Networks of corporate subjectivity: Southern Pacific, Rio Tinto, BP and the rhetorical emergence of the corporate subject

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82 fiercely packages them into human frameworks that tend to privilege wholeness, rationality, and inherent causality. The reductionist chooses which object-relations to analyze insofar as these objects support a rational hypothesis, which obviously excludes objects that appear irrational, fragmented, and ephemeral. This is a humanist move that implicitly preserves a Cartesian duality that separates humans from the rest of the world and privileges the human conception of rationality. In many ways, we can say that rhetorical critics have become masters of reduction that overlook interconnected components of rhetorical acts. Traditions of public sphere research, for instance, continue to contaminate critical potentials of rhetoric by reducing it to forms of representation16 rather than understanding rhetoric as a force within a specific assemblage of human and nonhuman objects. Alan Gross (2012), for example, recently attempted to reinstate the "lost" value of Habermas' (1991) public sphere in a recent anniversary of Habermas' Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in Argumentation and Advocacy. In making this idealist argument, Gross attacked critics such as Finnegan and Kang (2004), Kang and Finnegan (2013), DeLuca and Peeples (2002), and Watson (2013), while trying to move beyond the problematic assumptions of the public sphere. Indeed, Latour would say that the very act of isolating the public sphere - or the audience, speaker, or critic for that matter - is a symptom of modernity that privileges humans as experts of an unpurifiable purified world. Moreover, Latour's argument is an immediate challenge to the logic of 16 We should remember that logics of representation go back to logocentric traditions first outlined by Plato, who concluded that we only have representations of the ideal, where speech was first order, and writing was second order. Obviously, Derrida (1967/1998) demonstrated that the opposite was true and argued that speech is actually a supplement of writing, which displaced this logocentric system.