To Örebro University

This article looks at how exigence is made publicly observable in user-based media operating on recommendation algorithms. Messaging in these rhetorical environments often takes the form of imitative behaviors rather than statements inviting a direct response. Examined in the article are two audio memes from TikTok representing two modes of imitation: one a physical imitation meme associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, and the other a narrative imitation meme where participants objectify endemic social problems. The findings suggest that the responsorial imperative of audio memes can either intensify the speed and urgency with which an exigence is experienced, or it can bring urgency to endemic problems. The studies also find that the formal qualities of a given audio meme constrain both how an exigence is communicated as well as what kinds of exigences the meme can be taken up for in the first place.

Of the four types of experience available to objects in Graham Harman’s four-fold model of the object, one of them—intellectual speculation on an intended object’s real or invariant qualities—is only available to humans. This is an untenable position in a truly flat ontology. This article ‘closes the loop,’ so to speak, by arguing that invariance can be experienced aesthetically without the invariant qualities of an object being identified and divided by a human intellect. While there is no way of telling how a non-human object experiences invariance in the objects it intends, the experience of invariance before intellectual speculation is visible in at least one realm of human activity: genre-based action. This article argues that because the primary mode of generic production is mimesis (an aesthetic mode), certain invariant qualities of the genre may be experienced as significant and reproduced in iterations of the genre before they are analyzed and identified as such by the intellect. Therefore, rather than attributing some degree of intelligence to all objects, a line of continuity is drawn between the aesthetic and the intellect, rendering the latter an instance of the former.   

Since its beginnings in the 1970s, modern rhetorical genre studies has used classical Darwinian adaptation as a key analogy, if not a model, in the study of genre evolution. While the adaptation analogy has obvious strengths, it also produces blind spots. As the studies of rapidly evolving social media genres presented in this article suggest, not all of a genre’s formal features are the result of a purposeful adaptation to an existing rhetorical exigence. Some features repeat and intensify because they are part of the genre’s aesthetic landscape, becoming available to be coopted for a rhetorical purpose later on. This suggests that along with adaptation, exaptation should also be considered as a crucial force in genre evolution. Moreover, the inclusion of exaptation in our model of genre evolution also means that rhetorical genre scholars will need to rediscover the language of aesthetics and form even as genre continues to be studied as social action.

This essay calls for an independent theory of features in object-oriented philosophy. Theories offeatures are in general motivated by at least two interconnected demands: 1) to explain why objects have thecharacteristics they have, 2) to explain how regular divisions in those characteristics can be intuited. Whilea theory of universal properties may be the most internally consistent means of addressing these demands,an object-oriented metaphysics needs to address them without a concept of shared features. This meansthat regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetitionof self-same characteristics or natural laws. They can instead be explained by the immanent repetition ofsimilar features. However, this requires a new, radically aesthetic understanding of what it means to besimilar in the first place, one in which similarity is an emergent process rather than a state of affairs existingbetween resembling particulars.

Similarity has long been excluded from reality in both the analytical and continental traditions. Because it exists in the aesthetic realm, and because aesthetics is thought to be divorced from objective reality, similarity has been confined to the prison of the subject. In The Being of Analogy, Noah Roderick unleashes similarity onto the world of objects. Inspired by object-oriented theories of causality, Roderick argues that similarity is ever present at the birth of new objects. This includes the emergent similarity of new mental objects, such as categories—a phenomenon we recognize as analogy. Analogy, Roderick contends, is at the very heart of cognition and communication, and it is through analogy that we can begin dismantling the impossible wall between knowing and being.

In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

Of all the human sciences, linguistics has had perhaps the most success in pivoting itself towards the physical sciences, particularly in the past fifty years with the dominance of Universal Grammar, which is most closely associated with the work of Noam Chomsky. One of the most important implications of Universal Grammar has been that language production in its most natural and optimal state is organized analytically, and thus shares the same organizational logic of other knowledge systems in Western science, such as the binomial taxonomization of nature and analytic geometry. This essay argues that recent challenges to Universal Grammar represent more than just a theoretical dispute within a single discipline; they threaten to undermine the hegemony of analytical knowledge systems in general. While analytical logic has served Western science well, analogical knowledge systems may be able to address problems that analytical logic cannot, such as ecological crises, the limitations of artificial intelligence, and the problems of complex systems. Instead of studying languages as a means of modeling human thought in general, languages should also be studied and preserved as heteronomous knowledge systems which themselves exist as embodied objects within particular ecologies. Rethinking language as existing on a univocal plane with other ecological objects will provide us with new insight on the ethics and epistemology of analogical knowledge production.

In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

Mathematics teachers (K-12) utilize textbooks to largely determine the scope and the sequence of mathematics concepts taught in their classrooms (see, e.g., Braswell et al., 2001; Clements, 2002; Grouws & Smith, 2000; Grouws, Smith, & Sztajn, 2004; Woodward & Elliot, 1990). However, little is known of the nature of the learning trajectories of important mathematical concepts defined by textbook authors in the written curricula that serve as the conceptual basis for the scope and sequence of what and when mathematics is taught. Olson (2010) identified articulated learning trajectories (ALTs) defined by authors’ placement of concepts within the written text. The ALTs identified were related to the development of algebraic thinking concepts (e.g., functions) through the use of patterning concepts within four middle school mathematics textbook series: Saxon Math (Saxon) (Hake, 2007), Glencoe Mathematics: Applications and Concepts (Glencoe) (Bailey et al., 2006), McDougal Littell Math Thematics (Math Thematics) (Billstein & Williamson, 2008), and Connected Mathematics 2 (CMP) (Lappan, Fey, Fitzgerald, Friel, & Phillips, 2009). Importantly, differences in the development of algebraic concepts were identified among the four textbook series, as was the divergent use of mathematics terms critical in the mathematical development identified in the ALTs examined in the four curricula.