| Throughout the modern history of Europe and the United States, the answer to the technical problem of how to organize collective economic activity has been the corporation. In this dissertation, The Corporate Form: Capital, Literature, Architecture, I provide a diagram that corresponds to this particular form of social organization. I use the concept of the "corporate form" to describe a type of organizational structure that involves specific conceptions of time, subjectivity and space, and that affects the realms of the economic and of the aesthetic alike. While the corporate form is most recognizable today as the multinational corporation, it is also evident throughout a variety of cultural phenomena.;This study has four distinct reference points: the history of the corporation, economic theory, literature, and architecture. In each case I seek to analyze a historical manifestation of the corporate form by tracing its effects within diverse social and cultural realms. The first two chapters provide the history and economic theory of the corporate form, and chapters three and four trace the visibility of the corporate form in literature and architecture. In chapter one, I provide an analysis of the historical development of the corporation from its origins in maritime trade on the Mediterranean Sea to the development of colonial companies in the seventeenth century, and eventually to its modern form in the United States. Chapter two provides a theoretical analysis of Marxist economic theory and its relationship to the modern form of the corporation. This chapter is also an intervention into contemporary debates in Marxist theory concerning the definition of labor and exploitation today. Chapter three situates fiction in relation to the development of the corporate form and provides an analysis of two of William Gaddis's novels in order to trace the visible effects of the corporate form in literature. The final chapter documents the relationship between modern architecture and the corporate form by providing an analysis of Eero Saarinen's corporate architecture. Each of these diverse cultural and historical moments emerges as a specific expression of the corporate form. |
