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

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112 the 19th century when publics, litigants, and political stakeholders were debating about how to interpret the Reconstruction Amendments during a time when industrial actors were redefining the concept of progress through westward expansion. Although the Reconstruction Amendments may have been intended to unify a war torn nation and protect freed black slaves from social and economic inequalities in the South, post-war industrial actors, particularly railroad companies, were able to marshal their vision of industrial progress by demonstrating to the world that they were also constitutional subjects struggling for equality. This fact demonstrates that rhetoric is an extra-human achievement and that communication cannot be understood in a vacuum. Even though the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments may have intended to protect marginalized post-war human subjects, the constitutional corporate subject demonstrates that communicative intentionality is a humanistic myth, even within the SCOTUS. If nonhuman railway companies can achieve constitutional equality with networks, not reasons, then it seems the very concept of <equality>21 must be revisited from a nonhumanist, networked orientation. This chapter maps the rhetorical strategies railway companies used to secure 21 The concept of equality, as an ideograph (Condit & Lucaites, 1991, 1993; McGee, 1980a) has been a centerpiece of rhetorical criticism for a number of years. From an Isocratean perspective, Condit and Lucaites (1993) trace the diachronic formations of equality during pivotal moments of American history such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Separate But Equal era, and the "new equalities" garnered in the 1960s. This beautifully written and impressively researched book is a touchstone for any rhetorical scholar in our discipline because it not only grounds American political thought in rhetorical studies, but it does so in such a way that grapples with the historic tensions, confrontations, and even contradictions that political stakeholders encountered when shaping the meaning of this polysemic term throughout various rhetorical situations. Fernando Delgado (1995, 1999) has also dedicated research to the ideograph of equality in the context of the Chicano movement and Cuban post-revolutionary identity.