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| Sunday, July 8, 2001 |
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Humans are people too 
| | A little more about the last thing I said yesterday, which began with the observation that corporations don't exist. What I mean is that they don't exist to the degree we agree they exist. For legal purposes, we treat this social body — the corpus we call a corporation — as a humanesque being. Nothing wrong with that, just like there's nothing wrong with calling a market a battlefield or a speaking of your town's ball club in the first person plural: as a kind of we. The problem isn't that we've allowed the corporate, the institutional, to impersonate the personal a bit too successfully. |
| | Nobody believes that a judge when addressed as "the court" is a plural being. And nobody believes when a judgement is rendered that "the people" are expressing it. The language of law is highly formalized and institutional. It may express human agreement and even a degree of humanity; but the institutionality of the language makes clear that the speaker is an institution. |
| | For whatever reasons (and there are way too many of them to go into here) we've allowed ourselves to believe that companies really can think and speak and behave as human beings. They aren't, and they can't. |
| | I've got more to say about all this, but I've gotta go eat. See ya later. |
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