Show 26 Indeed, numerous communication researchers have studied the rhetorical production of subjectivity, but few are willing to jettison humanism and understand how nonhuman actors become subjectivized through a relational ontology. An exception to this is a growing trend in environmental communication and philosophy and rhetoric that has studied how nonhuman actors such as Orangutans (Sowards, 2006), wolves (Seegert, 2014a, 2014b), and other "creatures" (Davis, 2011) exhibit rhetorical agency (see Kennedy, 1998; Rogers, 1998). Nonetheless, academics have yet to study how corporations are rhetorical subjects from nonorganizational perspectives, and this author wishes to advance foundational research from folks like McGee (1975, 1990) and Charland (1987) who have opened doors for understanding corporations as subjects by assuming the subject is a fragmented rhetorical production that is never fully present. In doing so, this researcher hopes to test the constitutive (Charland, 1987), articulatory (DeLuca, 1999b), and immanent (McHendry et al., 2014; Middleton et al, 2011)3 capacity of rhetoric to produce and stabilize corporations as rhetorical subjects. Starting with McGee (1975) and Charland (1987), subjectivity has been largely understood as a discursive process of interpellation that creates publics, social movements, and individuals. This work influenced academics like McGee (1990), 3 This review of literature decidedly omits research done in organizational communication. Although there are many opportunities for researching the rhetorical dynamics of incorporated organizations, such a study would perform a theoretical contradiction for this particular project because organizational communication typically assumes corporations are coherent organizations before they are rhetorical subjects defined by their relations. To assume corporations are organizations is thus to employ what Latour (1984/1993) calls a "reduction," and this would fundamentally misunderstand how corporations work as subjective assemblages. It would also kill rhetoric by diluting corporate forces to imperatives about how organizations function scientifically. |
