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Show 271 persona (Black, 1970), is quite literally the personal image of the corporation that emerges from its multiple roles in public, private, and technical arenas of discourse. Black (1970) once explained that rhetorical critics encounter an author's second persona when doing criticism. To him, the second persona is the implied audience of a rhetorical artifact, and it allows critics to judge the text's moral character. In later years, Phillip Wander (1984) declared that the there is also a third persona in rhetorical criticism, which is the ideological audience implied, but negated, by the rhetor, and Morris (2002) developed the fourth persona to conceptualize a silenced, but implied auditor, especially one that is sexually marginalized, that simultaneously manages two ideological positions, "one that mirrors the dupes and another that implies, via the wink, an ideology of difference" (p. 230). While Black and Wander assume persona is a moral accomplishment unique to singular, rational, human subjects, Morris presumes subjectivity is still an ideological accomplishment that "mirrors dupes" to "pass" in a heteronormative society, especially during the 1930s when J. Edgar Hoover attempted to control acceptable standards of masculinity. I argue that personas can be multiple, irrational, and nonhuman. It is not ideological, and it is not a duality between dupes and herrings. Persona is a networked accomplishment that is multiple. It is under constant transformation along a plane of consistency as it acts and reacts to countless rhetorical situations. A persona is an affective relation that is not reducible to moral characteristics. Moral character is just one possible outcome of this multiple persona, and it is not even the most prominent personified force. The corporate subject teaches humans that persona is a schizophrenia, a performance, a networked, affective becoming. Understanding persona as a multiplicity, then, encourages rhetorical cartographers to map affective |
