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Show 122 inscription, the ideograph is measured in terms of its force with other objects and encourages critics to determine its enrollment of allies that have helped it achieve stability. As such, it is evident that this position takes the ideograph beyond synchronic approaches assumed by Johnson (2007) and DeLuca (1999), because we are not only putting the observed ideograph in relation to other ideographs, but all the other objects of the world that have helped shape the network. The ideograph, after all, is an actant that is no more or less "real" than other objects such as trains, railway companies, and iron ore. As Latour (1984/1993) declares, "everything that is said of the signifier is right, but it must also be said of every other kind of [actant]. There is nothing special about language that allows it to be distinguished from the rest for any length of time" (pp. 184-185). In other words, Latour escapes the logic of representation that Johnson (2007) claims has compromised the ideograph. In sum, we can see that the ideograph is an irreducible force that goes through processes of translation when actors (e.g., critics) bring this actant into relation with other objects. It is an inscription, not a representation. This necessarily adjusts the ideograph to better realize how nonhuman actants, such as corporations, fit into this network without following structures of representation or assuming all rhetorical actions are necessarily linguistic and reasonable. The ideograph is a raw force that is singular in all of its relational encounters. However, this does not mean that certain actors do not garner powerful allies to marshal a particular objective when toggling over ideographs, because as Chua (1995) demonstrated, actants are still motivated by particular self-interests. To fully realize how this occurs from a corporate perspective, it is necessary to consider the ideograph as an irreducible, ontological force that escapes the grasps of humanism. |
