path: root/ch7.tex

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So we begin again from another angle,
using one of the most highly computerized
of modern entities: the corporation. We will
talk for a while about entities, borders (or
skins), sets, organisms, time-series, populations and genetics.

We live in a time when corporate operations have become speeded up. They have
become mobile: they waltz across the sea:
they take wing and fly into the night: they
grow slender and slip through 30 gigabyte-wide needle's eyes. They attack and pillage
one another. They split into pieces and recoalesce. They live in this age and other
ages. Metanational entities gobble up chunks
of their national hosts. Nothing new about
that: what is new is the informational paraphenalia and the high-speed, distance-insensitive, time-devouring equipment which
pressages a vast political change.

Corporations are --- at least legally, and
metaphorically --- seperate entities. At the
same time they are not. They are linked into
para/meta/supra/sub-networks by investors,
interlocking consortia,
joint ventures, cartels... They defy the notion of discrete sets.
A corporation has a boundary only for purposes of classification and identification.
(By the same token, one can also say that
conceptual imprisonment denies the human
their individuality.)

A corporation is defined as a living being
in the \emph{contemplation} of the Law. A corporation is diverse. The contemplating Law is
also not only diverse, but dynamic and
changeable, requiring lawyers, plaintiffs,
litigants, defendants, judges and legal memory banks (precedents) assembled through
the ages. (Law too is being placed in data
banks, where into a system called Lexis.)
a corporation spans nations,
And it is contemplated by several systems of law at
the same time. Are we expected to believe
that the emanation of a complex of people,
events and memories, the law, can \emph{contemplate} the abstracted emanation of a complex
of people, events and memorigs, a corporation? That is to say a fiction, or anthology, or
novel, contemplates another fiction, another
anthology, another novel. A sort of organic
\emph{character}? We need hunt no further. Here,
truly, is artificial intelligence. Why spend
any more R\&D money?

The corporation
can be represented as
information in a pure, financial form, which
is a slice of the composite life of lives and works
in progress, taken at some point
in time. (Financial institutions, especially
banks, are considered here because of all
business, the financial entity is the most
heavily intellectualized, the most heavily
dependent on computers and communications. The technology is inextricably bound
up with the value-flows, the calculations
being fundamentally simple.) While appearing abstract,
ideal, it is neither ideal nor
platonic, nor is it static. Its positions can be
caught in an account sheet, but not in its
motion. Its motion can be caught, but the
positions are lost. Sound familiar? Its existence now requires the constant intervention
of humans and machines, managing, evaluating, working, integrating it into a market
structure. It includes several methodological histories; the evolution of the notion of
evaluation and the history of its accretion of
value. This is to say humans and machines
producing, trading, buying and selling money
or near-money. If it is to have life, it must
have lives to keep on working. Its abstract
operations have concrete results that drive
the lives of the people inside of it and
outside of it.

With the advent of the high-speed calculator, robots, and programs (based on long
statistical runs of past performances, accretions of admonitory history-scenarios and
tortured equations) which mimic some financial transactions,
such trading and instantaneous as automated communication
programs to link buyers and sellers into an
electronic market, it becomes possible to
concieve of a pure, automated and constantly adjusted financial corporation, one totally
devoid of humans, territories, factories...It
would do all the things financial organizations do: move money around, trade, arbitrage, take deposits, account, merge, acquire, make long and short term loans, divest, invest, liquidate, grow, collect, lobby
for laws, pay or dodge taxes, contemplate
risk and probability, now and then order an
assasination, all while living in exotic, anaerobic climes.

If there is no plant in the physical sense,
there have to be virtual \emph{plants}, as-if factories,
represented on paper or in computers, stored
in data banks, to guide bankers in their
moves, driven by modes of evaluation, lists
of people and institutions to borrow from or
loan to, risk studies about good and bad investments (prophetic programs; Joseph scenarios), market-switching-and-routing programs for heaving pools of money this way
and that.

But to be meaningful, this fictional being must be connected to other markets and
other forms of endeavor in real time, a something, somewhere in the universe to connect
to, someplace to enter inputs, a someone, or
set of someones or the simulation of someones to credit these messages from this totally automated financial institution. Most of
all, such an ideal financial being, in order to
exist, must be credible: that is, accepted as a
motivating act of faith, by other institutions,
other beings, and Law. This has not happened yet. As we talk about corporations, we
still detect humans ... somewhere, if only
living in palaces. It still needs humans to
interact. Humans to be affected by these
interactions. Although one can see a time
when some automated complex of corporations consume
what some automated
complex of corporations produce.

We talk about the life of the corporation in
several ways, as we talk about the life of an
organism. Humans are stockholders, directors, traders, officers, consumers,
workers. All who contribute to the life and existence
of this contemplated being have histories, both social and biological. They may also be
defined as a gene-pool, although differing from a race. This population is the result of
diversified reproduction as against non-diversified reproduction (a tribe, clan, race,
ethnicity, nation; those with subsets of shared genes). There is, to be sure, such a
thing as a family corporation, a form that
bridges the gap between a dynasty and
shareholder \enquote{democracy.}) Thus one can
say that the corporation has a sort of genetic
structure, one composed of sets of genetic
structures, each set composed of parts of
other sets, defined or ensetted not so much
by family or race consanguinity as by their
participation in the enterprise. Indirectly,
this corporate organism has, so to speak, a
genome, which is to say a complete genetic
constitution.
At the same time its participants invest, give life to, guide the destinies
of other such entities which have different
genomes, for one must spread risk and diversify.

Another way to think about the corporation is from the perspective of investments
(stock, bonds, etc.), plus other rules for life,
governance and growth (even replication).
This combination of investments and rules
can be considered as the genes of the corporate, fictional organism. These metagenes
are said to express themselves into living
organisms. Genes, information of living beings express themselves into other living
beings and also into metagentic forms: capital, which has its own rules of continuity and
metamorphosis.

Investments shapeshift into material life.
Here we have begun to introduce the concept of modern significant demographies in
which contiguity, as well as continuity is
provided by investment, participation and
modern communication. Replication does
not require face-to-face existence. And so the
question of space and time is raised again.
Offshore receptacles with names, await;
Panama is said to have at least one hundred
thousand corporations of all sorts. Some are
real. Some are shells, mere names
of fabulous beasts that are inspirited and informed
by a shower of electronic gold.

It is possible to perform a mind experiment. Consider the genes, in their informa-
tional aspect, of all who interact with the
corporation, and search for something in
common between genetics and corporate
life, belongingness, in turn related to the
equity\slash debt\slash assets expressed as stock, directorship, management, etc. This new set of
translations relates to the organism's two
totalities and is exemplified in the annual
report, the balance sheet, which is a slice of
life, frozen in time, but as transtemporally
allusive to past and future histories as, say,
Eliot's time-meditations in \booktitle{The Four Quartets}.

This being's genome can be seen as the
result of a long stretch of accreted historic
information (the story of the buildup of
equity and credit) which can, through a
series of reconstitutions (as one reads past
organisms, arranged in a historic sequence,
in the genetic memory of any being), be
remodeled backwards on to life, production
and reproduction of gods and humans. The
\emph{names} of those past and present humans, the
lives as they live, replicate in parallel, can be
mapped to the corporation's replication pattern. Or we can go forward again from these
humans
to dissolve
them,
their essences,
into this legal fiction, this corporate being.
It's a simple mapping problem; genetic information encrypting corporate information
and conversely. Once again; we should not
forget that both sets of information involve
human activity, or at least the \emph{still-living
memory} of human activity. Considering the
age-old continuity of some dynastic fortunes,
this is not too arcane to believe. After all, the
corporation is a metaphor embodying real
human existence. It is a chimera.

Corporate mergers are referred to in sexual
terms; marriage, even rape. Are these mere
words, anthropomorphisms used to describe
a phenomenon too complex for words? Shorthand? Key words, which when decrypted,
open up a vision of vast legal and credit data
banks containing huge record depositories
of swiftly shifting law, money, reports,
memos,
accountings, as well as histories of
the mixing of complex social groupings,
populations, evolving, revolving through a
variety of forms? An analogy?

There is a problem here: are we to take a
metaphor seriously? Is it truly descriptive of
a complex reality? No, but... The keyword
always becomes an intrinsic contentual part
of the phenomenon descibed; it is wrenched
loose with the greatest difficulty. What do
lawyers and accountants argue about? They
argue about \emph{words} and \emph{semantics}. They
structure, deconstruct, semiotisize, mine the
law-bodies for hermeneutic nuggets: they do
\emph{literary} criticism and linguistic analysis.
They invent new, post-dated critical theory.

And if we are talking about fictions, try to
think of what the Oedipus Complex describes
without the word \enquote{Oedipus} to unlock the
memory bank. Try to think of the merging,
through a marriage, involving two individuals, representative of two complex dynasties
(corporate entities) and fortunes (bloodlines
or genes; property and treasure); royal families. Whenever we are talking of corporate or
dynastic marriage, in terms of informational
essences, we are describing an alchemical
wedding, a marriage of heroes, gods, archeiypal figures, and enterprise. But what is it
that is mated? People? Yes. But also information:
bonds, representations, money, deeds, abstractions symbols (stock, for land)
which are generalized information, not specific to any corporations, resolvable into
things --- people, factories --- as the genetic
information is potentially resolvable into
bodies of living beings, races, once properly
expressed.

A vast practical and ceremonial apparatus
is required to bring alchemical essences together. A vast, practical, biological and cere-
monial apparatus is required to bring the
genetic essences of any two people together.
When it comes to the marriage of dynasties
or fortunes, ceremonial behavior increases
(to say nothing about a great to-do about
contracts). Mating dances. (Stock in \emph{this}
company or \emph{that} company allows for certain
kinds celebratory rites and participations.
When stock is loaned against currency, that
currency is potentially part of \emph{any} corporation, but only when traded for new securities
with their particular, limited set of behavioral instructions.)

If a human is a combination of two halved
gene-sets, a kind of information-bearing and
organism-producing program, then a corporate merger is a multi-sexual, abstract orgy. It
requires dozens, thousands of essence-sets
to conjoin, to participate, to be transferred in
order to materialize into another kind of
existence. Certainly as long as human activity goes on, as long as computerized and
abstraction-activity goes on, as long as it is
recognized in the contemplation of law and
the faith of people, this wonderous being
lives. Go tell someone that IBM does not live.

Do analogies of corporate marriage incorrectly define this entity? While we wait --- 
probably forever\footnote{Sorry, Sol. --- S.W. Editorial} --- for pure, artificial intelligence to come on line and carry on the purified and transcendent sum of knowledge, making
new, autonomous decisions, we can say: no humans, no corporations.
No human reproduction, birth, death? No corporations. The corporations may not
actually mate, but mating and reproduction must go on somewhere. Is this any sillier
than saying, as the sociobiologists do, that the body is nature's way of producing more
DNA? The exchanges, assets, liabilities, accretions, all the other signs of operations
in the corporation's informational sphere
can be said to be determinants of social
behavior inside and outside (wherever its
influence reaches) this being. It's individuals are just as caught up in a sort of fate as
poor Oedipus (a dynastic drama) was. Considering
the rhetoric; invisible religions,
acts of abject faith, superstition, lurk beneath
the most rational, mathematical and scientific works. Magic continues to shape human
behavior.

In ancient mythology there were organisms that had lion's heads, wings, human
bodies, snake's tails, the heads of hawks and
owls... We could in principle make a genetic map
of such a being. A modern, diversified transnational being is, of course,
infinitely more complex and amorphous, for
have an organism composed of living we
things, dead things, and the rememberances
of things dead and past, no less phantasmagoric than those ancient sphinxes, chimeras,
minotaurs and hydras.