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Show 65 CHAPTER 2 NETOWORKS OF CORPORATE SUBJECTIVITY: A THEORETICAL EXPOSÉ OF RHETORIC AND SUBJECTIVITY IN A POSTHUMAN EPOCH "‘Communication' is a registry of modern longings. The term evokes a utopia where nothing is misunderstood, hearts are open, and expression is uninhibited. Desire being most intense when the object is absent, longings for communication also index a deep sense of dereliction in social relationships...Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried about ‘communicating' as if they were thousands of miles apart…There are no sure signs in communication, only hints and guesses. Our interaction will never be a meeting of cogitos but at its best may be a dance in which we sometimes touch. Instead of being an unbearable problem of lonely minds and ghostly apparitions, communication should be measured by the successful coordination of behaviors." - John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air, pp. 2, 268 "When I describe Pasteur's domestication of microbes, I am mobilizing nineteenthcentury society, not just the semiotics of a great man's texts; when I describe the invention-discovery of brain peptides, I am really talking about the peptides themselves, not simply their representation in Professor Guillemin's laboratory. Yet rhetoric, textual strategies, writing, staging, semiotics - all these are really at stake, but in a new form that has a simultaneous impact on the nature of things and on the social context, while it is not reducible to the one or the other…To go back a few steps: we have to rethink the definition of modernity, interpret the symptoms of postmodernity, and understand why we are no longer committed heart and soul to the double task of domination and emancipation. To make a place for the networks of sciences and technologies, do we really have to move heaven and earth? Yes, exactly, the Heavens and the Earth" - Bruno Latour, We Were Never Modern, pp. 5, 10 It is quite evident that corporations have emerged as the most prominent political actors on the planet, and both social protestors and academics have bemoaned the loss of the nation-state (Hardt & Negri, 2000) and the democratic public participation that is believed to have come with it (Boggs, 2000). In the United States, industries set budget |
