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Abstract
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, corporations rapidly multiplied and grew in power. On the strength of their legal “personality,” the nature of which was the object of much anxious debate (was it derivative or free-standing? fictional or real?), they were granted startling new rights and privileges. Meanwhile, artists withdrew in droves into cults of aesthetic “impersonality.” While the cults relatively swiftly passed away, the flag of “personality” flies higher than ever over the corporate world today, thanks to Citizens United and a host of other cases. Indeed, when it comes to the cults, there was never any contest, as the orthodox version of modernist impersonality finally only confirms the terms it reverses. But the orthodoxy is not the whole story. This article works out a non-personalist line of response to corporate personalism through readings of some of the idiosyncrasies of Virginia Woolf's version of modernist impersonality (in particular, the twist that she gives to the widespread modernist association of impersonality and drama).
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Though the present article is focused on the last century or so, this vexation has gone on for at least the “twenty centuries” that Yeats tallies up in “The Second Coming.” For a strong account of the problem with personhood from classical antiquity to the present day, see Roberto Esposito, Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
2. Frederic William Maitland, “The Corporation Sole,” Law Quarterly Review 16 (1900): 335–54. This article appears in the same year (1900) as does Political Theories of the Middle Age, Maitland's translation of part of volume 3 – Die Staats- und Korporationslehre des Altertums und des Mittelalters und ihre Aufnahme in Deutschland – of Gierke's massive Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. The heatedness of discussion of the nature of “corporate personality” in the early 20th century can be fully felt in Arthur Machen, “Corporate Personality,” Harvard Law Review 24, no. 4 (1911): 253–67. In a study of the nagging of the question in late 19th- and early 20th-century American law, literature, and business theory, Walter Benn Michaels describes well the knots in which Machen ties himself; Walter Benn Michaels, “Corporate Fictions,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 183–213. It is far from clear that John Dewey manages to untie these knots in the article in which he tries to set the matter straight; John Dewey, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” Yale Law Review 35, no. 6 (1926): 655–73. What is clear, however, is that the question was, as it is once again today, widely seen as pressing in the first three decades of the 20th century.
In a seminal article, Gregory Mark notes how the question passes out of currency after World War II: “The personification of the corporation was once of central concern to American jurisprudence. Diverse political and economic views, phrased in the language of legal discourse, were essential to discussions of the corporation's design, form, function, and operation. After the Second World War, however, the place of the corporation in law had ceased to be controversial, and both theoreticians and practitioners concerned themselves instead with organizational theory and economic analysis of corporate behavior. The corporation as a legal institution ceased to be of interest. The historical and jurisprudential debates which had consumed the energies of some of the leading legal scholars were relegated to the introductory pages of corporation law textbooks, if they were discussed at all. As a result, a modern lawyer knows only that a corporation is considered a legal person but finds that terminology devoid of content”; Gregory Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (1987): 1441–83, 1441. A Harvard Law Review note expresses similar dismay over the state of reflection on the question: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Persons: The Language of a Legal Fiction,” Harvard Law Review 114, no. 6 (2001): 1745–68. Mark's article, however, marks the moment of the return of the question to currency. Certainly there is no shortage of worry over it today.
My first access to Mark's article was through Barbara Johnson's appropriation of it in Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 188–207. Her work in that essay on the instability of the category of “person” makes mine possible. And there is no clearer treatment of the problem of what to do with “impersonality” in an age when the personal is political – when old personal/political oppositions no longer hold – than hers in Barbara Johnson, “Deconstruction, Feminism, and Pedagogy,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 42–48. She does not explicitly consider impersonality in her discussion of corporate personhood, however.
3. Or, for that matter, compared to the philosophical and anthropological personalisms that were coming into vogue in the early decades of the 20th century. These fully flower in the 1930s and 1940s, in the philosophical personalism of Jacques Maritain and in the “culture and personality” school of anthropology.
For a thoughtful account of the history of “multiple personality,” see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). This division of the personality marks the cutting edge of “personality disorders.”
Along with the psychological discourse in which “personality disorders” figure prominently comes a new kind of prying in literary criticism. This is certainly an important determinant of modernist impersonality. Maud Ellmann explains: “Why did impersonality emerge as a doctrine when it did, and why did it become a watchword for the modernists? One reason was that it served to screen the poet from the prying forms of criticism which accompanied the rise of popular psychology. Since the 1880s, readers had begun to search the text for the confessions of the author rather than the truths of the external world […] and poets grew furtive to defend themselves against their readers’ scrutiny”; Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 5. Ellmann's path-breaking book on the modernist poetics of impersonality demonstrates very clearly that it is possible to acknowledge fully the fundamental defensiveness of modernist impersonality without falling back into the language of personalism. Indeed, the full acknowledgement cannot be made so long as “person” is treated as a natural category, given a priori. The persons who appear behind the screens of “impersonality” in Ellmann's study do not simply precede the cover up.
4. I do focus on others – T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, in particular – in the book project from which the present article is taken.
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Penguin, 1977), 214–15. Whether or not Stephen speaks for Joyce here is a classic question that involves a number of paradoxes. For example, if Stephen does speak for Joyce, then Joyce is not quite writing impersonally in Stephen's sense.
6. “Young men write lyrics; Joyce wrote lyrics”; Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 3. Lyric and immaturity are an indissociable pair for Kenner. So, if A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is to be taken seriously, it is because it constitutes a “meticulous pastiche of immaturity” (120). It moves through lyric ironically – pointing, every step of the way, to bigger and better things: the “rhythmical cries” it performs are, says Kenner, “lyric anticipations of the dense epic and dramatic works to come” (111).
Many different critical stories can be told around this same basic plotting of lyric, epic, and drama on the scale of personal to impersonal. For a sense of the range of possibilities, compare Kenner with Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
7. “Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world”; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 251. For the ice-breaking argument in defense of the poem, see Robert Scholes, “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Aesthete?,” in In Search of James Joyce (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 70–81.
8. “The author, in his work, should be like God in the universe: present everywhere, and visible nowhere”; Flaubert to Louise Colet, December 9, 1852, in Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. II, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 204.
9. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 215.
10. March 27, 1852; Flaubert, Correspondance, II, 62. And the famous quote from the December 9 letter about how the author “should be like God in the universe” is actually set up by a reference to Shakespeare, and to the great virtue of drama. Here are the three sentences that precede the famous one: “Regarde dans Le Marchande de Venise, si l'on déclame contre l'usure. Mais la forme dramatique a cela de bon, elle annule l'auteur. – Balzac n'a pas échappé à ce défaut, il est légitimiste, catholique, aristocrate”; ibid., II, 204.
11. Le Candidat, the one play of Flaubert's that was produced in his lifetime, failed miserably. But even though Flaubert never quite entered the theater in the way he had dreamed he would as a child, he never quite left. See Marshall C. Olds, Au pays des perroquets: Féerie théâtrale et narration chez Flaubert (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001); and Alan Raitt, Flaubert et le théâtre (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999).
12. Alone with his wife after dinner, Mr. Ramsey has an argument with the French novel in himself: “The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, the English novel and the French novel”; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 121. For an expression of Woolf's admiration for Flaubert, see the June 21, 1936 entry in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1984), 25.
13. These adjectives are from the August 16, 1922 entry in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1978), 189. They tally entirely with what Woolf says about Joyce in her published writing; e.g., Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), 94–119, 116; and idem “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader, First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1984), 146–54, 150–52. The harshest thoughts stay in the diary. Whether this is a sign of Woolf's conviction or doubt about them is an interesting question.
14. Virginia Woolf, “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” in Collected Essays, vol. II (London: Hogarth, 1966), 218–29, 219.
15. That is, E. M. Forster may not be entirely wrong in his suggestion that Woolf really ought to have written poetry; E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 23. For a strong answer to Forster, see Liesl M. Olson, “Virginia Woolf's ‘Cotton Wool of Daily Life,’” Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 2 (2003): 42–65.
16. Hungerford admits that personification “represented for deconstructive critics the very fantasy about language that they were trying to deconstruct”; Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5; but she does not do any digging in search of how these critics might answer her claim that they nonetheless personify texts in an irresponsible way – in such a way, for example, that “one's notion of nuclear holocaust is transformed from the destruction of humanity to the destruction of a group of personified texts” (60).
17. Jerome Christensen, America's Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Motion Pictures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 319.
18. Ibid., 330.
19. Ibid., 314.
20. Oren Izenberg. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2.
21. Izenberg seems to see “the desacralization or critique of the concept of the person” as a theoretical accessory to the crimes of the age: “The need to reground personhood responds to history on another scale: to a set of civilizational crises that are at once theoretical (the desacralization and critique of the concept of person) and devastatingly real”; ibid., 2.
22. The Latin word persona – meaning “mask” plus a cluster of metonyms – translates the Greek prosopon. The history by which prosopon/persona passed from theater, to grammar, to law, to theology, and eventually to the psychology of “personality” is a long and strange one, full of surprising reversals of sense, but that the stone in which it is written is so highly sedimentary does not mean that the current sense is in any way easily changeable.
23. Book ten of the Republic is the more famous argument against mimetic art; here I am summarizing a stretch in books two and three, from 369b to 398b, in which Socrates works out the principle of the division of labor in the just city and then considers storytelling in light of that principle; Plato, Republic, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revd. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Socrates divides narrative into three genres: “narrative alone, narrative through imitation, or both” (392d). “Narrative through imitation” is the most dangerous kind, and its pure form is drama. In drama – in tragedy and comedy – “one omits the words between the speeches and leaves the speeches by themselves” (394b). The application of the principle of the just division of labor to the question of “whether or not we'll be able to allow tragedy and comedy into our city” begins on 394d.
24. Eliot casts himself as the voice of “orthodoxy” in T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934). It should be noted that this text represents Eliot at an extreme from which he would try to withdraw. Candid in its racism (particularly in its anti-Semitism), After Strange Gods was never reprinted after its first publication, and Eliot is much more guarded, though not necessarily any less deeply racist and anti-Semitic, in his subsequent works of cultural theory, most notably The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, both in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).
25. For examples of the lip-service and the caveats, see T. S. Eliot, “The Aims of Education,” in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1965), 70–73; and idem, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 175. Eliot is more trenchant when it comes to another ordinary understanding of “democracy.” He insists that democracy is not, in and of itself, incompatible with totalitarianism; see, for example, Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 12.
26. Woolf, “Narrow Bridge of Art,” 226.
27. Ibid., 218.
28. Although, as a poet of dramatic and religious verse, Eliot follows quietly in the “tradition” of his own mother, Charlotte Stearns Eliot, author of Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926).
29. Woolf, “Narrow Bridge of Art,” 219.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 225.
32. Ibid., 222.
33. Ibid., 226.
34. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, 1959), 7. For “playpoem,” see, for example, the November 7, 1928 entry in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1980), 203. For one determinant of the wrinkling at the beginning of The Waves, see Tennyson's “The Eagle”: “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls […].” Tennyson, perhaps not entirely incidentally, is the subject of Freshwater: A Comedy, ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo (London, Hogarth, 1976), the only proper play Woolf ever wrote (she wrote it as a lark for a Bloomsbury party).
35. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; idem, “Modern Fiction.”
36. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957).
37. For an excellent account of the vicissitudes of this highly slippery term in the two centuries leading up to Woolf's, see Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
38. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 153.
39. On the polysemy of “part” in the novel – one cause and effect of this echoing – see Rachel Bowlby, “Partings,” in Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 146–54.
40. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 62.
41. The ideal of Shakespeare as unified, fully actualized mind is everywhere in A Room of One's Own, but see, for example, pp. 56–57 and 97–99.
42. Waxing and waning is one figure for the way personality comes and goes in Woolf's writing. A more Woolfian figure might be “rainbow.” In “The New Biography,” personality is famously “rainbow-like,” while “granite” holds down the other side of the opposition; Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in Collected Essays, vol. IV (London: Hogarth, 1967), 229–35, 229. That Woolf leans toward granite certainly does not mean that she does not leave room for rainbow in her texts. Indeed, in “The New Biography,” the purpose she is stating is to give both granite and rainbow their due. It is biography that is in question here, and, as Ann Banfield notes, “Bloomsbury connected ‘personality’ to biography,” but rainbows certainly happen all along the way in Woolf's novelistic pursuit of “impersonality,” too; Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 384. As Banfield puts it, “Personality does not disappear but shrinks to little islands of rainbow light […]”; ibid., 386. Bringing to light its backgrounds in Russell, no one has done better justice than Banfield to the specificity of Woolf's version of “impersonality.”
A complaint that Maurice Blanchot sometimes expresses about “impersonality” may not apply perfectly to Woolf's specific version. The slippery “il” that Blanchot is after is “a third person that is neither a third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality”; Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 563; idem, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 384. A cloaking of the person might be okay, but “impersonality” is too “simple” a cloak for Blanchot. “The neutral” is needed in order to get off the seesaw of the “personal”/“impersonal” binary. One of the many things one learns in reading Banfield's The Phantom Table is that “neutral” and “impersonal” are synonyms in Russell's version of “impersonality” (e.g., p. 174). Blanchot is only a shadow in The Phantom Table, though. The real meeting with Russell, which only Banfield could have arranged, happens in Ann Banfield, “The Name of the Subject: the ‘il,’” in Yale French Studies, no. 93 “The Place of Maurice Blanchot” (1998): 133–74.
43. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1974), 95; idem, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 102. “To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality […], to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me,’” says Barthes; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” trans. Stephen Heath, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1466–70, 1467; idem, “La mort de l'auteur,” in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 63–69, 64. Here the rhetoric of revolution is muted. By the end of the essay, Barthes has declared his cause to be “truly revolutionary”; Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 1469; idem, “Mort de l'auteur,” 68. The king must die: “it is necessary to overthrow the myth [of the author]: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”; Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 1470; idem, “Mort de l'auteur,” 69. On the less-heralded fatality of “character,” see, in addition to S/Z, Eleanor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
44. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 153–4.
45. Herbert Read develops his distinction between “personality” and “character” most fully in Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry (London: Vision, 1932). Eliot's gallery of heretics is After Strange Gods. It should be noted that, after After Strange Gods, Read and Eliot remained personal friends and professional colleagues on the board of The Criterion.
46. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 95, 96.
47. Ibid., 97.
48. Virginia Woolf, “An Unwritten Novel,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (London: Hogarth, 1985), 112–21, 117.
49. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 63.
50. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 2006). For a summary of the “persons cases,” see Albie Sachs and Joan Hoff Wilson, Sexism and the Law (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978).
51. For an account of this failure in the context of the closeting of drama in modernism, see Martin Puchner, “Stéphane Mallarmé: The Theater in the Closet,” in Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 59–80. For an illuminating discussion of this closeting in terms of sexuality, see Nick Salvato. Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
52. “This tale is addressed to the Intelligence of the reader, which stages things, itself”; Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 475.
53. “The man may be democratic; the artist splits himself in two and must remain an aristocrat”; Stéphane Mallarmé, “Hérésies artistiques. L'Art pour tous,” in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. II, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 360–64, 362.
54. That is, in the terms of Pound's expression of hope for an “aristocracy of the arts,” commerce holds the baton of aristocracy very firmly; the artist waiting to receive it should not be holding his or her breath: “The aristocracy of entail and title has decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying; the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service”; Ezra Pound, “The New Sculpture,” in Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980), 179-82, 182.
55. Ezra Pound. Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New York: Liveright, 1970).
56. Letter of November 12, 1816; Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Digital Edition, ed. Barbara Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). Accessed 5 Oct 2014.
57. Jefferson states this fundamental principle of his political thought most famously in his September 6, 1789 letter to Madison. For an example of Jefferson's application of this fundamental principle to the case of the corporation, see his July 16, 1816 letter (a propos of the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward) to New Hampshire Governor William Plumer.
58. For excellent mappings of the hazardous linguistic territory, see Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law”; Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Persons.”
59. Lawrence's “heresy” gets special treatment in After Strange Gods. For Lawrence's dislike of “equality” – and for his version of “impersonality” – see D. H. Lawrence, “Democracy,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1961), 699–718.
60. The relationship of which Locke is the groundbreaking theorist.
61. Indeed, it is not according to the logic of any lex talionis but rather in the name of the personhood of the perpetrator of a capital crime – of his or her dignity as person – that he or she is put to death by the state, according to the best, Kantian justification of the practice. See Derrida's seminar on the death penalty (1999–2001) for an argument against this justification that does not hastily write it off as a fig leaf for barbarism. Rather than appealing to the figures of the “cruel” and the “unusual” as do the usual arguments against the death penalty, Derrida engages with Kant on the strange new ground that Kant himself staked out for thought.
62. Simone Weil, “La Personne et le Sacré,” in Écrits de Londres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 11–44, 12; idem, “Human Personality,” in Selected Essays, 1934–43, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 9–34, 9. It was already bad enough, according to Weil, to talk about “the rights of man and citizen.” To introduce such a problematic figure as “person” as the subject of those rights, as Jacques Maritain and the personalists want to do (and succeed in doing after World War II, in the first place in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), only adds to the confusion: “The notion of rights, which was launched into the world in 1789, has proved unable, because of its intrinsic inadequacy, to fulfill the role assigned to it. To combine two inadequate notions, by talking about the rights of human personality, will not bring us any further“; Weil, “Personne et le Sacré, 12; idem, “Human Personality,” 10. For a highly illuminating account of the relationship between corporate personhood and the “person” enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.
63. Weil, “Personne et le Sacré,” 13; idem, “Human Personality,” 11.
64. Plato, Republic, 380d–382e.
65. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx says that before there is division of labor proper, there is division of “labor” in the sexual act; Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part I, in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 146–200, 158. A full account of the relationship between the division of labor among subjects and the internal division of the subject might begin in this prehistory.
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Herschel Farbman
Herschel Farbman is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature (Fordham University Press, 2008; 2012 in paperback). This article is part of a book project on corporate personhood, modernist “impersonality,” and the problem of the place of the writer in the corporate capitalist division of labor.