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Show 74 Everyday objects - desks, chairs, lamps, books, pens - are actants, or subjects, that are capable of exerting force when they are brought into alliance through increased levels of association. These entities are plainly material. Their wholes cannot be reduced to their parts and a subject is not separate from its qualities.14 As Harman (2009) observes, "all features belong to the actor itself: a force utterly deployed in the world at any given moment, entirely characterized by its full set of features" (p. 14). Realizing that actors are defined by their relations is a starting point for understanding how corporate subjectivity is a matter of actor-networks. Corporations are subjects because they are actants that exert rhetorical force in the world. They live among various assemblages that have helped them achieve their rhetorical goals and objectives. In other words, they have very strong alliances among countless numbers of other objects that have become part of their rhetorical associations. It is indisputable that they are part of our everyday lives. They are on our t-shirts, in our cellphones, and on our computers. While their omnipresent logos have become familiar objects in our quotidian affairs, the full scope of their networks - spawned from earth to billboard to personal computer - is a bit more difficult to fathom. Where exactly is the corporation located? Corporations are networks of forces and relations. While cooperative networks of people created the concept of the corporation, corporations have since taken on lives of their own, meaning the corporation, as a network, is an object that exerts rhetorical force in the world. Natural resource corporations such as Exxon Mobile, British Petroleum, and 14 Harman (2009) goes to great measures to point out that Latour's objects should not be confused with Aristotle's notion of "substance," where an object's substance is distinct from its own qualities and relations. Conflating substance with object is problematic for Latour because it would assume a more true representation of the object, which to him is blasphemy, since objects are defined only by their relations. |
