Historicizing the Analytics of Corporate Meaning

This review essay of Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons reflects on the relationship between two sets of questions. The first set deals with the analytics of corporate intention; the second, with the role of the corporation in modern society. Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons highlights the grappling of modernist art with the analytical questions. The review claims that modernism’s attention to the historically specific role of the corporation in society was no less crucial. Indeed, much of the energy and power of modernism’s engagement with the corporation lay in its resistance to capitalism