Scale

The concept of scale has become ubiquitous across the humanities, from discussions of the nonhuman and the planetary to artistic, political, and poetic reflections on the contemporary.

Yet, despite this new theoretical attention to scale, much remains uncertain about the term’s usage. ‘Scale’ is a shifting, polyvalent, relational term. Rather than a fixed measure, it is a fluid mode of inquiry involving manifold analytical approaches such as reducing and zooming out, focusing and expanding, dislocating and recontextualizing, or close and distant reading. To focus on a specific scale, be it the cosmic or the everyday, is to focus on objects and processes that become visible or invisible, central or marginal, at this scale compared to others, or to trace how our categories shift with a shift in scale. The relationality of scale makes it hard to define yet fruitful for engaging with complex experiences and phenomena.

This workshop reflects the ongoing collective inquiry by ICI Fellows into the concept of scale. Contributions to the workshop explore scale as it appears in various thematic and disciplinary contexts ranging from theories of artificial intelligence to anthropology and philosophy, and from literary studies to media studies to gender and queer theory. As such, the workshop aims to constellate some theoretical fragments on scale into a (necessarily incomplete) atlas crossing the human and non-human, modern and pre-modern, individual and social, local and cosmic, as well as artistic, political, and poetic.