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Show 37 advocacy cannot be reduced to moralism. To do so is to act as a totalitarian, sovereign critic that limits our understanding of how rhetoric and social change work as forces.10 As Friedrich Nietzsche (1887/2010) argued in Genealogy of Morals, priestly morals fundamentally misunderstand the world and facilitate hateful resentement, while assuming humans are somehow sovereign subjects capable of playing God. In sum, critics must confront the fact that the advent of corporate subjectivity reveals that humanism no longer works as an orientation for rhetorical criticism. To address the general problematic of humanism and morality in the wake of the corporate personhood thesis, this doctoral dissertation rethinks rhetoric and social change to understand how corporations pragmatically build networks of corporate subjectivity. In particular, this researcher explores how corporations, as nonhuman, nonrational, networked actors, perform subjective agency in legal, communal, and visual assemblages to determine the limits and possibilities of rhetoric in a historical moment where humans are no longer the communicative masters of the world. It should be clear that this topic of research is significant because corporations, as subjects, have potentially ushered in an entirely new age of communication where rhetoric, politics, and social change are achievements no longer unique to human subjects. If reason and communication are believed to be exclusively the properties of humans, then rhetorical critics will continue to misunderstand how corporations work as rhetorical actors and agents of social change. As such, the topic of corporate subjectivity is substantial because it breaks the tenuous structures of humanism that on principle dismiss the possibility of nonhuman, multiple, 10 This point will be developed in Chapter 2 and throughout the remainder of this dissertation. |
