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Show 100 freeways, and choose instead to walk through a tiny path not much wider than a donkey's trail. (p. 171) We have also observed that Latour's philosophy can be generally recognized as poststructural, though with reservations. As John Law (2008) notes, actor network theory can be understood as "an empirical version of poststructuralism" that is quite similar to Michel Foucault's analyses of discourses, or epistemes, because like Foucault, Laotur invites critics to study the "strategic, relational, and productive character of particular, smaller-scale, heterogeneous actor networks" (p. 145). Latour's networks are also not far removed from Deleuze and Guattari's (1980/1987) nomadic philosophy that recognizes no borders between disciplines and does not reduce texts to imaginary representations or abstract concepts. Indeed, if it were not for the clumpy title, Latour (1999) would prefer "actant rhizome-ontology" to "actor-networks." John Law (2004) has even argued that there is very little difference between Deleuze's concept of agencement (or "assemblage") and Latour's "actor network." Latour's poststructural philosophy has the potential to radicalize our field by observing no borders between disciplines and stripping researchers of their humanist predispositions. We might call these rhetorical transformations "networked rhetoric." Nonetheless, rhetoric is now more of a "radical possibility" than Biesecker (1989, p. 111) had imagined, since we are now capable of reassembling our entire object-oriented world. In many ways, Latour picks up where Derrida left off by equipping researching with tools for reconstructing an ontology from the ruins of deconstruction. The following chapter analyzes the legal assemblage of corporate subjectivity. Whereas Chapter 1 discussed a few consequences of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), it also mentioned that the precedent for the corporate personhood |
