To Örebro University

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an "anthrobotic" horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent "analytic" moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of "crealectic intelligence", a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or "Creal".

A cultural and philosophical history of neon, from Paris in the twentieth century to the perpetually switched-on present day.

For most of us, the word neon conjures images of lights, colors, nightlife, and streets. It evokes the poetry of city nights. For Luis de Miranda, neon is a subject of philosophical curiosity. Being and Neonness is a cultural and philosophical history of neon, from early twentieth-century Paris to the electric, perpetually switched-on present day Manhattan. It is an inspired journey through a century of night, deciphering the halos of the past and the reflections of the present to shed light on the future.

Invented in Paris in 1912, neon first appeared on a modest but arresting sign outside a small barbershop; the sign lit up number 14, Boulevard Montmartre, attracting so many passersby that the barber's revenues soon doubled. A century later, neon is no longer just a sign; it is a mythic object—a metonymy of contemporary identity and a metaphor for the present, signifying the ubiquity of commerce and the tautology of hypermodernity. But perhaps the noble gas of neon whispers something more, something deeper? In ten short, poetic yet precise chapters, de Miranda explores the neon lights of the twentieth century. He considers, among other historical curiosities, the neon compulsions of the Italian Futurists; the Soviet program of “neonization”; the Nazi's deployment of neon for propaganda purposes; Baudelaire's “halo” and Benjamin's “aura”; neon as a gas and crystallized chaos; neon and power; neon and capitalism—all of this backlit by an original reading of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. This English edition has been thoroughly revised and adapted from the French edition, L'être et le neon.

Is esprit de corps the secret engine of history?

• Unveils the hidden and conflicting ideologies at stake behind the concept of esprit de corps and its contemporary uses 
• Focuses on the discursive uses of esprit de corps in various transnational contexts and in the long term, from 1700 to present times 
• Combines intellectual history, cultural history, philosophy, history of ideas, discourse analysis, political theory and labour history 
• Offers a fresh look into the modern dialectics of individualism and collectivism, structure and agency, laissez-faire and corporatism
• Deepens our understanding of the history of corporate capitalism and its military influences, as well as to understand the current revival of occidental nationalism

Esprit de corps has played a significant role in the cultural and political history of the last 300 years. Through several historical case studies, Luis de Miranda shows how this phrase acts as a combat concept with a clear societal impact. He also reveals how interconnected, yet distinct, French, English and American modern intellectual and political thought is. In the end, this is a cautionary analysis of past and current ideologies of ultra-unified human ensembles, a recurrent historical and theoretical fabulation the author calls ‘ensemblance’.

In this essay, we sketch out a method, histosophy, which makes possible the study of intellectual history and conceptual genealogy both in depth and over long periods of time. Histosophy uses digital tools to survey ‘large issues within small compasses.’ A genealogy of signifiers, it considers metonymic parts of a problem in order to contribute precisely and coherently to a larger perspective. We outline the theoretical contours of our approach. We exemplify how it works in practice by looking at the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, the study of which is presented in detail in the histosophical book The Genealogy of Esprit de Corps(Edinburgh University Press, 2019). The phrase ‘esprit de corps’ has been widely used since the eighteenth century in different discourses (political, military, sociological, etc.), but it is sufficiently limited that its genealogy can be traced across centuries and nations with precision, coherence, clarity, and with the help of automated search engines. By contrast, related but bigger concepts like freedom, individualism or solidarity are part of dozens of disparate and fuzzy discourses, so often uttered that the analysis of modern uses is problematic. The histosophical methodology is applicable in six discrete stages, here outlined.

We contend that our relationship with robots is too often seen within a universalistic and individualistic mind-frame. We propose a specific perspective in social robotics that we call anthrobotics. Anthrobotics starts with the choice to consider the human-machine intertwining as a dynamic union of more or less institutionalised collectives rather than separated discrete realities (individual humans, on one side, and discrete individualised machines on the other). We draw on our research in types of social interaction and esprit de corps to imagine more plural and harmonious forms of shared natural-artificial cognitive systems. We propose to look at four types of organised groups: conformative, autonomist, creative, and universalistic, that may provide guiding principles for the design of more diverse anthrobots.

The notion of the mechanism is one of the most popular and widely used concepts in science and sociology is no exception. This paper problematizes the widespread and often uncritical use of the term "mechanism" in contemporary sociology. Drawing on the mechanistic worldview associated with leading figures of the scientific revolution, the paper emphasizes the impact of mechanistic thinking on the societal rationalization process identified by Max Weber and the Frankfurt School. The analysis suggests that mechanisms, when applied to sociological theories, may uncritically reproduce a cultural fetish of the rational society with potentially dehumanizing consequences. The author advocates for a critical reflection on the cultural and historical context of mechanisms, urging sociologists to view them not merely as analytical tools but as active contributors to the creation and shaping of social worlds erected on a belief in instrumental reason.

During the second parts of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century the middle class patriarch played an important role in the formation and transformation of the bourgeoisie in Sweden - especially in the upper middle class dominated by industrialists, wholesalers and owners of "bruk". According to the comic press in the early twentieth century appearance was characteristic. Obviously he was a man. In the caricatures he often carried a high cylinder, wore a sturdy moustache á la Bismarck, was evidently thick and because of that a back leaned posture, and had a authoritative appearance. Often he smoked a fat cigar. Here we will discuss his world view. First of all we discuss him on the basis of the changes in the bourgeois public and its patriarchal relations. Then we consider important parts of the world view and lastly we discuss the middle class patriarch as an industrialist.

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.

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 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.   

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.

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.

In this dissertation, the author argues that the post-process movement towards genre-based writing pedagogies is reproducing the logic of neoliberal or free-market ideology. By analyzing the relationship between three paradigms of sovereignty (feudalism, the nation-state, and globalization) and institutionalized language, the author demonstrates that teaching writing as multiple and genred as opposed to teaching it as a single, abstract skill is no a more rational approach, but rather a differently rational approach.

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.