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Show 70 Corporations are also capable of motivating widespread social change, so long as critics understand the social as a human and nonhuman achievement. And third, theorizing about rhetorical subjectivity has the advantage of treating corporations as more than innate objects, but as relational actors that readily employ rhetorical strategies. For rhetorical critics, this has the benefit of putting our traditions of criticism to the test by asking what strategies are most effective within extra-human rhetorical situations. In other words, it offers the possibility of a whole new line of criticism that does more than reduce complicated, networked objects to a static text: it allows critics to determine the effectiveness of corporate rhetoric while repurposing our tools for criticism to meet emerging 21st-century challenges such as energy dependency, technological proliferations, and climate change. So far, however, most of our rhetorical analyses remain indebted to the rational behaviors of human subjects. Rather than continuing to ignore the general symmetry between human and nonhuman actants, it is time to expand our work by locating humans and our corporate counterparts within their local and global networks of social relations. In sum, the purpose of treating corporations as subjects is an essential component to rhetorical inquiries because it encourages critics to continue projects that displace the human subject and reconsider rhetorical encounters with nonhuman actors. Moreover, this nonhumanist philosophical orientation potentially puts us in a position to ask what kind of subject is this corporation. My hypothesis is that corporations are schizophrenic subjects, in the Deleuzian sense, that act as irrational desire-producing multiplicities that never have the same identity twice. To take on this theoretical overhaul, this chapter is organized in the following |
