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Show 173 network of corporate community that naturalizes the visual disturbance in the Oquirrh Mountains and fortifies a corporate ethos of trust and good will. Rio Tinto's citizensubjectivity is etched into the stone of corporate community. This presence creates a hybridized network of country and city by the very design of this corporate community. Stone is the mark of something that has been removed from its natural environment for the benefit of society, particularly humans. Historically, stone has not always been regarded as mundane. In his book titled Stone, John Sallis (1994) explains that the beauty of stone has been an important object for philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, since its beauty offers a gateway to a unique aesthetic experience of art. Moreover, its detachment from earth to civilization, or from, we might say, country to city, is visual proof of the powerful relations that have turned mountains into copper. In the face of the ancient boundary stone one senses its way of belonging to that which it marks and bounds, a double relation to the earth that is possible only because the stone has been detached, has been shaped by human hands, has been stamped with the look of a certain human world…Stone can mark not only a boundary but also a former presence as in those self-images that nature prints in stone. (Sallis, 1994, pp. 8-9) In the 21st century, stones such as copper are different because machines, not humans, give them shape and render them so essential for modern communication technologies. It is quite something to consider the range of networks necessary to turn a natural resource as precious as copper into something so mundane and essential to everyday life. In a way, Rio Tinto builds relations with its community to remind publics how special copper is to our "techno-scientific second millennium" (Haraway, 1997) through places of corporate community that culturally educate subjects about the necessity of corporations to extract these resources. This strategy for governance is perhaps especially |
