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Show 347 transnational scale. Previous research has importantly pushed the rhetoric of social protest to focus on how bodies are important sites of dissensus that can performatively interrupt dominant modes of discourse and become sites of resistance (Conquergood, 1998, 2002; DeLuca, 1999; Fenske, 2007; Middleton et al., 2011; Pezzullo, 2001; Tonn, 1996), and these scholars are right; but with the rhetorical emergence of the corporate subject, perhaps it is time that we rethink the body as something more than sentient flesh unique to humans. The body is a relationship, and following Deleuze (1962/2006), the body itself is defined by an incorporation, or an association, that holds forces together when in competition with other forces. I quote Deleuze at length in Nietzsche & Philosophy: There are nothing but quantities of force in mutual "relations of tension"…Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body - whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. This is why the body is always the fruit of chance, in the Nietzschean sense, and appears as the most "astonishing" thing, much more astonishing, in fact, than consciousness and spirit…Being composed of a plurality of irreducible forces the body is a multiple phenomenon, its unity is that of a multiple phenomenon, a "unity of domination." (p. 40). If we understand the body as a relational incorporation comprised of this "plurality of irreducible forces," then we can see that networks of corporate subjectivity are not only bodies, but they are bodies with rhetorical and argumentative potentiality that can become sites of resistance and becomings. The body, it turns out, is capable of more than we ever knew possible. These findings indicate that rhetorical perspectives rooted in humanism are incapable of understanding the communicative world we live in, and it violently excludes the possibility of other actants such as corporations, but also trees, offices, and animals |
