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Show 325 they are some of the most prominent actors of our current communicative epoch. They get political candidates elected. They contribute to the warming of our planet. They are more powerful than many countries, and engage in violent affairs. Corporations deserve academic attention from continental perspectives. As we have seen, a networked orientation enables critics to study the forces of corporate actions from nonhumanist perspectives while also avoiding impositions of social, rhetorical, and moral frameworks onto the corporation. It was necessary to adopt new tools because the concept of the corporation exceeds reason, rationality, and humanism in general. This is why we turned to Bruno Latour. His philosophical orientation is uniquely well suited to our argument purpose because it is grounded in a nonhumanist ontology that accounts for the actions and consequences of nonhuman actors. Latour's world is flat, and it is comprised of objects that do not possess pre-ordained functions. They come alive only by their relations, and each moment of relation is called an event. From this networked orientation, actants - or what we have considered subjects - are no different from their relations. An actor/actant/subject is its relations. The implications of this metaphysic are important for this research because they assume that consciousness and bodies do not define subjectivity. Subjectivity is purely a relational force. A subject, or actant, is always part of a network of relations. Therefore, subjects are not singular, holistic, or human; they are objects that come alive through the connections and relations that they establish to give them force. Consequently, they are constantly on the move and cannot be pinned by fictional structures of representation created by the human subject. Corporations are never fully present, so it is a simple impossibility to capture, or represent corporate subjects with one photograph, one social theory, or one swoop of the |
