Corporations are not people, though they are represented by persons. The claim that corporations are people is revelatory of the logic of representation and of corporatism. By corporatism I mean the idea that an individuals identity is submerged in and not separable from the group; the two are quite different but related. Corporations today are bureaucracies; the corporatist ideal is the communitarianism of the harmonious group. Groups with leaders are antecedents of corporations and related to them. In some American war films and Westerns, there is a leader who is a real man and under him other men who are not real men and cannot be. They have no autonomy and no ability to act decisively. Modern workers in this situation become peres de famille and rule their families, or at least their children (the equality of men and women in the family means, in theory, that the women wear pants too and the men also do housework; mommy is a boss and not only a nurturer; Protestantism paved the wave for this by abolishing the divinity of a maternal nurturer and leaving you only with the father boss; and the ambiguous consequences of this may have included making womens equality easier to envision, centuries later). If you have to have power to be a hero, then those who are not senior officers have a bit of a problem. Fortunately, the enlisted man or low level worker is given a heroic opportunity in a portion fit for his size: the famous taking responsibility for underlings means obeying, not deciding, and of course the soldier is blessed with the opportunity to die.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 03:08:28 +0000
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