How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood

A Networked Approach to Rhetorical Culture and Corporate Subjectivity

Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 with the purpose of extending equal protection to former slaves in the American South. While the Thirteenth Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation formally freed men, women, and children shackled to the bondages of slavery, more measures were needed to secure their equal rights as citizens of this postwar nation. With the intention of fulfilling these duties, the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment states that actions of states and local officials must adhere to federal standards of governance, especially when considering questions of citizenship and due process of the law.

The Reconstruction Amendments posed dramatic challenges for Southern states now forced to adhere to federal standards of equality. Particularly, the equal protection clause of this section, which declared that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws,” was an attempt to boldly confront Southern heritages of slavery and integrate these states into the Union. Cases such as Santa Clara exceeded this intentionality by testing the limits of the Fourteenth Amendment as a protective measure only for African American subjects. SP was not alone in this endeavor, as numerous other corporations, especially railroad companies, sought to use the Fourteenth Amendment as a shield against state and federal regulation. According to legal historian Eben Moglen, “From the moment the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, lawyers from corporations—particularly railroad companies—wanted to use that Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection to make sure that the states didn’t unequally treat corporations” (quoted in Totenberg, 2014, para. 14). In fact, out of the 150 post-Civil War Supreme Court cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment prior to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 135 of them involved corporations attempting to “free” themselves from state regulations (Hammerstrom, 2002).

Even though the SCOTUS did not rule on the Fourteenth Amendment in Santa Clara, corporate personhood was ossified as precedent in later decisions, such as Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888) and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), and even in cases where the SCOTUS decided the Constitution did not limit state power to regulate corporations as they saw fit (e.g., Northwestern Nat. Life Ins. Co. v. Riggs, 1906). While some legal analysts continued to support the grant theory outlined by Justice Marshall in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), which restricted corporations to special privileges under state control, others believed this theory was outmoded and needed to be replaced with a natural entity theory that supported a broader interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to include corporations and account for how social change, culture, and politics affect interpretations of the law.

To understand how SP broadened interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, we must account for the wider rhetorical culture that it cultivated prior to Santa Clara and other test cases to determine how the SCOTUS so seamlessly extended equal protection to corporations. To do this, I draw from, and extend, the work of Hasian et al. (1996) who understand rhetorical culture as the ways in which the law is made publicly meaningful through available rhetorical tools. In their words, rhetorical culture is “the range of linguistic usages available to those who would address a historically particular audience as a public,” which includes a full range of rhetorical and argumentative resources such as, “allusions, aphorisms, analogies, characterizations, ideographs, images, myths, narratives, and commonplace argumentative forms” that “demarcate the symbolic boundaries within which public advocates find themselves flexibly constrained to operate” (Hasian et al., pp. 326–327).

While the discursive aspects of rhetorical culture usefully highlight how legal interpreters make sense of the law using extant linguistic rhetorical resources, they also tend to overlook the material dimensions of rhetoric that give texture to these cultures in certain times and places. Rhetorical culture, I hold, is more than discursive talk; it is a network of material and semiotic sensibilities that create relational webs of influence and force. As an intersectional term that includes both the discursive and extra-discursive modalities of rhetorical living, networked rhetorical culture is a way of emphasizing what Pfister (2014) calls the “networked sensibilities” of public life that give form to interpretations, opinions, and meanings of the law. Given the way that corporate personhood emerged from the semblance of linguistic and extralinguistic shifts throughout the latter half of the 19th century, a networked approach to rhetorical culture is warranted as a way to trace the subjective agency of SP and the materiality of its rhetorical networks.

This networked orientation to rhetorical culture resembles what Bruno Latour has called actor-network theory (ANT). To Latour, ANT is a process of assembling material-semiotic networks comprised of heterogeneous objects to understand how certain interactions succeed or fail. Latour’s concept of actors/actants is central to the network-making process. Actors/actants refers to human and nonhuman agents that create networks within the material-semiotic compositions of the world (see Latour, 2010). As such, Latour maintains that there is no difference in ability between technology, humans, and nonhumans to produce relations and build alliances through their actions.

To John Law (2008), ANT is a collection of “material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located” (p. 141). This interdisciplinary, “cosmopolitical” (Latour, 2007, p. 262) viewpoint observes no difference between nature and culture; moreover, it recognizes the ontological associations of human and nonhuman actor-networks (Latour, 1993).

SP created powerful alliances with environmental preservationists, publics, lawyers, judges, and racialized subjects to expand the boundaries of the Fourteenth Amendment to include not just postwar human subjects but also corporations, who were fighting their own battles against state “prejudices.” Through these material-semiotic networks and alliances, SP showed that corporations exceeded state authority by attaining powerful agency in political, cultural, legal, and social arenas. Effectually, SP shaped a networked rhetorical culture where the idea of corporations as constitutional subjects, or “persons,” was a taken-for-granted assumption for the SCOTUS.

While the term corporate person was not widely circulated throughout public culture as a metaphor or ideograph, it was nonetheless a felt cultural assumption—as evidenced by the headnote in Santa Clara—because of the nonlinguistic, cultural shifts that had occurred throughout the land. ¹ To understand how the networked rhetorical culture of the time shaped the SCOTUS’s opinion, critics must take into account the full range of discursive and extradiscursive networks that facilitated this interpretive transition. Doing so not only provides a fuller rhetorical context of corporate personhood, but it also equips rhetorical critics with a language for studying how corporations function subjectively as networks and forces.

Studying the law from a networked rhetorical perspective involves accounting for the material forces and rhetorical cultures that shape legal interpretations and the law itself. This understanding of legal discourse involves a process of collecting and assembling human and nonhuman elements that have helped shape legal judgments. Indeed, this requires tremendous efforts to organize and translate objects other than majority and dissenting opinions, since extralegal discourses and rhetorical cultures cannot be separated from deliberative arguments produced by adjudicators. Like science, the law is not “free of war and politics” (Latour, 1993, p. 8).

While this perspective on networked rhetorical culture is informed by ANT, it also makes a critical departure when it comes to agency. Whereas Latour attempts to build an expanded conception of agency by linking subjects and objects with networks that agency depends upon, agency, I argue, is also a product of all of these relations that produce an abstract singularity. In other words, networks are outright rhetorical actors, and oftentimes with personae, that exceed the mere sum of their parts. SP, for instance, existed as a singular subject in the abstract through the mobilization of its profuse objects. All of the actors/actants that comprise this vast corporate network (e.g., trains, politicians, environmentalists, forests, immigrants) have agency the way that Latour discusses, but in the context of SP’s network, they also serve SP’s rhetorical motivations as extensions of its subjectivity.

Corporate subjectivity is a useful concept for understanding how corporations express subjective agency as networked rhetorical actors within rhetorical cultures—or more generally, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call assemblages—that give them force. The SCOTUS’s corporate personhood thesis, for instance, gave corporations legal standing as “persons” with constitutional prerogatives, but as evident by SP well before Santa Clara, corporations already had agency as subjects throughout the United States. Corporate personhood just added to their subjective network by granting them constitutional prerogatives.

Rhetoric becomes the tie that binds argument assemblages, or actor-networks, to achieve particular objectives. It is a force found at the nexus of social, political, and cultural milieus that shapes material discourses and constitutes or articulates human and nonhuman subjects. Corporate personhood is a testament to rhetoric’s profound possibilities. Rhetoric, after all, transmuted an abstraction once considered a special privilege granted by the state into a constitutional person with legal rights.

Altogether, this section has argued for a networked approach to rhetorical culture that accounts for the rhetorical agency of corporate subjects and their extradiscursive networks and forces to provide a fuller account of rhetorical cultures of the law. Adapting Latour to the rhetorical study of corporations’ subjectivity, I conceive corporations as actor-networks that express agency through all of the heterogeneous objects, relations, and spokespersons that advance the motivations of the network in its singularity (e.g., lobbyists, politicians, or other spokespersons working on behalf of the “SP” network). This networked perspective complements Hasian et al.’s (1996) notion of rhetorical culture by considering entire actor-networks rhetorical subjects capable of shaping rhetorical cultures that affect the law. As I show later, SP was a powerful rhetorical actor with argumentative voice and agency even though it was irreducible to a singular human subject that was beyond the modern scope of the law.

In what follows, I study how SP gained a more robust alliance with the law by changing the links between legal, material, economic, and social practices that gave form to a new rhetorical culture where “trains” became “people” in the eyes of the SCOTUS. I then conclude with a discussion about the possibilities for recognizing the legal standing, and legal infringements, of other nonhumans in an age of networks.

The Actor-Networks of SP

After merging with the Central Pacific (CP) on October 12, 1870, SP became a deeply motivated and highly efficient rhetorical actor that literally moved mountains to turn the American West into an ideal place of nature that welcomed development and tourism. Holding huge swaths of land and federal bonds from the U.S. General Land Office under the Pacific Railway Act, SP had the motivation and the resources to turn the West into an idyllic place brimming with possibilities (DeLuca, 2001; DeLuca & Demo, 2000). Signed by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862, the Pacific Railway Act financially aided the construction of the transcontinental railroad by allocating land that stretched from southern Louisiana to coastal regions of California and Oregon. This provided SP with the incentive, and the wherewithal, to sell its land and fund its proposed railroad lines from the Missouri River to the San Francisco Bay (Orsi, 2005).

Although SP has been dubbed the “Octopus” by journalists such as Frank Norris (1901) for its tentacle-like control in political, legal, public, and economic domains, such reductionisms overlook the way SP also functioned as a pragmatic rhetorical actor that spurred social change in those same arenas. As historian Richard Orsi (2005) notes in his book Sunset Limited: Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West (1850–1930), SP “identified its corporate interests with the public welfare and promoted more organized, efficient settlement, economic development, and more enlightened resource policies in its service area” (p. xiv). Oftentimes, SP had “little options but to promote population growth, social change, and economic development” (p. xviii). ²

In its clarion call for Western development, SP networked with advertising firms, booster groups, and newspaper journalists that targeted farmers, homesteaders, and adventurists to promote the American West as a place not just of prosperity and wonder, but of sublime nature (DeLuca, 2001). As a rhetorical actor, SP disseminated photographs, essays, magazines, books, and poems, among other things, that articulated the corporation’s identity as positive and progressive and helped the company sell its swaths of land at an inexpensive cost (Orsi, 2005).

Images, as extra-discursive forces, served as particularly powerful rhetorical resources that allowed potential colonizers to witness, and participate, in the constitution of sublime wilderness (DeLuca, 2001; DeLuca and Demo, 2000). SP built strong alliances with famous photographers such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Ansel Adams, in addition to esteemed environmentalists such as John Muir, to create a vision of Western nature as sensual, pristine, and wild, which served the multipurpose of pressuring Congress to protect Yosemite Valley while also luring environmentalists, adventurer-seekers, and tourists to California (Solnit, 2003). SP even founded a monthly magazine called Sunset specifically designed to promote the work of these artists, which “fashioned a corporate rhetoric that promulgated park formation and wilderness preservation” (DeLuca, 2001, p. 639). Visually framing California as a utopia was a key rhetorical strategy for propagating SP’s networks across the United States. Associating SP with the affordances of Western development and sublime nature allowed the company to become known as a politically active, economically motivated, and rhetorically forceful network that penetrated mechanical, economic, and political assemblages.

SP also allied with land agents and immigration offices such as the Pacific Coast Land Bureau and the California Immigration Union to specifically target immigrants to purchase railroad land and settle as small-scale farmers (Parker, 1937; Orsi, 2005), which further expanded the networked rhetorical culture in which SP acquired subjective agency. With headquarters in San Francisco, the Land Bureau maintained 46 branches throughout California, and others in places such as New York, New Orleans, and even London and Hamburg. Land agents such as Benjamin Redding, Daniel Zumwalt, and William Mills—who were also fervent lovers of nature, especially Zumwalt and Mills—were key to SP’s eventual success in the sale, and cultivation, of available land through promotional literature that reached domestic and international audiences.

Within California, newspapers such as the Los Angeles Herald, the Spirit of the Times (San Francisco), and the Sacramento Record-Union proved to be reliant media for promoting fecund Western land for the Land Bureau. These newspapers also provided SP with a platform for political and environmental advocacy. This was particularly true for Mills’ edited Sacramento Record-Union, which often allotted space for nature proponents such as John Muir to advocate for preservationism. Mills himself wrote about public-environmental issues such as the support management of water for irrigation, continued advocacy for land preservationism, and the opposition of hydraulic mining. He even directly contributed to the moratorium of mineral waste disposal in streams in the Central Valley (Orsi, 2005, p. 360).

Perhaps the most striking example of SP’s environmental politicking was its involvement in the last-minute passage retrocession Yosemite Bill, which sought to transfer control of the newly created Yosemite National Park from California to the federal government due to the state’s own incompetence in managing the land. Writing again in the Record-Union, and alongside John Muir, Mills vociferously advocated for the bill’s passage by charging the state with “ignorance, stupidity, and vandalism” of the public park (Orsi, 2005, p. 363). SP went even further in the political matter after Muir petitioned SP owner, E. H. Herriman, to help pass the bill when it seemed all hope was lost due to rampant opposition within the California legislature. Herriman mobilized one of SP’s most powerful political allies for the task—William F. Herrin—who was the legal Chief Council and SP vice president. Herrin did not fail. He quickly activated the railroad’s legislative supporters who saw that the bill was passed, albeit at the last minute and only by one vote. As the Secretory of Muir’s Sierra Club put it, SP functioned as “the Hand of Providence” (p. 367) that “guid[ed] matters through all this doubt” (Orsi, 2005, p. 367). In the Sierra Club Bulletin, Muir wrote “even the Southern Pacific R.R. Co., never counted on for anything good, helped nobly in pushing the bill for this park through Congress” (Runte, 1990, p. 33).

SP’s alliances with environmentalists bolstered its case for equal protection against what it saw as too much state control, which many environmentalists, such as Muir, also sought in their quests for greater environmental protection from the federal government due to the negligence of state authorities to properly manage land such as Yosemite.

SP’s environmental, public, and political alliances facilitated a shifting rhetorical culture where railroad companies were personified as progressive actors key to the development of the American West. Changes in links between cultural, economic, and social practices boosted SP’s networked agency; yet, before SP could be legitimated as a constitutional subject, legal spokespersons still had to articulate these connections as a basis for expanding the legal rules and expectations for interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, legal argumentation became a crucial part of solidifying these cultural relations in the SCOTUS. Railroad lawyers were particularly forceful in advancing claims that state interventionist policies—specifically those imposed by California—were placing undue burdens on SP’s ability progress, growth, and public welfare.

Consider the importance of attorneys such as Hall McAllister, Silas W. Sanderson, Creed Haymond, and Alfred A. Cohen who represented SP and CP’s interests in expanding the Fourteenth Amendment by navigating tensions between states, publics, and other decision makers. Referring to these railroad lawyers, Levy (1996) notes in the law review, Western Legal History, “all of them, to varying degrees, were ‘bright legal technicians’ businessmen, and applied legal theorists, capable of reflection on how they were—even if at times only tenuously—participants in social change” (p. 226). McAllister and Sanderson were particularly forceful at building alliances to gain the “official acceptance” of corporate personhood, as they were “at the vanguard of doctrinal development in the areas of corporate personality” (Levy, 1996, p. 182).

Part of the lawyers’ general task was to mediate the railroad’s corporate personae in both public and private sectors. Railroads had to be public enough to continue to receive governmental economic and litigious support but also private enough to continue to amass capital. This balance came at a time, too, when corporations were under pressures from state governments attempting to limit their reach within their territories to regain economic control in their territories.

Framing arguments for corporate personhood within the register of equal protection also allowed railroad lawyers to build unlikely, but crucial, alliances with certain immigrants—namely, the Chinese—who were suffering from deeply racist laws and practices from the state of California. This alliance was made manifest when McAllister presented arguments against the California Constitution of 1870, which specifically targeted the Chinese as alien “burdens and evils” that carried “contagious infectious diseases” as “vagrants, paupers, mendicants, criminals, or invalids” (Cal. Constitution 1870, art. XIX, §1). It also included the provision that all corporations were prohibited from employing any Chinese or Mongolian. McCallister argued here, and in other cases (see McClain, 1994), that the state-sanctioned discrimination against the Chinese was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and warranted its expanded interpretation to include not just African Americans, but Chinese and corporations, too. Leeway was achieved when Judge Odgen Hoffman struck down the provision on the basis that “corporations have a constitutional right to utilize their property, by employing such laborers as they chose” (Boyle, 1880, p. 493, italics added). Even though corporations were still not yet constitutionally protected subjects, McCallister’s efforts contributed to a growing shift in consciousness about the meanings and intentions of the Fourteenth Amendment that recognized corporations as constitutional “persons.”

And such tactics worked when CP/SP advanced litigation against the state of California for a tax scheme against railroad companies in its new constitution in 1879 that prevented them, and other “quasi-public corporations” (Cal. Const. 1879, art. XIII, § 4), from deducting mortgages from their taxes like ordinary citizens. Refusing to pay taxes on the basis that they were unfair and discriminatory, SP forced arguments about the constitutional personhood of corporations in the pivotal case, San Mateo v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1885), where SP’s lawyers presented direct arguments as to why corporations should be considered corporate persons with equal protection. In that case, Sanderson stated,

I believe that the clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment] in relation to equal protection means the same thing as the plain and simple yet sublime words found in our Declaration of Independence, ‘all men are created equal.’ Not equal in physical or mental power, not equal in fortune or social position, but equal before the law. (California State Assembly 1889, p. 138)

Although the court rendered the corporate personhood arguments moot in San Mateo, Sanderson’s arguments buttressed future arguments in Santa Clara, which dealt with the same questions of California’s right to tax corporations differently than citizens, by giving credence to the prospective opinion that corporations were constitutional persons (Levy, 1996, p. 215). ³

Another one of SP’s vocal, even stalwart, spokespersons for personhood within the SCOTUS itself was Justice Stephen Field, who also happened to be one of the judges who served on California’s Ninth Circuit Court that heard San Mateo. Motivated by personal ambitions to serve as SCOTUS Chief Justice, and potentially President of the United States with the support of railroad money, Field worked tirelessly to expand the Fourteenth Amendment to include the rights of corporations. In his famous dissent in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which restricted the Fourteenth Amendment to privileges and immunities from state laws years prior to Santa Clara, he suggested the Court was rendering the Fourteenth Amendment “a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing, and most unnecessarily excited Congress and the people on its passage” (Slaughter House Cases, 1873/2018, p. 8). To Hartmann (2002), “It was often [Field’s] ‘corporations are a person’ decisions in California cases that led them to reappear before the U.S. Supreme Court,” which, due to his endorsement of corporate personhood, “was no accident on Field’s part” (p. 114).

When the SCOTUS decided only enough to dispose in Santa Clara, rather than ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment, for instance, Field was outraged. In his concurring opinion written in Santa Clara’s companion case County of San Bernardino v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886), he claimed that the Court was:

[failing] its duty to decide the important constitution questions involved, and particularly the one which was so fully considered in the Circuit Court, and elaborately argued here, that in the assessment, upon which the taxes claimed were levied, an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws. (San Bernardino, 1886, pp. 422–423)

SP exerted agency by building pragmatic alliances with actors and actants that shifted the links between legal, material, economic, and social practices (see Figure 1). Effectually, this networking shaped a rhetorical culture where it was sensible for the SCOTUS to assume corporations were legal persons protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. In other words, SP forcefully created a rhetorical culture where corporate artificiality no longer mattered. SP paved the way for future corporate equalities by demonstrating the possibilities of corporate rhetoric via networks in political, economic, and legal assemblages that allowed it to bolster its case for constitutional recognition.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Southern Pacific’s actor-network.

Although the Reconstruction Amendments may have been designed to unify a war-torn nation and protect freed slaves from social and economic inequalities in the American South, SP became a corporate person by mobilizing networks and alliances that forcefully changed the legal opinion of corporations’ subjective role in America by leading the constitutional fight against states for their attempts to regulate corporate practices. SP generated the articulation of equal protection as freedom from state intervention through networks in cultural, technological, political, and legal arenas that made railroad corporations real to American populations even if the Court had not yet worked through the philosophy of corporate subjectivity in deciding what counts as a legal “person.” SP changed links between legal, material, economic, and social practices by allying with actants/actors such as visual media, forests, environmentalists, politicians, lawyers, judges, and others searching for equal protection such as immigrants to expand the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by ushering in a rhetorical culture where constitutional personhood was about networks, force, and agency.

From a legal formalistic standpoint, which assumes the law is a science that requires expert opinion to interpret its true meaning, Santa Clara appears as a historical accident that was a sort of rhetorical “trick of the mind,” given that the Waite Court did not rule on the Fourteenth Amendment and that headnotes from Court reporters are not considered precedential. And this is the perspective that many individuals, such as Hartmann (2002), have adopted. From a networked standpoint, however, Santa Clara can be considered as a probable, even predictable, outcome of SP’s colossal network of trains, railroads, and spokespersons that aligned its interests with the progress of Western development and shaped the commonsensical opinion of the Waite Court that corporations were constitutional persons.

The failure of formalistic thinking explains why it was only in hindsight that justices confirmed corporations as real entities as opposed to imaginary inventions of the state (Horwitz, 1985, p. 173). In turn, social, economic, and legal actors had to reset basic constitutional assumptions about the individual, property, and privacy to create space that accounted for corporations’ constitutional equality. As corporations grew more forceful, legalists began to leap into the mercurial rhetorical situation to forge new alliances with the railroad by advancing pragmatic arguments that enabled an evolution of corporate equalities under the law. Said otherwise, the legal protections that expanded corporate equalities during this time occurred not from the sheer authority of the SCOTUS’s expertise, or from some dominant ideology, but from a set of set of alliances and cultural forces that created a rhetorical culture wherein corporations were seen as natural, rather than artificial, persons.

This point demonstrates that corporate personhood was not a historical necessity shaped by premeditated critical-rational debate or formalistic interpretations of the law; it occurred by force, without metaphysical origin, or even disputation. Even though drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments may have intended the equal protection clause to protect freed slaves from racist state practices, railroad companies struggling for subjective parity with humans seized it using vast networks that forcefully changed the nature of discourses about equality. Equal protection, then, began to function as an egalitarian relation, or correspondence, with objects and assemblages rather than a transcendental concept with essential meaning.

The force of SP’s rhetorical networks thus demonstrates that the law is always already influenced by the outside since its conceptualization of equal protection was not an atomistic container of meaning; it was influenced by outside networks such as rhetorical cultures, socioeconomic hybrids, and technological assemblages that permeated the SCOTUS as early as 1886, in Santa Clara. Consistent with arguments made by numerous critical legal and rhetorical scholars, Santa Clara thus demonstrates that the mythical boundaries that are supposed to separate law from rhetoric is a liminal space that must be scrutinized, deconstructed, and reconstructed in order to better understand how legal epistemes influence the politics of everyday life.

Reflections on Networks, Corporate Subjectivity, and the Law

This essay has offered a networked orientation to rhetorical culture to account for how corporations, as networked subjects, cultivated a rhetorical culture that shaped the SCOTUS’s assumption that corporations are constitutional persons. I have argued that SP networked with environmentalists, publics, politicians, legal spokespersons, and even other legally subjugated persons such as immigrants to build alliances against the states, specifically the state of California for attempting to encroach corporate territoriality. The effect of these alliances was a shift in the connections between legal, material, economic, and social practices that shaped a rhetorical culture where it was commonsensical for the SCOTUS to assume corporations are persons protected under the Fourteenth Amendment to protect them from unequal protection of the laws.

This article has contributed specifically to Hasian et al. (1996) by proffering a networked orientation to rhetorical culture. Networked rhetorical culture emphasizes rhetoric’s intersectionality with discursive and extra-discursive appeals that give form to legal interpretations, opinions, and meanings throughout time. As a web of material and semiotic forces, networked rhetorical culture shapes the boundaries of reasonability within legal, political, and social contexts and gives texture to the sense-making capacities of their rhetorical communities. One of the important aspects of this approach is that it shows how subjectivity is irreducible to human, speaking subjects. SP’s subjectivity was networked, revealing that networks have agency that can be mapped to configure networks’ singular, abstract subject. This advances studies on corporate advocacy because it enables rhetoricians to study corporations as rhetorical actors using extant tools for criticism while also accounting for the objects and relations that give them material force. In other words, it provides a route for studying what I have called corporate subjectivity as a dimension of rhetorical agency.

Even though corporations are nonhuman, disembodied actors without souls or consciousnesses, they are nonetheless rhetorically subjectivized through networked rhetorical cultures. Studying corporate rhetoric and subjectivity is an important area of research because it tests the constitutive, articulatory, and immanent capacity of rhetoric to produce and stabilize corporations as rhetorical subjects. It also extends research on nonhuman rhetorics to the realms of the abstract and the virtual (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Davis 2011; Kennedy 1992; Rickert, 2013).

Considering the contemporary corporate subject within the context of the law, readers may have a better idea of how corporations became “persons.” It was not through critical rational discourse about the true scope of the law, apolitical interpretations of timeless principles, or even a dominant ideology that that the SCOTUS accepted the argument that corporations are constitutional “persons.” It was through a networked rhetorical culture that SP itself created that altered how the SCOTUS made sense of the Fourteenth Amendment during a time of unfettered capitalistic expansion. Corporations, in many ways, were already “persons,” or subjects, before the intriguing case of Santa Clara.

Nearly 150 years since the “golden spike,” corporations have more rights than they ever have before under the current “Corporate Bill of Rights.” One of the questions that the SCOTUS will have to address as these rights inevitably expand with time is how to adapt the law, and apply its humanist standards of ethics and morality, to corporate subjects when corporations escape the law’s assumption that the individual, human, rational subject is the paradigm case of subjectivity. Confined to its own modernistic rhetoric, the law is caught in a perpetual state of incongruity—a vicious cycle—that claims to build from historical precedents, such as Santa Clara, to evolve and get closer to a perfectly just society even though the corporate subject can never be known or essentialized from a gods-eye-view (Latour & Hermant, 2006).

The law is necessary “equipment for living” (Hasian, 1994, p. 51), but its assumptions about rhetorical subjectivity are also plainly incompatible with how corporations exist as networks. However, since the crafting of the law—and its rhetorical means for interpreting matters that affect networked publics—is informed by the networked rhetorical culture that surrounds it, the future of corporate subjectivity, at least in part, continues to exist with those who have the agency to participate in the shaping of the law through social change, which in some ways is made more possible in an era literally and figuratively defined by networks (Benkler, 2007; Castells, 2011; Pfister, 2014). Likewise, as our rhetorical culture evolves by becoming more networked in the digital age, perhaps the SCOTUS will one day adopt another “commonsensical” assumption that subjectivity itself is networked.

The SCOTUS, however, still cannot escape stare decisis, which assumes the law evolves over time. To jettison this doctrine by overturning Santa Clara, for instance, would be to negate the SCOTUS’s “mythical foundations” for existing as a sovereign power capable of enforcing decisions that are true, just, and rational (Derrida, 2010, p. 239). The stakes, for Latour (2014b), are with humanity itself. As he mentions at the end of The Making of the Law, “without [the law], we wouldn’t be human; without it, we would have lost the trace of what we had said. Statements would float around without ever being able to find their enunciators” (p. 277, italics original).

At a critical juncture of humanity (see Latour, 2014b), it is incumbent upon rhetorical critics to do our part by beginning a reconceptualization of what it means to be “human” within the context that it is perhaps most cherished, and stabilized: the law (see Latour, 2014a). Also given the gravity of corporate personhood for publics, critics, and policy decision makers charged with muddying through the social, political, and environmental effects of corporate actions and consequences in the 21st century, we must look further than modernistic epistemologies and begin again by not only interrogating the idea of human but also rebuilding the law to meet the demands for social change in a networked world.

As the 21st century advances, and corporations continue to propagate as networked rhetorical actors that have arguably eclipsed nation-states (Hardt & Negri, 2001), we must find new ways to grapple with corporate subjectivity. Corporations teach rhetoricians that subjectivity is a networked accomplishment that is multiple, irreducible, and postdialectical. In more ways than some, corporations become the timeless and immortal exemplars, or the realized ideals, of rhetorical subjects, for they exist in perpetuity through networks and forces that are not restricted to biology. More than that, though, corporate personhood necessarily challenges the concept of humanity itself.