Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry

Abstract

Scale is part of everyone’s daily experience, and not all these experiences are as dramatic a mix of fear and awe as Pascal’s positioning of mankind between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. After all, to review a book is a scale experience, since the reviewer is no longer dealing with words, sentences, and paragraphs, which are the object of an actual reading, but with totally different units, ideas, claims, and hypotheses (and the reader of a review will obviously go through something similar when entering the book itself—which, by the way, I can strongly recommend). Although we are all permanently aware of the presence and importance of scale, our understanding of it remains elementary, not only because we are so used to it that we neglect to scrutinize its significance, but also because we frame it in the wrong way. Differences of scale are generally envisaged not only from a single viewpoint—that of a given discipline, separated from most other ways of looking and understanding—but also that of “our” Homo sapiens viewpoint, which brings everything back to a kind of “this scale” or “meter scale”—Joshua DiCaglio uses these words to suggest that we tend to express “nonhuman” scales by comparing them with our natural measuring systems. Moreover, we also believe that there exists a kind of analogy between what we observe via our human scale and what we observe on other scales, be they microscopic or telescopic, a way of naturalizing and normalizing scale differences that DiCaglio rightly describes as a way of nonscalar interpretation of scale (the body as a mere collection of cells, for instance, or the universe as a simple collection of stars). These mistakes are human, all too human, but they miss the real meaning of scale, which some of us experience in certain circumstances and which DiCaglio links with the impression of a fusion with the whole of being, a complete fading out of the boundaries between subject and object, I and the world, body and mind, etc. The author groups these experiences as “mystical,” while also insisting that it would be a mistake to consider all of them as religious in the traditional sense of the word (the religious experience is just one of the possible forms that a deep scalar experience can take and it is certainly not the universal key to a good understanding of what happens in the encounter that DiCaglio eventually labels as the coincidence of the I and the Cosmos). Scale, in other words, is not something that exists. It must be seen as a force that changes both subject and object and above all the relationship between them. To grasp what scale actually “does” and to avoid the traditional mistakes in our experience of scale, all of them being nonscalar interpretations of scalar facts, we need a real theory of scale, not a theory of scaling techniques and apparatuses or scaled objects but a general, nondisciplinary approach that can be applied to any scale experience. This is the ambition of DiCaglio’s book, an enthralling example of science studies (the study of science from the viewpoint of the humanities). In this regard, it is imperative to stress that the author does not identify science studies, as is often done, with the critique of science seen as the privileged access to truth, the purely objective study of reality, deprived of “social, personal, or political interests” (p. 199). For him science studies is not an a priori critical approach positioned as a form of “demystifying, unmasking, or unveiling the practices and claims of science” (p. 199). While acknowledging the necessity and usefulness of such a critical reading, DiCaglio does not share with many science studies scholars the editor-in-chief Michael Punt associate editors Hannah Drayson, Dene Grigar, Jane Hutchinson A full selection of reviews is published monthly on the Leonardo website: www.leonardo.info/reviews. leonardo reviews