Richard Hardack - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Richard Hardack
Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Volume 29, 2024 - Issue 6, 2024
The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world ... more The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world was alive, provided an unexpected philosophical foundation for the animism that attributes legal and ontological personhood to the corporation, an imitation of life. The transcendental reification of nature, recently evident in Avatar’s fantasies that one could merge with an impersonally conscious nature, turns out to be coterminous with the reification of corporate personhood, and both with the co-option of (fantasies of) white male individuality. The history of the corporation is also the history of the new world: its colonization was facilitated by joint-stock companies. After native populations were subjugated or exterminated, they took on symbolic roles in the colonizing cultures, and the animistic nature with which they are identified has been personified in ways that are transferred to the corporation. As white men began to feel isolated in society, they imagined they could regain connection with a racialized nature; but they could never have access to their conjectured (and ultimately virtual) aboriginal cultures. Transcendentalism also laid the groundwork for merger with the corporation, the dominant manifestation of contemporary capitalist ontology.
The Comparatist, 2021
The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I con... more The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists—in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers—have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity … [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] … [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being. In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental—for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance—and [End Page 229] yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start with the premise that cognitivism abrogates narrative itself. One of Žižek's concerns regarding cognitivism is that the Event that has been the domain of narrative has been co-opted by the domain of science. Summarizing the divide between humanism and scientific determinism and cognitivism, Lyotard concluded that it is "impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. … Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26).1 Similarly, according to Žižek, a positivist form of scientism threatens the categories of knowledge and communication that comprise the basis of human subjectivity: "the transcendental approach reached its apogee with [Heidegger] … while the ontological one seems today kidnapped by natural sciences; we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism" (Žižek, Event 6). This straightforward claim also hints at the religious anxiety that would attend the receipt of absolute knowledge, which would obviate faith, or the arrival of a messiah, god, or judgment day—i.e., any aspect of eschatology. Addressing the other temporal end of the ontological spectrum, the beginning, Žižek contends that science now offers the metanarratives that preclude human narrative: the "New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened—it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way" (133). In Žižek's estimation, we can tell stories and communicate as humans only because of "a minimal temporal gap between the existence of things in their immediate brute reality, and the registration...
symplokē, 2017
Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”... more Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson’s transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, “Demonology” is the essay that most fitfully “performs” those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition). Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson’s work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat “Demonology,” as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment. Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson’s pantheism. I reassess “Demonology”—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson’s ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of “Demonology” represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature. I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson’s inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson’s Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized “real” limit on established conventions. Emerson’s exposition of nature’s Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates. Emerson’s repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching “Demonology” in particular.
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood , 2023
Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising... more Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023):
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood is a wide-ranging study of the pernicious idea that corporations are people. It recontextualizes the inordinate influence of corporations and corporate advertising in The U.S. as a legal, political, psychological and sociological phenomenon. Hardack demonstrates the ways that advertising language helps legitimate a discourse and ontology of corporate personhood—a long-developing form of artificial intelligence—and that its premises have come to supplant human subjectivity in many aspects of U.S. culture. For example, because corporations were created as “artificial persons” under the law, many pop culture references to artificial and monstrous life contain some corporate residue. For instance, the amorphous and seemingly immortal corporation, revenant in many guises yet always the same, didn’t create the alien in the eponymous films—it is the alien. The book makes accessible a complex topic that integrates many pressing issues in the U.S.: the privatization of the public sphere; the escalating polarization of wealth and rights; unchecked corporate power, influence and monopoly; and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding and entertainment. The assumptions that foster corporate personhood are drivers and symptoms of a series of deleterious transformations in U.S. society, and a locus for understanding systemic changes to our economy and culture.
Your Call focuses on the historical and psychological significance of corporations, from their role in colonizing the new world and facilitating slavery to the ways they have come to impersonate and displace human beings. It begins by tracing the effect of corporate language, and the ways corporations “speak” and fabricate identities through advertising. The impersonal and depersonalizing speech of corporations, advertising provides a primary register for creating what Hardack terms “corpographies,” the networks of representation that make corporations appear to be coherent and personalized entities. Hardack illustrates how ads not only sell fantasies rather than goods, but by necessity have nothing to do with the products they sell, and the implications of that disjunction for how we communicate about everything. The book also highlights the overlooked connection between the impersonal corporate form—which separates managers from shareholders, action from accountability, and agency from personhood—and the impersonations of advertising, which separate signifier (ad) from signified (product), consumers from their money, and sense from reason. Corporations are at the center of a process that depersonalizes and dehumanizes people, and animates and personalizes things. The very nature of the corporation is that there’s no their there; or, to put it more technically, the corporation instantiates the premise that shit just happens, without an asshole to hold accountable. Developing a series of interdisciplinary arguments, Your Call documents the correlation between corporate status, advertising, and social personhood. Corporate personhood is part of a zero-sum game, one in which not just wealth, but human rights and traits—including privacy, legal entitlements and exemptions, and forms of familial connection and continuity—are in systematic ways transferred from people to corporations, which Hardack demonstrates are part of a teleology that ends in, and are themselves forms of, AI.
Contemporary Literature 59.2 (2018): 161-203., 2018
In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not kno... more In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not know they are dead. While critics have scrutinized the cultural significance of zombies and the undead, few have considered the distinct condition of being dead without knowing it. For Žižek, the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is “the return of the living dead.” But the most important variation of that fantasy pertains to those I call the nescient dead (“ND”): the characters in the relatively unexplored genre I analyze fail to realize they’ve died or exist in a repetitive flux between two deaths. “Being[s that] depend on not-knowing,” they have repressed or are being kept from that knowledge, yet paradoxically continue to exist in some liminal form until they confront it.
The ND raise questions about periodization and historicity that can be contextualized around issues of genre, knowledge, technology, diaspora and race. In the context of traumatic amnesia, the ND instantiate some of the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism; they represent pastiche and repetition, but without critical components of memory, and hence awareness. In many U.S. texts, the undead also have been racialized. Postcolonialism and diaspora generate more demarcated subject formations of the dead living, who often suspect their status and reflect a necessary wariness concerning an oppressor culture. The way we read many ND texts, however, is increasingly inflected by our grappling with an anthropocene that is already behind us. Unexpectedly, The Sixth Sense, or what it represents, anticipates The Sixth Extinction.
In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a res... more In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a response to the exigencies of wartime scarcity and prohibitions of contraband, has come to represent not a temporary alternative economy, but a permanent and predominant method of exchange in a specific strain of post-war U.S. culture. Many of the works I address treat the black market both as a manifestation of an historically-specific economy in crisis, and as a broader trope to address society as a whole and draw connections to discourses beyond those of the market. The pivotal texts in my assessment are Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow and Bleeding Edge, published forty years later, in part because they provide one emblematic arc that allows one to track developing notions of the black market, and the crises they often reflect, in U.S. culture. While economies have often been corrupt, the United States has been facing an escalating cycle of market-related crises since World...
British Journal of American Legal Studies, 2019
In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate per... more In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature. The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person. Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s ...
CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, N. 22: 1922/2022: Total Modernism - Vol. 1 (2023). https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO, 2023
In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon's formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes po... more In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon's formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes postmodernism, yet also is predicated on an abolition of sequential time and cause and effect, which might reflect a modernist decentering of space, time, and gravity. Pynchon's modernism dramatizes the idea that linear time no longer exists-that our time and space are no longer the center of the universe, much as conscious individual thought no longer is the center of subjectivity. Periods, literary or grammatical, also fall by the wayside. This decentering of time also is associated with modernist science and ontology, which paradoxically put modernism back at the center of an aesthetic without a center. Modernism functions as the narrative equivalent of relativity, yet also of quantum theory, because all spaces and time emerge and exist at once, in a process that Pynchon refers to as bilocation. Modernist connection then veers into concurrence. At least heuristically, Pynchon also treats the modernist project as a form of doubling and repetition. As a result, Pynchon situates modernism and World War I as precursors to their successor, postmodernism and World War II, without directly addressing them, yet somehow also as co-existing with them; both are doubled though repetitions that rewrite the originals. Pynchon situates modernism as an ethos of echoes, but a repetition without an original. A kind of quilting point, modernism becomes a contradictory master term that still explains everything, a lens through which all else is seen.
Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 2013
"Women’s bodies are figuratively “portioned,” and men’s bodies dismembered, in much of Melvi... more "Women’s bodies are figuratively “portioned,” and men’s bodies dismembered, in much of Melville’s work, and particularly in Pierre, where sexual difference is figured as a kind of irremediable metaphysical division. In many of Melville’s novels and poems, from Mardi onward, the very existence of two sexes represents a fragmentation of the self from a whole and sexless divinity, or from the unity or “All” of nature itself. This divided or partitioned sexuality is closely connected to Melville’s representation of a form of figurative incest, which comports with what Wendy Stallard Flory more generally terms “symbolic incest” in Pierre. Through such incest, the male self problematically merges with relatives or nature to transcend the imagined isolation, fragmentation, and sterility of white male individuality. Melville addresses not only the psychological components of fantasized incest with particular relatives, but an abstract and ontological incest that helps structure gendered identity. Some critics, such as Flory, contend that Pierre is only ambiguously incestuous at the literal level, but I would argue that, beginning with Mardi, Melville suggests the literal and figurative often cannot be clearly differentiated, and that such blurring is one of the defining traits of incest. Throughout this article, I address, primarily in literary texts, both actual and fantasized acts of incest that involve actual or fantasized relatives, but also acts and fantasies that are transcendentally incestuous because they transgress the norms of individuation and merge multiple subjectivitities in nature. Many of Melville’s male characters imagine that some form of feminized incestuous merger with a relative or nature, figured as the opposite of phallic fragmentation, might reunify them with some version of the All. Melville here uses transcendental pantheism—a discourse of putative male self-reliance that turns out to be predicated on the dependence of the male self, who is also emblematized by figuratively incestuous longings—to address the extremes of white male identity. In Melville’s work, incest becomes a proxy for redefining family, intimacy, reproduction, and the boundaries of individuality; and it serves as an unexpected locus for white male anxieties regarding self-reliance, gender, reproduction, race, originality, debt, and autonomy, the issues on which I focus in this article. For Melville, incest closely correlates with the rhetoric of transcendental pantheism and generates initially seductive fantasies of incestuous merger with nature, but subsequent fears of fragmentation or amputation in society. To the male transcendentalist, the next best thing to absolute self-generation is reproduction from one’s closest relative. Mimicking Greek gods, transcendentalists seek to replicate through parthenogenesis and incest, but encounter similar retribution for transgression. A self-reliant and self-created man would exist without debt, and incest becomes a reductio ad absurdum of self-generation. "
Contemporary Literature, 2018
In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not kno... more In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not know they are dead. While critics have scrutinized the cultural significance of zombies and the undead, few have considered the distinct condition of being dead without knowing it. For Žižek, the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is “the return of the living dead.” But the most important variation of that fantasy pertains to those I call the nescient dead (“ND”): the characters in the relatively unexplored genre I analyze fail to realize they’ve died or exist in a repetitive flux between two deaths. “Being[s that] depend on not-knowing,” they have repressed or are being kept from that knowledge, yet paradoxically continue to exist in some liminal form until they confront it. The ND raise questions about periodization and historicity that can be contextualized around issues of genre, knowledge, technology, diaspora and race. In the context of traumatic amnesia, the ND instantiate some of the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism; they represent pastiche and repetition, but without critical components of memory, and hence awareness. In many U.S. texts, the undead also have been racialized. Postcolonialism and diaspora generate more demarcated subject formations of the dead living, who often suspect their status and reflect a necessary wariness concerning an oppressor culture. The way we read many ND texts, however, is increasingly inflected by our grappling with an anthropocene that is already behind us. Unexpectedly, The Sixth Sense, or what it represents, anticipates The Sixth Extinction.
The Comparatist, 2021
The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I co... more The University of North Carolina Press
Volume 45, October 2021
pp. 229-255
In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists—in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers—have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity … [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] … [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being.
In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental—for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance—and [End Page 229] yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start with the premise that cognitivism abrogates narrative itself.
One of Žižek's concerns regarding cognitivism is that the Event that has been the domain of narrative has been co-opted by the domain of science. Summarizing the divide between humanism and scientific determinism and cognitivism, Lyotard concluded that it is "impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. … Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26).1 Similarly, according to Žižek, a positivist form of scientism threatens the categories of knowledge and communication that comprise the basis of human subjectivity: "the transcendental approach reached its apogee with [Heidegger] … while the ontological one seems today kidnapped by natural sciences; we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism" (Žižek, Event 6). This straightforward claim also hints at the religious anxiety that would attend the receipt of absolute knowledge, which would obviate faith, or the arrival of a messiah, god, or judgment day—i.e., any aspect of eschatology. Addressing the other temporal end of the ontological spectrum, the beginning, Žižek contends that science now offers the metanarratives that preclude human narrative: the "New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened—it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way" (133). In Žižek's estimation, we can tell stories and communicate as humans only because of "a minimal temporal gap between the existence of things in their immediate brute reality, and the registration...
Visionary New England, 2020
Mid-nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists sought to transcend themselves—that is, the... more Mid-nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists sought to transcend themselves—that is, their white male subjectivities—by seeking communion with a sacralized form of nature, which they believed offered an antidote to the perceived constraints and pathologies of their society. While aspects of transcendentalism might seem archaic to contemporary readers, some of its postulates foreshadow recent post-humanist theory, which rejects hierarchical and anthropocentric views of life. For example, some transcendentalists believed that all things are alive, sentient, and conscious in some way. This facet of transcendental thought—an animistic attribution of spirit to nature—draws on Native American, African American, and aboriginal sources, which transcendentalists sometimes acknowledged. Indeed, its syncretic nature in some ways makes transcendentalism distinctly American.
Many of those in antebellum New England who affiliated themselves with transcendentalism tended to view society with suspicion, but also to situate nature as their Other—everything that was outside themselves. Their animism usually fetishized a primitive and racialized nature, alienation from which lay at the heart of some post-colonial constructions of whiteness. A progressive and sometimes utopian vision for reforming society was connected to the visionary part of transcendentalism: the desire to transcend the ego to become one with nature, and to link the isolated individual to an imagined prelapsarian culture. But the nature they sought represented a retroactive fantasy of a state of being that never existed, and in this formulation white identity emerges as a belated, boot-strapped construct dependent on the non-existence of its imagined alterities. Attaining transcendence therefore often proved difficult.
Amerikastudien, 2019
In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a res... more In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a response to the exigencies of wartime scarcity and prohibitions of contraband, has come to represent not a temporary alternative economy, but a permanent and predominant method of exchange in a specific strain of post-war U.S. culture. Many of the works I address treat the black market both as a manifestation of an historically-specific economy in crisis, and as a broader trope to address society as a whole and draw connections to discourses beyond those of the market. The pivotal texts in my assessment are Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Bleeding Edge”, published forty years later, in part because they provide one emblematic arc that allows one to track developing notions of the black market, and the crises they often reflect, in U.S. culture. While economies have often been corrupt, the United States has been facing an escalating cycle of market-related crises since World War II (and some would argue since the nation’s founding). Pynchon tracks how a fraudulent war economy evolves into a fraudulent information economy, which he also depicts as contributing to a crisis in representation itself.
Human Rights After Corporate Personhood: An Uneasy Merger, 2020
In this article, I address case law, U.S. culture, and gift theory to trace how the idea of corpo... more In this article, I address case law, U.S. culture, and gift theory to trace how the idea of corporate personhood has, since the late nineteenth century, developed at the expense of human rights. In prior publications, I argued that corporations, both ontologically and under US stare decisis, should be considered incapable of producing any speech beyond commercial speech. Whatever “personhood” or rights a corporation has are intrinsically delimited by and pertain entirely to the domain of commerce: in other words, a corporation can possess only commercial, not human, personhood. The perverse abnegation of these limitations is all the more ironic given the Court’s recent equation of money with speech in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission which, among other things, fails to differentiate, even in terms of the Court’s own precedents, between free speech and commercial speech. Though now attributed with something resembling human personhood, corporations still cannot act with univocal personal intention or human agency. I argue that as a result of many such anomalies, corporations are increasingly structured to expropriate personal rights while avoiding aggregate liability.
I coined the term corpography to connote the limited forms of self-representation – such as advertisements, filings, and corporate histories – that corporations can generate as speech.. I proposed that personhood is a zero-sum game and that the more “personhood” and human rights corporations attain, the less of those traits and rights people retain. In the final necessary inversion – created by the displacement of human personhood and human rights by corporate personhood and corporate rights ¬– corporations don’t just become people; people must become like corporations. In other words, the logic that allows corporations to become persons is inextricable from and predicated on a logic that requires persons to begin to take on the attributes of corporate entities. This process, which I treat as a kind of negation of gift-giving or the potlatch, both documents and further precipitates a redistribution of wealth in a kind of polarizing feedback loop, but the more consequential and less examined aspect of the expansion of corporate personhood pertains to its effects in ontological and epistemological terms. In many ways, the current, ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap.
I contrast case law that treats corporations as deserving of some form of public assistance with case law that treats the poor as undeserving, and analyse how these cases implicitly presuppose or develop a theory of human rights. In the United States, private corporations have over a long period commingled incommensurate aspects of the private and the public and become recipients of public rights and gifts in inverse proportion to the way individuals, and especially the poor, have lost access to them or become ineligible for public benefits. I briefly invoke gift theory to address how corporations, in claiming exceptional status in an exceptional nation, pervert notions of public welfare, the common good, and democratic rights. In numerous contexts, Citizens United, and the increasingly pervasive attribution of personhood and rights to corporations, codifies a zero-sum game between corporations and the poor (and ultimately between corporate personhood and personhood itself).
Textual Practice, 2020
In this artice, I explore how Hawthorne addresses the relationship between spatial and social mo... more In this artice, I explore how Hawthorne addresses the relationship between spatial and social mobility in his depictions of railroads, and I partly focus on the chapter in The House of the Seven Gables in which Clifford and Hepzibah travel by train. Clifford’s reaction to the new spatialization the railroad augured encapsulates one of the novels’ central concerns—how travel and mobility will eviscerate, or emancipate us from, social bonds. For Hawthorne, the not so celestial railroad is an emblem not only of modernity, but secularization, class destabilization, and what we might see as a form of proto-nomadization. By nomadization, I refer to some of the spatial effects of globalization at this stage of its development, in which local homes, traditions, economies, and identities are increasingly supplanted by interconnected, uprooted, and transient identities, and space and time become increasingly entangled and compressed. Toward the end of the article, I address the connection between nomadism and the loss of home—emblematized by the railroad—and the annihilation of space through time.
I propose that in House Hawthorne stages a series of contests that gauge the material and ontological implications of rail travel in ways that display his ambivalence about both progress and tradition. At stake is whether the railroad, which connects all places at once (replacing nature), undermines the fixity of real property (houses that should be homes). Partly because land is neither fungible nor movable, Clifford avers that “what we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt in the world rests.” By the end of the 1840s, however, that solid ground or immovable object had begun to meet the unstoppable forces that the railroad represented.
ITI IMAGINING THE IMPOSSIBLE, 2020
As the response to the pandemic in the U.S., which we might call corona–capitalism, highlights, c... more As the response to the pandemic in the U.S., which we might call corona–capitalism, highlights, corporations are dead things that have inordinate influence over all living things.
The history of the new world is in many ways the history of that corporation—the early form of the corporation and the joint stock company were instrumental in expanding not just trade, but colonialism in all its forms; the displacement and appropriation of the aboriginal; the sugar trade; slavery; and, as Caitlin Rosenthal documents, the modern accounting methods that arose partly in connection with slavery. But I argue that the corporation dominates the contemporary world not just economically and politically, but, in largely unacknowledged ways, ontologically and culturally.
https://www.imaginingtheimpossible.com/research-1
British Journal of American Legal Studies, 2019
In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate per... more In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature.
The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person.
Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person.
In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap. The overarching effect of corporate personhood, which operates in tandem with privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights. Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that dynamically diminishes the personal.
The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the superhuman; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.
Time-Scapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral, 2019
In this essay, I consider the psychological and narratological implications of waiting as a struc... more In this essay, I consider the psychological and narratological implications of waiting as a structural component of litigation in the U.S., and how legal narratives address the spaces and times of waiting. Texts such as William Gaddis’ A Frolic of his Own replicate legal delay through narrative delay. I contrast the narratological aspects of legal delays
with the presumed pleasures of narrative delays that withhold plot, the resolution of mysteries, and closure. The pace of court cases was ideally suited to Dickens’ mode of serial publication, and some lawyers and writers have similar incentives to make people wait. One can fruitfully treat legal procedure as a form of serialisation, but also ask whether modes of legal analysis will help us better understand narrative deferral. I also address the cultural geography and spatialisation of waiting, and argue that such waiting has a millenarian or eschatological component in law – waiting for the judgment moment leaves the litigant in purgatory. In many recent texts, the end of waiting, judgment day, ushers in not only the end of time, but the often- overlooked termination of space – the end of boundaries.
symplokē 26.1-2 , pp. 329-360., 2019
Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology... more Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson’s transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, “Demonology” is the essay that most fitfully “performs” those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition).
Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson’s work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat “Demonology,” as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment. Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson’s pantheism. I reassess “Demonology”—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson’s ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of “Demonology” represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature.
I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson’s inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson’s Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized “real” limit on established conventions. Emerson’s exposition of nature’s Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates. Emerson’s repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching “Demonology” in particular.
Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Volume 29, 2024 - Issue 6, 2024
The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world ... more The animism that infused antebellum US transcendentalism, and the belief everything in the world was alive, provided an unexpected philosophical foundation for the animism that attributes legal and ontological personhood to the corporation, an imitation of life. The transcendental reification of nature, recently evident in Avatar’s fantasies that one could merge with an impersonally conscious nature, turns out to be coterminous with the reification of corporate personhood, and both with the co-option of (fantasies of) white male individuality. The history of the corporation is also the history of the new world: its colonization was facilitated by joint-stock companies. After native populations were subjugated or exterminated, they took on symbolic roles in the colonizing cultures, and the animistic nature with which they are identified has been personified in ways that are transferred to the corporation. As white men began to feel isolated in society, they imagined they could regain connection with a racialized nature; but they could never have access to their conjectured (and ultimately virtual) aboriginal cultures. Transcendentalism also laid the groundwork for merger with the corporation, the dominant manifestation of contemporary capitalist ontology.
The Comparatist, 2021
The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I con... more The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists—in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers—have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity … [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] … [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being. In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental—for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance—and [End Page 229] yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start with the premise that cognitivism abrogates narrative itself. One of Žižek's concerns regarding cognitivism is that the Event that has been the domain of narrative has been co-opted by the domain of science. Summarizing the divide between humanism and scientific determinism and cognitivism, Lyotard concluded that it is "impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. … Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26).1 Similarly, according to Žižek, a positivist form of scientism threatens the categories of knowledge and communication that comprise the basis of human subjectivity: "the transcendental approach reached its apogee with [Heidegger] … while the ontological one seems today kidnapped by natural sciences; we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism" (Žižek, Event 6). This straightforward claim also hints at the religious anxiety that would attend the receipt of absolute knowledge, which would obviate faith, or the arrival of a messiah, god, or judgment day—i.e., any aspect of eschatology. Addressing the other temporal end of the ontological spectrum, the beginning, Žižek contends that science now offers the metanarratives that preclude human narrative: the "New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened—it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way" (133). In Žižek's estimation, we can tell stories and communicate as humans only because of "a minimal temporal gap between the existence of things in their immediate brute reality, and the registration...
symplokē, 2017
Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”... more Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson’s transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, “Demonology” is the essay that most fitfully “performs” those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition). Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson’s work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat “Demonology,” as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment. Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson’s pantheism. I reassess “Demonology”—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson’s ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of “Demonology” represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature. I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson’s inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson’s Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized “real” limit on established conventions. Emerson’s exposition of nature’s Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates. Emerson’s repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching “Demonology” in particular.
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood , 2023
Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising... more Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023):
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood is a wide-ranging study of the pernicious idea that corporations are people. It recontextualizes the inordinate influence of corporations and corporate advertising in The U.S. as a legal, political, psychological and sociological phenomenon. Hardack demonstrates the ways that advertising language helps legitimate a discourse and ontology of corporate personhood—a long-developing form of artificial intelligence—and that its premises have come to supplant human subjectivity in many aspects of U.S. culture. For example, because corporations were created as “artificial persons” under the law, many pop culture references to artificial and monstrous life contain some corporate residue. For instance, the amorphous and seemingly immortal corporation, revenant in many guises yet always the same, didn’t create the alien in the eponymous films—it is the alien. The book makes accessible a complex topic that integrates many pressing issues in the U.S.: the privatization of the public sphere; the escalating polarization of wealth and rights; unchecked corporate power, influence and monopoly; and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding and entertainment. The assumptions that foster corporate personhood are drivers and symptoms of a series of deleterious transformations in U.S. society, and a locus for understanding systemic changes to our economy and culture.
Your Call focuses on the historical and psychological significance of corporations, from their role in colonizing the new world and facilitating slavery to the ways they have come to impersonate and displace human beings. It begins by tracing the effect of corporate language, and the ways corporations “speak” and fabricate identities through advertising. The impersonal and depersonalizing speech of corporations, advertising provides a primary register for creating what Hardack terms “corpographies,” the networks of representation that make corporations appear to be coherent and personalized entities. Hardack illustrates how ads not only sell fantasies rather than goods, but by necessity have nothing to do with the products they sell, and the implications of that disjunction for how we communicate about everything. The book also highlights the overlooked connection between the impersonal corporate form—which separates managers from shareholders, action from accountability, and agency from personhood—and the impersonations of advertising, which separate signifier (ad) from signified (product), consumers from their money, and sense from reason. Corporations are at the center of a process that depersonalizes and dehumanizes people, and animates and personalizes things. The very nature of the corporation is that there’s no their there; or, to put it more technically, the corporation instantiates the premise that shit just happens, without an asshole to hold accountable. Developing a series of interdisciplinary arguments, Your Call documents the correlation between corporate status, advertising, and social personhood. Corporate personhood is part of a zero-sum game, one in which not just wealth, but human rights and traits—including privacy, legal entitlements and exemptions, and forms of familial connection and continuity—are in systematic ways transferred from people to corporations, which Hardack demonstrates are part of a teleology that ends in, and are themselves forms of, AI.
Contemporary Literature 59.2 (2018): 161-203., 2018
In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not kno... more In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not know they are dead. While critics have scrutinized the cultural significance of zombies and the undead, few have considered the distinct condition of being dead without knowing it. For Žižek, the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is “the return of the living dead.” But the most important variation of that fantasy pertains to those I call the nescient dead (“ND”): the characters in the relatively unexplored genre I analyze fail to realize they’ve died or exist in a repetitive flux between two deaths. “Being[s that] depend on not-knowing,” they have repressed or are being kept from that knowledge, yet paradoxically continue to exist in some liminal form until they confront it.
The ND raise questions about periodization and historicity that can be contextualized around issues of genre, knowledge, technology, diaspora and race. In the context of traumatic amnesia, the ND instantiate some of the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism; they represent pastiche and repetition, but without critical components of memory, and hence awareness. In many U.S. texts, the undead also have been racialized. Postcolonialism and diaspora generate more demarcated subject formations of the dead living, who often suspect their status and reflect a necessary wariness concerning an oppressor culture. The way we read many ND texts, however, is increasingly inflected by our grappling with an anthropocene that is already behind us. Unexpectedly, The Sixth Sense, or what it represents, anticipates The Sixth Extinction.
In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a res... more In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a response to the exigencies of wartime scarcity and prohibitions of contraband, has come to represent not a temporary alternative economy, but a permanent and predominant method of exchange in a specific strain of post-war U.S. culture. Many of the works I address treat the black market both as a manifestation of an historically-specific economy in crisis, and as a broader trope to address society as a whole and draw connections to discourses beyond those of the market. The pivotal texts in my assessment are Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow and Bleeding Edge, published forty years later, in part because they provide one emblematic arc that allows one to track developing notions of the black market, and the crises they often reflect, in U.S. culture. While economies have often been corrupt, the United States has been facing an escalating cycle of market-related crises since World...
British Journal of American Legal Studies, 2019
In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate per... more In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature. The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person. Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s ...
CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, N. 22: 1922/2022: Total Modernism - Vol. 1 (2023). https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO, 2023
In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon's formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes po... more In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon's formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes postmodernism, yet also is predicated on an abolition of sequential time and cause and effect, which might reflect a modernist decentering of space, time, and gravity. Pynchon's modernism dramatizes the idea that linear time no longer exists-that our time and space are no longer the center of the universe, much as conscious individual thought no longer is the center of subjectivity. Periods, literary or grammatical, also fall by the wayside. This decentering of time also is associated with modernist science and ontology, which paradoxically put modernism back at the center of an aesthetic without a center. Modernism functions as the narrative equivalent of relativity, yet also of quantum theory, because all spaces and time emerge and exist at once, in a process that Pynchon refers to as bilocation. Modernist connection then veers into concurrence. At least heuristically, Pynchon also treats the modernist project as a form of doubling and repetition. As a result, Pynchon situates modernism and World War I as precursors to their successor, postmodernism and World War II, without directly addressing them, yet somehow also as co-existing with them; both are doubled though repetitions that rewrite the originals. Pynchon situates modernism as an ethos of echoes, but a repetition without an original. A kind of quilting point, modernism becomes a contradictory master term that still explains everything, a lens through which all else is seen.
Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 2013
"Women’s bodies are figuratively “portioned,” and men’s bodies dismembered, in much of Melvi... more "Women’s bodies are figuratively “portioned,” and men’s bodies dismembered, in much of Melville’s work, and particularly in Pierre, where sexual difference is figured as a kind of irremediable metaphysical division. In many of Melville’s novels and poems, from Mardi onward, the very existence of two sexes represents a fragmentation of the self from a whole and sexless divinity, or from the unity or “All” of nature itself. This divided or partitioned sexuality is closely connected to Melville’s representation of a form of figurative incest, which comports with what Wendy Stallard Flory more generally terms “symbolic incest” in Pierre. Through such incest, the male self problematically merges with relatives or nature to transcend the imagined isolation, fragmentation, and sterility of white male individuality. Melville addresses not only the psychological components of fantasized incest with particular relatives, but an abstract and ontological incest that helps structure gendered identity. Some critics, such as Flory, contend that Pierre is only ambiguously incestuous at the literal level, but I would argue that, beginning with Mardi, Melville suggests the literal and figurative often cannot be clearly differentiated, and that such blurring is one of the defining traits of incest. Throughout this article, I address, primarily in literary texts, both actual and fantasized acts of incest that involve actual or fantasized relatives, but also acts and fantasies that are transcendentally incestuous because they transgress the norms of individuation and merge multiple subjectivitities in nature. Many of Melville’s male characters imagine that some form of feminized incestuous merger with a relative or nature, figured as the opposite of phallic fragmentation, might reunify them with some version of the All. Melville here uses transcendental pantheism—a discourse of putative male self-reliance that turns out to be predicated on the dependence of the male self, who is also emblematized by figuratively incestuous longings—to address the extremes of white male identity. In Melville’s work, incest becomes a proxy for redefining family, intimacy, reproduction, and the boundaries of individuality; and it serves as an unexpected locus for white male anxieties regarding self-reliance, gender, reproduction, race, originality, debt, and autonomy, the issues on which I focus in this article. For Melville, incest closely correlates with the rhetoric of transcendental pantheism and generates initially seductive fantasies of incestuous merger with nature, but subsequent fears of fragmentation or amputation in society. To the male transcendentalist, the next best thing to absolute self-generation is reproduction from one’s closest relative. Mimicking Greek gods, transcendentalists seek to replicate through parthenogenesis and incest, but encounter similar retribution for transgression. A self-reliant and self-created man would exist without debt, and incest becomes a reductio ad absurdum of self-generation. "
Contemporary Literature, 2018
In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not kno... more In this article, I try to explicate contemporary culture’s obsession with the dead who do not know they are dead. While critics have scrutinized the cultural significance of zombies and the undead, few have considered the distinct condition of being dead without knowing it. For Žižek, the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” is “the return of the living dead.” But the most important variation of that fantasy pertains to those I call the nescient dead (“ND”): the characters in the relatively unexplored genre I analyze fail to realize they’ve died or exist in a repetitive flux between two deaths. “Being[s that] depend on not-knowing,” they have repressed or are being kept from that knowledge, yet paradoxically continue to exist in some liminal form until they confront it. The ND raise questions about periodization and historicity that can be contextualized around issues of genre, knowledge, technology, diaspora and race. In the context of traumatic amnesia, the ND instantiate some of the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism; they represent pastiche and repetition, but without critical components of memory, and hence awareness. In many U.S. texts, the undead also have been racialized. Postcolonialism and diaspora generate more demarcated subject formations of the dead living, who often suspect their status and reflect a necessary wariness concerning an oppressor culture. The way we read many ND texts, however, is increasingly inflected by our grappling with an anthropocene that is already behind us. Unexpectedly, The Sixth Sense, or what it represents, anticipates The Sixth Extinction.
The Comparatist, 2021
The University of North Carolina Press Volume 45, October 2021 pp. 229-255 In this article, I co... more The University of North Carolina Press
Volume 45, October 2021
pp. 229-255
In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists—in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers—have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity … [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] … [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being.
In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental—for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance—and [End Page 229] yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start with the premise that cognitivism abrogates narrative itself.
One of Žižek's concerns regarding cognitivism is that the Event that has been the domain of narrative has been co-opted by the domain of science. Summarizing the divide between humanism and scientific determinism and cognitivism, Lyotard concluded that it is "impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. … Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26).1 Similarly, according to Žižek, a positivist form of scientism threatens the categories of knowledge and communication that comprise the basis of human subjectivity: "the transcendental approach reached its apogee with [Heidegger] … while the ontological one seems today kidnapped by natural sciences; we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism" (Žižek, Event 6). This straightforward claim also hints at the religious anxiety that would attend the receipt of absolute knowledge, which would obviate faith, or the arrival of a messiah, god, or judgment day—i.e., any aspect of eschatology. Addressing the other temporal end of the ontological spectrum, the beginning, Žižek contends that science now offers the metanarratives that preclude human narrative: the "New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened—it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way" (133). In Žižek's estimation, we can tell stories and communicate as humans only because of "a minimal temporal gap between the existence of things in their immediate brute reality, and the registration...
Visionary New England, 2020
Mid-nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists sought to transcend themselves—that is, the... more Mid-nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists sought to transcend themselves—that is, their white male subjectivities—by seeking communion with a sacralized form of nature, which they believed offered an antidote to the perceived constraints and pathologies of their society. While aspects of transcendentalism might seem archaic to contemporary readers, some of its postulates foreshadow recent post-humanist theory, which rejects hierarchical and anthropocentric views of life. For example, some transcendentalists believed that all things are alive, sentient, and conscious in some way. This facet of transcendental thought—an animistic attribution of spirit to nature—draws on Native American, African American, and aboriginal sources, which transcendentalists sometimes acknowledged. Indeed, its syncretic nature in some ways makes transcendentalism distinctly American.
Many of those in antebellum New England who affiliated themselves with transcendentalism tended to view society with suspicion, but also to situate nature as their Other—everything that was outside themselves. Their animism usually fetishized a primitive and racialized nature, alienation from which lay at the heart of some post-colonial constructions of whiteness. A progressive and sometimes utopian vision for reforming society was connected to the visionary part of transcendentalism: the desire to transcend the ego to become one with nature, and to link the isolated individual to an imagined prelapsarian culture. But the nature they sought represented a retroactive fantasy of a state of being that never existed, and in this formulation white identity emerges as a belated, boot-strapped construct dependent on the non-existence of its imagined alterities. Attaining transcendence therefore often proved difficult.
Amerikastudien, 2019
In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a res... more In this article, I explore how and why the black market, an economy initially identified as a response to the exigencies of wartime scarcity and prohibitions of contraband, has come to represent not a temporary alternative economy, but a permanent and predominant method of exchange in a specific strain of post-war U.S. culture. Many of the works I address treat the black market both as a manifestation of an historically-specific economy in crisis, and as a broader trope to address society as a whole and draw connections to discourses beyond those of the market. The pivotal texts in my assessment are Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Bleeding Edge”, published forty years later, in part because they provide one emblematic arc that allows one to track developing notions of the black market, and the crises they often reflect, in U.S. culture. While economies have often been corrupt, the United States has been facing an escalating cycle of market-related crises since World War II (and some would argue since the nation’s founding). Pynchon tracks how a fraudulent war economy evolves into a fraudulent information economy, which he also depicts as contributing to a crisis in representation itself.
Human Rights After Corporate Personhood: An Uneasy Merger, 2020
In this article, I address case law, U.S. culture, and gift theory to trace how the idea of corpo... more In this article, I address case law, U.S. culture, and gift theory to trace how the idea of corporate personhood has, since the late nineteenth century, developed at the expense of human rights. In prior publications, I argued that corporations, both ontologically and under US stare decisis, should be considered incapable of producing any speech beyond commercial speech. Whatever “personhood” or rights a corporation has are intrinsically delimited by and pertain entirely to the domain of commerce: in other words, a corporation can possess only commercial, not human, personhood. The perverse abnegation of these limitations is all the more ironic given the Court’s recent equation of money with speech in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission which, among other things, fails to differentiate, even in terms of the Court’s own precedents, between free speech and commercial speech. Though now attributed with something resembling human personhood, corporations still cannot act with univocal personal intention or human agency. I argue that as a result of many such anomalies, corporations are increasingly structured to expropriate personal rights while avoiding aggregate liability.
I coined the term corpography to connote the limited forms of self-representation – such as advertisements, filings, and corporate histories – that corporations can generate as speech.. I proposed that personhood is a zero-sum game and that the more “personhood” and human rights corporations attain, the less of those traits and rights people retain. In the final necessary inversion – created by the displacement of human personhood and human rights by corporate personhood and corporate rights ¬– corporations don’t just become people; people must become like corporations. In other words, the logic that allows corporations to become persons is inextricable from and predicated on a logic that requires persons to begin to take on the attributes of corporate entities. This process, which I treat as a kind of negation of gift-giving or the potlatch, both documents and further precipitates a redistribution of wealth in a kind of polarizing feedback loop, but the more consequential and less examined aspect of the expansion of corporate personhood pertains to its effects in ontological and epistemological terms. In many ways, the current, ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap.
I contrast case law that treats corporations as deserving of some form of public assistance with case law that treats the poor as undeserving, and analyse how these cases implicitly presuppose or develop a theory of human rights. In the United States, private corporations have over a long period commingled incommensurate aspects of the private and the public and become recipients of public rights and gifts in inverse proportion to the way individuals, and especially the poor, have lost access to them or become ineligible for public benefits. I briefly invoke gift theory to address how corporations, in claiming exceptional status in an exceptional nation, pervert notions of public welfare, the common good, and democratic rights. In numerous contexts, Citizens United, and the increasingly pervasive attribution of personhood and rights to corporations, codifies a zero-sum game between corporations and the poor (and ultimately between corporate personhood and personhood itself).
Textual Practice, 2020
In this artice, I explore how Hawthorne addresses the relationship between spatial and social mo... more In this artice, I explore how Hawthorne addresses the relationship between spatial and social mobility in his depictions of railroads, and I partly focus on the chapter in The House of the Seven Gables in which Clifford and Hepzibah travel by train. Clifford’s reaction to the new spatialization the railroad augured encapsulates one of the novels’ central concerns—how travel and mobility will eviscerate, or emancipate us from, social bonds. For Hawthorne, the not so celestial railroad is an emblem not only of modernity, but secularization, class destabilization, and what we might see as a form of proto-nomadization. By nomadization, I refer to some of the spatial effects of globalization at this stage of its development, in which local homes, traditions, economies, and identities are increasingly supplanted by interconnected, uprooted, and transient identities, and space and time become increasingly entangled and compressed. Toward the end of the article, I address the connection between nomadism and the loss of home—emblematized by the railroad—and the annihilation of space through time.
I propose that in House Hawthorne stages a series of contests that gauge the material and ontological implications of rail travel in ways that display his ambivalence about both progress and tradition. At stake is whether the railroad, which connects all places at once (replacing nature), undermines the fixity of real property (houses that should be homes). Partly because land is neither fungible nor movable, Clifford avers that “what we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt in the world rests.” By the end of the 1840s, however, that solid ground or immovable object had begun to meet the unstoppable forces that the railroad represented.
ITI IMAGINING THE IMPOSSIBLE, 2020
As the response to the pandemic in the U.S., which we might call corona–capitalism, highlights, c... more As the response to the pandemic in the U.S., which we might call corona–capitalism, highlights, corporations are dead things that have inordinate influence over all living things.
The history of the new world is in many ways the history of that corporation—the early form of the corporation and the joint stock company were instrumental in expanding not just trade, but colonialism in all its forms; the displacement and appropriation of the aboriginal; the sugar trade; slavery; and, as Caitlin Rosenthal documents, the modern accounting methods that arose partly in connection with slavery. But I argue that the corporation dominates the contemporary world not just economically and politically, but, in largely unacknowledged ways, ontologically and culturally.
https://www.imaginingtheimpossible.com/research-1
British Journal of American Legal Studies, 2019
In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate per... more In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature.
The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person.
Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person.
In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap. The overarching effect of corporate personhood, which operates in tandem with privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights. Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that dynamically diminishes the personal.
The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the superhuman; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.
Time-Scapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral, 2019
In this essay, I consider the psychological and narratological implications of waiting as a struc... more In this essay, I consider the psychological and narratological implications of waiting as a structural component of litigation in the U.S., and how legal narratives address the spaces and times of waiting. Texts such as William Gaddis’ A Frolic of his Own replicate legal delay through narrative delay. I contrast the narratological aspects of legal delays
with the presumed pleasures of narrative delays that withhold plot, the resolution of mysteries, and closure. The pace of court cases was ideally suited to Dickens’ mode of serial publication, and some lawyers and writers have similar incentives to make people wait. One can fruitfully treat legal procedure as a form of serialisation, but also ask whether modes of legal analysis will help us better understand narrative deferral. I also address the cultural geography and spatialisation of waiting, and argue that such waiting has a millenarian or eschatological component in law – waiting for the judgment moment leaves the litigant in purgatory. In many recent texts, the end of waiting, judgment day, ushers in not only the end of time, but the often- overlooked termination of space – the end of boundaries.
symplokē 26.1-2 , pp. 329-360., 2019
Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology... more Though it focuses partly on dreams and the occult, the ulterior subject of Emerson’s “Demonology”—published in the North American Review in 1877, almost forty years after it was first delivered in lecture form—is not just contradiction, but the arcane inversions, doublings, and self-dismantlings of transcendentalism itself. Between many of Emerson’s pronouncements falls this shadow of Demonology, which I treat as a key aspect of his theories and essays of experience—that is, those in which his contradictions are preeminent, unsettling, and thematic. If Emerson’s transcendental pantheism is suffused with, or structured by, contradiction and doubling, “Demonology” is the essay that most fitfully “performs” those inversions; in which the double emerges as twin and negative; and in which polar opposites become both coterminous and sequential in any direction (and therefore almost never linear in exposition).
Both as the essay and concept I focus on in this article, Demonology is not a tangent or coda to Emerson’s work, but the cumulative residue of an attempt to codify that which resists his overarching theory that all forces, processes and attributes of nature are consistent, explicable, rational, and ultimately commensurate. Both its problematic provenance as an essay revised while Emerson suffered from failing mental acuity, and the way its tenets resist formalization, have led most scholars to treat “Demonology,” as an essay and concept, either as a digression or embarrassment. Critics of the day, however, seemed to realize that a protean Demonology was one of the definitive components of Emerson’s pantheism. I reassess “Demonology”—not just in spite of its inchoate status and troubled provenance, but in part because of it—as an overlooked encapsulation of many of Emerson’s ulterior tenets and a capstone of his metaphysics. In Lacanian terms, the contradictory or seemingly anomalous elements of “Demonology” represent the necessary remainders or gaps in his work that allow Emerson to address nature, a scenario complicated by the fact that the subject of these remainders is remainders. In other words, the subject of the essay is, implicitly, the cause of its own fragmentary nature. In never entirely stable ways, the demonological for Emerson represents specific forces within nature, but is also immanent to the system of nature.
I also attempt to counter the lingering perception of Emerson as both a rationalist and idealist. No consistent transcendentalism generates or allows for Emerson’s inconsistent pronouncements, because the inconsistency precedes the pronouncements at the level of ontology. A negation of the negation, Emerson’s Demonology does not emerge in the register of symbolic spiritual transcendence, nor as part of an uplifting imaginary vision, but as a dark, racialized, feminized, and materialized “real” limit on established conventions. Emerson’s exposition of nature’s Demonology, both in the eponymous essay and throughout his writings, thereby corroborates some poststructuralist as well as transcendental postulates. Emerson’s repeated emphasis on limitation, especially the limits of reason, bear some surprising affinities with Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Lacanian Real, which is why Žižek offers a useful interpretative language for approaching “Demonology” in particular.
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood, 2023
Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertisi... more Press description (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023):
Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood is a wide-ranging study of the pernicious idea that corporations are people. It recontextualizes the inordinate influence of corporations and corporate advertising in The U.S. as a legal, political, psychological and sociological phenomenon. Hardack demonstrates the ways that advertising language helps legitimate a discourse and ontology of corporate personhood—a long-developing form of artificial intelligence—and that its premises have come to supplant human subjectivity in many aspects of U.S. culture. For example, because corporations were created as “artificial persons” under the law, many pop culture references to artificial and monstrous life contain some corporate residue. For instance, the amorphous and seemingly immortal corporation, revenant in many guises yet always the same, didn’t create the alien in the eponymous films—it is the alien. The book makes accessible a complex topic that integrates many pressing issues in the U.S.: the privatization of the public sphere; the escalating polarization of wealth and rights; unchecked corporate power, influence and monopoly; and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding and entertainment. The assumptions that foster corporate personhood are drivers and symptoms of a series of deleterious transformations in U.S. society, and a locus for understanding systemic changes to our economy and culture.
Your Call focuses on the historical and psychological significance of corporations, from their role in colonizing the new world and facilitating slavery to the ways they have come to impersonate and displace human beings. It begins by tracing the effect of corporate language, and the ways corporations “speak” and fabricate identities through advertising. The impersonal and depersonalizing speech of corporations, advertising provides a primary register for creating what Hardack terms “corpographies,” the networks of representation that make corporations appear to be coherent and personalized entities. Hardack illustrates how ads not only sell fantasies rather than goods, but by necessity have nothing to do with the products they sell, and the implications of that disjunction for how we communicate about everything. The book also highlights the overlooked connection between the impersonal corporate form—which separates managers from shareholders, action from accountability, and agency from personhood—and the impersonations of advertising, which separate signifier (ad) from signified (product), consumers from their money, and sense from reason. Corporations are at the center of a process that depersonalizes and dehumanizes people, and animates and personalizes things. The very nature of the corporation is that there’s no their there; or, to put it more technically, the corporation instantiates the premise that shit just happens, without an asshole to hold accountable. Developing a series of interdisciplinary arguments, Your Call documents the correlation between corporate status, advertising, and social personhood. Corporate personhood is part of a zero-sum game, one in which not just wealth, but human rights and traits—including privacy, legal entitlements and exemptions, and forms of familial connection and continuity—are in systematic ways transferred from people to corporations, which Hardack demonstrates are part of a teleology that ends in, and are themselves forms of, AI.
"Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissanceuniversity of massachusetts, 2012
Press description: Many leading American thinkers in the nineteenth century, who accepted the pr... more Press description: Many leading American thinkers in the nineteenth century, who accepted the premises of Emersonian transcendentalism, valued the basic concept of pantheism: that God inheres in nature and in all things, and that a person could achieve a sense of belonging she or he lacked in society by seeking a oneness with all of nature. As Richard Hardack shows, however, writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville conceived of nature as everything “Other” —other than the white male Protestant culture of which they were a part. This conception of nature, then, became racialized, and the divine became associated with African American and Native American identities, as well as with femininity. In “Not Altogether Human,” Hardack reevaluates transcendentalism in the context of nineteenth-century concerns about individual and national racial identity. Elucidating the influence of pantheism, Hardack draws on an array of canonical and unfamiliar materials to remap the boundaries of what has long been viewed as white male transcendental discourse. This book significantly revises notions of what transcendentalism and pantheism mean and how they relate to each other. Hardack’s close analysis of pantheism and its influence on major works and lesser known writing of the nineteenth century opens up a new perspective on American culture during this key moment in the country’s history.