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Show 39 legal, the cultural, the communal, and the political. The questions driving this dissertation research are thus: 1) What are the networks of relations that produce and sustain the corporate subject? 2) What can the corporate subject teach us about rhetoric, argumentation, and philosophy? 3) What kind of subject is the corporation? Methodological Observances: Notes on Mapping the Corporate Subject To address these research questions, this dissertation will construct networks and assemblages that have produced corporate subjectivity. In doing so, I will identify numerous material-semiotic relations that give corporations force within legal, communal, and visual assemblages. This methodology encourages me to "muddle On one hand it is believed that writers, especially in the Humanities, can somehow "represent" their written subjectivity with words such as, "this author," "this researcher," or "I," which assumes subjectivity is a singular rather than multiple accomplishment. On the other hand it is expected that scientific writers must write objectively, without any subjective "interference" with data. This negates subjective becomings and encourages passive writing that literally and grammatically obscures the agent of action and assumes researchers are sovereign observers of the world. In both cases, academic research assumes a humanist subject. So how do we manage this complicated subjective situation? To reconcile this double bind, and simultaneously satisfy and transgress the Graduate School's violent apparatus, this multiple/networked/affective author thus softly bounces between various written subjectivities with the assumption subjectivity is an asignifying assemblage. This author has changed dramatically throughout the course of writing this dissertation and was never the same subject twice. Every object encountered while doing research on the corporate subject (including, but not limited to, articles, books, newspapers, photographs, videos, interviewees, museums, stadiums, suburban homes, computers, cellphones) has created new relations that have altered the subjective network of this researcher's assemblage. In other words, I have become-corporation despite the Graduate School's violent "order-words." As will be noted in later chapters, affect, understood as "a suspension of action-reaction circuits" that is a "state of passional suspension in which [the body] exists more outside of itself, more in the abstracted action of the impinging thing and the abstracted context of that action, than within itself" (Massumi, 2002, pp. 28, 31), is more forceful than words, reason, logos. Thus, even though this dissertation is written in the first person, the affective subjectivity of this author is an assemblage that is still becoming - . |
