Meta-metapragmatics of (Inter)Action: Fractality, Spatiotemporality, and the Scalar Complexity of Youth Politics

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Abstract

This paper advances a fractal theory of normativity and interaction to explain how Iranian Gen Z came to occupy a central role in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather than portraying their mobilization as spontaneous rupture or generational heroism, we argue that youth politics emerges through recursively patterned, spatiotemporally situated processes of meaning-making and action unfolding across scales.Drawing on complexity theory (Mandelbrot 1982), processual sociology (Abbott 2001, 2016), and social-scientific traditions grounded in meaning, context, and interaction (Goffman 1964; Silverstein 1993; Martin 2011), we conceptualize social life as operating at the intersection of order, disruption, and reconfiguration. Within this framework, normativities are not fixed moral codes but emergent formations constructed through engagement with spatiotemporally situated material and semiotic resources. When lived conditions diverge sharply from presupposed normalcies, disruptions generate reflexive and affective recalibrations that may scale from individual unease to collective transformation. Empirically, we combine historical analysis, interviews, digital ethnography, and large-scale social media data—including over one million tweets from the early days of the uprising—to trace how intergenerational youth memories, digital infrastructures, and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions converged in the present moment. We move across scales: from the longue durée of post-revolutionary youth politics to real-time digital circulation, and further into situated cases of everyday resistance. Theoretically, this approach enables what we describe as a meta-meta-pragmatics of interaction: a higher-order analytic position from which both actions (pragmatics) and the normativities that orient them (metapragmatics) can be apprehended as elements within a complex, multi-scalar network of spatiotemporal formations. By foregrounding fractality and scalar complexity, the paper offers a dynamic account of how patterned multiplicities of meaning and action accumulate, synchronize, and rescale across contexts.

Authors

• Mahbubeh Moqadam, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Farzad Karimzad, Salisbury University