The monopoly corporation becomes the true subject of history in Michaels’s account.

Evidence

The third strand of Michaels’s book then consists in watching the emergence of this other kind of “character” so different from the anthropomorphic ones — the first signs, straws in the wind, redoubled reference, insistence growing more than significant, and finally the thing itself, full-dress and full-blown, in its ultimate triumph. To keep the frame of reference, it is a little like those amazing final pages in Norris Octopus when we finally penetrate the outer offices and come face to face with God himself, behind the chairman’s desk (in modernism, this will turn back into an encounter with the Author, as in Unamuno Mist). The futures market already gave us some sense of what would happen to time itself and to individual uncertainty when you got the proper handle on it. Now, however, through the welter of merely empirical fact (the Rockefellers and their “handwringing” enemy Ida M. Tarbell), we break through to the new thing and its category: the trust, the monopoly, the “soulful” corporation, with its new corporate law. This new “subject of history” now abolishes the individual characters of laissez-faire, with their false problems; it supersedes the opposition between production and consumption; it finally does something to the very category of the machine itself (which figured rather differently in the photography chapter): In fact, following Seltzer’s lead, we can say that the “discourse of force” not only undoes the opposition between body and machine but, perhaps more surprisingly, undoes the opposition between body/machine and the soul, between something that is all body and something that is no body at all. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 480

Categorization

• XREF: The emergence of the corporation-as-subject parallels the periodization thesis — economic forms producing new aesthetic/agential structures. Directly feeds the reader’s key idea that style is the economy’s way of appearing.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: the corporation as narrative protagonist — how ‘soulful’ corporate personhood migrates from Gilded Age fiction into contemporary legal and rhetorical discourse (e.g., corporate personhood debates, ‘too big to fail’).