Emergent Corporate Mind

A lively debate over “corporate mind” materialized in legal, philosophical, and political scientific guises throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Legal theorists such as Harold Laski, Jethro Brown, and Frederic Maitland sought to ascribe intentions to mindful corporations to understand why corporations acted as they did and to treat them accordingly; theorists like Morris Cohen, John Salmond, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. thought this tactic made no sense. This chapter examines their dispute to argue that Gertrude Stein’s conceptualizing of groups of artists proposed representational solutions both similar to and ultimately divergent from these conceptions of corporate minds. A radical reading of Stein’s revolutionary prose poem, G.M.P. (1912), is offered, supported by archival manuscript evidence. That text ponders the difference between a publicly traded corporation, with its repetitive daily “life” exposed to anyone with a ticker-tape machine, and the creations of a group of painters and poets. Abstracting the art collectivity and giving the movement a name (“G.M.P.”) more typical of publicly traded companies on a stock exchange, Stein registers its divergence from a crowd, a corporate collective, or an individual. Like business entities, aesthetic movements possess emergent properties that are more than the sum of their artist parts; yet art’s immortality differs from a corporation’s life in perpetuity. Offering context for the period’s corporate ideas from various disciplines—political science, jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology—this chapter catches writers thinking through how a corporate group imagines and creates.