Corporations are Not People: Dissensual Democracy and the Movement Against Corporate Rights

This dissertation describes the way that the movement against corporate rights employs democratic ideals and media technologies to present itself as "the people" who have a more legitimate claim to sovereignty than corporations. The movement's use of rhetoric and technology demonstrate that democratic ideals do not necessarily represent actual democratic processes, but enacting them is still an effective way to produce a sense that a democratic event is occurring. Although different branches of the movement advocate different goals and use different rhetorical and technological strategies, they use similar techniques to demonstrate shared participation in the overall movement. These core shared techniques indicate that scholarship on democratic movements and their political issues has the opportunity to increase its effectiveness and relevance by integrating insights about how to produce dissensus based on studying movement techniques. Additionally, the history of the legal theoretical rhetoric of corporate rights relies on a sharp distinction between organic and technological collectives that shapes how the movement is able to selectively critique and enact democratic doxai.Doctor of Philosoph

The Lessons of Community Rights Ordinances for Democratic Philosophizing

Jacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against "metapolitical" theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing