Abstract
Why would personhood be a problem? After all, rhetorical and legal claims to personhood have historically been used to counter dehumanization and to secure equal rights and protections, due process, and legal standing for human beings denied the capacity to make legal claims. Given historical and ongoing struggles for political equality—and those struggles should not be discounted—the logical move to protect more entities such as animals and trees from destruction and depredation would be to assert legal personhood. Or would it? It might make logical sense if not for the historical applications of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, in which judicial interpretations of “person” have consolidated and fortified corporations as persons in ways that have displaced the claims of formerly enslaved persons to rights. Lisa Siraganian knows this well, as I am merely recapitulating the argument of the last chapter in her 2020 book, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. But I mention the conundrum here because this “person” as a corporate form born in the late nineteenth century during a moment described by W. E. B. DuBois as the counterrevolution of property, is central to why personhood is a problem.
The Problem of Personhood both builds on and pushes Siraganian’s interrogations of corporate personhood in new directions. Its central intervention, carried out with brilliant and nuanced argumentation, is to stop the logical and rhetorical move to assert legal personhood made in hopes of protecting entities from damage and deprivation. The “problem of personhood” is not just that the meaning of personhood has been distorted to strengthen corporate power at the expense of those who are actually suffering from hierarchies of power. It is that legal formations of corporate personhood have crafted a powerful, increasingly dominant model of “expansive personhood” (so dubbed by Siraganian) based around all of the powers consolidated there. These powers are as follows: limited liability; the capacity to act without corresponding duties or responsibilities; and the privileging of property over the publicness of persons. When we use claims of personhood to argue for the equal rights and treatment of “unborn persons,” forests, animals, robots, or AI, we find ourselves on a perilous course. For we are not arguing for more entities to be counted as persons. Rather, Siraganian argues, we are reinforcing political and social patterns of constructing our world around the powers enumerated above. As she puts it, “it is the corporate form that separates the legal subject from its potential liabilities and duties, and it is that fundamental division that every new form of personhood reactivates. Subjects and rights proliferate, while liability and duties languish unaddressed” (60). Siraganian historicizes and theorizes “expansive personhood,” thinks through the ways in which it is applied with deeply troubling consequences, and directs us toward specific, meaningful approaches to address the problem. It is worth noting that this last step is rare for an academic book.
The Problem of Personhood is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction situates the argument within political-philosophical and artistic interrogations of legal personhood, spanning its varied trajectories since the eighteenth century (although under different terms—Siraganian crucially notes that “personhood” as a term is of relatively recent vintage). Chapter one provides the framework: it theorizes the model of expansive personhood, defining its central characteristics and its derivation from the corporate form—specifically the forms it takes through venture-colonialism, the company-state, and the multinational corporation. She defines “expansive personhood” through four main theses. First, its precondition is the idea of formal equality. Second, the model is ambiguous, emptied out of moral and social particulars to incorporate many kinds of entities under its “thin” descriptions. Third, “expansive personhood” reduces moral and ethical components of personhood to the abstract legal version. Finally, it replaces the “publicness” of personhood with thingness and property (54-6). This is a key point. To secure privileges and immunities that far exceed civil rights, expansive personhood relies on property claims. It is a legal form whereby “power is . . . transferred onto property and capital” (38).
The four chapters that follow show how this model of expansive personhood is the primary vehicle—sometimes explicit, sometimes lurking in the shadows—for claiming legal personhood on behalf of unborn persons, animals, trees, and digital entities including robots and AI. Siraganian carefully provides an overview of each of the debate, no mean feat given the different political and legal histories of each case. But this demonstration does not consist merely in analyzing the legal rhetoric and argumentation in U.S. Supreme Court and state legal cases. Expansive personhood is not a static model or legal definition, but is “actually an ongoing process and performance that requires an enormous amount of rhetorical, analytical, and theoretical work in the shadows” (94). Each chapter treats legal, rhetorical, and aesthetic strategies used by writers and artists across moral philosophy, case law, political theory, children’s literature, popular culture, contemporary art, and political and ethical debates. Such interdisciplinary exploration is crucial for understanding the broader legal, cultural, and representational shifts toward the logics of expansive personhood. For example, in the chapter “Unborn Fictions,” Siraganian analyses contemporary art, detailing the aesthetic practices used to visualize the fetus and convert “an envisaged figure into a real one” (93). In picturing the fetus as a separate, alienated figure, artists and others using biomedical imaging techniques erase the mother. They eliminate any understanding of the fetus as part of the mother and the mother as an inseparable person. In another chapter on the case of arguments for the legal standing of trees or rivers, Siraganian focuses on inescapable processes of anthropomorphism that reinforce claims of personhood. In Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, this anthropomorphism, Siraganian argues, results in a picture of personhood that abdicates responsibility and passively accepts capitalist drives.
Because the formations of expansive personhood are constantly being worked on and worked through, these formations can be undone, and their go-to moves of abstraction and personification can be engaged with in other ways. In analyzing Wangechi Mutu’s sculpture She’s got the whole world in her (2015), for instance, Siraganian describes Mutu’s animation of the world not as a move that renders everything property but one that relates and acknowledges responsibilities and so offers us a view of “a transformed place in which a person becomes self-possessed in an entire little world” (153).
The fact that we have made the tool of expansive personhood means that we can change it. Attention to cultivating different practices and tools is very important for Siraganian. At every turn, she draws out the implications of using the model of expansive personhood, including both the social practices it embeds and the world it makes. For example, in the chapter on AI, she teases out the implications of using AI to handle state welfare system case-loads: “critical ethical-social choices are transferred from caseworkers to computer engineers and economists, to ‘political decision-making machines’. Such algorithms are not built for the purpose of social justice but ‘to manage the symptoms of austerity’—another damaging social choice” (186). Attention to such concrete processes and implications is crucial because the goals of this book are both critical interrogation and change. The book offers a specific, pointed strategy for moving forward; in the conclusion, this strategy is called “letting persons go” (195). According to Siraganian, pushing back against the legal and rhetorical tool of personhood opens the way for other policies and practices that work toward reproductive, environmental, and animal justice. These arguments rest less on making claims about kinds of entities and more on picturing a world of relations.
For anyone engaging with the politics of claiming personhood as a vehicle for gaining rights and protections, The Problem of Personhood makes an important argument. For anyone participating in the ongoing processes of expansive personhood, which, given its history, is all of us, the argument must be reckoned with. As all bold work will do, the book generates additional questions and developments, however. For this reader, I wondered further about the colonial underpinnings of the corporation. Given the deep historical imbrication of corporate form with “venture-colonialism” and multinational corporations, as detailed in chapter one, are there some characteristics of expansive personhood that are more tightly related to those historical and ongoing formations than others (44)? The peculiar spatial arrangements of multinational corporations whereby their “interests” can be in multiple places while being nowhere at the same time perhaps crystallize an aspect of expansive personhood and its continuities with colonial relations of self and world. I also wanted further details on the models and tools that eschew the legal claims of (corporate) personhood. The book highlights several: a trust for nonhuman animals, stewardship, and home. But given the concrete particulars of process and consequences that Siraganian pays attention to, I wanted more details on these and other alternative models. I felt their absence most keenly in environmental law, because of the relatively large volume of land, water rights, and fishing rights cases fought by Indigenous groups and tribes. In what ways have different models moved the question of rights away from the claims of expansive personhood, and in what other ways might the corporate sovereignty of expansive personhood be challenged? No doubt these and other conversations will be sparked by Siraganian’s significant intervention.