Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian Geoffrey R. Kirsch Lisa Siraganian, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. Oxford UP, 2021. v + 270 pp. The primary subject of Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons is not a literary but a legal fiction: the artificial personhood of corporations as legal entities endowed with rights and duties of their own. Recently placed in bad eminence by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014), corporate personhood is often encapsulated by critics and proponents alike with a question-begging slogan: corporations are people. In truth, the corporate fiction is no less ambiguous than the literary fictions that Siraganian explores. Is the corporation best understood as an association of individual people, or as an autonomous entity distinct [End Page 803] from its members? Can it form, communicate, and act on intentions in the same manner as a flesh-and-blood person? And how should its differences from natural people inform its legal status? Siraganian’s argument rests on a familiar leitmotif in law and literature scholarship: without the irritable reaching after fact and reason necessary to adjudicating legal responsibility, literature can better probe and problematize the ambiguities of the corporate person. She makes a compelling case for the particular relevance of American modernism, her area of expertise. Not only did modernism roughly coincide with a period of intense debate over corporate personhood among legal scholars; but it also, with its many coteries and (as enunciated most famously by T. S. Eliot) its aesthetic of “impersonality” (33), posed similar tensions between the individual and the collective. Above all, Siraganian writes, modernist writers were “operating a veritable literary and cultural laboratory on the question of collective intention” (30). Intention serves as Siraganian’s primary bridge from the legal to the literary, as she posits a tacit equivalence between the corporation and the modernist art-object by way of a single ontological problem: “how minimal could intention be and still be sufficient?” (31) The relation of the modernist art-object to its creator, Siraganian suggests, resembles that of the corporation to its actions: if a found poem or a Duchamp “Readymade” could offer sufficient indicia of creative intention to constitute art, so even the smallest tokens of collective action and expression might suffice to endow a corporation with mind, intention, and personality. This interest in collective intention, Siraganian suggests provocatively, in turn implies a “genetic connection” (34) between naturalism and modernism: where the latter movement formalizes the problem of collective intention, the former thematizes it. This genealogy helps to justify the fact that in a book titularly about modernism, the two most wholly convincing chapters actually focus on classics of the naturalist canon. While Siraganian is not the first critic to propose corporate personhood as a crux of Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, her readings of these two great novels of business are at once original and eminently persuasive. As Siraganian contends in the first chapter, The Octopus dramatizes “the epistemological difficulty of knowing a corporate person’s meaning” (44). Norris’s farmers mistakenly rely on the “solemn pledges” (68) made in person by individual railroad company agents, when in fact the corporation has carefully avoided entering into any legally enforceable contracts with them. Siraganian shrewdly links Norris’s interest in corporate intention and expression to both the jurist Oliver [End Page 804] Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe: all three thinkers, she explains, conceptualize intent not as a subjective mental state but as a quality of particular actions and expressions. This objective, external redefinition allows for the possibility of corporate intention and meaning, but also produces a cacophony of external signs purporting to represent the corporation’s speech. Chapter 2 examines this unfortunate consequence, first by scrutinizing the equation of corporate money with speech that underwrote Citizens United and then, somewhat anachronistically, by highlighting the incoherent, commodified nature of “corporate speech” (83) in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s late-career writings on Hollywood. Chapter 3 in turn moves from speech and intention to the broader question of...