Who we are. Who can be trusted. Who gets to speak in what spaces. Who exists. Corporate rhetorics answer these questions for both artificial and natural bodies.
And what is our resource for the preservation of the Constitution? Reason and argument? You might as well reason with the marble columns encircling them.
-Thomas Jefferson, to William Branch Giles, Monticello, December 26, 1825
When Jefferson says that we might as well be arguing with columns, he is saying that the capacity to argue about a document as important, complex, and sacred to most people is so difficult, that agency becomes limited enough that we have no more than the granite on the front of a building.
But as you’ll hear me argue in the book, those columns actually do persuade. On the first federal buildings—the Bank of the United States—they persuaded strolling Philadelphians that the government was strong (it was not), that its money was secure (its was not), and that it was transparent and republican in the tradition of ancient Greece and Rome (it was not). And such persuasion worked. Those columns are vessels for the agency of planners, architects, cartoonists, and even the citizens taking them in as they walk by. In other words, they are “material rhetorics,” but only so far as people have endowed them with meanings. Our hairier ancestors believed that the rocks were actually alive because of this: carving a rock into a persuasive body made it a living God and idol to be worshiped.
For the past three thousands years, we have made that capacity exceedingly complicated. We now, for good reason, protect these rocks (and much else in the environment) with laws and regulations with incredibly complex relationships and institutions. We also create complex groups with complex webs of agency to have this same God-like power. To “make corporate” is to give a body to an artificial entity—to make a metaphor of living entities to non-living entities, and then to put agency into them. Westerners pretended to get “civilized” to this through “reformation” and “enlightenment,” but it is still incorporation—hocus pocus—of some sort (hocus pocus being a vulgarizing of “Hoc est corpus meum,” or “Here is my body,” from the Words of Institution in the Lord’s Supper, making the non-body into a body for consumption).
With the modern environmental movement and recovery of older “logical” traditions we’re beginning to see differently. The environment needs just as much protection as corporations, so perhaps the wood and stone is just as meaningful and capable of persuasion as these fictional human entities. “Corporate personhood” has gone too far in endowing complexity and rights to limited types of corporation (profit-seeking and collective bargaining ones), beginning to actually rob us of a right Americans thought entirely fulfilled by the First Amendment: the right of being heard. Third, inequality is getting so bad that we now realize the “monsters” have been deemed “too big to fail,” that their voices have monopolized the government, and that little can be done to stop a CEO from making four hundred times what the hardest working person at a factory is making.
It’s not wise or rational in any way of conceiving of those terms, nor is it what those in power would have you believe: an escape from rhetoric.
Years of changes with money involved have just substituted some forms of speaking (realism and bureaucracy) for others (courtly and republican speech).
More complex organization means more diffuse agency within institutions—a mostly positive change for us all except that it makes responsibility difficult to find in a few cases.
And finally, we can remember older modes of agency that put meaning back into traditions, generational thinking, and circulation rather than forgetting the history that makes us human.
We have unlimited options. If the vampires are sucking the life from us, we can kill them and consider new ways of organizing. More likely, given our dependence on corporate power, we can “tame the beasts.” This appears hard because centuries of law, going back to the predominant timeframe of this book, have made the understandings of corporations so dry, so boring, and so convoluted that we are invited not to approach them. Even the best corporate lawyers throw up their hands. The earlier generations’ way to do this was to give the “monsters” more vivid life, often as women, in order that they could have their way with them. Today, we just need to understand it all as a broader process of rhetoric and agency.
