L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetics, corporations are gods, language has an agency

 My introduction to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was a class I took with Karen Mac Cormack. There's a lot you can say about L-poetics, but language to these poets was material like paint or clay. Meaning trapped and limited poets so constructing a poem from the starting point of meaning often led to blocks. It seems extremely practical to me. Eventually, everyone runs out of things to say. So, different ways to use text as stuff was a great way to think about language and poetics.

I was less enthusiastic about ascribing an agency to language, but, perhaps that was due to my own psychological baggage. It's more obvious to me than almost anything else than language has more agency in this world than human beings. I don't even know if this is a bad thing. When you think of religion as a social language with specific social functions, you start to think of other things as language that serve other functions. Suddenly, almost any organized group is a language including companies and corporations. How did we get here? Well, the articles of incorporation are essentially a script for instantiating the corporate object. It's a legal object. Every new corporation inherits the properties of the corporate object. It's that simple. Governments have constitutions. It's language generating language. We create myths and stories around it. Language generating language. Going all the way back to the local deities of the Near Eastern traditions. Our governments and states and social organization was inextricably tied to religion and even in some cases, gods. State governments inherit federal laws. Local municipalities inherit state laws. 

Language did have an agency in the creepiest possible way and there may not only be no escape from it, but it may be better than what we had before. Consider that our own personal motivations tend to taint the objective of the law or corrupt our motivations. We want to avoid that, right? The script appears to prevent some forms of corruption while allowing others.

A corporation is a legal document. It's language. It borrows the will of potentially millions of people to function. That's why it's a god. And like a god, it's more important than a person. 

So, the idea of language generating language is not unusual. In some ways, it's a performance of the relative loss of humanity that occurs in modern bureaucracies, ancient bureaucracies, and to humans living under human systems.