Cherry Ma’s ENGE4700 final project is an extensive (27 page) exploration of Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, Nostromo. Cherry’s focus is on the concept of the ‘corporation,’ which she sees as the dominant model used by the European-influenced elite of Conrad’s fictitious South American nation of Costaguana in their efforts to improve the economic and political conditions of an emerging regional power. Cherry’s analysis of the novel shows how its leading characters all view the process of political change in an optimistic manner, privileging ideas of ‘science,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘materialism’ which will ultimately generate investment, economic growth, and stable political institutions. Cherry’s most exciting idea is how this model of national growth is premised not only on a view of the nation as a ‘corporation’ – a well-organized administrative bureaucracy dedicated to economic expansion – but on a view of the corporate nation as a ‘person,’ a legal fiction that has its origin in the middle ages and continues, even today, to exert a great influence in determining the legal rights and duties of large and powerful institutions. In Cherry’s analysis, the efforts in the novel on the part of the Costaguanans, and their European financers, to construct the nation using a corporate model, are unsuccessful for the same reasons that envisioning a corporation as a person are problematic in the modern world. Instead of making a corporation more responsible and ‘human’ in its aims, the idea of ‘corporate personhood’ instead functions as an ideological mystification, providing corporations with the ‘rights’ of a person but without any spiritual component. As a result, the desperate efforts of the corporate ‘stakeholders’ to identify their values with an abstraction to which they have assigned human identity, can only result in failure – a process that Cherry meticulously analyzes in the course of her first-rate capstone project.

Through its chronicle of the advent of corporate capitalism, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo explores the tensions intrinsic to the corporate, and dramatizes the loss of individual integrity as the corporation grows increasingly autonomous. The act of incorporation originally is intended to endow the San Tome silver mine in the novel with an organic unity and sensibility, animating what otherwise would have been a mere profit-generating instrument. The fusion of humanist sensibilities and pragmatic considerations allows the owner of the mine, Charles Gould, to attribute qualities of personhood to the mining enterprise. However, it soon becomes apparent that the personhood of the corporation, which strives to realize the corporate will to infinitely perpetuate itself at all costs, competes with the expression of the individualism of those who purportedly own it or run it. The tension inherent within an incorporated business enterprise shows through the word corporate, which simultaneously denotes a physical, corporeal body and a disembodied, aggregate of many. Nostromo explores the precariousness of the organicist imagination that the mine, when incorporated, would create a social collective uniting individuals of disparate interests. Through delineating how the corporation corrodes the spectacular individualism of the title character Nostromo, as he becomes a willing servant of the silver mining enterprise, Conrad expresses his skepticism towards the practice of anthropomorphizing the business corporation. Like the silver of the mine, Nostromo, when incorporated into the corporation, finds the value of his actions defined only in terms of corporate philosophy, abbreviated in the novel as the pursuit for “material interests”. At the end of the novel, it becomes obvious that the mine, immortal and amoral in its operation, consumes the initial idealism and eventually the human lives who have grown to be obsessed with it. Nostromo is an enquiry into the origins of corporate power, and the fictiveness of the corporate. Conrad’s critique of the anthropomophization of the corporation in Nostromo anticipates our contemporary concerns regarding the ontological status of the corporation.

During my internship at a law firm last year, I was struck by the imbalance of bargaining power between the business corporation and the private individual. My encounters with clients whose everyday life had been severely affected by the years of toilsome litigation fueled my interest in how the modern legal system places the individual in a disadvantageous position when engaging in lawsuits with the corporation, which is unbound by corporeality. This capstone project provides an invaluable opportunity for me to critically examine the genealogy of corporate personhood.