| OCR Text |
Show 273 Pictures Want?, images have agency. And while humans tend to evaluate them from a consumer perspective, images nonetheless have unique qualities that exceed consumerist intelligibilities, for they have been idolized, fetishized, and totemized. Although corporations are not subjects in the flesh, images still produce personalities through affective relations built with audiences. This is why the corporate persona is unique to logos. Altogether, this theoretical section has argued that logos are image events, they are argumentative, and their affective forces may produce corporate personas. Logos are networks that visually articulate the corporate subject as objects of desire and because affect exceeds reason, visual corporate subjects cannot be pinned as a rational actor. Logos compete with other image events from other corporations, social protesters, and news reporters for argumentative force on visual planes of consistency. Words are not needed to convey argumentative force or to read their becoming. Corporate image events are agents all by themselves and they are critically important to the corporate subject's networks of subjectivity. It is still true that corporations cannot bleed, eat, drink, and defecate. They remain abstractions. These abstractions, though, are both present and absent, much like the Derridean signifier.30 Corporations are made real by the relations that give them force, 30 It is worth noting, especially in the margins, that the visual presence of corporate subjects gives a whole new meaning to the concept of logocentrism. To Derrida (1989), logocentricism is a hierarchical domain of knowledge that assumes words and language are fundamental expressions of meaning. This goes all the way back to Plato's dialogues, which assumed the spoken word (logos) was a means for producing reasoned discourse through the presence of its dialogic speech. We are now in a new age of communication where humans are no longer the primary rhetorical and argumentative actors on the planet Earth. Consequently, we are also in a new moment of logocentrism where the logo |
