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

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259 Reflections on No Logo in the Context of Corporate Subjectivity Logos are quintessential to the visual corporate subject because they establish public relations27 within various assemblages that forcefully construct corporate identities and personas. The visual corporate subject is traceable in nearly every corner of civilization. Corporate logos are present on clothing, food and drink labels, and public screens (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). Corporations have even branded the human genome (Fortun, 2008; Koepsell, 2009). To begin to understand the rhetorical effects of these images, it is necessary to consider the work of Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein's international bestselling book No Logo is foundational for understanding the logo. Klein argues that corporations, and their logos, have penetrated nearly every corner of public and individual space with infinite webs of corporate control, and this has left publics with "no space" for democratic practice, "no choice" for alternative thinking, and "no jobs" for many North American workers. To her, corporate obsessions with branding techniques have insidiously inflated consumer prices while increasing divestment strategies, proliferating cheap, unfair labor in the United States and abroad, stifling free speech with censorship laws, and infiltrating governments, social movements, and schools. Klein supports these arguments with countless examples that all indicate there has been a shift in late-capitalism, which has created "a new kind of 27 Public relations, in this sense, does not mean what readers may think. While classicists such as Lee and Bernays defined it as "a management function, which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures, an interests of an organization…followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance" (in Ahmad, 2012, p. 182), this understanding is problematic because it assumes corporate subjects control their message. This, however, is an impossibility because communication is always an accidental relation of dissemination, not dialogue (see DeLuca, 1999; Peters, 1999). Public relations here, simply means that corporate subjects build relations with publics to build alliances and expand their network of subjectivity.