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"Reyes, G. Mitchell"
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Algorithms and Rhetorical Inquiry: The Case of the 2008 Financial Collapse
Algorithms have never been more influential, yet our collective understanding of how they transform massive networks of cultural power has not kept pace. This is especially true when it comes to economic algorithms, which operate as black boxes largely inaccessible to the majority of citizens whose worlds they continuously reshape. This essay offers a rhetorical approach to reading algorithms—not only to challenge the positivism and mathematical realism that naïvely apotheosizes algorithms and algorithmic culture but more importantly to become critical informants, scholars who can open up these black boxes for fellow citizens, examine the hidden assumptions therein, and study how they actively transform our social-material worlds. The essay's exemplar is the 2008 financial crisis and a little-known algorithm called the Li Guassian copula, which played a major role in the spread of subprime mortgages. I argue that this copula puts on spectacular display the power of algorithms as principles of composition—actants that materially expand our social collectives even as they marginalize human agency and practical judgment with forms of technological rationality that, in the case of the Li copula, concentrated the networks of structured finance around a single decision apparatus, rendering those networks both larger and, contra conventional wisdom, more fragile.
Journal Article
The Evolution of Mathematics
There is a growing awareness among researchers in the humanities
and social sciences of the rhetorical force of mathematical
discourse-whether in regard to gerrymandering, facial recognition
technologies, or racial biases in algorithmic automation. This book
proposes a novel way to engage with and understand mathematics via
a theoretical framework that highlights how math transforms the
social-material world.
In this study, G. Mitchell Reyes applies contemporary rhetorical
analysis to mathematical discourse, calling into question the
commonly held view that math equals truth. Examining mathematics in
historical context, Reyes traces its development from Plato's
teaching about abstract numbers to Euclidian geometry and the
emergence of calculus and infinitesimals, imaginary numbers, and
algorithms. This history reveals that mathematical innovation has
always relied on rhetorical practices of making meaning, such as
analogy, metaphor, and invention. Far from expressing truth hidden
deep in reality, mathematics is dynamic and evolving, shaping
reality and our experience of it.
By bringing mathematics back down to the material-social world,
Reyes makes it possible for scholars of the rhetoric and sociology
of science, technology, and math to collaborate with mathematicians
themselves in order to better understand our material world and
public culture.
eBook
Arguing with Numbers
As discrete fields of inquiry, rhetoric and mathematics have long been considered antithetical to each other. That is, if mathematics explains or describes the phenomena it studies with certainty, persuasion is not needed. This volume calls into question the view that mathematics is free of rhetoric.
Through nine studies of the intersections between these two disciplines, Arguing with Numbers shows that mathematics is in fact deeply rhetorical. Using rhetoric as a lens to analyze mathematically based arguments in public policy, political and economic theory, and even literature, the essays in this volume reveal how mathematics influences the values and beliefs with which we assess the world and make decisions and how our worldviews influence the kinds of mathematical instruments we construct and accept. In addition, contributors examine how concepts of rhetoric—such as analogy and visuality—have been employed in mathematical and scientific reasoning, including in the theorems of mathematical physicists and the geometrical diagramming of natural scientists. Challenging academic orthodoxy, these scholars reject a math-equals-truth reduction in favor of a more constructivist theory of mathematics as dynamic, evolving, and powerfully persuasive.
By bringing these disparate lines of inquiry into conversation with one another, Arguing with Numbers provides inspiration to students, established scholars, and anyone inside or outside rhetorical studies who might be interested in exploring the intersections between the two disciplines.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Catherine Chaput, Crystal Broch Colombini, Nathan Crick, Michael Dreher, Jeanne Fahnestock, Andrew C. Jones, Joseph Little, and Edward Schiappa.
eBook
Arguing with Numbers
As discrete fields of inquiry, rhetoric and mathematics have
long been considered antithetical to each other. That is, if
mathematics explains or describes the phenomena it studies with
certainty, persuasion is not needed. This volume calls into
question the view that mathematics is free of rhetoric.
Through nine studies of the intersections between these two
disciplines, Arguing with Numbers shows that mathematics
is in fact deeply rhetorical. Using rhetoric as a lens to analyze
mathematically based arguments in public policy, political and
economic theory, and even literature, the essays in this volume
reveal how mathematics influences the values and beliefs with which
we assess the world and make decisions and how our worldviews
influence the kinds of mathematical instruments we construct and
accept. In addition, contributors examine how concepts of
rhetoric-such as analogy and visuality-have been employed in
mathematical and scientific reasoning, including in the theorems of
mathematical physicists and the geometrical diagramming of natural
scientists. Challenging academic orthodoxy, these scholars reject a
math-equals-truth reduction in favor of a more constructivist
theory of mathematics as dynamic, evolving, and powerfully
persuasive.
By bringing these disparate lines of inquiry into conversation
with one another, Arguing with Numbers provides
inspiration to students, established scholars, and anyone inside or
outside rhetorical studies who might be interested in exploring the
intersections between the two disciplines.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are
Catherine Chaput, Crystal Broch Colombini, Nathan Crick, Michael
Dreher, Jeanne Fahnestock, Andrew C. Jones, Joseph Little, and
Edward Schiappa.
eBook
Global Memoryscapes
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transnational movement of people and ideas has led scholars
throughout the humanities to reconsider many core concepts. Among
them is the notion of public memory and how it changes when
collective memories are no longer grounded within the confines of
the traditional nation-state. An introduction by coeditors
Kendall Phillips and Mitchell Reyes provides a context for
examining the challenges of remembrance in a globalized world. In
their essay they posit the idea of the “global
memoryscape,” a sphere in which memories circulate among
increasingly complex and diffused networks of remembrance.
The essays contained within the volume--by scholars from a
wide range of disciplines including American studies, art
history, political science, psychology, and sociology--each
engage a particular instance of the practices of memory as they
are complicated by globalization.
Subjects include the place of nostalgia in post-Yugoslavia
Serbian national memory, Russian identity after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, political remembrance in South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the role of Chilean mass
media in forging national identity following the arrest of
Augusto Pinochet, American debates over memorializing Japanese
internment camps, and how the debate over the Iraq war is framed
by memories of opposition to the Vietnam War.
eBook
The Evolution of Mathematics
There is a growing awareness among researchers in the humanities and social sciences of the rhetorical force of mathematical discourse—whether in regard to gerrymandering, facial recognition technologies, or racial biases in algorithmic automation. This book proposes a novel way to engage with and understand mathematics via a theoretical framework that highlights how math transforms the social-material world.In this study, G. Mitchell Reyes applies contemporary rhetorical analysis to mathematical discourse, calling into question the commonly held view that math equals truth. Examining mathematics in historical context, Reyes traces its development from Plato’s teaching about abstract numbers to Euclidian geometry and the emergence of calculus and infinitesimals, imaginary numbers, and algorithms. This history reveals that mathematical innovation has always relied on rhetorical practices of making meaning, such as analogy, metaphor, and invention. Far from expressing truth hidden deep in reality, mathematics is dynamic and evolving, shaping reality and our experience of it.By bringing mathematics back down to the material-social world, Reyes makes it possible for scholars of the rhetoric and sociology of science, technology, and math to collaborate with mathematicians themselves in order to better understand our material world and public culture.
eBook
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Politics of Realism, and the Manipulation of Vietnam Remembrance in the 2004 Presidential Election
The group calling themselves The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth first organized in April 2004 in order to plot a strategy to undermine John Kerry's bid for president. They developed several advertisements that questioned everything from the legitimacy of Kerry's medals to the accuracy of his version of the past; they portrayed Kerry as an overly ambitious person willing to distort the truth to achieve his political goalsy and they generated a firestorm of political debate. This essay argues that the Swift Boat veterans used realist discourse in collusion with Vietnam remembrance to create rhetorically powerful indictments of Kerry. To develop the argument, I focus on the Swift Boat veterans' first broadcast advertisement, an ad that had a significant influence on the presidential campaign both ideologically and in the polls. I argue that a discourse of realism dominated the ad, concealing not only its questionable credibility and political motives, but also the rhetorical tactics it used to reinforce its realist frame.
Journal Article
When Memory and Sexuality Collide: The Homosentimental Style of Gay Liberation
Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument's use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.
Journal Article
