Scale in Literature and Culture - Michael T. Clarke & David Wittenberg PDF

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
Scale
in Literature
and Culture
Edited by
Michael Tavel Clarke
and David Wittenberg
Series editor
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX, USA
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing
on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial
turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion
of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriti-
cism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising develop-
ments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary
geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more gen-
erally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the represen-
tation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones
where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs
and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history,
often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse
critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial
Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of
space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15002
Michael Tavel Clarke · David Wittenberg
Editors
Scale in Literature
and Culture
Editors
Michael Tavel Clarke David Wittenberg
Department of English Department of English
University of Calgary University of Iowa
Calgary, AB, Canada Iowa City, IA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-64241-3 ISBN 978-3-319-64242-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949203
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: NASA Earth Observatory
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the contributors to this collection for their patience,

dedication, and care in helping see the book to completion. We are
grateful to Bruno Latour and Mark McGurl for allowing us to include
their previously published essays. We gratefully acknowledge Flammarion
and the Fondation Louis Vuitton for permission to reprint Latour’s
“Anti-Zoom” from Olafur Eliasson: Contact, and we thank Anne-Sophie
Milon for permission to reproduce her drawing “The Two Powers of
Ten,” which accompanied Latour’s essay in its original publication. We
thank Critical Inquiry and the University of Chicago Press for per-
mission to reprint McGurl’s “Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age
in King Kong,” and Patsy Williams at Critical Inquiry for her help in
locating and providing the images from McGurl’s original essay. We are
grateful to Bianca Bosker, whose photograph “Eiffel Tower, Hangzhou,
China” is included in Aikaterini Antonopoulou’s essay, and to Sebastian
Aedo Jury for permission to include his photograph of the Berlin City
Palace Façade in the same essay. We thank the University of Iowa
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for their generous subvention to
assist with manuscript production. Finally, we thank David Martinez for
his careful work on the index and Lara Trubowitz for her invaluable criti-
cal advice.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg
Part I Scale: History and Conception
2 Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives

for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene 35
Zach Horton
3 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s

Powers of Ten 61
Derek Woods
4 Anti-Zoom 93
Bruno Latour
Part II Scale in Culture
5 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong 105

Mark McGurl
vii
viii Contents
6 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb

on Spaceship Earth 143
Joan Lubin
7 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural

Reproductions 177
Aikaterini Antonopoulou
Part III Scale in Literature
8 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav

Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide 203
Melody Jue
9 World Literature as a Problem of Scale 225

Oded Nir
10 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative

Criticism and Richard Grossman’s “Breeze Avenue
Working Paper” 253
Bradley J. Fest
11 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David

Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale
of Encyclopedic Fiction 281
Jeffrey Severs
Index 305
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Michael Tavel Clarke is an Associate Professor of English at the

University of Calgary in Canada. He is the author of These Days of
Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930 (University of
Michigan Press, 2007) and an editor of the journal ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature.
David Wittenberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of

English at the University of Iowa in the USA, with joint appointments
in Cinematic Arts and Comparative Literature. He is the author of two
previous books, Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in
Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson (Stanford University Press, 2001), and
Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (Fordham University
Press, 2013).
Contributors
Aikaterini Antonopoulou is the Simpson Postdoctoral Fellow in

Architecture at The University of Edinburgh, where she also teaches
architectural design and theory. Her research examines the role and
agency of new technologies and digital cultures in the context of crisis
Athens, Greece.
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Bradley J. Fest is an Assistant Professor of English at Hartwick College

in the USA. His work has appeared in boundary 2, The b2o Review,
Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long
Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, The Silence of Fallout
(Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen. He
is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue
Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017).
Zach Horton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Pittsburgh. His research focuses on the intersection of technological media-
tion, ecology, and scale. His current projects include a study of the “cos-
mic zoom” and the development of a trans-disciplinary theory of scale, as
well as a cultural history of geoengineering. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Resilience, and Deleuze Studies, and
in the books Ecosophical Aesthetics, Deleuze and the Animal, and Shaping
Emerging Technologies. He is also a filmmaker and camera designer.
Melody Jue is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara in the USA. Her current book project, Wild
Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater, develops a science fictional
methodology of estrangement to reimagine media theory underwater.
Her articles appear in Grey Room; Animations: An International Journal;
Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction; Humanities Circle; and
Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Bruno Latour is a Professor in Sciences Po in Paris, France and
Professor at Large at Cornell University in the USA. He is the author
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard University Press, 2013),
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory
(Oxford University Press, 2005), We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard
University Press, 2001), and many other books. His awards include
honorary doctorates at the University of Lund, the Medal of Honor
at the University of Bologna, the Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences award, the Legion of Honour in France, and other
distinctions.
Joan Lubin is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the
USA completing a dissertation on Social Science Fictions: Novels to Scale
in Cold War America.
Editors and Contributors xi
Mark McGurl is a Professor of English at Stanford University in the

USA and Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel.
He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise
of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Novel
Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton
University Press, 2001). His articles have appeared in journals such as
Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History.
Oded Nir is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Judaic Studies
Program at Franklin & Marshall College in the USA. He is the author of
Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Zionist and Israeli
Literature (forthcoming, State University of New York University Press,
2017), and the edited volumes Marxism and the Narration of Zionism
(forthcoming special issue of Rethinking Marxism), and Materiality and
the Time of the Present in Israeli Culture (with Ari Ofengenden, forth-
coming). He is an Associate Editor of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature
and Culture.
Jeffrey Severs is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
British Columbia in Canada. He is the author of David Foster Wallace’s
Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (Columbia University Press, 2017).
He is co-editor of Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s
Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011) and has published articles in
Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and else-
where.
Derek Woods is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows and
the Department of English at Dartmouth College in the USA. Entitled
What Is Ecotechnology? U.S. and Canadian Cultures of Science, 1935–
2008, his book in progress describes the role of technology in the cul-
tural reception of the ecosystem concept following the Second World
War. Derek has published essays in American Literary History, The
Minnesota Review, Anthropocene Reading, and The New Politics of
Materialism, among other journals and collections. He is starting a new
book about the poetics of scale and their relation to scale concepts from
the philosophy of science and new materialist theory.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 An earth that can fit into our hands, a widely-circulating

public domain image, https://pixabay.com/en/earthworld-
hands-global-offer-1964822/ 9
Fig. 2.1 Interactive “object ecology visualization” of Walt
Whitman’s Song of Myself, top level 47
Fig. 4.1 The Two Powers of Ten, by Anne-Sophie Milon,
SPEAP, 2014/15 95
Fig. 5.1 RKO Pictures logo 109
Fig. 5.2 The individual inventor as Kong-like rebel 111
Fig. 5.3 The Woolworth Building (1913), New York City 112
Fig. 5.4 Bragdon’s illustration of the fourth dimension 114
Fig. 5.5 Bragdon’s illustrations of the hypercube 116
Fig. 5.6 RCA Building crown 117
Fig. 5.7 Postcard of New York City’s tallest skyscrapers 118
Fig. 5.8 King Kong and electricity 121
Fig. 5.9 Anonymous, The “Bolter Up” (1930) 123
Fig. 5.10 State House (1931), Baton Rouge, La 124
Fig. 5.11 Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932) 126
Fig. 5.12 Model of Kong during production 129
Fig. 5.13 Kong’s assault on the Empire State Building 132
Fig. 7.1 Eiffel Tower, Hangzhou, China, by Bianca Bosker
in Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in
Contemporary China 182
Fig. 7.2 Looking back and looking forward, “The London Crystal
Palace Brochure” 188
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 7.3 The New Berlin City Palace: Sample Façade,

Sebastian Aedo Jury 191
Fig. 8.1 Landsat 7 satellite image of the Sundarbans estuary system,
released by NASA Earth Observatory, 2008 204
Fig. 8.2 Example of Snell’s Window, U.S. Navy photo by Mass
Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric 214
Fig. 9.1 Mapping World Literature Theories 232
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg
In 1638, Galileo Galilei published his last and most important book, Two
New Sciences, an extended dialogue written while he was under house
arrest by the Roman Inquisition for his advocacy of Copernican cosmol-
ogy six years earlier. Of the pair of sciences named in the book’s title,
the second and most famous is that of “local motion,”1 founded upon
Galileo’s formulation of what historians have referred to as “the law of
fall”: the distance traveled by a falling body is proportional to the time
during which it is accelerated by gravity, but never, as Aristotle believed,
proportional to its weight. Galileo’s technique for deriving this law is,
very famously, experimental testing and observation in lieu of logical
or metaphysical deduction, a methodology that is both his great philo-
sophical coup and his enduring legacy to the sciences.2 The information
about the physical world that Galileo corroborates through this method
represents a striking rebuke to the Jesuit-sanctioned Aristotelianism of
the time. The discrepancy between the obviousness of the physical facts
M.T. Clarke (*) 
Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
D. Wittenberg 
Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
© The Author(s) 2017 1

M. Tavel Clarke and D. Wittenberg (eds.), Scale in Literature
and Culture, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_1
2 M.T. CLARKE AND D. WITTENBERG
Galileo observes and the scandal they represent for the prevailing ortho-
doxy indicates the very deep roots of the metaphysical doctrines he is in
the process of unearthing and attacking.
When we turn back to the other “new science” introduced by Galileo,
that of mechanics and materials, the results gained through observation
and experiment—in this case, about the significance of scale—are pos-
sibly even more startling in their simultaneous obviousness and radicality.
This portion of the dialogue opens in the Venetian arsenal, as Sagredo—
the interlocutor representing the viewpoint of an “intelligent layman
curious to learn”3—expresses a sensible-sounding but nonetheless utterly
incorrect opinion about how shipbuilders conceive of scale:
Now, all reasonings about mechanics have their foundations in geometry,

in which I do not see that largeness and smallness make large circles, trian-
gles, cylinders, cones, or any other figures [or] solids subject to properties
different from those of small ones; hence if the large scaffolding is built
with every member proportional to its counterpart in the smaller one, and
if the smaller is sound and stable under the use for which it is designed,
I fail to see why the larger should not also be proof against adverse and
destructive shocks that it may encounter.4
What Sagredo neglects to take into account—but which any artisan

dealing with actual materials would readily intuit—is that when one
increases the size of an object in one dimension (for instance, length),
the cross-sectional area of that object is enlarged by the square of the
same increase, and its volume (along with its mass) increases by the cube.
So if Sagredo were actually to double the length of a beam in the scaf-
folding he mentions, the overall weight of that beam would swell by a
factor of eight (23), and both its form and its material would need to
be proportionately altered for the beam to remain “sound and stable.”
Likewise, a ship constructed to a length of, say, ten times its scale model
would weigh a thousand times as much as the model (103), and would
therefore require fundamentally different materials and design to remain
seaworthy. Indeed, as Salviati—the interlocutor in the dialogue clos-
est to Galileo himself—helps us to understand, the nature of materials
sets absolute limits on scalar transformations in the physical world: “it is
impossible to build enormous ships, palaces, or temples, for which oars,
masts, beamwork, iron chains, and in sum all parts shall hold together;
nor could nature make trees of immeasurable size, because their branches
would eventually fail of their own weight.”5
1 INTRODUCTION 3
The revolutionary character of these insights about scale certainly

does not reside in their underlying mathematical calculations, which are
simple enough for a schoolchild to perform, but rather in the degree to
which the results are capable of shocking an otherwise reasonable intel-
lect such as Sagredo’s. As with the “law of fall,” Galileo’s seemingly
rudimentary deductions about size changes challenge metaphysical pre-
conceptions so deeply entrenched that their repudiation amounts to a
spiritual crisis: “Already I feel my brain reeling,” Sagredo declares, “and
like a cloud suddenly cleft by lightning, it is troubled.”6 Throughout the
discussion that follows, Sagredo dwells on the “marvelous,” “remark-
able,” and “wonderful” qualities of Salviati’s geometrical proofs and
analogies, which, as Salviati states, “are so far from the opinions and
teachings commonly accepted, that to broadcast them publicly will excite
against them a great number of contradictors.”7 By the end of the dia-
logue, one might conclude that, alongside the scientific discoveries
Galileo presents, the book’s most effective demonstration is of the sheer
difficulty humans have in conceiving scale adequately, and of our reliance
on fixed ideas that hamper our understanding of the true significance of
the sizes of real objects.
Nonetheless, humans’ ineptitude in comprehending scale in the real
world is likely the flipside of the tremendous ease with which we are able
to rescale things in our imaginations. Sagredo’s initial failure to compre-
hend the pragmatism of Venetian artisans results not just from his unfa-
miliarity with actual materials, but also from the sheer precociousness
of his imaginative ability to “reason from the small to the large” while
blithely ignoring physical consequences.8 Indeed, Sagredo invents gigan-
tic ships, machines, buildings, or even animals in his mind’s eye as eas-
ily as he imagines shrinking or enlarging the “circles, triangles, cylinders,
[and] cones” he recalls from his geometry lessons, or as easily as nowa-
days we might reduce or enlarge a cartoon, photocopy, or digital image.
This disconnect between the virtually infinite rescaling capacities of
human imagination and the real constraints imposed by physics—or, in
other words, between what our minds allow us to invent and what mate-
rials science permits us to construct—persists well past Galileo’s teach-
ings. Even despite the prolific achievements of physics and engineering
in industrial modernity, elemental debates about scale have endured.
Resistance to a complete understanding of scale has been especially evi-
dent in biology, as Galileo might have foreseen: “the zoologist or mor-
phologist has been slow,” as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson declares in
his seminal 1917 work on mechanics and biological form, “where the
physiologist has long been eager, to invoke the aid of the physical or
mathematical sciences.”9 Such resistance lingers even after scaling and
“allometry” have become watchwords of twentieth and twenty-first
century biology. In 1957, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane laments that
“although Galileo demonstrated the contrary more than three hun-
dred years ago, people still believe that if a flea were as large as a man
it could jump a thousand feet into the air.”10 And in the later era of
molecular-biological science, one still finds biologists bemoaning their
colleagues’ obtuseness over problems of scale, especially by contrast with
the more painstaking attention paid to such problems in physics and
engineering.11 It may be fair to conclude that problems of scale com-
prise a region of thinking in which habits of everyday observation, or
even possibly biases built into human perception itself, are especially slow
to give way to empirical measurement and evaluation, even at scales far
less extreme than the “ungraspable” subatomic or the “overwhelming”
cosmological.12
The Sublime
Galileo’s work represents a decisive realization that size and scale have
effects in the physical world—a moment at which the natural philoso-
pher’s conceptualization catches up with the artisan’s practical intui-
tion that size belongs inherently to things themselves, not merely to
their relative appearance or position for some perceiving subject. For the
domains of aesthetics and cultural studies, a corresponding moment of
conceptual immanence arises, perhaps somewhat more ambivalently, with
a new discourse of “the sublime” emerging in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries.
The sublime had been part of literary analysis since Longinus’s
first-century treatise, On the Sublime, but from the seventeenth century
on, the topic becomes more directly involved with questions of scale—in
particular, the magnificence and grandeur of natural landscapes. As the
English theologian Thomas Burnet writes in his 1689 The Sacred Theory
of the Earth, natural things “that are too big for our Comprehension . . .
fill and overbear the Mind with the Excess, and cast it into a pleas-
ing kind of Stupor and Admiration”; John Dennis, describing a trip
across the European Alps, writes of the “delightful horrour” or “ter-
rible Joy” the scenery produced in him: “at the same time, that I was
1 INTRODUCTION 5
infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.”13 With Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise,

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, such oscillations between pleasure and terror are gathered into
a full-blown theory of the psychological impact of very large things. For
Burke, “greatness of dimension” causes an “astonishment” closely akin
to “pain and danger,” an excess of emotion ultimately derived from real
experiences of pain or fear: “If the pain is not carried to violence,” Burke
suggests, “and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction
of the person . . . , they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure,
but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror.”14
A crucial aspect of Burke’s sublime is “distance,” the aspect of subjective
experience that modulates the perceived scale of an otherwise “terrible”
object.15 Immanuel Kant, too, requires that a spectator be removed to
a certain distance in order to experience the “negative pleasure” of the
sublime, which Kant follows Burke in identifying as an “astonishment
bordering on terror” that nonetheless “is not actual fear.”16
The significance Kant attributes to sublimity surpasses even Burke,
and in a decisive philosophical coup that will influence nearly all subse-
quent theoretical discourses of size and scale, Kant elevates the sublime
into an encounter with the transcendental structure of human intellect
itself. “We call sublime,” Kant asserts, “what is absolutely large [schlech-
thin groẞ],” a “magnitude equal only to itself.”17 However, such abso-
lute largeness can be discovered “only in our ideas,” never in actual
nature, and thus Kant reshapes the ambivalence of the sublime into a
fundamental insight about subjectivity: “the very inadequacy of our fac-
ulty for estimating the magnitude of the things of the sensible world
awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us.”18 Confronted with
the “absolutely large” thing, we exhibit for ourselves both “the inad-
equacy of any sensible standard for the estimation of magnitude” and
the way in which “this very judgment of the inadequacy . . . corresponds
with reason’s laws.”19 Finally, then, as a reflection upon the essential dif-
ference between sensible and supersensible, sublimity is a catalyst for
inquiry into every realm in which the limitations of human experience
are exposed or challenged by ideas: aesthetics, religion, ethics, even poli-
tics. In short, for Kant, the “estimation of magnitude” leads us to the
transcendental structure of all phenomena, and even to the basic rela-
tionship between mind and nature or between subject and object.
The legacy of Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” particularly in its for-
mulation of the experience of scale as a decisive moment for theorizing
subjectivity, is detectable throughout later discussions of the topic. For

Gaston Bachelard, the experience of large-scale things provides “the
purest sort of phenomenology”; in analyzing “what immensity con-
tributes to an image,” we are referred “directly to our imagining con-
sciousness.”20 Supplementing Kant, Bachelard suggests that the artwork
or poem is the “by-product” of this interplay (or “harsh dialectic”)
between “our own paltry selves” and the “grandeur” we construct in
“daydreams” of nature—he ironically terms such an experience “intimate
immensity.”21 Susan Stewart, by contrast, sees the ambivalence of sub-
limity—its “double-voiced quality” of overwhelming largeness “tamed”
by distance—as an ironic subversion of the meaning of scale.22 The spec-
tator “must always remain aware of the frame” of the sublime image, a
fact that renders the gigantic and the miniature virtually interchangeable:
“Although the miniature makes the body gigantic, the gigantic trans-
forms the body into miniature, especially pointing to the body’s ‘toylike’
and ‘insignificant’ aspects.”23 In Elaine Scarry’s work on how we con-
struct images of violence and war, a similar interchangeability between
gigantic and miniature—still an echo of the ambivalence observed by
Burke and Kant—becomes an essential component of ideology and
propaganda. In the rhetoric of war, the “abstraction” of vast numbers of
individual soldiers or civilians into “single integrated creature[s]” such as
armies, divisions, nations, or enemies verges on “a mythology of giants,”
one that effectively “assists the disappearance of the human body” or
refigures its suffering as that of the “imaginary body of a colossus.”24
What Scarry calls the “rarified choreography” of war imagery is simul-
taneously accurate in depicting the large-scale political stakes of conflict
and utterly inadequate as an account of the suffering inflicted upon the
bodies of real people.25 And it is worth remembering that the “mytho-
logical” figurations of war that Scarry observes become even more con-
sequential as technologies of “scalar modulation” are invented to realize
such figurations in the control mechanisms of actual weaponry: surveil-
lance satellites, big-data integration, drones, and the perhaps inevita-
ble confluence of video-gaming and bomb-sighting technology known
to military strategists as the “kill box,” a “temporary autonomous zone
of slaughter” arranged through telemetry and video graphics. Grégoire
Chamayou suggests that the logic of the “kill box” will eventually lead to
“microcubes” of technological warfare, “miniaturized” zones of armed
conflict virtually independent of geographic or political borders, let alone
of conventional battlefields.26
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Contemporary theorists of globalization and the environment owe

similar debts to Kant’s formulation of sublimity and distance. For
Timothy Morton, the “hyperobject”—a phenomenon so large that it
cannot in principle be perceived by humans, but nonetheless must be
conceptualized—is closely related to the Kantian sublime object, which
exceeds understanding even as it comprises a single idea. Adapting recent
theoretical reconsiderations of objectivity from philosophers such as
Graham Harman, Quentin Mellaissoux, and Bruno Latour, Morton pro-
poses that the earth’s environment is such a “hyperobject.” The extreme
size of any truthful representation of the environment—however impera-
tive such a representation may be in the current climate crisis—both sets
limits on our capacity to understand it and makes more urgent the inven-
tion of new means or media to depict its scale. Scholars such as Manuel
De Landa and Jussi Parikka are engaged in similar efforts to understand
how changes in scale affect epistemology and representation, and many
theorists of contemporary film and media are radically altering both the
size of mediated “objects” they study and the profusion of intercon-
nected scales at which images are constructed, perceived, and consumed.
Recent books such as Sean Cubitt’s The Practice of Light: A Genealogy
of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic
Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, and
John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of
Elemental Media offer examples of the complexity with which questions
of scale confront theorists in the age of globalization and digitization.
The Anthropocene, Globalization,

and the Politics of Scale
Unquestionably, climate change and the emergence of the related con-

cept of the Anthropocene have provided a key impetus for the recent
intensification of discussions of scale. The recognition of anthropogenic
global warming (AGW) has destabilized traditional understandings of
human scale. Following the Kantian tradition, in which contemplation
of immensity triggers a reassessment of the workings of consciousness,
Timothy Clark suggests that “[c]limate change disrupts the scale at
which one must think.”27 The human influence on the planet has been
revealed as massive, far out-scaling any conventional understanding of
our impact and forcing us to think about human agency in new ways.
Dramatic instances of our effect on the planet are apparent in impres-

sive visual images of massive glaciers retreating in time-elapse photogra-
phy and of ice caps shedding enormous chunks into the oceans—chunks
which are so large, we are told, they will accomplish the incredible feat of
raising sea levels. Meanwhile, the earth itself has seemingly shrunk as the
human impact has grown; visual images from Google, satellites, the space
station, and interstellar probes depict a globe that can fit into our hands,
and these images circulate in ways that reinforce our growing sense that
the earth is small, the human impact large, and the necessity for pro-
tecting the planet both imperative and potentially within our grasp (see
Fig. 1.1). Even as widely circulating visual representations of the globe
often displace the human, depicting the planet without the scaling
device of comparison to a relatively tiny human figure, the simultaneous
absence and distortion of humans in such imagery suggests a new way of
thinking about human scale as simultaneously expanded and disembod-
ied—in a word, as posthuman.
Theorizing these new conceptions of the human, Dipesh
Chakrabarty has argued that “the current conjuncture of globalization
and global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of
human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.”28
Chakrabarty re-imagines the human today as occupying two distinct and
irreconcilable scales, each with its own kind of agency: the traditional
individual human, and the collective, world-spanning geological human
whose impacts on the planet erase and defy agency. Timothy Clark adds
that new challenges to agency and intentionality are eroding the founda-
tions of democratic governance and the liberal political tradition passed
down from the Enlightenment of Kant’s time. This political tradition
is founded on “institutions of private property, market-based econom-
ics, individualistic-rights-based notions of personhood and the concep-
tion of the state as ‘existing to secure the freedom of individuals on a
formally egalitarian basis.’” Such systems encourage “the unmolested use
of individual property and exploitation of natural resources,” and as a
consequence accelerate global climate change and demand approaches to
global warming that require more collective ways of thinking.29
If anthropogenic global warming has a variety of scale effects—
entailing a scalar jump in governance from the nation to the globe,
challenging democratic traditions founded on a scale commensurate
with a different age and human-environment relations, and shifting our
1 INTRODUCTION 9
Fig. 1.1 An earth that can fit into our hands, a widely-circulating public domain
image, https://pixabay.com/en/earthworld-hands-global-offer-1964822/
conceptions of the human itself—then AGW is wholly consistent with

another of the dominant forces defining our times: globalization. As
Arjun Appadurai and others have argued, globalization has contributed
to a weakening of the nation-state and the rise of institutions of power
and authority operating on a supra-national level, such as multinational
corporations, the IMF, and the World Bank. These potentially undemo-
cratic institutions are reviving a democratic political rhetoric founded on
discourses of size and scale. Self-consciously invoking the rhetoric of size
introduced by Hobbes at the origins of Western modernity, Hardt and

Negri, for example, characterize the global political condition today as “a
new Leviathan”30 and emphasize the necessity of “a new David” to bat-
tle the modern Goliath.31 They challenge skeptics who insist that democ-
racy, “confronted today by a leap of scale,”32 “is utterly impossible . . . in
the extensive territories of our globalized world,”33 and they argue that
“like the revolutionaries of the early modern period, we will once again
have to reinvent the concept of democracy and create new institutional
forms and practices appropriate to our global age.”34 In imagining the
“new David,” Hardt and Negri not only disregard the solitary individual
engaged in politics; they also replace traditional collectivist ideas of the
proletariat, the masses, and the people with “the multitude.” A human
agent that is simultaneously singular and plural,35 expressing both the
collective will and diverse individual interests, Hardt and Negri’s multi-
tude anticipates the bifurcated idea of human agency that Chakrabarty
describes.
While Hardt and Negri take for granted that a scaling-up process of
politics has accompanied Western modernity since its origins and that
contemporary globalization is the latest phase, Rob Nixon and Anna
Tsing explicitly examine this association between upscaling and moder-
nity. In Slow Violence, Nixon argues that megadams and other spec-
tacular, large-scale engineering projects (skyscrapers are clearly another
important example, as discussed below) have come to signify modernity
itself, and that these often inefficient and socially destructive ventures
are widely embraced by postcolonial and developing nations seeking to
announce their progress and national ascent. The result is often crippling
national debt, peonage to international monetary institutions, and popu-
lation displacement. For Nixon, neoliberal globalization is intensifying
modernity’s “disease . . . of developmental gigantism.”36 Tsing offers a
slightly different but compatible argument that an obsession with scal-
ability is as important to modernity as monumentality: “We learned to
know the modern by its ability to scale up,” she suggests.37 Tsing further
argues that we have erroneously come to believe that everything is scal-
able, an idea reinforced today by digital technology, with its smoothly
expandable pixels, and business culture, with its assurance of “economies
of scale.”
Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that conversation about
the politics and economics of scale began in the past two or three dec-
ades. In the USA, for example, debates over the proper size of nation
1 INTRODUCTION 11
and government go back to the foundations of the country.38 Such dis-

cussions were revived for the economic sphere in the anti-trust debates at
the turn of the twentieth century,39 and the economic debate has been
ongoing.40 Nevertheless, discussion about scale has almost certainly
intensified since about 1990, a development particularly evident in the
field of human geography.
Unlike in literary studies, where a global scale of analysis has gradu-
ally triumphed during the past twenty-five years without substantial
controversy, human geographers have continued to debate both the
political significance of different scales of analysis and the principle that
one’s choice of analytical scale has important ideological implications.
With its roots in cartography, geography traditionally understood scale
in Euclidian or Cartesian terms, as “a fixed, nested hierarchy of bounded
spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national, suprana-
tional, and global.”41 Beginning in the 1980s, however, the discipline
underwent a cultural turn. Influenced by Lefebvre, who suggests that
“space is not a given arena within which things happen, but the physi-
cal, social, and conceptual product of social and natural events and pro-
cess,”42 human geographers have come to regard scale not as a given
but as socially constructed, and they increasingly consider how the social
construction of scale shapes the way different spaces are defined.43 The
global today, for example, is characterized by the realms organized by
capital rather than by regions contained within empire, as in the days of
Alexander the Great.44 Space is produced in ways that accord with domi-
nant understandings of scale; the urban today is a space open to the flows
of global capital, while the urban of the walled medieval city was a closed
space shaped by resistance to military conquest. In general, the “urban,”
the “regional,” the “national,” and the “global” are all concepts shaped
by history and subject to social contestation. Acknowledging that size
and scale are socially constructed does not preclude the possibility that
scale has implications for the physical properties of objects in the material
world, as explained above, in part because scale is used to address both
material objects and abstract concepts such as “region” or “nation.”
Human geographers have undertaken a systematic evaluation of the con-
ceptions of scale dominating their discipline, as well as the implications
of various metaphoric models: the hierarchical model of ascending scales
as rungs on a ladder; the nested model of scales as concentric circles or
Matryoshka dolls; and the non-Euclidean model of scales as overlapping
networks.45
In addition to their recognition that scale is socially constructed,

human geographers since about the 1990s have considered that con-
structions of scale are produced through political struggle and gener-
ate widespread material effects and changes in identity. With regard to
identity, for example, thinking of oneself as “an Angelino, a Californian,
a Westerner, an American, or a citizen of the world really does mean
something and can have very significant material consequences,” sug-
gest Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright.46 Pursuing the politics of scale,
Neil Smith has argued that “jumping scale” is often “a primary avenue
to power”47—for instance, through the implementation of NAFTA and
similar transnational trade agreements, capital has circumvented national
restrictions by jumping scale. The politics of scale involve control over
particular scales, over the development of new scales, and over the rela-
tionships among scales.48 The relative importance attributed to differ-
ent scales (e.g., local vs. global) is equally a result of political and social
struggle.49 Pointing out that major globalization and political theorists
privilege a global scale of analysis and regard the global as “the appropri-
ate scale for an oppositional politics,”50 the two economic geographers
writing under the pen name J. K. Gibson-Graham suggest that “the
power of globalization seems to have colonized [the] political imagina-
tions” of many writers.51 They note that “the global is associated with
strength, domination, and action, while the local is invariably coded as
weakness, acquiescence, and passivity.”52 Advocating local and small-
scale politics, these scholars propose that “[t]he judgment that size and
extensiveness are coincident with power is not simply a rational calcu-
lation in our view but also a discursive choice and emotional commit-
ment.”53 Contrary to much contemporary rhetoric emphasizing the
necessity of upscaling in the modern world, several human geographers
suggest that downscaling may sometimes be more politically effective.54
If the privilege ascribed to the global over other scales is an effect of
the dominance of neoliberal globalization and discourses linking size and
power, one might justifiably ask whether academic disciplines prioritiz-
ing the global scale are serving or resisting the forces of capitalism. In a
highly suggestive article that provoked the so-called “scale debates” in
human geography, Marston, Jones, and Woodward suggest the former
may be the case. They propose to “eliminate scale as a concept in human
geography” and offer instead a “flat ontology” that does not depend on
scale (either vertical or horizontal). In their view, conventional “hier-
archical scale (de)limits practical agency” and reinforces the politics of
1 INTRODUCTION 13
neoliberal globalization.55 According to these scholars, “globalization

blinds us . . . to the ways ‘global’ discourses produce identities that dis-
empower us as agents.”56 While their argument that human geography
should dispense with the concept of scale has met with resistance, the
idea is nevertheless consistent with widespread skepticism about the
concepts of the “global” and the “local” in the discipline, as well as
an increasing focus on the politics of scale rather than on the inherent
nature of given scales. Thinking beyond the essay’s impact on the field
of human geography, the warning from Marston, Jones, and Woodward,
that prioritizing the global scale may reinforce neoliberal globalization
and undermine a sense of agency, may help explain the increasing con-
cerns about agency and democratic governance that have accompanied
the shift in focus to the scale of the global among both academics and
the press.
Urban Development, Architecture, and Film

With the possible exceptions of cartography and geography, no profes-
sional field has dealt as consistently with questions of scale as architec-
ture. The triangular ruler known simply as a “scale” is an omnipresent
tool on the architect’s desk, and questions of scale arise at every level
of design practice, from basic decisions about form and materials to
contextual analyses of the built environment, resources, economics,
and climate. Indeed, as in the biological sciences, matters of scale are
so pervasive throughout design practice that architects rarely concep-
tualize them directly or explicitly. The most conspicuous theorizations
occur in the area of urban planning, where very large-scale proposals
have traditionally been prominent and sometimes notorious, and where
the complicity of architects, businesses, and politicians in altering entire
neighborhoods or districts—at times, even whole cities or nations—is
continually a focus of political and ethical debate. In architecture, the
material effects of size and scale converge with their social construction
in especially acute and significant ways.
In the realm of pure theory, of course, imagining a new metropolis
is a relatively easy task, and the bravado with which architects have pro-
posed interventions in the natural or built environment can be simul-
taneously inspiring and disconcerting. Some of the twentieth century’s
most notorious urban designs are conceived at scales so colossal that
their practical effects could disseminate only in fragments or echoes.
Hints of Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin, which called for the replace-
ment of almost half of Paris with a complex of huge, homogenous glass
buildings surrounded by park space, are evident in the clustered tow-
ers of twentieth-century commercial and public housing projects.57 The
radially organized hubs and zones of Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 “Garden
City” became prototypes, often relatively accidentally, for a great many
suburban subdivisions. And the modular forms and quasi-organic ico-
nography of what Reyner Banham famously labeled “megastructures,”
proposed by futurist designers such as R. Buckminster Fuller in the
USA, Archigram in the UK, and the Metabolist group in Japan, can be
detected in prefabricated and other technological urban or suburban
schemes up to the present day.
Any proposal actually implemented at such an immense scale not
only demands new technological solutions to the challenges of m aterial
scale effects (as in the creation of the skyscraper) but also directly affects
vast populations and ecologies, and therefore understandably gener-
ates controversy over resource allocation, labor exploitation, environ-
mental impact, the value of historic preservation, and outright aesthetic
merit. The very largest triumphs of centralized urban planning have
been sites of simultaneous celebration and scandal: for example, Baron
Haussmann’s replacement of traditional neighborhoods in Paris with
broad avenues and circuses during the 1850s, Robert Moses’s urban
renewal and highway projects in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s,
and Lúcio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer’s gigantic icon of high modern-
ism, the capital city of Brasilia in 1960. By the mid-twentieth century,
the scale of centralized “rational planning” was commonly a target of
vigorous critique, and alternative theories of urbanism based on com-
munity oversight, incremental growth, sustainability, and overt ecological
or environmentalist politics gained traction. Among the most influen-
tial counter-theorists of urban planning and scale are Lewis Mumford,
Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, and Saskia Sassen, all
of whom provide intensive reconsiderations of the scale, velocity, and
potential inhumanity of modern urban construction and expansion.
In the current historical climate, very large-scale development pro-
jects usually occur only through the cooperation of governments and big
business and therefore tend primarily to be organized as global-capital
investment ventures—a point mentioned above in the context of what
Rob Nixon calls “developmental gigantism.” A number of such pro-
jects are currently underway in the Middle East and East Asia, where
1 INTRODUCTION 15
intimate connections between capital and the state tend more readily to
release the huge quantities of money required to launch them. Examples
include the massive, interconnected landscape developments of Dubai
in the United Arab Emirates, Lusail in Qatar (planned for the 2022
FIFA World Cup), “Kingdom City” in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, “New
Cairo,” intended to house up to five million Egyptian residents, and the
Songdo International Business District in South Korea. A large num-
ber of metropolitan areas whose scale has rapidly increased over the past
few decades—sometimes by explicit planning and sometimes by accre-
tion into “megacities”—are located in Asia: Tokyo-Yokohama, Jakarta,
Manila, Seoul, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Karachi, Delhi, and Beijing.
Partly for pragmatic reasons such as population density and commer-
cial efficiency, but also for the sake of symbolism and promotional visibil-
ity, large redevelopment schemes often foreground very big and visible
single buildings: commercial or mixed-use towers, transport centers and
airports, civic and tourist centers, and above all, skyscrapers. Examples
are the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the kilometer-high Kingdom Tower now
under construction in Jeddah, the Shanghai Tower, and One World
Trade Center in New York, all of which illustrate the speculative value of
the singular big building within an urban plan, amalgamating the diverse
functions of public center, tourist attraction, cultural or political icon,
and profit-generating scheme. Possibly the best known theorist of how
the singular big building operates in the contemporary city is the Dutch
architect Rem Koolhaas, who argues that “bigness” in architecture repre-
sents an altogether new epoch of urbanity, thrusting conventional scalar
parameters such as urban environment, proportionality, functional effi-
ciency, and historical tradition into permanent crisis. As Koolhaas finally
declares: “Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. . . . Its subtext is
fuck context.”58
Since the advent of architectural postmodernism in the late 1970s,
dramatic shifts in the way architects think about design and planning
have been prompted by the rapid and widespread rise of computer aided
design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), which enables both building
technologies and new scales of design and construction inconceivable
only a few years earlier. As a catalyst for innovation in the theory and
the practice of architectural scaling, computers are in a sense continu-
ous with other modern-industrial innovations that spur design trends:
steel framing, electricity, the elevator, modular manufacturing, and plas-
tics. However, CAD/CAM has arguably augmented an already existing
trend in high-modernist and postmodernist design toward scalar audacity

and total revisualization of the built environment. As Gerald Adler sug-
gests, computers tend to “minimise scale differences” for architects, both
because “computer drawings may be scaled up or down with no increase
or diminution of detail” and because CAD tends to “privilege architec-
ture freed from its site-contextual considerations”59—a strange, virtual
subversion of Galileo’s founding insight that engineering must obey the
physical constraints on scale determined by the properties of materials.
Interestingly, a postmodern architecture “freed” by computers from
both material and social context may be both reflected and intensified by
the evolving imagery used by contemporary filmmakers, whose stock-in-
trade has increasingly become extreme manipulations of scale using spe-
cial effects enabled by computer-generated imagery (CGI). A number of
film and media theorists suggest that CGI effectively dissociates imagery
from its physical foundations, potentially disrupting altogether the
already contentious “indexical” function of the photographic image.60
The radical scalability of computerized imagery in new media under-
scores the observation by Anna Tsing, mentioned above, that “we have
erroneously come to believe everything is scalable.” Kristen Whissel sug-
gests that CGI, in a trend that “logically favors the epic,” has “expanded
exponentially” both the “verticality” that Hollywood filmmakers exploit
to suggest “rising and falling emotions” and the “horizontality” used
to convey “temporal and historical continuity.”61 Echoing Hardt and
Negri’s ideas about “the multitude,” Whissel describes a variety of films
in which an apparently boundless profusion of computer-generated
objects—for instance, the endless armies of Lord of the Rings: The Two
Towers, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and Troy—offer a new
allegory of apocalypse, infinitude, or eternity, perhaps distilling the vast
contemporary global structures of power and control. Likewise, scenes
of extreme “verticality” enabled by CGI (The Matrix, Avatar, Inception,
Superman Returns) seemingly dissociate the human body from “the laws
of physics,” suggesting “radical forms of mobility that might signify both
the exhilaration and the anxiety of rapid historical change.”62
Literature
As the previous sections have suggested, scalar concerns are a pparent in
numerous discursive realms, from the political and ecological (evident in
familiar slogans like “Think globally, act locally”) to the physiological,
1 INTRODUCTION 17
artistic, and academic. In historical studies—a realm that has impor-

tant implications for the literary—the debate over the precedence of a
national versus a global focus was vital to the world-systems theory
of Immanuel Wallerstein. While the transnational approach met ini-
tial resistance during the nationalist decades following World War II,
it gained influence with the ascent of globalization discourse in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In literary studies, conflicts
over the proper scale of analysis are particularly apparent in the contro-
versy over Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading. Recognizing that literary
studies has developed within a peculiar constraint—the fact that scholars
can read only a tiny fraction of all the literature produced in any time or
place, and that methods of close reading reflect this intensive and lim-
ited focus—Moretti arrives at the conclusion that, in a globalized era
with impossibly accelerating demands for textual competency, literary
studies might transcend its problematic foundations by abandoning close
reading. Moretti’s model of distant reading involves quantitative meth-
ods that allow him to deal with an enormous corpus of material, enabled
by computer technology and the ready availability of digital texts. In a
similar vein, Timothy Clark has suggested that a proper environmental
criticism operates on a scale consistent with the knowledge that human
influence on the planet is global, collective, and enduring on a geological
timeline. For Clark, an analytical method that focuses on the implications
of narratives for local or national rather than global concerns risks eliding
the devastating impact of the human species on the world as a whole.63
These writers promote a kind of maximalist analytical method consistent
with a large-scale, global logic. Their programs of inquiry are echoed by
such works as Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System,
Scale, Culture, in which the editors announce that “large is beautiful”64
and encourage a return to grand narratives, panopticism, and large-scale
vision in order “to learn once again to tell large stories, and to tell them
better.”65
The assumption that the contemporary world is fundamentally char-
acterized by bigness66 is apparent, too, in scholarship on literary maxi-
malism. A number of scholars have suggested that large contemporary
novels reflect “the size and scale of contemporary experience.”67 Stefano
Ercolino proposes that key features of the maximalist novel, in addition
to its length, include an encyclopedic ambition, an explosive, digressive
multiplicity of voices and plots, and an aspiration for global representa-
tion. All of these points are consistent with Moretti’s Modern Epic, which
argues that the modern epic is long, encyclopedic, polyphonic, digres-

sive, and fundamentally a “world text.” Individual characters and stories
are less important in such works than “a collectivity of characters and a
plurality of stories,” as Ercolino suggests.68 LeClair sees the anti-individ-
ualism and anti-localism of contemporary maximalist fiction as a result
of the cultural influence of systems theory. In the contemporary “sys-
tems novel,” individuals are disempowered and protagonists lack agency
in a world dominated by massive ideological and institutional systems.
Similarly, Moretti argues that the traditional literary epic is a product
of the premodern (“pre-State”) era, when individualism reigned; the
polyphony of the modern epic, by contrast, reflects a shift from the lan-
guage of the individual to the language of institutions. One result, for
Moretti, is that the hero of the modern epic is passive and spectatorial,
unlike the active, conquering hero of the traditional epic.
Ercolino sees a tension in contemporary maximalist fiction between
a desire for agency and a fear of its loss. Drugs, which often feature in
maximalist fiction, are a sign of this loss of individual agency: “Drugs
become a palliative . . . , an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to
sidestep the inability or the impossibility, of playing an active role in his-
tory.”69 Moreover, the characteristic use of an omniscient narrative per-
spective in maximalist fiction suggests a compensatory desire for authorial
agency: “there is a fundamental need in the maximalist novel to construct
a narratorial gaze capable of perceiving from above, and thus of dominat-
ing, the entire narrative flow.”70 Unlike LeClair, who argues in The Art
of Excess that the contemporary systems novel aspires to mastery of a pro-
foundly complex world—and aspires to aid the reader in acquiring this
mastery—Ercolino suggests there is “an ambiguous relationship between
maximalist narrative forms and power.”71 Finally, Moretti concludes that
the absence of heroic agency in modern (Western) epics is a device that
disguises the Western will to global dominance.72 Since none of these
authors addresses non-Western maximalism, epics, or systems novels, it
remains unclear whether such texts of the Global South share an anxiety
over agency, and if so, what purpose or function anxiety serves in those
texts.73 What is certain is that studies of literary maximalism engage with
many of the issues raised by scalar aesthetics: the challenges of compre-
hending scale in the abstract as well as objects existing in scalar realms
different from our own; the epistemological challenges of shifts in scale;
the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; and the
nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales.
1 INTRODUCTION 19
Contents
In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary conversa-
tions around scale, essays in this collection range in subject matter from
literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific
and political writing. The book begins with a set of essays exploring the
history of concepts of scale. All three essays in this section seek to under-
stand the foundations, assumptions, and political implications of con-
temporary scalar logic, which is particularly crucial to discourse on the
Anthropocene.
Predicated on the notion that the Anthropocene signifies a crisis of
scale, Zach Horton’s “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives
for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene” investigates four historical con-
ceptions of scale that have important implications for contemporary eco-
logical thinking. According to Horton, the scalar logic that is currently
dominant, the “universal overview,” imagines that humans can access
a transcendent, unitary, mastering vision that will enable a technocratic
solution to Anthropogenic global warming. The error of this imagined
vision is rooted, at least in part, in the principle of smooth scaling, the
idea that the methods and results of our perception remain stable despite
shifts in scale—that jumps in scale require no perceptual translations. For
Horton, three other models of cosmic vision are preferable: Paracelsus’s
sixteenth-century conception of the relation between the microcosm
and macrocosm, Walt Whitman’s nineteenth-century serialized cosmic
view that preserves the singularity of separate scales, and Kees Boeke’s
twentieth-century cosmic scale that embraces Whitman’s fragmentation
and discontinuity while simultaneously foregrounding mediation across
scales. Taken together, they offer a richer historical understanding of
how scalar models are constructed, which can help denaturalize the cur-
rently hegemonic model of the overview.
While Horton is interested in the value of different historical con-
ceptions of scale for contemporary environmentalism, Derek Woods’s
essay “Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten”
grapples with the problems and possibilities inherent in the representa-
tion of nonhuman scale domains. Woods acknowledges the common
critiques of such endeavors: they involve anthropomorphism (or, to use
Woods’s term, “scalism”) in the way they project human modes of per-
ception into scale domains that render such modes impossible or irrel-
evant; they involve analogies with human scale (e.g., the comparison of
an atom’s electrons to an insect swarm) that may actually interfere with

our ability to understand other scale domains; and they erase the way
processes of construction shape the knowledge constructed. In spite of
these problems, Woods suggests that attempts to represent nonhuman
scale domains have value and produce useful knowledge. In particular,
such efforts engage with “epistemic things”—things that are abstract
and imperceptible to humans, yet real—and these epistemic things sub-
sequently participate in the formation of a posthuman future shaped by
contact with things we cannot perceive.
Bruno Latour’s essay “Anti-Zoom,” originally published in 2014,
considers the significance of Olafur Eliasson’s art exhibition at the
Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2014–2015 for rethinking con-
ventional ideas of scale in space and time. Latour argues that Eliasson’s
“machines” encourage a viewer to circulate freely through scales, from
the local to the global (in space) and from the briefest instant to the
longest period (in time). Unlike zoom effects, which encourage a view
of scale as a set of dimensions nested within one another like Russian
Matryoshka dolls, Eliasson’s exhibition promotes a way of thinking
in terms of connectivity rather than hierarchy. Echoing the critique of
Woods and other contributors to this collection about the problems of
smooth scaling, Latour argues that zoom effects reinforce hierarchical
ways of thinking about scalar arrangements that originated historically in
a nationalist era and were popularized visually in the twentieth century
by the film Powers of Ten. But in a move that challenges other contrib-
utors to this collection, Latour also suggests these hierarchical ways of
thinking are gradually being eroded in a globalized, anthropocenic age.
Latour provocatively suggests that “good artists do not believe in zoom
effects” despite the continued importance of such effects in contempo-
rary cultural media such as Google Maps.
While the collection’s first section explores major concepts of scale
at different historical moments, the second section addresses the signif-
icance of scale and size in film, architecture, and other twentieth- and
twenty-first-century aesthetic domains.
Mark McGurl’s essay, “Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in
King Kong,” originally published in 1996, argues that the US corpo-
ration in the 1920s and 1930s was undergoing an “ontological” crisis,
negotiating its ambivalent identity as both a nebulous legal fiction and
an expanding, ever more concrete force in US life. Artifacts of corporate
power and self-representation from the period such as skyscrapers and
1 INTRODUCTION 21
radio towers risked exposing corporate influence as a physical embodi-

ment of exploitative business practice, and therefore subject to the
counter-efforts of labor activism, anti-trust legislation, and public criti-
cism. McGurl interprets the 1933 RKO film King Kong as an “elliptical”
allegory of such corporate self-representation, a text that fruitfully dis-
plays the ambivalent aims of business to promote a “corporate theology”
through large-scale, visible iconography but simultaneously to maintain
an invisible, semi-mystical status.
Joan Lubin’s essay “The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on
Spaceship Earth,” proposes that many of the aesthetic and epistemologi-
cal underpinnings of the contemporary discourse of the Anthropocene
and climate change were prefigured in a set of cultural texts dedi-
cated to scalar analytics in the 1960s. Lubin’s central case study is the
Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1963 volume The Great Ideas Today, featur-
ing original contributions from Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley, Paul
Tillich, Herbert Muller, and Harrison Brown, as well as a reprint of
Thomas Malthus’s famous essay on population. In the Britannica vol-
ume’s twinned obsessions with space and population, unified under the
concept of “the stature of man,” Lubin identifies an organizing impulse
of mid-century thinking about the relationships between scale, scientific
experimentalism, and the human. Her essay moves between readings
of the cultural commentary in Great Ideas, mid-century science fiction
films featuring shrinking characters, writings on the “population bomb”
by Hugh Moore and Paul Ehrlich, and recent work on the theoretical
and aesthetic consequences of the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Mark McGurl, and others.
Engaging with theories of the loss of the real in twentieth-century
culture, Aikaterini Antonopoulou’s essay “Large-Scale Fakes: Living in
Architectural Reproductions” compares China’s recent large-scale repli-
cation of Western cities with the effort (aborted in 2015) to rebuild the
Crystal Palace in London, as well as Germany’s current reconstruction
of the Berlin City Palace. In the Chinese reproductions, Antonopoulou
argues, massive scale is used to erase historical context, to escape the past
and construct a new reality in a manner suggested by Rem Koolhaas. In
the London reproduction, the meaning of enormity is highly contested,
with some suggesting it represents the glory of the past and others claim-
ing it represents the transformation of Europe into a theme park. In the
Berlin project, competing conceptions of Germany’s recent democratic
past and its more distant aristocratic history battle in the large-scale
space. Antonopoulou concludes that “the ‘real’ in the [contemporary]

city is mythologised, idealised, and monumentalised,” as suggested by
Andreas Huyssen in Present Pasts, and the effect of this construction of
the real is to transform traditional notions of place and context in ways
shaped by political contests over the past and future.
The third section of this collection addresses scale in contemporary
literature. In this section, contributors consider the significance of scale
for the ways in which we categorize literature, the ways literature reveals
how shifts in scale affect how and what we know, and the proper meth-
ods and political implications for grappling with cultural objects that
either stretch or exceed the human scale.
Like other contributors, Melody Jue, in her essay “From the
Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry
Tide,” questions assumptions behind the principle of smooth scaling.
Influenced by Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene,
Jue urges us to “think of scale as ‘part of the phenomena it seeks to
measure,’ rather than an abstract measure imposed from the outside.”
Considering scale in relation to a watery environment, and explor-
ing the way scale works in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide,
Jue suggests provocatively that theories of scale need to acknowledge
how the orientation of the subject and the medium of perception pro-
foundly shape what we are able to know at different scales. Her goal is
to develop a concept of scale flexible enough to accommodate nonhu-
man forms of embodiment and environmental conditions outside ordi-
nary human habitation.
Oded Nir’s essay “World Literature as a Problem of Scale” uses scale
theory for reconceptualizing world literature. The production of scale
involves a “tension between detail and system”; fiction characteristically
uses a necessarily reduced scale (a limited group of characters, limited
settings, etc.) to imaginatively resolve larger social problems involving
regions, nations, or the world. Recent theories of world literature also
invoke this tension between detail and system. Assessing the theories
of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and others, Nir
proposes defining world literature as “contemporary literature that total-
izes,” in effect endeavoring to map the contradictory system of global
capitalism and, in so doing, to “imaginatively solve the real problem of
the stretching of the scale of social relations.” Nir concludes with a dis-
cussion of the relevance of this proposed definition to recent theories of
maximalist fiction by Ercolino and others.
1 INTRODUCTION 23
Bradley J. Fest’s essay “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative

Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper,’”
addresses a challenge similar to that of Derek Woods’s essay on Powers
of Ten: how to engage with a scale that surpasses the human. Fest uses
the announcement of Richard Grossman’s three-million-page evolving
novel, Breeze Avenue, to theorize the megatext, an unreadably large mul-
timedia form dependent on digital technology and collective authorship.
Engaged with Fredric Jameson’s arguments about the technological sub-
lime and Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject, Fest suggests
that the contemporary megatext is a response to “a world increasingly
constituted by large, unknowable objects,” including both global capi-
talism and global warming. His essay proposes three theories of how to
read and analyze megatexts: an imaginative, speculative mode of criti-
cism; a strategically limited method of reading; and collective interpre-
tation. He concludes with an intriguing and circumspect reflection on
whether the form of the megatext merely reinforces global capitalism or
inspires vital and salutary methods of communal engagement with over-
whelming objects.
In his essay “Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster
Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction,” Jeffrey
Severs explores the changing significance of encyclopedism in the
late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction of US author David
Foster Wallace. According to Severs, although Wallace’s early work
laments the way media saturation and information overload lead to
a pervasive condition of passive consumer spectatorship in US culture,
Wallace’s late work explores the positive potential of the human brain’s
active capacity for processing overwhelming quantities of data. Severs
challenges Ercolino’s definition of the maximalist, encyclopedic novel, as
well as the more general assumption in studies of maximalist literature
that the contemporary condition undermines human affect and agency.
He suggests that Wallace’s late fiction trains readers in practices of cog-
nitive exclusion, which have the surprising result of mitigating solipsism
and facilitating greater human connection and empathy.
Together, the contributions in this collection explore a number of
key issues for understanding scale in literature and culture: the histori-
cal foundations of different conceptions of scale; the methodological
and epistemological consequences of shifts in scale; and the social and
political significance of scale in cultural and aesthetic products. While
the essays gathered here offer exciting new perspectives and approaches,
there are undeniable gaps in the collection that deserve acknowledg-

ment. To solicit essays for the volume, the editors circulated a call for
papers as widely as possible and contacted known scholars working in rel-
evant areas. The call for papers invited work on topics addressing both
ends of the scalar spectrum: the very large, such as geopolitics, globali-
zation, climate change, the Anthropocene, big data, and aesthetic max-
imalism, and the very small, including localism, economic downsizing,
digitization, gene technology, nanotechnology, and aesthetic minimal-
ism. The call for papers also encouraged attention to phenomena of both
expansion and reduction, such as narratives of growth and shrinkage or
discourses of economic growth and decline. We invited work in all his-
torical and geographic areas.
The proposals and submissions we received from our call overwhelm-
ingly addressed large-scale phenomena and the contemporary period in
European, US, and Anglophone cultural production. While we worked
to provide as much historical, geographic, and scalar coverage as possi-
ble, these biases undoubtedly remain in the collection you see in front of
you. To some extent, the reasons for such preferences are not fully clear
to us. The emphasis on Western cultural production, for example, may
reflect broad institutional biases in academic literary and cultural theory,
or it may simply reflect problems in our call for papers or our methods
of distribution. In terms of the collection’s emphasis on large-scale phe-
nomena and processes of scaling up, the explanation may be plainer;
these emphases likely reflect the way dominant contemporary discourses
of scale, particularly concerning globalization and the Anthropocene,
privilege the large. As human geographers have noted, “the politics of
scale is discursive; certain scales become important as a result of dis-
courses highlighting them.”74 Erik Swyngedouw observes that “political
power struggles and strategies” involve mobilizing “scalar narratives, sca-
lar politics, and scalar practices,”75 and Neil Smith adds that “[t]he lan-
guage of globalization itself [and, we might insert, of the Anthropocene]
represents a very powerful if undeniably partisan attempt to rescale our
world vision.”76 The emphasis among academics on the large, and more
generally on phenomena of growth, doubtless reveals the effects of dom-
inant discourses, but also reflects the interest of scholars in addressing
and challenging those same discourses.
Of course, the gesture of announcing a possible shortcoming in one’s
collection is not equivalent to actually correcting it. Nevertheless, we
remain hopeful that the reader will detect among the essays a persistent
1 INTRODUCTION 25
and determined view (sometimes explicit, always at least implicit) toward

research in global literatures and cultures, a concern with a variety of his-
torical periods, and a consideration of diverse scalar phenomena in all
these contexts. If the present collection can contribute its part to such an
expansion of scholarship, we will be content.
Notes
1. Galileo, Two New Sciences, 147ff, passim.
2. Galileo did not invent modern experimental methodology in physical sci-
ence, as is sometimes presumed, but rather was among its most effective
innovators and champions. For a useful discussion of experimentation up
to Galileo’s time, see Drake, especially Chaps. 4 and 5.
3. Drake, xxxiii.
4. Galilei, Two New Sciences, 12.
5. Ibid., 127.
6. Ibid., 13.
7. Ibid., 86.
8. Ibid., 12.
9. Thompson, 2.
10. Haldane, 427.
11. See Schmidt-Nielsen, 7–9; Bonner, 4; and Brown, West, and Enquist,
2. Bonner observes: “That the role of size has been to some degree
neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity” (4).
12. Bryson, 9; Sagan, 8.
13. Qtd. in Hope Nicolson, 29, 27. Also see Shaw (especially Chap. 2) for a
useful discussion of theories of bigness and sublimity in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe.
14. Burke, 66, 36, 123.
15. Ibid., 36–27.
16. Kant, 129. Note that we have slightly modified some of the translations
from Kant.
17. Ibid., 131, 152.
18. Ibid., 134.
19. Ibid., 141.
20. Bachelard, 184.
21. Ibid. In general, see Bachelard, 183–210.
22. Stewart, 78.
23. Stewart, 78, 71.
24. Scarry, 70–71.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. Chamayou, 70.
27. Clark, n.p.
28. Chakrabarty, 1.
29. Clark, n.p.
30. Hardt and Negri, 62.
31. Ibid., 50–51.
32. Ibid., 236.
33. Ibid., 306.
34. Ibid., 238.
35. “Our concept of the multitude . . . attempts to break this numerical alter-
native between the single and plural,” Hardt and Negri write (222–23).
“The multitude is something like singular flesh that refuses the organic
unity of the body” (162).
36. Nixon, 168. In various ways, Nixon echoes the earlier work of E. F.
Schumacher, who argued in 1973 that “institutional arrangements for
dispensing aid are generally such that there is an unsurmountable bias in
favour of large-scale projects on the level of the most modern technology”
(157). Schumacher concludes that the “economics of giantism” ignore
“the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed” (55).
37. Tsing, 523.
38. See Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, Federalist Papers, especially numbers
9–10.
39. For further discussion, see Clarke, especially Chap. 3.
40. A comprehensive list of participants in economic debates over size, scale,
and growth would be impossible, but an idiosyncratic list might include
Meadows et al., Schumacher, Chandler, Coyle, Quah, and a recent series
of blog posts by Tom Murphy (“Galactic Scale Energy,” “Can Economic
Growth Last?,” and “Discovering Limits to Growth”).
41. Leitner, 238.
42. Smith, “Scale Bending,” 196.
43. See Brenner, “Limits to Scale”; Herod; Herod and Wright, “Placing
Scale”; Marston; McMaster and Sheppard; Smith, “Contours,”
“Remaking Scale,” and “Scale Bending”; and Swyngedouw and Heynan.
44. Smith argues that today “the global scale is primarily a construct of the
circulation of capital” (“Contours,” 76).
45. See Herod; and Herod and Wright, “Placing Scale.”
46. Herod and Wright, “Introduction: Rhetorics of Scale,” 149.
47. Smith, “Remaking Scale,” 62.
48. Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local,” 156.
49. McMaster and Sheppard, 19.
50. Gibson-Graham, 28.
51. Ibid., 35.
1 INTRODUCTION 27
52. Ibid., 18.
53. Ibid., 51.
54. See Gibson-Graham; and Herod and Wright, “Introduction: Scales of
Praxis,” 218.
55. Marston, Jones, and Woodward, 416, 427.
56. Ibid., 427.
57. Le Corbusier, 275ff.
58. Koolhaas, “Bigness,” 502.
59. Adler, 2.
60. See Manovich, 38.
61. Whissel, 26.
62. Ibid., 29–30.
63. See Clark, n.p.
64. Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, 1.
65. Ibid., 9.
66. This notion is challenged by human geographers who argue that politi-
cal, economic, and social power and authority have shifted from the
nation to both global and local institutions. See Brenner, “Beyond State-
Centrism,” and Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local.”
67. LeClair, 6.
68. Ercolino, 57; emphasis in original.
69. Ibid., 142.
70. Ibid., 100; emphasis in original.
72. One could argue alternatively that it illustrates the equal submission in
the West to the global dominance of transnational institutions, at least for
ordinary individuals.
73. The one notable exception is Moretti’s discussion of One Hundred Years
of Solitude, but he does not explore the role of agency in that novel.
74. McMaster and Sheppard, 18.
75. Swyngedouw, Scale and Geographic Inquiry, 134.
76. Smith, “Scale Bending,” 207.
Works Cited
Adler, Gerald. Introduction. In Scale: Imagination, Perception, and Practice in
Architecture, edited by Adler, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, and Gordana Fontana-
Giusti, 1–10. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson,
Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994.
Banham, Reyner. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York:
Harper and Row, 1976.
Bonner, John Tyler. Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Brenner, Neil. “Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical
Scale in Globalization Studies.” Theory and Society 28 (1999): 39–78.
———. “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar
Structuration.” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 4 (2001): 591–614.
Brown, James H., Geoffrey B. West, and Brian J. Enquist. “Scaling in Biology:
Patterns and Processes, Causes and Consequences.” In Scaling in Biology,
edited by Brown and West, 1–24. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books,
2003.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate
Change.” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–18.
Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New
York: New Press, 2013.
Chandler, Alfred. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1990.
Clark, Timothy. “Derangements of Scale.” In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era
of Climate Change, Vol. 1, edited by Tom Cohen, n.p. Michigan: Open
Humanities Press, 2012.
Clarke, Michael Tavel. These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in
America, 1865–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Coyle, Diane. The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Cubitt, Sean. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints
to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone,
2000.
Drake, Stillman. History of Free Fall: Aristotle to Galileo. Published with Galilei,
Two New Sciences.
Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño's 2666. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
1 INTRODUCTION 29
Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by
Stillman Drake. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
———. Two New Sciences, Including Centers of Gravity and Forces of Percussion.
2nd ed. Translated by Stillman Drake. Toronto: Wall & Emerson, 1989.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. “Beyond Global vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside
the Binary Frame.” In Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, edited by Andrew
Herod and Melissa W. Wright, 10–25. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2002.
Haldane, J. B. S. “On Being the Right Size.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 152
(March, 1926): 424–427.
Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers.
1787–1788. Project Gutenberg. Nov. 6, 2009. https://www.gutenberg.org/
files/1404/1404-h/1404-h.htm#link2H_4_0085.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Herod, Andrew. “Scale: The Local and the Global.” In Key Concepts in
Geography, 2nd ed., edited by Clifford, et al., 217–235. Los Angeles: Sage,
2009.
Herod, Andrew and Melissa W. Wright. “Introduction: Rhetorics of Scale.” In
Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, edited by Herod and Wright, 147–153.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
———. “Introduction: Scales of Praxis.” In Geographies of Power: Placing Scale,
edited by Herod and Wright, 217–223. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
———. “Placing Scale: An Introduction.” In Geographies of Power: Placing Scale,
edited by Herod and Wright, 1–14. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. London: Swan Sonnenschein
and Co., 1902.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage,
1992.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–360. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
———. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
———. Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Bigness, or the Problem of Large.” In Small, Medium, Large,
Extra-Large, 2nd ed., by Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Office for Metropolitan
Architecture, edited by Jennifer Sigler, 495–516. New York: Monacelli, 1995.
———. Delirious New York. New edition. New York: Monacelli, 1994.
Latour, Bruno. “Anti-Zoom.” In Contact (exhibition catalogue), edited by

Studio Olafur Eliasson, 121–124. Paris: Flammarion, 2014.
LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and its Planning. Translated by Frederick
Etchells. New York: Dover, 1987.
Leitner, Helga. “The Politics of Scale and Networks of Spatial Connectivity:
Transnational Interurban Networks and the Rescaling of Political Governance
in Europe.” In Scale & Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, Method, edited by
Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster, 236–255. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2004.
Longinus. Longinus on the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris
Manuscript. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Marston, Sallie. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human
Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219–242.
Marston, Sallie, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward. “Human Geography
Without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series
30, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 416–432.
McGurl, Mark. “Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong.” Critical
Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 415–445.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative
Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
McMaster, Robert B. and Eric Sheppard. “Introduction: Scale and Geographic
Inquiry.” In Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method,
edited by Sheppard and McMaster, 1–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Meadows, Donella H., et al. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of
Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe, 1972.
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso, 2013.
———. The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez.
Translated by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1996.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its
Prospects. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Murphy, Tom. “Galactic-Scale Energy.” July 12, 2011. https://dothemath.ucsd.
edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/. Accessed Dec. 20, 2015.
———. “Can Economic Growth Last?” July 14, 2011. https://dothemath.ucsd.
edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/. Accessed Dec. 20, 2015.
———. “Discovering Limits to Growth.” Sep. 7, 2011. https://dothemath.
ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-growth/. Accessed Dec. 20, 2015.
1 INTRODUCTION 31
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2015.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1959.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Palumbo-Liu, David, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds. Immanuel
Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham, NC:
Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2015.
———. What is Media Archeology. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental
Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Quah, Danny. “The Weightless Economy in Growth.” Business Economist 30, no.
1 (Mar 1999): 40–53.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Schmidt-Nielsen, Knut. Scaling: Why is Animal Size So Important? New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. New York:
Perennial Library, 1975.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the
Production of Geographical Scale.” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81.
———. “Remaking Scale: Competition and Cooperation in Prenational and
Postnational Europe.” In Competitive European Peripheries, edited by
H. Eskelinen, et al., 59–74. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1995.
———. “Scale Bending and the Fate of the National.” In Scale & Geographic
Inquiry: Nature, Society, Method, edited by Eric Sheppard and Robert B.
McMaster, 192–212. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Swyngedouw, Erik. “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of
Scale.” In Spaces of Globalization: Reassessing the Power of the Local, edited by
Kevin Cox, 137–166. New York: Guilford, 1997.
———. “Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place, and the Politics of Scale.” In Scale
and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method, edited by Eric Sheppard
and Robert B. McMaster, 129–153. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Swyngedouw, Erik and Nikolas C Heynen. “Urban Political Ecology, Justice and
the Politics of Scale.” Antipodes 35, no. 5 (Nov. 2003): 898–918.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. Complete revised edition.
New York: Dover, 1992.
Tsing, Anna. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to
Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (Fall 2012):
505–524.
Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: Open
Humanities Press, 2014.
PART I
Scale: History and Conception

CHAPTER 2
Composing a Cosmic View: Three

Alternatives for Thinking Scale
in the Anthropocene
Zach Horton
The Anthropocene’s Universal Overview

The “Anthropocene” is commonly understood to signify a crisis of
scale, bringing into focus the temporal, spatial, and causal extent of the
human. In this sense, the Anthropocene is less about the discovery of
new scales than it is a form of self-reflexive knowledge: it marks human-
ity’s confrontation with itself as a trans-scalar entity. Through climate
change and geological history (“deep time”) we come to see the human
as something alien. The mechanism of this alienation is scalar. We are
shocked to discover that in carrying out the routine enterprises of indus-
trial modernity, and perhaps collective agrarian enterprises before that,
we didn’t recognize our own scales. The shock of the Anthropocene is
less the shock of geological time or planetary space than it is the shock
of Western thought confronting its own limits. The surprise is that the
Anthropocene is a surprise. Why is this? I’ll briefly suggest three reasons.
First, we tend to think in mono-scalar patterns. “The human” evokes,
Z. Horton (*) 
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_2
36 Z. Horton
for Westerners, the scale of the rational, autonomous individual of

European Enlightenment tradition. Sometimes we append to this sub-
ject the scale of a community or nation. Thinking the human itself at
multiple scales disturbs the delicately balanced affective and ideological
attachments that stabilize our identities. Second, our own scale usually
remains unmarked. Entities of enormous or diminutive proportion seem
to humans to possess scalar attributes, while we, the perceivers of those
objects, seem to occupy a scale-free perspective. Because most of us see
other scales and not our own, when we encounter ourselves at other
scales, we narrativize the encountered object as something other than
human. Third, and most profound, Western subjects have frequently
failed to recognize our own scales because Western thought tends to col-
lapse the difference between scales in the process of connecting them.
This is not an accidental feature of the Enlightenment tradition, but
rather a deliberate and systematic tactic that arises jointly from colonial
and instrumental-rationalist logics. I call it scalar collapse. It is an interfa-
cial technique of conjoining two or more different scales within a single
medium, enabling access from the first to the second by homogenizing
their differential dynamics and subordinating the second to the first.
There are many forms of scalar collapse, from Rutherford’s model of
the atom (the atom functions like a miniature solar system) to Gaia the-
ory (the Earth functions like an organism). Sometimes collapsing scale
may be necessary; often it is productive. But the tendency to collapse
scale occludes difference, suppressing the fundamental alterity of matter-
energy’s constant flow of compositions and decompositions into new
assemblages. As entities combine and split apart, as they change scale,
they gain new properties and potentials. In a fundamental way, collaps-
ing scale in our technology and thought diminishes our understanding of
and ability to fully encounter the world that we inhabit.
At one extreme, scalar collapse produces a “universal overview,”
a mastering gaze that subsumes everything under its single logic. The
universal overview can be detected in Western culture from at least the
time of the Roman Empire, when what Denis Cosgrove refers to as
the “Apollonian eye,” or the desire to produce a viewpoint above the
Earth and outside the world itself, came to full fruition. This “divine and
mastering view from a single perspective” is “at once empowering and
visionary, implying ascent from the terrestrial sphere into the zones of
planets and stars.”1 This desire for a universal overview, a scopic mas-
tery of the world that would fully authorize its reformulation according
2 COMPOSING A COSMIC VIEW: THREE ALTERNATIVES … 37
to the projections of religion, Empire, or technoscience, has animated

Western culture ever since.
If we accept that scalar collapse and its ideological apotheosis, the
universal overview, have been constitutive of the problems of the
Anthropocene, it is perhaps all the more surprising that Paul Crutzen,
who developed the Anthropocene concept in 2000, seems to pro-
mote exactly this form of thinking as a solution to the problems of the
Anthropocene. After arguing persuasively that human technologies have
remade the face of the planet in dangerous and unsustainable ways,
Crutzen and Stoermer (his co-author on the original article that intro-
duced the concept in its current form) suggest that the Anthropocene is
essentially an engineering problem. That is, once we have achieved the
critical self-reflexive knowledge of the scales of human influence (which
Crutzen and Stoermer presume we have now achieved), the process of
arriving at a solution to the horrific geological and ecological effects that
they have enumerated is passed off to scientific specialists and engineers:
To develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of eco-

systems against human induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks
of mankind, requiring intensive research efforts and wise application of the
knowledge thus acquired in the noösphere. . . . An exciting, but also dif-
ficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering
community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental
management.2
Knowledge production for the Anthropocene, in this account, consists

primarily of the mapping of the ecosystems impacted by human techno-
science, conjoined with the directed application of further technoscientific
practices toward environmental management. Leaving aside for a moment
the circular nature of this “solution,” it is nonetheless clear that Crutzen’s
and Stoermer’s suggestion requires the systematic production of a total-
izing vision of human and natural ecology, a data-driven, meticulously
assembled overview of all processes involving or affected by humans. This
overview, catalyzed by the self-reflexive charge of the Anthropocene but
assembled through the protocols of scientific data collection and tech-
nological application (the inseparable interrelation of which is generally
referred to as “technoscience”), places humanity in the driving seat of the
planet’s ecology, first as the unwitting inflicter of “stresses,” and then,
ever so swiftly, as the deliberate and self-assured inflicter of corrective
38 Z. Horton
management technique. Humanity, according to this view, has fouled

its nest not so much from arrogance or overreach as from under ambi-
tion: it has not sufficiently claimed its rightful role as monarch of crea-
tion, overseer in both the perspectival and managerial senses. Humanity
can and therefore must master all the scales it has inherited by aggregat-
ing them into a single map that can also serve as an engineering diagram
of potential intervention and optimization. The Anthropocene, as disci-
plined knowledge practice, simply is a kind of self-reflexive mapping of the
cosmos as a set of linear scales, with the Earth as their reference point and
the human as their perspectival anchor and guarantor. Thus Crutzen’s
technoscientific cosmic view is itself a universal overview, arising from the
same logics of scalar collapse that have obscured the multi-scalar nature of
ecology from the beginning.
Scholars in the humanities have approached the concept of the
Anthropocene, and its attendant scalar shift, with both trepidation and
cautious optimism. The optimism tends to come from the environ-
mental humanities, and those who feel more generally that we need
new forms of thought radically disarticulated from human exceptional-
ism, capitalism, and the exploitation that they enable. For scholars such
as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, the looming shadow
of the Anthropocene acts as a check on some of the most hegemonic
and intransigent traditions of the Enlightenment, enabling a darker
form of thought more open to other scales and beings (Morton) at the
same time that it demands a “cross-hatching” of two disparate histo-
ries: that of capital and that of species (Chakrabarty).3 The trepidation,
for some, stems from a suspicion that shifting the scale of inquiry from
human relations to larger ecological, planetary, and geological scales
threatens to homogenize human difference into one mass subject—
the human species—and erase the important work accomplished in the
academic humanities over the past fifty years to theorize the construc-
tion of knowledge, exposing the compositional character of naturalized
“facts.” Claire Colebrook argues: “If theory has become an attention to
construction and composition, the Anthropocene often appears as a reac-
tionary insistence on the real and non-negotiable. Indeed, it often seems
as though it is theory as such that seems to have fallen victim to the new
scale of the Anthropocene.”4 The danger of shifting scales, then, is not
that we may lose sight of the familiar, but that we may lose a certain criti-
cal capacity to trace the history of our own ideas and impressions—that
we may impose our own concepts (such as those that animate Crutzen’s
global engineering regime of environmental management) without

recognizing them, so benumbed are our critical capacities in the face of
that which is so immense (the planet, climate, deep time) that it seems
given, no longer subject to critical inquiry.
Humanities scholars have often critiqued the Anthropocene con-
cept for its seemingly central focus upon the human. This comes at
the moment when the humanities are working hard to decenter the
universalizing concept of the human as inherited from the European
Enlightenment. Ushering back in a central focus on the human by nam-
ing the current epoch after it threatens not only deconstructive and
genealogical work that has traced the construction and colonial deploy-
ment of the “human,” but also work in philosophy, feminist theory and
the environmental humanities that has effected a shift to thinking, valu-
ing, and becoming-with entities other than the human: animals, plants,
and other forms of matter-energy. As Donna Haraway notes, evolution-
ary biology and human historiography alike, as knowledge practices,
have moved on from notions of static and autonomous beings toward
a form of multi-species becoming: “What happens when organisms plus
environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even
Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals
and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a trans-
formative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!”5
Indeed, there is more than a little perversity in naming what should
be a radical shift away from the centrality of the human after the human
itself. Jussi Parikka has suggested that, in order to mark this perversity,
we modify our geological marker to the “Anthrobscene.”6 Haraway
in turn suggests that, in order to respond to the challenges of the
Anthropocene we must move beyond it, inheriting its scale but intro-
ducing a new form of multi-species relationality in our theory and prac-
tice, an engagement with the “Chthonic Ones,” the beings of the earth.
Haraway calls this hypothetical shift the “Chthulucene.”7
Following Chakrabarty, Colebrook, Parikka, and Haraway, I would
like to frame the central question of the Anthropocene as one explicitly
about scale: How do we meet the challenge of this moment in which we
as humans are faced with the destruction we have wrought upon each
other and non-humans alike—when we are forced to face our true scale
as a species—without resorting and reverting to the universal overview, a
standpoint that renders a guilty verdict on human activity only to put us
back on top of the epistemological ladder as sole masters of ever-larger
40 Z. Horton
scales? How do we keep alive not only an active engagement with dif-
ference at all scales, but also a thick understanding of how new forms
(bodies, collectives, concepts) emerge and change? If our thinking is, as I
have suggested, plagued by scalar collapse—a meeting of disparate scales
that erases their difference and imprints the qualities of one onto the
other—then how do we escape from this cycle? How do we generatively
engage other scales and give them their due while maintaining an open-
ness to the transformative nature of the trans-scalar encounter itself?
It is easy to get caught up in the urgency of the Anthropocene’s eter-
nal present, its ahistorical irruption, a crisis that seems to demand nov-
elty of response. I suggest that, as we look to the future, we also look to
the past for “new” ways of thinking. Attempts to cultivate a cosmic view
that aggregates the scales of being into knowledge and experience are
not novel to this self-reflexive period of the Anthropocene. Mystic, liter-
ary, and scholarly works have long sought to provide such trans-scalar
access to the many scales that touch us, as well as those we touch. In the
remainder of this essay I will examine three alternative models of cos-
mic view composition that predate the concept of the Anthropocene: the
microcosm, as exemplified by the writings of Paracelsus, the serialized
cosmos evoked by Walt Whitman, and the resolved or mediated cosmos
explored by Kees Boeke.
Each of these alternative cosmic views consists of a model of sca-
lar relationality, affordances of human access to other scales, a prescrip-
tive set of practices for the cultivation of a trans-scalar perspective, and
implicit or explicit arguments for the social value of such practices.
Rather than assume, as Crutzen appears to do, that the technoscientific
assembly of a universal perspective stands at the zenith of human achieve-
ment in the realms of knowledge, ethics, and milieu-building technique,
I will consider these three alternative forms of cosmic view composition
as singular in their positioning of the human vis-à-vis ecology, perspec-
tive, and potential. Even a brief discussion of these alternatives will help
us to contextualize the scalar assumptions implicit in Anthropocenic dis-
course and critically evaluate how they function to establish particular
relationships between ecology, human intervention, social identity, and
personal identity. In short, these considerations will suggest that human
ecological intervention in the Anthropocene must begin a bit further
back, not with the confident implementation of a set of already-assumed
technoscientific purposes, but with a questioning of how we have arrived
at our scalar assumptions and perspectives in the first place.
The Microcosm: Healing the Trans-Scalar Body

George Perrigo Conger, who in 1922 published the first monograph
on the subject of “theories of microcosms” in the history of Western
thought, and remains the closest we have ever had to an expert on the
subject, finds “traces of these theories . . . throughout practically the
whole history of philosophy. . . . [A]lthough they exhibit periods of
rise and decline, such views apparently belong among the philosophical
perennials.”8 These perennial views have in common the positing of a
structurally homologous relationship between at least two different size
domains within the totality of the universe. The term “microcosm” is
from Greek, meaning “little world.” The microcosm, of course, always
comes with a sister world, a “macrocosm” that outscales it but remains
attached as if by a mysterious umbilical cord. Conceptually, a microcosm
is always conjunctive: it circumscribes a space, draws the boundaries of
a world, but at the same time draws another world nearer—causally and
poetically—than it might otherwise seem to be. Conger’s definition of
microcosmic theorization tellingly conflates the literary with the math-
ematical, “the attempt at a descriptive parallelism indicating, point by
point, that one portion of the universe imitates another or others on a
smaller scale.”9 I am going to challenge Conger’s formulation of micro-
cosmic philosophy as fundamentally mimetic, but for now the important
point is that microcosmic theorization is simultaneously mathematically
precise in its pinpointing of the universe’s scalar joints and poetic in its
evocation of the potential articulations that such a structure affords.
Rather than consider a genealogy of microcosmic philosophy, which
runs from Pythagoras through Plato to the Stoics, then later through
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, I wish to focus briefly on a sin-
gle philosopher whose system of thought is in many ways the apothe-
osis of microcosmic thought, an unrestrained, ecstatic exploration of the
potentials of scalar homology for dwellers at any scale: Paracelsus, the
sixteenth-century German philosopher, physician, and alchemist.
For Paracelsus, medicine and alchemy are one and the same knowl-
edge practice. Both are “signatory” arts that teach us “how to give true
and genuine names to all things.”10 To understand the proper names of
things is vital, because each thing is a sign of something else at another
scale. To understand a thing’s name is to understand its essence, but
that essence is relational: every individual thing encountered is what it
is only by virtue of the principles by which it is differentiated from all
42 Z. Horton
other things. This difference, the primary differentiation of substances in

the universe, is almost always occluded through their undignified mixing.
The Art of Alchemy is the art of divining occluded difference, recover-
ing the proper names that signify each element as unique unto itself. “In
order to understand what separation is, you should know that it is noth-
ing else but the segregation of one thing from another, whether two,
three, four, or more have been mixed.”11 Linguistic differentiation and
material separation are thus two sides or perspectives of a single alchemi-
cal process of recovery. Paracelsian alchemy proceeds from the assump-
tion that fundamental difference has been sensibly occluded through the
mixing of all things, and that making differentiating cuts in this apparent
manifold reveals essential relationships that hold at all scales. Thus scalar
homology underlies material difference, which, viewed from the wrong
perspective, looks like undifferentiated substance, the milieu inhabited by
the non-Alchemist. For Paracelsus, the hard work of assembling a cosmic
view begins by differentiating the human from its environment, which
further entails breaking the human down into its essential components:
The first Separation of which we speak should begin from man, since he
is the Microcosm, the lesser world, and for his sake the Macrocosm, the
greater world, was founded, that he might be its Separator. But the sepa-
ration of the Microcosm begins from death. For in death the two bod-
ies of man separate from each other, that is to say, the Celestial and the
Terrestrial, the Sacramental and the Elemental.12
Paracelsus differentiates two components that are essentially unlike, yet

mixed or occluded in life. These two “bodies,” the one made of earthly
stuff and the other of heavenly stuff, once differentiated, reveal another
difference: the celestial part of the human consists of a soul belonging
to the “first matter of the sacraments” and the spirit belonging to “the
first matter of the aerial chaos.”13 Each operation of alchemical thought,
in producing a differentiating cut, reveals a relationship between those
essential components that have been separated. It is this relationship,
between the celestial and the terrestrial on one hand, and the (corpo-
real) body, soul, and spirit on the other, that Paracelsus sees as universal:
it animates every body, from the human to the earth to the universe at
large. This is why the human is a microcosm: the relationships between
its constituent components are universal in structure, and repeat at larger
and larger scales:
What has now been said concerning the separation of the Microcosm
should also be understood of the greater world, which the mighty ocean
has separated into three parts, so that the universal world is thus divided
into three portions, Europe, Asia, and Africa. This separation is a sort of
pre-figuration of the three principles, because they, too, can be separated
from every terrestrial and elemental thing. These principles are Mercury,
Sulphur, and Salt. Of these three the world is built up and composed.14
Paracelsus’s alchemical analytic, proceeding down to the most funda-

mental difference (three “principles” or fundamental forms of matter),
has thus revealed the structure of all bodies. In the example above, he
shows that the human body is a microcosm of the earth: mercury, sul-
fur, and salt form a homologous relationship at these two different scales.
In Paracelsus’s theory of difference, then, every point of differentiation,
every site of separation, forms a point of collocation or correspondence
between different scales. These are the cosmic “joints” that articulate the
world. They can be found at every scale, but this homology itself weaves
all scales together. Paracelsus notes that “there is a similar star also in the
elements, as in the earth, and that an efficacious one. That star receives
an impression from the higher star, and then of itself acts on the earth,
so that there is drawn forth from the earth whatever exists or lies hid in
it.”15 The cascade of scales that comprises the universe is more than a set
of cosmic Matryoshka dolls, each nested inside the other: it establishes a
causal axis:
External stars affect the man, and the internal stars in man affect outward
things, in fact and in operation, the one on the other. For what Mars is
able to effect in us, that also can the man effect in himself if he restrain
himself in his manly operations. Thus are the double stars related one to
the other. Man can affect heaven no less than heaven affects man.16
This is certainly a surprising result. Differentiation at one level has

revealed fundamental relationality, a structure that corresponds point by
point with bodies composed at different scales. But those points them-
selves, when viewed laterally as lines running through all scales, form
causal axes. As conjoined articulations, movement at one scale can influ-
ence movement at other scales. This efficacious influence is bidirectional:
smaller structures can influence larger ones just as the latter can influence
the former. Scale literally animates the universe.
44 Z. Horton
We have now clarified the scalar relationship between the human and
the rest of the universe: like every other body, the human is caught up
in this vast cascade of scales, each exerting its influence on the others.
The uninitiated human, then, is at the mercy of these trans-scalar impres-
sions. He bears the weight of all scales, and is reduced to the state of the
automaton or animal:
The stars compel and coerce the animal man, so that where they lead he
must follow. . . . What other reason is there for this, save that man does
not know or estimate himself or his own powers, or reflect that he is a
lesser universe, and thus the whole firmament with its powers hidden
within himself?17
Alchemy produces a particular kind of knowledge, not only about the

composition of all substances, but about the universal structures that
underlie all forms, connect vastly different scales together, and enable
movement to ripple through the universe along these scalar axes. This is
why Paracelsus sees alchemy as a healing art and a suitable replacement
for the practices of ancient medicine: infirmity and disease are nothing
other than the mixing of those principles that should remain apart, and
thus the disarticulation of the individual body from the cosmic whole.
The process of healing, for Paracelsus, is one of purification: various
mixed elements must be separated within the sick body so that they may
return to their proper proportions and places. These internally opti-
mal relationships are determined by the homologous relationships that
pertain at other scales. The sick body can no longer function normally
because its internal relationships are out of alignment with the cosmic
order of the universe, and thus with the causal axis of influence that ties
scales together. Healing is thus, paradoxically, the art of reading signs of
other times and places. Medicine is astronomy; one learns as much about
the human body by studying the stars as one does through anatomical
study. Of course, the reverse is also true: alchemical medicine traces the
scalar ties of the human to all other scales of the universe. “Hence man
is now a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all
the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the ele-
ments; and so he is their quintessence.”18
The healer, the alchemist, cultivates a cosmic view that renders visible
these scalar homologies and, in the sick body, their condition of mis-
alignment. The alchemist recognizes that “the interior or invisible man is
a kind of constellation or firmament,” and that these human stars should

correspond with the stars of the firmament: they are “so arranged by the
Olympian spirit that the man can be led and changed into quite another
man.”19 The physician’s cosmic perspective gives him the capacity to
effect this re-articulation, the return to health, and thus the recovery of
the ability to act. Bringing the constituent elements of the body back
into alignment with cosmic structure means recognizing the place of the
human in that larger structure, including human needs and dependen-
cies: “Such, then, is the condition of man, that, out of the great universe
he needs both elements and stars, seeing that he himself is constituted in
that way.”20
Ultimately, Paracelsus’ alchemical knowledge of scalar homology
becomes a kind of cosmic ecology. For sustenance, man depends upon
both the earth (nature) and the heavens (spirit). These dependen-
cies, which cannot be circumvented, require human alignment with the
axis of scalar causation that wends its way through the entire universe.
Human efficacy and health depend upon the cultivation of scale-articu-
lated knowledge. Dwelling harmoniously in the universe is thus contin-
gent upon being able to read the signs of scale: one thereby participates
in a bidirectional, entangled form of trans-scalar causality, a self-reflexive
process that reveals the human as constellated at many scales.
The Serialized Cosmos

Microcosmographies such as that developed by Paracelsus are mapping
devices: they attempt to chart the whole of the universe without pro-
ducing a totalizing perspective by positing the universe as a cascading
set of interrelated scales. This cosmic chart can be drawn in advance of
empirical investigation, because structure is homologous at all scales. The
microcosmic knowledge practitioner, as soon as she examines any struc-
ture, is immediately embedded in a cosmic ecology, but that ecology
functions on the basis of similarity instead of difference. Not only does
this create a potentially vexed relationship between microcosmic knowl-
edge and empirical knowledge (thus provoking the purge of homolo-
gous thinking that enabled modern chemistry to emerge from alchemical
occultism, with all of the losses that entailed), but also has the disadvan-
tage of denying difference between scales. This is one of the ironies of
Paracelsian scale thinking: it celebrates intra-scalar difference only to col-
lapse inter-scalar difference.
46 Z. Horton
A form of cosmic view production capable of preserving a more

robust inter-scalar difference would need to abandon a priori knowledge
of scalar homology, which would in turn require some other method of
aggregating or tying together diverse scales. One such alternative would
be a serialized approach that incorporates ever more entities into its
model in an iterative fashion. Instead of starting from a totalizing over-
view or posited scale-spanning homology, it would begin in punctiform
fashion, with something singular. It would then add to this structure in
iterative waves of incorporation. It could never incorporate everything in
the universe into its model, of course, as it would be limited by finite
accumulation in time. It would have the advantage, however, of preserv-
ing the singularity and difference of every scale that it engages.
Walt Whitman develops exactly such an approach in his most celebrated
poem, Song of Myself. It opens with a declaration of self-valuation: “I cel-
ebrate myself, and sing myself, /And what I assume you shall assume, /
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (29).21 This
stanza sets in motion two seemingly opposed vectors: one inward, into the
psyche and experiential field of the narrator, and one outward, directed
at an indefinite “you” who acts as the potential recipient of the narrator’s
constitutive particles. The tension between these two vectors will develop
throughout the poem into a serialized aggregation of the scales of the cos-
mos as enunciation, as song: a lyrical cosmic view.
The self is a scale, a home, a perspective: scale ground zero. The open-
ing stanzas relate the most intimate of processes: “My respiration and
inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through
my lungs.” The body of the narrator (hereafter “the poet”), molecular-
ized into processes and flows, however contained, compact, and scale-inti-
mate, soon finds itself connected to flows outside of itself: “The sniff of
green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea rocks,
and of hay in the barn” (30). Particles from the surrounding environment
travel through the blood and inhaled air, and thus an intimate awareness
of the scale of the human body imperceptibly morphs into an awareness
of a world, the scale of a habitat. It goes without saying that this pat-
tern will be repeated again and again, that more particles will be taken
in, sung in ever-expanding scales. Keeping up with this process, this con-
centric journey outward through the ecological-scalar meshwork is the
poem’s explicit challenge to its reader: “Have you reckon’d a thousand
acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?” (30). “Reckoning”
signifies more than the act of contemplation or measuring. It means,
Fig. 2.1 Interactive “object ecology visualization” of Walt Whitman’s Song of

Myself, top level
for the poet, an enlargement of the self, an incorporation: “and of these

one and all I weave the song of myself” (42).
The progressive incorporation of scales into the poet’s self does not
proceed abstractly, but in famously concrete detail. Song of Myself is a set
of nested lists, organized categorically but ultimately populated with sin-
gular entities (Fig. 2.1). Thus we encounter, inter alia:
Events: Apple-peelings, a regatta. (57, 40)

Body parts: “The malform’d limbs are tied to the
surgeon’s table,” “convex lips.” (39, 35)
People going about their business: clam-diggers, the President, a “clean-
hair’d Yankee girl works with her sew-
ing-machine.” (36, 41, 40)
Marginalized people: a runaway slave, a prostitute being
mocked by a crowd. (59, 41)
Animals: a turkey-hen, a “gigantic beauty of a
stallion.” (39, 55)
48 Z. Horton
Plants: pecan-trees, “the running blackberry.” (41, 54)

Tools: “a staff cut from the woods,” the hand-saw. (73, 75)
Places: Manhattan, “the old hills of Judæa.” (56, 75)
Elemental Substances: the dirt, “You sea!” (50, 46)
Celestial bodies: Uranus, “far-sprinkled systems.” (51, 72)
Starting with the scale of the self, Whitman (the poet-narrator) pro-
ceeds not linearly to other scales, through some abstract medium, but
rather through a kind of quixotic spiral, encountering and incorporating
these diverse objects and subjects. It is not that they are caught in an
ever-widening net so much as they form the fibers of the net itself, con-
junctive strands that are at once the raw materials of the poet’s weaving
and the woven garment itself. This poetic self, then, is not unchanging,
remote, autonomous. It is animated intersubjectively by that to which it
is connected, acting as a center but not a whole: “there is no object so
soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe” (76). This scalar asser-
tion is striking. The part is not to be subordinated to the whole; in this
radically dehierarchized ontology, any point, any singularity, can serve
as the center to everything. And yet this “everything” is not a totality:
“They are but parts, anything is but a part” (73). This is what authorizes
Whitman the narrator-poet to assume that subjectively central position;
anyone else would do just as well. The key to occupying the position
of the hub, the central condensation point for an aggregation of entities
at multiple scales, is the perspectival feat of producing universal articula-
tions given only a finite collocation of elements (the objects that pop-
ulate the categories listed above) while also acknowledging the radical,
embodied contingency of this necessary perspective.
This dual paradox, of universality in singularity and necessity in con-
tingency, produces the conceptual space of the serialized cosmic view. It
proceeds through a necessary incorporation (it couldn’t have been oth-
erwise; the meshwork of the universe cannot be denied) of elements into
an entirely arbitrary center, while each entity thus incorporated retains its
singularity, remains differentiated from everything else. Every iteration,
every turn of Whitman’s wheel adds more detail, as differentiated bodies
in motion gathered into a single mass. The resulting aggregate is there-
fore always maddeningly incomplete for anyone craving a universal over-
view, but in its openness to further conjunction, the potential to always
add more, it avoids scalar collapse. It aggregates and conjoins without
homogenizing.
More and more detail accumulates, always articulated to the “I” that
is the center of perspective, the surface that makes possible such con-
junctions by presenting itself as the substratum for proliferating differ-
entiation. Thus Whitman as the self, the song, fulfills the role of what
Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “body without organs,” which
“forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the
entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface.”22 As a
surface of inscription that produces nothing but provides an assembly
point for all production (movement, change, connection, weaving), the
body without organs keeps all of its aggregated entities apart from one
another. They multiply, squirm, differentiate, because they are unable to
join in a single whole: “Machines attach themselves to the body with-
out organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire
network of new syntheses is now woven.”23 A new entity takes form as
a set of virtual connections coursing through the universe, producing
one possible geometry for its articulations, one out of an infinite set of
potential hubs.
Thus instead of wading deeper and deeper into endless differentiation,
an accumulation of detail that could only adjust our focal point closer
and closer—a scalar myopia—Whitman weaves difference into cosmic
vectors that expand ever outward. Again, he discovers necessity in con-
tingency, universality in difference. We may find it suspicious, however,
that we can know the outcome of Whitman’s poetic encounters prior to
their occurrence, as in Paracelsus; however singular they are, they nec-
essarily lead to a disjunctive conjunction: they will be aggregated into
the tapestry of the self as detail, as conserved difference. As Deleuze
and Guattari note, “the body without organs reproduces itself, puts
forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe.”24
Whitman always explores two vectors at once: the actual detail con-
tained everywhere he looks, and the virtual vectors of universal conjunc-
tion that spiral ever outward, encompassing new scales: “My voice goes
after what my eyes cannot reach, /With the twirl of my tongue I encom-
pass worlds and volumes of worlds” (50). Whitman’s suspended tension
between these two vectors, one discovering ever more detail within and
the other encompassing ever more without, keeps his serialized cosmic
view from collapsing into an abyssal plunge into detail on one hand (the
actual), or infinite potentiality that resolves no actual detail on the other
(the virtual). Instead, Whitman produces a paradoxical literary persona
that suspends reduction on either side, becoming both a potentially
50 Z. Horton
infinite being (“a kosmos,” containing “multitudes,” capable of stand-

ing “cool and composed before a million universes”), and an entirely cir-
cumscribed singularity that gazes into the eyes of particular oxen, aids a
runaway slave, etc.25
Thus Whitman’s affirmation of all that he encounters and a priori
all that he could potentially encounter, his dismantling of any and all
hierarchies, his radical democratization of objects and subjects should
be understood as components and consequences of a delicate balance
between actual and virtual scales, with his poetic self poised on the ful-
crum between the two: “I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an
encloser of things to be” (71). His project consists of the production of a
particular viewpoint integrating both. In its accretive mode, it functions
as an approach to detail and difference as potentially infinitely assimilable,
but actually endlessly differentiated and serialized.
Whitman’s cosmic view affirms the beauty of difference, but also the
labor of reading, the labor of constructing a viewpoint that is always
necessarily incomplete and thus fully open, never closed to new scales,
whether larger or smaller. He declares this paradoxical aim in the pref-
ace to his first edition of Leaves of Grass: “Let the age and wars of other
nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that
finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here comes one
[who] sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are
now no solid forms.”26 The goal is to conjure these forms that have not
yet come to be, to trace their vectors of actualization while fully affirm-
ing their difference (for this movement of actualization is both a conden-
sation of the limitless potential of the virtual and a movement outward
from the actual, a swerve from one state to an entirely new one). This is
the cosmic view as a speculative process or rhythm, a poetic ecology that
one cannot learn in the mode of empirical cartography or astronomy. To
inhabit it is to serve, for one moment, necessarily but contingently, as the
hub of the universe.
Short Circuiting the Overview: Medial Scale Jumping

in Boeke’s Cosmic View
The serialized cosmic view, as modeled by Whitman in Song of Myself,

achieves undeniable poetic heights, heights from which much can be
seen. It does require, however, a condensation point for the virtual
entities of the world, a singular perspective that is both a surface and a

container for the collection of detail. If Whitman creates a persona to
play this role, we may nonetheless remain skeptical about the essential
communicability of this vision, its potential to be shared and remain effi-
cacious, as well as its potential to be abused. Must we start with a self,
and must we rely so heavily upon its capacity for transcendence? Perhaps,
but I wish to consider one final alternative form of cosmic view produc-
tion that begins with and relies upon quite a different set of relation-
ships between the self and its scalar others. This is the mid-twentieth
century book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by radical Dutch
schoolteacher Kees Boeke. This remarkable work produces something
like a universal overview that is nonetheless fragmented, discontinuous,
and mediated. The subject who attains such a cosmic view remains situ-
ated, embodied, and uncertain rather than transcendent. Boeke’s scale-
jumping experiment nonetheless takes the production of new subjectivity
seriously, according it a position of centrality. Ultimately, this twentieth-
century mutation in cosmic view composition functions by bringing a
medial sensibility to bear on elements of both serialized cosmography
and the therapeutic dynamics of Paracelsian microcosmic medicine.
Both Boeke and his wife, Beatrice Cadbury, were wary of indi-
vidualism. Beatrice, the daughter of one of the founders of the
Cadbury Brothers company in England, became so disillusioned with
the class hierarchies produced and reproduced by capitalism that she per-
manently ceded all of her shares in the company to the workers in the
Cadbury factory.27 During World War I, Beatrice and Kees, newly mar-
ried, became pacifists in order to protest Britain’s continued participation
in that conflict. In London, they attended weekly Quaker meetings dur-
ing which the entire community would collectively discuss a topic and
arrive at a consensus decision. The lack of political hierarchy within the
organization particularly impressed Boeke, and after the war the couple
set out to replicate this radically communitarian, anarchistic structure in
the domain of education. If children could be taught communitarianism
and responsibility, perhaps a better society could be built. The Boekes
thus shared Whitman’s basic desire for a radically new, radically democ-
ratized society; their emphasis, however, was less upon the affirmation of
difference and more upon the production of a collective subject.
The nature of subjectivity itself was to change along with its scale:
in 1926 they founded the Werkplaats Children’s Community, a radical
primary school in which the children were treated as full shareholders
52 Z. Horton
and decision makers. The school was (and is still) located in the town
of Bilthoven, outside Utrecht, where it became the site of a new scalar
experiment in education. The children not only made collective decisions
regarding the running of the school, but also divided their labor into
productive units for the active maintenance of its infrastructure, build-
ing its chairs and desks, maintaining a garden for food, and so forth.28
The school was meant as a scalar foothold on the collective imagina-
tion of the world’s peoples. Boeke hoped that the skills, procedures, and
forms of subjectivity required to organize a school along communitarian
lines would, once developed in its students, successively scale up to ever
higher levels, until it would culminate in a “World Meeting to govern
and order the whole world.”29
After World War II, during which the Nazis had occupied the school
and rebuilt its main structure for use as a communications hub, Boeke
developed a new group project for the school’s children, designed to
guard against the possibility that “our attitudes may become narrow
and provincial,”30 a state of affairs all-too-recently verified by the tragic
nationalism that had led to this second European conflict. The subject of
this work was not merely the Netherlands, or Europe, but the entire cos-
mos. Together with the Werkplaats’ students, Boeke composed a book
consisting of a series of drawings, each to a different scale and contain-
ing a miniature version of the one before. Thus on forty pages in Cosmic
View appear forty images and forty units of text that attempt to cap-
ture the dynamics and features of each particular surface and thereby to
impart to the reader “a sense of scale.”31
The book begins with the image of a student sitting in a chair on a
concrete pad, holding a cat. The accompanying text informs us that this
is a student at the Werkplaats school, sitting in the center of its court-
yard, holding her pet cat. The scale of the image is marked: its field of
view encompasses a space 1.5 meters by 1.5 meters in area, while the
borders of the image on the book’s page measure 15 centimeters
square. Thus the scale is 1:10. The next image is the same size on the
page, yet depicts a scene ten times larger: the entire Werkplaats’ court-
yard. The scale is now 1:100. Inexplicably, a whale has become visible,
sprawled out in the courtyard. It was right there next to the girl on the
first page, but unrevealed until now. A small square (1.5 cm × 1.5 cm)
in the center of the image reproduces the field of view of the image on
the previous page. On the next page, a third square will appear, depict-
ing the field of view two pages back; the edges of this third frame are
only 1.5 mm in length. Thus the surprise revelation of the whale in the
courtyard is scale-contextualized in relation to the previous view. “A long
and unlikely story would certainly be needed to make the presence of a
whale at this place and time plausible or even possible,” notes the text,
and leaves the mystery at that.32 This surprise whale, however, establishes
a pattern of revelation afforded by jumps in field of view.
As we jump to ever greater scales, more and more context for the
Werkplaats is revealed. By the sixth scale, a map of the Netherlands fills
the 15 cm × 15 cm frame on the page. The accompanying text points
out feature after feature:
Here we see the central part of the Netherlands. The small square in the
middle of course shows the town of Utrecht, and the tiny square inside is
the twice-reduced picture of illustration 4. There is Bilthoven, and . . . there
is the little girl: we know she must be there, but we cannot see her!33
The text’s point is seemingly mundane: of course we can no longer see

the girl, since we are looking at a map of the whole country. But the
implication for scale-jumping media is significant. The book has set up a
material scalar relationship between the resolution of the paper and ink
droplets, the area of the image’s frame (15 cm × 15 cm), and the dimen-
sions of the surface that each image describes. Here, Boeke is asserting
that the girl is in the picture even though we can’t see her. This is a radi-
cal claim, of which we can only make sense in relation to the dynamics
of resolution and the scalar relationship between two surfaces. The ink
droplets on this page cannot resolve the girl because the amount of detail
that they can register in a given area of paper is less than that required to
code any recognizable detail of the girl into the fibers of the paper, given
this field of view or medial scalar ratio. Nonetheless, the girl continues to
exist on the surface described by the book. She is in the picture by dint
of the retentive capacity of the reader’s mind.
Resolution in Cosmic View is highlighted as a material property
or relationship between two scales: the scale of the book in the read-
er’s hands and the scale of the surface that each page depicts. The
reader, given the affordances of the ink and paper fibers, must nego-
tiate the scalar relationship initiated by each page. What is in the pic-
ture and what isn’t? What can be retained even though it can no
longer be resolved? The process of scale jumping becomes both mate-
rial and serialized. The reader must work within the material limitations
54 Z. Horton
of resolution and the discontinuity between scales, yet generate virtual

connections between these scalar slices of the universe.
The seventeenth scale that appears in the book depicts not much
more than the inky void of space. The text, however, takes issue with this
too-easily assumed void: “This seems like a very uninteresting picture:
it contains no more than one tiny white spot in the center of a black
square! That spot, however, stands for the whole solar system, which on
this scale would be only little more than 0.1 millimeter in diameter.”34
The solar system is not resolvable, but we know it is there. Boeke sug-
gests that when we look at other stars, they may also contain planets,
continents, living organisms, and so forth. Just because we cannot
resolve detail given a particular medial relationship does not mean that
no detail exists.
This is a critical insight about scalar mediation’s relationship to ecol-
ogy. Any apprehension of difference across scales is necessarily the dual
function of differentiation on the surface thus described—the mechanism
by which Whitman’s serialized cosmic view proceeds—and the resolving
power of the medial apparatus of the observer. As we negotiate jumps
across ever greater scales, our field of view changes while the resolving
power of our media remains the same. In short, field of view and resolv-
able detail are inversely proportional: the larger the area we represent,
the less detail we can see. This basic equation cannot be circumvented
no matter how much we increase the resolution of our media: the appre-
hension of scale will always be a negotiation of difference between two
surfaces, one medial and one mediated. Cosmic View, by making visible
the apparatus of scalar mediation itself, enrolls its readers in a drama of
resolution that speculatively connects their own scale to many others, not
as a permanent and unmediated form of access, but as a contingent and
mediated negotiation of difference.
What is the end result? After we as readers have resolved forty dif-
ferent surfaces at forty different scales, with what are we left? We have
resolved the surface detail of the entire known universe right down to
the nucleus of an atom, and explored at each stage the dynamics that
take place within that scale. This view of the cosmos, while aggregative,
is nevertheless, like Whitman’s, never complete, for the surface it resolves
is discontinuous. In order to focus on each scale, we must negotiate a
medial relationship with its surface, a process that takes time and effort.
Certain details are available to us at each scale that by necessity disappear
at most other scales. The book reminds us that we cannot change scales
without losing as much as we gain. While later filmic versions of Boeke’s

book attempt to smooth over scalar difference, representing all scales
as a single, smooth, zoomable surface,35 here the process of stabilizing
a particular scale and the revelation of ecological detail that is thereby
afforded remains self-reflexively foregrounded. The scales of the uni-
verse simply are not continuous: each is marked by different processes,
dependencies, and interactions. These are irreducible scalar dynamics,
brought into focus by a consideration of the medial nature and inherent
limitations of any attempt to bridge scale.
Conclusion: Humanity’s New Scales

When we view the Anthropocene though the lens of the universal over-
view, it appears in the guise of an engineering problem: How to opti-
mize the earth’s systems, prevent the scaling up of negative effects, and
enable the scaling up of positive ones? How to re-tool the interrelation-
ships between the planet’s many scales so that humans may increase their
mastery of its multi-scalar ecology? How to shore up human exceptional-
ism by further protecting and isolating the planet from human resource
extraction? These framing questions all stem from a singular logic of
planetary management, an example of what Jacques Ellul refers to as
“technique,” a conjoining of technological systematicity with organiza-
tional totality.36 Technique can produce no solution outside the perspec-
tive that enables and sustains it. The dominant scalar technique of the
Anthropocene is one in which technoscience is conjoined with a universal
overview of all scales. The human returns as villain and savior—in fact, as
the entire cast of an apocalyptic theater that subsumes all scales and col-
lapses the difference between them. In the Anthropocene, if the human
has become the defiler, nonetheless everything else has become human.
The microcosm too has wormed its way back into Anthropocenic
thought, especially in climate change discourse. The polar bear becomes
a discursive condensation point, an analogue for the larger dynamics that
threaten humanity’s future. The individual human body similarly serves
as the figurative and literal accumulation point for globally diffuse tox-
icity, a byproduct of the Anthropocene, whether in the form of heavy
metal poisoning, petroleum contamination, or radiation. Microcosmic
thinking can help to give us a new perspective, to break us out of our
monological form of technoscientific thinking. The problem, from a
Paracelsian point of view, is not one of stabilizing a viewpoint outside
56 Z. Horton
and above the world in order to manipulate, exploit, and optimize

it more effectively, but rather one of following the inter-scalar threads
that ineluctably tie us to the movements of stars, planets, and microbes.
Any inquiry into the dynamics contained within one scale automati-
cally becomes an inquiry into most of the other scales of the universe,
larger and smaller. A view of the human as “constellated” goes some
way toward dismantling the hyper-separation between mind and matter,
human and nature, active design and passive receptivity to imprinting, a
set of policed binaries that ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood has
diagnosed as the condition of Western modernity.37
The multiple, constellated human contains Whitman’s kosmos as
a virtual horizon. This is an empowering vision of trans-scalar engage-
ment that nonetheless proceeds by difference rather than homogeneity
or totality. The always-incomplete self functions as a cosmic map, encom-
passing only those differences that can be detected and described, yet at
the same time standing “cool and composed before a million universes”
(76). This second, virtual dimension to cosmic view composition over-
shoots totality just as the dimension of actualization undershoots it.
Infinite potential and necessarily incomplete detail mark the two halves
of the circuit that electrifies the serial cosmic view.
Ultimately, however, the Anthropocene calls for an ecological cosmic
view, an apprehension of scale that avoids both the Scylla of totalizing
vision and the Charybdis of individualized subjectivism. Humans can no
longer occupy the roles of naïve adventurers and colonizers of the con-
tinents of other scales. Our field of view has become wide indeed, but
the detail we can resolve using this vast apparatus of technique has only
decreased proportionally. This would be less of a problem if we could
remember what is in the picture even when it cannot be resolved. But
alas, we have spent too much time and effort composing a cosmic view
that is glassy smooth and fully continuous—a cosmic view that promises
to deliver a totality for human contemplation and intervention, but that
only achieves this breathtaking illusion by eliding scalar difference.
The self-reflexive medial project undertaken by Boeke and his revo-
lutionary students reminds us that we can potentially see the entire
universe, but not all at once. Whatever connectives appear, whatever
articulations of the universe we experience, they are only unified in the
speculative mind of the student, reader, or viewer. The fragments of scale
that comprise our world cannot be unified through a single, linear axis.
Instead, this kosmos is only a fragmented whole, always incomplete,
but by the same token always open to differentiation, the appending

of new details through medial resolving cuts. What emerges from this
meshwork is a new, trans-scalar ecology that hurls the willing observer
into a trans-scalar medium. This self-reflexive process of scalar mediation
links her to endlessly branching connective ligaments between all scales,
a rhizome consisting of mediated detail and proliferating observation
points rather than progressively purified observational distance.
Our new question, as we face the millions of universes that are our possi-
ble futures, is not merely how the human has become multi-scalar, or how to
outscale the negative effects of the Anthropocene by re-implementing tech-
noscientific technique within ever-larger fields of view, but how we have
mediated scale in such a way as to produce our current version of the
Earth—and how, if Paracelsus is correct that humankind “needs both ele-
ments and stars,” we can work our way back down to that Earth and up to
the stars through one and the same wheel’d motion.
Notes
1. Cosgrove, xi.
2. Crutzen and Stoermer, 18.
3. See Morton, 5–6; Chakrabarty, 214.
4. Cohen, Colebrook, and Miller, 94.
5. Haraway, 30–31.
6. See Parikka’s essay The Anthrobscene for his introduction to the subject, as
well as his more fleshed-out treatment in A Geology of Media.
7. Haraway, 2.
8. Conger, 133.
9. Ibid., xiv.
10. Paracelsus, “Nature,” 188.
11. Ibid., 160.
12. Ibid., 161.
13. Ibid., 162.
14. Ibid.
15. Paracelsus, “Hermetic Astronomy,” 286.
16. Ibid., 285.
17. Paracelsus, “Nature,” 174.
19. Paracelsus, “Composition of Metals,” 116.
21. Whitman, Song, 32–33. Hereafter, pages from Song of Myself cited in
parentheses.
58 Z. Horton
22. Deleuze and Guattari, 10.

23. Ibid., 12.
24. Ibid., 10.
25. Whitman, Song, 48, 78, 76, 38, 36.
26. Whitman, “Preface,” 6, emphasis added.
27. Joseph, “Prologue.”
28. Boeke, “Bilthoven,” 106.
29. Boeke, “Sociocracy.”
30. Boeke, Cosmic View, 7.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. Cosmic View was adapted into three films by the end of the 1960s. The
first, an educational film titled “How Vast is Space?” is now lost (“Letter
from Offices of Johnson and Tannenbaum”). The second, “Cosmic
Zoom,” is a short animation by Canadian artist Eva Szasz. The third
was “A Rough Sketch” by the celebrated US designers Ray and Charles
Eames. Both of the latter films, released in 1968, use large plates on an
animation stand to blend different resolving cuts (still images) together
to effect the illusion of a cosmic zoom. The fundamentally discontinu-
ous nature of these scalar slices is nonetheless abundantly evident, as the
detail of each plate fails to increase along with its magnification; detail
suddenly jumps as each new plate is introduced. By the time the Eames
Office produced their most famous film in 1977, however, a substantially
more expensive re-make titled “Powers of Ten,” improvements in source
imagery and animation techniques, combined with a persuasive narration
written and performed by physicist and popular science promoter Philip
Morrison, lead to an effective illusion of scalar continuity throughout
the entire known universe. By this point, then, Boeke’s project had been
transformed from a self-reflexive consideration of the dynamics and trade-
offs of scalar mediation and the fundamentally discontinuous nature of
scale into the emblematic medial representation of the universal overview.
36. Ellul, xxv.
37. Plumwood, 51.
Works Cited
Boeke, Kees. “Bilthoven, Holland’s International Children’s Community.” The
Clearing House 13, no. 2 (October 1, 1938): 106–8.
———. Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. New York: John Day Co.,
1957.
———. “Sociocracy.” Accessed August 31, 2014. http://worldteacher.faithweb.

com/sociocracy.htm.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry
35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller. Twilight of the Anthropocene
Idols. London: Open Humanities Press, 2016.
Conger, George Perrigo. Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms: In The History
Of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922.
Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the
Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Crutzen, Paul, and Eugene Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” IGBP Newsletter
41 (May 2000): 17–18.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
New York: Penguin, 2009.
Eames, Charles, and Ray Eames. A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing
with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Pyramid
Media: 1968. Film.
———. Powers of Ten. Pyramid Media: 1977. Film.
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson.
New York: Vintage, 1964.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Joseph, Fiona. Beatrice: The Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune.
Birmingham: Foxwell Press, 2012.
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016.
Office of Johnson and Tannenbaum. “Letter to Offices of Kaplan, Livingston,
Goodwin, Berkowitz & Selvin.” TS, August 13, 1971. Eames Archive,
Library of Congress.
Paracelsus. “Concerning the Nature of Things.” In The Hermetic and Alchemical
Writings of Paracelsus, Volume I, edited by Arthur Edward Waite, 120–94.
N.p.: Martino Fine Books, 2009.
———. “Hermetic Astronomy.” In The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings
of Paracelsus, Volume II, edited by Arthur Edward Waite, 282–314. N.p.:
Martino Fine Books, 2009.
———. “The Composition of Metals.” In The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings
of Paracelsus: Volume I, edited by Arthur Edward Waite, 114–19. N.p.:
Martino Fine Books, 2009.
Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2015.
———. The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1994.
60 Z. Horton
Szasz, Eva. Cosmic Zoom. National Film Board of Canada: 1968. Film.
Whitman, Walt. “Preface.” In Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition, 3–20.
Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007.
———. Song of Myself. In Leaves of Grass, 29–78. Philadelphia: David McKay,
1892.
CHAPTER 3
Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray

Eames’s Powers of Ten
Derek Woods
Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten (1977) begins with an aerial
shot of a man and a woman sleeping in a park. Centered on the man’s
hand, a square outline marks the scale of one meter. Throughout the first
portion of the film, the vanishing point remains fixed to the hand as the
frame zooms up and out. In the upper-right corner, outside the frame,
a number 10x increases by degrees of magnitude as the scale increases.
Receding square outlines correspond to each power of ten, as though
sliding along an invisible ruler in space. The Eameses made the film
for the American Physics Society, and the disembodied voice of physi-
cist Philip Morrison narrates the journey. As we leave Chicago behind,
“we are able to see the whole earth.”1 As the solar system vanishes, the
Milky Way and the Virgo cluster of galaxies sweep into view. At 1024
meters, we are at the limits of “our vision.” The zoom slows to a stop,
then slides back toward Earth. In the park, the frame pauses above the
same two people, then moves toward the vanishing point. Passing skin-
cell membranes, we see the chromosomes of the nucleus and a carbon
D. Woods (*) 
Dartmouth College, Society of Fellows and Department of English,
Hanover, NH, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_3
62 D. Woods
atom in a molecule of DNA. Passing electrons like white noise, we enter

what Morrison calls the “vast inner space” between their orbits and the
nucleus. Here, inside a proton, the story ends with quarks. We are 10−16
meters from the man on the blanket, but still strangely in his outer sur-
face. As Vittoria Di Palma notes, the frame’s movement is an illusion.
The zoom does not imply actual motion, but rather changes in resolu-
tion.2 Over the course of nine minutes, viewers travel visually “across”
forty degrees of magnitude.
Powers of Ten is an aesthetic event comparable to the first image of
the earth from space. Though much less discussed, the Eameses’ film
represents all known scales of the universe in one continuous zoom,
expressing a space-age cosmology. Images that many had by then seen in
textbooks and magazines seem sutured together in a single, virtual shot.
The film locates the human perceptual mesocosm, the world perceptible to
our senses, between vast expanses of patterned energy and microscopic
depths of atomic structure. This new mid-twentieth-century scientific
world picture incorporates quarks, DNA, the earth as seen from space,
the multiplicity of galaxies, and the size of the universe as constrained
by the speed of light. The Eameses’ film is like an integrated collage of
images such as Robert Hooke’s drawings in Micrographia or early aerial
photography. The zoom technique thus makes the film a synoptic over-
view of one of the less-discussed narratives of modernity: the emergence
of ever more scales beyond the world of our senses, often populated by
objects with counterintuitive behaviors not easily understood by analogy
with perceptible actions. Contemporaneous with the first photographs of
the earth from space, Powers plays a similar role in the history of scale
aesthetics.
Film scholar Justus Nieland situates the Eameses’ film in their broader
body of work and the technoscientific context of the decades following
World War II. The couple’s work as designers and filmmakers carries
forward modernist techniques, such as collage, to a project of mid-
century modernism often dismissed as a neutralization of modernism’s
radical and disruptive formal innovation by corporate forces and bland
technocracy.3 For Nieland, however, the modernism of designers such as
the Eameses and the Independent Group in the UK inaugurates a new
media pedagogy of scale. Influenced by the holist and globalist ecotech-
nics of Buckminster Fuller, these designers attempted to understand and
actively shape the “expanded sensorium” of the technoscientific sub-
ject. Their interest in “a new, bewildering fluidity of scales between the
3 EPISTEMIC THINGS IN CHARLES AND RAY EAMES’S POWERS OF TEN 63
intimate and the universal, the molecular and the cosmic” (expressed also
in Gene Youngblood’s notion of “expanded cinema” and Susan Sontag’s
essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility”) led them toward a holistic
view of the earth and its place in the cosmos.4 The didacticism of the
Eameses’ modernism seems to have more in common with Sir Philip
Sidney’s Defense of Poetry (art should delight and instruct) than with
the work of Virginia Woolf or the avant-garde. This mixed relationship
with modernism appears formally in the way that Powers, as an animated
collage of nested images, smoothes out the jumps that should exist at
the edges of each still image. The film thus uses “collage” to adumbrate
something for which modernist collage would be too fragmentary: for
Nieland, the synthetic view of “worldly, integral seeing” that preoccu-
pied Fuller and others during the same period.
Through movement from one scale to another, Powers uses two tech-
niques to create its integrating effect: smooth zoom and a trope that I
call scala, after the Latin root of scale. Smooth zoom is much discussed
in criticism on the film. Taken up widely, from Philip Kaufman’s Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1978) to the interface of Google Earth, it is by
far Powers’s most influential device. Yet smooth zoom is only one way
of representing relations across scale, a method that inevitably reduces
qualitative differences of scale to quantitative ones. Scale variance is the
opposite of this reduction. Without scale variance, there would be no
reason to mark differences between what ecologists call scale domains,
since these would be understood by analogy with one another and col-
lapsed into the scale invariance of which fractal geometry is one com-
mon example. As R. John Williams notes, Benoit Mandelbrot discovered
fractal geometry during the 1960s and 1970s while working for IBM,
the same corporation that funded Powers of Ten.5 As the second inte-
grating technique, the trope of scala works by substituting one object
for another across at least a degree of magnitude. In Powers, this trope
appears when Morrison describes an atom’s electrons as a “swarm of
shimmering points.”6
Combined with the film’s didacticism, the erasure of scale variance in
Powers invites a simple question: to what extent is this technoscientific,
cosmological artwork accurate? Given the film’s relationship to the sci-
ences, however, a critical reading can draw on forty years of science-stud-
ies criticism that attends to how the processes of knowledge-making are
erased in their product. If any film qualifies as an example of what Donna
Haraway calls the god’s eye “view from nowhere,” Powers of Ten is that
64 D. Woods
film.7 But Powers also raises phenomenological questions that I address

through a parallel tradition of philosophical commentary on physics and
biology. Including work from philosophers Gaston Bachelard, Hannah
Arendt, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this tradition meets science stud-
ies in the writing of historian of biology Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Taking
this meeting into account, the second critical question to ask of the
Eameses’ film is to what extent objects from nonhuman scales can ever
be translated into the bubble world of “our” limited senses. The point
here is not to make perversely literal demands of art, but to ask what the
Eameses’ aesthetic and practical holism accomplishes given the condi-
tions of extreme scientific specialization which, as Nieland notes, they
explicitly recognize and work to counter.8
Beyond this critique, there is a positive moment available to readings
of texts such as Powers. If the film seeks to represent what Rheinberger
calls “epistemic things,” which are abstract yet real, and capable of influ-
encing the construction of scientific fact, then what is the film’s relation
to epistemic things if we consider the critical reading just suggested?
How can we interpret the traces left in texts by epistemic things excluded
from representation yet simultaneously included as conditions for the
production of meaning? How can objects from other scale domains par-
ticipate even in the formation of illusions about themselves? One answer
to these questions emerges from a dialogue between Rheinberger’s
work and Jacques Derrida’s technological critique of phenomenology.
Combined with the concept of scale variance, the prosthetic extension
of subjective worlds suggests a way of understanding the role of what lies
outside them, at insensible scales, in their construction.
Smooth Zoom and Scale Variance

Recent critical and anthropological work discusses the concept of scale
variance, a term which I favor for its relation to the more common term
scale invariance. For example, anthropologist Anna Tsing uses the term
nonscalability to describe economic relations, such as mushroom forag-
ing, that agriculture seems unable to make into vast industrial operations
like corn or soy production. In engineering, the scalability/nonscalability
distinction appears in discourse about whether a technology can be mass-
produced and whether a design can grow or shrink without modifica-
tion. Tsing links the “effortless zoom” of Google Earth, “its power to
make the great tiny and the tiny great” (I return to this chiasmus below),
with “the quality called scalability, that is, the ability to expand—and
expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements.”9 Comparing
the fantasy spaces of nanotechnology and geoengineering, Zach Horton
critiques the process of “scale collapse,” which treats disparate scales as
though identical to that of human embodiment.10 Tsing, Horton, and
others contribute to a growing body of work concerned with phenom-
ena that do not scale smoothly.
As the opposite of smooth zoom and scalability, scale variance names
the observation that things happen differently at different scales due to
physical constraints upon becoming.
As I argue elsewhere, we can abstract a general concept of scale
variance from phenomena observed in biology, physics, engineer-
ing, and other fields—a concept distinct from the more familiar notion
of emergent complexity.11 Scale variance then becomes useful for criti-
cal and theoretical projects on which it has so far had little purchase.
Oppositions between scalability and nonscalability, scale variance and
scale invariance are lexical options in a language game not yet standard-
ized. They are guiding distinctions for criticism on scale aesthetics and
for thinking scale more broadly.
Scale variance entails a very different picture of reality from that
apparent in much canonical art about growing and shrinking. In
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Brobdingnagians are humans scaled
up and Lilliputians are humans scaled down. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in
Wonderland, the mushrooms that Alice eats to change size do not also
change her form: she telescopes smoothly from one size to another. In
Powers of Ten, the scalar journey takes place with the smoothness of an
imaginary zoom lens. In the animation The Inner Life of a Cell (2011),
linear-point perspective gazes into a space where it would be unavailable
due to the laws of optics. The same pattern holds across numerous texts.
Writers and artists often imagine changes of scale as continuous expan-
sion or contraction, or re-inscribe features of the human sensory world in
scales at which they could not exist.
My approach to Powers requires one further term, which I borrow
from the discourse of ecology. For J. A. Wiens, scale domains are
separated by relatively sharp transitions from dominance by one set of

factors to dominance by other sets, like phase transitions in physical

66 D. Woods
systems. . . . Scale-dependency in ecological systems may be continuous,

every change in scale bringing with it changes in patterns and processes.
If this is so, generalizations will be hard to find, for the range of extrapola-
tion of studies at a given scale will be severely limited. If the scale spectrum
is not continuous, however, there may be domains of scale, regions of the
spectrum over which, for a particular phenomenon in a particular ecologi-
cal system, patterns either do not change or change monotonically with
changes in scale.12
Wiens’s definition refers to ecosystems and patterns of species distribu-

tion, but as his later references to fractal geometry demonstrate, this
definition of the scale domain may be broad enough to apply to exam-
ples ranging from physics and biology to engineering and economics. As
Devin Fore notes, for example, the insect body is scale-limited, and the
same is true of many designs in engineering.13 While the list of possi-
ble scale domains could be quite long and (as a taxonomy) beyond my
expertise, the concept seems necessary as a corollary of scale variance. If
scale variance is the difference, scale domains are what it distinguishes.
The concept of the scale domain has phenomenological implications.
For critic Timothy Clark, “one scale forms a kind of norm for human
beings, the usually-taken-for-granted scale of bodily, terrestrial existence
and perception.”14 What this point leaves open to question is the extent
to which scale domain and phenomenological world are separate cat-
egories. Although the scale domain seems to be a broader category than
the worlds-for-themselves of different lifeforms, what Jacob von Uexküll
calls the Umwelten [subjective environments] of different species should
at times align with the limits of scale domains.15 For example, we seem
to share a scale domain (if not a world) with dogs—but not with the
spiders walking on the ceiling. A single scale domain can host multiple
worlds. Our perception is very different from that of dogs; we can see
things that they cannot, but chemical traces appear in their worlds that
are insensible to us. These differences are not correlated with a differ-
ence of scale domain. For this reason, scale domains must be involved in
the production of phenomenological worlds, without determining their
precise details. But they would also constrain objects that have no world
at all, if there are any (See Nealon’s 2016 book Plant Theory for a discus-
sion of who/what gets to have a world in the phenomenological tradi-
tion). Thus, the distinction between scale domain and phenomenological
world complicates the question of whether we can translate imperceptibly

large or small objects into our sensory worlds.
“They Appear in Quantum Motion as a Swarm

of Shimmering Points”
On its way to the atomic nucleus, Powers’s zoom passes through an

atom’s electron shell. When Morrison calls it a “swarm of shimmer-
ing points,” he uses a trope uniquely tied to differences of scale, sub-
stituting the group behavior of social insects for the quantum behavior
of electrons.16 Another example of this trope appears in Lucretius’s On
the Nature of Things, when the Roman poet describes how atoms form
clouds: “These particles/First cause small clouds to form; and, there-
upon/These catch one on other and swarm in a flock.”17 While trope
is often used in the sense of repeated theme, I adopt the classical rhe-
torical meaning: a figure of speech in which one term replaces another.
One advantage of this definition is that it avoids reducing all tropes to
metaphor. Though some uses of epic simile, metaphor, and synecdoche
do count as scala, there are cases in which it matches none of their defini-
tions. Scala is a trope that substitutes objects from one scale domain for
objects from another, across at least one degree of magnitude. One well-
known example is the city-as-circuit board in Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Perhaps the most politically-significant example
is the Hobbesian body politic, an example of organicism which substi-
tutes the organism for society.
What the swarm figure encodes in Powers is less organic than a cyber-
netic fusion of the organic and the technological like that Jussi Parikka
and Devin Fore find in the social insect collective. Parikka and Fore
argue that insects have been models, inspirations, and resources for com-
munication technology and nanotechnology, a point that sheds light on
their appearance as a figure of the electron.18 These life-forms are per-
haps a master zoomorph for the episteme that takes shape during and
after World War II. This episteme is characterized by information and
space travel, and the Eameses were closely engaged with them both eco-
nomically and ideologically, as their work on communication engineering
and IBM’s sponsorship of Powers suggests. In the film, the “swarm of
shimmering points” visually resembles white noise on an analog televi-
sion. Doubly medial in relation to the historical context of Powers, the
68 D. Woods
swarm thus connotes electronic communication and radiation, the natu-

ral and technological interacting at a scale where they become difficult to
distinguish.
One of many allusions in Powers of Ten points to Niels Bohr’s image
of the atom as a miniature solar system, which serves as a second example
of scala. The figure invokes what architecture critic Vittoria Di Palma, in
a reading of the film, calls the “correspondence” between “the micro-
scopic and the telescopic . . . , the world and the atom, the planet and
the point.”19 Though superseded in certain ways, Bohr’s solar system
model is still taught in introductory courses on physics. Bohr proposed
that electrons “orbit” the nucleus of an atom much like planets orbit
the sun, with attraction provided by electrostatic forces rather than by
gravity. Bohr was not the only physicist to use this trope, but his model
solved a crucial problem with the notion that electrons orbit atoms: per
classical physics, as electrons move, they should radiate electromagnetic
waves and, as they lose energy, collapse into the atomic nucleus. This
would mean that atoms are not stable enough to exist. To explain why
atoms do not collapse, Bohr proposed that electrons occupy “energy
shells,” which orbit stably at discrete distances from the nucleus associ-
ated with different levels of energy.20
The cosmic atom also appears in didactic art from Dutch educator
Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View (1957) to Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s television
series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). At 1019, Boeke notes, “it
is not surprising that the sun could no longer be seen with the naked
eye from that distance, as its size at the scale of this drawing would
only be 0.00014 microns, or about the size of an atom!”21 In a figure
that DeGrasse-Tyson repeats thirty years later, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A
Personal Voyage (1980) opens with a chiasmus that substitutes atom for
sun and universe for atom: we explore “atoms as massive as suns, uni-
verses smaller than atoms.”22 These texts continue the figurative tradi-
tion of Bohr and others who used the scala “atom as solar system.”
We can only observe the atom empirically through complex instru-
mentation. As Hannah Arendt writes, citing physicist Max Planck, “the
data with which modern physical research is concerned turn up like
‘mysterious messenger[s] from the real world.’ They are not phenom-
ena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither
in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence
only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”23
Far from how we might read the speculative atomism of Democritus and
Lucretius, however, students are now given little reason to doubt the
reality of the modern atom.
Atoms are real but invisible; the instruments that physicists use
to observe them bear little analogy to animal sense organs. This lat-
ter point comes across clearly in YouTube interviews about IBM’s recent
nanoscale stop-motion films, a continuation of the corporate aesthetic
tradition in which the Eameses participated decades before. In A Boy
and His Atom, “the world’s smallest movie,” a boy plays with an atom
as though it were a ball.24 In an interview, IBM engineer Christopher
Lutz describes moving atoms on a surface to create the images used
for the animation. He reminds us that when it comes to observing and
manipulating atoms, “we can’t use light to see them—we’re not look-
ing through a microscope [and] in a sense we’re feeling the shape of
the atoms.”25 Lutz’s “in a sense” ironizes his choice of analogical sense
organ. “Feeling” is a figurative sense used to make sense, in the biologi-
cally constrained human lifeworld, of the techniques these engineers use
to move atoms and “explore the limits of data storage.” In this way, the
interview shows how the technical practices of sciences that study invis-
ible scale domains recursively affect the phenomenological worlds of
scientists, for instance by creating new figurative notions of the sense of
touch.
Deorganization
Philip Morrison’s narration for Powers of Ten begins in Chicago, where
Google now occupies the space that once held the Eameses’ design firm:
We begin with a scene one meter wide, which we view from one meter
away. Now every ten seconds we will look from ten times farther away, and
our field of view will be ten times wider. This square is ten meters wide,
and in ten seconds the next square will be ten times as wide. Our picture
will center on the picnickers, even after they have been lost to sight. One
hundred meters wide, the distance a man can run in ten seconds. . . . This
square is a kilometer wide, one thousand meters—the distance a racing car
can travel in ten seconds. We see the great city on the lakeshore. Ten to
the fourth meters, ten kilometers—the distance a supersonic airplane can
travel in ten seconds. We see first the rounded end of Lake Michigan, then
the whole great lake. Ten to the fifth meters, the distance an orbiting satel-
lite covers in ten seconds. Long parades of clouds; the day’s weather in the
Midwest.26
70 D. Woods
The first moments of the zoom combine a purely quantitative approach

to scale with objects that act as speed symbols. These objects (a running
man, a racecar, a jet, a satellite) point to the mathematical relation of
space and time as a function of speed. In this respect, as director Paul
Schrader puts it, Powers of Ten popularizes post-Einsteinian thought.27
In his book on time travel and narratology, David Wittenberg concurs
with this reading, arguing that Powers is as much a time-travel text as one
about spatial scale.28 The racecar, jet, and satellite mark scale domains
characterized by physical constraints for which engineers have adjusted
over time. Each technology fits a domain separated by degrees of mag-
nitude. These technologies raise the question whether we are still in the
human scale domain when, for example, a jet stands synecdochically for
a scale. How many of the scales in Powers of Ten are part of “the” human
sensory lifeworld?
As I noted above, for critic Timothy Clark there is a normal or (to
repurpose a term from Stephen Jay Gould) proper scale for human
beings. Developing his scalar account of the lifeworld, Clark goes on to
argue that “this particular physical scale is inherent in the intelligibility
of things around us imbued with an obviousness and authority which
it takes an effort to override.”29 For him, climate change in particular
shows us the contingency of this proper scale. Yet it is difficult to dis-
tinguish, in the first place, a “proper” scale of the human that any his-
torical event could show to be contingent. The racecar, jet, and satellite
are examples that become increasingly divorced from the scale of the
human body as the list goes on. No longer strictly prosthetic, I under-
stand them as what Ernst Bloch calls technologies of “deorganization.”30
With deorganization, technologies scale up or down to the extent that
they can no longer be said to extend any organ of the human body. They
are no longer instances of Organprojektion, to use the concept developed
by the German philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp, nor prostheses in
the sense of McLuhan’s account of technology as “extensions of man.”
Thus, the process described by Bloch complicates considerably what we
understand by “the” human scale.
To paraphrase Fore on this topic, scale variance drives deorganiza-
tion.31 Deorganization reflects a broken analogy between the film’s sym-
bolic technologies and the human scale domain. Jets and satellites are
not prostheses for any organ. In the passage above, Morrison’s narration
of Powers of Ten is thus at odds with its visual technique, expressing dis-
analogy rather than analogy—and this despite the fact that these scales
still fall within the scope of society. Conceived in terms of speed, jets and
satellites evoke a planetary industrial apparatus adapted to transconti-
nental travel or Earth orbit. For the satellite in Morrison’s narration, the
scale domain analog is the weather of the entire Midwest.
Influence and Subjectivation
While this section deals briefly with the background and influence of
Powers, it does not come first or serve as introductory material because it
does more than simply contextualize the film. The broad archive of texts
that use smooth zoom and scala to represent movement across scales
constitute a process of subjectivation, in Felix Guattari’s sense of shap-
ing the collective possibilities of imagination in relation to social assem-
blages and the nonhuman environment.32 As these texts spread through
the populations they reach, they interact with human bodies to create
new forms of subjectivity. Subjectivity in this sense distributes across the
media technologies and aesthetic forms that support its development
across time. How we interpret it depends on the relation of text and
epistemic thing.
A review of source texts, adaptations, cognates, and influences situates
Powers in a sizable network. Charles and Ray Eames based Powers explic-
itly on Boeke’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, in which
each jump consists of a drawing and a verbal description of what is vis-
ible at the indicated scale. Boeke seems motivated in part by the same
ecological and didactic purpose that designer Eric Schuldenfrei finds in
Charles Eames’s own interpretation of Powers.33 When the earth comes
into view in chapter eight, Boeke writes that “we now see the whole of
it as a limited dwelling place in the surrounding blackness of space.”34
Powers maintains Cosmic View’s logarithmic account of scale, which
divides the book’s chapters according to powers of ten. Boeke’s “jumps”
become the film’s white squares that momentarily align with the frame
and then recede to the vanishing point. Returning to Wiens’s argument
above, the scales that both of these texts distinguish are thus strictly
quantitative—they do not point to qualities that might become possible
or dominant at a given scale.
Other texts are not documented influences but share much in com-
mon with Powers of Ten in their use of the smooth zoom. H. G. Wells’s
science-fiction story “Under the Knife” (1896) is a possible early influ-
ence on both Cosmic View and Powers. The story is a narrative of an
72 D. Woods
out-of-body experience in which a perceiving subject floats away from

earth, viewing greater and greater cosmic scales before falling back
zoom-like into its convalescing body. One film and one animation
released in 1968 also precede Powers of Ten. The film is Eames and
Eames’s A Rough Sketch of a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of
Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (1968), a black-and-
white draft that uses Florida as a launch pad in an allusion to the Apollo
program (1961–72). Different from Powers, the narrator of Rough
Sketch is a flat computer voice who sounds like a feminized counterpart
to Kubrick’s HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The draft is also
more explicitly Einsteinian, incorporating a set of dials that compare the
time on Earth with the changing time for the narrative point of view as
it accelerates into space. The animation is not often discussed by crit-
ics working on Powers of Ten. The National Film Board of Canada pub-
lished Eva Szasz’s Cosmic Zoom (1968) in the same year that the Eameses
made Rough Sketch. Szasz’s piece is fully animated, beginning from
the Ottawa river [Kichisipi, Rivière des Outaouais] as it flows past the
Canadian capital. Animation precludes the need for the Eameses’ more
difficult techniques, which create the feeling of zoom using air and satel-
lite photography (only for the photographable scales, of course) rather
than paintings. Cosmic Zoom lacks the mathematical trappings of Powers,
including the count-up and countdown of numbers and the Cartesian
effect of the receding squares. Szasz’s film also lacks a voiceover, and its
visuals are accompanied, ironically, by something like elevator music.
However, Cosmic Zoom does share one very geometrical technique with
both Powers and Cosmic View: the whole animation remains centered
on a vanishing point that recedes as the focal length increases, and into
which the shot enters when it zooms down to the microscale. As Cosmic
Zoom enters the microscale, it zooms not into a man’s hand, but into
a blood cell in the proboscis of a mosquito on the hand of a boy in a
rowboat. Microcosm/macrocosm correspondence, moreover, is at least
as active in Cosmic Zoom as it is in Powers. This effect is even more prom-
inent in the Canadian animation, since its abstracted forms of galaxies,
cells, and atoms are more similar in appearance to those of the Eameses’
film.
Following its release, Powers of Ten influenced feature film and tel-
evision. Philip Kaufman’s remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) opens with a zoom from Mars to Earth that borrows from Powers
in order to imagine the dissemination of parasitic plants through space.
Carl Sagan’s didactic television series Cosmos: A Voyage (1980) and Neil
DeGrasse Tyson’s 2014 remake use the zoom to represent rapid travel
through time and space. The opening zoom of Robert Zemeckis’s film
Contact (1997), which represents an alien signal beaming to earth, bor-
rows directly from the Eameses’ film; so does Barry Sonnenfield’s Men in
Black (1997). As we know from Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s
Dune (2013), Spanish surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s incom-
plete adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1968) uses an animated
zoom as a world-building technique, mapping the geography of the spice
planet. Finally, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Wells’s The War of the
Worlds (2005) features a zoom from Mars to Earth similar to that of
Kaufman’s Invasion.
Filmmakers have remade Powers multiple times. Bayley Silleck’s
Cosmic Voyage (1996) is a digital animation narrated by Morgan
Freeman; Andy Rohrmann and Peter Lucas’s The Powers Project (2012)
has forty artists adapt the 1977 film. Google created both a less com-
pelling digital remake called Cosmic Eye (2012), which begins from
the Mountain View corporate headquarters and follows the pattern of
Powers, and a similar Android app called Cosmic Zoom (2013). The music
video for Big K.R.I.T.’s The Bigger Picture (2013) is another tribute to
the Eameses’ film.
Perhaps it makes the most historical sense to see Boeke’s book or the
Eameses’ film as the major influence on this network of texts, or instead
the zoom lens itself as a medium with major cultural implications that
play themselves out over the course of the twentieth century. Still more
distant, uses of zoom to characterize sudden dives and pull-ups in stunt
flying could be the earliest example of this form. Answering such ques-
tions of cause and priority would go beyond the scope of this chapter.
No doubt the most significant reception of the smooth zoom is indus-
trial: the Google Earth interface is a direct adaptation of the Eameses’
animation. In the words of Jonathan Rosenberg, discussing the Keyhole
software that became Google Earth, “we’ve always loved Powers of 10,
the classic 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames that takes you on a vis-
ual ride from inside an atom to the edge of space in under 10 min. It
turns out Keyhole brings a similarly astonishing perspective to its visual
mapping software.”35 For Monica Brannon, “while Powers of Ten offered
a technological imaginary and new perspective from which to view
space, Google Earth normalizes this visual logic.”36 Although it would
no doubt be wrong to characterize the Eameses’ film as a necessary
74 D. Woods
condition for Google Earth’s interface, we can say that the visual logic
of Powers has become massively influential as a process of subject forma-
tion, since it extends to everyone who uses Google Earth and Google
Maps (or Sky, or Mars) for pleasure and navigation. This relationship to
Google Earth is one of many ways in which the Eameses’ work relates
to the predominantly white and middle-class “whole earth” US coun-
terculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The film represents a lesser-known
aspect of that movement, which is, as historians such as Fred Turner have
argued, far more closely connected to the emergence of Silicon Valley
than scholars had previously thought.37
In relation to these texts that deploy smooth zoom, Google Earth
and Maps is strong evidence for the thesis that there is a process of sub-
jectivation at work in the cultural formation surrounding the Eameses’
film. Available to everyone with internet access, the interface of this
information technology fixes an aesthetics of scale that has cultural pre-
cursors across varied media. If the films and other texts just discussed
have disseminated, among a more limited audience, one major form
through which humans might experience their relation to other scales,
Google generalizes this form across a vast audience. The point here is
not that smooth zoom is either a correct experience of scale or a politi-
cally neutral one. Rather, using Raymond Williams’s terms, we can say
that the transcalar zoom has shifted from an emergent cultural form to a
media-technological dominant since the 1960s.38 The question remains
whether and to what extent it is possible to fold other scales into the
human scale domain without domesticating them.
Operation and Description
Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”
(1963) is an analysis of the phenomenological implications of scalar
modernity—a topic she also discusses in the final section of The Human
Condition (1958). Arendt draws on the writing of early twentieth-century
physicists to discuss the implications of space travel and the ability of tech-
noscience to operate technologically upon, or express mathematically,
what language is unable to describe. She aligns the limits of description
with the limits of our biologically constrained phenomenological worlds,
arguing that the new microphysical realities will never be translated
meaningfully into “everyday human language” or the “five senses.”39
The problem Arendt raises is not that of solipsism, which would suggest
that we are unable to describe even objects from our own scale domain.
She is concerned with the more specific issue of describing objects from
other scale domains, which present a problem not only of representation
but of sensation.
In his incomplete work The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Maurice
Merleau-Ponty provides some first steps toward a discussion of the phe-
nomenology of insensible scales. Like Arendt’s “Conquest,” his argu-
ment emerges from the same two decades that see the composition of
Powers of Ten and many of the texts cited here. Merleau-Ponty holds out
the possibility that the lifeworld is less fixed than in Arendt’s essay, and
thus able to incorporate weird data without domesticating them. These
two thinkers can be combined in an interpretation of Powers. Each devel-
ops phenomenology in relation to the counterintuitive results of twen-
tieth-century science, and expands Shelley’s argument, in “A Defence
of Poetry,” that “we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we
know.”40
Written soon after John F. Kennedy’s “Address at Rice University on
the Nation’s Space Effort” (1962), Arendt’s essay discusses the phenom-
enological significance of post-classical physics. She tells a familiar story
from the history of science, the one about Einstein’s rejection of quan-
tum theory for its ontologization of probability and its embrace of non-
local causation. Arendt argues that the “older generation” of scientists,
Einstein included, were “still firmly rooted in a tradition that demanded
scientific theories fulfill certain definitely humanistic requirements such
as simplicity, beauty, and harmony.”41 Yet Niels Bohr, in his Kantian way,
understood that “causality, determinism, and necessity of laws belonged
to ‘our conceptual frame’”—there was no reason to expect the universe
to conform to the categories of reason. Bohr considered atomic phe-
nomena to include “regularities of quite a new kind, defying pictorial
description.”42 Arendt reads Bohr using a distinction between expres-
sion and description similar to that between knowledge and imagination
invoked by Shelley: what defies description in a language that works by
analogy with our sensory world “can no longer be described at all, and
it is being expressed, but not described, in mathematical processes.”43
Bohr hoped that an expansion of the “conceptual framework” would
make it possible to “describe” quantum theory outside mathematics, but
Arendt doubts that this is can be done.44 She attributes “our” reason to
sense experience and to the figurative use of the senses. She suggests that
translating results obtained by instruments and mathematical formalism,
76 D. Woods
as Max Planck put it, “back” into the language of the sense world seems
less and less likely as the history of science goes on. What this argument
suggests is that reason, at first derivative of sense experience, becomes
externalized in machines and formalisms and thus increasingly distant
from imagination. The result is not that the real is ungraspable by rea-
son, nor simply that no individual subject can describe the increasingly
powerful results of “our” deracinated rationality, but that, as scalar
modernity goes on, imagination is less and less able to render the nat-
ural world in the way that a novel might be said to render a historical
moment.
Arendt does not go on to note the complexities of specialization that
further amplify this problem of description. Yet the question of situated
knowledge raised by Donna Haraway and other scholars in feminist sci-
ence studies in the late twentieth century now demands the acknowl-
edgment that there is no singular “we” or common human world for
which these quantum mechanisms (or for that matter, counterintuitive
forms of causality in biology) can be translated. Disunified science works
across incommensurable communities of reason and imagination. In
this respect, Arendt may be too strict in treating the sense organs as the
boundary of the human lifeworld. She takes this boundary as naturally
given rather than historically reshaped by prosthetic extension in a way
that ultimately leads to deorganization, breaking the analogy with the
human body altogether.
In his discussion of modern physics, Merleau-Ponty makes a distinc-
tion similar to Arendt’s, aligning the gap between epistemology and
ontology with at least one difference of scale:
when granted access to domains not given to man—astronomical spaces

and microphysical realities—the more inventiveness in the wielding of
algorithm science has exhibited the more conservative it has shown itself
to be in what concerns the theory of knowledge. Truths that should not
have left its idea of Being unchanged are—at the cost of great difficul-
ties of expression and thought—retranslated into the language of tradi-
tional ontology. The considerations regarding scale, for example, if they are
really taken seriously, should not relegate the truths of physics to the side
of the “subjective”—a move that would maintain the rights of the idea of
an inaccessible “objectivity”—but they should contest the very principle
of this cleavage and make the contact between the observer and observed
enter into the definition of the “real.”45
Merleau-Ponty invokes distinctions between knowledge and being; the

“naturally given” “lifeworld” [monde vecu] of “man” and microphysi-
cal algorithm; between “that upon which we can operate” and “that upon
which we have an openness.”46 I compare these distinctions with Arendt’s
expression/description distinction, favoring operation as a term easier to
distinguish from definitions of expression used in poetics. Unlike expres-
sion, operation encompasses both mathematical formalization and obser-
vation mediated by instruments. The key point to extract from these
thinkers is thus a distinction between operation and description. To
return to Nieland’s account of the Eameses’ work, this distinction helps
us to think art’s relation to science in “an era whose modernity is syn-
onymous with debilitating overspecialization.”47
Arendt and Merleau-Ponty refer to domains of scale outside the
human lifeworld, emphasizing these domains’ difference from what
seems, here and for us, to be intuitive. They ask the phenomenologi-
cal question whether lifeworld-friendly description can be stretched and
altered, or whether we are stuck with worlds fundamentally incompatible
with the scale domains on which our instruments nevertheless operate to
produce enormous practical effects.
The two philosophers offer different conclusions. Where Arendt is
not optimistic about the limitations of our senses and their metaphori-
cal extension in language, Merleau-Ponty holds out the possibility of a
descriptive writing capable of crafting an ontology suited to domains of
scale that human senses are unable to perceive directly. That these new
forms of writing and thinking would seem nonsensical and paradoxical,
at least at first, is one of the widely-noted interpretations of Bohr’s call
for a new logic or “conceptual frame.” For example, the spin of protons
and other particles is called ½ spin because they must spin 720 degrees,
not just 360 degrees, to complete a rotation. For planets and pool balls,
by contrast, 360 degrees do the trick every time. Even this suggestion
that electron spin proceeds through “720 degrees” is a simplifying anal-
ogy with a more familiar geometry. This example of scale variance sug-
gests that uses of scala in Powers of Ten extend the norms of the human
scale domain into other domains in an illusory way. This is not exactly
anthropomorphism, but more specifically the projection of a scale world
outside itself. ½ spin is an instance of dissonance rather than consonance
between the big and the small, an example that makes Bohr’s solar sys-
tem figure read as a catachresis. Such dissonance is evidence for Arendt’s
78 D. Woods
argument that microphysical realities can be expressed mathematically,

but not described in the broadly comprehensible terms of the lifeworld.
Powers of Ten is an explicit effort to describe new objects of science
and alter the phenomenological worlds of its viewers. Can a text such
as Powers really describe any of the “microphysical and astronomical,”
trans-scalar realities it represents using visual techniques such as smooth
zoom? As a didactic text, the film is singularly engaged with Merleau-
Ponty’s optimism. At the level of recorded intention, as Schuldenfrei
notes, the piece was meant to educate people about their place in the
universe, about the relations among the different sciences, and about the
finitude of the Earth.48 Powers zooms through objects unknown before
World War II, such as quarks and the “coiled coil” of the DNA helix.
This scale-aesthetic event was possible only through knowledge acquired
in the twentieth-century sciences, especially the technosciences driven by
Cold War funding and massive collaboration. Is the film an example of
description in the sense just outlined?
Scalism
The first answer is negative. Indeed, Powers of Ten domesticates
the uncanny or paradoxical activity of nonhuman scales using the
Protagorean/Vitruvian measurement norms of the human lifeworld.
Even as the shot moves through scale domains far beyond that of the
human body, the techniques of smooth zoom, scala, and voiceover col-
lapse these scales back into one that Merleau-Ponty calls “pre-scientific,”
so that description demands no revision of “traditional ontology” (16).
To take one example, comparing the Eameses’ swarming electrons to
Lucretius’s use of the swarm as a scala for atoms in On the Nature of
Things shows how traditional ontology slips back into place in a text that
hopes to transcend it, despite the availability of radically different evi-
dence during modernity. For Mark Dorrian, Powers embraces a kind of
premodern microcosm/macrocosm similitude: “the microscopic scales
of inner space are revealed to be visually consonant with their counter-
parts.”49 With smooth zoom reinscribed at multiple and incommensu-
rable scales, scale variance collapses into one continuous space. This
space operates with an optical logic that is only tenable within the nar-
row range of scales that Powers represents. That is, the Eameses extend
optical principles modeled on the zoom lens and the Hitchcockean pull
focus as techniques for the representation of the full scalar spectrum of
the universe. There is thus a scalism that results from the ontological
privileging of one scale domain, with its specific qualities and constraints,
as a model for all the others. Smooth zoom is a scalism that expands the
human mesocosm to encompass the totality, so that the small contains
the large or the subset contains the set.
Critique of scala and the use of voiceover in the film have the same
result: scala most often substitutes some object or creature from the
human scale domain for things too large or small for our senses. The
trope thus thinks unfamiliar things in terms of a familiar description,
which from both Arendt and Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives would be
a failure. As Dorrian argues, in the spirit of theorists such as Haraway
and Sandra Harding, Morrison’s voiceover amplifies this domesticating
effect by maintaining throughout the film, in an unvarying tone, the
male voice of neutral scientific mastery, echoing the countdown voice of
NASA’s mission control.50 Powers of Ten does not imply that knowledge
must also change with a change of scale domain, as in Rheinberger’s
claim that epistemology should engage “new, specific complexities” in
each “domain of knowledge.”51 Yet describing what has only been oper-
ated upon by specialist researchers, without reducing it to “traditional
ontologies,” demands precisely this kind of epistemology.
Epistemic Things from Other Scales

The positive aspect of my reading of Powers draws on the concept of
deorganization and the phenomenology of scale domains developed
above. With its broken analogy between the human scale domain and
nonhuman scales, the concept of deorganization demands a considera-
tion of how our technologies extend outside not only our phenomeno-
logical worlds but also our scale domains. Deorganization’s longue durée
in the history of technology has much in common with Powers of Ten.
That is, I can safely argue that humans begin their technical becom-
ing with technologies that exist at our own scale, then create larger and
larger technical ensembles that eventually outscale us. Later, as media
theorist Vilem Flusser notes in “Our Shrinking,” we go on to create
microscopic and nanoscale technologies that outscale us (or inscale us?)
in the other direction.52 While it is easy to imagine visible technolo-
gies that, unlike hand tools, no longer fit within our phenomenological
worlds (a postal system or an aqueduct, for example), such miniature
technologies go much further, crossing the boundaries of our scale
80 D. Woods
domain altogether. As the mechanism of deorganization, scale variance

breaks the analogy of technical objects with the human body, since scale
variance is a space-time difference that forces technologies to adapt and
be adapted to new scale domains textured by different constraints.
In order to understand this technological dimension of the phenom-
enology of scale domains, we need a deconstructive approach to phe-
nomenology of the kind inaugurated by Jacques Derrida and adapted to
science studies by Rheinberger, who translated Of Grammatology into
German. Rheinberger’s work rests in a broader tradition of poststruc-
turalist philosophy of technology that includes thinkers such as Friedrich
Kittler and Bernard Stiegler.
One dimension of Derrida’s reading of phenomenology is his account
of the externalization of thought into technologies such as language and
communication media. For him, phenomenology’s phantasmatic worlds
take shape in a circular relationship with technics. The interiority of the
world does not precede the technologies that it creates, technologies that
subsequently loop back to alter the properties and possibilities of that
same interior world. As Derrida argues in The Beast and the Sovereign II,
“there is no ipseity without this prostheticity in the world, with all the
chances and all the threats that it constitutes for ipseity, which can in this
way be constructed but also, and by the same token, indissociably, be
destroyed.”53 The use of “world” in this passage may lead to confusion,
since it refers to the outside, the Earth, as opposed to the phenomeno-
logical world or the “ipseity” of the self-referential subject. The point
is that having an interior at all, having a world, depends paradoxically
on the inscription of subjectivity outside itself. As in the role of diaries,
scrapbooks, or social media in practices of self-cultivation, “prostheticity”
becomes “a structural condition for self-relation.”54
Far from anthropocentric, Derrida sees this process as a condition of
possibility for the worlds of the living in general. For similar reasons to
those addressed by Bloch’s concept of deorganization, however, pros-
theticity is too narrow a definition of technology. Thus, Derrida intro-
duces another concept, the “stabilizing apparatus,” which we might see
as a broader category embracing technical assemblages and semiotic sys-
tems that are in no way extensions of the human body. The reader can
find a discussion of this kind of animal techno-dasein in the work of Cary
Wolfe, and the role of stabilizing apparatuses in my argument is this:
because of the way they affect humans and other beings differentially,
there is no reason to assume that there can be a common world guaran-

teed simply by the shared sense organs of the able bodied.55 There are
no shared worlds, but rather varied worlds brought into temporarily sta-
ble states through interaction with their techno-semiotic context:
neither animals of different species, nor humans of different cultures, nor

any animal or human individual inhabit the same world as another . . .
because the community of the world is always constructed, simulated by
a set of stabilizing apparatuses . . . , codes of traces being designed, among
all living beings, to construct a unity of the world that is always decon-
structable, nowhere and never given in nature.56
Deconstructive analysis leaves us with no recourse to “the” human life-

world invoked by Arendt and Merleau-Ponty, but adds a new kind of
openness. The self-referential loop that creates a world is constantly
“contaminated” by its technological outside. What we lose in terms of
identity—“the human” world—we gain as an openness predicated upon
a more thoroughgoing closure. Not even the members of a species share
a world, but their relation to stabilizing apparatuses brings a new form of
opaque openness into play, since the technologies that are common can-
not help but contaminate closed interior worlds.
More strikingly, because stabilizing apparatuses grow and shrink into
other scale domains even as they remain structural conditions for self-
relation, these apparatuses answer the closure of Arendt’s lifeworld with
a particular kind of openness to nonhuman scale domains. In Powers of
Ten, this simultaneous process of openness and closure is at work in a
uniquely scalar way. The film is closed in its representational approach to
nonhuman scale domains, reducing their strangeness through techniques
such as smooth zoom and scala. But the film is open to the traces of the
objects these scale domains contain and constrain.
These “objects” from other scale domains are a particular kind of
scientific object: Rheinberger calls them “epistemic things.” For him,
epistemic things are most often objects of knowledge that exist beyond
our senses, so that only a prosthetic sensorium makes them percepti-
ble. Rheinberger’s conception of the epistemic thing, however, goes
beyond prostheticity to include a sense very similar to Derrida’s more
abstract notion of the stabilizing apparatus. It is not only that scientists
observe things from other scales, like Robert Hooke with his bacterial
82 D. Woods
animalcules. They also frame, purify, and process these objects in settings
that increasingly use interconnected machines to create a stable context
for observation and experimentation. The objects of study for such sys-
tems, whether they are genes, atoms, hadrons, or the earth’s climate, are
“constructed” in a very specific sense. In a series of both/and formula-
tions that read as a stylistic effort to push beyond the Science Wars polar-
ity of constructivism and realism, Rheinberger suggests that epistemic
things are both discursive and real, abstract and material: “situated at
the interface between the material and conceptual aspects of science.”57
He maintains that there is some opaque x, the real object of knowledge
independent of what we know about it, even though this object is often
underdetermined by explanations. For example, he cautions critics not to
see the multiple vague and contradictory definitions of epistemic things
such as the gene as evidence of the failure of biology to understand
heredity. Rather, the ambiguity around such objects is often useful for
the sciences as they work provisionally and maintain openness to future
versions of their objects of study. Despite the fact that such “objects
of science are entities that cannot be grasped in unmediated fashion,”
and that “experimental representation may be taken to be equivalent
to bringing epistemic things into existence,” Rheinberger assumes that
epistemic things have some discrete character even if scientists are unable
to complete a list of their properties and abilities.58 Like the objects of
object-oriented philosophy, itself a reading of phenomenology, epistemic
things withdraw in the same moment that aspects of them become avail-
able to observation, experimentation, and inscription as memory.
Rheinberger provides one further piece of this puzzle, discussing the
contribution of epistemic things to the construction of knowledge about
themselves. He builds the feedback of the object into his account of sci-
entific knowledge production. His theory of epistemic things would be
incomplete without “the reciprocity in which the object itself becomes
an agent of the process of knowledge.”59 What this means, given that
this process is a fallible one that often has multiple possible outcomes, is
that epistemic things participate even in misleading observations and bad
interpretations of themselves. Such observations and interpretations are
always collaborations with the epistemic thing, not only arbitrary projects
by individual and collective human subjects. While the concept of agency
to which Rheinberger has recourse may be the wrong one for grasping
this nonarbitrary constructivism, some examples immediately present

themselves. Particle accelerators, for instance, need to be enormous sta-
bilizing apparatuses to produce knowledge about quarks and hadrons.
This does not mean that they can necessarily represent such particles to
us, or even necessarily tell us correct things about them. Yet because of
how the properties of specific particles affect the construction of particle
accelerators, even errors and illusions that arise during this process are
particle-morphic errors.
Rheinberger expresses this situation in his discussion of molecu-
lar biology, in a formulation that recalls Derrida on recursive technical
externalization: “scientific mind and scientific object enter into a sym-
biotic relationship of reciprocal externalization, and simultaneously, of
internalization.”60 “Symbiotic,” like “reciprocal” above, signifies mutual
influence between the subject that constructs knowledge and the objects
that it constructs knowledge about. Like the creation of tools that feed
back to influence human cognition and action, we can also read “symbi-
otic” as a figure of circular causality. As Merleau-Ponty suggests above,
the subject–object relation is too simple to capture the process at work in
the production of knowledge about nonhuman scales, which involves a
six-part path of causal loops among epistemic things, scale domains, sta-
bilizing apparatuses, prostheses, texts, and human (or in some cases ani-
mal) phenomenological worlds, each separated by a boundary but each
preventing the others from achieving full closure or full arbitrariness.
Reading a film such as Powers in light of this position, the task is to
develop an aesthetic theory that considers this nonrepresentational rela-
tion to the epistemic thing. Through this relation, nonhuman scale
domains can perturb phenomenological worlds, but Powers stands out
as a text that attempts to represent them within it. In this context, the
interest of the film lies in its combination of two features in one text:
representational realism and a popular didactic method geared specifi-
cally to “imagining that which we know,” but in a way that an audience
of physicists could also welcome. Yet even for a text that works explic-
itly to convert operation to description, the only way it succeeds is via
the indirect six-part path just described. Thus, the aspect of Powers most
in touch with epistemic things is nonrepresentational: neither the film’s
zoom nor its images of galaxies and electrons, but its traces of epistemic
things from other scales.
84 D. Woods
“At the Atomic Scale, the Interplay of Form and Motion

Becomes More Visible”
As Timothy Clark writes, echoing Derrida’s point about the insularity of
phenomenological worlds, “I may have no access to the singular world
of another as such, but I am in it in a minimal sense, even in obscure
if unidentifiable traces and hairline cracks there.”61 Three examples
of such traces in Powers of Ten make up the positive aspect of my read-
ing. These traces are cracks in the film’s holistic edifice through which
what Merleau-Ponty calls the “un-prethinkable” objects discovered by
the modern sciences leak into the film, contributing to the form of its
representational illusion. They are traces of cosmic background radia-
tion, Brownian motion, and the distinction between atom and molecule.
Modeling the effect on “our” phenomenological worlds as the density
of new epistemic things involved in social communication increases dur-
ing modernity, Powers incorporates traces that are only possible after the
development of complex observational and experimental apparatus. One
implication of this point is that the swarm and dust figures, the scalae in
Morrison’s voiceover, do not count as traces of epistemic things.
Derrida’s account of the trace is essential to this reading, but this
version of the trace is not reducible to a function of human language.
More than the spectral presence of signifiers unspoken but necessary
for a given instance of signification, the concept of the trace extends to
the relational conditions for a meaningful event that are detectable yet
not fully present in the event. The sense from Speech and Phenomena
in which the trace “indicates a way out of the closure imposed by the
system” (and the phenomenological world) clarifies the role of the
epistemic thing in Powers.62 The trace is preferable to concepts such as
hybridity and “symbiosis,” in this context, because it maintains the sepa-
ration of the elements it brings into relation rather than merging them in
a third entity. Hidden-yet-explicable traces are included in the mode of
absence in a wide variety of texts. The trace of an epistemic thing from
another scale domain is a very specific kind of trace, one relevant to the
problematic of operation and description outlined above.
The first of three such traces in Powers comes at 7:18, in the cut that
separates DNA molecules from the atoms that compose them. We might
see this cut as a crack or flaw in the zoom, where the necessity of col-
laging one image within another breaks the suture of the viewer to this
optical illusion. The cut itself is not a visual representation of atoms or
molecules, nor is there any reason to think that they look as they do
in the film, or indeed “look” like anything at all, as Lutz reminds us in
relation to nanoengineering. Yet the only reason for the film to make
the cut here in the first place is the difference between atoms and mol-
ecules itself, by this point in the history of science a very stable epis-
temic “thing.” As historians of science Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and
Isabelle Stengers argue, the discovery of atomic substitution in the mid-
nineteenth century shifted the focus of chemistry to molecular structures
and to the applications of chemical synthesis.63 The newly discovered
ability to create synthetic molecules had implications for chemical theory,
because substitution clarified how molecular structures hold together,
bringing the difference between atoms and molecules into focus in new
ways. The gap between atoms and molecules and the ability to manip-
ulate this gap emerge in the technically augmented field of chemistry,
driven by the possibility of new applications in a chemical industry that
was growing dramatically in size and complexity. Different from the
Eameses’ swarming electrons and galaxies like dust, then, this trace is the
effect, across several degrees of separation, of a stabilizing apparatus that
found and fixed an epistemic thing unobservable in the sensory worlds of
human beings.
The second trace is closely related, a representation of Brownian
motion scaled down to movements of molecules themselves. Also at
7:18, Powers cuts from a static image to an image in motion, a brief ani-
mation meant to represent atoms jumping in short jerky movements.
Morrison’s description glosses the transition like this: “at the atomic
scale, the interplay of form and motion become more visible.”64 First
observed by the Victorian botanist Robert Brown in 1827, Brownian
motion is the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid (a liq-
uid or a gas), resulting from their collision with atoms or molecules.
Brown observed it in pollen grains under a microscope, and, as Pearl S.
Brilmeyer notes, John Tyndall referred to Brown’s observations in 1872
in an address that “ushered in a new paradigm in which movement and
power were understood to be immanent to all matter.”65 Along with
atomic substitution in chemistry, Brownian motion is one of the phe-
nomena that led to the acceptance of the existence of atoms. For life-
forms such as bacteria, Brownian motion is an important aspect of the
scale domains to which they must adapt—but it may be evolutionarily
unimportant for bears, humans, and planets.
86 D. Woods
In Powers, however, this microscopic phenomenon is a trace rather

than a representation of Brownian motion, because it scales “down”
from the motion of particles the size of pollen grains to figure the move-
ment of atoms and the distinction between atoms and molecules. An
empirical phenomenon from one scale thus comes to characterize one
where it is unobservable, the effect (movement of visible particles) figur-
ing the cause (invisible molecular movement) in a metonymic instance
of scala. In this case, the trope does not so much domesticate nonhu-
man scale domains anthropocentrically as move an epistemic thing from
a domain of prosthetic visibility to one accessible only to complex stabi-
lizing apparatuses.
The film’s third exemplary trace of a nonhuman scale domain (no
doubt there are others as well) is legible at the still-smaller scales of elec-
trons and quarks. Here the interaction of voice and image leads to a
bifurcation in the experience of viewing Powers, with one path leading
(as it were) to Arendt’s position and the other to that of Merleau-Ponty.
The swarm figure has the effect discussed above, but the image itself
resembles white noise on an analog television, where much of such visual
snow is the result of cosmic background radiation. If this epistemic thing
is less thing-like, it nevertheless occupies a scale domain: the wavelength
of this form of microwave radiation and the temporal duration that gives
cosmic background radiation seniority as the oldest light in the universe.
Ranging between one millimeter and one meter, the wavelength is vastly
larger than the subatomic particles that it figures in Powers of Ten. Once
again, the trace of an epistemic thing from a nonhuman scale domain is
at work in a visual representation, in this case of electrons and quarks.
In this nonlinguistic account of the trace, there is a need to move
away from the opposition of constructivism and realism in science stud-
ies. Nonhuman scales add a further dimension to this familiar problem,
one that demands that we incorporate a distinction between at least two
scale domains into classical debates about realism and under-determina-
tion. This distinction between scale domains has implications for recent
turns to materialism and realism across multiple disciplines, suggesting
that these turns should avoid conflating poststructuralism and the lin-
guistic turn when they work to set themselves off from the theoretical
architectures that preceded them.
This deconstructive approach is a way of rereading representations of
insensible scales, such as those of hyberobjects and atoms and the world
of ants, which draws out the indirect relations with epistemic things that
make these representations possible. Deconstruction both limits and
adds something to the operation/description distinction used by Arendt
and Merleau-Ponty. If we consider Powers as an effort at description, it
fails in that there is no loss-free translation across the complex mediat-
ing devices that make it possible to operate on such scale domains in the
first place. But these same mediating devices, not in spite of but because
of their self-referential organization, open our worlds to the influence of
epistemic things, leaving traces for interpretations that are themselves a
process of subject formation taking place as our worlds encounter beings
from outside the human perceptual mesocosm.
Since our worlds are unfinished and irreducible to a fixed bodily con-
figuration, we can affirm a kind of posthumanism that emphasizes the
need to understand how culture is constituted by the nonhuman beings
with which we are more and more thoroughly mixed during modernity.
There is a holism in this affirmation that corresponds to the holism of
Buckminster Fuller and the Eameses, discussed by Nieland above, that
is, to their shared ecological politics and to the effort in Powers to repre-
sent the cosmic totality. Yet the cracks and traces in this whole are just as
important if resynthesis (after reductionism, after collage) is to learn any-
thing from modernist fragmentation and the critical process of applying
knowledge to itself. As all the king’s horses and scientists and filmmak-
ers attempt to reconstruct the whole, the cracks in Humpty-Dumpty’s
organic shell should remain visible. Ecological thought and action should
not be about going back to a time before modernity, but about moving
through it to think the long durations of the climate change era. The
deconstructed naturalism of a text such as Powers of Ten could be central
to how we orient ourselves during this transition.
Notes
1. Eames and Eames.
2. Di Palma, 260.
3. Nieland, 47, 82.
4. Ibid., 81.
5. Williams, R. John, 484.
6. Eames and Eames.
7. Haraway, 581.
88 D. Woods
8. Nieland, 54.
9. Tsing, 505.
10. Horton, 204.
11. Woods, “Scale Critique,” 137; Woods, “Scale Variance.”
12. Wiens, 392; my emphasis.
13. Fore, 41–42.
14. Clark, 9.
15. Von Uexküll, 53–54.
16. Eames and Eames.
17. Lucretius, Book 6.
18. Parikka, 121–44; Fore, 45.
19. Di Palma, 257.
20. Manners, 38.
21. Boeke, 27.
22. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
23. Arendt.
24. IBM Corporation, A Boy and His Atom.
25. IBM Corporation, Moving Atoms.
27. Schrader, 11.
28. Wittenberg, 11.
29. Clark, 9.
30. Bloch, 661–2; my emphasis.
31. Fore, 38.
32. Guattari, 27–37.
33. Schuldenfrei, 137.
34. Boeke, 16.
35. Rosenberg.
36. Brannon, 299.
37. Turner, 1–11, 175–207.
38. Williams, 121–27.
39. Arendt.
40. Shelley.
41. Arendt.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Merleau-Ponty, 16; my emphasis.
46. Ibid., 18; author’s emphasis.
47. Nieland, 54.
48. Schuldenfrei, 137.
49. Dorrian.
50. Ibid.
51. Rheinberger, 29.
52. Flusser, 75–82.
53. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign II, 88.
54. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign I, 18.
55. Wolfe, 63–84.
56. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign II, 8–9; author’s emphasis.
57. Rheinberger, xiv.
58. Ibid., 30, 107.
59. Ibid., 31.
60. Ibid., xv.
61. Clark, 20.
62. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 141.
63. Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, 127.
65. Brilmeyer, 62.
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. “The Conquest of Space and The Stature of Man.” 1963. The
New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 18 (2007): 43–56.
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Isabelle Stengers. A History of Chemistry.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Big C.R.I.T. The Bigger Picture. YouTube Video, 4:06. 9, April 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfi00488QEc.
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice,
and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Boeke, Kees. Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. New York: John Day, 1957.
Brannon, Monica. “Satellite Imagery in The Age of Big Data.” Configurations:
A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 21, no. 3 (2014): 271–301.
Brilmeyer, Pearl S. “Plasticity, Form, and the Matter of Character in
Middlemarch.” Representations 130 (Spring 2015): 60–83.
Clark, Timothy. “What on World is the Earth? The Anthropocene and Fictions of
the World.” Oxford Literary Review 35, no. 1 (2013): 5–24.
Contact. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1997.
DVD.
Cosmic Zoom. Directed by Eva Szasz. Toronto: National Film Board of Canada,
1968. https://www.nfb.ca/film/cosmic_zoom. Animation.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Directed by Brannon Bagga et al. Studio City, CA.
Cosmos Studios. Television. Episode 1, March 9, 2014.
90 D. Woods
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Translated by Geoffrey
Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
———. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey
Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
———. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.
1967. Translated by David B. Allison and Newton Garver. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1979.
Di Palma, Vittoria. “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy.” In Intimate
Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, edited by Vittoria Di Palma,
Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri, 239–70. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Dorrian, Mark. “Adventure on the Vertical.” Cabinet 44 (2011–12). www.cabi-
netmagazine.org/issues/44/dorrian.php.
———. “On Google Earth.” In Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual
Culture, edited by Dorrian and Frédéric Poussin, 290–307. New York: Tauris,
2013.
Eames, Charles, and Ray Eames. Powers of Ten: A Film about the Relative Size
of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Los Angeles:
IBM/Office of Ray and Charles Eames, 1977. www.powersof10.com/film.
Flusser, Vilem. Post-History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Fore, Devin. “The Entomic Age.” Grey Room 33 (Fall 2008): 26–55.
Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.
London: Althone, 1997.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn
1988): 575–99.
Horton, Zach. “Collapsing Scale: Nanotechnology and Geoengineering
as Speculative Media.” In Shaping Emerging Technologies: Governance,
Innovation, Discourse, edited by K. Konrad, 203–218. Amsterdam: IOS Press,
2013.
IBM Corporation. A Boy and His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie. Online
video clip. YouTube, 1 July 2015.
———. Moving Atoms: Making the World’s Smallest Movie. Online video clip.
YouTube, 1 July 2015.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Philip Kaufman. Los Angeles:
Solofilm, 1978.
Jodorowsky’s Dune. Directed by Frank Pavich. Los Angeles: Snowfort Pictures,
2013. DVD.
Lucretius. On The Nature of Things. Transated by William Ellery Leonard.
Online Text. 5 August 2015. http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.
html.
Manners, J. Quantum Physics: An Introduction. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2000.
Men in Black. Directed by Barry Sonnenfield. Los Angeles: Columbia Studios,

1997. DVD.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Translated by
Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2016.
Nieland, Justus. “Midcentury Futurisms: Expanded Cinema, Design, and the
Modernist Sensorium.” Affirmations: Of the Modern 2, no. 1 (2014): 46–84.
Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century
Histories of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Rosenberg, Johnathan. “Power of 2.” Google: Official Blog. October 27, 2004.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/10/power-of-2.html.
Sagan, Carl. “Cosmos S01E01 The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” YouTube.
Last modified 10 November 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
bBMcDPV2NrQ.
Schrader, Paul. “The Poetry of Ideas.” Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1970): 2–19.
Schuldenfrei, Eric. The Films of Charles and Ray Eames: A Universal Sense of
Expectation. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” The Poetry Foundation. 10 July
2015.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1966.
Tsing, Anna. “Nonscalability.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–524.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole
Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.
Uexküll, Jacob Von. A Foray into The Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a
Theory of Meaning. 1934. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Wiens, J. A. “Spatial Scaling in Ecology.” Functional Ecology 3, no. 4 (1989):
385–97.
Williams, R. John. “World Futures.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (Spring 2016):
473–546
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013.
Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
92 D. Woods
Woods, Derek. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 83
(2014): 133–43.
———. “Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter.” In The New Politics
of Materialism, edited by Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito.
Forthcoming.
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970.
CHAPTER 4
Anti-Zoom
Bruno Latour
The optical devices and unexpected courses of events in Olafur

Eliasson’s exhibition disturb our perceptions and force us to address the
question of scale in space and time in an entirely new manner. In the
era known as the Anthropocene, such issues have become increasingly
urgent, since we poor humans—or rather earthlings—remain perplexed
as to how to find our place among phenomena, which are at once
immensely vaster than we are, and yet subject to our affect. It is no easy
task to cut a way through all this. It is indeed this problem of scale that
I would like to tackle in this brief essay written to accompany Eliasson’s
exhibition.
The idea of common sense—that “right path” which Eliasson’s
machines obviously render null and void—has it that one can circulate
freely through and in every scale, from the most local to the global (in
space), as well as shuttle about back and forth from the briefest instant
(as, for example, in the course of a chemical reaction) to the longest
Note from the editors: This essay originally appeared in the exhibition catalog
Olafur Eliasson: Contact, published by Fondation Louis Vuitton/Flammarion in
2014.
B. Latour (*) 
Sciences Po, Paris, France

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_4
94 B. Latour
period (as in so-called “geological time”—before, precisely, people

started dubbing the blink-of-an-eye period known as the Anthropocene,
a “geological era”).
Unfortunately “common sense,” here as elsewhere, is a poor guide.
For neither the schema of space, nor that of time, appear continuous:
levels of reality do not nestle one within the other like Russian dolls.
It cannot be said that the small or the short lie within the large or
the long, in the sense that the largest or the longest contain them but
with just “fewer details.” This metaphor emerges from the optics of
photography, from the zoom created by the use of a lens aptly called
“telescopic.” In fact, one might almost posit a rule: good artists do not
believe in zoom effects.
It is incorrect, moreover, to think that maps, for instance, prove the
reality of the zoom effect: when s scale of 1 cm to 1 km to one on 1 cm
to 10 km, the latter does not contain the same information as the for-
mer: it contains other information that might (or might not) coincide
with what appears in the former. In spite of appearances, the optical and
cartographic metaphors do not overlap. It might even be said that the
former has become so parasitical on the latter that it has rendered the
very concept of cartography almost incomprehensible. Optics has dis-
torted cartography entirely.
One can of course arrange maps to offer the impression of a zoom
effect, but it is exactly that: an effect, an assemblage as artificial as a fake
perspective in a stage set.
Such montage effects can be verified by a glance at Google Earth. The
engine provides the impression of optical transition (the pixels become
increasingly small), whereas, in practice, each stage in the “resolution”
extracts from the new data sets on the server (following the same princi-
ple as in cartography, similarly founded on the concept of a range of data
whose projection depends entirely on the metric selected) (Fig. 4.1).
What is true for space is no less so for time—though, significantly
enough, the point is even more evident in the latter case. When one
turns from an account of a single day (June 6, 1944, for example) to one
covering five years (the 1940–1945 War), the details of June 6 are not
included in the second narration, just “less exactly” (as if such a change
equated to the one from a grid of sensors in a high-rsesolution telescope
to a grid at a lower resolution but at a wider angle). Though the author
might aver that (s)he has “changed focus,” the “long” narrative does not
4 ANTI-ZOOM 95
Fig. 4.1 The Two Powers of Ten, by Anne-Sophie Milon, SPEAP, 2014/15

96 B. Latour
contain the “shorter” one at all: it instead reiterates all the elements dif-
ferently, to the point of constituting an entirely new story (and not the
same account with just fewer details).
In this sense, Olafur Eliasson is right to insist on the fact that the
mechanisms of disorientation he employs are as much temporal as spatial.
As a temporal narrative relates less readily to the optical metaphor of the
lens, the discrepancy appears more obvious for time than for space. The
argument, however, remains identical: an account of June 6 is no more
included in an account of WWII than a 1-to-10 scale is included in a
1-to-100 scale. In both cases, there is no insertion (no transitivity) of
one scale into the other.
An appreciation of the argument concerning what occurs with time
can aid an understanding of why the situation as regards space affords
scarcely less realism. In the teeth of common sense, moving freely from
one scale to the next—be it in time or in space—remains problematic.
Moreover, this illusion of unhindered movement limits reactions to
the ecological crisis, since people think they can talk blandly about, for
instance, “everything,” or about the “fate of the planet,” without real-
izing that what they call “everything” generally tallies with some tiny
model in a research bureau or lab. In this regard, research by artists con-
verges with analyses by sociologists and historians of sciences: there is no
zoom, though there is a rich history of zoom effects.
Yet, it would be absurd to deny that differences in time and space
are crucial. One cannot pretend that talking about the Amazonian
Basin is the same thing as working on a ten-acre experimental station in
the Jura. Biochemists observing the brief moment that a photon takes
to be captured by an oak leaf are not dealing on the “same scale” as
those tracking the shifting tectonic plates of the Antilles beneath the La
Soufrière volcano. Though variability in the data may subsist, one must
remember that these should not be confused with the arrangement of a
range of data sets that have simply been assembled differently. Among
these forms of arrangement, which the optical-cum-photographic met-
aphor improperly characterizes as a zoom, there are two that are easy
to grasp and thus relatively easy to circumvent: administrative hierarchy
and disciplinary hierarchy.
The history of cartography emerges very largely from that of nation
states, so that the arrangement of its data sets has respected, since at least
the seventeenth century, the perimeters and hierarchies of governments.
4 ANTI-ZOOM 97
Today, however, all discussion of the Anthropocene must ignore limits

such as counties, regions, states, and nations. Now, physical geography
is not the factor of order behind “human” geography; rather it is the
occupation of the territory by the modern state that has very largely dic-
tated the type of arrangement, the organization, the staging, even, of all
the information supplied to geographers, sociologists, statisticians, politi-
cians, and which is subsequently analyzed and exploited by these same
professions. Such interrelations have been exhaustively studied by histo-
rians of geography and cartography, as well as by historians of the official
history of these same nations.
The second readily identifiable configuration affects the scientific dis-
ciplines themselves, which, a little like states, “occupy the territory” and
claim to “include” or “absorb” all the others (which remain more local,
more qualitative). Patently, though, this “pecking order” between dis-
ciplines cannot be employed to arrange data in a stable or continuous
manner, since it is obvious that, on each occasion, the material gathered
is not congruent at all. This point is a given for all those artists, who,
like Eliasson, use advanced techniques extensively. Scientists from vari-
ous disciplines cannot be marshaled as if they all belonged to one and
the same continuum. To employ a rather arcane term, the connections
between them are not hierarchical, but heterarchical. The relationship
between a surveyor in the field walking along a trench on a segment
of road and his or her colleague back in the lab pouring over a false-
color satellite sweep that covers the same area is not one of inclusion.
The second does not see the data of the first, with just “less detail”:
they are dealing with different findings. If they do manage, as the say-
ing goes, to “reconcile” each other’s data, this will only be due to a
fortunate combination of circumstances and after countless meetings
during which the two sets of data will be completely reconfigured.
It will absolutely not arise from a hierarchical relationship, in which the
“smaller” is subordinated to the “larger” (still less so from a hierarchical
relationship predicated on competence, scientific probity, qualifications,
or, indeed, salary!). Fortunately, then, since each discipline or sub-
discipline “orders” the others differently, the resulting fruitful cacoph-
ony can hardly sustain the impression of a “zoom” for long. That the
contrary view has occasionally been advanced seems to me to be due
in part to the success of a celebrated film shot in 1977 by Charles and
Ray Eames, The Powers of Ten, which has inspired, and, it might be said,
98 B. Latour
led astray, many artists and scientists. By the optical expedient of

threading a series of scenes one through the other, this film claims to
materialize a near-continuous shift, from the infinitely large (the gal-
axy), down to the infinitely small (atoms), starting with and return-
ing to the everyday situation of a couple enjoying a picnic in a park
in the center of Chicago on a fine, sunny day. It is a movie in which
everything is at once true and false. True, since, on every occasion, the
images present exactly what is revealed by some device (telescope, satel-
lite, microscope, particle accelerator), not to mention the movie cam-
era filming the couple. Yet at the same time, everything is also false,
because the position allotted to each image is completely implausible.
Where could we stand to view the Earth from another galaxy? What
laboratory would we have to visit to observe cells from the skin of our
two amorous picnickers?
It is also unlikely that one is able to shift in a few seconds from
microscope to particle accelerator. The supposedly “educational” space-
time portrayed in Eames’s film is in fact a figment of the imagination.
In the process of exploring the so-called “scientific image of the world”
it betrays just how unrealistic this image is. To actually mirror the path
taken by the eye through each of these scales would require a prolonged,
continuous movement, both extremely complicated and exorbitantly
expensive—one that would wander through all of Chicago, from labo-
ratories via science institutes to academies, and even then one would
not manage to thread all of these various “space-times” like pearls on a
necklace.
Personally, I would be first in line to see an exhibition in which artists
would demonstrate this type of motion, at once completely alien to our
thought processes and yet perfectly realistic. Obviously, it would not be
easy. To access data of different natures originating from various pieces of
apparatus and belonging to totally distinct disciplines, and yet to avoid
immediately organizing them in accordance with the disastrous meta-
phor of the zoom, requires the creation of an arrangement tailored to
some other principle.
The least complicated alternative would be to order the data in
accordance with the principle of connectivity—a principle that has
the distinct advantage of not distinguishing the question of time scale
from that of space (the whole difference between time and space being
itself a figment of the zoom—or, as Henri Bergson puts it, of the
4 ANTI-ZOOM 99
cinematographic view of experience). In practice the data (better called

the information “sublata”) is always composed of connections (a table
with figures in columns, a sequence of sentences, pictures placed side by
side, and graphs, to name a few). In truth, it is these connections that
are subsequently projected in various formats to provide the impression
of describing a particular space and time (in fact, it is always a matter of
space-time; a route or trajectory). The point (a philosophical one, but we
cannot help that) is that one should not confuse projection with connec-
tivity: the data are richer in connectivity than are the (inevitably limited)
projections used to organize them. This is just another way of saying that
maps (projections) should not be confused with what is obtained in the
field; that narrative (invariably another format of projection) should not
be mixed up with trajectory. Simply put, a projection cannot equate to
the path followed to acquire the connections.
Yet what does learning how to traverse the “data accumulating the
connections”—an expression that might usefully replace “learning how
to obtain changes in scale”—actually mean?
Imagine describing, for example, a drainage basin, and among the
data collected (“obtained”) you discover chemicals whose signature is
the same as those extracted from a certain mine in the RDC (formerly
Zaire). That is to say, in practice, that the comparison has been made
using two data sets from entirely distinct sources. It is not first a con-
nection between two places located thousands of kilometers apart that
implies the transportation and concealment (probably illegal) of hazard-
ous chemicals. On the contrary, the connection first requires pinpointing
a place (in the sense of connection) before visualizing it through a pro-
jection onto a map (for example, by using an arrow to link the site to the
RDC). Furthermore, it is this very connection that might be presented in
the form of an account: “On a date D, highly toxic products from mines
in the RDC were hidden by X at some place in this catchment area.”
The argument would be exactly the same if one had started out with the
following storyline: “Toxic waste traffickers transported from the RDC
to this point dangerous refuse, traces of which should be detectable in
the effluent from this critical zone.” If the account begins by establish-
ing connections between agents subsequently placed in a chronology
(before/after, brief time/long time, intense phase/uneventful phase, and
so on), it can also be projected onto a map (the RDC, complete with
every relevant anamorphosis).
100 B. Latour
With respect to the concept of connectivity, temporal and spatial

dimensions are nonetheless entirely interchangeable (many search
engines project data automatically in the form of timelines and maps). In
practice no map is ever shown that is not afterwards narrated in the form
of motion, in the form of events in time (for only thus can description
occur); and, conversely, no narrative has ever existed without the aid of
localization (again, so that description can occur).
It is now clear that the choice of the backdrop of a map or the sto-
ryline of a narrative on which to project the connections is a decision
that follows after the links derived from resemblances identified in the
data have been established. The order is then always the following: first
identify the data sets, then locate the connections, then reconstruct the
pathway and figure out a projection, and, finally, select the maps and/or
narratives.
There is no reason to fall for the opposite trajectory, which is solely
designed to convince us that we can describe changes in position in space
or time by using the notionally fixed points of a chronological timeline
or the pseudo-Euclidean metric of a map. Data sets do not occur in
space or in time: instead, space (maps) and time (forms of narration) are
schemas used to display and to present—either mimicking the ordered
arrangement of the subsets of the hierarchy (those of nation states, or, as
in Eames’s film, of scientific disciplines), or, on the contrary, seeking to
rearrange the data so as to undermine or circumvent these hierarchies.
Artists who take inspiration from the sciences are right to pour into
this breach; luckily, they also often appear reticent to swallow the puta-
tive “scientific image of the world” whole. For when it comes to images,
artists have more than one trick up their sleeve: they are unlikely to be
taken in by zoom effects.
A yawning gap thus exists between learning how to interrelate the
scales of space and time, all the while managing to eschew the zoom
effect. These two modes of positioning in fact remain deeply antagonis-
tic. To intercut every scale effectively (to “crosscheck,” to “reconcile”
the data) it is necessary to jettison for good all notion of a continuous,
transitive scale. This issue was of little importance at one time because
the distinction between the natural and the social sciences (the humani-
ties) still held water; just as the distinction between the sciences of time
and those of history seemed to mean something.
4 ANTI-ZOOM 101
The Anthropocene has gradually eroded such distinctions. Thus, to

fully comprehend the dimensions occupied by humans, or rather by all
earthly creatures, it has become necessary to devise new methodological
principles: connectivity, yes; scale, no. This is the lesson in orientation I
draw from the course in disorientation, provided by Eliasson.
PART II
Scale in Culture
CHAPTER 5
Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age

in King Kong
Mark McGurl
The gist of it is, I take it, behind every form we see there is a vital something or
other which we do not see, yet which makes itself visible to us in that very form.
In other words, in a state of nature the form exists because of the function, and
this something behind the form is neither more nor less than a manifestation of
what you call the infinite creative spirit, and what I call God.
—Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats
And so . . . the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the
tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own
children.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Note from the editors: This essay was first published in Critical Inquiry in 1996.
Professor McGurl has added a brief postscript commenting on the development
of scale studies since the original publication.
M. McGurl (*) 
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_5
106 M. MCGURL
In 1929, Hugh Ferriss, the foremost architectural renderer of his time,

the Rembrandt of the Skyscraper, described the view from his studio
high above the island of Manhattan like this:
There are occasional mornings when, with an early fog not yet dispersed,
one finds oneself, on stepping onto the parapet, the spectator of a… nebu-
lous panorama. Literally, there is nothing to be seen but mist; not a tower
has yet been revealed below, and except for the immediate parapet rail
(dark and wet as an ocean liner’s) there is not a suggestion of either local-
ity or solidity for the coming scene. To an imaginative spectator, it might
seem that he is perched in some elevated stage box to witness some gigan-
tic spectacle, some cyclopean drama of forms; and that the curtain has not
yet risen.1
A few years later, on the bridge of the SS Venture, six weeks out from
New York Harbor, a fictional filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert
Armstrong) will tell Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher) to set a course
for Skull Island, lying somewhere in the empty expanse of ocean to the
southwest. On approach to its destination, however, the ship is envel-
oped in a curtain of mist. The crew stands at the rail, wondering what
will be revealed. Denham has told them it will be “something no white
man has ever seen,” something “monstrous, all-powerful,” “neither
beast nor man”—the legendary Kong. They are not sure they believe
him, but now as drums sound through the fog they are nervous. There
is, come to think of it, something convincing in Denham’s claim, offered
with an ominously raised brow, that “every legend has a basis of truth.”
There is also, evidently, something far-reaching about that claim,
something excessively confiding about it. One feels as though Denham
speaks not only to the crew but to the film’s viewers as well, even its
casual ones, who have indeed had the sense, since it premiered in 1933,
that the “legend” which is the film King Kong refers to a “truth” not
directly represented on the screen. The mythic, comic-book broadness
of the film’s imagery invites one, not merely to see, but to interpret. Few
would deny that King Kong is an allegory of some sort. The persistent
question, though—one that I believe remains to this day an occasion
for productive interpretive labor—has been the nature of the “truth” to
which the film extravagantly, if with resonant obscurity, seems to refer.
The trick will be to account simultaneously for this obscurity and for the
relative specificity of the cultural work it performs.
5 MAKING IT BIG: PICTURING THE RADIO AGE IN KING KONG 107
I will suggest, in what follows, that we step into the gap between
truth and legend and read King Kong as a confessional text, an entry of
sorts in the spiritual diary of the corporation. If this seems odd at first
glance it is only, it will turn out, a way to take hold of the particular
strand I would like to follow through a much larger and more familiar
tapestry, that of corporate self-representation. In the twenties and thirties
the task of “business expression”2—in the terse phrase of a Westinghouse
executive—was experienced by corporate authorities not merely as an
opportunity but as an ontological necessity. Self-representation was a
way for the corporation to lay visible claim to a privileged, indeed domi-
nating, place on the landscape of American market culture, to be sure,
but it was also, I will argue, a way to quell the corporation’s anxieties
about its odd identic status as a legal fiction. The “fictionality” of corpo-
rate identity has been a theme since the late nineteenth century for crit-
ics of the corporation, suspicious of this entity vested with the privileges
of personhood but not its responsibilities. But what has been less widely
noted is that a declared corporate identity is a potential source of anxi-
ety for the corporation itself. From this perspective self-representation
may be, among other things, a way for the abstract body of business,
corporeal but invisible, to convince itself of the “reality” and sturdiness
of its own existence. On the other hand, perhaps predictably, the self-
representation of the corporation produces its own anxiety, complemen-
tary to that attaching to invisibility: the anxiety of embodiment. In other
words, to the extent that critics of the corporation were right to under-
stand the invisibility of the corporation as a pervasive and disturbing
form of power, the ontological certainty vouchsafed by self-representa-
tion may seem, for the corporation itself, to carry its own heavy price. To
be visible is, after all, to be, for example, a glaring target: of public criti-
cism, or federal antitrust legislation, or the actions of organized labor.
Embodiment may carry with it a risk of admission; the bases of the cor-
poration’s existence may be merely material in nature, comprised less by
abstract, spiritual entities than by, for instance, the bodies of the laborers
it absorbs. Hence the mode of self-envisioning deployed in some of the
corporate artifacts I will discuss is what we might call an elliptical one, a
visibility that expresses the aspiration to disappear all over again.
The imperative of corporate self-representation, operating between
the equally dangerous poles of pure spirit and pure matter, spills over in
documents like King Kong as a sort of spectacular confessional excess.
With the application of sufficient interpretive pressure the “truth”
108 M. MCGURL
revealed at the base of the corporate “legend” will be something other

than what was intended for public consumption. The elaborate invest-
ments in public relations and advertising by corporations of the twenties
and thirties occasioned the thorough intertwining of selling things and
selling corporate self-image, but these activities were only the humblest
forms of the imperative to self-representation. Witness those fantastic,
phallomaniacal monuments to corporate identity, the skyscrapers, soon
to emerge from the morning mist before Ferriss’s “imaginative spec-
tator.” Witness, too, aloft the tallest building in the world, the unruly
symbolic employee, the enormous African social climber, King Kong.
The corporation’s most colossal self-assertions, though they are declara-
tions of a truly titanic power, might as well be taken, at the same time, as
opportunities for an appropriate, analytical ridicule.
Invisible Media
Radio-Keith-Orpheum, the Hollywood studio better known sim-
ply as RKO, was a child of the radio industry, and King Kong, the stu-
dio’s blockbuster of 1933, is a radio picture. The film, so conspicuously
invested in the visible—indeed, whose professed subject is Denham’s
search for spectacular photographic footage—claims its ethereal pater-
nity, and therefore its faintly oxymoronic identity, when the studio’s logo
appears before the credits (Fig. 5.1). From the bottom of the screen
swells the planet Earth, pronounced in its curvature but straddled by an
outsized radio tower. While the words “A Radio Picture” scroll across the
heavens, and while the same words are tapped out audibly in Morse code,
the tower emits a halo of visible radio waves, a pulsing, jagged ejaculation.
The idea of venturing from the corporate home of radio, New York
City, to the film business in Hollywood had been David Sarnoff’s. While
still in his teens, the Lower East Side immigrant had become a telegraph
key operator, tapping code for the American branch of Britain’s Marconi
Wireless Telegraph Company, the premier force in the first two dec-
ades of this century in the new business of wireless communication. By
the time American Marconi was sheared, at the behest of the U.S. gov-
ernment, from its British parent just after the First World War, Sarnoff
had risen high enough in Marconi so that he quickly became vice presi-
dent and later president of the newly constituted Radio Corporation of
America. The formation of RCA, the so-called radio trust, had followed
from nationalist concerns for the security implications of the new invisible
Fig. 5.1 RKO Pictures logo
medium of the wireless. It was however not a government operation but

a corporate one, the common property of General Electric, Westinghouse,
and AT&T. Each had controlled separate, but interdependently crucial,
patents for the development of radio. These patents had been purchased
from eccentrics such as Lee de Forest, inventor of the Audion tube, and
Howard Armstrong, inventor of the regenerative circuit and later of the
technique of frequency modulation, or FM broadcasting.
If, as for instance de Forest claimed, he alone had “‘discovered an
Invisible Empire of the Air, intangible, yet solid as granite,’” Sarnoff,
as one biographer puts it, “believed deeply in the power of the corpo-
ration over the individual inventor.”3 By way of RCA, which set up its
own research laboratories, Sarnoff resolved the decentralized, populist,
nerd-in-the-basement ethic that had dominated early radio research
into the abstract personage of the imperial American corporation,
which had claims, he argued, as did the telephone company, to a “nat-
ural” monopoly of its medium, in this case the airwaves.4 To someone
like Armstrong, who never became a salaried employee of the corpora-
tion, this may have looked like a step into the distant past. Armstrong
would probably have agreed with Michael Pupin, his friend and teacher,
a renowned electrical engineering professor at Columbia University,
who had argued that the revolutionary power of modern science was
the product of the awakening of “scientific individualism” in figures
110 M. MCGURL
like Galileo. Modern science, for Pupin, had founded itself precisely by
shrugging off the “monopolies” on knowledge held by the “enormous
ecclesiastical administrative apparatus” of the church; the advent of the
corporate laboratory may thus have seemed to him the reappearance of
a stifling anachronism.5 Indeed, if the incorporation of radio could be
lucrative for patent-holding nerds like Armstrong, the absorption of their
achievements by the corporate ecclesiastical apparatus came with visible
signs of tension, as was evidenced by Armstrong’s boyish, Kong-like pre-
dilection for scaling, sometimes with a photographer in tow, a massive
radio tower constructed by RCA in the heart of Manhattan (Fig. 5.2).
Armstrong sent the photos to Sarnoff and to Sarnoff’s secretary, Marion
MacInnis, Armstrong’s own Fay Wray, whom Armstrong later married.
Sarnoff was enraged by the stunt, but not because he didn’t understand
the urge to see the earth arrayed beneath him in imperial, totalized per-
spective. He had been delighted, as key operator for Marconi a decade
before, to be assigned to the company’s eighteenth-floor offices in the
Woolworth Building, completed in 1913 and for several years the tallest
building in the world (Fig. 5.3). Dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce”
by the booster-priest, the Reverend Samuel Parkes Cadman—an appel-
lation joyously accepted by the building’s owners—and described by
Cadman as an inspiration to “those who aspire toward perfection, and [to]
those who use visible things to obtain it,”6 the Woolworth Building was
for its time the crowning achievement of what was already known as the
American “romance” of the skyscraper. Henry James, when he observed
these “monsters of the mere market” in 1904, contrasting them with the
old, overshadowed churches suddenly, mercilessly “deprived of their vis-
ibility,” mistook what he saw as the mere triumph of the profane over the
sacred.7 What he missed were the first steps of the elaboration, as a busi-
ness religion, of certain themes familiar from American transcendentalism.
Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen has noted that, in the rhetoric of the skyscraper
movement, “a strange kind of simultaneity is presupposed: skywardness is
not caused by business and traffic, but it is business and traffic. The skyward
trend of thought [evident in the building of skyscrapers] implies business.”8
“Of all our architectural flora,” wrote Claude Bragdon in 1932, “the
skyscraper alone is truly indigenous to the American soil… a natural
growth, and a symbol of the American spirit… . ruthless, tireless, assured
energism, delightedly proclaiming, ‘What a great boy am I!’”9 It was
understood that what differentiated the boyish skyscraper from other
large buildings, apart from its ebullient assertion of verticality, was its steel
Fig. 5.2 The individual inventor as Kong-like rebel
frame, upon which masonry, providing no structural support, was merely

hung as a facade. The skyscraper shared, that is, a structural kinship to
the radio tower, itself a construction of modern steel, but also a “natural”
efflorescence of that modernity. Both skyscraper and radio tower, in other
words, were thought to serve as visible emblems of a natural, and yet
invisible, modern power—emblems of what E. B. White in 1933, describ-
ing radio, called “a pervading and somewhat godlike presence.’’10
Now the invisibility of electricity, of radio waves, was from a certain per-
spective taken to be a sign of its strength—its alliance, as a pantheistic ana-
logue, to the Holy Spirit. Frank Arnold, hired in 1926 to head development
at the new radio broadcast network, NBC, founded and owned by RCA,
claimed for radio advertising a superior, because fourth-dimensional, identity.
112 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.3 The Woolworth Building (1913), New York City

Since the late nineteenth century and until the popular absorption of the
theories of Einstein gradually refigured it as time, the fourth dimension had
generally been conceived as a higher space, quite real, yet existing invisibly in
relation to our three-dimensional world somewhat as the cube relates to the
two-dimensional square.11 Arnold’s book Broadcast Advertising: The Fourth
Dimension (1931) recounts the intrinsic limitations of the merely visible
advertising media of newspapers, magazines, and billboards, but
then came radio broadcasting, utilizing the very air we breathe, and with
electricity as its vehicle entering the homes of the nation through doors
and windows, no matter how tightly barred… . For the first time in the
history of mankind, this dream of the centuries found its realization.12
Lee de Forest had imagined radio as an Invisible Empire of the Air, an

idea that claimed radio’s allegiance to that other “Invisible Empire,” the
organization revived by D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915),
the Ku Klux Klan.13 In Arnold’s account, the white spirit is commercial-
ized: the radio wave is an invisible capitalist predator, able as never before
to penetrate domestic, “feminine” space. Thus it is more powerful by
far than the Kong-like demonic black shadow who pursues a naked, ter-
rified, “higher-dimensional” white person in Bragdon’s introduction to
the philosophy of the fourth dimension, A Primer of Higher Space (1923)
(Fig. 5.4).14 Here, by the exigencies of Euclidian spatial representation,
one’s existence in the world as a visible “personality” requires a self-figur-
ing as a self-menacing blackness—an idea that suggests rather strikingly, if
yet only obliquely, what in other contexts, such as The Birth of a Nation,
looks like the ontological necessity/threat of the racial other in the his-
torical formation of white American identity. Bragdon, a graphic artist,
architect, and prominent Theosophist (he translated P. D. Ouspensky’s
Theosophical masterwork, Tertium Organum [1920]), was also an
important aesthetic theorist of the skyscraper movement; a friend of Louis
Sullivan, the high priest of skyscrapers; and an important instigator of the
publication of Sullivan’s widely disseminated, often mystical, writings on
architecture. That the skyscraper movement, like much of the abstract
modern art of the time, was so closely, if complicatedly, tied to crank mys-
tical philosophy has not yet, I think, been fully appreciated. Bragdon, now
largely forgotten, was indubitably, in his time, a crank of consequence.15
In Bragdon’s neo-Neoplatonic view, the Euclidian regime of visibility
is a limiting one. But if these limits cannot be overcome, they should
114 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.4 Bragdon’s illustration of the fourth dimension

nonetheless be stretched as far as possible in pursuit of higher, “vision-

ary,” fourth-dimensional consciousness. This project was formalized
most directly in Bragdon’s efforts to represent, by various complicated
means, what was admitted to be the unvisualizable four-dimensional
hypercube (Fig. 5.5). But in less direct ways the aspiration to four-
dimensionality underwrote much of modern art, whose “abstract signifi-
cance,” wrote Bragdon’s friend Sheldon Cheney in 1934, “is one phase
of mankind’s contemporary advance in spiritual apprehension.” Abstract
art was an attempt, in its mobilization of geometrical figures, at the “rev-
elation of cosmic architecture.”16
So, too, for Cheney, did the mystical “logic of Modernism” inform
contemporary “building art,’’17 which as a discipline was prepared to
take the notion of “cosmic architecture” fairly literally, especially in the
erection of skyscrapers. The skyscraper was, though, for all its monstrous
visibility, necessarily a sort of compromise, since the fourth dimension,
it was admitted, could not actually be seen.18 Hence the paradox of the
skyscraper—similar perhaps to the paradox of the Gothic cathedral—
is that its very hugeness and towering height were understood to be
emblematic precisely of the effort to exit, vertically, the space defined by
three-dimensional visibility and thereby to take possession of the noume-
nal realm. Skyscrapers were evidence of things not seen, of natural pow-
ers that could only remain an abstraction: the “American spirit,” capital,
corporate-owned radio waves. In a sense, therefore, as Reverend Cadman
may have agreed (since he distinguished visible means of attaining per-
fection from other ways), the transcendental capitalists of the early
twentieth century were replaying the turn away from Judaic abstrac-
tion evident in certain aspects of Christianity, which demanded that the
deity become, at least for a while, embodied. His temporary embodi-
ment underwrote, even under the aegis of the invisible Judaic deity, an
explosion of sensuously apprehensible graven images of his representa-
tive—underwrote, that is, a mass religion heavily invested in images of
the Savior.19 Transcendental capitalism, similarly, placed ultimate value in
the realm of the invisible and yet, for all that, could not rid itself of the
urge to see.
Thus, when the first RCA Building was erected in New York in 1931,
its crown was adorned with jagged lines similar to those emanating from
the radio tower in the RKO logo in an explicit attempt to picture invis-
ible radio waves (Fig. 5.6).20
116 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.5 Bragdon’s illustrations of the hypercube

Fig. 5.6 RCA Building crown
These lines act as a sort of ellipsis to the building’s vertical thrust, a

suggestion of the continuation to infinity of the height and extent of the
corporate power visually represented by the building and the medium,
electricity, through which it moves. This iconography remained func-
tional when the building passed into the hands of General Electric in
1933 as part of the consent decree that refashioned the “radio trust”
in such a way as to avoid the appearance of monopoly.21 RCA, for its
part, moved into its newly completed tower in Radio City, Rockefeller
Center, adorned with a massive neon sign near its pinnacle that said
RCA. A postcard from that time calls the new building one of New
York’s “Three Monarchs,” the other two “kings” of the city being the
Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building (Fig. 5.7). The latter,
named after the state of New York—a name, however, that seems to sug-
gest aspirations of considerably greater extent—was unlike its monarchi-
cal brethren. It was a speculative venture, not a corporate one, without
118 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.7 Postcard of New York City’s tallest skyscrapers
a single, dominant corporate tenant. With the onset of the Depression

and because its owners were forced to rent its space in piecemeal fash-
ion, they had difficulty for some time reaching full occupancy. But if the
structure earned the derisive nickname “The Empty State Building,” so
too did it signify, appropriately enough for the tallest building in the
world, that this structure had raised itself even closer to God than its fel-
lows, being, as it was, an emblem not of the corporation but of its pur-
ported guiding light, the heroic spirit of “pure” speculative capital (one
says “purported” because of course the monopolistic practices of the
corporation, then as now, were directed precisely toward containing the
risks of speculating in a truly free market).22
It was around the time that Sarnoff began planning to picture RCA’s
corporate power with the first RCA building, in 1928, that he sealed
the deal with financier Joseph Kennedy in the Grand Central Oyster
Bar that occasioned the venture of RCA into the business of visibility,
the business of making pictures. This was effected by the purchase, and
the merging into a single entity, of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum vaude-
ville theaters, the Pathé Exchange, and the small film production studio
Film Booking Office (FBO). Sarnoff’s inspiration for this move, Ronald
Haver notes, was the tremendous success in 1927 of Warners’ The Jazz
Singer; the first important film to allow its actors to be heard, using
Western Electric’s Vitaphone sound-film technology.23
RCA in these years was developing its own sound-film technology,
Photophone. But if the amazing success of Vitaphone represented, for
Sarnoff, the victory of Western Electric, a brother in the market of the
invisible, it also suggested the usurpation, by Hollywood, of radio’s natu-
ral right to the human voice. Though the picture business had been tre-
mendously powerful and lucrative decades before radio had even existed,
the “altogether novel medium of communication” of national corporate
radio, notes a remarkable study published in 1935, made radio in its own
way “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence
upon the mental horizons of men.”24 Sarnoff had no doubt which of the
two media should be considered more important: the spirit of America
was the spirit of an all-pervasive, long-distance radio transmission, and
his age, in his words, was the “Radio Age.” But, as the 1935 study avers,
it seems impossible to decide which is the more influential medium in

American social life. Each of the two agencies is immensely important in
standardizing public tastes and values. The radio engages the attention of
more listeners more hours a week, reaches more listeners at one time, gives
more varied programs, and touches more sides of life. The talkie deals
almost exclusively in fantasy, but deals with it in such a way as to create an
illusion of reality. It is more vivid, more personal, more glamorous. The
radio on the whole appeals to the practical interests of men, and the talkie
to the repressed desires.25
What we know today as the medium of the so-called angry white male,
the corporate populist railing at what he believes is his dethroning by the
minority preferences of the “liberal” federal government, was in 1935
perceived rather to be the province of the “rational” bourgeois major-
ity, who as a “traditional family unit” gathered around the first version
of the broadcast-hearth to hear the calming tones, for instance, of FDR’s
fireside chats.26 The relation of radio to movie, in this early account,
can be mapped to the relation of mind to body: the first, practical and
moral; the second, the site of repressed desires, sublimated and made vis-
ible. More specifically, though, the mind/radio connection suggests the
ambiguous ontology of the corporation itself, an abstract body, corporeal
120 M. MCGURL
and invisible at once, and it suggests one motive (among others) under-
lying the corporation’s desire to be seen, and to see itself, on the big
screen. Taking visual possession of its own “vivid,” “glamorous” body on
film, RCA responds to the anxiety of invisibility.
This—of course I drastically simplify—is one thing that had been
entailed in Christianity’s demand to see the body of God in the person of
Christ and by way of that vision to take possession of the godliness of the
human body made, so it had been promised, in the heavenly image of
the Father. So, too, was it entailed in the related medieval concept of the
Body of the King, discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, which,
although the concept necessitated the notion of an eternal, unchanging,
abstract Kingly body—the body politic—it demanded that this King rep-
resent himself in the visible body of the living monarch.27 Both of these
valences may be at play, then, in Cecil DeMille’s 1927 epic of the life
of Christ, King of Kings, part of whose sets were recycled for use in the
making of King Kong six years later.28 DeMille, in his epics, had notori-
ously turned Christian piety in the direction of spectacle, so much so that
some wondered if there wasn’t something ironically impious, pagan—or
at least, for some, disturbingly Catholic—in the richness and sensuous-
ness of his visual displays. A recent study of DeMille by Sumiko Higashi
notes the pious suspicion that DeMille’s epics inspired in some quarters,
tying it to suspicions on the part of traditional Protestant elites of the
burgeoning middle-class commodity culture of the teens and twenties.
This was a culture of insistent, garish visibility. DeMille’s biblical epics,
seen in this light, were at once visualizations of the deity and something
like obnoxious shop windows writ large, directly influencing, Higashi
notes, middle-class taste in interior decor.29
King Kong, the radio picture, follows the excessive logic of spiritual
embodiment to a still greater extreme, finding at the center of the “nat-
ural” monopoly of the modern market not merely its sensuous body
but its latent, unruly primitivism. In King Kong the passionate, sacrifi-
cial embodiment of the Radio Age becomes a towering libidinal gorilla
who, a publicity still makes clear, approaches New York City with elec-
tricity as his sponsor (Fig. 5.8). This monster is shot down by the air
force from the pinnacle of his own idealized, dignified, and larger dou-
ble, the Empire State Building, completed in 1931 and billed by its own-
ers, exactly as RKO would bill King Kong two years later, as the “Eighth
Wonder of the World.”
Fig. 5.8 King Kong and electricity
Every Man a King Kong

In America, in the thirties, there was no dictatorship of the proletariat,
but in some regions it was held that every man is a king. The motto
“Every Man a King” had first been used by William Jennings Bryan, but
it was put to more influential use when it was taken up as the motto
of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana and repeated incessantly by him
to the nation over the radio. In his home state, Long’s power had been
secured by his gift for the charismatic personal appearance, by which
means he soldered the poor of Louisiana together into a faithful pop-
ulist body, achieving the virtual dictatorship of his state. The national
reputation he gained in the early thirties was, however, as in the case
of Father Coughlin, largely a product of radio, the very medium whose
corporate-monopoly ownership he severely criticized. Long’s nickname,
the Kingfish, was borrowed from a character on NBC’s own hugely
122 M. MCGURL
successful “black voice” impersonation comedy “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” the

show that many argue truly nationalized broadcast radio entertainment.
Given the chance, Long might have used the master’s invisible tool
to destroy the master’s house. He was admired, across racial lines, by the
poor in his home state—his enemies might have said “worshipped by
the natives”—and was credited with bringing them textbooks, bridges,
paved roads.30 His national power—represented by the many Share-Our-
Wealth political clubs dedicated to him across the country and by his
outsized status as a political media figure second only, some argue, to
FDR himself—was growing when in 1935 he was, not shot down from
atop a skyscraper, but, at any rate, assassinated.
For the small class of corporate monarchs of the twenties and thirties,
whose individual proper names Long pulled, in his speeches, from the
protective mist of corporate anonymity and intoned in a sort of ritual-
ized hit list, the Kingfish represented, in his notoriously garish visibility,
a potential obstruction to the corporations’ transcendental aspirations.
He represented, first, the rebellion of the outlying provinces of their
New York-centered empires, but he may also be said, I think, to have
represented the return, and the accession to governmental power, of the
repressed bodies of the laborers made invisible in the formation of the
abstract body of the corporation. These laborers had indeed been known
to scale the heights of Manhattan in the construction of the New York
skyscrapers, a working-class version of an office at the top. The so-called
sky boys, however, were known in large numbers to fall congenially
enough to their deaths on the street below (Fig. 5.9).
Does King Kong consciously allude to King Long? The link is, at the
very least, suggestive. But Long’s quality as a beastly government dou-
ble of the corporate monarchs—reigning over his own Skull Island,
Louisiana, as they reigned over Manhattan Island—was more or less
announced when, with great controversy, in 1931, the same year the first
RCA tower and the Empire State Building were completed, Long built
a thirty-one story skyscraper state house in Baton Rouge to visualize his
ambitions whether for himself or his state it was disturbingly unclear. It
stood out, at any rate, against its humble provincial backdrop, like an
enormous middle finger directed toward the northeast (Fig. 5.10).
The mission to slay the sort of beast represented by Long—slay
him symbolically at least—was given to Merian Cooper, a midtown
Manhattan airline executive and jungle filmmaker—that is, an “adventure
capitalist” very much like Carl Denham in the film. He was also an actor,
Fig. 5.9 Anonymous, The “Bolter Up” (1930), © The Museum of the City
of New York
at least for a moment: Cooper and his partner Ernest Schoedsack are the
pilots who shoot King Kong, their own creation, down from the Empire
State Building. Slaying the King, Cooper tames the laborer—who in The
Son of Kong (1933), in the person of the mutinous crew of the Venture,
will actually start to spout Marxist boilerplate: “You blasted bourgeoi-
sie!” says one of the crew, “You don’t give us a living wage for our
bloody sweat. You think you own us heart and soul.” Closer to home
than Louisiana was a real-life Hollywood crew, the film industry laborers
threatening at the time to strike. They did so in protest of Louis Mayer’s
response to the Depression box-office drop, a proposed industry-wide
124 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.10 State House (1931), Baton Rouge, La
50 percent wage cut. Studio executives, including Cooper, were meet-

ing one day in 1933 to discuss the problem—predictably enough on the
top floor of one of Hollywood’s tallest buildings, the Roosevelt Hotel—
when suddenly there was an earthquake. It may be that this earthquake
is remembered at the end of Son of Kong, made later that year, when
Skull Island crumbles into the sea. At the end of that film, Carl Denham
is saved by being held aloft in the fleshy palm of Baby Kong, a mid-
sized, mulatto, altruistic ape—the visual average, it would appear, of little
white Fay Wray and the big black King. Thanks to the symbolic progeny,
Denham and the treasure he has found can be picked up by one of the
Venture’s lifeboats. Baby Kong, an image it seems of the Creole worker
turned corporate populist, sacrifices himself to the corporate venture,

RKO, which indeed was temporarily saved from bankruptcy by the suc-
cess of the Kong films.
In Hadley Cantril’s and Gordon Allport’s 1935 account of the psy-
chology of radio, cited above, both the moral force of radio and the
fantasy apparatus of film standardize public tastes and values. A con-
temporary account by an English building contractor notes as well that
“building a skyscraper gives one a marvelous chance of appreciating at
close range what is meant when America is spoken of as a mixing-pot.”
The American skyscraper, “as indigenous as the Red Indian,” is a “tower
of Babel” of immigrant labor that nonetheless unifies itself in the “team
work” of the workers “under strong direction” from a boss, and
it seems to me a good thing for the spirit of a people that they should be
able to gaze upon very high buildings. . . . The habit of looking upwards
is a strengthening habit. It encourages self-confidence, it gives a soaring
turn to one’s thoughts and ambitions, it sets up a current of sympathy and
emulation between one’s hidden self and the towering object upon which
the eyes are turned.31
In building the American skyscraper, in this account, the foreign worker

performs his own Americanization. He sees a monumental version of his
new American self appear before his eyes. The worker’s position in rela-
tion to the tower is, though, quite the reverse of the monarch with an
office at the top, and if the skyscraper is a Tower of Babel—the anal-
ogy was often drawn—its social effect was thought to be, by the booster,
quite the opposite of the linguistic (and therefore social) disintegration
imposed by the jealous God of Genesis.
It is along similar lines of the visual-technological production of
Americans that a recent series of essays by Michael Rogin develops the
thesis that “each transformative moment in the history of American film
has founded itself on the surplus symbolic value of blacks, the power to
make African Americans stand for something besides themselves.”32 In
Rogin’s reading of Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer; for instance, the
Jewish entertainer Jack Robin, né Jakie Rabinowitz (A1 Jolson), deploys
the racial techne of blackface makeup at a crucial point in the film to
access the primitive emotive authenticity thought to be the province
of the black entertainer; but this move simultaneously emphasizes, in
the evident falseness of the makeup, the “actual” whiteness of the skin
126 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.11 Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932)
beneath it. Performing in blackface, Jakie achieves his dream of making

it “big,” giving birth to himself, and to the Jewish-run studio who spon-
sors him, as an “authentic” white American entertainer.
The ape costume is another masking techne related to blackface. It was
used most vividly in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932) where
the “foreign” Marlene Dietrich performs the advent of her (and her
character’s) American stardom—it was her first American film—with the
bizarre primitivist dance number “Hot Voodoo”; she gradually sheds a
full-body ape costume to reveal herself as an authentic blond chanteuse
(Fig. 5.11). If on one level the ape costume seems, in an obvious way, to
extend the racial stereotype embodied by blackface to an even more gro-
tesque extreme, it yet emphasizes an ambiguity in the Rogin thesis that
will be difficult to resolve. For if the ape costume ultimately references
blacks it does so first, it must be said, by referencing a more general
notion of the “primitive” (this is true of the Bragdon diagram as well).
Determining a specific historical “allegorical” referent for Kong will be,
for us, intractably difficult.
For King Kong, though, this ambiguity is productive in a number
of ways. It is productive, most generally, of the referential looseness
of the film’s allegorical quality, which has invited its viewers to make a
misidentification with the corporation (the building) against themselves
(the Kongs). This produces the not uncommon reading, for instance,
that Kong represents the threat to the American people posed by the
Depression in 1933. More specifically, though, it lends a certain deniabil-
ity to the film’s apparent mobilization, precursive in many respects of the
campaign tactics of today’s political Right, of racist sentiment; the under-
lying message is that the obstruction of the corporation is the act of a
quasi-African un-American. Then as now the deniability factored into
tactical racism refuses responsibility for its divisiveness; it throws down
the gauntlet of what can now be suggested is only the “liberal” critic’s
racializing paranoia. Indeed, when critics as early as 1935 began to claim
that the film suggested invidious racial and sexual meanings, Cooper stri-
dently denied that it had any social-allegorical significance at all.
The Rogin thesis, at any rate, makes it clear that the habitual use of
the “surplus symbolic value of blacks” in classical Hollywood cinema is
directed not so much toward the management of black/white race rela-
tions as such, but toward the completion of other cultural projects, in
particular the assimilation of European immigrants.33 Blackness, insofar
as it is figured in these films, is in the strongest sense something deployed
by the studio, put in its service no less than the studio’s wage earners
are. Cooper’s original inspiration for Kong may have been a “child-
hood image of the giant ape carrying off a screaming woman into the
jungle,”34 then, but his creation, with Willis O’Brien, of the eighteen-
inch model used in filming King Kong entailed trading the helplessness
of childhood nightmare for mastery. Unlike Huey Long—symbolically
excluded, perhaps, from the white, corporate nation as a quasi-African
un-American, but a real force to contend with nonetheless—the model
Kong is from beginning to end under someone’s thumb (Fig. 5.12).
This was literally true—the model was moved manually—but it is evi-
dent in the film most interestingly in the fact that the apparent scale of
Kong, measured in relation to other things on the screen, in fact changes
repeatedly. Though the viewer is not intended to notice this fluctua-
tion, in the film the size of the monster ranges from eighteen feet to over
sixty, depending on its representational convenience to the given scene.
Kong is a pliant nightmare.
The principle at work here—the filmmaker’s manipulation, by special
effects, of visual scale—is put in its more basic form by Bragdon, who in
his Primer of Higher Space uses the example of film projection to explain
the “metaphysical” concept of the “relativity of space magnitudes”:
128 M. MCGURL
At a moving picture exhibition we never think of the image on the screen

as being essentially different from the photograph from which it is pro-
jected, though the difference in spatial extension is enormous. All that
matters is the relation of parts to one another, and these being identical,
the question of absolute size does not even enter the mind.35
King Kong sets out the thesis of projection itself during its opening cred-
its when the small-type title, “KING KONG,” suddenly rushes at the
viewer to fill the screen, reinforcing the point that the identity of the film
is deeply imbricated in the technology of enlargement. Along the same
lines, Bragdon suggests that the filmgoer’s fantasies of equivalence are
the combined product of a consensual hallucination: a willingness on the
part of the viewer to ignore obvious differences in scale and the efforts of
whoever is controlling the apparatus, whoever keeps the projection run-
ning. One can see in this relation a version, admittedly at some remove,
of the vertical metaphorics we saw surrounding the skyscraper, where a
certain fantasy of equivalence is operant in the “current of sympathy”
that runs between the faithful little guy on the street and the enormous
building that overshadows him, a projection of his “hidden” self but
also, visibly, his master.
But if Kong is a pliant nightmare, whose fantasy life does he serve? As
King Kong was put together over the course of more than a year, this
question gradually presented itself as a problem. The fantasy of increased
scale that is King Kong, though it originated in RCA’s project of self-
representation, became deeply entwined, as it was painstakingly elab-
orated by a group of film technicians—the film was more a laboratory
production than anything else—with elemental questions of the ways
and means of its own medium in a way we usually associate with a more
“serious” modernism. And, in their small studio on the RKO lot, they
were concerned not only with film’s singular capacity to effect, to project,
big visions. Indeed, King Kong, for its on-site makers, came to repre-
sent the state-of-the-art film—of Dunning process shots, of stop-motion
animation, of set design, sound effects, and dynamic film scoring—and
therefore it became possible to ask how it was possible, though it was
surely true, that what was being produced was a “Radio Film,” the son
of an Invisible Empire.
Unlike the techne of the ape costume, the Kong model never hides a
human actor. The Kong model is pure artifice, suggesting—as did the
skyscraper, which was at once a “natural growth” and a technological
triumph—an absolute merger of that artifice with the power of nature.

The Kong model therefore bypasses, in its deployment, an entire level
of reference present in blackface and ape costume, the conversion to
white nationality of whichever actor is given the privilege of donning,
and then shedding, the mask of blackness. Instead, it was Cooper himself
who acted out the movements of Kong before an audience of his techni-
cians, who then echoed his movements in the stop-motion manipulation
of the model. It is possible to see in Cooper’s slaying of Kong at the
Fig. 5.12 Model of Kong during production

130 M. MCGURL
end of the film, then, a sort of self-sacrifice of his internal “otherness” to

the white corporate power, a killing he undertook with visible and, on
this account, predictable sympathy for his victim. This is plainly repre-
sented in Son of Kong, I think, by the tormented guilt Denham—master
to Kong’s slave—feels for the tragedy that has befallen his ape/self in the
earlier film.
One source of this identificatory sympathy, ineffectual for Kong as
it nonetheless was, may have been Cooper’s own conflicted view of his
ultimate bosses in New York. Cooper himself had recently been a Pan
Am executive in the same town, but the move to Hollywood made
of him a humbler sort of employee, and the heads of RCA were con-
stantly threatening to shut his expensive film project down. He had once
thought, indeed, that he “‘wouldn’t be able to make this picture unless
I was my own boss all the way down the line, with no interference from
executives or front offices.’”36 At crucial moments Cooper in fact used
his own money to keep the production running when the big boys in
New York effectively cut him off. More broadly, it is possible to see in
RKO’s King Kong an allegory of the Hollywood studio’s own beholden-
ness to the Radio Corporation in New York, whereby in identifying with
Kong the studio puts itself in the novel position of playing the embat-
tled, self-sacrificing individual to RCA’s coercive corporate structure. (In
histories of classical Hollywood the studio has usually played the part
of coercive structure within which the romantically individual artist—
usually the director conceived as auteur—must struggle to express him-
self.) Cooper had been hired by David O. Selznick, a film industry
“native” if ever there was one, who had himself been hired by Sarnoff,
as the Depression set in, to float the financial deadweight that RKO sud-
denly represented for its parent company RCA. Selznick’s brief tenure
at RKO was marked by his constant attempts (mostly failed) to gain
executive independence from New York. In King Kong we can, I believe,
recover the traces of the studio’s efforts, made on behalf of those who
identified film as the King of the Media, to respond to various forms of
pressure from without.
This pressure did not simply move westward on a thin rail from RCA
to RKO. A broader set of pressures, along with the nagging of the RCA
executives, was placed on Hollywood as a whole. The Payne Fund stud-
ies, whose summary document, Our Movie Made Children, was pub-
lished in 1933, interrogated, among other things, the moral and physical
effects on impressionable youngsters of Hollywood’s predilection for
“sex and crime” films.37 These studies, a significant impetus to the

imposition of Hollywood’s Production Code a year later, instanced the
common enough use of the figure of the child as a justification for regu-
lation. The problem, its authors claim, is that the child is ill-equipped
to make on its own what they call the “adult discount,” the ironizing
judgement that what is put on the screen is, after all, not real. King Kong
seems to reference these arguments when Denham indignantly defends
himself against the charge, by a theatrical agent, that his taking a young
woman aboard the Venture is inherently abusive: “I suppose there’s no
danger in New York. Why, there’s dozens of girls in this city that are in
more danger than they’ll ever see with me.” The implication is that the
Depression, drawing girls into the streets in search of food, already pre-
sents a greater danger to their safety and virtue than their employment in
film. Denham, indeed, speaking for other fearless adventurers like him-
self, claims that the only reason he has hired a woman at all is because
the “public, bless them, must have a pretty face.” That is, the self-serv-
ing cultural work of erection-obsessed boy-men requires an alibi: the last
words of the film, spoken by Denham, are “it wasn’t the airplanes, it was
beauty killed the beast.”
At any rate, the Payne Fund studies’ “adult discount” is incorporated
into the plot of the film as a “revelation of the device” when, on the voy-
age to Skull Island, Denham stages an elaborately self-reflexive rehearsal
before his camera of his young actress’s horror before a still-imaginary
monster, a scene that Selznick worried might ruin the film but that
Cooper insisted upon retaining. This ironic self-defense on the part of
the film against claims of its own dangerousness was however not entirely
effective, as certain of the gorier and more sexually suggestive parts of
the film were excised before it premiered, on 2 March 1933, in New
York City at RCA’s own brand-new Radio City Music Hall. If Cooper
had had his way, King Kong, in the film, would himself have premiered
at Radio City, laying symbolic waste to the very building in which the
film was first being projected, but Selznick convinced him this would be
an affront to RCA executives.38
And yet the urge to allegorize the potential wreck of RCA by its own
creation remained too deeply built into the picture to be removed. This
is implicit, I suggested above, in the connection between the radio tower
in the RKO logo and the Empire State Building climbed by Kong, a
connection transgressive of the film’s diegetic boundaries. It is also, I
think, implicit in Denham’s decision to bring back from Skull Island,
132 M. MCGURL
Fig. 5.13 Kong’s assault on the Empire State Building
not photographic footage after all, but the beast himself. A woman in
the film, taking her seat in the theater for Denham’s show, thinks she
is going to see a movie until an usher tells her that what she will see
“is more in the nature of a personal appearance” (the very sort of char-
ismatic personal appearance that the anticorporate Huey Long, now
elected to the U.S. Senate, was at the time making in Washington, per-
ilously close by).39 King Kong’s “personal appearance” responds to the
demands of RCA that RKO exceed the boundaries of its own medium,
film, and its own locality, Hollywood, in service to the ends of the invis-
ible, New York-based corporate medium whose specialty was, after all,
the live broadcast. RKO does its master’s bidding but not without inter-
nalizing, with Kong’s self-sacrificial assault on the Empire State Building,
a scenario of oedipal rage, one of the best-known single images in film
history (Fig. 5.13).
By 1933, though, Sarnoff was already beginning to champion a new
medium that would combine the invisible breadth of broadcast with
the seductive power of the visible—television. And from his point of
view King Kong, in which radio makes itself seen, was in a sense avant
la broadcast, merely the first television show. Haver speculates, indeed,
that part of Sarnoff’s motive for founding RKO had been to develop an
image bank that could later be reinvested by RCA in, and as, television,
the medium that would finally, emphatically, end any claims for the cul-
tural dominance in America of the movies.40
In 1933, when King Kong was first hurled from the top of the Empire
State Building, Howard Armstrong, the eccentric individualist inventor,
boyish scaler of radio towers, was ordered by Sarnoff, finally unable to
stand the man, to remove his experimental FM broadcast apparatus from
the laboratory space RCA had rented at the top of that same Empire
State Building. (Why RCA couldn’t find space in its own tower uptown
is something to ponder.) When Armstrong had cleared out, all that
remained within the world’s highest spire, hundreds of feet above the
island of Manhattan, was the equipment being used by RCA, at the same
time, to develop television. In later years, after the war, when the helpless
fate of the Hollywood studio system was being sealed by, among other
things, the ascension to visibility of broadcast in New York, the spire of
the Empire State Building was in fact converted into a permanent tel-
evision broadcast tower, emitting the strongest television signal in the
world. This signal prophesied, in its heroic reach, the final erasure even
of the boundaries of corporate nationality. In our time, this prophecy has
become largely a reality, as the declared nationality of the media corpora-
tion of the twenties and thirties, which served the purpose of marketing
itself to America but also left the corporation open to the constant threat
of regulation by the federal government, has evolved in recent decades
into the increasingly unfettered multinational media entities of today.
We might then, finally, ask ourselves whether in that prophetic broad-
cast, emanating from atop the skyscraper, there wasn’t also a prediction
of the specific nature of more recent acts of architectural iconoclasm.
Would it be merely fanciful, for instance, or just too simple, to see in
recent events a sort of transformation, at several decades remove, of the
Empire State Building into the (comparatively modest) nine-story Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City?41 Did that building
become the target of angry white men because the sort of lessons taught
by texts such as King Kong—that there is a relation of identity between
the white worker and the corporation, that their problems are the same
problems, the fault at once of grasping minorities and a malevolently
obstructive federal government—have, by now, taken hold? Does King
Kong predict our own corporate populism, which is given purest voice,
notoriously, on talk radio? Is there a meaningful connection between
the corporate theology developed early in this century and, for instance,
the white theology of the Christian Identity movement? It is difficult to
134 M. MCGURL
say. A long and significant stretch of cultural history intervenes between

the two. And yet it is eerily suggestive, nonetheless, that for the militia
groups and others—groups whose demographic base is made up largely
of whites frozen out of the advances of the multinational corporate econ-
omy—it has become dogmatic truth that the building the God-fearing
American properly assaults in the nineties is no longer owned by the
corporation or the speculator, as the anticorporate populism of a Huey
Long would have had it, but by the government.
The anger of the white man has been vibrating in the Invisible Empire
of the Air, searching for its object, only to reappear on the television
screen as the charred, gutted hulk of the Federal Building after the blast.
The “cyclopean drama of forms” unveiled in King Kong may be visible,
in retrospect, as the ironic, conflicted, first step of big pictures into a
little box. It is not only for adherents to classical Hollywood theology,
though, for whom television will always only signal the End, but perhaps
for the rest of us, too, that King Kong might figure as a text of revela-
tion, a spectacular prophecy of apocalypse.
Postscript (2017)
Big, small, short, long, strong, weak: the terms by which the world is
qualitatively scaled operate in and across our entire experience of physi-
cal reality, measuring units of space, time, and force in whatever form
they are found to be relevant. Matters of scale are everywhere, and are
everywhere relative, positively or negatively, to a presumed norm. And
yet if only by way of its overbearing obnoxiousness and centrality to the
experience of industrial and post-industrial modernity, bigness has always
seemed to me the king of scalar concepts, the one by which the problem
of scale as such is most likely to be noticed as a problem. So in any case
did it seem to me when this essay was first written a number of years
ago. I was helped toward this view by the occasion of its writing: a study
of the medium of film, and more specifically of classical Hollywood cin-
ema. Inspired in different ways by Michael Fried, who got me thinking
about the theorization of painterly modernism associated with Clement
Greenberg, and Jerome Christensen, who was beginning to teach his
students to see the films of the studio era as occasions for corporate
authorship, the bigness of the movies seemed an element at once of their
medium specificity and of their cultural-political meaning.
Little did I know that the problem of bigness was not done with
me, and would return again and again in my later work even as it
drifted far beyond the study of images on the big screen. Reading this
essay on King Kong in light of that more recent work, and in light also
of the work of many other scholars who had already been or would
soon take up the question of scale in other ways, I notice losses and
gains. What has been lost? For one thing, the tricky question of dimen-
sionality as a question of scale: we speak easily of something’s “dimen-
sions,” its size, but in a way this essay takes up fairly colorfully, that
term also points toward the limits of our ordinary Euclidean standards
for understanding scale. That there might be “higher” dimensions than
the ones we know from ordinary experience is an idea possessed of real
mathematical seriousness and, in some quarters, starry-eyed kookiness,
but the way it complicates scalar theory bears further thought than I
have given it since. What has been gained since the writing of this essay
is an awareness of two disciplines of thought, complexity theory—
specifically a sub-variant thereof sometimes called hierarchy theory—
and mathematical biology, in both of which the question of scale is
addressed with particular intellectual intensity and consequence, even
more so, I think, than in the equally scale-obsessed discipline of cul-
tural geography.42 Without, alas, having found entirely satisfying ways
to bridge the gap between these bodies of scientific theory and the
more or less hermeneutic ones that guide our work in the humani-
ties, I have found in them an inspiration to think more deeply about
the often occluded but everywhere extant hinge between quantity and
quality, fact and value.
As for the cultural political situation in which this essay was writ-
ten: stunned as it was by a then-recent act of home-grown terrorism
in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, it had not yet borne witness either to the world-historical act of
architectural iconoclasm that was 9/11, when an international terrorist
group took aim at the World Trade Center as a symbol of U.S. hegem-
ony, or to the tragicomic rebranding of Trump Tower as an edifice of
global kleptocratic political significance. And yet, as far as it goes, the
essay’s analysis of the politics of scale and corporate culture from the
1930s to the 1990s still seems to me essentially correct and uncannily
relevant even now. All our Kongs continue to climb, and continue to
be shot down.
136 M. MCGURL
Notes
1. Ferriss, 15.
2. Davis, xv.
3. Lewis, 1, 6; quoting de Forest, 4.
4. On the populist, adolescent male culture of early radio, see Douglas,
187–215. A related and helpful account of the cultural milieu of early
science fiction is available in Ross, Strange Weather, 101–35. A helpful
account of the social-historical background of nineteenth-century “elec-
tricity culture” is found in Marvin.
5. Pupin, 18, 17.
6. Qtd. in Goldberger, 47.
7. H. James, 40, 38: a reprint of the New York City portions of The
American Scene (1907), first published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in
1906. James finds it “stupefying” that it was the Trinity churchwardens
themselves who sold the property upon which was built Trinity’s neigh-
boring monster.
8. van Leeuwen, 9.
9. Bragdon, Frozen Fountain, 25.
10. White, 51; qtd. in Lewis, 231.
11. A fine account of the cultural history of the fourth dimension, with an
emphasis on the visual arts, is found in Henderson. A well-known
exception to the figuring of the fourth dimension as higher space is
H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), which figures the fourth dimen-
sion as time.
12. Arnold, 42; qtd. in Smulyan, 87.
13. See Michael Rogin’s chapter, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision:
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” on the representational/racial
politics of this film (“Ronald Reagan,” 190–235). King Kong seems to
refer to Griffith obliquely when Denham asks his would-be leading lady
Ann Darrow (a name that itself recalls Clarence Darrow, the defense
attorney in the Scopes trial of 1925) if she has had any acting experience.
Darrow (Fay Wray) tells Denham that she was once an extra at the film
studio out on Long Island before it was shut down. This would have
been Griffith’s own studio in Mamoroneck, which had indeed finally shut
down a few years before King Kong was made. On the Darwinist back-
drop of the film, see Carroll.
14. Bragdon, Primer, plate 12.
15. I say “complicatedly” tied to crank philosophy because there was not una-
nimity, on the part of the spiritualists—many of them tied to socialist politi-
cal causes—about what the skyscrapers signified. Bragdon himself was wont
to be disappointed by skyscrapers that seemed to him too beholden to
merely practical, financial concerns—his ideal being the marriage of aes-

thetic and practical need, or what he called, after Emerson, the “beautiful
necessity.” The left-oriented spiritualists were at times confronted with the
fact that their transcendental aesthetic was assimilable to the ends of “posi-
tivist” commerce, which with their own tools could now express itself as a
transcendental business religion. Van Leeuwen speculates that the eclipse of
Bragdon’s reputation was caused in part by his declared ties to Theosophy,
which eventually became an embarrassment. See van Leeuwen, 125.
16. Cheney, 316, 321.
17. Ibid., 374.
18. To do that one would have to be able to envision not merely three mutu-
ally perpendicular lines, such as those that meet in the corner of a room,
but four mutually perpendicular lines. For cube to become a hypercube,
one has to imagine that the cube could extend in a direction perpendicu-
lar to all of its surfaces.
19. It may seem odd to say that Christianity “demanded” that God be embod-
ied—why not simply “believed” that he was embodied?—but a glance at the
early history of Christianity, such as can be found in Pagels, demonstrates
that the notion that Jesus was literally embodied, and was resurrected bodily
from the dead, was won at the cost of intense debate and factional splinter-
ing between early Christian groups, and that the notion of his literal embodi-
ment underwrote the claims to authority of the early orthodox church.
20. The mutual implication of the abstraction and the individual, here, where
the abstraction produces the individual, is a reversible, which is to say dia-
lectical, relation. Tennyson, for instance, described his capacity to attain
mystical states in the following terms:
[They have] come upon me through repeating my own name to
myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve
and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state
but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—
where death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of per-
sonality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.
(Qtd. in W. James, 346)
For the immortal corporation, too, death would be a “laughable impos-
sibility,” and the dialectic of abstraction and individuality, visible in the
RCA Building, would secure at once this mystical sense of immortality
and at the same time RCA’s individuality.
21. Paul Goldberger notes that “the [RCA] tower top was intended to sug-
gest radio waves, and indeed it does so, or at least the physical image
of radio waves as it existed in the public imagination in the days of that
138 M. MCGURL
medium’s youth; what is remarkable is how much the crown also suggests
traditional Gothic spires, and how little contradiction one feels between
these things” (73).
22. Hence one of the more far-reaching and powerful lies of our times: that
of the political right in claiming to be for the “free market” and against
“government interference,” when in fact an elaborate and titanically
expensive system of corporate preferences, tax breaks, and so on—that is,
“corporate welfare”—is the single greatest drain on our national finan-
cial resources, dwarfing the expenditures on social programs and aid to
the poor that have been targeted by Republicans recently for budget cuts.
See, for instance, a recent, brief analysis by Tidrick.
In a remarkably literal exemplification of this dynamic, which
R. Jeffrey Lustig has called “corporate liberalism,” where corporate
entities do not so much respond to the demands of government as the
reverse—making of the corporations a kind of quasi-governmental
entity—the owners of the Empire State Building hired as their front-
man in the erection of the building the former governor of New York,
Al Smith. One imagines that some of the appeal of Smith, who knew
nothing about buildings, was that he reinforced, as a governor-turned-
employee, the symbolic reversal of the relative powers of government and
capital that Lustig investigates. On Smith’s role in the organization that
built the Empire State Building, see T. James, Jr., 92–109.
23. See Haver, 66. Haver’s extremely detailed production history of King
Kong has been immensely helpful to this project.
24. Allport and Cantril, vii.
25. Ibid., 16.
26. Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, inducing mass
hysteria, would soon expose the limitations of the 1935 view.
27. See Foucault, pt. 1. This problematic, figuring in the context of
American politics, is given even more extensive treatment, I discover, in
Rogin’s chapter, “The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, and
Presidential Self-Sacrifice” (“Ronald Reagan,” 81–115).
28. Specifically, King Kong’s ancient wall had been the gates to DeMille’s
Temple of Jerusalem, where the devil tempts Jesus, in the gospels of
Matthew and Luke, to prove his divinity by taking a Kong-like leap off
the temple’s parapet.
29. See Higashi.
30. The relative lack of race-baiting in Long’s political career seems to have
been more pragmatic than principled. See, for example, Wilkins’ inter-
view with Huey Long, 41, 52; reprinted in Graham, 75–79.
31. Bossom, op. 119, 9, 105.
32. Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 417. Other essays in this series include
“‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’” and the recent “‘Democracy
and Burnt Cork’: The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights.”
33. Nonetheless, a fine, detailed analysis of King Kong as an allegory of race
relations can be found in Snead, 1–36. It would be wrong, I think, to
say that because the main force of the use of the racial/racist techne is
directed somewhere else that it does not function, at the same time, in
the field of black/white race relations as such. Indeed the film Emperor
Jones (1932, from the Eugene O’Neill play)—which traces the fate of
an African American (Paul Robeson) who, fleeing from the police finds
his way to an island, there to set himself up as “Emperor,” only to be
brought down by his own greed and the torment of primitive psychic
spirits—seems heavily invested in the history of race relations as such, and
is in some ways a striking precursor to King Kong, from the following
year.
34. Haver, 76.
35. Bragdon, Primer, 65.
36. Haver, 70.
37. See Forman.
38. Haver, 101.
39. In a somewhat similar fashion, I discover, Robert Torry sees the Bonus
March on Washington of 1932 as the kind of threat to which King Kong
imaginatively responds. See Torry.
40. See Haver, 66.
41. Another pertinent example is, of course, the bombing of the World Trade
Center in 1993, a building climbed by a Kong remake in the seventies.
At first glance, this bombing looks complementary to the bombing of
the Federal Building in a telling way: nowadays, in other words, it is only
professedly anti-American “foreigners” who attack the center of com-
merce, while the “patriotic” militia groups choose the site of the regu-
lation of commerce, the Federal Building. This picture is complicated,
though, by the fact that the World Trade Center, while conceived by
business leaders, was in fact in the end financed by public funds and is
administered by the Port Authority; it is a signal instance, that is, of “cor-
porate liberalism,” of government putting itself in the service of business,
the latter managing to figure itself as representing not one interest, but
the “public interest.” The case of the World Trade Center bombing is
given extensive treatment in Andrew Ross’s chapter, “Bombing the Big
Apple” (Chicago Gangster Theory, 99–158).
42. See, for instance, Ahl and Allen, and Thompson.
140 M. MCGURL
Works Cited
Ahl, Valerie and T. F. H. Allen. Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary and
Epistemology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Allport, Gordon W., and Hadley Cantril. The Psychology of Radio. New York:
Peter Smith, 1935.
Bossom, Alfred C. Building to the Skies: The Romance of the Skyscraper. London:
The Studio Publications, 1934.
Bragdon, Claude. A Primer of Higher Space: The Fourth Dimension. 2d revised
ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.
———. The Frozen Fountain: Being Essays on Architecture and the Art of Design
in Space. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932.
Carroll, Noel. “King Kong: Ape and Essence.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the
Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 215–44. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1984.
Cheney, Sheldon. Expressionism in Art. New York: Tudor, 1934.
Davis, Harry P. Foreword to Frank A. Arnold, Broadcast Advertising: The Fourth
Dimension. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1931.
de Forest, Lee. The Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest. Chicago:
Wilcox and Follett, 1950.
Douglas, Susan J. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow. 1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1986.
Forman, Henry James. Our Movie Made Children. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Goldberger, Paul. The Skyscraper. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Graham, Hugh Davis, ed. Huey Long. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1970.
Haver, Ronald. David 0. Selznick’s Hollywood. New York: Knopf, 1980.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean
Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
James, Henry. New York Revisited. New York: Franklin Square, 1994.
James, Theodore, Jr. The Empire State Building. New York: Harper and Row,
1975.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.
1902. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: Harper
Collins, 1991.
Lustig, R. Jeffrey. Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American

Political Theory, 1890–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric
Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Pupin, Michael. The New Reformation: From Physical to Spiritual Realities. New
York: Scribner, 1924.
Rogin, Michael. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His
Voice.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 417–453.
———. “‘Democracy and Burnt Cork’: The End of Blackface, the Beginning of
Civil Rights.” Representations 46 (Spring 1994): 1–34.
———. “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of
Limits. New York: Verso, 1991.
———. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society. New York:
Verso, 1994.
Smulyan, Susan. Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting
1920–1934. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Snead, James. White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. Edited
by Colin McCabe and Cornel West. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. 1917. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Tidrick, Steve. “The Budget Inferno.” The New Republic (May 29, 1995):
17–25.
Torry, Robert. “‘You Can’t Look Away’: Spectacle and Transgression in King
Kong.” Arizona Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 61–77.
van Leeuwen, Thomas A. P. The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the
American Skyscraper. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
White, E. B. “Sabbath Morn.” In One Man’s Meat. New York: Harper and Bros.,
1944.
Wilkins, Roy. Interview with Huey Long. The Crisis 42 (Feb. 1935): 41, 52.
CHAPTER 6
The Stature of Man: Population Bomb

on Spaceship Earth
Joan Lubin
The “Anthropocene” gives a new name to a phenomenon a long time in

the making. This essay suggests the aesthetic and epistemological rami-
fications of this epochal designation are likewise newly visible, but not
altogether new. The essay delineates the forms and functions of a set of
cultural texts of the 1940s to the 1970s that prefigure the scalar analytics
envisioned by recent discussions of climate change in the humanities. In
tracing this history, one finds not a line of descent tethering this moment
to that one, but rather a series of inversions, discursive condensations,
and detours into the figurative, operating under the sign of “stature” and
running up against the limits of the earth.
In 1963, a “Symposium on Space” convened to address the question
“Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?” The
arrayed answers form the centerpiece of Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1963
volume of The Great Ideas Today, the yearbook series designed to evalu-
ate the relevance of “the great books of the western world” to the most
pressing concerns of the given year. Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley,
Paul Tillich, Herbert Muller, and Harrison Brown each take a shot at
J. Lubin (*) 
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_6
144 J. Lubin
answering this question. A reprint of Thomas Malthus’s famous essay on

population closes the volume. In the volume’s twinned obsessions with
Sputnik and Malthus, space and population, hanging under the sign
of “stature,” one finds an organizing impulse of mid-century thinking
about the scaling of man to planet. This essay follows a line of thinking
out of The Great Ideas Today, shifting its focus from “the conquest of
space” to “the stature of man.” In so doing it grounds the cosmological
anxieties of the space race on the Earth as the parametric condition of
human life, attending to those domestic narratives of diminution, on the
one hand, and population explosion, on the other, that set the poten-
tial to colonize other planets to one side in favor of a thorough-going
account of the terrestrial effects of exceeding the Earth—be it by space-
ship or resource depletion.
While scholarship from a number of disciplinary perspectives has
elaborated the spatial imaginary of the social sciences and literatures of
the mid-twentieth century that invest newly in data and mathematical
formalism to describe the built environments containing and support-
ing human social life, this essay scales up once more to consider the spa-
tialized and scalar logics of human climes writ large: the anthropogenic
climate change that is remaking both the planet itself and our concep-
tual tools for making sense of the human species’ relationship to it. The
Anthropocene is the newest proposed geological epoch, dated to the
moment when human influence on the planet becomes readable in the
stratigraphic record. The International Commission on Stratigraphy has
yet to endorse an official periodization, but a majority contingent of its
Anthropocene Working Group has proposed pinning the moment to
the first nuclear bomb detonation, the Trinity nuclear test of July 16,
1945, conducted by the US Army at Alamogordo.1 Recent humanities
approaches to thinking the Anthropocene have attempted to make sense
of its consequences by historicizing conceptions of weather, climate,
ecology, eschatology, or by theorizing agency at scale—be it through
very large or very small inhuman units like icebergs, tectonic plates, bac-
teria, or microorganisms, or by reconceptualizing the locus of exertion
of human agency as the species or supra-individual collectivity. In what
follows, I take a different tack, elaborating instead an account of the
planet conceived as a form in which human life can be made to flourish.
In the history that underpins this account, the planet is taken as a natu-
rally given form reconfigured as a technology for supporting human life:
“spaceship earth.”2
6 THE STATURE OF MAN: POPULATION BOMB ON SPACESHIP EARTH 145
Figured as a spaceship, the earth is a fragile form under threat

of buckling from without or busting from within by dint of human
hubris—the outsizing of human existence relative to the planet that sus-
tains and contains human life. Spaceship earth is manned by a human
crew of variable size and stature, in possession of divergent but comple-
mentary skillsets that must be expertly aggregated and properly scaled
in order to keep the intricate form of the planetary vessel intact. This
image is ubiquitous in science fiction plots at mid-century, but perhaps
in exemplary form in Richard Fleischer’s film (and Isaac Asimov’s famous
novelization of the same) Fantastic Voyage (1966) in the team of astro-
nauts, surgeons, biologists, and weapons experts radically scaled-down
for their “fantastic voyage” into the human bloodstream aboard a space-
ship shrunken and repurposed for travel in resolutely human climes—
the viscera. Outer space is refigured as visceral interior, as the spaceship
meant for travel in the former is scaled down to traverse the latter. The
chimeric entanglement of these two scales, outer space and human inte-
rior, is emblematized by the new universality of the spaceship as both
conveyor and protector of human life, no matter the terrain: a vehicular
planetarity. It also underwrites the crux of the plot, in which the fate of a
world under threat of nuclear eradication rests upon the eradication of a
blood clot in the body of the one man with the knowledge to disarm the
bomb. That is to say, planetary survival is contingent upon the removal
of micro-obstructions to the scaling-up of human knowledge.
To put this slightly differently, Fantastic Voyage illustrates the his-
torical transition between organic and mechanistic models of the social
world that forms the backdrop to the discourse of the stature of man
that this essay charts. The consolidation in the early 1960s of the fig-
ure of “spaceship earth” manned by a human crew tasked with keeping
everything in proper proportion knits together the ecological, economic,
and aesthetic in a common logic of system and scale. Like the contem-
poraneous figuration of society as an organism with its attendant eco-
logical theories of social formation and social deviance, but operating at
several greater orders of magnitude, the figure of spaceship earth encodes
ecological thinking at a planetary scale. By scaling-up and away from
the organic model in favor of a technological one, “spaceship earth”
as a conceptual model attempts to clean up the improperly algorithmic
logic of the social sciences of the preceding decades, still in the thrall
of the biological, by reconceiving the earth as a technology of life-sup-
port rather than a biological system. The equilibrium that the planet
146 J. Lubin
must maintain is thus reconceived as a problem of mathematical dis-

tribution (of resources and the populations that consume and produce
them) rather than homeostatic regulation of competing sub-systems, as
it was for the structural-functionalist founders of US social theory of the
early twentieth century. The locus of responsibility for maintaining this
balance is also relocated from the social world as an autonomously oper-
ating organic system to its constituents; the earth is reconceived as the
sustaining ground and precarious charge of its human inhabitants. But
born of these shifts—the aggrandizement of human ecology and human
responsibility—is a new uncertainty about the stature of man, at once
puny with respect to a newly expansive world and grotesquely bloated
with newly staggering power over that world.
In what follows I collate the discourses of population bomb and space
race as the two most substantial attempts in the twentieth century to
assay the limits of the earth.3 Their affiliation is consolidated through a
set of examples that explicitly grapple with the relationship between pop-
ulation, space, and planetary limits, and that utilize a figure of stature to
think this conjunction of terms. This figure operates unevenly and some-
times simultaneously as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or absolute
literalization, synchronically bridging otherwise quite disparate modes
and genres and bringing a complex conjunction of concepts into view.
I find in this account of a conjoined population bomb and space race
discourse a commitment to the Earth as absolute limit that makes these
texts both precursors of and resources for the kind of thinking neces-
sitated by the Anthropocene. This allows us to reframe the conversation
as one about the parametric and the scalar—rather than the catastrophic
and the tragic. I propose that the discourse of the Anthropocene in the
humanities be organized not around the history of science and the future
of humanism, but rather the history of stature4 and the future of formal-
ism. This is to say that the opposition between humanism and scient-
ism that is explicitly articulated in the historical discourse on space and
planet, and inadvertently shored up in the contemporary one, is a false
opposition, and an analytically mystifying one.
Part of the crux of its mystification resides in the changing fates of
formalism, articulated historically as a scientific analytical procedure con-
sisting in the conversion of linguistic meaning into pattern, sequence,
and structure, and leveraged now quite differently (as its moniker in lit-
erary studies, “the new formalism,” announces) as a riposte to the oust-
ing of close reading by the arrayed methodologies of the “quantitative
turn,” chief among them those that fall under the penumbra of the digi-
tal humanities. That is to say, formalism has mediated between human-
ism and scientism over the whole arc of the history I trace here, but
where initially it marked a fearful encroachment of the coldly scientistic
into the properly humanistic province of narrative meaning-making, it
now serves as a bulwark against the encroachment of the scientistic into
the very same humanistic terrain. I inquire in what follows after a for-
malism that would refrain from reinscribing an ideologically freighted
opposition between an embattled humanism and a destructively hegem-
onic scientism. By reading the figuration of human stature in population
bomb and spaceship earth discourses together, I historicize humanism in
terms of a moment in which it was being heartily opposed to a fearfully
scientistic mathematical formalism in order to analytically disentangle
formalism from the grips of a spuriously moralized debate between these
false poles.
In the philosophical discourse on planetary limits in the early years
of the Cold War, formalism is always already wedded to the scientistic
abstractions of the mathematical, which stands accused of displacing
the humanism of the linguistic, and there was perhaps no more prolific
accuser than Hannah Arendt. I will return to her work in greater detail
in closing, but I will begin with it now in order to consider the framing
function granted to her in a much-cited essay by Dipesh Chakrabarty,
whose two essays on the Anthropocene from 2009 and 2012 have
quickly become the most discussed of the humanities contributions to
the discourse of the conceptual consequences of anthropogenic climate
change.5
In the more recent of these essays, “Postcolonial Studies and the
Challenge of Climate Change,” Chakrabarty routes his closing thoughts
through a brief reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958),
the prologue of which meditates on the significance of Sputnik’s 1957
launch into the Earth’s orbit and the possibility it represented of
“escap[ing] from man’s imprisonment to the earth,” as Arendt (quot-
ing an unnamed newspaper) puts it.6 Chakrabarty invokes Arendt’s read-
ing of Sputnik as a way of tracking the distance between the 1950s and
the present, finding that the “fateful repudiation of the Earth”7 that
Arendt hypothesized “has come in a shape Arendt could not have even
imagined in the optimistic and modernizing 1950s.”8 Global warm-
ing, Chakrabarty writes in the final sentence of this essay, marks a “pro-
found change in the human condition,” a change that provokes many
148 J. Lubin
of the same questions that Arendt broached in 1958, but that portends
entirely different answers, free of what Chakrabarty identifies as her
“optimism regarding the survival of the human species”9—because the
Anthropocene admits of no optimism on this count.
But while Sputnik may signal the first “step toward escape from man’s
imprisonment to the earth,” the repudiation of the earth that Arendt
cites is in fact twofold, consisting of a flight from both earth and world:
the “modern world” was “born” not with Sputnik, but “with the first
atomic explosions,” and the “alienation” that characterizes this modern
world consists in a “twofold flight from the earth into the universe and
from the world into the self.”10 Both of these lines of flight derive from
the inadequacy of human speech to the new conditions of the modern
world, from the “trouble” that “the ‘truths’ of the modern scientific
world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formu-
las and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal
expression in speech and thought.”11 This entails the problem “that we,
who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were
dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is,
to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to
do.”12
Given these newly cosmic climes, in which “earth-bound
creatures” behave as if universe-dwellers, Arendt reluctantly concludes, as
Chakrabarty also does, that the newly modified human condition renders
Marxism inadequate to a politically astute account of the present. The
new relation each author identifies between humankind and the earth
precipitates the need for as yet unavailable vocabularies. Arendt is hardly
optimistic about the likelihood of cultivating such vocabularies; in her
estimation, it seems likely that speaking and doing “have parted com-
pany for good.”13 But what “we are able to do” in Arendt’s estimation
is not just launch Sputnik into the orbit of the earth, or leave earth for
some other post in the universe, but rather, and more pressingly, deto-
nate atomic bombs that would obliterate the earth and ourselves. This
is the difference she draws between the “modern age” and the “mod-
ern world”—the age began with the Enlightenment; the world came
into being with the bomb, and it will cease being with it, too.14 However
“optimistic” Arendt may be about “the survival of the human species,”
her optimism is set against the ground of a modern world “born with the
first atomic explosions,” a world “against whose background [her] book
was written.”15
Chakrabarty notes in his earlier essay on climate, “The Climate of

History: Four Theses,” that “the anxiety global warming gives rise to is
reminiscent of the days when many feared a global nuclear war.”16 But
he is quick to note that the two are distinguished from one another by “a
very important difference”: while “nuclear war would have been a con-
scious decision on the part of the powers that be,” global warming “is
an unintended consequence . . . of our actions as a species.”17 While it
is fair to say that global warming cannot be detonated in the same way
that a bomb can, it is precisely Arendt’s point that the existence of the
atomic bomb is an “unintended consequence of our actions as a spe-
cies,” or as she puts it, of the “thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness
or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have
become trivial and empty,” a habit which she counts “among the out-
standing characteristics of our time”—a scientistic formalism run amok.18
As a species we have endorsed a scientific program that exceeds our abil-
ity to articulate our actions in speech. The product of this program is
an “unintended consequence” insofar as it exceeds human powers of
intention: the bomb inaugurates the moment in which “know-how” and
“knowledge” “have parted company for good.” That is, anxiety about
the threat of global nuclear war prefigures the anxiety about global
warming not just in its apocalyptic posthuman imagining, but also in the
phenomenological rendering of human species-being that it inspired in
mid-century narratives that take the bomb as the parametric condition of
“all thinking about the present.”19
As Arendt writes, and as Chakrabarty cites, in the possibility for the
repudiation of the earth represented by Sputnik, and more ominously
by the bomb, science had landed upon a thought that “up to then
had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fic-
tion.”20 I propose that one such burial site is Richard Matheson’s The
Shrinking Man, and his film adaptation of the same as The Incredible
Shrinking Man the following year—the year of Sputnik’s launch. These
stories imagine not the repudiation of the earth that Arendt locates in
Sputnik, but rather the repudiation of the earth that Chakrabarty locates
in climate change. I turn to the 1950s not to track the distance between
that moment and this one, but rather to track the continuity between
Matheson’s figures of the human and Chakrabarty’s. I take these texts
less as exemplars of the repressed political unconscious of either their
moment or the present one, and instead read them as manifest for-
malizations of the conceptualizations put forth and called for by recent
150 J. Lubin
humanistic attempts to think the present through global warming, and as

such, as complications of them.
There are few more dogged narrativizations of an asymptotic logic
than Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, the 1956 novel that
Matheson adapted into the screenplay for Jack Arnold’s better-known
film version of 1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man.21 Where the film
sticks to straight chronological sequence, the novel proceeds as an
extended inhabitation of the brink of “zero,” intercut with flashbacks
to taller times, titled only with the number of inches of its protagonist’s
height. He shrinks “a seventh of an inch a day, as precise as clockwork.
He could have devised a mathematical system on the absolute constancy
of his descent into inevitable nothingness.”22 This decline, plotted on a
Cartesian plane, would make for the simplest of lines, descending arith-
metically from a y-value of seventy-two inches by one-seventh of an inch
per day, ticked off along the x-axis. But such a line, unchecked, come the
504th day, would pass cleanly through zero and into the negative. That’s
all well and good for a line, but what of the man upon whose diminution
this “mathematical system” has been devised?
The great revelation at the end of novel and film alike is that what
had seemed like an inexorable march towards the nothingness of death
turns out in fact to be an asymptotic approach towards subsumption
into the earth. But instead of disappearing into oblivion, the shrink-
ing man simply disappears from the world of human perception into
the “new world” of geological being (in the novel) or the cosmic ether
(in the film), tracking both sides of Arendt’s prophesied “twofold flight
from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self.”23
Ultimately these prove to be conceptually one and the same. The novel
ends this way:
Last night he’d looked up at the universe without. Then there must be a
universe within, too. Maybe universes. . . . He’d always thought in terms
of man’s own world and man’s own limited dimensions. He had presumed
upon nature. For the inch was man’s concept, not nature’s. To a man, zero
inches meant nothing. Zero meant nothing. But to nature there was no
zero. . . . Suddenly he began running toward the light. . . . Scott Carey ran
into his new world, searching.24
While the diminishment of the shrinking man’s size may be arithme-

tic, decreasing linearly in even increments, the warping of his scale is
logarithmic, becoming exponentially more distant from the human per-

ceptual scale of “man’s own world” as he approaches “zero” and finds
“his new world” organized around “nature’s” concepts, rather than
man’s. That is to say, “reality was relative,” and one-seventh of an inch
means a lot more to a shrinking man on day 497, when he’s one inch
tall, than it does on day one, when in fact he fails to register any change
at all. (It takes him weeks to notice he’s shrinking.) The Shrinking Man
thus dramatizes both the difference between size and scale, and the link-
age between the geological and the cosmic, through the mathematical
formalism of the asymptote and the perspectival aesthetics of scale. The
ever-receding and expanding bounds of “man’s own limited dimensions”
are capable finally of encompassing the cosmos itself as man and geology
are enfolded into one another.
This obsession with the asymptote, with how close one might come
to a limit without ever reaching it, with how long one might defer
the moment of contact with a parametric condition or extend the tail
of one’s curve along its side—this obsession, that is, with logistic func-
tions and logarithmic scales, with depicting and imagining the scaling of
time and space, people and planet, to their joint limit—this is a formal
feature yoking population bomb and space race to one another in the
post-World War II period as part of an effort to cultivate models for cali-
brating the scale of man to planet.
“‘Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?’
These ten simple words are pregnant with almost as many major prob-
lems in semantics.”25 Aldous Huxley opens his contribution to the
“Symposium on Space” with this disheartening observation, resituat-
ing the discussion (like any good scholar invited to weigh in on some-
one else’s program) as an inquiry into the semantics of its organizing
question. Huxley determines in short order that this question, to put it
bluntly, makes no sense. Or rather, it makes too much sense, as each of
its constituent terms signifies in several directions at once. After taking
great pains to enumerate these “major problems,” Huxley distills them
into a fundamental inconsistency in the meaning of “man,” as animal-
species versus human-culture, its two modes pitted at cross-purposes
insofar as “man, the species, is now living as a parasite upon an earth
which acculturated man is in the process of conquering to the limit—and
the limit is total destruction.”26 Born of this conflict is another: accul-
turated man, “preoccupied . . . with new worlds to conquer,” is “apt to
forget that [the] much-touted Space Age is also the Age of Exploding
152 J. Lubin
Populations.”27 And indeed, this link has largely been forgotten in the
decades since Huxley’s diagnosis.
For their part, the editors of “A Symposium on Space” note in their
introduction that the question of “the conquest of space” is already
passé, even though, in 1963, it has yet to really happen. The real ques-
tion is “the stature of man.”28 This is the pressing issue behind the end-
less debates over space travel; this is the question that transcends the
boredom of the cold war framework that reduces everything to a sym-
bolic contest between US and Soviet powers. If we grant “the stature of
man” abstract meaning that “the conquest of space” has come to lack,
then we apprehend the population bomb as a problem at once newly
enveloped in the cold war framework, and newly meaningful beyond it.
The “conquest of space” is, in this view, nearly a synonym for “popu-
lation explosion”; it is just a matter of whether the “space” at hand is
extra-terrestrial or squarely Earth-bound. “The stature of man” is like-
wise double, a figure for moral fortitude as well as for a species grown
too large for its plot.
By the time the title of Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling The Population
Bomb became a catch-phrase for the population crisis of the 1970s, the
space-race framework that the Britannica editors were eager to reconfig-
ure had been largely sloughed off, and lost with it was the link between
the “Space Age” and the “Age of Exploding Populations” upon which
Huxley had so vehemently insisted. When The Population Bomb landed
on bookshelves in 1968, it did not inaugurate a discourse so much as it
condensed one.29 Ehrlich’s book trained the course of population dis-
course towards conservationist, birth control, and policy efforts, and
away from social hygiene and communist containment. (It’s easier to talk
about conserving resources than it is to talk about brainwashing popula-
tions, or eradicating them.) But in so doing, The Population Bomb did its
part to obscure the tangled origins of population discourse in nationalist
catastrophizing, imperial eugenics, and big business lobbying efforts that
saw the population explosion as bad for the maintenance of capitalism’s
globally distributed inequalities, and bad for the “stable-state econom-
ics” that would come to acquire many other names, including, a decade
later, “spaceship earth.”30
Ehrlich’s title is a citation of entrepreneur Hugh Moore’s (1954)
pamphlet by the same name, which advises vigilance against “the
deadly triangle of War, Communism and World Population,” and warns
that “Today the population bomb threatens to create an explosion as
dangerous as the explosion of the H bomb, and with as much influ-

ence on prospects for progress or disaster, war or peace. But while the
H bomb is only being stockpiled, the fuse of the population bomb is
already lighted and burning.”31 Moore’s clarion call explicitly links the
population bomb to the H bomb, nominating both as world historic
threats to the “progress” of humankind. In this framework the Cold
War imperative of communist containment becomes coterminous with a
US imperial eugenic project. Moore’s pamphlet recasts the cold war as a
struggle over the parametric conditions of human life, not just compet-
ing ideological frameworks. Those parameters are set out between popu-
lation bomb and H bomb, two figures with the potential to obliterate
humankind at unprecedented scale.
Ehrlich’s book issued from a line of postwar population explosion dis-
course of which Moore’s pamphlet is but one part. This discourse is per-
haps best exemplified by two best-sellers of 1948, Fairfield Osborn’s Our
Plundered Planet, and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. Vogt described
man’s relation to the earth this way: “The human race is caught in a situ-
ation as concrete as a pair of shoes two sizes too small.”32 Vogt figures
the human population of the planet as a man outgrowing his vestments,
but new ones are not an option. If the human race’s feet are to be loosed
from its crowded shoes, it must trade them in for a new foothold in the
earth itself. Human thinking likewise must reckon with the material sub-
strate of the planet as “total environment” to which our “philosophies”
must be scaled. Closing out a long paragraph of rousing exhortation to
epistemological reconfiguration, Vogt writes: “Our philosophies must be
rewritten to remove them from the domain of words and ‘ideas,’ and to
plant their roots firmly in the earth. Above all, we must weigh our place
in the society of nations and our future through the decades to come in
the scale of our total environment.”33
Fairfield Osborn, in his best-seller of the same year, Our Plundered
Planet, shares Vogt’s commitment to weighing the place of the human
race “in the scale of our total environment,” but he scales up considera-
bly, proposing that “we can best comprehend the human situation today
if we first peer through the long vistas of space and time.”34 Osborn’s
name for this maneuver is “the long view,” for “perspective sometimes
provides its own insight.”35 The insight that perspective provides in this
case is that “our home, the earth, is one of the smallest of the nine plan-
ets that belong to a star that we call the sun.”36 However, “the sun is,
in fact, a relatively insignificant star” when set against the scale of the
154 J. Lubin
galaxy, and our galaxy in turn is relatively insignificant when contextu-

alized in the universe as a whole—a whole the size and scale of which
are inconceivable to the human mind.37 Osborn’s “long view” entails a
rhetorical zooming out, away from “our home” and from the teeming
populations of mankind who inhabit it, in order to reconfigure the earth
as a small and vulnerable planet precariously occupying a tiny corner of
an inconceivably vast universe. The earth, that is, must be coddled like
the “newborn babes,” “the children of the earth,” 175,000 of whom are
daily “freed from the darkness of their mothers’ wombs” to become “day
after day a living part of the environment into which each of them has
come.”38 Like Vogt, Osborn locates his proposed solution in a feedback
loop yoking man to planet in a shared struggle to persist in the indiffer-
ent darkness of extraterrestrial space, a line of thought linking Osborn to
the figure of spaceship earth to come.
Viewed long, the earth is scaled down. As Osborn puts it, “so it is that
the earth is constantly becoming smaller, or rather our knowledge of it is
leading us to think of it as diminishing rapidly, which, after all, amounts
to one and the same thing.”39 The recasting of material condition as
epistemological effect that this characterization performs allows Osborn’s
ultimate designation of “The New Geologic Force: Man” to stand as
both figure and fact, describing the power of the species to alter the
geology of its home planet as well as inaugurating a conceptual schema
that constitutively binds man and planet to one another.40 “Man” is
redefined by apposition in geologic terms—strikingly prefiguring con-
temporary critical reconfigurations of “agency” in the era of climate
change that relocate human agency at the geologic scale.41 Osborn’s
articulation of man and geology prefigures this turn of thought, but until
it sinks in, the human race is but a “plunderer” of a precarious planet.
This disposition towards the earth, as a vulnerable system in need of a
steward but inhabited only by a naturally reckless crowd, would come in
the ensuing decades to be crystallized in the image of “spaceship earth,”
a phrase coined in the late 1960s across the writings of Buckminster
Fuller, Adlai Stevenson, Kenneth Boulding, and Barbara Ward. Aboard
spaceship earth, humankind must imagine itself as a species working in
concert among its ranks and with the planet to pilot a course through
the time and space of the universe. The species and the planet that sus-
tains it, and that it must in turn sustain, float free in the infinite abyss,
with only each other to cling to. This is a different imaginary than the
hubristic vision conjured by Vogt—man too big for his britches, and
earth embarrassingly buckling under his load—but it shares this figure’s

investment in describing a planetary limit, and in staking the definition
of the planetary on its parameters. The planet becomes imaginable as
an object of care and concern insofar as it is represented as the enabling
container of human thriving.
One can still hear echoes of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual
for Spaceship Earth in the contemporary literature about climate change,
as for instance in a 2009 report authored by a team of climatologists
including Paul Crutzen, who popularized the term the Anthropocene.
This report, “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” is devoted to
“identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be
transgressed.” The report, like the predecessors I have here discussed,
is attempting to address “the scale of human action in relation to the
capacity of Earth to sustain it.”42 The yoking together of population and
climate crises on the model of “spaceship earth” carries on today with
the likes of Elon Musk, Space X, and Mars One, as the privatization of
space travel makes the dream of creating self-sufficient human residential
colonies on Mars increasingly plausible, if still not actually realizable.43
Osborn followed his best-seller of 1948 with another in 1953, The
Limits of the Earth, “the purpose” of which was “to stress the influence
. . . exerted by the relationship between people and the resources of the
earth. This is indeed the eternal equation—the formula that holds the
key to human life, then, now and tomorrow.”44 The Limits of the Earth
would find an echo twenty years on in the Club of Rome’s The Limits to
Growth, novel in its implementation of computer modeling to describe
the interrelation of elements in a world system, but fundamentally lit-
tle more than an extension of Osborn’s concern into new methodologi-
cal terrain. Their goal was to provide a conceptual model to aid in the
achievement of “a society in a steady state of economic and ecological
equilibrium.”45 To do so, they mandated that “man must explore him-
self—his goals and values—as much as the world he seeks to change. The
dedication to both tasks must be unending.”46 Their vision entailed the
installation of an “unending” perspectival feedback loop between “man”
and “the world,” binding them to one another as proxies for economy
and ecology.
The Club of Rome, an informal international association of scholars
across the disciplines with a working group based at MIT, published The
Limits to Growth in 1972 as the first report for a general audience of the
results of “Phase One of the Project on the Predicament of Mankind.”
156 J. Lubin
Mankind’s predicament was this: “man can perceive the problematique,

yet, despite his considerable knowledge and skills, he does not under-
stand the origins, significance, and interrelationships of its many com-
ponents. . . . This failure occurs in large part because we continue to
examine single items in the problematique without understanding that
the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that change in one ele-
ment means change in the others.”47 The strategy that they devised to
resolve this predicament was, as one of their critics would promptly put
it, “Malthus with a computer.”48
Man and planet are thus imagined in systemic relation as a provisional
conceptual resolution to the “problematique” that arises from the for-
mer’s propensity to outpace the latter. But because the alchemy by which
the system in which man and planet are alike embedded comes to be
“more than the sum of its parts” remains murky, the question of the rela-
tion of man to planet raises itself again as a problem of how precisely to
scale them to one another. The Limits to Growth arises from a moment
of convergence between the historical trajectories of population and
space discourses. What had been—for writers like Moore, Vogt, Osborn,
Ehrlich, and Malthus (without a computer)—a social problem, the prob-
lem of how to structure and maintain human social forms given the eco-
nomic and ecological constraints imposed on them by the finitude of the
planet on which they take shape, becomes, with The Limits to Growth,
a representational problem, the problem of how to model a problema-
tique that otherwise remains conceptually elusive to the humans labor-
ing blindly within it. With a computer, Malthusian thought can be made
to model a relation formally that Thomas Malthus had decried morally.
The model itself rises to salience, subordinating both its primary terms in
favor of a focus on their joint limit.
As the scaling of man to planet becomes a representational problem,
it becomes a parametric inquiry rather than an ontological one. The
nature of man and earth are rendered moot in the face of an inquiry into
their formal entanglement—no longer “the human condition” so much
as the parametric conditions of human life. Here the double senses of
the “stature of man” as denoting both size and moral integrity begin
to delaminate in favor of the primacy of the former. It is in revisiting
this moment that I locate the possibility of shifting the discourse of the
Anthropocene away from the catastrophic and the tragic, and into the
parametric and the scalar. The decades straddling World War II may have
been the “age of the crisis of man,” as Mark Greif’s recent book by that
name argues, but they were also the age of “the predicament of man-
kind,” as The Limits to Growth put it, a moment of massive upheaval and
extensive discourse on the crisis of the Earth as parametric condition for
human life. What Greif’s study leaves out of the picture by focusing on
narrowly humanistic tracts is the contemporary ecological-cum-economic
discourse—a kind of prototypical and apolitical instantiation of world
systems thinking—that witnesses the crisis of man happening in a closed
system bounded by the earth, such that the crisis of man is also the crisis
of planet.49 The name given to their joint limit conceived as representa-
tional problem is “carrying capacity,” a concept derived from Malthus
that redacts his social thought into the representational idiom of mathe-
matical formalism to address the new scene of the mid-twentieth century.
This transformation of Malthusian thought is what lands his An Essay on
the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, in the pages of The
Great Ideas Today 1963 alongside the “Symposium on Space.”
Inspired in the mid-nineteenth century by Malthus’s Essay, the math-
ematician Pierre François Verhulst developed what he called the “logis-
tic” equation to model the growth parameters narratively described in
Malthus’s work. While Malthus’s model of population growth consisted
in forecasting the inevitable incompatibility between two factors—
geometric population growth outpacing arithmetic production—the
logistic equation had the virtue of modelling population in a way that is
inclusive of the “checks” on growth that Malthus described (i.e., positive
checks that raise the death rate, and preventive ones that lower the birth
rate). Population and its checks are represented by a single line, deform-
ing into a sigmoid curve as it accommodates the hindrances to its oth-
erwise exponential increase. Rediscovered and popularized in the 1920s
by US biologist Raymond Pearl, the logistic equation became the stand-
ard model for representing a stabilized relation between population and
resources in a given environment, despite being only haltingly successful
as a predictive model, and not markedly better as a descriptive one.50
Population, to be meaningful, must be modeled. The Limits to Growth
represented a new way of modelling the “limits of the earth,” and it
marked a key moment in the drift into the figurative of “carrying capac-
ity” as a formalization of the problem of man-planet mismatch: carrying
capacity is a figure for the scaling of human to environment, a descrip-
tive name for their joint limit.51 As humanity begins to be viewed at the
species level by conservationists, and as globally linked by economic and
political networks by just about everyone else, the “environment” is
158 J. Lubin
reconceived as the planet itself.52 In this reconception, carrying capacity

becomes a figure for a parametric planetarity.
Carrying capacity emerges from population discourse as a representa-
tional problem: how does one figure a limit and the trajectory by which
it is approached? How does one formally represent the proper scaling of
man to planet? We find illustrative resolutions to these representational
conundrums as they unfold across two pairs of novels and their filmic
adaptations of the same period, the late Matheson film adaptation The
Incredible Shrinking Woman, and the adaptation of Harry Harrison’s
sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! into the Charlton Heston vehi-
cle Soylent Green. These texts, and their filmic adaptations in particular,
formalize two organizing aspects of the modelling of carrying capacity.
Soylent Green “grounds” this model by short-circuiting it, binding popu-
lation and production to one another in geometrically increasing lock-
step by converting human corpses into a food supply. The Incredible
Shrinking Woman shorts this circuit in a different way, aggrandizing
one woman’s shrinkage into a population control solution—shrink-
ing populations, rather than people—motivated by a closed-system
logic that necessitates eradicating others in order to get bigger oneself.
Across these films we can see the ingenious symbolic resolution of the
Malthusian contradiction through a tighter and tighter braiding together
of space and population, a union out of which “space” comes to mean
in equal parts the expanses of outer space and the evaporating terrestrial
space of a crowded planet.
Yet a third formalization of the scaling of man to planet is articu-
lated in The Incredible Shrinking Man. Each of these texts innovates a
strategy for the symbolic resolution of the Malthusian conundrum—
the incommensurate scales of the production of resources, on the one
hand, and the reproduction of humans on the other. Cold war logics of
global governance and ecological postulates about the sustainability of
the human species unite to stage this conundrum as a rapprochement
between man and planet. This rapprochement is figured variously by
each of these texts, all of which convert what had seemed like an antago-
nism between man and planet into a system striving towards equilibrium.
Soylent Green unites economy and ecology and lodges this new unity in
the breach, while The Incredible Shrinking Woman reifies human popula-
tions as manipulable empirical units of resource consumption rather than
casting them as the mathematical abstractions derived from the aggre-
gation of individual lives that they in fact are. But the earliest of these,
The Incredible Shrinking Man, is closest to a distillation of the man–

planet problematique to its central terms. Its representational vocabu-
lary hews closest to the conundrum of scaling man to planet because it is
capable of imagining so few solutions to interpose between them, offer-
ing instead a Robinsonade dramatizing man’s confrontation with the
indifference of his environment to his survival. The solution it proffers
to this scalar incommensurability is located not in economy, ecology, or
world systemic redistribution of people or resources, but in the project
of scale itself, the perspectival rescaling of man to the planet on and in
which he lives.
As The Incredible Shrinking Man’s eponymous Scott Carey begins to
shrink, he attempts to liberate his wife, Louise, from her marital obliga-
tions. Louise protests, “I love you,” but he replies, “No, you love Scott
Carey. He has a size and a shape and a way of thinking. All that’s chang-
ing now.” In short order his wedding band falls off his shrinking finger
and bounces around mockingly on the floor of their car, crassly demon-
strating that Carey’s size, at least, is indeed changing now, to say nothing
yet of his shape and way of thinking. It is easy to be distracted by this
cheap shot at Carey’s masculinity, casting aside incidentally the tripartite
transformation that he has just credited with rendering him ineligible
for love in favor of a tight focus on the first term, “size.” And indeed,
size is obviously a crucial theme of The Incredible Shrinking Man, but
in their conjunction, “size,” “shape,” and “way of thinking” constitute
a discourse, more pressingly, of scale—which the novel also illustrates in
its own way, as suggested above. The crux of it, as the shrinking man
himself puts it in the novel, is that “he was not shrinking, but the world
enlarging.”53
In The Fantastic Little Girl, Matheson’s screenplay for a sequel to
the film that was never produced, Scott Carey’s wife Louise falls prey to
the same shrinking process and joins him in the deep structures of the
earth’s matter—Adam and Eve set to repopulate an earthly Eden now
writ stratigraphic. This is a creation myth for the Anthropocene if ever
there was one, the suffusion of the geological with human presence, and
the “golden spike” planted not at the stratum delineated by the byprod-
ucts of man’s earthly activities (industrial production, nuclear testing),
but at the stratum wherein man himself is deposited in the earth’s struc-
ture.54 The etiology of both Scott and Louise Carey’s shrinking derives
from their exposure to some admixture of pesticide and radiation. The
relationship between agricultural production and nuclear panic at the
160 J. Lubin
root of the drama of stature anticipates the epistemological indecision

of the stratigraphic debates. Here this indecision is resolved in advance
by transforming pesticide and radiation, and the ecological and nuclear
complexes they index, into the joint cause of an existential condition.55
The Incredible Shrinking Man, like so many b-movies of its moment,
has looked to critics like a closed case, a straightforward—not to say
graceless—channeling of cold war anxieties into the medium of film,
with minimal interference along the way from any concern for artistry or
sophistication. If it has some deeper meaning this is secured only allegor-
ically, which is to say by gesturing beyond itself, because all it contains in
itself is a series of puns on impotence: a grab bag of dick jokes. But this
obsession with size leaves shape and thought hanging. Scott Carey “had
a size and a shape and a way of thinking. All that’s changing now,” not
just the first term. The problem isn’t that Carey is too small to fulfill his
marital obligations; the problem is that he is now too small relative to
Louise (he has an affair with “Mrs. Tom Thumb,” a midget carnival per-
former, quite ably).56 In other words, size alone doesn’t matter much;
what matters is that “reality is relative”—this is one “way of thinking”
about “size” and “shape.”
Readings of the film as a kind of pop psychoanalytic parable, male
impotence standing in for masculine anxieties more generally—the weak-
est kind of allegorical reading—amount to reiterations of cold war ide-
ology, not demystifications of it, to the extent that they cede the terms
of analysis to the facile Freudianism that so heavily saturates the popu-
lar discourse of the period that its power to decode its objects has been
evacuated in advance through ubiquity and diffusion.57 We might locate
a different way of reading these materials by zooming out, away from
the nuclear family and into the family of man.58 On the periphery of this
inquiry lies a claim about cultural authority, and an inquiry about scale:
why should it be the case that b-movies dramatize only Freudian theses?
As Susan Sontag noted early on, “science fiction films are not about sci-
ence. They are about disaster. . . . If you will, it is a question of scale.
But the scale . . . does raise the matter to another level.”59 Following the
matter to another level, I want to expand the sense of what the Freudian
might mean here: not the family romance so much as the “consequence
of man’s raising himself from the ground,” which is to say the Freud of
phylogeny, not ontogeny. It is this Freud who authored a set of “theo-
retical speculations” on the history of the species and its futures, who
ventured the historiographic hypothesis that “the fateful process of
civilization” begins with the coming into stature of man, “with man’s
adoption of an erect posture.”60
If Freud speculated that civilization began with man’s adoption of an
erect posture, Hannah Arendt predicted that civilization would come
to an apocalyptic end with man’s arrogant stature. In “The Conquest
of Space and the Stature of Man,” as she would later title her contri-
bution to the “Symposium on Space,” Arendt predicts that the end
of the world will come with the hobbling of man back down from his
hubristic heights wherein, buckling under the cosmological weight of his
own totalizing scientism, man will have no choice but to regard himself
behavioristically, “like a rat.” “Under these circumstances,” she warns,
“speech and everyday language would indeed be no longer a meaning-
ful utterance that transcends behavior even if it only expresses it, and it
would much better be replaced by the extreme and in itself meaningless
formalism of mathematical signs.”61 Arendt’s philosophical concern was
not borne out by the historical unfolding of her feared future, but in its
nomination of mathematical formalism as the apotheosis of mid-century
scientism, it serves in spite of itself as a very apt naming of an emergent
aesthetic mode, exemplified in texts like Matheson’s and in concepts
like carrying capacity.62 Mathematical formalism did not (only) entail a
reduction of man to rat—though its affiliation with population mode-
ling conceptually derived from animal husbandry and nonhuman ecology
does indeed go some distance towards eroding the distinction between
man and animal. But this erosion is not for nothing, as mathematical for-
malism simultaneously instantiates a powerful mode of representing the
relation of human kind to its sustaining conditions, which include those
conditions underwriting the persistence of man as animal, which is to say
as a species: the ecology and geology of the planet Earth.
Arendt rounds out her vision of the asymptotic approach towards
“meaningless formalism” with a final insistence on the absoluteness of
the limit of which she writes: “the conquest of space and the science that
made it possible have come perilously close to this point. If they ever
should reach it in earnest, the stature of man would not simply be low-
ered by all standards we know of, but have been destroyed.”63 But the
stature of man has neither been “lowered by all standards we know of”
nor “destroyed,” as Arendt warned in these final remarks of her bitterly
foreboding essay. In light of the recent deluge of popular and schol-
arly reports, remarks, critiques, and jeremiads on the dawning of the
age of the Anthropocene, one might rightly say that the stature of man
162 J. Lubin
has been absolutely hypertrophied, aggrandized to cosmic proportions

by the very science that Arendt feared. And that science has itself now
become something of a humanism, charged with re-educating a public
under the sway of an outmoded scientism—an absolute faith in techno-
logical deliverance that only very reluctantly gives way to the competing
absolutism of the impending climatological apocalypse.
Despite this apparent divergence from Arendt’s feared future—its pre-
dicted peril not so much averted as inverted—the discourse tracing the
conceptual consequences of the Anthropocene has nonetheless thus far
remained strangely bounded by the terms of her now half-century old
critique—and literally at that, as Chakrabarty’s favorable discussion of
her Sputnik-obsessed preface to The Human Condition as a precursor to
his own recent theses about the Anthropocene, discussed above, readily
attests. Humanism has lost its sheen, to be sure, but the stature of man
remains a pressing concern.
Recent thinking about and born out of the confrontation with the
changing relation between the human and the earth has prompted broad
attention to an analytic hitherto more familiar among geographers than
humanists: scale. This is a historiographic and methodological debate as
much as it is a political or topical one, with critics as generally far flung
as Wai Chee Dimock, Mark McGurl, Eric Hayot, Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Ursula Heise, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Ian Hodder, Stacey
Alaimo, and Donna Haraway—just to name a few—all circling the same
set of concerns—concerns with how to think about a world poised for
catastrophe, and with how to represent this world to ourselves in a way
that might make us feel a stronger stake in its fate. The problem all of
these critics run up against, as Arendt did before them, is the morali-
zation of an analytical conundrum that has the unintended and darkly
ironic consequence of rendering the conundrum unresolvable. The ques-
tion becomes one of how to represent the world as an object of care and
concern, rather than as a limit not to be breached. McKenzie Wark has
quipped, “The unspeakable secret about climate change is that nobody
really wants to think about it for too long. It’s just too depressing!”64
Wark insists, as I do, that “a theory for the Anthropocene can be about
other things besides the melancholy paralysis that its contemplation too
often produces.”65 The discourse of the Anthropocene is too often con-
tent to describe the confrontation with incommensurable or incompre-
hensible scale. In one case, this encounter is aestheticized to the point
of becoming its own genre, “the posthuman comedy,” which does a lot
to make the scene of climate change analytically available to humanities

scholars, but nonetheless fuses literature and criticism to one another
inside of the wild laugh with which both alike must meet the prospect of
their ultimate extinction.66
We might think around the limits staked out by Arendt’s terms, the
limits that have come to characterize a certain strain of scholarly think-
ing about the human and the planet, by returning to her central ques-
tion, the question of the status of the stature of man. We return to this
question not to take on her terms, but instead to turn her terms into
objects of analysis. I contend that the various problems with the pre-
dominating line of thought about climate and planet in the humanities at
present—its mysticism, its disabling wonder at the horror of the world,
its disavowal of historical materialism, its helpless rejection of all extant
modes of thought as inadequate to the radically new scene of the epoch,
its insistence on novelty even as it retreads the most threadbare histori-
cal humanisms so that they might masquerade as contemporary theori-
zations—resolve into the larger problem of its tendency to sublimate its
analytical objects into methodological concepts. This is a problem born
of a confrontation with the order of the literal, with how to analytically
apprehend the apparent concretion of our concepts (agency, force, con-
tract, subjectivity, objectivity, animation, entanglement) in the matter of
the earth itself. We might undo this collapse of method and object of
analysis by thinking further about how to read the literal and concrete,
without resorting to wonder, laughter, or depression at the collapse of
our conceptual categories into the geological substrate out of which we
are attempting to theorize them.
One way of reading The Incredible Shrinking Man in the broadest of
thematic strokes would be to say that this is a parable of the nearly abso-
lute diminishment of a nonetheless indefatigable humanism under the
crushing cosmological force of scientism—not a bad caricature of the
present predicament that humanities scholars collectively face. In this
resonance one can begin to track a mid-century aesthetics of scientism to
a contemporary science of aesthetics: the scientification of the humani-
ties, in its methods and its objects. Here I want to distinguish between
good and bad faith versions of “zooming out.” One enables more pow-
erful historicisms, while the other tries to aggrandize the particular by
suturing it to a generality of broader social significance. As Heather Love
has noted of the rhetorical yoking of the “critique debates” to climate
change discourse, perhaps the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance of
164 J. Lubin
the resolution of the methodological debates in the humanities—but

more likely not. More importantly, “the most salient context for these
debates is not global survival but rather the university, with its longstand-
ing fractures along disciplinary lines.”67
Both forms of zooming out arise from a question about the shifting
locus of historical and world-making agency. This is an analytical and
political question, not an empirical one, though it is easy to mistake it
as such. For Chakrabarty and others, in line with Arendt, the presaged
future is one in which the stature of man is evacuated as agency trav-
els to another scale: the species. For Latour and others, agency is relo-
cated in the planet itself. But these two positions amount to one and the
same insofar as they are two different descriptions of the same problem:
how to apprehend the “anthropogenic” aspect of anthropogenic climate
change, a change that begins with humans but promptly exceeds us.68
This is a crisis of agency lost through diffusion, wherein agency becomes
nonphenomenological—conceptual rather than experiential. We might
seize this as an occasion, a prompt to critical reflection, rather than the
death knell of our critical faculties and methods.
To do so we might dwell a bit longer on the family of man, which
rhetorically forges a link between man and mankind, human beings and
species-being. “The family of man” is bound to index the eponymous
1955 traveling photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and
made infamous in academic circles by Roland Barthes’s conscription of
it in Mythologies as a paradigmatic example of myth as a naturalization
of ideology. My own use of the phrase is meant to index the humanistic
spin in the period on neo-Darwinian devolution anxieties that conjured
the image of the human-as-species. But it is also to point up, through
the uneasy reverberations of anachronism emanating from it, the strange
constancy of its deployment in much the same terms in today’s climate
change discourse: as a conflation of history and nature, and a moraliza-
tion of both by displacing the agency of apocalypse onto the species itself
and off of particular bodies—individual, at risk, governing, or otherwise.
As Barthes writes, “This myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very
old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bot-
tom of History. . . . Progressive humanism, on the contrary, must always
remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to
scour nature, its ‘laws’ and its ‘limits’ in order to discover History there,
and at last to establish Nature itself as historical.”69 Chakrabarty’s asser-
tions that the Anthropocene inaugurates a “profound change in the
human condition,” and that “anthropogenic explanations of climate

change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between
natural history and human history” resound uncomfortably in light of
this formulation, and are rescued from this strange resonance only inde-
terminately by their exemplary insistence on the empirical veracity of this
thesis.70 The apparent literalization of a trope of humanism in the geo-
logical record should not be taken for granted, not because this literali-
zation is not occurring, but rather because we should not be so sure we
know how to read the literal.71
It may seem a strange trade to swap in Barthes for Arendt, for if the
problem with contemporary humanities discourse around climate change
is its inhabitation of a history the consequences of which it would pur-
port to explain, then a lateral move from one 1950s cultural critical scion
to another would hardly prove a solution. However, the trouble comes
less from the affinities with historical precursors than from the analytical
confusion around the encounter with the anthropogenic aspect of anthro-
pogenic climate change. Only the mistaking of the human primacy in
anthropogenic climate change for a question for humanism as conceptual
apparatus would make Arendt seem like the go-to theorist for this next
chapter in the transformation of the “human condition.” But as C. S.
Lewis put it, “Surely the analysis of water should not itself be wet?”72 A
more rigorous separation of the question of the scale of human agency
from our extant theoretical frameworks of the human reveals the neces-
sity of a formalist conceptual framework as the precondition for any
analytical purchase on the human as a newly planetary phenomenon.
Finitude on this scale has little to do with human perceptual experience.
Just as Matheson’s shrinking man failed to notice his changing size until
his circumstances were irremediably dire, anthropogenic climate change
has, until quite recently, operated at a scale that eludes human percep-
tion. Another way of phrasing the Anthropocene is as the becoming-
formal of humankind: the aggrandizement of human agency to a plane-
tary scale is the formalization of human agency as geological force, rather
than the extension of the human soul to the earth itself.
Let’s take one last pass at the limits of the earth: “Zhdanov made fun
of Alexandrov the philosopher, who spoke of ‘the spherical structure of
our planet.’ ‘It was thought until now,’ Zhdanov said, ‘that form alone
could be spherical.’ Zhdanov was right: one cannot speak about struc-
tures in terms of forms, and vice versa. It may well be that on the plane
of ‘life,’ there is but a totality where structures and forms cannot be
166 J. Lubin
separated. But science has no use for the ineffable: it must speak about
‘life’ if it wants to transform it.”73 As the humanities turn once again to
“the spherical structure of our planet” and find embedded there deposits
of the human, let us not resort to a cry or a laugh in the face of the inef-
fable. If we are to have a brush with science, let us at least make the most
of its mandate to transform life.
Notes
1. A recent paper co-authored by members of the Anthropocene Working
Group describes the three predominant periodizing models that have
been proposed. These would date the beginning of the Anthropocene
variously from a few 1000 years ago, from the Industrial Revolution
c.1800, or from the Great Acceleration of the mid-twentieth century.
The article makes a case for the salience and utility of the last of these,
based primarily on the globally registered geological presence of novel
nuclear byproducts in the soil for which this moment is responsible, and
that will persist for thousands of years to come (Zalasiewicz et al.).
2. “Spaceship earth” is an unusually itinerant image, and one that was mobi-
lized by ecological, environmentalist, conservationist, economic, specula-
tive, policy, and governmental movements alike, though the values and
goals motivating these various mobilizations were often quite divergent.
The Whole Earth movement of Stewart Brand and the economic theory
of Kenneth Boulding, both of which take “spaceship earth” as their mas-
cot, offer an exemplary stark contrast.
3. Another attempt to assay the limits of the earth, consistent with both pop-
ulation bomb and space race impulses, is polar exploration. The history of
Antarctic exploration begins a bit earlier and will not be my focus here,
but it is important to note that Antarctica becomes significant in the cold
war as bases are rapidly constructed there in the 1950s, culminating with
the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. Cf. for instance DeLoughrey
and Glasberg.
4. There is an ample literature on the history of the social significance of
human stature that informs this essay. Because the texts of interest to the
present study are ones that conjure an aesthetics of stature occasionally
literalized through the actual stature of a human body, rather than ones
that explore the signification in a given moment of variously statured
persons such as midgets, giants, or the like, this history remains some-
what ancillary. Cf. Franzino, for instance, for one approach to this his-
tory. Stewart’s On Longing is more aligned with the present essay in its
orientation towards aesthetics, but in its insistence on metaphor as the

organizing term for its analytics of scale that alignment terminates.
5. See also his “Afterword” to the January 2017 special issue of South
Atlantic Quarterly on climate change, “Knowledge in the Age of Climate
Change,” edited by Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky.
6. Arendt, Human Condition, 1.
7. Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies,” 2.
8. Ibid., 15.
9. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 3.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. Ibid.
16. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 221.
17. Ibid.
19. It is also the case that climate change, while certainly an “unintended
consequence” in its particulars, is in fact also monitored, mediated, pro-
duced, and managed by “the powers that be.” To suggest otherwise is to
remove climate change too promptly from the purview of politics. While
Chakrabarty cites Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing as evidence
of the shifting “mood” of “globalization analysis” towards global warm-
ing (“Climate of History,” 199), he neglects to cite the conclusions of
Arrighi’s analysis: namely that the extent and imminence of the global
geological consequences “of our actions as a species” depend in large part
on the ecological limits imposed and encountered by developing econ-
omies such as China’s. The strong periodizing move that Chakrabarty
tries to interpose between the present and the 1950s crumbles under
a critique of capitalism that would find in this shift not a rupture but
a transformation, and not even a particularly “disjunctive” one—as
indeed Arrighi does across the works that Chakrabarty cites: The Long
Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing. Chakrabarty notes a rhe-
torical transformation of the human in scientific discourse between these
moments from “an experimenter on a geophysical scale in the 1950s”
to a “geophysical force himself” “by the 1990s,” but he sees them com-
paratively rather than systemically (“Postcolonial Studies,” 11). Cf. Adam
Smith in Beijing, especially “Part IV: Lineages of the New Asian Age”
on the ecological limits and consequences of capitalism, and The Long
Twentieth Century.
20. Arendt, 2.
168 J. Lubin
21. I claimed that there has scarcely been a more dogged narrativization of
the asymptote than this—but that’s not for lack of competitors. For
example, the logarithmic scale of Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of
Ten (1968/1977), Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View (1957), and Eva Szaz’s
Cosmic Zoom (1968), very explicitly formalize and thematize these scalar
aesthetics.
22. Matheson, Shrinking Man, 83.
23. Arendt, 6.
25. Huxley, 21.
26. Ibid., 24.
27. Ibid., 25.
28. Hutchins and Adler, 2–3.
29. Desrochers and Hoffbauer.
30. While it may seem counter-intuitive that big business interests would
favor population control, as greater populations might presumably entail
the salutary expansion of markets, in fact high population growth in this
period was correlated with susceptibility to communism, and so the inter-
ests of capitalists in the spread of democratic governance and its hospi-
tality to free-market capitalism mediated their interests in the unfettered
cultivation of new markets.
31. Moore, 15; emphasis in original.
32. Vogt, 288.
33. Ibid., 286.
34. Osborn, 5.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 3–4.
39. Ibid., 33.
40. Ibid., 32.
41. The language of “force” is particularly resonant with contemporary dis-
course. For example, Chakrabarty extends the metaphor of “force” in
order to describe the human of the Anthropocene, invoking Newtonian
physics to argue that “A geophysical force—for that is what in part we are
in our collective existence—is neither subject nor an object. A force is the
capacity to move things. It is pure, nonontological agency” (“Climate of
History,” 13).
42. Rockström et al., 474.
43. Valentine.
44. Osborn, 5.
45. Meadows et al., 196.
46. Ibid., 197.
47. Ibid., 11.
48. Freeman, 5.
49. Cf. Kenneth Boulding’s “closed earth” economic framework.
Reanimating this historical discourse has the benefit of bringing some-
thing like political economy or systems theory back into the account of
climate, alongside aesthetics. For an illustrative example of the perils of
excluding this aspect, see Mark Greif, especially the last section, which
touches upon the ramifications of this crisis for our present encounter
with the Anthropocene.
50. Cf. Kingsland for a history of the development and critiques of the logistic
function. One way to account for the popularity of the logistic function
for modelling relations between human reproduction and resource con-
sumption irrespective of its empirical accuracy is to consider the ideologi-
cal ballast it provided for a spate of racist eugenic projects of the era by
lending the imprimaturs of scientific authority and mathematical objectiv-
ity to a discourse of species crisis that underwrote the systematic under-
development of the third world and motivated medical interventions
perpetrated by the state against poor people and people of color, espe-
cially African American women.
51. For a history of the slide into the figural of this initially quantitative
descriptor, see Pulliom and Haddad, and Sayre.
52. Höhler.
54. This golden spike is no fanciful turn of phrase: once Global Boundary
Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSP) are established, their boundaries
are marked with a spike made of gold, or the like.
55. As the yoking of the two together via the figure of the “P-Bomb” would
already suggest, both population bomb and space race are quotidian
forms of catastrophizing constituting the two major discourses of what
Jessica Hurley has termed “the nuclear mundane,” the suffusion of cul-
tural and state discourses with the logics of risk, exposure, event, limit,
and containment that define and constitute the epistemology of the
bomb. This epistemology continues to undergird present debates over
yet another presaged apocalypse, climate change, as stratigraphic debates
about the placement of the “golden spike” that would designate the geo-
logical transition from Holocene to Anthropocene epochs revolve around
whether it is waste deposits derived from the industrial revolution, or
radiation-exposed soil derived from nuclear testing, that form the hall-
mark of this new epoch.
56. Here the film is positioning itself relative to a nineteenth-century tradition
of representing “distorted” human scale by conjuring a character whose
170 J. Lubin
stage-name refers to an eponymous celebrity “dwarf,” whose marriage to

Mr. Tom Thumb was a tabloid sensation in the immediate postbellum
period in the eastern USA (Franzino).
57. Examples of this kind of reading predominate in the critical discourse on
the film. For instance, cf. Modleski, Tarratt, Shapiro, Slusser, Jancovich,
and Wells. Michael Tavel Clarke characterizes the main features of this
criticism in a literature review that prefaces his own “reservations about
interpreting narratives of shrinking men in Freudian terms,” citing their
tendency to operate “as if body height can only be understood theoreti-
cally in Freudian terms such as castration anxiety” (244).
58. Cf. Hendershot for a reading of The Incredible Shrinking Man in relation
to mid-century species-discourse.
59. Sontag, 213.
60. Freud, 54, n. 1.
61. Arendt, [Untitled], 47. Arendt’s contribution to “The Symposium on
Space,” to which all pagination in this essay refers, was untitled, but
its appearance in that volume was a republication of her essay “Man’s
Conquest of Space” from American Scholar printed earlier that year. She
subsequently republished the essay with additional editorializing in the
footnotes and the title “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”
in The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society.
62. Arendt is also describing, without realizing it, the transition from an
organismic to a linguistic model of thought. She is describing it painfully
from inside it, and projecting her pain into a warning about the future
of humanity, but it is already fully underway in the transformations of
structuralism, the making of language a model, a system in which mean-
ing itself, not meaninglessness, is consolidated through “the formalism of
mathematical signs.” Cf. Jameson.
63. Arendt, [Untitled], 47.
64. Wark, xvi.
65. Ibid., xx.
66. McGurl (“Neither Indeed,” “Ordinary Doom,” and “Posthuman
Comedy”) and Dimock.
67. Love, 52.
68. For a critique of conceptions of agency at scale in the discourse of the
Anthropocene with which this essay is sympathetic, but which traffics
in an adjacent theoretical vocabulary, cf. Woods, especially as he argues
that “The problem of writing the Anthropocene is this: how to inter-
pret the data signal that differentiates the present geologic moment from
the Holocene without amplifying the human subject smoothly across
scales . . . or forgetting our addictive dependence on nonhumans. The
point of arguing that the subject of the Anthropocene is nonhuman is
not to suggest that biological humans can have no influence over this
geologic epic. The point is to rewrite the epoch’s causes in order to see
what forms agency takes and which mediators entangle it. So long as
the smooth zoom and the human/nature gap dominate writing on the
Anthropocene, a scaled up, abstract notion of the human mystifies the
agency of terraforming assemblages” (140).
69. Barthes, 197–98.
70. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 201.
71. As Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt put it in the introduction to
“Denotatively, Technically, Literally,” their co-edited special issue of
Representations, “the literal is a way of making meaning manifest rather
than a manifest level of meaning” (11). We have a lot of resources for
reading the material, and for identifying “new materialisms.” The prob-
lem, though, arises when the abstraction of “species” comes on the scene,
divorced from its ecological and historical senses as a supposedly novel
occasion for epistemological bewilderment, as if we—cultural critics,
scholars, not to mention thinking people more generally—have no expe-
rience in making the non-phenomenological appear in its reality before
us.
72. Lewis, 71.
73. Barthes, 220.
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacey. “Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and Animal
Studies in the Abyss.” Paper presented at “Changing Nature: Migrations,
Energies, Limits,” the Tenth Biennial Conference of the Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS,
May 28–June 1, 2013.
Arendt, Hannah. [Untitled]. “A Symposium on Space: Has Man’s Conquest
of Space Increased or Diminished His Stature?” In The Great Ideas Today,
34–47. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963.
———. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Arrighi, Giovanni. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.
New York: Verso, 2007.
———. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times. New York: Verso, 1994.
Asimov, Isaac. Fantastic Voyage. New York: Bantam, 1966.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Translated by Richard Howard and Annette
Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
172 J. Lubin
Boulding, Kenneth. “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.”

In Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, edited by H. Jarrett.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Afterword.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017):
163–168.
———. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009):
197–222.
———. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New
Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–18.
Clarke, Michael Tavel. These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in
America, 1865–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” Public
Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 257–280.
Desrochers, Pierre, and Christine Hoffbauer. “The Post War Intellectual Roots
of the Population Bomb: Fairfield Osborn’s ‘Our Plundered Planet’ and
William Vogt’s ‘Road to Survival’ in Retrospect.” The Electronic Journal of
Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 37–61.
Dimock, Wai Chee. “Low Epic.” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 614–631.
Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1968.
Fantastic Voyage. Directed by Richard Fleischer. USA: Twentieth Century Fox,
1966.
Franzino, Jean. “‘The Biggest Little Marriage on Record’: Union and Disunion
in Tom Thumb’s America.” American Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2015): 189–217.
Freedgood, Elaine, and Cannon Schmitt. “Introduction: Denotatively,
Technically, Literally.” Representations 125, no. 1 (2014): 1–14.
Freeman, Christopher. “Malthus with a Computer.” In Models of Doom: A
Critique of the Limits to Growth, edited by H. S. D. Cole et al., 5–13. New
York: Universe Books, 1973.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Translated by James
Strachey. New York: Norton, 1989.
Fuller, Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.
Glasberg, Elena. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of
Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. London: Palgrave, 2012.
Greif, Mark. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–
1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene:
Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165.
Harman, Graham. “Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour
and Ian Hodder.” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 37–49.
Harrison, Harry. Make Room! Make Room! New York: Double Day, 1966.
Hayot, Eric. “Near Stars: Analytic Scale and the Literary Object.” Paper
presented at “Theorizing,” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, September 26, 2014.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination
of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hendershot, Cyndy. “Darwin and the Atom: Evolution/Devolution Fantasies in
‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,’ ‘Them!’, and ‘The Incredible Shrinking
Man.’” Science Fiction Studies 25, no. 2 (1998): 319–335.
Hodder, Ian. “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View.”
New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 19–36.
Höhler, Sabine. “The Law of Growth: How Ecology Accounted for World
Population in the 20th Century.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social
Theory 8, no. 1 (2007): 45–64.
Hurley, Jessica. “Ground Zero at the City on a Hill: Apocalypse and the Politics
of Form in the Nuclear Age.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
Hutchins, Robert, and Mortimer Adler, eds. The Great Ideas Today. Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963.
Hutchins, Robert, and Mortimer Adler. “Introduction.” “A Symposium on
Space: Has Man’s Conquest of Space Increased or Diminished His Stature?”
In The Great Ideas Today, 1–3. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963.
Huxley, Aldous. [Untitled]. “A Symposium on Space: Has Man’s Conquest
of Space Increased or Diminished His Stature?” In The Great Ideas Today,
20–33. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963.
The Incredible Shrinking Man. Directed by Jack Arnold. USA: Universal Pictures,
1957.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Directed by Joel Schumacher. USA: Universal
Pictures, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of
Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972.
Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996.
Kingsland, Sharon. Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population
Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary
History 45, no. 1 (2014): 1–18.
———. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2013.
———. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters
of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–248.
Lewis, C. S. Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. San Diego: Harcourt, 2002.
174 J. Lubin
Love, Heather. “The Temptations: Donna Haraway’s Feminist Empiricism and

the Problem of Critique.” In Critique and Postcritique, edited by Elizabeth
Anker and Rita Felski, 50–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Matheson, Richard. “The Fantastic Little Girl.” In Unrealized Dreams, 19–69.
Colorado Springs: Gauntlet Press, 2005.
———. The Shrinking Man. New York: Tor, 1994.
McCarthy, Anna. “From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the
Politics of Scale.” In Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, edited by Mimi
White and James Schwoch, 21–53. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006.
McGurl, Mark. “‘Neither Indeed Could I Forebear Smiling at My Self’: A Reply
to Wai Chee Dimock.” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 632–638.
———. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies and the Wasteland of the Present.”
New Literary History 41 (2010): 329–349.
———. “The Posthuman Comedy.” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 533–553.
Meadows, Donella, et al. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books,
1972.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a
“Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Moore, Hugh. “The Population Bomb.” New York: The Hugh Moore Fund,
1954.
Osborn, Fairfield. The Limits of the Earth. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1953.
———. Our Plundered Planet. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948.
Pulliom, H. Ronald, and Nick M. Haddad. “Human Population Growth and the
Carrying Capacity Concept.” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 75,
no. 3 (1994): 141–157.
Rockström, Johan, et al. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Nature 461
(2009): 472–475.
Sayre, Nathan F. “The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity.”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 1 (2008): 120–134.
Shapiro, Jerome. “Atomic Bomb Cinema: Illness, Suffering, and the Apocalyptic
Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 17, no. 1 (1998): 126–148.
Slusser, George. “Pocket Apocalypse: American Survivalist Fictions from Walden
to The Incredible Shrinking Man.” In Imagining Apocalypse, edited by David
Seed, 118–135. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” In Against Interpretation, 209–
225. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
Soylent Green. Directed by Richard Fleischer. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
1973.
Stevenson, Adlai. “Strengthening the International Development Institutions.”
Speech before the United Nations Economic and Social Council Geneva,
Switzerland, July 9, 1965.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the

Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Tarratt, Margaret. “Monsters from the Id.” In Film Genre Reader, edited by
Barry Keith Grant, 382–401. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
Valentine, David. “Exit Strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans
in Space.” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1045–1067.
Vogt, William. Road to Survival. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948.
Ward, Barbara. Spaceship Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso,
2015.
Wells, Paul. “The Invisible Man: Shrinking Masculinity in the 1950s Science
Fiction B-Movie.” In You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, edited by Pat
Kirkham and Janet Thumin, 181–199. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Woods, Derek. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” Minnesota Review 83
(2014): 133–142.
Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth
Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal.” Quaternary
International 38, no. 5 (2015): 196–203.
CHAPTER 7
Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural

Reproductions
Aikaterini Antonopoulou
The Passion for the Real

The “real,” the “authentic,” and the “original” are highly appreciated
(although often very difficult to recognize) in the digital age, while the
copy is associated with the inferior, the dishonest, and the valueless.
Paradoxically, that which is identified as the “authentic” becomes signifi-
cant and valuable, almost an object of desire, but once this authentic, the
“real thing,” has been found and captured, it travels fast via the social
media and the Internet in the form of—often—low resolution images,
creating yet another, very different impression of reality.
In his book The Century, Alain Badiou identifies the “Passion for
the Real” as the key feature of the twentieth century, arguing that there
has been great commitment to understanding the relationship between
“real violence and semblance, between face and mask, between nudity
and disguise.”1 According to Badiou, the semblance situates, local-
izes, and makes visible the real. Since real and semblance are so closely
linked, the real presents itself as a representation, and therefore it is only
A. Antonopoulou (*) 
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_7
178 A. Antonopoulou
effective in the gap between the real effect and its apparent representa-
tion. “Distancing,” the creation of this gap between the two, becomes
a trope to break up the links between the real and its semblance, and
thus determines the perception of the real. At the same time, the pas-
sion for the real, the continuous effort to distinguish the real from the
deceptive reality that surrounds it, leads to its opposite, “the passion for
ignorance.” This passion for ignorance is driven by the suspicion that
whatever we perceive as real might actually be part of this deceptive
reality: “the real, conceived in its contingent absoluteness, is never real
enough not to be suspected of semblance.”2 Therefore, the connection
between the thing and its referent must always be cleaned and purified.
And since only the “nothing”—which cannot contain any reality in it—is
not a suspect, this process of purification results in absolute nothingness.
Badiou suggests that there are two different ways to deal with the pas-
sion for ignorance. The first is to transform it into a passion for identity:
“to grasp real identity, to unmask its copies, to discredit fakes. It is a pas-
sion for the authentic, and authenticity is in fact a category that belongs
to Heidegger as well as to Sartre.”3 Yet this passion can only be accom-
plished as absolute destruction—a result of the absolute purification.
The second, the “other” passion for the real, is constructive instead of
destructive: it lies in the construction of a “minimal difference,” a critical
gap that will illustrate the clear difference between the two. The chal-
lenge, according to Badiou is “to invent content at the very place of the
minimal difference, where there is almost nothing. The act is ‘a new day
in the desert.’”4 Against the pursuit of the absolute and pure identity,
Badiou suggests that we acknowledge the existence of a minimal differ-
ence between the real and its representation, which is where the experi-
ence of things takes place.
Extending Badiou’s line of study, in “Welcome to the Desert of the
Real,” Slavoj Žižek reflects on this enthusiasm to identify the Real within
everyday social reality. For Žižek the twentieth century is characterized
by the need to directly experience the Real “in its extreme violence as the
price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality.”5 However,
the obsession for authenticity, the need to approach the Real in its
purity either by getting closer to it or by isolating it and resisting any-
thing from the environment that might corrupt it, often results, accord-
ing to Žižek, in its opposite phenomenon, the creation of the theatrical
spectacle. Therefore, he argues, the contemporary world is a world of
pure semblance, dominated by the phenomenon of virtualization.
7 LARGE-SCALE FAKES: LIVING IN ARCHITECTURAL REPRODUCTIONS 179
Similar to virtual reality, in which objects maintain their appearance but

are deprived of their substance, our “real” (meaning here “physical”)
reality becomes itself “virtual”: “coffee without caffeine, cream with-
out fat, beer without alcohol, . . . sex without sex, . . . politics without
politics, . . . the Other deprived of its Otherness,”6 which transforms
reality into an idealized version of itself. The phenomenon of virtual-
ization becomes much more apparent within the digital age, in which
images travel fast, and information and communication overlie physical
spaces, transforming them into illusory landscapes. In recent times the
spectacular escapes the boundaries of theme parks and shopping malls—
but also of digital platforms—to play a dominant role in the way that
cities are shaped today. In this context, buildings and neighborhoods,
monuments and memories, and most generally the urban experience
become mass-produced, mass-marketed, and mass-consumed, making
the so-called “authentic urban experience,” which cities often promise to
both their visitors and their dwellers, a contradiction in terms.
The aim of this essay is to examine what it is like to live within this
context of virtualization and the role of scale in it through the phenom-
ena of architectural mimicry and replication, which attempt to create
large-scale spectacles in the contemporary city context. It will, therefore,
look into two different examples of architectural replication: the popu-
lar movement in China to build neighborhoods or even entire cities that
replicate cities of the West, and the discussions on the reconstruction
of the Crystal Palace in London at the place of its relocation in 1854,
discussions that emphasized “faithful[ness] to the original building and
all its ingenuity, scale and magnificence.”7 The idea of “Bigness” as
formulated by Rem Koolhaas8 will frame this discussion. According to
Koolhaas, if the “Whole” and the “Real” have ceased to exist in recent
times due to an obsession for expansion, consolidation, and megascale,
then Bigness becomes an opportunity to “reconstruct the Whole, res-
urrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.”9
Mass scale, the containment of a multiplicity of programs, people and
forms within a grand iconic envelope as a new Whole, becomes a strat-
egy against context and against any traditional understanding of the
urban environment. Despite its massive presence, Bigness transcends its
materiality to engage with virtuality, simulation, and non-existence. At
the same time, Bigness creates an alternative world and a new reality that
brings into the scheme technologies and infrastructure, but also politics
and ideas, in the form of a big, artificial bubble. If the established reality
180 A. Antonopoulou
is not enough any more—or, put differently, since the passion for the
Real that Badiou and Žižek have described encourages people to pur-
sue something that is beyond the real—Bigness comes into play to create
alternative, artificial, privileged realities.
In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction,”10 Boris
Groys argues that the traditional roles of the “world traveler” and the
local, “sedentary population” have dwindled, making not only the tour-
ist and the city-dweller identical, but also the cities reproducible: “cities
are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist—they too are starting
to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world scale and
to expand in all directions.”11 Along with this expansion, identities and
differences embark on a journey themselves, following a similar process
of expansion and reproduction. The “real” in the city, in the sense of
the authentic urban experience and the original content, becomes itself
“mythologized,”12 infused by local memories and pasts, and therefore
idealized, following the global cultural obsession for monumentalization.
The phenomenon of virtualization seen at a city scale involves a series of
phenomena: “mythologization,” “monumentalization,” and “musealiza-
tion.” A recent article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Greenspan, “How
to Manhattanize a City,” explores the class dynamics of these phenomena.
In Greenspan’s article, the meaning of the term “Manhattanization” shifts
from referring to the demolition of the old storefronts in order to make
space for commercial high-rise developments to “turning a city into a
playground for its wealthiest inhabitants, even if it forgets about the poor-
est.” Greenspan comments upon the common practices of all cities, fol-
lowing the example of Manhattan, to create iconic environments in order
to satisfy the increasing appetite of its wealthy inhabitants and consumers,
pushing at the same time the less privileged of the city towards its edges.
The culture of the copy expands in all directions in the contempo-
rary city, shaping the urban fabric and also the lifestyle of the inhabitants
as much as the attractions for the visitors. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott
Brown and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas, Rem Koolhaas
in Delirious New York, Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation,
and Umberto Eco in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality have exten-
sively described the USA as the land of simulation. Their writings pre-
sent theme parks as the testing ground for the development of cities, in
which signs, lights, and replicas of great historical monuments attempt to
supplement the “insufficient” reality with virtuality and form a complex
and fascinating world, where the real totally disappears. In recent times,
however, architecture does not take the form of billboards and stage sets
in order to develop a new language of communication, nor does it adopt
stylistic elements of past times and places to mask a rather blank interior.
Instead scale plays a key role: the contemporary simulacra, embracing
Bigness, become worlds-in-themselves, buildings, neighborhoods, cities
to be inhabited in a much more complex reality. This phenomenon takes
one of its most extreme expressions, in terms of its expansion and scale,
in China. This essay departs from the Chinese “simulacrascapes”13 for
this reason and aims to juxtapose this case study to the attitude towards
reproduction in Europe, where authenticity is often mythologized. By
examining these architectural reproductions and their contribution to
the complex way cities are experienced today, the essay explores what it
means not only to build “large-scale fakes,” but, most importantly, to
dwell in them as part of a contemporary global culture.
Architectural Replication in China

Within two decades, China has transformed its cityscapes into iconic
spectacles, aiming to satisfy the increasing needs of the country’s inhabit-
ants for both housing and workspaces. While the city centers give space
to high-end skyscrapers and mega-structures aiming to defy gravity and
challenge technology and engineering, participating in this way in an
informal competition among the “global cities,” their peripheries take a
very different form. In order to accommodate a quickly expanding and
increasingly demanding upper-middle class, the residential city-suburbs
replicate the West in many variations: from spectacular versions of Paris,
Amsterdam, and New York, to Venetian Palazzos, Austrian villages, and
Victorian town centers. These Western-style structures, following the
design principles of theme parks or even US suburbia, come in the form
of extensive gated communities that aim to recreate the atmosphere and
the experience of their originals.
In her book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary
China, Bianca Bosker looks into this phenomenon in detail. Bosker
records the various “simulacrascapes” and their relations to the o riginals.
The replication of the original takes many forms: although there are
examples of identical replication, as in the case of the Austrian town
of Hallstatt that was secretly surveyed stone by stone to be later dupli-
cated in Huizhou,14 in most cases the Chinese versions are resized and
also reassembled in new ways in order to accommodate the needs of the
182 A. Antonopoulou
Fig. 7.1 Eiffel Tower, Hangzhou, China, by Bianca Bosker in Original Copies:

Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China
development. The “Western” becomes filtered through the Chinese expe-

rience and understanding in order to appeal to local consumers.15 In some
cases, replicas become larger and bulkier to allow for wider open spaces
and more spacious apartments, while in others, monuments and buildings
of similar characters and atmospheres but originally located in different
places are brought together in complex recompositions.16 Simulacrascapes
take a massive scale, aiming to achieve the most immersive experience for
inhabitants. Landmarks play a central role in the creation of the specific
regional character, and the landmarks may be enlarged, scaled down, or
relocated in order to fit their new surroundings (see Fig. 7.1). Significant
architectural pieces may be exaggerated in order to make the develop-
ment more iconic and attractive to consumers, or underplayed to serve
the purposes of the development. The replication does not stop at the
exterior but carries on to the interior of the domestic space and even to
the lifestyle of the inhabitants. Houses are furnished and decorated to
match the period and character of the outside, while names, slogans, and
signage equally contribute to the creation of the desired atmosphere.

The residents often need to make concessions to their habits and back-
ground: the layouts of such developments break with traditional Chinese
philosophy and architecture and, further than that, homeowners are usu-
ally not allowed by the developers to change anything on the outside of
their house (not even to dry their laundry there17) in order to keep with
its original character. The shops and services also harmonize with the rel-
evant theme, sometimes making it difficult to find a Chinese restaurant
or teahouse in the neighborhood.18 In an attempt to brand these new
towns and immerse the new residents in the Western environments, their
developers organize festivals and celebrations that will familiarize them
with their customs, food, and activities. Zooming out, the transforma-
tion of the Chinese city peripheries comes alongside the social transforma-
tion of the middle class: the architectural style is closely linked to social
sophistication. As Bosker argues, “the statement of these simulacrascapes
is twofold: first, ‘culture,’ refinement, and social prestige are as covetable
as cash; and second, for the Chinese to live like the British or Germans in
their homes is not enough; one must be the global elite as well: in habit,
in custom, and in manner.”19 Chinese residents of these immense envi-
ronments live the fantasy of a new “good life” on many different levels.
It is worth noting here that although in Western thought the copy
is associated with the valueless and the dishonest, in Eastern culture a
high quality copy conveys the essence of the original and is, there-
fore, not inferior to it. Miniatures and replicas are understood equally
as “real” and “authentic,” since the real and its simulacrum are consid-
ered interchangeable and interrelated. In the Chinese tradition learning
comes through copying: the ability to understand, design, and produce
the “other” exerts power over the original, hence duplication signifies
the assertion of power and control and, by extension, possession. In the
same way that the Chinese gardens re-present a microscopic replica of
the universe and symbolize the ability to control the world and exercise
power in it—a power also deriving from the act of possessing this rep-
lica—the contemporary simulacrascapes aim to symbolize the country’s
financial and cultural domination over the world. These Western-inspired
constructions, conceived, designed, and inhabited by the Chinese, stand
for the country’s advanced state of development in both intellectual and
technical terms. They suggest that the Chinese are currently capable of
understanding and appropriating the world and disengaging from their
socialist past. China is then attempting to reposition and place itself on
184 A. Antonopoulou
the global map by replicating other places. Interestingly, the replications

of the West’s glorious past become symbols of the country’s opening
to a globalized future and a response to the world’s most advanced and
iconic cities. At the same time, these large-scale reproductions are highly
programmed and populated: on the one hand they shape spectacular
images but, on the other, they are to be inhabited by China’s promising
middle class.
Large-scale developments of this sort swarm the suburbs of Chinese
big cities to compose a wide field of complex and strange amalgamations.
Bosker writes that “within an afternoon in Shanghai, visitors can tour the
Weimar Villas of German-style Anting Town, stroll the granite piazza
of Italian-themed Pujiang Town (or rather the ‘Citta de Pujiang’), and
go boating on Malaren Lake in the Scandinavia of Shanghai, Luodian
Town.”20 Such environments do not simply provide the stage-sets for
events to take place; instead, they construct lifestyles engaging their users
in multi-role-playing games: an ever-changing everyday reality. These
neighborhoods aim to give the impression to their inhabitants that they
live abroad without ever leaving Shanghai. At the same time, those who
cannot afford to live in the neighborhoods visit as tourists and photo-
graph themselves there. Only a few years earlier, the “Beijing World
Park,” a theme park that still operates in Beijing, boasted that visitors
could see the whole world without ever leaving the city. Built at a time
when travelling abroad was highly controlled by the country’s authori-
ties, the park was modelled on the globe, representing all the oceans and
continents by their most famous landmarks (among others, the Arc de
Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, the London Tower Bridge,
the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, the Grand Canyon, the Sydney Opera House,
the Statue of Liberty, the White House, the Capitol, and even a minia-
ture of the Great Wall). Cultural activities and performances are staged
alongside these monuments to create the appropriate atmospheres. The
park is also featured in the Chinese film production The World by Jia
Zhangke. The film presents a discontented vision of China by showing
both the stage and the backstage of the absurd theme park; it focuses
on people who spend their days performing at these hyperreal environ-
ments and retreat at the end of the day to their crowded and depressing
backstage accommodation. The main advertising slogan of the park—
“see the world without ever leaving Beijing”—is repeated throughout
the film, juxtaposed with the protagonists’ dreams to acquire a passport
and abandon the country for a better future.21 Certainly Bosker’s analysis
describes a very different China. Within very few years the country has
transformed from a place whose residents could not travel to one where
they don’t need to travel as long as they can afford—to buy or to visit—a
replica of any place in the world.
Bigness
Although the photographs from the streets of the Chinese simulacras-
capes appear overwhelming, with old English townhouses at the back-
ground of spacious public spaces and security guards dressed in uniforms
inspired by those of the Queen’s Foot Guard, or with inflated Venetian
palazzos freshly painted in bright colors behind wide canals, the aerial
photos of these developments reveal much more. The view from above
presents pompous masterplans, which consist of enormously wide ave-
nues (sometimes even disconnected from the road network), massive
buildings and extensive public spaces, altogether in a loose relationship
with their surroundings. In effect, these complexes either seem to float
in an undefined landscape, far away from any inhabited area, or they
stand in an awkward and distanced relationship to the existing urban fab-
ric. Large scale here seems to erase any context and impose a new set of
rules.
In S, M, L, XL Rem Koolhaas discusses “Bigness” as an architectural
strategy against context. Koolhaas argues that “beyond a certain critical
mass, a building becomes a Big Building,”22 acquiring its own agency
and disengaging architecture from composition, scale, proportion, and
detail. In Bigness, the “honesty” of the design is also under question,
as the distance between the interior and the exterior allows space for
the autonomy of the individual parts of the scheme. Most importantly,
the building breaks with tradition and ethics in such a way that it no
longer stands as part of the urban fabric: “It exists; at most it coexists.
Its subtext is fuck context.”23 According to Koolhaas, the size of the
building expresses an ideological program that goes beyond the inten-
tions of the architect or even the logic of the city. Following a process
of reconstruction and deconstruction and by embracing Bigness, the city
itself becomes a series of “architectural islands floating in a post-archi-
tectural landscape of erasure.”24 Then erasure as context transforms the
city into an “un-city” of multiple urban islands.25 This is beautifully illus-
trated in Bosker’s descriptions and images: the Western-style develop-
ments in China are all big enough to suggest worlds-in-themselves that
186 A. Antonopoulou
will absorb their inhabitants or even their visitors in their own reality,
minimizing their interaction with whatever may take place outside their
boundaries.
By separating from context by default, Bigness introduces a “non-
urban” situation that is no longer defined by its relations to the exterior,
but has instead an internal complexity and organization, in the form of
a contained universe. This “seamless interiority”26 does not propose an
interior order instead of an exterior chaos; on the contrary it refers to
a “contained” chaos—a multiplicity of programs, users, and infrastruc-
ture—that follows its own internal rules. This separation from the out-
side brings with it the liberation from the historic, the traditional, and
the established; therefore this erasure that Koolhaas describes comes
across as freedom and as the release of any (architectural or non-architec-
tural) oppression, and, most generally, as the construction of a new real-
ity that is independent from its outside.
If Bigness becomes an all-enveloping reality, the question arises as to
what happens when it expands and accumulates. Koolhaas argues that
this forms a new construction that may no longer relate to the tradition-
ally conceived city—at most it exists alongside. This new construction
becomes itself urban in a new way: “Bigness no longer needs the city: it
competes with the city; it represents the city; it preempts the city; or bet-
ter still, it is the city.”27 This can be read in the context of contemporary
China’s intentions to forget its recent past and take part in a new, global
condition. As discussed earlier, erasure, grand scale, mythologization,
and replication all come together to become tools for the nation’s mod-
ernization. A new question arises then: does this phenomenon work in
the same way on the other side of the world in the European city, which
is densely built with tradition, history, and memory? How does Bigness
(and the new worlds it introduces) fit in places infused by local memories
and pasts, and in what ways are these worlds experienced and lived? Does
reproduction have a place there?
The Crystal Palace and the Berlin City Palace

In October 2013, the Mayor of London welcomed a £500 million
investment by the Chinese development company ZhongRong Group to
rebuild the Crystal Palace at the place of its relocation in 1854 and to
restore the 180-acre park. The company aimed to build the new Crystal
Palace as “a great symbol of Victorian innovation and optimism,”28
which has inspired subsequent generations for over 150 years. Following

a 1990 Act of Parliament, any building constructed on the site should
be in the spirit of Paxton’s original building, with similar footprint and
structure to the original. To accomplish that, the company invited six of
the most renowned and iconic architectural firms in London, including
Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield, to develop proposals for the new
design. For Ni Zhaoxing, Chairperson of ZhongRong Group, the new
development should both retell and extend the fascinating story of the
Palace to the people of London and beyond: “The former Crystal Palace
is celebrated in China as a building of great achievement. Its ingenuity
and scale is magnificent and this project is a once in a lifetime opportu-
nity to bring it back to life. My intention is to recreate the Palace and
restore the park to its former glory to create a new destination for local
people and international visitors.”29 Through an extensive architectural
program of cultural, entertainment, and commercial facilities, includ-
ing a hotel and conference center, the Palace is to be given a second—
or rather a third—life in the south of London. The brochure’s slogan
“looking back and looking forward”30 (see Fig. 7.2) conveys a promise
to bring back the past glory of the site by re-placing it in the present.
The brochure’s image of a delicate yet massive structure appears trans-
lucent and ethereal, opening up to a series of green fields and gardens in
which happy people enjoy the sun and the landscape.
The story of the Crystal Palace is already one of architectural repro-
duction. The original building was a temporary construction, designed
to house the Great Exhibition of Industry of all Nations in Hyde Park,
London, in the summer of 1851. The popular Crystal Palace was dis-
mantled in April 1852 after the end of the exhibition in October 1851
and after many discussions about keeping it in the park and transforming
it to a winter garden. The building would have been sold for steel and
glass had the Crystal Palace Company not been formed to buy it and to
re-erect it on a new site. The new site was Sydenham Hill, a woodland in
South East London. The building reopened in 1854. The new Crystal
Palace was quite different from the first one. It was longer and two floors
taller than the original. Unlike its predecessor, which featured the best
of Britain’s manufactured products, the new Crystal Palace looked more
to the past than the future, hosting numerous replicas within itself and
featuring a series of courts that drew from various periods of historic
architecture and art. Augustus Pugin’s Mediaeval Court from the (origi-
nal) Great Exhibition was accompanied with courts displaying segments
188 A. Antonopoulou
Fig. 7.2 Looking back and looking forward, “The London Crystal Palace
Brochure”
of the world: among many others, replicas of Egyptian, Alhambran,

Roman, Renaissance, Chinese, Pompeian, and Grecian art. Alongside the
building, the gardens were redesigned and a railway was also constructed
to connect the development to the city. The “Palace of the People,” as
it soon became known, evolved into a theme park of its time for mass
entertainment and gave space to a wide range of events, from flower,
dog, cattle, and bird shows to aeronautical, mining, and photographic
exhibitions, society meetings, concerts, firework displays, ballooning,
cycle racing, football cup finals, and funfairs. The life of this building
ended tragically in a fire in November 1936.
Because the original Crystal Palace was a symbol of innovation and
advanced engineering in its time, a number of reproductions have
appeared around the world. The New York Crystal Palace, directly
inspired by the one in Hyde Park, housed the Exhibition of the
Industry of All Nations in New York City in 1853, while the Infomart,
a 147,094.2 square meter office building in Dallas, Texas, built in 1985,
was also modelled after it. None of the previous replicas, however, pro-
voked such a strong reaction as the recent one in London. In his arti-
cle “A Fake Crystal Palace will Shame Britain,” Stephen Bayley argues
that the construction of the replica will be yet another contribution to
the city’s “Disneyfication”—or virtualization, as suggested earlier in this
essay. The article concentrates on the fact that “a magnificent gesture of
national confidence” will be recreated by a Chinese company, despite the
fact that the short-listed designers are all based in London: “Why do the
Chinese want to fake it? One theory is that their fetishization of handbag
brands and European architecture is a delayed reaction to drab Maoist
uniformity. Belief in Louis Vuitton or in Prince Albert offers a simula-
crum of the family bonds which the Cultural Revolution so effectively
destroyed.” Objection to the construction, in other words, did not stem
from the fact that the Crystal Palace is an outdated edifice, nor that it
will constitute the copy of a copy and as such a simulacrum standing as
a “groundless claim,”31 but that it will be built on the grounds of its
original reconstruction by a Chinese developer, who, if anything else,
must have significant experience on the subject since the phenomenon
of architectural mimicry flourishes in China. It is unclear whether it was a
series of such reactions or ZhongRong Group’s delay in submitting a full
proposal on the development that prompted Bromley Council to cancel
the project in February 2015 and to consider anew the possibilities for
the redevelopment of the park and its adjacent area.
The story of the Crystal Palace is not an isolated case in Europe. In
June 2013, the foundation stone of the Humboldtforum, the recon-
struction of the Berlin City Palace, was laid at its original site in the
Museum Island of Berlin. The €590 million development will house a
series of museums, university facilities, libraries, and other cultural and
leisure activities; it will also mark the end of a long period of debate
on the necessity and the symbolism of such a project. The Association
Berliner Schloss boasts that the new City Palace will return the city to its
190 A. Antonopoulou
former glory and its “world-famous identity,”32 restore the cohesion of

the historic city center, and complement the Museum Island as a whole.
Three out of the four façades of the building are to be reconstructed
with “extreme authenticity” (according to an on-site information panel),
while the fourth façade will feature the design of Franco Stella, the archi-
tect who has undertaken the task to bridge “the past with the present.”33
Both the site and the building in this case have participated in a long his-
tory of events. Since its establishment in 1443, the Berlin Palace has housed
Brandenburg electors, Prussian kings, and German emperors. It has under-
gone endless additions, extensions, and transformations. It owes its gran-
diose Baroque appearance to the architect and sculptor Andreas Schlüter
(1662/9–1760), who reshaped the building in the early eighteenth cen-
tury in response to a commission from the Prussian King Frederick I.
Architects Stüler and Schinkel reshaped its dome in 1850.34 During World
War II, the building was partly damaged in an air raid, and additional sec-
tions were destroyed by a fire near the end of the war in 1945. In 1950, the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities demolished the building
in a symbolic action against monarchy. In 1973 they built the Palast der
Republik on its site. The new building housed the parliament of the GDR
and a “cultural palace,” which is said to have been built, used, and loved by
the people before and after the German unification and has given space to
significant cultural and artistic events. In 2003, perhaps in another symbolic
action, the German parliament demolished the Palast der Republik, initiat-
ing the discussion on the future use of the site.
The place is currently, and will be until 2019, a busy construction
site. The ten-minute virtual movie presented at the Humboldtbox (an
on-site information center) and also featured on the Association’s web-
site presents in extreme detail the reliefs, portals, balustrades, Roman
gods, eagles, and crowns that will adorn the façades and the courtyards
of the Palace. In the periphery of the physical construction site a series
of posters also displays the building in its completed form, while a “sam-
ple façade,” a small section of the elevation, has been rebuilt to illustrate
that the new building will be identical to the original (Fig. 7.3). At the
Humboldtbox’s website, a webcam broadcasts the development around
the world in real-time. Both the physical site and the website advertise
and record the absolute erasure of the recent past and the restoration of
another former past. For a city that has given space to some of the most
important historical events of the twentieth century, including war and
destruction, and the shifts from democracy to fascism to Stalinism, and
Fig. 7.3 The New Berlin City Palace: Sample Façade, Sebastian Aedo Jury
where history is replicated and re-enacted in the form of memorabilia

today, the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace raises important ques-
tions about what is to be reconstructed from the past, and thus mass-
marketed and mass-consumed, and what is to be erased and forgotten.
In the place where one can rent a Traband (a typical East German car)
and travel around the remains of the Berlin Wall, the Karl-Marx-Allee,
and the Checkpoints in a “trabi-safari” in order to experience the Berlin
of the GDR, the City Council determined that the City Palace, instead of
192 A. Antonopoulou
the People’s Palace for instance, must be rebuilt on its original grounds
in order to restore the “authenticity” of the city.
As advertised, the Palace presents a very clear position about the city:
the Museum Island will only be completed once the Berliner Schloss
has been rebuilt. The unified master plan for the Museum Island and
the Palace aims to bring them together so they can support each other.
According to the Association Berliner Schloss’s website, the Ethnological
Museum, which is one of the major projects to be housed within the
Palace, will present the arts and crafts of Africa and the Americas, while
the Museum of East Asian Art and the Museum of Indian Art, which are
currently housed elsewhere in the city, will also move onto the new site.
The scientific collections of Humboldt University and the non-European
literary resources of the Central and the State libraries will also con-
tribute to this “universal forum.”35 Most importantly, these collections
will stand next to the European collections and those of the Near East
and Egypt, currently housed in the other galleries of the Island, so that
together they situate “the world in the middle of Berlin.”36 Following
the motto of the local Museum Island Festival, “all the arts without
end,” the site aims to contain everything within itself: the world with all
its arts and cultures, books, and scientific knowledge, in one place and
without end. The reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace and the hous-
ing, within this replica, of thousands of original and valuable artefacts
suggest a new form of interiority: the Palace opens up and the Museum
Island as a whole becomes an enveloping virtuality, a new world to con-
tain the World. The building of an outward-looking shell, the reproduc-
tion of the palace’s original exterior calls for the expansion of “Bigness”:
the island (ready to absorb the rest of the city perhaps?) becomes a total,
complete, encapsulated “other” world, a fake space.
The Crystal Palace and the Grand Interior

In The World Interior of Capital Peter Sloterdijk draws on Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s impressions of the Crystal Palace (as reconstructed on
Sydenham Hill) in Notes from the Underground (published in 1864)
as a deeply symbolic and hybrid construction. According to Sloterdijk,
Dostoyevsky saw in the Crystal Palace the coming of a “new aesthetic of
immersion”37 and the transposal of “the outside world as a whole with
a magical immanence transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism.”38
With its nearly immaterial presence and its entirely artificial atmosphere,
the Crystal Palace—almost prophetically—becomes both the materiali-

zation and the symbol of today’s capitalism. Its construction, according
to Sloterdijk, marks a critical transformation: the principle of the interior
shifts scale, from the middle- or upper-class domestic interior or even the
urban shopping arcades to the interior that contains in itself the outside
world as a whole. Within this large-scale world of inclusion (which inevi-
tably creates another large-scale world of exclusion), both nature and
culture become indoor affairs and transform into performances for mass
consumption. In a globalized age of luxury and cosmopolitanism, the
Crystal Palace becomes the absolute symbol of the “crystallization”39 of
all kinds of relations and marks the beginning of the posthistorical world,
in which the social life in its entirety—after the end of history of war
and conflict—takes place in an extensive, protective, and fully controlled,
domestic-like (yet large-scale), interior environment, where one can
find no interruptions in the form of historic events, but only “domestic
accidents.”40 This crystallization aims at the generation and standardi-
zation of boredom in such a way that it will prevent the re-emergence
of history in this posthistorical world. Within this protective shell, the
end of history will be accompanied by the end of politics; the space
will be an atmosphere of endless comfort and consumer convenience.
“Accordingly,” Sloterdijk continues, “there would no longer be politics
or voters, only mood competitions between parties and the fluctuations
among their consumers.”41 He offers the European Union as an example
of a great interior. The luxurious edifice of the Crystal Palace—similar
to the illustrations in the brochure by the ZhongRong Group—appears
both utopic and timeless, featuring an artificial climate of eternal spring
and endless comfort and contentment. The Crystal Palace serves a dou-
ble role: it represents an endless enclosure that, on the one hand, repels
history while, on the other, makes society an exhibit in itself, absorbing
the exterior world in its vast interior.42 If the Crystal Palace encapsu-
lates the world in an endless space of—and for—consumption, then the
“new” Crystal Palace the ZhongRong Group wants to create and the
reconstructed Berlin City Palace take this one step further by bringing
into this interior history itself, yet transformed into a commodity. The
fame, the “former glory,” the achievements of the past, all need to be
returned to their original grounds in order to restore the magnificence of
their originals.
I would like to stay for a while with this use of the Crystal Palace as a
metaphor for the “generalized indoor reality”43 and, by extension, to the
194 A. Antonopoulou
transformation of the world into infinite grand interiors. According to

Sloterdijk, at the stage of terrestrial globalization in which we currently
live, there is no place on the earth that has not been dis/uncovered, rep-
resented, inhabited, and then bound to other places through movement
patterns and telecommunication networks. The world is now without
gaps or time-outs, a synchronized world,44 occupied by crystal palaces,
in other words, spheres of inclusivity. These spheres may be physical or
virtual, and they almost never need to materialize their boundaries in
the form of solid walls; instead, they are expressed as access to places,
data, and goods, through monetary mediation due to the unequal dis-
tribution of opportunities in life. Inclusivity in this globalized world
comes through spending power, and exclusivity is, naturally, inherent in
the scheme too. And since inclusivity comes through spending power,
the world of globalization takes the shape of a series of artificial islands
of containment, floating in an ocean of poverty that nevertheless cre-
ates the impression of a world that is all-inclusive by default. “The
world interior of capital,” according to Sloterdijk, becomes the “socio-
topological term that is here applied to the interior-creating violence of
contemporary traffic and communication media: it traces the horizon of
all money-dependent chances of access to places, people, commodities
and data—chances based without exception on the fact that the decisive
form of subjectivity within the Great Installation is determined by dis-
posal over spending power.”45 The grand interior marks the shift from
belonging (to places, communities, ideas) to a condition based on mon-
etary relationships, raising interesting questions about being, dwelling,
and travelling within the Great Installation as well as questions about
the possibility of leaving it (if there is ever the need to go outside). The
Crystal Palace as presented by the ZhongRong Group is a miniature of
this Great Installation; weatherless and timeless, gigantic but ethereal,
it brings history and past, but also the present of the city in the form
of entertainment, leisure, and shopping, and even the city itself as an
object, cleaned and purified from any external noise, into its interior for
consumption.
In his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Fredric Jameson sees the Bonaventure Hotel as “a total space, a com-
plete world, a kind of miniature city (and I would want to add that to
this new total space corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode
in which individuals move and congregate, something like the prac-
tice of a new and historically original kind of hyper-crowd).”46 As in
Koolhaas’s theory of Bigness, the building no longer has to fit into the
context, according to Jameson. Instead the Hotel disregards the city
and generates a more attractive interior, inside which the urban context
is reconstructed and performed in a new way. Sloterdijk’s discussion of
the Crystal Palace suggests that such techniques are today employed
on a larger scale, with districts, cities, or even the capitalist world as a
whole becoming encapsulated in an artificial environment, a “postmod-
ern hyperspace”47 of autoreferentiality, in which the human body loses
any capacity to locate itself, to spatially perceive its environment, or to
geographically position itself in the world.
Place, Size, Scale

One would expect within this world of worlds and illusions the ques-
tion of place would be unimportant; however, the reconstruction of the
Crystal Palace and the Berlin City Palace tell a different story. The mag-
nificence of the Crystal Palace needs to be returned to its original place
(or its previous reconstruction) so that the site regains its past glory.
Even the reactions against the project are based on the idea that a for-
eign developing company might “spoil” the original grounds with an
unoriginal design. Similarly, the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace
is eagerly awaited to complete the historic city center and re-establish
the site’s “world famous identity.” The “original” and the “authentic”
are validated by the originality of place here; however, place itself trans-
forms into yet another icon contributing to the overall spectacle, much
like the Chinese simulacrascapes. The “original” ground and all that it
represents—history and tradition, experiences, and events—is thinned,
reduced to an abstract form which, against the traditional understand-
ing of the ground, can no longer bury past worlds within. Through dif-
ferent stories of bigness, containment, and reproduction, this essay has
illustrated how the “real” in the city is mythologized, idealized, and
monumentalized and how fakes contribute to the image and the struc-
ture of the contemporary city. Clearly, the traditional understanding of
place and context change in a globalized and digitized world. But the
question remains: how do we inhabit this grand interior, and how can we
engage with this large-scale world? In his lecture on “The Anthropocene
and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe,” Bruno Latour argues
that instead of engaging with the notion of the globe and any global
thinking, and thus with unifying rather than composing the image of the
196 A. Antonopoulou
world, we should shift from the model of the globe to the innumerable
loops that slowly draw it:
It’s not that suddenly the tiny human mind should be transported into a
global sphere that would anyway be much too big for his or her tiny scale. It’s
instead that we have to weave ourselves, to cocoon ourselves within a great
many loops, so that progressively thread after thread, the knowledge of where
we reside, and on what we depend for our atmospheric condition can gain
great relevance and feel more urgent. This slow operation of being wrapped
in successive looping strings is what it means to be of this earth. And it has
nothing to do with being human in nature, or human on the globe, it’s rather
a slow and painful progressive merging of cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic
virtue, because of the way the loops are rendered more and more visible for
instruments and art forms of all sorts. For each loop we become more sensi-
tive and more responsive to the fragile envelopes we inhabit.48
Latour calls for a return to the scale of the human body, and I would
argue that this involves the understanding of a human body which today
escapes its corporeal limits to become physically or mentally extended
beyond its skin and opposes any pre-given and fixed identity and any
categorization such as the “normal,” the “pure,” and the “original.”
Following Latour’s thinking, this body can now start building infinite
connections—“successive looping strings”—that will render it active,
sensitive, and responsive to the environment in order to inhabit the
world. Here, connections, narratives, and attachments will be the tools
for the dissolution of the fixed and the stable, of the established and the
given, of the grand and the placeless, of the fake and the mass-produced,
but also of the original and the authentic, aiming at new constructions of
complex interrelationships and meaningful purposes.
Notes
1. Badiou, 48.
2. Ibid., 52.
3. Ibid., 56.
4. Ibid., 57.
5. Žižek, 5–6.
6. Ibid., 10–11.
7. ZhongRong Group.
8. In Koolhaas and Mau.

9. Ibid., 510.
10. In Groys.
11. Ibid., 105.
12. Huyssen, 16.
13. This term originates in Bosker, 7.
14. Ibid., 47, 49.
15. Ibid., 49.
16. Bosker presents the example of “Paris” at Tianducheng, in which the
Eiffel Tower is placed next to a garden from Versailles, a reproduction of
the Arena of Nimes, and a historic amphitheatre that can be found in a
city at the south of Paris (Ibid., 47–48).
17. Ibid., 41.
18. Ibid., 63.
19. Ibid., 66.
20. Ibid., 37.
21. For more on the “Beijing World Park” see Antonopoulou.
22. Koolhaas, 499.
23. Ibid., 502.
24. Ibid., 201.
25. Ibid., 200.
26. Otero-Pailos, 385.
27. Koolhaas and Mau, 515.
28. ZhongRong Group, 2.
29. Ibid., 3.
30. Ibid., 6.
31. Deleuze, 53.
32. Association Berliner Schloss, “New Images.”
33. Gortz.
34. Ibid.
35. Association Berliner Schloss, “Humboldt-Forum.”
36. Ibid.
37. Sloterdijk, 169.
38. Ibid., 170.
39. Ibid., 171.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 175.
43. Ibid., 193.
44. Ibid., 141.
45. Ibid., 198.
198 A. Antonopoulou
46. Jameson, 40.
47. Ibid., 83.
48. Latour, Bruno. “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the
Globe.” Gifford Lecture Series: Facing Gaia. A New Enquiry into Natural
Religion. Lecture at the University of Edinburgh, February 25, 2013.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/arts-humanities-soc-sci/news-events/lectures/
gifford-lectures/archive/series-2012-2013/bruno-latour/lecture-four.
Works Cited
Antonopoulou, Aikaterini. “Re-Thinking Landscape in the Context of
Virtualization.” In Landscape & Imagination: Towards a New Baseline for
Education in a Changing World, edited by Conor Newman, Yann Nussaume,
and Bas Pedroli, 39–42. Pisa: Bandecchi and Vivaldi, 2013.
Association Berliner Schloss. “New Images of Berlin 2019.” Accessed July 1,
2015. http://berliner-schloss.de/en/new-palace/new-images-of-berlin-2019.
———. “The Humboldt-Forum. The Usage Plan for the New Palace of
Berlin.” Accessed July 1, 2015. http://berliner-schloss.de/en/new-palace/
usage-plan.
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity,
2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Beyley, Stephen. “A Fake Crystal Palace Will Shame Britain.” The Telegraph,
October 3, 2013, accessed July 10, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cul-
ture/art/architecture/10353232/A-fake-Crystal-Palace-will-shame-Britain.
html.
Bosker, Bianca. Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” Translated by Rosalind Krauss.
October 27 (1983): 45–56.
Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Vintage, 1995.
Gortz, Birgit. “The Return of Berlin’s City Palace.” Deutsche Welle, June
11, 2013, accessed July 1, 2015. http://www.dw.de/the-return-
of-berlins-city-palace/g-16870945.
Greenspan, Elizabeth. “How to Manhattanize a City.” The New Yorker,
October 23, 2013, accessed March 10, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/
currency-tag/how-to-manhattanize-a-city.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Jia, Zhangke. The World: A Film (original title: Shijie). 2005. Office Kitano,
Lumen Films, X Stream Pictures, Bandai Visual Company in association with
Shanghai Film Group, Xinghui Production. DVD.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL. Edited by Jennifer Sigler. New
York: Monacelli, 1995.
Latour, Bruno. “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the
Globe.” Gifford Lecture Series: Facing Gaia. A New Enquiry into Natural
Religion. Lecture at the University of Edinburgh, February 25, 2013.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/arts-humanities-soc-sci/news-events/lectures/
gifford-lectures/archive/series-2012-2013/bruno-latour/lecture-four.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge. “Bigness in Context: Some Regressive Tendencies in Rem
Koolhaas’s Urban Theory.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory,
Policy, Action 4, no. 3 (2000): 379–389.
Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of
Globalization. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Torry, Harriet. “Re-creating the Baroque Glory of a Berlin Palace.” The Wall
Street Journal, August 13, 2014, accessed July 1, 2015. http://www.wsj.
com/articles/re-creating-the-baroque-glory-of-a-berlin-palace-1407938317.
Venturi, Robert, Denise S. Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on 11 September and
Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.
ZhongRong Group. “The London Crystal Palace Brochure.” The London Crystal
Palace. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.thelondoncrystalpalace.com/
uploads/1/2/1/3/12137857/the_crystal_palace_-_highres.pdf.
PART III
Scale in Literature
CHAPTER 8
From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On

Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide
Melody Jue
Consider the image of the Sundarbans, shown in Fig. 8.1, of the

geometric errancy of blue-white tendrils of water reaching up into the
Indian continent. Nestled comfortably at the height of outer space,
the satellite image exists at the scale of the “planetary” that so many
theorists of the Anthropocene find alluring, allowing us to assess, to
measure, to manage, a ready-made map for navigating the territory.1
At this resolution we cannot see any of the region’s residents (humans,
tigers, dolphins, crabs), but we can begin to imagine mythic figures of
the region, as Amitav Ghosh does, imagining the river Goddess Ganga
tangled in the unraveling hair of Shiva. Yet this heightened view insu-
lates the image from any tempestuous events below (the tides, flooding,
seasonal cyclones). It takes for granted the seemingly frictionless and
transparent air as the “normative” medium for zooming between scales
of relation. Yet what would it mean to zoom in but get “stuck” at the
level of water? How might we imagine a concept of scale responsive to
specific environmental conditions, emerging out of the opacity of briny
Sundarbans’ waters?
M. Jue (*) 
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_8
204 M. Jue
Fig. 8.1 Landsat 7 satellite image of the Sundarbans estuary system, released

by NASA Earth Observatory, 2008
Towards exploring these questions, I turn to Amitav Ghosh’s novel,

The Hungry Tide. The novel immerses us in the question of how to navi-
gate different scales of relation through the medium of water, blending
story and environment in ways that make impossible their disentangle-
ment. From the story of the Goddess Ganga falling from the sky, to the
scientist Piya tracking dolphins in the Sundarbans, to a chance meeting
occurring because of spilled tea, The Hungry Tide suggests a theory of
scale that fundamentally concerns the problems of navigation and orien-
tation, or how different bodies sense and move within and through the
world. Focusing on the figure of “falling water,” I argue for the signifi-
cance of theorizing friction across scalar shifts. Joanna Zylinska reminds
us that “scale” is from the Latin scala or “ladder,” a “practical and con-
ceptual device that allows us to climb up and down various spatiotem-
poral dimensions in order to see things from different viewpoints.”2 The
Hungry Tide also operates through a ladder-like aesthetic of verticality
through the cyclical rise and fall of tidal waters, and through the vertical
movement of storm water that collapses scales of relation.
8 FROM THE GODDESS GANGA TO A TEACUP: ON … 205
Falling water changes the possibilities of orienting with stories

and within stories, precipitating sensory shifts in figurative language.
Narrative provides the conditions of possibility for seeing how water
signifies differently across scales, such that sensing scale depends on the
orientation(s) of the subject and the layers of mediation and culture that
enable the subject to observe phenomena. In this way, story functions as
an orientation technique for navigating the scalar relation between self
and world; to be without stories is to be lost and disoriented, unable to
position oneself in relation to the mass of stories that came before. Scale,
then, is not only a Cartesian matter of spatiality—of the visual ability to
zoom in or out to different levels—but also a matter of phenomenology
(whose eyes are we seeing through?) and orientation (where are we see-
ing from?).
I theorize scale through the medium of river water, drawing on its
varied material properties—its silted opacity, its viscosity—to develop a
sense of scale responsive to milieu. This shares kinship with Zylinska’s
call to think of scale as “part of the phenomena it attempts to measure,”
rather than an abstract measure imposed from the outside.3 As we will
see, theorizing scale through water—especially the phenomenon of see-
ing at particular scales—runs into problems when that water is muddied.
Water calls into question the expected transparency and frictionless zoom
of shifting between scales, which constitutes a kind of forgetting of the
body, environs, and opacity of the Other. Theorizing scale through fall-
ing water, with all its disorienting estrangements, brings us to an ethics
of crossing scales that fundamentally depends on humility.
Falling Water
The Hungry Tide is formally divided into two sections: the bhata and
jowar, or the ebb and flood tides. The bhata codes for exposition (as the
waters recede, land and story are revealed), while the jowar codes for the
loss of history (as flood waters rise, they cover land and erase the mate-
rial traces of history). Tidal rhythms thus inform the overall structure of
the novel, as well as the action that happens in the diegetic world of the
novel. The poly-vocal structure of the novel also braids together three
narrative points of view: Piya, a cetacean biologist (ecology); Kanai, a
professional translator (language); and Kanai’s uncle Nirmal, who wrote
an account of the Morichjhãpi massacre in a notebook (history). Like
206 M. Jue
the watery tendrils of the broader estuary (Fig. 8.1), the three narratives
cross and depart, adding up to a larger geography, or hydrography.4
The movements of water draw together both mythic and mun-
dane scales of relation. The novel begins with the story of a river crash-
ing down from the sky, a story that the linguist Kanai reads from a
few Xeroxed pages as he sits on a crowded train going from Kolkata
(Calcutta) to the small coastal town of Canning:
In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heav-
ens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by
tying it into his ash-smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in
a certain way: as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water,
unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to
the tale becomes apparent only in the final states of the river’s journey—
and this part of the story comes as a surprise, because it is never told and
thus never imagined. It is this: there is a point at which the braid comes
undone: where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knot-
ted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and sepa-
rates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.5
These italicized passages are from the writings of Kanai’s late uncle
Nirmal, who explains how the river Ganga came to be on earth when
the “heavenly braid” of the goddess Ganga fell into Shiva’s hair. The
landscape tells a story that exceeds the time frame of a single human life.
Yet the unraveling of Ganga’s braid is not only an origin story: it also
figures as a visual omen for what becomes of stories—the possibility of
their becoming frayed, disintegrated, unraveled, interrupted, and chan-
neled elsewhere. Indeed, after only two pages the narrative switches to
the perspective of another rider on the same train: the young US ceta-
cean biologist Piya, who, carrying a cup of chai, is knocked by one of
the train passengers. Piya spills her spiced milk tea mostly out the train
window, “but she could not prevent a small trickle from shooting over
his [Kanai’s] papers” (8). This accidental spillage of tea—arching out of
the cup and falling onto the very pages of the story that we, along with
Kanai, are reading—mirrors the goddess Ganga falling to earth. Falling
water figures as a plot device and substance that connects Ganga to
Shiva, Piya to Kanai, entangling their destinies. Yet the accident of spilled
tea not only echoes the Ganga story visually (a trickle rather than a tor-
rent) but also interrupts our reading of that very story. Angry at having
tea spilled on Nirmal’s writings, Kanai “crumpled up the pages he had

been reading and tossed them out the window” (9). We will never know
if there was more to the Ganga story than the two Xeroxed sheets of
Nirmal’s writing we read before they were soaked by spilled tea. Water
disrupts Kanai’s and our experience of reading the Ganga myth, begin-
ning and ending the possibility of the story. Water does not only exist
at different scales of relation; it actively crosses these scales and disrupts
them.
Nirmal’s story emphasizes the narrative dimension of understanding
events that unfold at a planetary scale, a perspective that sees geology
and mythology both as stories that compress vast scales of time and space
into relatable things and processes. Later in the novel, Nirmal attempts
to convince a young Fokir of the relation between geology and mythol-
ogy with the following comparison: “Look at the size of their heroes,
how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the
other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly,
equally remote form us” (150). I see Nirmal’s hydrographic imagina-
tion of the subterranean flow of the Ganges as another such compres-
sion of scale. Framed as a meditation on how he would teach children
about Morichjhãpi, the Sundarbans, and beyond, Nirmal describes how
the Ganga is the “greatest of all earth’s rivers” (150), proved by a map of
the sea floor that reveals its continued passage:
In the reversed relief of this map they would see with their own eyes that the
Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins
with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along
the floor of the bay. The map would reveal to them what is otherwise hidden
underwater: and this is that the course of this underwater river exceeds by far
the length of the river’s overland channel. (150–151; original italicized)
This imaginative leap provides the preconditions for nationalist pride and
a sense of regional belonging. To imagine the “hidden Ganga,” extend-
ing one’s cartographic imagination along into oceanic depths, is to reim-
agine how the borders of the nation extend beyond terrestrial space both
horizontally (into the Indian Ocean) and vertically (below sea level, and
down into the benthic deep). Nirmal’s hidden Ganga is another example
of how mythology intersects with geology because of the way that both
involve narrative techniques of conveying scale. Nirmal writes that in
both geology and mythology, “the plots go round and round in both kinds
208 M. Jue
of story, so that every episode is both a beginning and an end and every out-
come leads to others. And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas
and epochs, Kaliyuga and the Quaternary. And yet—mind this!—in both,
these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of
a story” (150; original italicized). The verb “telescoping” suggests a kind
of visual channeling not unlike the channeling of the Ganga itself on the
seafloor, a necessary reduction or funneling to a human scale to “per-
mit the telling of a story.” Geology and mythology utilize narrative as
a way of bringing something very large into relatable scale, to personify
and thus see the river as an active force for creation, rather than passive
matter. However, Nirmal’s map of the hidden Ganga, of a river within an
ocean, does not visualize or illustrate the fluid river or the ocean itself:
the map only indicates fluid form by earth contours, the scoured and
clearly marked channel that the river continues to cut along the bottom
of the seafloor. The vertical dimension of the water column remains to
be completed by a leap in imagination.
Spatial theories of ocean navigation have focused on moving across
water in a horizontal fashion, rather than up and down through the
actual water column.6 In contrast, The Hungry Tide depends upon a
principle of verticality, whose scale shifts differ from the horizontal imag-
inary that has so permeated geographic mapping practices.7 Kimberly
Peters and Philip Steinberg write that “[h]eight and depth open up
new dimensions of space,” challenging the ways that map-based spatial
studies have favored the horizontal.8 Verticality is the precondition for
imagining volumes rather than planes. Countering Claude Levi-Strauss’s
characterization of the sea as a space of absence, Peters and Steinberg
contend that,
the sea is not merely a planar, flat, monotonous area that offers only a hori-
zontal field of vision. It is a space of flux, flows, and churning. It is deep,
volatile, and ever changing. It is a volume that—with the persistence of
depth and mobility—produces realms of invisibility that frustrate conven-
tional forms of knowledge.9
The Sundarbans waters “frustrate” these conventional forms of knowl-

edge by obfuscating that which is submerged, shifting the contours of
island boundaries, and rerouting new channels of water. Consider Piya’s
scientific attempts to map dolphin routes with GPS, a tool for record-
ing hard, factual evidence of location. Upon her first contact with
Sundarbans Irrawaddy dolphins, Piya “had only to extend her arm to get
a reading on the GPS monitor. She recorded the figures with a sense of
triumph: even if the dolphins took flight this very minute, this little scrap
of data would have made the encounter credible and worthwhile” (95).
Even after she loses her written data when the cyclone hits, her GPS
remains intact: “All the routes that Fokir showed me are stored here. . . .
Fokir took the boat into every little creek and gully where he’d ever seen
a dolphin. That one map represents decades of work and volumes of
knowledge. It’s going to be the foundation of my own project” (328).
Digital recording, as it so often does, signifies a collective desire to fight
against erasure and ensure the preservation of information against the
vertical fluctuation of the tides.
Fokir and Piya represent two differing epistemic practices—
satellite-scale navigation via GPS vs. human-scale observations, oral his-
tory vs. digital documentation—and yet the rhythms of their work (fish-
ing, cetacean study) are highly compatible. Consider how Piya describes
the experience of being a cetacean biologist, watching the water for
hours on end:
for a long time nothing happens, and then there’s a burst of explosive
activity and it’s over in seconds. Very few people can adapt themselves to
that kind of rhythm—one in a million, I’d say. That’s why it was so amaz-
ing to come across someone like Fokir . . . it’s like he’s always watching
the water—even without being aware of it. I’ve worked with many experi-
enced fishermen before but I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible
instinct. It’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart. (221)
Seeing “right into the river’s heart” is, of course, not a matter of
vision alone, but part of Fokir’s experience as a fisherman, able to read
many kinds of cues in the mangrove forest: sounds, felt rhythms of
water, knowledge of the tides, knowledge of the migrational habits of
dolphins—embodied sensations that the zoom function of cameras can-
not relate by vision alone.10 Fokir has attuned himself to the rhythms
of the delta and migration routes of the Irrawaddy dolphins in relation
to the story of Bon Bibi, the merciful goddess who saves supplicants
from tiger attacks, as told to him by his mother Kusum (who died in the
Morichjhãpi incident when he was young).11 Kusum called the dolphins
“Bon Bibi’s messengers” (254): they disperse at high tide to gather news
around the area, and return to certain deep pools at low tide to report
210 M. Jue
to her. Fokir’s knowledge of Sundarbans ecology is thus inextricably tied

up with the mythological story of Bon Bibi. Fokir’s attunement with
the water, or how Piya says he seems always to be watching it “without
being aware of it,” is suggestive of what Stefan Helmreich calls “oscil-
lating ocean time” rather than “geologic time,” the documented, stable
object of scientific inquiry, with which we might associate Piya.12 What
we learn from Fokir is a way in which the Bon Bibi story becomes a way
of navigating and living within oscillating ocean time; the story not only
teaches Fokir how to look at his environment, but how to survive within
it, crossed by different scales of moving water (blood, tides, storms). For
Fokir to “see into the river’s heart” is less a matter of literal transpar-
ency of the water than of the familiar opacity of a story, learned by heart.
Another way of putting this is that each scale of trained observation—
Fokir’s local knowledge and Piya’s GPS-assisted notation—depends on
orienting via particular kinds of devices (technical, narrative), and yet
what Piya finds surprising is their compatibility in practice.
The Hungry Tide’s oscillation between local and global scales of rela-
tion is evocative of tidal dialectics—or tidalectics—theorized by poet
Kamau Brathwaite and taken up by scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey in
Routes and Roots (2007). Tidalectics suggest new paradigms of spatial
relation and navigation based on the “chronotope” of the coastal margin
and tidal rhythms.13 DeLoughrey writes that Brathwaite’s tidalects pre-
sent “a dynamic model of geography [that can] elucidate island history
and cultural production, providing the framework for exploring the com-
plex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indi-
geneity, and routes and roots.”14 Tidalectics suggest an ecopoetics where
“the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean” foregrounds “alter/
native” epistemologies distinct from western colonialism and its geo-
poetics. For example, the ocean navigational practice called “etak” ima-
gines that the voyaging canoe is standing still in the ocean and instead
the islands and cosmos move, flowing towards the traveler, countering
Western mapping practices that assume a moving subject amongst a sta-
tionary landscape/waterscape.15
As we have seen, The Hungry Tide is guided not only by a horizon-
tal imaginary, but also by falling, which suggests a vertical tidalectics,
modifying and expanding the Caribbean theorization of tidalectics to
include rising and falling (in) water. Fokir’s navigation of vertical tida-
lectics takes place not through the Western scientific precision of GPS
mapping, but through the interrelation of ecology and mythology,
of the recognition of tidal cycles as taught by the Bon Bibi myth. Yet
Fokir is just as vulnerable as anyone else to another vertical dimension—
that of the sky, when the cyclone hits at the end of the novel. The storm
inverts the previously settled boundaries between earth, sea, and sky; for
example at one moment, Piya sees “something that looked like a whole
island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of man-
groves, held together by the trees’ intertwined roots” (314). Vertical
tidalectics account for not only the regularity of tidal rhythms, but also
for currents of air and their capacity to organize into dangerous cyclones,
with the capacity to destroy and reorder the delicate fringes of coastal life.
Indeed, water does not signify consistently nor produce the same
affect across scales. Paradoxically destructive and benign, water is that
element that connects across scales but also violently destroys the insu-
lating boundaries between scales.16 On the one hand, we have the god-
dess Ganga who in falling would have catastrophically “split the earth”
(6), and on the other hand, Nirmal’s characterization of the ebb tide as
a cause for celebration, for “it is only in falling that the water gives birth
to the forest” (7). Consider the following passage from Rainer Maria
Rilke’s Duino Elegies that Nirmal uses to evoke the surprising affect of
falling tides:
we, who have always thought of joy
as rising . . . feel the emotion
that almost amazes us
when a happy thing falls. (7)
Nirmal’s use of Rilke’s stanza sets up a relationship between human

emotion and the environment that is different from what we intuitively
expect to be joyful.17 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have made the
argument that the ways we cognize and speak about the world reflect
our physiological embodiment and cultural experience. They identify a
pattern of “orientational metaphors,” using case studies from how peo-
ple speak about being happy or healthy (“I’m feeling up today”) or feel-
ing sad, ill, or injured (“I’m feeling low”).18 The joy of the falling tide
goes against our habitual intuition of falling as sad, rising as happy. Thus
for Nirmal to connect the falling water of low tide to Rilke’s lines that
celebrate “when a happy thing falls” surprises us because of its sensory
212 M. Jue
inversion, a kind of alienation effect.19 Water extracts us from the very

habits of thought we are accustomed to on land, shifting the aesthetics
of our perception.
Sarah Ahmed’s theorization of “queer phenomenology” precisely
takes up these questions of orienting to place and attending to how our
emotions are directed to what we come in contact with. By focusing on
the way that (sexual) orientation can be thought of as a matter of resi-
dence, or how we take up space, Ahmed offers a provocation to consider
how “‘what’ we think ‘from’ is an orientation device.”20 We can extend
Ahmed’s provocation to attend to where we think “from” in The Hungry
Tide to consider the queerness of falling water. The vertical dimension
of falling should remind us that orientation is not only about turning left
to right (as for Heidegger and Kant), but also up and down. Falling can
mark a transition in milieu (air to water) and a new moment of contact,
a transition of sense from one world to another, but with dramatic reor-
ganizational consequences where many things are sure to be knocked
out of place—moments of radically jumping between scales, or even of
dangerously collapsing them.
What we learn from Nirmal and Rilke, then, is that falling waters sig-
nify differently at different scales: they are catastrophic at geologic or
mythic scales (as with Ganga falling to earth), joyful at low tide, acci-
dental when spilled from a teacup. This insight resonates with Timothy
Clark’s observation in Ecocriticism on the Edge that the meaning or
moral of a story (like the meaning of water here) depends on the scale
at which we examine it.21 Clark examines the stakes of reading Raymond
Carver’s short story “The Elephant” across scales, arguing that while
the story could be read for its heroism or protest against social exclu-
sion on an individual or national scale, a geologic scale casts the story as
one of human entrapment in petroculture. This critical necessity to shift
scales and apprehend differences at scale has been persuasively articulated
by Ursula Heise in Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2011). Heise argues
that contemporary environmentalism and ecocriticism should not favor
local interaction with nature above, or in opposition to, the possibilities
of environmental engagement at a distance. A hybrid kind of environ-
mentalism might instead shuttle between scales of relation, from local
farming or hiking to representing the global through digital mapping
practices.
Friction and Opacity
For Clark and Heise, the critical strategy of shuttling between scales
would seem to solve the critical problem of each scale’s limitations, lead-
ing us towards a kind of comparative hermeneutics between scales. Yet
perhaps moving between scales is not frictionless, but instead a matter of
risk associated with the transition. Consider the moment when Piya falls
into the water, after trying to hand the fisherman Fokir a wad of cash in
compensation for the forest guard’s fine (read: theft) of Fokir’s earnings.
The chapter “Snell’s Window” begins almost sleepily, and is worth quot-
ing at length:
In the clear waters of the open sea the light of the sun wells downward
from the surface in an inverted cone that ends in the beholder’s eye. The
base of this cone is a transparent disk that hangs above the observer’s head
like a floating halo. It is through this prism, known as Snell’s window, that
the oceanic dolphin perceives the world beyond the water; in submersion,
this circular portal follows it everywhere, creating a single clear opening in
the unbroken expanse of shimmering silver that forms the water’s surface
as seen from below.
Rivers like the Ganga and the Brahmaputra shroud this window with a cur-
tain of silt: in their occluded waters light loses its directionality within a
few inches of the surface. Beneath this lies a flowing stream of suspended
matter in which visibility does not extend beyond an arm’s length. With no
lighted portal to point the way, top and bottom and up and down become
very quickly confused. As if to address this, the Gangetic dolphin habitu-
ally swims on its side, parallel to the surface, with one of its lateral fins
trailing the bottom, as though to anchor itself in its darkened world by
keeping a hold on its floor.
In the open sea Piya would have had no difficulty dealing with a fall such
as the one she had just sustained. She was a competent swimmer and
would have been able to hold her own against the current. It was the diso-
rientation caused by the peculiar conditions of light in the silted water that
made her panic. (46–47)
The passage performs the very disorientation that Piya feels, taking the
reader across two kinds of habitat and embodiment: clear water and
silted water, dolphin embodiment and human embodiment. What we
might call a perceptual aesthetics of scale in this passage not only concern
214 M. Jue
Fig. 8.2 Example of Snell’s Window, U.S. Navy photo by Mass

Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric
changes in size (small to large, local to mythic) but also changes in

medium (like air to water) and the possibilities of perceptual orienta-
tion within that medium.22 Snell’s window not only refers to the por-
tal of optical clarity through which the dolphin sees the surface; it is the
aperture by which we, along with Piya, speculatively inhabit the dol-
phin’s visual world in the medium of water (Fig. 8.2). Yet to inhabit the
Irrawaddy dolphin’s visual world is to experience the riparian milieu of
hazy, silted water with no “window,” a frightening experience in which
Piya could not tell up from down and could not orient. It is not surpris-
ing, then, that the scene of a milieu-shift is also a scene of rebirth: as Piya
struggles in the water, the river’s edges “seemed always to recede, like
the slippery walls of a placental sac” (47). Piya survives only with Fokir’s
live-saving help as he dives into the water to haul her up, a kind of verti-
cal baptism with Fokir as the silent midwife.
Yet consider the striking sequence of perspectival shifts from para-
graph to paragraph, where shifts in scale necessitate shifts in orientation.
Whereas Ghosh could have written the scene in more action-packed
terms (ex: Piya struggled desperately to orient in the river!), he instead
mediates Piya’s experience in the river by first imagining the perspective
of dolphins. The first paragraph describes the oceanic dolphin’s point

of view, or what it is like to look through clear seawater towards the
sky. The next paragraph negates the first: we are not in the clear ocean
waters, we are in the silted opacity of the Sundarbans waters, foreclosing
such a window into the sky. The third paragraph negates the previous
two: we are not seeing from the perspective of the dolphin, but from
Piya’s eyes as she flails in the disorienting conditions of the cloudy river
water, uncertain which direction is “up.” This process of negation char-
acterizes Timothy Morton’s theorization of “ecomimesis” in nature writ-
ing, the attempt to simulate presence through the description of place.
Like Ghosh’s “Snell’s Window” chapter, Morton discusses how nature
writing typically presents a cascade of positions that retrospectively revise
each other, forcing the reader to re-evaluate the stability of her point of
view.23 Morton gives the following example: “As I write this, I am sitting
on the seashore. . . . No—that was pure fiction; just a tease. As I write
this, a western scrub jay is chattering outside my window. . . . That’s also
fiction . . . a digital camera is resting silently on a copy of an anthology
of Romantic poetry,” continuing mise en abyme. Morton argues that the
“as I write” gesture of ecomimesis cannot “achieve escape velocity from
writing itself” but aims towards a poetics of ambience, in which writ-
ing only impossibly approximates the sensation of being in a particular
place.24
It is this very impossibility of conveying an unmediated sense
of emplacement—or perspective from a given scale for a particu-
lar observer—that underlies the ontological conditions for writing
in The Hungry Tide. Ghosh goes to great lengths to make this impos-
sibility noticeable. He continually reminds the reader of the limits of
translation—that what it is like to see through another’s eyes is always
already refracted through the viewer (or reader) in her own perceptual
environment. In one scene Piya imagines the dolphins “listening to ech-
oes pinging through the water, painting pictures in three dimensions—
images that only they could decode. The thought of experiencing your
surroundings in that way never failed to fascinate her: the idea that to
‘see’ was also to ‘speak’ to others of your kind, where simply to exist was
to communicate” (132). The alterity of dolphin communication might
occur through a whole complexity of body positioning and protocols
around “reading” each other through sonar.25 Piya reflects that in com-
parison, human speech “was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into
believing that you could see through the eyes of another being” (132).
216 M. Jue
This scene balances a speculative generosity towards the synesthetic

mode of dolphin communication (“to see was also to speak”) with a
qualification—that to know this is to have that very knowledge mediated
by the trickster figure of human language.
Perhaps a comparative hermeneutic of sliding across scales (taken
as frames of reference) is not so frictionless after all. Consider Ghosh’s
obsession with moments where language breaks down, only able to
approximate the experience of another, both in the case of the charac-
ter Fokir and the case of the river dolphins. Throughout the novel, we
are only privy to third-person limited points of view in English, focalized
through Piya, Kanai, and Nirmal (as translated from Bengali to English
for us by Kanai). Yet despite his centrality to so many events, we never
hear what Fokir is thinking—Ghosh simply doesn’t make the attempt.
The closest he comes to showing us Fokir’s perspective occurs in a scene
at the end of the novel when Kanai, who had lorded his superior edu-
cation over Fokir, takes up Fokir’s dare to set foot on a possibly tiger-
inhabited island and falls face-first into the mud. Kanai looks at Fokir and
reflects that it is as if “he were seeing not himself, Kanai Dutt, but a great
host of people—a double for the outside world, someone standing in for
the men who had destroyed Fokir’s village, burnt his home and killed his
mother; he had become a token for a vision of human beings in which a
man such as Fokir counted for nothing, a man whose value was less than
that of an animal” (270). Kanai’s moment of double- consciousness—
of himself seeing Fokir see himself—does not aspire to see directly from
Fokir’s point of view, but remains mediated by his own presence. If one
of scale’s ladder-like synonyms is hierarchy, then we should be conscien-
tious of whose eyes we aspire to see through as we climb up and down its
rungs.
Ghosh’s decision not to write from Fokir’s point of view conscien-
tiously avoids replicating the colonizing gaze that would be so easy to
attempt in third-person omniscient perspective, preserving in Fokir what
Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant calls the “opacity of
the Other.” For Glissant, opacity is “the moral generosity disposing me
to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not sim-
ple and straightforward, with only one truth—mine.”26 Glissant argues
that it is not necessary to grasp the other or become him in order to feel
solidarity with someone; rather, one should strive to preserve the other’s
opacity and not imagine that he can be entirely and transparently under-
stood in his thoughts, motivations, desires, and identity. Glissant invokes
a rather suitable estuarine analogy to talk about opacity: if the West has
seen the world as if through the clear water of a mirror, there is, “opacity
now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by pop-
ulations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored
even today, denied or insulted more often than not, and with an insistent
presence that we are incapable of not experiencing.”27 This environmen-
tal analogy should remind us of Piya falling into the silted waters—the
waters that are Fokir’s territory—and of how Fokir can “look as if into
the river’s heart.” Fokir, and the subalterity Glissant alludes to, is akin
to silt itself, “an alluvium deposited by populations” whose presence is
insistent, yet illegible. Opacity draws on the environmental imaginary
of silted waters to imagine a version of identity politics that opposes the
demand to fully disclose, to translate into the language of power, or to
reify one’s ever-evolving identity. Opacity is precisely what the satellite
image (Fig. 8.1) rails against, in pursuit of clarity, transparency, knowa-
bility, the entire motivation for seeking to look from the planetary scale
in the first place. The implications of a concept of opacity for scale theory
should be clear: how might our visual perception, barriers of language,
or practices of encountering the world affect how we see at different
scales? Do we always expect to see clearly at every level?
The possibility of a theory of scale inspired by the estuarine environ-
ment brings us to the dual question of the relation between water and
words in The Hungry Tide and our (in)ability to see clearly through
them. It is almost too easy to read water as a metaphor for everything in
the novel. Sometimes words are water, as in Nirmal’s observation that
“the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but
also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese, and
who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation
of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow” (205; italics original). Yet
this interpretive view not only threatens to essentialize water to a set of
fluid properties, predictable at every scale, but also neglects the various
phase changes that water can go through. Sometimes words are abrasive
and solid (artificial, mediating), as when the fisherman Horen recounts a
time that he made love, where “there were no words to chafe upon our
senses: just an intermingling like that of fresh water and salt, a rising and
a falling as of the tides” (301). Words may “chafe,” but silence allows
for intimacy and intermingling through other modes of sensation. Thus,
words are like water if they are transparent (simulating direct access) and
not like water if they are opaque (get in the way of understanding).28
218 M. Jue
Language appears as an intuitive device only when we do not notice

its mediating function, only when it appears so naturalized so as not to
be noticed. The material properties of water—to be clear or silted—
constitute an environmental imaginary that not only informs how we
understand language but, crucially, how we understand the friction
involved in shifting perspective across scales—which also means across
forms of embodiment and environment.
Ghosh’s textual opacity is the antithesis of the satellite image that I
began with, with all its desired transparency and mastery of vision. So
often, thinking across scales is frictionless, like zooming in and out in
Google Earth.29 Yet what I have aimed to show, alongside Joanna
Zylinska and Timothy Clark, is that every scale leaves something out.
Scale is always for a particular perceiver, colored by species (human or
dolphin?), language (English or Bengali?), and milieu (air or water?).
Sliding along scales in geography and in literary fiction is in fact not
frictionless, but always involves acts of translation. There is an excess of
knowability and materiality in the world that our abstractions of particu-
lar scales do not account for that Zylinska calls thinking at the “univer-
sal scale.” Her “universal scale” is not a desired totality but a gesture
towards that which escapes totalization. It serves as “a reminder for us
that there is an excess to our acts of world-making and that it is perhaps
imprudent or even irresponsible to forget about it in all kinds of discus-
sions.”30 Reading The Hungry Tide is an exercise in appreciating this
excess, estimating what we don’t know as we move across scales, trans-
late perspectives, reorient across milieu. Opacity leads towards an epis-
temic humility when attending to matters of scale.
Saturation
Falling water and its power to collapse scales relates to a broader poli-
tics of endangerment in India and the Pacific Ocean today.31 In addi-
tion to the 2004 tsunami, sea-level rise and government-sponsored dam
building continue to threaten coastal and other littoral zones. Take,
for example, the necropolitics of recent protests where villagers from
Madhya Pradesh submerged themselves in river water for over fourteen
days in September 2012.32 The dams raised the height of rivers in low-
elevation land, saturating the farmland that residents needed to survive.
The human cost of this damming has been recorded by numerous docu-
mentary films, such as The Narmada Diary (1995). Bishnupriya Ghosh
notes how the camera—so comfortably able to zoom out to take in the
glory of the dam—falters when a man points to where his home had
once been, “unable to capture or locate what lies beneath, what has been
lost.”33 The water constitutes a vertical barrier that the camera and its
penetrating zoom function cannot pass through, the scale of devasta-
tion unable to be fully represented. The problem of flooding in Madhya
Pradesh evokes what Rob Nixon has called “displacement in place,” an
erosion of land and resources “that leaves communities stranded in a
place stripped of the very characteristics that made it habitable.”34
Displacement in place is part of a broader Anthropocene politics that
continues to face problems of definition, representation, and respon-
siveness across scales.35 Yet one of the consequences of thinking scale
through the medium of water is that scale need not be so mathemati-
cal or clear-cut. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad, Joanna Zylinska
offers a strong provocation to think about scale as “part of the phe-
nomena it attempts to measure,” not imposed from the outside, but
generated from within a particular situation.36 This claim takes on new
significance when we think about scale through water, as the condition
of where we think from. Once water is of material consideration, scale
theory needs to consider not only size, but also orientation, opacity, and
the possibility of experiencing multiple scales at once.
One watery concept that signifies the plenitude of experiencing multi-
ple scales at once is saturation.37 Consider Kanai’s reflection that “Rilke
said ‘life is lived in transformation,’ and I think Nirmal soaked this idea
into himself in the way cloth absorbs ink” (233). Although this is, on
the one hand, a comment about Nirmal’s life-long enrapture with revo-
lutionary ideals, we can also read it as an example of remediation. To
“soak” an idea into oneself might remind us of a kind of calligraphy, in
which people are the pages that are not so much inscribed as stained
with the ink of stories. Yet on a more literal level, Nirmal (having passed
away) exists ontologically as ink itself, at first on the pages of his note-
book, secondly in Kanai’s memory after the notebook is lost, and finally
as ink again when Kanai proposes to “write the story of Nirmal’s note-
book” (329) at the end of the novel—which we can assume is actually
The Hungry Tide, the novel we just read. The substance of ink thus con-
nects language and water, a noninscriptive conception of writing that
does not cut or mark the subject so much as occupy, suffuse, and move
the subject from within, a condition in which experience is condensed
220 M. Jue
into the small-scale and portable substance of inked pages, an ontological

condition of being saturated by stories larger than oneself.38
In the final scene, after surviving the cyclone, Piya and Nilima
exchange thoughts on what exactly makes a home. Rather than referring
to the ground beneath their feet, Piya and Nilima both identify two types
of mobility or ritual connected to water: for Piya, “home is where the
Orcaella [dolphins] are,” while for Nilima, “home is wherever I can brew
a pot of good tea” (329). The ritual of brewing a pot of tea, to drink
together with company, is an opportunity to share water and to share
stories. Saturation—to be filled with water—provides an alternative to
the fixed “groundedness” of home, suggesting participation and contin-
gency simultaneously. Perhaps saturation allows us a partial view of how
we always already participate in multiple scales of relation, even though
the nature of this participation might be opaque.
In the Sundarbans, one might be occupied by many waters.
Notes
1. On “planetarity,” see Spivak and Chakrabarty. On the relation between
power and vision from above, see Arendt, Virilio, Chow, and Pratt.
2. Zylinska, 26.
3. Zylinska, 29.
4. See Baucom.
5. Amitav Ghosh, Hungry Tide, 6. Subsequent references are in parentheses
in the text.
6. See Steinberg.
7. Asking what it would mean to “secure the volume” (49), Stuart Elden has
compellingly argued for a geographic practice that takes verticality into
consideration, particularly in areas like Israel and the West bank where
tunnels course through hillsides, unseen topographically.
8. Peters and Steinberg, 127.
9. Ibid., 128.
10. Amitav Ghosh characterizes Fokir as the person most closely in tune with
the forest and Irrawaddy dolphins, but also as subaltern: the only time he
“speaks” in the novel is when Kanai reads in Nirmal’s writings a mem-
ory of what Fokir said as a boy. Every time he appears as an adult in the
novel, what he says is either translated into English by Kanai, or met with
Piya’s uncomprehending ears.
11. According to Nilima’s informal estimate, “a human being is killed by
a tiger every other day in the Sundarbans—at the very least” (199).
The story of Bon Bibi—so moving for Kanai and Kusum in their youth—
begins not in India, but Arabia, when two twins (Bon Bibi and her
brother Shah Gonjoli) are sent east to establish an area for human habita-
tion. They banish the existing demons to half of the land; the strongest
demon, Dokhin Rai, is said to take the form of a tiger who will eat you if
you cross into his territory. Dokhin Rai promises great wealth to one man
in return for the sacrifice of one young boy, Dukhey; but when Dukhey is
left, he calls on Bon Bibi for help, and she saves him.
12. Like tidalectics, oscillating ocean time is a theory that develops out of
environmental form and specifically in response to wave movement, a
temporal “genre” that “takes in such long durée processes as ocean circu-
lation as well as such rapid changes as tides and waves” (Helmreich 107).
13. See Cohen.
14. Deloughrey, 2.
15. Ibid., 3.
16. As Astrida Neimanis helpfully points out, water does not demonstrate
only dialectical properties, but a multitude of different properties.
Delineating six hydrologics, she argues that water can: be gestational;
have the capacity to dissolve; act as a medium of communication; pro-
duce differentiation; serve as an archival medium; and exceed mastery in
its ultimate unknowability.
17. The joy of the tides falling is different from the “pathetic fallacy” famously
derided by the critic John Ruskin. Whereas the pathetic fallacy describes
a misattribution of human emotions to inanimate natural objects (related
to personification), the joy of the tides falling locates emotion in the
human observer rather than an environmental feature or object.
18. Lakoff and Johnson, 15.
19. Also consider the terror when a thing rises, like a crocodile: “Suddenly
the water boiled over and a pair of huge jaws came shooting out of the
river, breaking the surface exactly where Piya’s wrist had been a moment
before” (144).
20. Ahmed, 4.
21. Clark, 104.
22. This resonates with what I have elsewhere named milieu-specific theory, a
critical awareness of the relationships between our environment and how
we speak about the world. See Jue, “Vampire Squid Media.”
23. Morton, 29.
24. Ibid., 30.
25. For additional perspectives on dolphin communication, see McIntyre,
Bateson, Peters, Burnett, and Bryld.
26. Glissant, 154.
27. Ibid., 111.
222 M. Jue
28. Alexander Galloway has noted something similar about interfacial media:

“the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media
altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. To suc-
ceed, then, is at best self-deception and at worst self-annihilation” (25).
29. See Jue, “Proteus and the Digital.”
30. Zylinska, 26.
31. Ghosh also wrote a short essay about the literal loss of identity that
accompanied the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, where survivors had had
their ID cards and passports swept away. See Ghosh, “The Town by the
Sea.”
32. For more on the submerged protests in Madhya Pradesh, see Das.
33. Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that such documentaries cultivate an aesthetic
of emplacement that immerses the spectator in the world soon to be
lost so that we too might inhabit the loss of those affected by the dam
(74–75).
34. Nixon, 19.
35. Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy points out the “devastating absence of
any agent—a state, or even a movement—that could act on the scale
of the problem” or contextualize the human cost of change in the
Anthropocene (n.p.).
36. Zylinska, 29.
37. Water is more than a dialectical substance that can create or destroy; see
Neimanis’s discussion of water’s multiple properties (to archive, gestate,
dissolve, communicate, differentiate, and remain unknowable).
38. For more on the coincidence between ink and subjectivity, see Jue,
“Vampire Squid Media.”
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC:
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of
Baucom, Ian. “Hydrographies.” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 301–313.
Bryld, Mette. “Dialogues with Dolphins and Other Extraterrestrials:
Displacements in Gendered Space.” In Between Monsters, Goddesses, and
Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine, and Cyberspace,
edited by Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti, 47–71. London: Zed Books, 1996.
Burnett, D. Graham. Sounding the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical

Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 1–23.
Chow, Rey. Age of the World Target: Self-referentiality in War, Theory, and
Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke Press, 2006.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold
Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Cohen, Margaret. “Chronotopes of the Sea.” In The Novel, Volume 2, edited by
Franco Moretti, 647–666. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Das, Siddharth Ranjan. “A Protest, Standing in Water, 14 Days.” NDTV,
September 7, 2012. Accessed June 15, 2015. http://www.ndtv.com/
india-news/a-protest-standing-in-water-for-14-days-498689.
Deloughrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific
Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
Elden, Stuart. “Secure the Volume.” Political Geography 34 (2013): 35–51.
Galloway, Alexander. The Interface Effect. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Mariner, 2006.
———. “The Town by the Sea.” In Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of
Turmoil in our Times, 1–25. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya. “‘We shall drown, but we shall not move’: The Ecologics
of Testimony in NBA Documentaries.” In Documentary Testimonies: Global
Archives of Suffering, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, 59–82. New
York: Routledge, 2009.
Glissant, Édouard. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Lansing:
University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of
the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Helmreich, Stefan. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of
Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Jue, Melody. “Proteus and the Digital: Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s
Materiality in Ocean Animations.” Animations: An Interdisciplinary Journal
9, no. 2 (2014): 245–260.
———. “Vampire Squid Media.” Grey Room 37 (2014): 82–105.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
McIntyre, Joan, ed. Mind in the Waters. New York: Scribners, 1974.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007.
Neimanis, Astrida. “Feminist Subjectivity, Watered.” Feminist Review 103
(2013): 23–41.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2013.
224 M. Jue
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Theory of Elemental

Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Peters, Kimberly and Philip Steinberg. “Toward a Wet Ontology.” Harvard
Design Magazine 39 (2014): Wet Matter: 124–129.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 1992.
New York: Routledge, 2008.
Purdy, Jedediah. “Imagining the Anthropocene.” Aeon Magazine, March
31, 2015. Accessed July 10, 2015. http://aeon.co/magazine/science/
should-we-be-suspicious-of-the-anthropocene/.
Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press,
2003.
Steinberg, Philip. The Social Construction of Ocean Space. Cambridge: Cambridge
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. 1977. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006.
Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 2014.
CHAPTER 9
World Literature as a Problem of Scale
Oded Nir
To speak of literature and spatiality is to speak of figurative mechanisms,

or the literary constructions that stand for certain spaces and allow us
to grasp them. The attempt by novelists to produce figures for national
space is perhaps the most well-known example of this process: to imag-
ine the nation means here to craft a complex social and geographical
allegory, in which different socio-geographical types must be imag-
ined to work together to overcome contradictions that tear them apart,
or in which the protagonists’ adventures somehow mirror those of the
nation.1 Realist and historical novels are good examples of almost explicit
figuration of national space in literature. Less well understood, per-
haps, is the spatially orienting function of utopian novels, which consti-
tute “pedagogical practices . . . that enable us to inhabit, make sense of,
orient ourselves within, and act through” social spaces.2 In all of these
examples, what is to be noticed at the outset is that the representational
challenges of scale are expressed in a tension between detail and system,
where the former belongs to the realm of the immediately visible, and
the latter remains invisible and not immediately graspable, in need of a
reductive figuration that would make it thinkable at all. As Toscano and
Kinkle have recently asserted, the tension between detail and system,
O. Nir (*) 
Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_9
226 O. Nir
between embedded individual perspective and its systemic determinants,

itself becomes a problem (or even an unresolvable antinomy) on which
these spatially orienting texts reflect.3
Thus, we can begin this essay by asserting that scale becomes a prob-
lem whenever a representational solution or a figure for a certain space as
a whole or a totality is sought. It is in this sense that Fredric Jameson’s
notion of cognitive mapping is fruitful for any thinking about the inter-
section of literature and scale. According to Jameson, the stretching of
social relations internationally under global capitalism, defeating any
national claim to autonomy, produces a challenge for any attempt to
represent a spatial totality.4 It is the transformation of social relations,
rather than simply the enlargement of scale, that throws previous modes
of imagining geopolitical space into deep crisis for Jameson. What we
should emphasize here is the conceptual convergence of what Jameson
discusses in terms of cognitive mapping and attempts to theorize geo-
graphical scale itself. The critical conceptions of scale developed by Neil
Smith, Sallie Marston, and others emphasize precisely the material pro-
duction of scale and the political struggles over (and using) the ways in
which scale is materially constructed.5 What theorizations of scale have
in common with the notion of cognitive mapping is their relation to
totality: while Jameson challenges his readers to invent new aesthetic lan-
guages that creatively stand in for the unrepresentable totality of capital-
ism, scale is “a factor in the construction and dynamics of geographical
totalities,” to quote Richard Howitt.6 Howitt’s insistence on the rela-
tional nature of scale, its role in relating individual to system, is precisely
equivalent to the mediating role of the aesthetic in Jameson’s schema
of cognitive mapping. Thus, for example, the scale of the household in
Marston’s analysis functions for women as a way of mediating between
their subjectivities and larger social structures.7 We can even suggest
that Neil Brenner’s observation that theorizations of scale tend to make
the term grow uncontrollably inclusive are indicative of the totalizing
impulse animating these discussions.8
Moreover, the creative reduction inevitably performed by the aesthetic
in Jameson’s schema is equivalent to the process of producing scale
itself. In both cases, this creative reduction can be seen as an attempt
to resolve the real contradictions of capital (an imaginary resolution in
the aesthetic case), as Smith argues.9 This direct attempt to resolve capi-
talism’s contradictions, even though it is bound to fail (or is ideologi-
cal, to use Althusser’s term), is nonetheless a necessary first step toward a
9 WORLD LITERATURE AS A PROBLEM OF SCALE 227
revolutionary politics. It is in this light that I would like to consider liter-

ary critics’ growing preoccupation with the problem of world literature
since the late 1980s. The attempts to theorize world literature can be
seen both as a symptom of this stretching of relations of production onto
a global scale, and an attempt to imagine an unrepresentable system. As
we will see below, the theorizations of a global literary scale are precisely
so many attempts to relate detail and system; to come up with creative
reductions that allow new kinds of agency and meaning to become vis-
ible. This essay focuses on the ways in which theorists of world literature
have tried to imagine their new subject matter, and the ways in which
the problem of scale allows us to suggest a new definition of world litera-
ture. Throughout the essay, therefore, we will treat “world literature” as
a discursive space in which the necessity of a totalizing impulse is made
visible. We will start with a typology of world literature theories, drawing
on influential texts from the last thirty years. The tendency of discussions
of world literature toward formalistic definitions of its subject matter
will inevitably make our own discussion formalistic, at least at its point
of departure. However, as the argument will suggest, the typology itself
will provide us with a way out of this formalism. Indeed, the typology’s
reductive operation will prove not to be a bad flattening of otherwise
complex theoretical accounts; rather, it will enable us to reintroduce con-
tent into our formalistic account of world literature in a way that does
not relegate the content of specific novels to the role of a space-filler,
mere material to serve as a random example for the operation of this or
that conceptual apparatus.
Varieties of World Literature

One of the more colossal attempts to concretely “map” something
like a literature of the world can be found in Franco Moretti’s writing
about the spread of the novel as a literary form.10 In his short essay,
“Conjectures on World Literature,” Moretti expounds on the theoreti-
cal conclusions that can be drawn from a study of the novel on a plan-
etary scale.11 According to Moretti, as the novel travels from its original
European context to other contexts, particularly as a result of coloni-
alism, its form has to be adapted to radically different local situations.
Not only do “peripheral” writers have to accommodate new contents,
and new natural and human landscapes they also have to find a way to
bring the form of consciousness that the novel can accommodate—the
228 O. Nir
clear demarcation of a narrative voice—into dialogue with local forms of

knowledge. What quickly becomes evident, according to Moretti, is that
the process of welding local consciousness with the novel form is mani-
fested in disruptions in the narrative voice, disruptions that register the
material struggles, the transformations of social relations, which under-
pin the travel of the novel as an aesthetic form in the first place:
For me, it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material—and local
form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters; and then, local
narrative voice: and it’s precisely in this third dimension that these novels
seem to be most unstable—most uneasy. . . . Which makes sense: the nar-
rator is the pole of comment, of explanation, of evaluation, and when for-
eign “formal patterns” (or actual foreign presence, for that matter) make
characters behave in strange ways . . . , then of course comment becomes
uneasy—garrulous, erratic, rudderless.
“Interferences,” Even-Zohar calls them: powerful literatures making life

hard for the others—making structure hard. And Schwarz: “a part of the
original historical conditions reappears as a sociological form. . . . In this
sense, forms are the abstract of specific social relationships.” Yes, and in
our case the historical conditions reappear as a sort of “crack” in the form;
as a faultline running between story and discourse, world and worldview:
the world goes in the strange direction dictated by an outside power;
the worldview tries to make sense of it, and is thrown off balance all the
time.12
Thus, in the case of “peripheral” novels, the systematic inequality

between the parts of the global system (a claim that Moretti borrows
from Immanuel Wallerstein) is inscribed into each particular hybridiza-
tion of the novel’s form.13
Moretti’s conception of world literature emphasizes an extra-literary
moment of struggle, which is then mediated into the realm of aesthetic
form: the historical struggles of colonialism and imperialism give birth
to the formal aesthetic hybridization of the narrative voice. Two other
results of Moretti’s conception are also important for our discussion.
First, there is Moretti’s often-debated practice of “distant reading” and,
second, the anti-nationalist stance that complements it.14 Comparative
literature scholars, according to Moretti, should not study literary texts
directly when working within his conception of world literature. They
should rather rely on analyses provided by scholars of various national
literatures.15 It is this division of labor that for Moretti establishes an anti-

national impulse at the disciplinary center of comparative literature.16
This division of labor and the distance of “distant reading” therefore
come to constitute more than the methodological indirectness of the
comparatist’s work; it also signifies a political imperative to “disrupt”
national-literary historiographies, particularly their claim to the relative
autonomy of their subject matter.17 We will return to these points below.
If Moretti’s conception of world literature relies heavily on social and
economic transformations, David Damrosch’s approach can be said to
form an oppositional approach, one in which extra-literary transforma-
tions are admitted into the theory, but fade into the background as the
aesthetic phenomena take center stage. Thus, Wallerstein’s claim for the
differentiation caused by the unification of the global system—a com-
mon point of departure for Moretti and Damrosch—is seen to produce
the emergence of a new global consciousness, itself differentiated accord-
ing to context, to which corresponds the emergence of a new, global,
literature.18 World literature, for Damrosch, is therefore not a circum-
scribed, predefined group of texts. Rather, it is a mode of reading (which
depends on the circulation of texts from one cultural context to another)
in which cultural differences and similarities are constantly scrutinized,
elaborated, and brought into play in a way that does not reduce any
one context to another. According to Damrosch, “works of world lit-
erature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to
understand this new life we need to look closely at the ways the work
becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts.”19
This process leads to the production of new meanings and new ways of
seeing—somewhat similar to what other interpretive traditions would call
estrangement—that are determined by a complex interaction between
the text itself, its reader and her cultural context, and the text’s transla-
tion.20 Thus, the production of meaning does not belong exclusively to
the original cultural context in which it was written. Rather, the travel of
literary texts to different contexts “refracts” their meaning-making pro-
cess (to adopt Damrosch’s terminology), making it belong no less to the
receiving culture than to its original (national) context. This process of
refraction makes possible both increased familiarity with difference and
a rethinking of the local culture through this difference. In Damrosch’s
words:
230 O. Nir
This refraction, however, is double in nature: works become world litera-

ture by being received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined
in many ways by the host culture’s national tradition and the present needs
of its own writers. Even a single work of world literature is the locus of
negotiation between two different cultures. The receiving culture can use
the foreign material in all sorts of ways: as a positive model for the future
development of its own tradition; as a negative case of a primitive, or deca-
dent strand that must be avoided or rooted out at home; or more neu-
trally, as an image of radical otherness against which the home tradition
can more clearly be defined. world literature is thus always as much about
the host culture’s values and needs as it is about the work’s source culture;
hence it is a double refraction, one that can be described through the fig-
ure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci
that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world litera-
ture, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone.21
Therefore, as was the case with Moretti, Damrosch’s conception of

world literature creates an opposition between the imagined holism of
various national literatures and the emergent world literature.22 The spa-
tial metaphorization of this nascent political moment—that of distance—
also pervades both scholars’ thinking on world literature. For Moretti, as
we have seen, it is the practice of distant reading that allows for recogniz-
ing patterns common to the global travels of the novel; for Damrosch,
the spatial metaphor—the distance that a text traverses in its travels—
gives rise to the estrangement effect that drives the cultural-refractive
process.
Many other approaches to world literature that take as their starting
point the colonial heritage of the world system, such as those of Graham
Huggan, Sarah Brouillette, James English, and Pascale Casanova, can
now be seen, for the construction of our typology, as specific super-
positions of the two positions articulated by Moretti and Damrosch.23
Moretti’s assertion that the so-called “peripheral” novel bears the marks
of historical struggles in the disruption of the novel’s form is parallel, for
instance, to Brouillete’s claim that authors and readers collude in sub-
verting aesthetic constructions of postcolonial situations.24 The same
approach is also echoed in Pascale Casanova’s literary “revolutionaries,”
the peripheral authors who subvert the rules of the literary field with
which they must engage, appropriating universality.25 By contrast, for
instance, Graham Huggan’s description of the formation of a Bourdieu-
inspired literary field of value around peripheral exoticism, in which the
representation of colonial difference is constantly negotiated, assumes in

advance something like Damrosch’s claim of the literary “refraction” of
cultures.26 Thus, one side of the opposition between the Damrosch and
Moretti positions seeks at least to detect instances of global dialogue, if
not to trace the contours of a common field of meaning that is being
created on a global level, while the other is concerned with the disrup-
tions or subversions of the rules of the field. Since either of these poles
has to assume its opposite (the creation of a common field of meaning
necessitates the subversion of a previous regime; the subversion of the
rules must assume their power), we can see them as complementing each
other rather than standing in absolute opposition.27
The imagined opposition between the two positions, however, has
yielded some bitter debates. For example, the essay collection Debating
World Literature, which includes contributions by Benedict Anderson,
Emily Apter, Moretti, and others, is dominated by a rejection of any
approach that focuses on literary and extra-literary struggle as the point
of departure for theorizing world literature.28 In his introductory essay,
Christopher Prendergast vehemently attacks Casanova’s World Republic
of Letters and Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” with an array
of arguments, in which the charge of reductionism—reducing literary
meaning to extra-literary struggles—looms large and ominous:
It is not that the national-competitive model is irrelevant; on the con-

trary, it can be made to do much useful work. . . . It is simply that in
[Casanova’s] hands it is made to do all the work, accorded such grand
explanatory powers that it effectively posited as capable of accounting for
everything. But for this claim to stand up it would have to be subjected,
Popper-style, to a range of counter-considerations, none of which get a
look in. The most predictable objection to the model is that there are vari-
ables other than nation and relations other than competition.29
Prendergast does not offer much in the way of a positive conception

of world literature, but his critique seems to indicate a weak dialogical
image of world literature, in which both moments of struggle and strug-
gle-free literary value coexist independent of one another, in a kind of
pluralistic acceptance of interpretation, which changes according to read-
ers’ perspectives.30
Simplifying the different positions we have addressed so far, we can
now map the different approaches to world literature using Fredric
232 O. Nir
Fig. 9.1 Mapping World Literature Theories
Jameson’s rendering of the Greimassian rectangle. According to

Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, the rectangle offers a spatial meta-
phor for the work of dialectical thinking.31 The rectangle is defined by
two types of opposition: the top horizontal line of the internal square
connects two “contraries,” to use Jameson’s term. These are terms that
exclude each other in some sense while being positive concepts in their
own right. The diagonal lines in the internal square connect each of
the main contraries with its “simple negation,” or a term that receives
its significatory power by negating the term with which it is diagonally
connected. The Greimassian rectangle shown in Fig. 9.1 thus plots the
typology of world literature theories outlined in the preceding pages.
Several things need to be emphasized about this mapping of the dif-
ferent approaches. The basic opposition or the pair of “contraries” in
the rectangle is the one between dialogue and struggle. Each corner of
the outer rectangle represents a combination of the two corners of the
inner rectangle closest to it (thus, for example, Moretti and Casanova
represent a combination of struggle and non-dialogue). Of course, none
of the real approaches match completely the ideal type of that specific
corner. Moretti and Casanova, for example, cannot be said to reject dia-
logue altogether, but it is clear that their theorization of world literature
stresses struggle as what produces world literature. The non-dialogical
moment for Moretti can be seen not only in his emphasis on struggle,
but also in the negative characterization of the hybridization of the novel

as it travels: the construction of narrative voice is disrupted; it acquires
a constitutive lack from the point of view of the European novel. From
the perspective of a Western reader, therefore, this effect is registered
as a disruption of communication. The “pluralist approach” at the top
corner of the outer square designates the weak combination of the two
approaches, one that does not commit to either pole as a more funda-
mental moment, and is therefore hesitant to assert any meaningful con-
nection between them other than a loose, independent coexistence—a
pluralism of interpretations, one which can be considered a Hegelian
“bad” variety. What is missing from the diagram is the bottom term, to
which we will return shortly.
For now, it is important to show that other approaches to world liter-
ature can be mapped onto the rectangle. Rebecca Walkowitz’s discussion
of what she calls “comparison literature” can serve as a good example
here.32 In her account, comparison literature includes texts that both
express and constitute a reflection on their quick translation and transna-
tional travel. In terms of both form and content, Walkowitz shows that
these literary products are written with their travel in mind, which results
in an emphasis on events and plot over linguistic play, and comparative
structures over community-specific forms of expression. It is not that
cultural specificity, local histories, and politics are effaced in this transfor-
mation; rather, they are expressed through the new formal arrangements
of the novels and through the events and action being represented.33
Walkowitz thus presents us with a more concrete model for intercultural
literary dialogue in world literature, one that tries to come up with cre-
ative aesthetic solutions for the problems arising from the novel’s trav-
els. Walkowitz’s account therefore belongs in Damrosch’s corner of the
square, even if her account is very different from Damrosch’s, and is
even in some respects antagonistic to his.34
This mapping is, of course, a reduction. Before we explore the bot-
tom term in our rectangle, we should highlight the consequences that
our typology has for theorizations of scale. We should here return to
Neil Smith’s basic assertion that the material production of scale should
be seen as so many attempts to reconcile the contradictions of capital-
ist society.35 In the literary realm, this reconciliation will of course
be an imaginary one. We should be careful not to fall under the spell
of our theories—seeing Damrosch’s schema as a dialogical reconcilia-
tion of contradictions but viewing Moretti’s emphasis on conflict as an
234 O. Nir
attempt to keep aesthetic and social contradictions visible. Rather, both

of them position our new literary scale—that of the world—as some-
thing through which an antagonism to other scales can be articulated,
with the national scale being the most important of these. Thus, what on
the scalar level of national imagination has ceased to function, or has run
into irresolvable contradictions, is “resolved” on the scale of world lit-
erature (much as in Smith’s more political-economic examples). The new
laws that Moretti discovers by tracing the spread of the novel over the
global scale, the new intelligibility given to literary struggles when put in
global perspective in Casanova’s account, or the new meanings generated
in Moretti’s account—all of these are new coherences, new ways of rec-
onciling imaginary contradictions. In other words, the different theories
of world literature all hypothesize the new literary scale as the concep-
tual space in which imaginary reconciliation happens. The contradictory
belongs to other scales, particularly that of the nation, on which we will
have more to say in what follows.
It is the enigma posed by the bottom term (which Jameson calls the
neutral term) whose exploration will enable us to see that the typology
is productive for our purposes despite the reduction it entails. Now,
the neutral term is occupied by everything that is strongly rejected by
our theoretical accounts: if the top term designates some combination
of the two types of theoretical positions, the neutral term is necessarily
characterized by an impossible combination of non-dialogue and non-
struggle. And it is in the double cancellation of the initial opposition (the
one between struggle and dialogue, in our case) that the utopian finds its
expression in the imaginative space opened by the rectangle for Jameson,
as Phillip Wegner shows.36 This is how Jameson himself puts it, discuss-
ing Louis Marin’s Utopiques:
whereas the narrative operation of myth undertakes to mediate between

the two primary terms of the opposition . . . and to produce a complex
term that would be their resolution, utopian narrative is constituted by the
union of the twin contradictories of the initial opposition . . . , a combi-
nation which, virtually a double cancellation of the initial contradiction
itself, may be said to effect the latter’s neutralization and to produce a new
term, the so-called neuter or neutral term.37
That none of the positions discussed seems to correspond to the utopian

pole should not immediately indicate to us that our mapping is wrong
in some fundamental way. Nor does this absence immediately imply that
the theorists that we have been discussing are fundamentally wrong or
pass over an important possibility for theorizing world literature (since it
is only their writing that made this last option visible in the first place).
Rather, we might begin understanding what the neutral term entails, in
the context of theorizing world literature, by looking for what is rejected
or excluded from counting as world literature in the different concep-
tions we have been considering.
These excluded or rejected options appear in many forms—the archaic
or retrograde, the degraded, the bad imitation, and so forth—but in gen-
eral they belong to two groups: those that designate a past situation or
consciousness that is being overcome, and those that designate an omi-
nous new development that should be distinguished from the possibil-
ity of “real” world literature. National literatures are probably the most
conspicuous example of the first group: they are what is being refracted
and broken down in Damrosch’s global literary dialogue, and they are
what Moretti’s whole program of world literature sees as its main antag-
onist. Prendergast, Huggan, and Brouillette also situate the new global
literary language or field, whether it is a good or a bad one, in oppo-
sition to the various national literary consciousnesses, deemed to be
a thing of the past.38 We can even refine this observation: what is par-
ticularly antagonistic about national literatures, from the perspective of
world literature, is, in one way or another, their proclaimed autonomy.
This autonomy and its accompanying stable subject and meaning system
are expressed through the projection of a cultural center in Casanova
or in Moretti’s rejection of national literatures’ claim to some smooth,
wholly internal developments in their respective contexts, or through
their insufficiency to explain the terms of global dialogue for Prendergast,
to mention some examples.39 In short, we can say that it is the totaliz-
ing aesthetic of national literatures that somehow makes them unsavory
to theoretical accounts of world literature. It is no surprise, therefore,
that the formation of a “good” world-literary field is by definition non-
totalizing, except on a very thin formal level: the universal disruption of
narrative voice in Moretti, the appropriation-for-different-ends of literary
rules and conventions by Casanova’s literary revolutionaries, Brouillette’s
authors of exoticism, or the complete subjectivization of any conception
of the literary world in Damrosch—all are anti-totalizing “first principles”
of the emerging world literary system.
236 O. Nir
This is, however, only half of the story. The breaking down of old
holisms is complemented by the second rejection that we have men-
tioned: the “bad” kind of world literature. For some, such as Huggan,
this is the only kind that exists—the representation of postcolonial oth-
erness always ends up in the commodification of postcolonial exoticism,
the transformation of once-antagonistic representational strategies into a
new rationale of literary value to be consumed and celebrated.40 If for
Huggan the new aesthetic code marks the transition from an antagonistic
politics to its neutralization by the global capitalist market, for Damrosch
it is this commodification’s expression in what he calls “airport litera-
ture,”41 a mere imitation of engagement with otherness for commercial
purposes, that constitutes a degraded form of world literature, an ersatz
version of true defamiliarization through the encounter with otherness.
Finally, Moretti’s version of a degraded world literature is to be found
in the habit of viewing peripheral or non-Western novels as degraded or
failed imitations of the Western ones (a position that Moretti debunks
using what he terms “Jameson’s law”).42
The rejection of national literatures as belonging in world literature
is rooted in a temporal claim, namely, the relegation of national cultural
autonomy to the past. The second type of rejection points at either the
present or the near future: singling out either in reality or as a theoreti-
cal error, possible sinister developments of the emerging system (such as
the spread of commodification) or viewing it as strongly centered around
Western nations. It is important to emphasize here how these alterna-
tives fit into our Greimassian rectangle: for both Damrosch and Huggan,
for example, commodification excludes true dialogue or a negotiation
of otherness (“non-dialogue” in our rectangle), and at the same time it
neutralizes political antagonism or struggle (“non-struggle” in our rec-
tangle). The commodification of a literary language of otherness, there-
fore, is both non-dialogic and non- (or anti-)struggle, in accordance with
the defining characteristics of the bottom term in our rectangle.
We therefore have several examples for the theoretical possibilities
included in the neutral term: national literatures, commodification of
the aesthetic of otherness, or centralization around the cultural power-
houses of the West or global North. It is here that our particular reduc-
tionism starts paying off, for all three of these options have something
in common: they all offer us what we can call a totalizing horizon for
the interpretation of literary works, whether that horizon is the complex
totality of national autonomy or identity, or the grand unifying logics
of commodification (everything turns into a commodity),43 or a global

cultural center that makes particular aesthetic norms into the universal
norms of a larger field of literary value. Now, the breaking up of previous
totalizing imaginaries such as that of the nation is not essentially prob-
lematic, since the creation of a new totalizing project always depends on
such destructive moments. Relegating the nation to the dustbin of his-
tory could signify the emergence of a new type of historical conscious-
ness. What should give us pause, however—at least if we consider the
two other examples that we have for the bottom term in the rectangle—
is the undialectical throwing out of the baby with the bath water: not
only a particular, historically determinate totalizing imaginary is rejected
here, but totalization itself seems to be antagonistic to world literature.
We will come back to totalizing literature later in this essay.
We can now add to our typology several other discussions of world
literature, ones that do not necessarily constitute attempts to provide a
new theory of it. Prominent among these are reflections on literary stud-
ies in general and their relation to globalization, in particular on the dis-
ciplinary identity of comparative literature. Many of the commentaries
and critiques generated on the topic seem to be centered on a growing
dissatisfaction with postcolonial studies and the (related but not iden-
tical) growing reliance on “theory” in literary studies in the last dec-
ades of the 1900s and the early 2000s. This position is shared by many
prominent scholars in the field, such as Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said,
Rey Chow, Masao Miyoshi, and Imre Szeman. In Spivak’s Death of a
Discipline and in other interventions, she argues that the turn to theory,
intimately connected with the rise of postcolonial studies, has served in
the long run to create new means to avoid real engagement with oth-
erness. The Eurocentrism and Orientalism that were supposed to be
overcome through postcolonial studies have reinscribed themselves into
literary-critical writing through the new tools forged by the discipline.44
In 2001, in essays from issues of PMLA and South Atlantic Quarterly
devoted to the topic, Edward Said, Rey Chow, and Imre Szeman and
Susie O’Brien seem to advance a very similar position: the turn to the-
ory and the rise of postcolonial studies as a discipline no longer provide
a point of view from which effective political critique can be waged.45
While the precise framing of the problem differs from one critic to
another, we can take Imre Szeman and Susie O’Brien’s formulation,
appearing in the introductory essay to the South Atlantic Quarterly issue,
to be representative:
238 O. Nir
It seems to us that the solution [to the political challenge of thinking

together literature and globalization] isn’t to ontologize the margin as the
incommensurable and nonrecuperable “residue of representation,” but to
read the discourse of the margin as a symptom of postcolonialism’s com-
mitment to a geopolitics and an understanding of the global circulation of
power (its causal circuits and lines of force) that has been changed whole-
sale in the era of globalization. Authenticity, hybridity, margins—these are
all names for antinomies that postcolonial studies has identified but has
been unable to resolve because of its commitment to a worldview that
understands globalization as simply “neoimperialism”: something new, but
not different in kind from earlier moments of global capitalist expansion
and exploitation.46
The solutions offered (if any) to the problem vary widely: Spivak
urges literary scholars to shift the methodological focus of their inquir-
ies back to the study of marginal languages and histories and abandon
more theoretical starting points for literary inquiry. Only in this way, she
argues, can we reinvent comparative literature as an ethical project, one
that strives for what she calls “planetariety,” situated against today’s glo-
balization. If globalization seeks to make otherness transparent, the plan-
etary figure is one in which an engagement with otherness commits its
practitioners to the retention of opacity:
If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents,

planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived
from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings
us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of
our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space,
what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is
not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate our-
selves into this peculiar mindset.47
Even if Spivak’s prescriptive solution is unique—the production of plan-

etary alternative to globalization, which translates for her into a new pro-
gram for comparative literature—her critical starting point is shared by
other critics such as Masao Miyoshi and Edward Said.48
As these discussions already intimate, the debates over world literature
were, at least in their early stages, strongly related to a feeling of crisis
within the field of comparative literature. The field’s uneasiness about
the turn to theory and postcolonial studies is here related to deeper
anxieties about the discipline’s identity and self-definition. Comparative

literature as a discipline is uniquely situated within the field of literary
studies in relation to this trajectory, for comparatists have long regarded
cosmopolitan, non-national, or even anti-nationalist approaches to liter-
ary study as their own domain (as Gunn reminds us in his introduction
to the PMLA issue).49 Thus, the anti-nationalism washing over literary
studies as a whole—shattering methodological hegemonies along the
way, as well, so that comparison is no longer the exclusive domain of the
comparatist—has made the practices that had previously distinguished
comparative literature part of the domain of all literary studies.50
A brief examination of two “Reports on the State of the Discipline”
(published every several years, including contributions by prominent
comparatists) reveals the changing attitude of comparatists to the fate of
their field. The report edited by Charles Bernheimer in the mid-1990s,
Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, shows a division
between those who are desperately looking for a new raison d’être for
comparative literature and those who welcome the destabilization of dis-
ciplinary boundaries.51 However, the report published almost ten years
later, edited by Haun Saussy, reveals a completely different picture: while
some, such as Spivak, see a need to emphasize certain critical practices
(for Spivak, as we have already mentioned, this involves developing a
deep acquaintance with more languages, histories and literatures), no
one is arguing that comparative literature should be distinguished in any
stable way from other disciplines. The anxieties of the 1990s, fueled by
the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, make way for an acceptance of
this dissolution as an established fact, generating a combination of cel-
ebratory attitudes and sweeping critiques of comparative literature.52
It is in this juncture that theories of world literature intervene.
Starting with the publication of Moretti’s essay in 2000, the PMLA
and South Atlantic Quarterly special issues in 2001, and Damrosch’s
and Spivak’s books in 2003, the following ten years have seen a small
explosion in publications on world literature. Even if the search for a
new disciplinary identity is still very important for Moretti, Damrosch,
and Spivak, the general tendency of these publications is to relinquish
attempts to redefine comparative literature in favor of looking for literary
texts of a new kind, a global or worldly one. The emergence of world lit-
erature as a field of inquiry can be seen, therefore, as indicating a loss for
which we do not yet have a proper substitute. This diagnosis is strength-
ened by the fact that most of the attempts to theorize world literature
240 O. Nir
(even as late as Brouillette’s 2011 book discussed earlier) seem to have

trouble breaking away from the initial dichotomy of struggle and dia-
logue, or our opposition of Moretti and Damrosch. Some of the more
recent publications that still deal with the fate of comparative literature,
such as Pheng Cheah’s “The Material World of Comparison” (in which
Cheah claims, against Saussy, that comparison as a method has actually
become a hindrance to the emergence of a new world consciousness),
seem to recreate the same dichotomy as well.53
What we can now suggest is that the bottom term in our square is
a placeholder for that loss and its not-yet-visible replacement, which we
have preliminarily characterized as totalizing. I would thus like to pro-
pose that we define world literature in terms of precisely that loss or
absence—that is, in terms of what is rejected by most accounts of world
literature. In other words, we can define world literature as contemporary
literature that totalizes. A few words on what literary totalization means
are in order at this stage. Totalization is to be understood in this context,
following Georg Lukács, Jameson, Toscano, and others, as an attempt
to “map” a contradictory system, namely, that of capitalism (generating
in the process either a spatial or non-spatial figure for it), along with a
subjects’ location and relation to this system. Lukács’s approach to real-
ist novels is a good example of literature that attempts such mapping.
Realism, for Lukács, narrates the contradictions of bourgeois society, rep-
resenting them by setting up social typology with its corresponding psy-
chology, ideology, and material settings. The mediating activity of realist
narration, according to Lukács, slowly reveals social types as constituting
antagonistic positions that belong to a single system or a contradictory
whole—or a social totality.54 Even if the closure or resolution of realist
narratives, as in Stendhal or Balzac, is strongly related to the authors’
ideological attitudes, the social contradictions their novels map still con-
stitute a relatively closed system, even if its internal contradictions pre-
vent it from being a harmonious one.
Yet, as Kinkle and Toscano and of course Jameson emphasize, real-
ism seems to run into problems when the system to be mapped is
enlarged, rendering previous national mapping obsolete.55 Imperialism,
that stretching of social relations onto a multinational scale that we men-
tioned earlier, is precisely what brings about realism’s difficulty in cap-
turing the social experience of not only life in the metropolis, but its
equivalent in the colonies, of which the Western writers knew little. This
failure of realism is precisely what brings about the rise of modernism,
whose formal brokenness and isolated individuals thematize precisely

the crisis of previous mappings.56 This does not mean the end of literary
totalization, of course. Even if the everyday experience through which
contradictions are made visible becomes too radically dispersed for real-
ist representation, other representational strategies are still useful in
attempting to generate a figure for the system, which becomes increas-
ingly unrepresentable directly as its scale is enlarged. As Phillip Wegner
argues, utopian novels, beginning with More’s Utopia, constitute pre-
cisely an attempt to totalize an imagined social space.57 If realism works
directly with social contradictions taken from lived experience, the uto-
pian novel’s narrative instead estranges real contradictions in its gradual
construction of (or the reader’s orientation to) an imaginary society.
Again, rather than a seamless, harmonious whole, the utopian narrative
enacts a continuous displacement of contradictions, which Wegner calls,
following Louis Marin, “the refusal of non-contradiction.”58 The form
of the utopian novel thus seems to be less susceptible than that of real-
ism to the crisis of social orientation brought about by the coalescence
of multinational capitalism, even if the utopian, too, must somehow
refer eventually to real contradictions through its estrangement.59 Other
examples of totalizing aesthetics abound, from certain uses of detective
stories to non-generic examples such as the ones discussed by Toscano
and Kinkle, Gail Day, and others.60
In all of these instances, the real multinational scale of the social rela-
tions to be mapped makes the system ultimately unrepresentable. Yet,
what is important is the attempt itself to totalize, the effort to invent a
figurative idiom through which subjects’ locations within contradictory
systems can be imagined, rather than this attempt’s ultimate failure. For,
returning to our problem of world literature and scale, any attempt to
make totality visible today will necessarily have to try to solve aestheti-
cally the incongruity between immediate individual experience and the
vast scale of the system that governs this experience. In other words,
contemporary totalizing literature is necessarily world literature, in the
sense that it has to somehow imaginatively solve the real problem of the
stretching of the scale of social relations. What we can now suggest is
that the project Fredric Jameson once proposed under the name “cogni-
tive mapping” is, in its literary version, the project of world literature:
every aesthetic reproduction of totality must today engage the world, for
it is the only literary project that cannot avoid the globality of the system
that it tries to miniaturize, reduce, or simplify.
242 O. Nir
To conclude, we can point to several newer attempts to think of

world literature that come close to defining it in terms of a totalizing
aesthetic. Two recent attempts to wed a totalizing impulse and world
literature can be seen in Stefano Ercolino’s definition of the genre he
calls the maximalist novel, and Mariano Siskind’s discussion of what he
terms the “novelization of the world.”61 Even if the world features only
marginally in Ercolino’s discussion of the maximalist novel, the genre he
is describing is clearly equipped to take on the world itself as an object
of representation. The encyclopedic tendency of novels belonging to
the genre (which includes, according to Ercolino, works such as David
Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,
and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño), through which they attempt to capture
“everything,” includes a multitude of styles and presents countless social
types and situations.62 This makes the genre a strong candidate for syn-
thesizing globally differentiated situations, styles, and characters. Even
if Ercolino employs a very vague concept of totality in describing the
genre, it is clear that the novels belonging to the genre display a strong
totalizing impulse, particularly in what Ercolino calls a dialectic of “cen-
tripetal” (order-giving) and “centrifugal” (entropic) forces:
Length, the encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, and diegetic exu-

berance would make the maximalist form ungovernable if there were not
countermeasures: rigid structural practices, a capillary control of narrative
information through an omniscient narrator, and a holist construction of
the plot. Within the internal dialectic of the genre, we thus encounter two
powerful and opposed forces: the centrifugal vs. the centripetal; anarchy vs.
order; chaos vs. cosmos. These antithetical forces guarantee the maximalist
novel’s system-genre its delicate equilibrium, an equilibrium indispensable
to its fundamental symbolic need to represent the complexity of the world
in which we live.63
While the definition of the maximalist novel remains purely formal,

Siskind’s discussion of the novelization of the globe offers us both form
and content: he considers different literary representations of the world
itself, particularly those that fantasize about the conquest of the entire
globe by European bourgeois ideals.64 Siskind argues that peripheral
attempts to represent the world—those that originate in the periph-
eral countries of the world literary system—can be meaningfully related
to those produced in the European metropoles, mostly through an
inversion of formal characteristics or through a demarcation of the limits

of the possibility of such images.65 Even though it is not clear why for
Siskind the inequalities of the global literary system are given expression
in narratives about the world itself (rather than in narratives that feature
other types of content), the theme on which he is focusing—represent-
ing the world—obviously contains a totalizing impulse that is relatively
autonomous from the totalizing system of global power dynamics.
The types of novels discussed by Siskind and Ercolino contain a strong
totalizing impulse. However, here it seems that we have already reintro-
duced determinate content into what world literature represents—the
world itself—a choice that seems arbitrary at best, or at worst borne of
a too-literal understanding of “world literature.”66 However, arbitrary as
it may be, the introduction of content into purely formal systems does
not foreclose possibilities for inquiry, but rather creates a space for a host
of productive questions: Can the novel as a form accommodate some-
thing like a representation of the world? If it can, what genres are most
amenable to representing the world? How does the historical coupling of
the novel with the nation state pose restrictions on a novel that attempts
such a radical extension of the nation’s strong territorial coordinates?
These questions stand at the heart of Christian Thorne’s essay, “The Sea
Is Not a Place; or, Putting the World Back into World Literature.” In a
lengthy and entertaining critique of Casanova’s World Republic of Letters
and its celebration of abstract literature, Thorne turns our attention to
the role of Modernist abstraction and other formal signifiers of cosmo-
politanism, which nevertheless serve as the basis of nationalist literature.
He then makes a provocative claim: if, following Adorno’s formulation,
form is always sedimented content, then
where are the naively planetary novels of which these techniques are the
vaporings? Do we have in front of us the strange case of a sediment that
precedes the object of which it is the residue? How could a novel make
good on Joyce’s Hibernio-Slavic quotation dashes? Is it possible to recon-
stitute the body from that trace? Could a world literature actually tell sto-
ries about the world?67
Realism on a global scale, then, or a naive attempt to represent the

entire world in a novel, is no mere arbitrary choice. Rather, it seems to
be a missing term in literary history. Thorne goes on to explore several
candidates for this missing term including for example, the role of the
244 O. Nir
colonies in Jane Austen’s novels. In Austen, Thorne argues, the faraway

colonies act many times as a readily available off-stage problem solver, a
place where things happen without an explanation, or in which the real-
ist cause-and-effect narration falters, leaving things to fortune or chance
(76).68 The question of the possibility of realism on a global scale thus
remains an open one for Thorne (an open challenge for novelists as well
as opening lines of inquiry for scholars); the only conclusion with which
he leaves us is that the emergence of abstraction in novels marks a failure
to narrate the world rather than something to be celebrated explicitly,
such as in Casanova’s writing, or favored implicitly, as in the purely for-
mal level at which discussions of world literature tend to remain.
What is important for us in Thorne’s discussion is the totalizing
impulse that the search for realism on a global scale presupposes. This
impulse is no longer inherent in a simple ability to incorporate globally
diverse contents and forms (an ability possessed by the maximalist novel,
for instance), nor is it a search for images of world-unity (as in Siskind’s
“novelization of the world”). Rather, considering Thorne’s Marxist-
Hegelian approach to the problem, it is Georg Lukács’s strong coupling
of Realism with totality, which we have already mentioned, that serves
as the implicit background for Thorne’s provocation. In other words,
it is the realist novel’s mediation of different social positions and their
corresponding ideological attitudes that make visible the systematic con-
tradictions of bourgeois society. Thorne is looking for a specifically real-
ist answer to Modernism, not just any invocation of faraway territories,
serving as an easy narratological solution (such as the unexplained “for-
tune” in Austen) or a placeholder in some national allegory, but rather
an actual attempt to map social relations on a global scale, one in which
no geopolitical unit serves merely as a convenient way to solve formal or
ideological contradictions. Therefore, it is not an insistence on the rep-
resentation of the entire world that makes Thorne’s realism on a global
scale totalizing; it is instead the possibility of reinventing a realism that is
not bound by the nation state.
Conclusion
Our Greimassian rectangle of world literature theories has lead us to sug-
gest the following formulation: world literature is contemporary totaliz-
ing literature. This is not because of the holism implied by the image
of the globe itself, but because the totalizing viewpoint today inevitably
sends literary imaginaries to look at distant causes or solutions for the

oppositions or conflicts they trace. Global scale, therefore, is inescapa-
ble as a representational challenge in this definition of world literature
as totalizing literature. But this formulation is still a completely empty
one: it is not even a formal definition, let alone a designation of any spe-
cific content, since totalization does not designate any specific formal
literary feature. The formulation, however, does send us back into the
hidden abode of literary production, or to the role of literary texts (and
other cultural objects) as generating specific forms of social knowledge,
knowledge that has to provide us with imaginary solutions to real con-
tradictions in order to exist at all. Thus, the definition presents us with
a challenge or a starting point rather than some ultimate solution to
the problem of literature and the globality of scale. What it seeks is the
invention of new ways to totalize, new aesthetic figures for the unrepre-
sentable system that somehow capture its contradictions.
Our definition thus seems to create more problems for us than it
solves. In this sense, we should add a short methodological note about
literary-critical definitions. Not only does our definition seem to leave
us with less than we started; it might also seem objectionable on some
empirical ground: it excludes certain novels that seem to belong in the
category of world literature (for example, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of
Innocence) and includes some that do not seem to belong to world litera-
ture (for example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312). Yet, such objections,
today, only reveal to us that there is in fact no “empirical” ground for
typologies, or that references to the empirical always betray some pre-
conceived non-empirical notion already at work in our conception of
what constitutes world literature (In Pamuk’s case, for example, that his
work is quickly translated into many languages and globally circulated).
If, in the past, these preconceived notions were disguised expressions of
historicity, or of belonging to a certain collective project (no matter how
reified a notion of belonging), they do not seem to perform that work
anymore. We therefore cannot rid ourselves of definitional prejudice, and
at the same time we cannot really justify any specific definitional preju-
dice; that “it works” would, again, presuppose an empirical givenness. If
not to do away with definitions altogether, we would therefore suggest
that definitions are approached in a rather different way: we ask what
we can do with them, or what new connections, analogies, and opposi-
tions they allow us to think, rather than what empirical truth is affirmed
through them. This approach to defining world literature would, of
246 O. Nir
course, always project some principle of selection, or would again tell

us which novels are included and excluded from the category. But this
time, the principle of selection is secondary to an emerging newness that
the definition helps us see. The past, as it were, comes to be defined by
future possibility. It is in this way that our suggested definition of world
literature—that it is literature that totalizes under global capitalism—
should be considered.
To conclude, we should return once more to the theorizations of scale
on which we have been drawing. Above, following Smith’s and others’
writing, we suggested that terms that seem to define new scales are those
that make possible a totalizing operation or a new vantage point from
which contradictions can be conceptualized and temporarily resolved.
The struggle over the construction of new scales, and the new forms
of agency that these constructions make conceivable,69 are precisely the
result of this totalizing operation. Indeed, the fact that new categories of
scale seem to multiply, constantly causing some kind of productive “slip-
page” from one domain of thought or action into another, as Brenner
suggests, is indicative of the totalizing impulse animating theorizations of
scale.70 The definition of world literature proposed in this essay is aimed,
in a similar fashion, at making the literary scale of the world a site at
which social contradictions can be thought, explored, and imaginatively
resolved. The scale of the world thus becomes a site of representational
struggle and of the figuration of new forms of agency through this
totalizing operation. To give these concrete content is a task very dif-
ferent than the postmodern celebration of the thwarting of agency, and
simultaneously it is a refusal to simply return to national figurations of
subjectivity.
Notes
1. Jameson, “Third World Literatures,” 73; Thorne, 76.
2. Wegner, 15.
3. Toscano and Kinkle, 86–87.
4. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 352.
5. See Smith, “Contours”; Marston.
6. Howitt, 56.
7. Marston, 237–38.
8. See Brenner.
9. Smith, “Contours,” 65.
10. See Moretti, Atlas and Modern Epic.

11. See Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.”
12. Ibid., 65–66.
13. Wallerstein, 5–9.
14. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 61–62.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. An anti-nationalist, internationalist, or at least “nation-neutral” impulse
is repeatedly expressed in attempts to theorize world literature, an
impulse that sees itself as keeping up with the anti-nationalist tradi-
tion of Comparative Literature. We will return to this point later in the
discussion.
17. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 60.
18. Damrosch, 1.
19. Ibid., 20.
20. Ibid., 4–6, 22–27, 281–83.
21. Ibid., 283.
22. Ibid., 281.
23. See Huggan, Brouillette, English, and Casanova.
24. Brouillette, 7, 67.
25. Casanova, 324–48.
26. Huggan, 15.
27. I am ignoring here the authors’ judgment of the new global literary
sphere implicitly present in their analyses, from Huggan’s evil commodi-
fication to Casanova’s heroic rebels. Whether it is deemed a good devel-
opment or a bad one, or a mix of the two, all of these accounts imply
the emergence of a new literary field of meaning, which is the important
point for our discussion.
28. See Prendergast.
29. Ibid., 11–12.
30. Ibid., 3, 24.
31. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 166.
32. See Walkowitz.
33. Ibid., 571, 576.
34. For example, Damrosch puts the onus of becoming familiar with differ-
ent cultures on the reader, turning her into an amateur scholar of litera-
ture. Walkowitz, on the other hand, makes the novels themselves solve
the problems of translatability, without having them efface otherness.
35. See Smith, “Geography”.
36. Wegner, “Greimas Avec Lacan,” 221.
37. Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches,” 79.
38. Brouillette, 177; Prendergast, 14.
248 O. Nir
39. Prendergast, 2–3; Casanova, 39; Moretti, “Conjectures on World

Literature,” 59–61.
40. Huggan, x, 6–15.
41. Damrosch, 18.
42. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 58–61.
43. We will not be able to discuss here in detail the particular ways in which
increased commodification—the becoming-commodity of ever growing
areas of life—is itself totalizing. Theorists of world literature themselves
seem to have only a vague idea of the concrete effects of commodifica-
tion, usually summed up as a neutralization of struggle or of “real” dia-
logue. It is of course the writing of Adorno on popular culture to which
we can turn for an account of the ways in which commodification of
culture makes cultural objects’ form match the conditions of their pro-
duction and consumption under capitalism in general (Adorno, 17–48),
which then allows us to see the logic of the commodity as making dif-
ferent areas life match each other—and in this “matching” a totalizing
impulse is now obvious. As for the effects of commodification on the
internal characteristics of aesthetic objects, we can briefly say that the col-
lapse of the distinction between high and mass culture (or, the demise of
modernism) in postmodernity poses a challenge to the totality that con-
stitutes the work of art itself (or its autonomy), as described in a recent
essay by Nicholas Brown (155–60). Seeing commodification as totalizing,
therefore, has to do more with the effects of commodification on the cir-
culation of cultural commodities and their form—Adorno’s argument—
than with the aesthetic effects of the commodification.
44. Spivak, 1–24.
45. See Said and Chow.
46. O’Brien and Szeman, 607.
47. Spivak, 73.
48. Miyoshi, 68.
49. Gunn, 17.
50. Ibid., 16, 19.
51. See Bernheimer. In this report, Jonathan Culler, David Damrosch,
Michael Riffaterre, Peter Brooks, and others insist that a distinct identity
for comparative literature should be sought, though mainly in relation to
cultural studies. Others, such as Rey Chow, fully embrace the influence of
cultural studies.
52. See Saussy. The celebratory attitude is probably the strongest in Saussy’s
opening overview of comparative literature (“Exquisite Cadavers Stitched
from Fresh Nighmares,” 3–42). Saussy compares comparative literature
to a laboratory of ideas, from which, like “genetically-modified seeds,”
the comparative methods developed spread out to other “fields” (of
study). Critical assessments of the discipline in this report are present

in Kadir’s claim that comparative literature is complicit in global power
relations, Damrosch’s demand to revise the literary canon and Spivak’s
emphasis, once again, on the need to study marginal languages and
literatures.
53. See Cheah.
54. Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 5–6, 88; Lukács, “Realism in the
Balance,” 28–34.
55. Thorne, 62; Toscano and Kinkle, 36.
56. Toscano and Kinkle, 1–25; See Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping.”
57. Wegner, Imaginary Communities, xi–xix.
58. Ibid., 37.
59. It should be briefly noted in this context that dystopian novels perform,
in many cases, the same totalizing operation as their utopian counter-
parts. The tracing of the oppressive system and its contradictions, as it
appears in the protagonist’s life in Orwell’s 1984, is an almost self-evident
example.
60. See Toscano and Kinkle; Day.
61. See Siskind; Ercolino.
62. Ercolino, 245.
63. Ibid., 250–51.
64. Siskind, 342.
65. Ibid., 350.
66. In this context, it is important to mention Moretti’s Modern Epic, in
which he searches for a literary text that captures the entire world.
According to Thorne, Moretti’s examples do not live up to his promise,
since “the world” has to undergo too many mediations for the novel in
question to be seriously considered as a representation of the world in
any sense recognizable to the reader (61).
67. Thorne, 66.
68. Ibid., 76. It is important to emphasize that Thorne does not consider
colonial travel narratives, for example, as attempts at narrating the world
that could serve as content for the formal worldliness of Modernism.
Also, since the content that is supposed to precede the form is supposed
to be a naive narration of the world, the fact that distant lands become
simple placeholders or colonial mirrors (thus failing to “really” narrate
the world) should not disturb us, since they are still naive narrations of
the world, which makes them good candidates for Thorne’s missing plan-
etary realism.
69. Marston, 234.
70. See Brenner.
250 O. Nir
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science
7 (1941): 17–48.
Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Brenner, Neil. “The Limits to Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 4
(2001): 591–614.
Brown, Nick. “Close Reading and the Market.” In Literary Materialisms,
145–65. New York: Palgrave, 2013.
Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Cheah, Pheng. “The Material World of Comparison.” New Literary History 40,
no. 3 (2009): 523–45.
Chow, Rey. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA
116, no. 1 (2001): 71–74.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Day, Gail. “Realism, Totality, and the Militant Citoyen.” In Georg Lukács: The
Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, 203–20. New York: Continuum, 2011.
English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of
Cultural Value Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Ercolino, Stefano. “The Maximalist Novel.” Comparative Literature 64, no. 3
(2012): 241–56.
Gunn, Giles. “Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies.” PMLA 116, no. 1
(2001): 16–31.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Howitt, Richard. “Scale as Relation: Musical Metaphors of Geographical Scale.”
Area 30, no. 1 (1998): 49–58.
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988.
———. “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of
Utopian Discourse.” In The Ideologies of Theory, Vol. 2, 75–101. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
———. “Third World Literatures in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Social

Text 15 (1984): 65–88.
Lukács, Georg. “Realism in the Balance.” In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by
Fredric Jameson, 28–34. New York: Verso, 1980.
——–. Studies in European Realism. Translated by Edith Bone. New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.
Marston, Sallie. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human
Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219–42.
Miyoshi, Masao. “‘Globalization,’ Culture and the University.” In The Cultures
of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 247–70.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. New York: Verso, 1998.
———. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.
———. Modern Epic: World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. New York:
Verso, 1996.
O’Brien, Susie, and Imre Szeman. “Introduction: The Globalization of Fiction/The
Fiction of Globalization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 603–626.
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. New York: Verso,
2004.
Said, Edward. “Globalizing Literary Study.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 64–69.
Saussy, Haun. Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Siskind, Mariano. “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the
Global: A Critique of World Literature.” Comparative Literature 62, no. 4
(2010): 336–60.
Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spatialized Politics,” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81.
———. “Geography, Difference, and the Politics of Scale.” In Postmodernism
and the Social Sciences, edited by J. Doherty, E. Graham, and M. Mallek,
57–79. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press,
2003.
Thorne, Christian. “The Sea Is Not a Place; Or, Putting the World Back into
World Literature.” Boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 53–79.
Toscano, Alberto and Jeff Kinkle. Cartographies of the Absolute. Washington:
Zero Books, 2014.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. “Comparison Literature.” New Literary History 40, no. 3
(2009): 567–82.
Wegner, Phillip. “Greimas Avec Lacan: From the Symbolic to the Real in
Dialectical Criticism.” Criticism 51, no. 2 (2009): 211–45.
———. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of
Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC:
CHAPTER 10
Toward a Theory of the Megatext:

Speculative Criticism and Richard
Grossman’s “Breeze Avenue Working Paper”
Bradley J. Fest
I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species . . .
teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library—enlightened, solitary,
infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless,
incorruptible, and secret—will endure.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
Theorizing Megatexts
On August 23, 2011 poet and novelist Richard Grossman bur-
ied a five-inch corundum sphere inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten
Commandments three hundred feet into Mount Princeton in Colorado.
In twenty million years the mountain will erode and the “‘Torah
Ball’ . . . will emerge from and roll down the crumbling mountain,
thus re-creating a ‘Mount Sinai experience’ well after the human race
has been driven to extinction.”1 Though not the infinite library Borges
B.J. Fest (*) 
Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_10
254 B.J. FEST
imagined, “The Pop-Up Torah” will endure solitary, unmoving, and

secret as the longest-lasting text in history after anyone who could read
it has disappeared. The hard-as-diamond synthetic sapphire ball is also
merely one element of what will be the longest book ever published.
Conceived in the 1990s and announced in 2007, Grossman’s forthcom-
ing Breeze Avenue will reportedly be, among other things, a three mil-
lion page novel composed of five thousand volumes installed as a reading
room in an as yet undetermined location. It will also exist in a massive
online form that will have “access to forty-five trillion bytes of informa-
tion” and will significantly change every seven days for a century, each
time creating a unique text.2 At different levels of temporal and spatial
magnitude, Breeze Avenue will surpass in size and scale any other single
artistic text yet created.
One way of accounting for the appearance of Breeze Avenue would be
to treat it as the culmination of a long history of very large books. From
the epics and religious scripture of antiquity, to Dante Alighieri’s Divine
Comedy (1308–20) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605,
1615), to what Franco Moretti has called the “modern epic” extend-
ing from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1806, 1831) to James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), to experimental modern and postmodern long
forms, it is difficult to overstate the historical role such big texts have
played in shaping global culture.3 Through its sheer size, Breeze Avenue
suggests placement at the end of such a list. But whatever one might
say about the large texts predating Grossman’s project, they are all, at
some level, readable. Though it may take a significant amount of time
and effort for readers of the Bible or Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene
(1590, 1596) to get from one cover to another, even these very long
works can be completely traversed in a semi-reasonable amount of time.
Though Breeze Avenue should be understood in terms of a historical
genealogy extending from Homer’s Iliad to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973), it also signals a break from this tradition in terms of its
unreadability. As communications scholar Marshall T. Poe has pointed
out, at roughly a billion words it “probably approaches the upper bound
of the length of a written message decodable by one person in one life-
time.”4 In this sense, it is only “readable” in theory. Combined with
its changing online form, the text quickly and exponentially surpasses
an individual subject’s ability to encounter anything other than a small
fraction of its total text. Breeze Avenue is, quite simply, too big to read.
Further, it is also too big to write, requiring algorithmic composition
10 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE MEGATEXT: SPECULATIVE CRITICISM … 255
and collective collaboration for its production. As such, the publication

of Breeze Avenue will signal the emergence of a distinct twenty-first-
century multimedia form made possible by advances in digital technol-
ogy: the megatext.
In this essay, I will use the term megatext to designate massive yet
discrete textual objects that have appeared in the past twenty-five years.
In this, I depart from how the term has previously been employed in
science and speculative fiction (SF) studies. Damien Broderick’s use
of “sf megatext” appears to be the most widely reproduced use of the
term so far: how the archetypes, tropes, and conventions of SF form a
coherent text. The SF megatext is “generated and received . . . within
a specialized intertextual encyclopedia of tropes and enabling devices,”5
which includes the entirety of SF writing by authors, fans, and scholars.6
Though clearly it is useful to have a term for an enormous assemblage
of cultural objects that share generic and tropological similarities and
connections—for example, the entire body of US literature or a particu-
larly large chunk of a library shelf—such entities must necessarily remain
abstract because they are unbounded in time and space. Both the first
and second definitions of mega in the Oxford English Dictionary empha-
size massiveness but not infinitude: “A. adv. Chiefly as an intensifier:
very, hugely. Also: in huge or ambitious terms”; and “B. adj. 1. Huge,
great, substantial; much, many, a large quantity of.”7 So I would like
to use megatext not to mean the totality—perhaps a better word—of a
body of literature, but just a very big, coherent text, something purpose-
fully made, with limits and boundaries. Megatexts are unreadably large
yet concrete aesthetic and rhetorical objects, produced and conceived as
singular works, and they depend upon digital technology and collabora-
tive authorship for their production.
In his field-defining work on electronic and interactive literature,
Cybertext, Espen Aarseth coins the term ergodic to account for texts
that require some amount of effort and manipulation on the part of
their readers beyond simply turning the pages sequentially: “During the
cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence,
and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the
various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for. This phenomenon I
call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the
Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning ‘work’ and ‘path.’ In ergodic lit-
erature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the
text.”8 The megatext should be understood as a hyperbolic extension of
256 B.J. FEST
Aarseth’s notion of ergodic literature. No matter how much nontrivial

effort is expended in reading Breeze Avenue, Grossman’s text will mate-
rially frustrate attempts by a single person to experience it totally. The
efforts required to engage megatexts may include the kinds of physical
manipulation required of ergodic literature, but the difficulties involved
in traversing them extend beyond simply clicking hyperlinks or manip-
ulating a print book. Megatexts, quite simply, cannot be traversed by
individual human subjects. The “Torah Ball” is an impossible megatext
to traverse because humans do not live for twenty million years. Breeze
Avenue cannot reasonably be read because reading three million pages
would take, presumably, decades. The description on his website makes
clear that it is impossible to read even a large portion of the online ver-
sion of Grossman’s text: “Breeze Avenue can never be depicted as a com-
plete and present form. Given its momentary nature as an emanation, it
can only be viewed once it no longer exists; and given its fluid and omni-
present aspect, it is only retrievable in part.”9 A megatext, even though
finite, is a work that materially frustrates or prevents its own reading due
to its massive spatial or temporal size.
Breeze Avenue is also unwritable. Reading can usually be accom-
plished more quickly than writing. (For example, it will take me many
hours to compose and revise this essay, and it can reasonably be read in
under an hour.) Given classical composition’s technological limitations,
works composed with quill, ink, paper, and typewriter do not generally
overwhelm a reader’s capacities. Without the aid of digital, algorithmic,
or other technological processes, it is very difficult to generate content
more quickly than it can be read. To achieve megatextuality requires
novel methods for generating text beyond traditional, mechanical writing
techniques, and it also necessitates collective or corporate collaboration.
Grossman’s “Breeze Avenue Working Paper,” a fifteen-page technical
description of the larger project, makes this clear: “its function has been
to coordinate the activities of participants so that everyone is afforded
a broad, current, and precise view of the whole.”10 The working paper,
which forms the basis for my remarks here, serves primarily to organize
many people working together over a long period of time.11
As mentioned, I also want to reserve the term megatext for works
that appear predominantly during the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries and that feature some relationship to digital technology.12
Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy (1830–56), at ninety-one fin-
ished and forty-six unfinished works, certainly appears to qualify as a
megatext. But as Georg Lukács once famously distinguished between

the epic and the novel based on the material, historical, and philosophi-
cal realities of the nineteenth century and the emergence of global capi-
talism as a totality the novel was uniquely suited for attending to, so I
believe that we should similarly distinguish the nineteenth-century realist
novel and twentieth-century long forms from contemporary megatexts
and the different kinds of totalities they attempt to comprehend.13 The
megatext, I will argue, has clear roots in previous cultural attempts to
represent what Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism (1991) once called the
“technological sublime,” which means that it has important twentieth-
century precursors in both popular and avant-garde art. But the mega-
text is also an emergent twenty-first-century form responding to and
arising from the changing realities introduced by life in the age of big
data, distributed global communication networks, and what Timothy
Morton calls hyperobjects “that are massively distributed in time and space
relative to humans.”14
The twenty-first century has seen megatexts appear across media.
Perhaps the largest, most visible, and most widely used contemporary
text would be Wikipedia. Unreadably large, collectively authored using
digital tools, an encyclopedic project on its scale was functionally impos-
sible before the internet. But Wikipedia in its changing, amorphous
state on the internet is not a megatext because it lacks finite limits; it is
an ungraspable totality, that is, until artist Michael Mandiberg recently
printed out the entirety of the immense encyclopedia in over seven
thousand volumes.15 When physically instantiated, Wikipedia becomes
a megatext because it is unreadably large, collectively authored, digi-
tally produced, and finite. Other megatexts abound. The contemporary
videogame is an especially visible example of a massive form native to
twenty-first-century computational media. World of Warcraft (2004–),
for instance, is the result of digital, collective authorship and requires
thousands of hours of playtime to be traversed. The recently released No
Man’s Sky (2016) dwarfs even the biggest contemporary videogames.
Featuring a procedurally generated open universe with eighteen quintil-
lion planets, it will reportedly take five billion years for millions of players
to explore the game.16 As digital technology advances, more videogame
megatexts will appear.
But megatexts do not only arise in forms native to computers.
Popular twentieth-century serial media such as the comic book and
the television soap opera were significant precursors to contemporary
258 B.J. FEST
megatexts. Television shows with over fifty-year runs such as General

Hospital (1963–) and Dr. Who (1963–) and the recently “concluded”
Marvel Universe (1961–2015) achieved megatextuality through col-
lective authorship, sheer duration, massive accumulation, and, eventu-
ally, their dissemination as discrete digital objects. Megatexts also need
not be limited to a single media. The immense popularity and absorp-
tive power of the dispersed narrative stretched across films, novels, tel-
evision, comics, and videogames in the Star Wars Expanded Universe
(1977–2014) indicate the crucial role megatexts play as financially lucra-
tive corporate intellectual properties. The proliferation and consolidation
of transmedia megatexts demonstrate that the cultural logic of contem-
poraneity is successfully reproduced through the projection and sale of
megatexts to a global audience. The popularity of recent long novels and
their adaptation in other media—for example, George R. R. Martin’s
A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books
(1997–2007)—signal a megatextual impulse in contemporary popular
literature as well (even if they are not megatexts according to my defini-
tion). Though the truly literary megatext may in fact be epiphenome-
nal, Grossman’s forthcoming work has a peer in Mark Leach’s seventeen
volume, ten thousand page, open source, digitally generated meganovel,
Marienbad My Love (2008), which will also undergo transformation
as other writers add to and manipulate the text. (Leach’s work cur-
rently holds the record as the longest novel until Breeze Avenue appears,
according to Dooley.) And finally, Mark Z. Danielewski’s ambitious,
twenty-seven volume serial novel, The Familiar (2015–), will be a mas-
sive, digitally composed work, and yet more evidence of a megatextual
impulse in contemporary literature.17
Such examples across a range of media indicate that the megatext has
emerged as an important twenty-first-century form, and scholars and
critics need to start developing ways of confronting and understanding
these unreadably large texts. Breeze Avenue, in this sense, should serve
as an excellent case study for the preliminary questions it inspires: How
does someone read such a huge text? How could a scholar responsibly
and productively study something they cannot read? I would like to offer
an exploratory three part answer to these questions that I hope will also
serve as an initial foray into theorizing megatexts.
First, I would like to suggest that megatexts require speculative crit-
icism. Breeze Avenue does not yet totally exist, and it is my hope that
this is a feature rather than a bug in my method. In this essay, I draw
upon my reading of the “Breeze Avenue Working Paper,” as its level of

technical detail provides something concrete to speculate about. But my
remarks are also shaped by Grossman’s other published work: two collec-
tions of poems, Tycoon Boy (1977) and The Animals (1983); the first two
novels of his American Letters Trilogy, The Alphabet Man (1993), and
The Book of Lazarus (1997); and the Twitter novel published on Kindle
as a four volume e-text, Boswell Speaks (2012–13). All of these will be
included in Breeze Avenue. I contend that, though at significantly differ-
ent scales, reading Grossman’s currently published oeuvre and imagining
the completed megatext involve acts of speculation similar to attempting
to read the actual text. To read Breeze Avenue requires acts of imagina-
tion, of assembling, parsing, connecting, inventing, and speculating. For
Grossman’s unreadably large text, then, reading is and must be poiesis.
Second, reading Breeze Avenue must also involve limiting one’s task
in some real and substantial way. If my small set of six working texts
require acts of critical imagination to extrapolate from their limited view
a larger sense of the whole project, so will wading much deeper in. How
much of Breeze Avenue would one have to read to be able to responsi-
bly say something about it? Ten thousand pages? Three million? Where
does one draw the line and why? At the moment, I have a clear answer
to these difficult questions because I am in the unfortunate but enviable
position of only having the working paper and the five books Grossman
has published to consider. (I can begin from having read all of Breeze
Avenue that exists!) And I can speculate about what other parts of the
text will be like, something that I would need to do whether I consider
one thousand or three hundred thousand pages. Like productively using
the formal limitations of the sonnet as impetus for poetic activity, reading
a megatext involves working within boundaries. Readers must poetically
form and curate what they will attend to, as the totality of the whole
will always be out of reach. Criticism of megatexts will be well served by
being similarly creative, poetic, imaginative, selective, and speculative.
Third, whatever a speculative reading of a megatext might produce,
a concrete encounter with the text itself is still necessary. As no sin-
gle reader will ever read an entire megatext, we can assume that read-
ing them closely will be a collective activity. Though distant reading and
quantitative analysis will be useful for studying Breeze Avenue some-
day—and that day may be very soon—such critical approaches may actu-
ally prove limited in what they will be able to tell us. Grossman’s “Breeze
Avenue Working Paper” describes how each element of the text has been
260 B.J. FEST
produced, algorithmically and otherwise. As it already emerges from

computational methods, reading Breeze Avenue quantitatively may only
mean returning to the initial algorithms that produced it. As Grossman
says, the working paper “stresses the mathematical and organizational
[rather than] discuss[ing] the more important matter of literary content
in any depth.”18 So to begin moving toward an engagement with the
actual text requires a speculative reading of the working paper, but also
an attempt to account for whatever literary depth may be present in the
materials at hand. Experimental close reading, especially as the collective
of scholars working on Breeze Avenue grows, will be necessary for bring-
ing the project to a place where more distant modes of reading will then
be useful.19 Of necessity, my discussion of Breeze Avenue is both limited
and general, but I hope that this preliminary approach to a paradigmatic
example of an emergent twenty-first-century form will prove interesting
for starting a conversation about this remarkably huge book and fruitful
for thinking about massive contemporary forms more generally.
Speculative Criticism: Writing, Hyperobjects,

and the Imagination
Among other speculative approaches, encountering Breeze Avenue’s

formal composition as outlined in the working paper encourages me to
return initially to Jacques Derrida’s influential theories of writing in Of
Grammatology (1967). Recall that for Derrida, writing should not be
principally or merely understood as the recording of speech, and that
“what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only
a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect,
a species of writing.”20 Rather than view writing in a secondary, mimetic
relationship to speech, Derrida’s famous deconstructive move is founded
on understanding writing as the more fundamental phenomenon of
which spoken, natural language is merely a part. Though this is rather
counterintuitive, the very kinds of “writing” necessary to produce Breeze
Avenue—and indeed, the larger techno-informatic data-fugue of the dig-
ital age—indicate that, understood broadly, writing has detached itself
from spoken language in a variety of ways. As Derrida says further, lan-
guage “now seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion;
under the circumstances . . . of this death of the civilization of the book,
of which so much is said and which manifests itself particularly through
a convulsive proliferation of libraries. All appearances to the contrary,

this death of the book undoubtedly announces . . . nothing but a death
of speech . . . and a new mutation in the history of writing, in history
as writing.”21 Derrida’s larger polemical and philosophical point here
regards the necessity to deconstruct logocentrism, a metaphysics that
privileges speech above other ways of understanding human life, and of
course much has been said about this. But he is also being speculatively
prophetic: “we must think of a new situation for speech, of its subordina-
tion within a structure of which it will no longer be the archon.”22 In the
twenty-first century, digital information moving within the cybernetic
structures and distributed networks organizing society have replaced
speech as the archon of contemporaneity. We should begin our think-
ing about Breeze Avenue, then, as a concrete materialization of this situa-
tion, of not only the metaphorical “death of speech,” but its replacement
by informatics. No single human will ever speak or hear all of Breeze
Avenue. It is not the record of a voice. Nor can it be coherently regarded
as a record of experience, human consciousness, bourgeois subjectivity,
or anything else that we have long understood the novel as a vehicle for
representing and accessing. Such concerns may have little bearing on
how we understand Breeze Avenue’s grammatological and informatic acts
of totalization.
Breeze Avenue participates in an important genealogy of postmodern
literature that either explicitly or implicitly understands itself in terms
of an initially cybernetic and now digital “new mutation in the history
of writing.” As Derrida suggests that discussions about the “end of the
book” lead toward massive archival accumulation—“a convulsive pro-
liferation of libraries”—so Mark Greif argues that “the ‘big, ambitious
novel’ as it emerged in the postwar period first appeared in response to,
then came to depend upon, the maintenance of a conceit of the ‘death
of the novel.’”23 Novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow and William Gaddis’s
J R (1975) respond in various ways to eschatological declarations and
cybernetic transformation. Indeed, in a description of Breeze Avenue
no longer online, Grossman clearly frames his project as a response to
the end of the book in the information age: “in its massive printed ver-
sion it stands as a bulwark against predigested and inane communication
and as symbol and dirge for the global extinction of culture now in pro-
gress.”24 Even though Grossman has avowed, “I don’t consider myself
to be a postmodernist. My principal concerns have evolved from differ-
ent ideas,”25 it would be a mistake not to position his work in regard to
262 B.J. FEST
the encyclopedic postmodern novel. The Alphabet Man and The Book of
Lazarus share many affinities with the work of Gaddis and Pynchon. And
it is clear that Breeze Avenue will go even further in continuing the tradi-
tion of the big, ambitious novel “in which the ceaselessness of narration
and proliferation of characters and plots [reveal] the domination of indi-
vidual human lives by ‘systems’ with irresistible, superhuman logics.”26
But Breeze Avenue also constitutes a break with or transition beyond
the postmodern encyclopedic novel. Tom LeClair, extending his impor-
tant study of Don DeLillo and what LeClair calls the “systems novel,”
argues that books like Gravity’s Rainbow and J R “represent and intel-
lectually master the power systems they exist within.”27 Later writers
like Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace
not only represent such systems for LeClair, but “thoroughly conceive
their fictions as information systems, as long-running programs of data
with a collaborative genesis.”28 Grossman’s text, however, especially in
its online form, goes a step further. Breeze Avenue will not merely resem-
ble or “represent” a system; it will not “master” some other system; it
will not simply be “conceived” as a system; it will actually physically and
materially be a long-running, actionable, procedural data program, a sys-
tem of ungraspable size and complexity, embodying (rather than simply
attempting to represent) the technological sublime. Grossman takes what
I have elsewhere called the hyperarchival impulse of contemporaneity—
the desire to massively accumulate information, an impulse on display in
the postmodern encyclopedic novel as much as in the National Security
Agency’s data collection programs—and makes this hyperarchivalism
Breeze Avenue’s formal organizing principle. Grossman thereby creates,
and does not just “represent,” a system.29 Though certainly not the
first text to do so, Breeze Avenue, in its massive, unreadable, unwritable
form, dramatically demonstrates how certain forms of writing have been
decoupled from speech in the digital age.
Grossman’s work should also be understood as a break with lit-
erary postmodernism not through transcendence or rupture, but
through the hypertrophic expansion and exploitation of one of its most
visible and important forms. Rather than ask itself one of the clas-
sic questions of postmodernity—Oedipa Maas’s “Shall I project a
world?”30—Grossman’s text asks how it can become a world, or rather,
become a system, how it might conceive of its being, its ontological con-
dition, as a network.31 Consider, for example, how the working paper
begins (it deserves to be quoted at length):
Breeze Avenue can best be described as a massive, highly integrated cyber-

spatial literary form that disgorges music, architecture, art, dance, video,
and a large variety of books in prose and verse. Sections of the work
draw on information from geology, screenwriting, software develop-
ment, astronomy, politics, architecture, graphic product design, meteor-
ology, metaphysics, linguistics, literary and social theory, material science,
acoustics, musical instrumentation and composition, computer anima-
tion, cryptology, deaf theater, sleep theory, mathematics, choreography,
photography, engineering, archaeology, business practice, zoology, quan-
tum mechanics, lexicography, and Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, and
Hebrew studies. Documents are produced in Latin, Yiddish, Orkhon,
Hebrew, Fraser, Sanskrit, Chinese, Hieroglyphs, American Sign Language
and Sutton Signwriting, various forms of numeric and symbolic notation,
and English.32
At first glance, this list displays an unbridled hyperarchivalism, an omniv-

orously absorptive appetite incorporating as much of the world as it can,
eating dead languages as much as digital multimedia. Breeze Avenue
appears to take the hyperarchival logic of the world-projecting encyclo-
pedic postmodern novel to its apotheosis. Considering the scale of the
project, however, one should also note how limited Grossman’s list actu-
ally is. In Umberto Eco’s masterful cultural history, The Infinity of Lists,
Grossman’s description would be tame compared to other literary lists of
“coherent excess.”33 So rather than evidence of Breeze Avenue’s unbri-
dled encylopedism, we should note the strictly limited network its initial
description defines. Instead of projecting an unbounded realm of possi-
bility, Breeze Avenue imposes aesthetically determined limits. And though
the connections between the nodes of these heterogeneous cultural
forms multiply exponentially, and though Breeze Avenue’s online expan-
sion into the next century makes it ultimately inaccessible to humans
in their finitude, Grossman’s text is finite. Working hypertrophically
through the encylopedism of postmodernity, taking its impulse farther
than was possible before digital composition, Breeze Avenue participates
in the invention of a new form exploring the limits of what it means to
make a massive systemic textual object.
Despite its size, the fact that Grossman’s megatext is limited and
thereby constitutes a coherent, discrete object is significant. As Martin
Heidegger insisted in “On the Origin of the Work of Art” (1950),
a world, to have any meaning, must have a horizon: “a stone is world-
less. Plant and animal likewise have no world” for they lack temporal
264 B.J. FEST
horizons.34 Texts that are too big to read cannot be worlds in the
Heideggerian sense because they do not have a human horizon. The
notion of creating a world, of worlding a world depends upon the
boundaries of a single human life and its being-toward-death. But Breeze
Avenue does have a sense of an ending; its temporal limits just surpass
any individual life, and thus its horizon extends beyond that provided
by Heidegger’s sense of world. As such, megatexts do more than simply
project a world. World of Warcraft does not only represent a world: it
is a system spread massively across a global distributed network played
by millions of people; it economically interconnects with global capi-
tal in a variety of complex ways; and it can never be fully experienced
even though it is an artwork created by humans. Breeze Avenue’s tem-
poral horizon surpasses the lifespan of an individual human, and, at its
most extreme, it will outlast the species. Its very form refuses the indi-
vidual subject access to its whole. Instead, generations of readers, a col-
lective extended in time and space, are required to explore the horizons
of Grossman’s megatext.
In this, I think Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects (2013) will be
immensely valuable for beginning to read megatexts.35 Hyperobjects,
in their size and scale, far exceed individual humans’ capacity for know-
ing or comprehending them because of their massive extension in time
and space. Global warming, the Milky Way Galaxy, the totality of the
capitalist system, the internet, plastic, all the carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere—these are all hyperobjects. They are massive in physical
scale and extend into deep time and can be both the result of human
activity or radically nonhuman. The effects of global warming will still
be around one million years from now. In tens of thousands of years
one of the clearest indicators of previous human existence will be a thin
layer of plastic in the geologic record. Objects that exist at these kinds of
scales dwarf our ability to concretely know them in anything except the
abstract.
Many recent readings of vast narratives have emphasized how they
project or create worlds. Breeze Avenue and other megatexts show that
we can construct aesthetic objects bigger than worlds. This is rather
remarkable. Megatexts do more than simply represent or simulate a
world. These texts have found other ways of organizing time and space,
of understanding human life as an aesthetic phenomenon to be poeti-
cally constructed, than even the notoriously malleable, absorptive, and
adaptable novel. Megatexts still have limits and thus can be read and
interpreted, just as a novel’s limits and boundaries do not foreclose a

wide array of interpretations. Megatexts are just a whole lot bigger than
any singular cultural object previously existing. They emerge from a his-
torical moment in which hyperobjects have become visible and suggest
that “world” is not quite the appropriate concept for understanding
the kinds of things being made in the twenty-first century.36 Further, it
seems like no coincidence that an artwork with a nonhuman horizon has
arisen at a moment when the nonhuman realities of climate change have
become increasingly observable and pressing. Breeze Avenue, by becom-
ing a massively extended poetic system, should clearly be understood as
a response to the Anthropocene, to a world that has been made into a
postnatural system massively extended in space and time.
Take, for example, the “Annual Cloud Narrative.” As mentioned,
Breeze Avenue will be made up of thirty-seven “elements,” each succes-
sively bigger or smaller than the next. At the upper limit is the “Annual
Cloud Narrative” consisting of 365 thousand photos of clouds in the
sky taken from the same vantage point in Minneapolis—one thou-
sand photos a day for a year. (This is followed by the Bonsai Poem, a
three-million-page poem algorithmically generated from three thou-
sand characters. One-tenth of this poem, or three hundred thousand
pages, will be “distributed fairly evenly throughout” Breeze Avenue.37
At the lower end are the nonexistent Intercalarian Commentaries,38
the one page poem “Everglades,” the two pages of acknowledgments,
etc.) Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) springs to mind as a precursor to
the “Annual Cloud Narrative,” but Empire’s eight hours, even though
quite long, are still watchable in their entirety without too much com-
mitment from the viewer. Flipping as quickly as one can through
365 thousand pages—and of course these photographs will be inter-
spersed throughout Breeze Avenue, so to get at even this single element
would actually require turning three million pages—would take quite
a bit longer: over one hundred days.39 The dispersal of the “Annual
Cloud Narrative” throughout the entirety of Breeze Avenue allows one
to think the duration of an entire year, and other temporalities as well,
such as a year slowed down over the many years it might take to read
all of Grossman’s text. Temporality itself, different scales of duration,
deep, geologic time, the time of cities and people, the time of climate
change and the annual seasons, the time of a day, the miniscule, incre-
mental change introduced between one photograph and the next—all
these divergent, competing, complimentary, synchronic, and diachronic
266 B.J. FEST
temporalities are materially present across the entirety of Breeze Avenue.

Quite simply, the “Annual Cloud Narrative” stages an encounter with
the time of hyperobjects.
When discussing the temporality of hyperobjects, Morton stresses
that they “cannot be thought as occupying a series of now-points ‘in’
time or space.”40 The 365 thousand photos of the sky taken from a
fixed point in Minneapolis would at first appear to emphasize chron-
ological time and the space of a particular locality. But recall that
Minneapolis itself is merely a point on a planet spinning around a star
circling the center of a galaxy hurtling through the void of space; at a
less cosmic level, passing through Minneapolis and present in each
image are other nonlocalizable flows: weather, climate, light, water
vapor, carbon dioxide, seasons, automobile exhaust, human exhalation,
and so on. Rather than repeat a cliché about how acting locally con-
nects to thinking globally, the “Annual Cloud Narrative” dramatizes
Morton’s insight that “there is no such thing, at a deep level, as the
local. Locality is an abstraction.”41 With its images dispersed through-
out the forty-five terabytes and three million pages of Breeze Avenue, in
a text that has as its upper-limit the twenty million years of the “Torah
Ball” and its lower-limit the temporally “nonexistent” Intercalarian
Commentaries, the “Annual Cloud Narrative” poetically and system-
atically enacts the undulating and nonlocal temporality of hyperobjects,
connecting a moment, or 365 thousand moments, to countless other
moments and objects in the past and future. And importantly, this tem-
porality is bounded: “hyperobjects are not forever. What they offer
instead is very large finitude.”42 I must continue to stress that megatexts,
like hyperobjects, are finite. It is precisely in terms of their massive fini-
tude that the megatext should be understood as a form that emerges
from and responds to the ecological implications of human activity
understood in terms of the vast yet finite timescales given to thought
by the concept of the Anthropocene. The “Annual Cloud Narrative”
materially instantiates how humans can no longer comprehend their
condition if they restrict their subjective experience to an immediate
and anthropically bounded local temporality, acting as if whatever lay
beyond their experiential horizon was inaccessible and unconnected. By
expanding the form of the individual photograph toward megatextual
accumulation, however, the 365 thousand images repeat again and again
how “hyperobjects envelop us,”43 even if perceived from the single van-
tage point of a building in Minneapolis. Megatextuality thus stages an
encounter with a temporal experience of hyperobjects, with geologic

finitude and environmental transformation speculatively rather than with
narrative or mimesis.44 To encounter the “Annual Cloud Narrative,”
this powerful meditation on the temporality of the Anthropocene, one
is not required to see all its images or trace its representational changes
through chronological time. Rather, the sheer materiality of the accu-
mulated photographs emphasize the idea or concept of the heteroge-
neous temporalities involved. As with hyperobjects, one must rely on
abstraction in order to approach megatexts. Without an act of specu-
lative totalization, without an act of poetic, imaginative creation, one
simply cannot read the “Annual Cloud Narrative,” much less Breeze
Avenue, much less the Anthropocene.
In the first chapter of Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson diagnosed the
“dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to
map the great global multinational and decentered communicational net-
work in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”45 More
recently, Alexander R. Galloway has claimed that there is a “dilemma
of unrepresentability lurking within information aesthetics”46; the com-
plexities of massive distributed networks resist and defeat efforts to rep-
resent those networks. For both thinkers, the totality of the massive
digital, informatic, economic, political, and environmental systems that
structure contemporaneity exceed any individual’s ability to understand
and coherently position themselves within that totality. To exist in post-
modern hyperspace is to encounter the uncanny size of the technologi-
cal sublime. In Postmodernism, Jameson famously called for “an aesthetic
of cognitive mapping”47 as a critical and poetic response to this condi-
tion of postmodernity, and more than twenty years later Galloway argues
that “the point is not so much to call for a return to cognitive mapping,
which of course is of highest importance, but to call for a poetics as such
for this mysterious new machinic space. . . . Offering a counter-aesthetic
in the face of such systematicity is the first step toward building a poet-
ics for it, a language of representability adequate to it.”48 Both thinkers
emphasize art’s potential power for making sense of the immensely com-
plicated postmodern world while also admitting that an aesthetic form
appropriate to the realities of contemporaneity has not yet emerged. In
its more pessimistic formulation, the lack of a new aesthetics of cogni-
tive mapping, or what Galloway calls a “poetics of control,” has been a
running theme from a variety of commentators. The inability to invent
forms appropriate to life in the age of global capital signals the complete
268 B.J. FEST
foreclosure of the imagination by the culture industry; we can no longer

even imagine, much less create, any world other than the one produced
by late capitalism.49
Though it is still in a nascent and emerging state, and consequently
I cannot make too many claims about its novelty or its potential, the
megatext seems uniquely suited to address the dilemmas Jameson and
Galloway describe. Though a rather simple idea, the “Annual Cloud
Narrative” allows whoever contemplates its massiveness to encounter
temporal scales that are radically nonhuman, to think and imagine the
complexities of the weather as experienced over an entire calendar year,
while also grounding its scope in something accessible, even only in
part, by a human subject. The “Annual Cloud Narrative” visualizes, at
an unreadably large scale, the dynamic tension between a unique, sub-
jective vantage point and the complex realities of global climate change,
which is, of course, a hyperobject with significant ties to other eco-
nomic, political, and historical totalities, and points toward the deep
time, both in the past and the future, of a planet without humans. In
short, we cannot read Breeze Avenue without engaging in the activi-
ties of cognitive mapping, without a poetic encounter with informatics,
without confronting the immense systematicity of Breeze Avenue and
a contemporary landscape dominated by hyperobjects; we cannot read
this megatext, and potentially many others, without thinking about the
temporal and experiential transformations engendered by our aware-
ness of the Anthropocene. Grossman dramatizes something fundamen-
tal about contemporary art: through its very form, Breeze Avenue enacts
how we should regard the imagination as absolutely vital for living in a
world increasingly constituted by large, unknowable objects. That Breeze
Avenue, to make this point, must hyperarchivally accumulate beyond
readability might indicate how desperately we need forms capable of
opening up poetic activity, forms that do not foreclose the imagination
but rather inspire and encourage it, indeed, even necessitate or require
imaginative activity. The emergence of megatexts in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries signals that aesthetic forms appropriate to
the age of hyperobjects can be made and a reinvestment in the imagina-
tion might still be possible after all.
The Megatext to Come

In 1997, thirty years after the above predictions about writing in Of
Grammatology, Derrida returned to and revised his thinking on the
materiality of books in a short essay on Maurice Blanchot’s The Book to
Come (1959). There Derrida wrote:
Now what is happening today . . . of the book’s to-come, still as the book,
is on the one hand . . . the dissemination with no possible gathering, the
irreversible dispersion of this total codex . . . ; but simultaneously, on the
other hand, a constant reinvestment in the book project, in the book of
the world or the world book, in the absolute book. . . . It re-creates the
temptation that is figured by the World Wide Web as the ubiquitous Book
finally reconstituted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the
World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though
what it does is to repeat the end of the book as to-come.50
In this remarkable short essay responding to how writing has trans-

formed in the digital age, Derrida is concerned with the persistence of
two historical fantasies. On one hand, which I have written about else-
where, the fantasy of bibliographic destruction clearly persists with the
internet, evidenced by the frequent invocations about the end of print
or the death of the novel, along with the more radical representations of
archival destruction that a variety of cultural products continue to depict.
On the other hand, the internet is often understood as a global hyper-
archive that promises nothing less than the liberation and transcendence
of the species through total knowledge.
As Breeze Avenue does not yet exist, I believe that these two fanta-
sies should be cautiously kept in mind when it is finally published and
further work on it continues, so I will conclude this initial discussion of
Grossman’s megatext by roughly sketching a few paths for further criti-
cal inquiry in light of these concerns. Until this point I have been pos-
itively discussing Breeze Avenue, but as emerging billion dollar cultural
franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–) and the reboot of
Star Wars demonstrate, the megatextual impulse can be quite complicit
with the reproduction of dominant cultural narratives, particularly sto-
ries about war, empire, and exceptionalism. One should not forget how
much such texts are driven by violence and profit; their hyperarchival
accumulation is inseparable from capital. This is also why Derrida roman-
tically warns us, “The truth of the book . . . resists . . . these fantasies,
270 B.J. FEST
which are only the flipside of each other.”51 The teleological fantasies of
the book, the eschatological and utopian futures projected for writing
and informatics in the twenty-first century, are powerful ideological nar-
ratives and can be used in a variety of ways for insidious ends. The mega-
text as a phenomenon of the past twenty-five years, for example, should
not be divorced from many of the triumphs of neoliberalism (for all the
utopianism above). So it would be a mistake to not indicate how Breeze
Avenue addresses its own potentially dangerous hyperarchival fantasies.
Following this, perhaps the most striking aspect of the working paper,
next to the sheer fact of the massive text it describes, is how much of
Breeze Avenue is for sale. The working paper, in many ways, functions
like an advertisement. Granted, that advertisement is being used to
help what I have to imagine is an immensely difficult project to fund,
no matter how much money its author may have. But the extent to
which Grossman has commodified Breeze Avenue, with many of its ele-
ments apparently created solely as saleable commodities, is worrisome.
In a recent discussion of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996),
David Letzler productively calls “cruft” the “unreadable” and “mean-
ingless” aspects of the novel: the useless footnotes, the redundant lists,
and so forth.52 I am led to suspect, beyond simply the reasonable need
to raise money for a massively ambitious project, that the working paper
of Breeze Avenue has been constructed to seriously ask what it means to
fund such a project that may very well border on total cruft, a massive,
unreadable (and meaningless) text that nonetheless will circulate as a val-
uable cultural commodity. Given how clearly Grossman anticipates the
future market for his project, at some level we have to ask whether or not
the book is any “good” in semi-traditional ways: Is its language inter-
esting? Are its forms compelling? Does it contain interesting ideas? Is it
worth reading and funding? Is there anything in it besides commodified
cruft? So exploring how Breeze Avenue relates to questions of quality and
twenty-first-century economics will be important further work to do.
Breeze Avenue’s relationship to global capitalism is significant for
biographical reasons as well. According to his website, Grossman was
“a high-level executive for a multinational financial services company[;]
he left the corporate world in 1976 in order to devote his time to writ-
ing.”53 The poetic record of this transformation, Tycoon Boy, contains an
important declaration about the nature of multinational firms in “The
6640,” which I will quote in full:
Form outweighs substance in business like Physics

a solution
is no more than the application of a Rule.
The computer is our tool

with its third party Peripherals: disc paks
CRT’s, intelligent Terminals
its cassettes and leased lines

and the mainframe sunk in our basement
behind a glass door you need a plastic card to Touch
its controls where millions of bites

shriek like the dead at the edge of sleep.54
Grossman, in his first collection, writes in the voice of a disillusioned

“tycoon boy,” who now devotes his energy to poetry. This figure tells
us that the computer is the tool of multinational financial firms; the
tools of late capitalism are the terminals, wires, discs, and plastic cards
of contemporary control societies, the very things he is attempting to
escape in his move toward poetry. Breeze Avenue will make prominent
use of these very same tools, albeit for poetic ends. How the tension
plays out between the technologies used to create Breeze Avenue and the
way the text interrogates those very technologies will be worth further
consideration.
Perhaps most worrisome would be how Breeze Avenue participates in
the teleological fantasy of the total book, as Grossman explicitly frames
its larger goals in terms of transcending human realities: “that there is
something independent of human experience that impacts human expe-
rience and can make us better people.”55 In the current description on
Grossman’s website, it is “a flow of limitless imagination and grace that
was generated by a coterie of Los Angeles writers intent on portraying a
pathway of insight into paradise.”56 In other words, it seems as if Breeze
Avenue may in fact aspire to be a religious text for posthumanity, a meg-
atextual heaven. Though clearly the work ironically challenges the idea of
a digital library of Babel collectives of scholars can devote their lives to,
in terms of some of the things Grossman has explicitly said, being such a
metaphysically hyperarchival object appears to be within Breeze Avenue’s
ambitions. While the text is thoroughly grounded in the material and
272 B.J. FEST
technological realities of the twenty-first century, it may also be anach-

ronistically and purposefully transcendental. This contradiction deserves
further inquiry.
But this is partly the point of the “Torah Ball”: what would it mean to
find such a bafflingly purposeful and complex object twenty million years
from now? Surely it would be evidence of gods, or at least intelligence.
Perhaps Breeze Avenue should not be faulted for such hubristic aims. The
simple fact that Grossman’s megatext thinks in terms of such deep, geo-
logical timescales is remarkable. And the production of a physical object
that materially spans such durations probably cannot avoid being meta-
physical in some way. I am not sure. But it does seem that perhaps an
unreadably large text is precisely what we need, both in its inevitable call
to our speculative imagination and to the desperate need we have for
new modes of communal, collaborative meaning making. On a rapidly
changing, precarious planet, a form that requires a deliberate act of com-
munity to collectively articulate something none of us individually could
know because of its overwhelming nonhumanity might be a good start;
it might be posthuman enough for confronting the global risks of con-
temporaneity. In a time of hyperobjects, perhaps we need megatexts. I
look forward to reading Breeze Avenue.
Notes
1. Grossman, “Breeze Avenue Working Paper,” 206. Considerable logis-
tical effort was required to bury the “Torah Ball”: “A drilling site had
to be found that met all the specifications of the geologists, who had
to take into account the tectonic forces that continually shape Mount
Princeton and the rest of the Sawatch Range. Permits had to be obtained
from the U.S. Forest Service to fix the washed-out sections of the access
road so the heavy equipment could be hauled up by truck. Even after
the improvements the road proved too rough and narrow for one truck,
which had to be retrieved from the edge of a cliff” (Koerner). For a time-
lapse video of the burial, see American Letters Press. For a brief inter-
view with Grossman about the “Torah Ball,” see “20-Million-Year Time
Capsule.”
2. Frummer, n.p.
3. On the modern epic, see Moretti. On modernist encyclopedic texts, see
Saint-Amour. On the postmodern long poem, see McHale. For important
discussions of the postmodern encyclopedic novel, see Greif, LeClair, Art
of Excess, and Mendelson.
4. Poe, 82.
5. Qtd. in Vint, 57.
6. “Megatext” has also been used to describe somewhat different tex-
tual formations. Christine Brooke-Rose, in a poststructuralist study of
SF and fantasy, describes the parallel world building being done by J.
R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–55) series as a megatext: how
the geography, history, and language of Middle Earth are “treated as if
[they] existed” (243). More recently, Daniel Leonard Bernardi follows
Broderick in his media ecological approach to race in Star Trek as “a con-
glomerate of texts and intertexts, becoming nothing less than a mega-
text: a relatively coherent and seemingly unending enterprise of televisual,
filmic, auditory, and written texts” (7). Also see Palmer.
7. I also think it is important that, according to the OED, the first use of
mega as an adverb occurred in 1966 and as an adjective in 1968,
only a few years after Paul Baran published his research for the Rand
Corporation on packet-switching, a technology that would lay the foun-
dations for the ARPAnet and the World Wide Web. In other words, the
term megatext might more suitably be applied to singular textual phe-
nomena unique to the computer age rather than somewhat anachronisti-
cally mapped upon the total body of SF texts, many of which appeared
well before World War II.
8. Aarseth, 1.
9. Frummer, n.p.
10. Grossman, “Breeze Avenue Working Paper,” 193.
11. One might consider Henry Darger’s output of both the unpublished fif-
teen thousand page manuscript of The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What
Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War
Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, and the many paintings he
made to accompany it, the upper limit of a single text that a lone artist
might create in one lifetime. But In the Realms of the Unreal, though it
displays a megatextual impulse, is not a megatext because it is a readable
single author work composed in print.
12. And by saying, “some relationship to digital technology,” I am pur-
posely casting a fairly wide net. As N. Katherine Hayles makes clear in
Electronic Literature, “almost all contemporary literature is already digi-
tal. Except for a handful of books produced by fine letter presses, print
literature consists of digital files throughout most of its existence. So
essential is digitality to contemporary processes of composition, storage,
and production that print should properly be considered a particular form
of output for digital files rather than as a medium separate from digital
instantiation” (159).
274 B.J. FEST
13. Lukács writes: “The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great
epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors’ funda-
mental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with
which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in
which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which
the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still
thinks in terms of totality” (56). On US and British writers engaged in
similar projects of totalization during the nineteenth century, see Arac,
Commissioned Spirits.
14. Morton, 1.
15. Mandiberg “describes the project as half utilitarian data visualization pro-
ject, half absurdist poetic gesture” (Schuessler).
16. Khatchadourian, 48. The game is so large that its creators have sent space
drones into its universe to explore and report back in order to help them
design it further. See Starkey and Tach.
17. One critic recently labeled 2015 “The Year of the Very Long Novel”
(Kachka).
19. This is also to raise the question of how one would go about a distant
reading of Breeze Avenue, as it appears that there will be no stable ver-
sion of it available for quantitative digital analysis. I imagine one will not
be permitted to scan all the books in the reading room, and the effort
to concretize and map the entirety of its changing online form will pre-
sumably be difficult if not technically impossible. Hypothetically, Breeze
Avenue has been created in the way it has to frustrate or discourage the
methods of distant reading that have emerged in recent years.
20. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 8.
21. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
22. Ibid.
23. Greif, 12. Another way of putting this might be to suggest that the ency-
clopedic novel emerged and maintained its status as a dominant cultural
form by insisting on the novel’s status as a residual form. See Arac, “What
Kind of History” and Williams.
24. Qtd. in Fest, “Apocalypse Networks,” 97.
25. Amerika, n.p.
26. Greif, 28.
27. LeClair, Art of Excess, 6. Though I retain the term postmodernism
throughout this essay, one might also productively understand such sys-
tems novels vis-à-vis what Mark McGurl has recently called “technomod-
ernism” (37–45).
28. LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction,” 14.
29. Elsewhere I have defined the term hyperarchive as “an archive whose
goal, whether stated or not, can be seen in an attempt to gather
together as many documents and texts as it can, regardless of content”
(Fest, “Apocalypse Networks,” 102). For an earlier discussion of hyper-
archivalism, see Fest, “The Inverted Nuke.” For further discussion
about the difference between representation and procedure, see Fest,
“Metaproceduralism.”
30. Pynchon, 64.
31. For a discussion of “network being,” see Galloway and Thacker, 118–19.
For a discussion of other forms responding specifically to the rise of net-
works, see Jagoda.
33. Eco, 278–319.
34. Heidegger, 43.
35. Until Breeze Avenue is available for perusal, I am unwilling to say that
megatexts constitute hyperobjects in themselves. Even though very large,
I suspect that megatexts do not yet come close to the size of hyperobjects
as Morton understands them.
36. Morton claims that hyperobjects “are entities that become visible through
post-Humean statistical causality” (16) and that “after 1945 there began
the Great Acceleration, in which the geological transformation of Earth
by humans increased by vivid orders of magnitude” (5; emphasis in origi-
nal). This transformation has led to humans gaining a temporal and geo-
logical perspective capable of perceiving hyperobjects, something that
occurred “about a decade ago” (5).
38. The Intercalarian Commentaries, though technically zero pages, are
also “an element that is beyond the grasp of almost all readers. . . . This
element is impossible to find, and once found, is impossible to deci-
pher short of amassing and decoding it with the aid of programming”
(Grossman, “Breeze Avenue Working Paper,” 194, 207). The irony here
is that the “smallest” aspect of the text is also the aspect that is the most
unreadable. This element may also be a joke about quantitative analy-
sis and distant reading, the content of which would require quantitative
analysis to determine.
39. Spending eight hours a day flipping pages, allowing one second to glance
at each of Breeze Avenue’s three million pages, would take 104 days.
40. Morton, 47.
41. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 55.
276 B.J. FEST
44. For a discussion of contemporary short novels that attempt to narrate the

temporality of geologic finitude, see Fest, “Geologies of Finitude.”
45. Jameson, Postmodernism, 44.
46. Galloway, 86.
47. Jameson, Postmodernism, 54.
48. Galloway, 99.
49. Such pessimism is nicely captured by Jameson’s revision of one of his
more famous quips: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the
end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now
revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imag-
ining the end of the world” (“Future City,” 573). For a further discus-
sion of representation and Galloway, see Fest, “Poetics of Control.”
50. Derrida, “The Book to Come,” 15; emphasis in original.
51. Ibid., 17.
52. Letzler, passim.
53. Grossman, Breezeavenue.com.
54. Grossman, Tycoon Boy, 63.
55. “20-Million-Year Time Capsule.”
56. Frummer, n.p.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Michael Tavel Clarke and David

Wittenberg for their efforts to bring this volume into print and for their editorial
guidance, along with the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and
suggestions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Racheal Fest and Dan Malinowski
for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like
to thank the students of my spring 2015 Interactive Literature class at the
University of Pittsburgh for listening and responding to some of my exploratory
ideas about megatexts and Breeze Avenue.
Epigraph drawn from Borges, 118.
Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.
American Letters Press. “Richard Grossman’s Pop-Up Torah: Time-Lapse Video
of Installation in Mount Princeton.” Vimeo, March 4, 2012, video. Accessed
June 1, 2015. https://vimeo.com/37919331.
Amerika, Mark. “The Book as Biomorphic Object: An Interview with Richard
Grossman.” Alt-X, 1997. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.altx.com/
int2/richard.grossman.html.
Arac, Jonathan. Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens,

Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne. 2nd edition. New York: Columbia
———. “What Kind of History Does a Theory of the Novel Require?” Novel: A
Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 190–195.
Bernardi, Daniel Leonard. “Star Trek” and History: Race-ing Toward a White
Future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” 1941. In Collected Fictions, trans-
lated by Andrew Hurley, 112–18. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and
Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Book to Come.” 2001. In Paper Machine, translated by
Rachel Bowlby, 4–18. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
———. Of Grammatology. 1967. Corrected edition. Translated by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Dooley, Ben. “The World’s Longest Novel.” The Millions, September 3, 2007.
Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.themillions.com/2007/09/world-longest-
novel.html.
Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York:
Rizzoli, 2009.
Fest, Bradley J. “Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive.” In
The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, edited by
Michael J. Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor, 81–103. Newcastle upon
Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
———. “Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-First-Century
Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Reza Negarestani’s
Cyclonopedia.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57, no. 5 (2016):
565–578.
———. “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-
Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” boundary 2 39, no. 3
(2012): 125–149.
———. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of
Postmodern Metafiction.” “Videogame Adaptation,” edited by Kevin M.
Flanagan, special issue, Wide Screen 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. Accessed February
26, 2017. http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/
105/145.
———. “Poetics of Control.” Review of The Interface Effect, by Alexander
R. Galloway, b2o Review, July 15, 2015. http://www.boundary2.org/
2015/07/poetics-of-control/. Accessed December 30, 2015.
278 B.J. FEST
Frummer, Kathleen. “Introduction to Breeze Avenue.” RichardGrossman.com,

July 30, 2014. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.richardgrossman.com/
breeze_avenue/.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Greif, Mark. “‘The Death of the Novel’ and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of
the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel.’” boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 11–30.
Grossman, Richard. The Alphabet Man. Boulder, CO: Fiction Collective Two;
Normal, IL: Illinois State University, 1993.
———. The Animals. Revised edition. 1983. Los Angeles: American Letters,
2011.
———. The Book of Lazarus. Normal, IL: Fiction Collective Two, 1997.
———. Boswell Speaks. 4 volumes. Los Angeles: American Letters. Kindle edi-
tion, 2012–13.
———. “Breeze Avenue Working Paper.” In Third Person: Authoring and
Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin,
193–207. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
———. Breezeavenue.com, 2015. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://www.rich-
ardgrossman.com/.
———. Tycoon Boy. Santa Cruz, CA: Kayak, 1977.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 1950. In Poetry,
Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 17–86. New York:
Perennial Classics, 2001.
Jagoda, Patrick. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” In The Ideologies of Theory, 563–76. New York:
Verso, 2008.
———. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Kachka, Boris. “When Did Books Get So Freaking Enormous? The Year of the
Very Long Novel.” Vulture, May 19, 2015. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://
www.vulture.com/2015/05/year-of-the-very-long-novel.html.
Khatchadourian, Raffi. “World Without End.” New Yorker 91, no. 13 (2015):
48.
Koerner, Jane. “The Curious Crystal Ball Inside Mount Princeton.” Colorado
Central Magazine, November 1, 2013. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://coz-
ine.com/2013-november/the-curious-crystal-ball-inside-mount-princeton/.
LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary Fiction. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989.
———. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and

David Foster Wallace.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 1
(1996): 12–37.
Letzler, David. “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s
Endnotes.” In David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the
Novels, edited by Marshall Boswell, 127–47. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on
the Forms of Great Epic Literature. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative
Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long
Poems. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” In Mindful Pleasures: Essays on
Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz, 161–95. New
York: Little, Brown, 1976.
Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez.
Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: Verso, 1996.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, December, 2015.
Accessed December 30, 2015. http://www.oed.com/.
Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
Poe, Marshall T. A History of Communications: Media and Society from the
Evolution of Speech to the Internet. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Harper Perennial,
2006.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Schuessler, Jennifer. “Moving Wikipedia from Computer to Many, Many
Bookshelves.” New York Times, June 16, 2015. Accessed June 16, 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/books/moving-wikipedia-from-
computer-to-many-many-bookshelves.html.
Starkey, Dave. “584,942,417,355: Years It’d Actually Take to Visit Each Planet
in No Man’s Sky.” Kotaku, August 18, 2014. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://
kotaku.com/years-itd-actually-take-to-visit-each-planet-in-no-mans-1623468883.
Tach, Dave. “No Man’s Sky Is So Big, the Developers Built Space Probes to
Explore It for Them.” Kotaku, March 3, 2015. Accessed June 1, 2015.
http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8140343/no-mans-sky-space-probes-
gdc-quintillion-worlds.
280 B.J. FEST
Vint, Sherryl. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Bloomsbury,
2014.
Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.”
1973. In Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, 31–49. New York: Verso,
2005.
“20-Million-Year Time Capsule: A Pop-Up Torah.” 9News, KUSA, September
19, 2011, television broadcast. Accessed June 1, 2015. http://archive.9news.
com/video/default.aspx?bctid=1168108878001.
CHAPTER 11
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David

Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale
of Encyclopedic Fiction
Jeffrey Severs
You’re special—it’s O.K.—but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising
two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with
4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.
—David Foster Wallace in a letter to a friend, 1999 (Max, 285)
We will never know what size The Pale King—David Foster Wallace’s
final, unfinished novel about the IRS, Illinois, and boredom—might have
grown or shrunk to, had its author lived to present a coherent published
version. The text that editor Michael Pietsch synthesized from Wallace’s
unordered and multi-headed manuscript in 2011 runs to 538 pages,
with an additional eight pages of Wallace’s “Notes and Asides”; the 2012
paperback adds 25 pages of new scenes. Pietsch assembled the published
book from material found on and in “[h]ard drives, file folders, three-
ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks”1 at Wallace’s
J. Severs (*) 
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_11
282 J. Severs
home after his 2008 suicide—nearly 3000 pages of drafts.2 I have read
through some of the unpublished writing at the Harry Ransom Center
in Austin, where Wallace’s archive is preserved; critic David Hering and
biographer D. T. Max have read through much more for their respective
books on Wallace, and Max reports on abandoned subplots that include
a pornographic film business that is seized for tax evasion and comes to
feature as its primary performer the IRS examiner Shane Drinion (result-
ing in Wallace’s cheeky prospective title, Sir John Feelgood).3 Despairing
over the many years he had worked on the book, Wallace speculated
in 2006 to his friend Jonathan Franzen that he would “have to write a
5000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%.”4
As that editing math suggests, Wallace was not necessarily intent on
exceeding or closely matching his career-defining 1996 novel of 1079
pages and 388 endnotes, Infinite Jest. He was even, Max also notes,
pleased enough with the completeness of The Pale King’s §22, Chris
Fogle’s story, to consider publishing its 98 pages as a standalone book.5
Typical proportions of action and pacing are no guide to The Pale King’s
projected final size: as Wallace’s notes say, he had decided that the cen-
tral conflict between tax-examining methods—computer systems vs.
humans—would achieve no climax, the scenes instead emphasizing the
slow passage of time. “Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening,” he
writes to himself regarding the novel’s “Central Deal,” “but nothing
actually happens.”6
While there are no completely firm grounds on which to project a
complete Pale King, studying Wallace’s frustrated engagement with
issues of scale does allow us to understand his metamorphic sense of
what writing an encyclopedic novel (or a novel of any size) entailed in
the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century USA. In this essay, contex-
tualizing longer works with some shorter ones and discussing the rela-
tionship of encyclopedism to consciousness, emotion, and the cognitive
process of “exformation,” I argue for some crucial differences between
the two novels that it is tempting to parallel as his “big,” information-
laden books, Infinite Jest and The Pale King. To evoke these differ-
ences I trace the transformed means by which Wallace approached one
of his central topics, human attention, which I address through the dif-
ference between two ratios, two ways of quantifying the flow of stimuli
and thought to and from individual minds. Through his mid-career he
lamented a media- and ad-saturated USA of distraction and superabun-
dant information, and he composed Infinite Jest with the idea of overload
11 CUTTING CONSCIOUSNESS DOWN TO SIZE … 283
and glut constantly in mind: “the world . . . of 250 advertisements a day

and any number of unbelievably entertaining options.”7 But I spend
much more of this essay detailing the signature style of his late career, to
which his studies of neuroscience led him: a densely detailed, multi-track,
and often intentionally boring style in which any given page of a chapter
or even a short work could become the encyclopedia of a single minute
of physical sensations, meandering thoughts, and psychic eruptions, with-
out the implicit suggestion that the minds on display were made this way
by postmodern media immersion. Human consciousness itself, considered
outside limited modern contingencies of stimuli, was at its core an over-
whelming experience. The ratio of attention at work in these later pieces
was the awesome one of 11 million to 40 that Wallace derived from
Timothy D. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive
Unconscious: “Consider that at any given moment,” Wilson writes,
“our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of informa-
tion. . . . The most liberal estimate [among scientists] is that people
can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second. . . .
What happens to the other 10,999,960?”8 Ultimately Wallace’s two nov-
els, considered together, lead to the difficult question of what exactly
counts as knowledge in a big book: the esoteric facts from history, sci-
ence, and trivia with which many encyclopedic writers have peppered
their texts, or the quotidian details, unconsciously perceived phenomena,
and opportunities for empathy that amass at every second of human per-
ception, going unrecorded on a scale that haunted Wallace and his sense
of what fulfilling fiction ought to capture. As the letter I quote in my epi-
graph suggests, Wallace felt both challenged and heartened by the sheer,
breathtaking scale of detail that lay hidden not in databases but in the
mind of the stranger across the table.
Because Infinite Jest is considered his masterpiece, Wallace is likely to
be enduringly classified among encyclopedic novelists, especially those
predecessors he took as “patriarch[s] for my patricide,” such as John
Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon.9 With these writers Infinite
Jest shares features that Edward Mendelson, in a seminal definition of
the form, regards as some of the keys to encyclopedism, from Dante and
Cervantes to Joyce and Pynchon: “a full account of a technology or sci-
ence,” a wide range of styles, a tendency to focus on “gigantism.”10 But
considering Wallace’s oeuvre leads to other ways of seeing his general
profile. Wallace wrote very long but also very short; and he published at
lengths of 60–100 pages (in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
284 J. Severs
Way,” “Mister Squishy,” “The Suffering Channel,” and others) that can
be difficult to classify according to typical understandings of short stories,
novellas, and novels. In 1997, as he turned to new projects after Infinite
Jest and his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
had been published, Wallace found himself writing on a much smaller
scale11: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999) contains some stories
of fewer than 300 total words such as “A Radically Condensed History
of Post-Industrial Life,” “Another Example of the Porousness of Certain
Borders (VI),” and “Think,” micro-narratives or flash fictions follow-
ing in the vein of his two-page “Everything is Green” from Girl With
Curious Hair (1989) and anticipating the unbearably tense three-pager
“Incarnations of Burned Children” from Oblivion (2004).
There was, simply put, no standard-size Wallace narrative. To an inter-
viewer in 2006 Wallace professed not to be following any conventional
standards for the lengths of his projects:
There are writers in America who consider themselves only novelists.

I do all kinds of different things. . . . I haven’t made any decisions about
one kind of genre or another. . . . I don’t have any views about the novel
versus the short story or anything like that. I have for the past five or six
years many times started some things. I don’t really understand the term
“Novel,” but I guess everything over about 150 pages is a novel. I’ve done
a couple of longer things, I just don’t like them very much right now and I
don’t [know] whether I will rewrite them.12
One result of the unfinished projects and his lack of agenda with respect
to length was a tendency toward spin-offs and self-cannibalism: Pietsch
reveals that Wallace began the short works “Adult World” (published in
Brief Interviews) and “The Soul is Not a Smithy” (76 pages long and
in Oblivion) as parts of The Pale King.13 Stephen J. Burn shows that
yet more of Oblivion emerged in symbiosis with the tax novel,14 while
Max notes that Wallace considered making “Incarnations of Burned
Children” one of the many traumatic childhood backstories in that final
novel.15 In some ways, with access to his archive, critics can now see
Wallace’s output from the late 1990s forward as an evolving array of
modular units, able to be assembled and broken down into fictions of
wildly different scales.
Infinite Jest’s identification with encyclopedism and the mega-size
novel has justifiably been a dominant topic in criticism of Wallace and a
wider swath of postmodern and post-postmodern fiction. Burn’s guide

to the novel designates it as encyclopedic,16 and as David Letzler docu-
ments, many Wallace critics, including Frank Cioffi and Timothy Aubry,
use this terminology as well.17 Stefano Ercolino, in The Maximalist
Novel, defines his central term using primarily Infinite Jest, Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Roberto Bolaño’s
2666 as key exhibits. Tom LeClair, in one of the earliest critical takes on
Infinite Jest, classified Wallace, along with William Vollmann and Richard
Powers, as a writer of “prodigious” fictions, marked by the commingling
of heavyweight young minds (or prodigies) and large-scale narrative.18
In the most recent refinement of the claim that Wallace is an encyclope-
dist, Letzler uses Infinite Jest’s often-superfluous endnotes as well as riffs
in The Pale King on the uselessness of information in massive amounts
to expose paradoxes in Wallace’s reader-overloading tendencies. Letzler
claims that much of these works’ heft actually arises from the inclusion of
“pointless” and uninteresting data meant to train a reader in, essentially,
not reading it, with a Wallace book “serving as a kind of all-purpose
mental gymnasium for mental filtering skills” in an age awash in informa-
tion.19 My interpretations below of neuroscientific principles of exclusion
will offer a new vocabulary that echoes some points on paradoxical ency-
clopedic inclusion made by Letzler, who calls such pointless information
by the computer science term for program-excess, “cruft.”
The very title of Infinite Jest proposes the biggest possible scale, a
topic on which Wallace was a technical expert: a student of the inter-
sections between philosophy and higher mathematics since his college
days, in 2003 he contributed to a series by literary writers on scientific
topics an overview of Georg Cantor’s findings titled Everything and
More: A Compact History of Infinity. In Infinite Jest, the typical reader
operates with more of a layman’s sense of infinity as endlessness, as the
greatest possible size of anything; and in those terms Cioffi is right to
see Wallace’s central contrast as that between two overwhelming items
of entertainment and edification, differently consumed and requiring
far different investments of time and energy: the book Infinite Jest on
the one hand, and on the other a mesmerizing and deadly film by that
name within the diegetic plane.20 Causing viewers to want to do noth-
ing else but watch it (not even eat), the looping film is a Macguffin driv-
ing a plot of international terrorism and double agents that owes a major
debt to the quest for an alleged pornographic Hitler film in DeLillo’s
Running Dog.
286 J. Severs
The extreme conceit of a murderously pleasing film allows Wallace to

place late twentieth-century visual technologies in relation to weighty
traditions of sublime and sometimes deathly beauty (the “fatally pulchri-
tudinous”),21 which the novel explores through references to Helen of
Troy, the Medusa, and exceedingly weird avant-garde cinema (physics
researcher James Incandenza is able to make the anomalous film at the
end of an experimental filmmaking career by drawing on his deep knowl-
edge of optics). Yet what makes Infinite Jest (set largely in “Subsidized
Time,” readily identifiable as the 2010s) an enduring cultural analy-
sis is not just its prophecies of the twenty-first century’s “binge” view-
ing of on-demand video (it portrays a digital “InterLace” system of
“dissemination[s]” to “teleputers” and film-cartridges delivered in the
Daily Mail22) but its satires of the run-of-the-mill 1990s US viewer, not
yet in a clinical vegetative state but a couch-potato nonetheless. Wallace
dubs this average viewer “Joe Briefcase” in his 1993 essay “E Unibus
Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.”23 In this essay, taken by many crit-
ics as a blueprint for Infinite Jest, Wallace makes an explanatory refrain
out of an overwhelming daily quantity that serves as everyday analogue
to the deadened state of his fictional film’s viewers: “Statisticians report
that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American
household. . . . Six hours a day is more time than most people (con-
sciously) do any other one thing.”24 TV has a “six-hour hold on my gen-
eration’s cojones.”25 The Wallace of Infinite Jest was thus committed to
considering TV as a McLuhanesque environment from which there was
little chance of escape. The world of Infinite Jest is the one evoked by
a character’s explanation of why she is “proud to be an American” in
Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a key influence on Wallace: “We still lead the
world in stimuli.”26
Let me offer just a few examples of how this conclusion about an
all-pervasive medium of near-constant and determinative stimuli leads
to a particular portrayal of attention and distraction. Wallace offers a
funny set-piece on statesmen’s turn to advertisers to attempt to coun-
teract the spread of the killer film with a public-service ad featuring
“Fully Functional Phil,” a cartoon donkey.27 Advance studies predict
the children targeted will have an “[a]dvertable attention-span of six-
teen seconds with a geometric fall-off commencing at thirteen sec-
onds.”28 The irony of this discussion is the myopic inability to see how
poison and presumed antidote (constant motifs in this novel of addic-
tions) coincide: their means of combating a deadly film is an object in
the same dangerous medium—there is no outside to the screen-world.

TV for Wallace inspires a set of insidious assumptions that elements of
the animate world will behave just like the framed world onscreen that
continually directs the gaze to what is most important and seems pre-
pared (to quote Wallace in another context) just for “YOU,” the “abso-
lute center of the universe.”29 In one riff on the power of screens,
video-phone technology leads absurdly to its users wearing masks that
seek to “reassure . . . [the party sitting at the other screen] that they
were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have
to exert”—a TV-driven lesson about passivity and solipsistic exception-
ality.30 The theory of “figurants”—silent people on the margins of sit-
com scenes, “human furniture”—strikes similar notes.31 The dominant
visual medium of Wallace’s childhood and young adulthood had shrunk
and funneled an attention over which watchers exercised little or no real
agency or active choice.
In The Pale King, though, the restless Wallace seems to have set him-
self the challenge of going in an opposite direction, into a world sorely
lacking in stimulus, entertainment, and comforts, despite the book’s
mid-1980s setting. The one intra-textual film here is a very long docu-
mentary capturing examiners’ narratives, including Fogle’s story, about
their attitudes toward their tedious jobs. An imagined Beckettian play
by one of the examiners captures the pervading spirit of The Pale King:
in this “totally real, true-to-life” artwork, an audience would watch an
examiner sit at his desk until they get “more and more bored and rest-
less” and all eventually leave—whereupon “the real action of the play
can start,” though what action that would be this playwright could not
decide.32 Pietsch includes, in additional scenes published in the paper-
back, the story of an IRS agent who wants to watch every single second
of television broadcast in one month, a feat involving multiple VCRs.33
But aside from the incidental reference (and a passing note on social
media and “reality television” in the book’s “cultural present of 2005”),
film and TV—especially as inundating forces and totalizing environ-
ments—have largely been banished from The Pale King as Pietsch gives
it to us.34 In Infinite Jest the title film was an experience that meant the
end of all experience, an abyss for consciousness; in The Pale King by
contrast, the impossible object to which the novel implicitly compares
itself is the US tax code and the massive documentation surrounding it.
As a narrator named David Wallace (not to be conflated with the author)
puts it while describing his research, “[N]ot one journalist seems to
288 J. Severs
have” read through the IRS’s voluminous archives—though the narra-

tor says he has. “This stuff is just solid rock. The eyes roll up white by
the third or fourth” paragraph.35 Perhaps there is a distant (and counter-
ing) reference here to the zombie-like reaction Infinite Jest viewers have
to the Entertainment. If pleasure, rapt attention, and paralyzed watch-
ing were the key objects of analysis in Infinite Jest, The Pale King’s are
pain, boredom, and the act of endless reading. And if killer film and big,
salutary novel were implied opposites in Infinite Jest, in The Pale King
(especially with the pornography subplot excised from the book we have)
paper and text have no real other.36
As Conley Wouters and Simon de Bourcier have convincingly argued
in different veins, The Pale King seeks to compare its information-process-
ing characters to another technological development of the mid-1980s
period in which it is set—the rise of computers—the efficient machines
with which systems experts want to replace human examiners at the IRS
as part of the Reaganite “Spackman Initiative” Wallace invents.37 But in
comparing the impact of television and computers on Wallace’s novels, it
seems all-important to see the former as an external technology produc-
tive of pervasive output for passive recipients. Computers, by contrast,
figure more as direct comparison points for human minds, as processors
of information that carry out their work (just as our brains do) in hid-
den and thus mysterious fashion. When we consider that shift in light of
the reading about human cognition that the archive reveals Wallace was
doing, we can see that his central topic had transformed, essentially, from
consciousness within an overwhelming media landscape to consciousness
more generally and flexibly considered. He seems to have discovered that,
while computers offered a useful set of analogies for setting human capac-
ities in relief, the data human brains were taking in had not reached an
overwhelming scale any time recently in their evolutionary arc—problems
of uncountable stimuli were endemic to consciousness, which carried out
as one of its central (but unseen) tasks a filtering of that onslaught.
I take this essay’s title, “Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,” from
the subtitle of Tor Nørretranders’s work of popular science The User
Illusion, first published in Danish in 1991 and translated into English in
1998.38 Agreeing with the Timothy Wilson line I quoted near the begin-
ning, Nørretranders writes in a representative passage, “The human con-
sciousness can express the experience of only very few bits a second. But
that is not to say we do not experience more than that. Consciousness is
a measure of but a very small portion of what our senses perceive.”39
The User Illusion offers a key for unlocking the new features of the late
style of Wallace, who owned a copy of the 1998 English publication’s
advance uncorrected proofs and annotated it extensively.40 He took up
Nørretranders’s language immediately, it appears: Wallace notes in his
March 1998 speech about Franz Kafka and humor that “great short sto-
ries and great jokes” “[b]oth depend on what communication-theorists
sometimes call ‘exformation,’ which is a certain quantity of vital infor-
mation removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as
to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipi-
ent.”41 Wallace must have in mind Nørretranders, who coined the term
“exformation” in The User Illusion, defining it as all the pre-existing
knowledge and associations in a listener’s or reader’s head that allows
her to be informed of something by a writer or speaker. Nørretranders’s
definition is actually more general than the Kafka effect that Wallace
recounts:
The idea of transmitting information is to cause a state of mind to arise in

the receiver’s head that is related to the state of mind of the sender by way
of the exformation referred to in the information transmitted. The idea of
sending information is that the mind of the receiver must contain some
inner information related to the exformation the sender has in his head.
The information transferred must elicit associations in the receiver.42
When an author writes the word “horse,” Nørretranders continues,

“he draws on a huge amount of personal experience” of horses; he “has
read about horses,” “watched horses on television,” and knows what
others associate with them. When he writes the word in a certain con-
text, this author “has excited a space of association in your head.”43 The
exformation is not actually present in the chosen word, “horse”: exfor-
mation exists in “the mental work we do [in advance] in order to make
what we want to say sayable. Exformation is the discarded information,
everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before
we say anything at all.”44 This theory of psychic sharing and writer/
reader interdependence must have appealed to the Wallace who, from his
early career onward, sought to particularize poststructuralist tenets about
the limits of signs and emphasize the involvement of a reader in making
a text’s meaning. A reader of his formally disordered texts, Wallace says
in an interview, “has to do the work of connecting [scenes] to each other
and to the narrative”45; fiction did not really change a reader or serve as
290 J. Severs
a wholly external object to which readers reacted—a text, once out of

Wallace’s hands, “lives not just in but through the reader.”46 Such a view
of active readers (or listeners) was also opposed to TV’s “passive specta-
tion” and to the early Wittgenstein’s conclusion that human minds were
essentially solipsistic, fundamentally opaque to each other.47 Exformation
as discarded information also appears in Wallace’s theories of reading
within a culture of “Total Noise”48: Wallace laid out the importance of
discarding rather than accumulating information in his editorial pref-
ace “Deciderization,” about his own sifting through entries for The Best
American Essays 2007. “[F]rom the perspective of Information Theory,”
Wallace writes, the major part of his deciding labor is excluding nomi-
nees, as an “entropy-reducing info processor”; “the really expensive,
energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/
resetting.”49
Brief Interviews, the story collection Wallace published in June
1999, contains several short-short stories evocative of Kafka’s elliptical
parables and of exformation as Wallace defined it in his speech on his
predecessor’s humor. But Wallace, in his characteristic preference for
metafiction and highly self-conscious forms, was interested in not just
deploying exformation as an authorial tactic but in sharing the work of
enacting exformation and its process of discarding on the page—a page
that would represent not a stripped-bare minimalist exhibit (Wallace,
who emerged at a time when Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis were
ascendant, always took minimalism as an enemy) but a crowded, noisy
space. Hence the centerpiece of Brief Interviews, “Octet,” suggests it will
offer eight brief parables or “pop quizzes” but then manages to mount
only three before beginning a fourth with the line, “You are, unfor-
tunately, a fiction writer,” and asking the reader to consider abortive
accounts of what the writer abandoned in making the malformed, failed
text at hand.50 I might, in a more encyclopedic version of this essay, look
as well to the over-stuffed stories of Oblivion for evidence of exformation
in action; in Marshall Boswell’s apt claim, those stories made up of para-
graphless “wall[s] of text,”51 such as “Mister Squishy” and “Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature,” present characters marked by the “nested
entropic workings” of their chaotic minds.52 But here I will focus on
just how big a role exformation played in Wallace’s conceptualization of
how to assemble an encyclopedic novel—how to make a medium famous
for hyper-inclusivity into a drama of exclusion that turns inwardly drawn
minds outward, toward the stranger across the table.
In defining the maximalist novel, Ercolino writes of how it shares in

the “additive nature of the epic” and produces a “poetics of inclusion”
and “unlimited extendibility.”53 But Wallace in The Pale King and else-
where was adding so much material because he wished to teach readers
to exclude some of it—or, as Letzler puts it, to “modulate their attention
to navigate between [useless information] and valuable text.”54 Let me
turn back to Nørretranders to show just how crucial his precise concepts
were as Wallace incorporated these sorting methods into The Pale King,
infusing the book with both didactic lessons and more performative
learning by the reader. In his opening chapter, Nørretranders illustrates
his claims about discarding information rather than accumulating it:
For example, you are standing at the checkout at a supermarket. Your pur-
chases are being totaled. Each item in your basket has a price. The cashier
enters each price, adds them, and arrives at a sum—a total price of, say,
$27.80. This amount is the result of a calculation involving the addition of
a lot of numbers.
What contains the most information, the sum or the calculation itself? The
sum is one number ($27.80), while the calculation was a collection of sev-
eral numbers—twenty-three different prices, say. We might feel that on the
face of it there must be more information in the result, because when we
did sums at school our teacher instructed us to come up with the right
answer.
But in fact there is far less information in the result than in the problem.
After all, there are lots of different combinations of goods that can lead to
the same total price. But that does not mean you can guess what is in each
basket if you know only the price.
The cashier and the register discard information as they calculate the
total. . . .
The total price is what matters, even though it contains very little
information—or more accurately, the fact that it contains very little infor-
mation is what matters. It contains precisely the information that is rel-
evant in the context.
Calculation is a method of getting rid of information in which you are not

interested. You throw away what is not relevant.55
Readers of The Pale King will recognize immediately here the clear
source for the scene of training examiners in §27.56 The similarities
292 J. Severs
between Nørretranders’s lines and the trainer’s speech are so great that
perhaps Wallace, in revising the scene for publication, might have done
more to change the material he borrowed. A reader of The Pale King
does well to always be comparing examiners’ information-processing
to her own, and indeed, the trainer in §27 instills a method of selective
attention useful in navigating the novel’s dense scenes of introspection
and observation—discard what is not relevant, and “[g]et over the idea
that your function here is to collect and process as much information as
possible.”57
But who determines the standard of relevance in a novel where per-
haps the most engaging narrator is nicknamed Chris “Irrelevant” Fogle
for his longwindedness? How does a reader, line to line, “get over”
the instinctual idea of himself as a collector of details about this fic-
tional world? And isn’t Wallace himself, as he winnows 5000 pages by
90%, always the one who has determined in advance every detail, laid
every item on the supermarket conveyor belt? Letzler suggests that vary-
ing levels of “skimming” through “junk” text are the right way to read
Infinite Jest,58 and in The Pale King the David Wallace narrator does in
a footnote say “feel free to skip or skim the following if you wish” as
he explains the oddities of the book’s copyright and legal status.59 But
does an engaged reader really take such advice at face value? I want to
demonstrate here that Wallace in The Pale King, with exformation in
mind, reconfigures the encyclopedic novel’s relationship to information
by showing that even the briefest moments and most mundane interac-
tions are bursting with unspoken psychic content—are occasions for an
encyclopedia of data, all of which indeed needs to be read. Attuned to
that potential mental feast, who could ever actually be bored, or centered
on himself? Wallace’s scenes also place questions of encyclopedism in the
temporally dynamic context of second after fleeting second that any con-
scious observer finds himself in—far from the model of static information
on a dusty shelf or in a database that undergirds the basic analogy of
novels to encyclopedias.
Wallace was drawn to, as LeClair suggests, portrayals of prodigies and
the prodigious—tackling infinity as a topic led him naturally to characters
with a seemingly bottomless capacity for incorporating data. In Infinite
Jest the prodigious mind belongs to Hal Incandenza, who “can . . . recite
great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will”60 and has fellow players
ask him to “[d]o a dictionary-page” as they unwind after practice.61 Such
a character is an analogue for the writer himself attempting an ambitious
novel, yet the isolating and useless nature of much of Hal’s word knowl-
edge suggests that fictional prodigies for Wallace were not god-like fig-
ures but occasions for exploring wrongheaded and often anti-social
paths. Mental capacities beyond belief were on Wallace’s mind once
again in planning out The Pale King, where melancholy and Sisyphus-
like drudgery shadow the seemingly amazing minds and the stories of
how they got that way: Wallace’s notes suggest that “gifted examin-
ers” are being brought to Peoria, possibly to compete with a computer
system, and that Fogle might know (but has forgotten?) a “formula of
numbers that permits total concentration.”62 Just as he had associated
prodigious mental talents with sadness in Infinite Jest, Wallace had plans
to reveal that “some of the very best Examiners—most attentive, most
thorough—are those with some kind of trauma or abandonment in
their past.”63
In a novel attempting on so many levels to supersede even traditional
realist narrative with the “totally real” and “true-to-life,” Wallace was
using untapped super-powers not in the service of an X-Men remake
(DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star is a more likely model) but to illuminate mortal
limitations, and the true prodigy of The Pale King is one whose extraor-
dinary mental capacities are intertwined with the entropic forces of mess
and destruction that are ubiquitous in the novel: Claude Sylvanshine, a
“fact psychic” or “data mystic.”64 This character, possibly charged with
investigating the gifted examiners to aid the systems camp’s case that
computers are always superior, shows that The Pale King was in part
about wresting prodigious attention from the US mythology of work
efficiency and placing it in the realm of affect and empathy, territory in
which most encyclopedic novels (before Wallace) have been thought not
to excel. A more distant literary inheritance, modernist stream of con-
sciousness, while similar at times in texture to the Wallace style, never
had the emphasis on the vacillating state of consciousness he found
definitive of technologized, twenty-first-century life: swings between
states of overloaded stimulus and those of boredom, blankness, and
numbness.
The nature and mechanism of Sylvanshine’s powers are deeply
ambiguous in The Pale King as Pietsch assembles it from Wallace’s dis-
continuous, incomplete scenes. Thus let me first summarize two of
the three major sections in which Sylvanshine’s special abilities are
either displayed or explained. In the plane ride to Peoria presented as
§2, Sylvanshine’s mind is overwhelmed with both fear of flying and his
294 J. Severs
study for an upcoming accounting exam. Non-sequitur exam mate-

rial (“The three major codifications of US tax law being of course ’16,
’39, and ’54”),65 ambient details about the flight, reminiscences, and
random trivia (“Yaw was way in a mirror, it occurred [to Sylvanshine]
for no reason”)66 all come at the reader without pattern or organiza-
tion, in often staccato sentence fragments. In a later section (§15) we
learn that Sylvanshine suffers (or benefits) from a condition called “RFI
(= Random-Fact Intuition)” that causes “ephemeral, useless, undra-
matic, distracting” facts to erupt in the minds of those who have it:
“The middle name of the childhood friend of a stranger they pass in a
hallway. The fact that someone they sit near in a movie was once six-
teen cars behind them on I-5 near McKittrick CA on a warm, rainy
October day in 1971. . . . What Cointreau tasted like to someone with
a mild head cold on the esplanade of Vienna’s state opera house on 2
October 1874.”67 “Perhaps one in every four thousand such facts is rel-
evant or helpful,” Wallace writes.68 Hal’s eidetic memory in Infinite Jest
(actually he “tested out at Whatever’s Beyond Eidetic on the Mnemonic
Verbal Inventory”) had allowed him to control the retrieval of data.69
But now, with Sylvanshine’s one-in-four-thousand relevance, Wallace
had contrived a capacity for data that paralleled the kind of overwhelm-
ing ratio of conscious to unconscious information that Wilson and
Nørretranders described. Was RFI at work in Sylvanshine’s stuffed mind
in the §2 plane ride, or would Wallace have gone back and edited that
section? It would appear the facts are not random enough there; all can
be tied to his experience somehow. But perhaps some conditions apply
to Sylvanshine’s super-power that would have deepened the novel’s mys-
tery, and perhaps Wallace would have been strategic about ordering his
psychic’s displays and an explanation of his ability. We can see too that
such questions lead us anyway toward Wallace’s real thematic bounty, as
inspired by Nørretranders: as author communicates with reader via char-
acter, what are the standards of relevance and association that distinguish
exformation from information? Who—or what—is doing the (collective?)
thinking that makes narrative and description of a recognizable scene
work? Leopold Bloom’s mind may wander toward random associations
throughout Ulysses, but Wallace was seeking a new kind of stream of con-
sciousness, one that could evoke the tidal wave of external stimuli that
had inundated the human mental stream in postmodernity.
Postmodern encyclopedists such as Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis have
been repeatedly accused of being cold and without affect, so intent on
packing in facts that they neglect traditional novelistic tasks of building

plausible characters and moving the reader. In his infamous critique of
what he calls “hysterical realism,” for instance, James Wood includes
the Wallace of Infinite Jest, Pynchon, DeLillo, Zadie Smith, and Salman
Rushdie among those writers who, in attempting the “big, ambitious
novel,” offer brainy, highly networked books that “continually flourish
their glamorous congestion” but become consequently “almost incom-
patible with tragedy or anguish.”70 Sylvanshine’s sections of the novel
could easily meet with the charge that they are merely flourishing verbal
congestion and oddball skills and coincidences (other targets of Wood)
at the expense of affective interests. But much depends here on how
Wallace, clearly still shaping Sylvanshine, would have deployed the fact
psychic’s ability: a Wallace note on §15 makes it seem as though it was
in fact a belated decision to use RFI (“It’s Sylvanshine who’s the fact
psychic”), and that change “would require rewriting the Sylvanshine
arrival sequence,” that is, the plane ride of §2.71 I would suggest that
with the idea of RFI Wallace was in essence enfolding within his novel-
in-progress a meta-portrayal of the encyclopedic or information novel
tradition, or perhaps the power of parataxis, paranoia, and catalog-style
in a writer such as Pynchon: some of the intruding facts “are connected,
but rarely in any way that yields what someone with true ESP would
call meaning.”72 Sylvanshine might have been set up to somehow move
beyond RFI or to see (or help us see) its truly empathic capacities, an
unexpected transformation of the encyclopedic tradition Wallace was
responding to.
It is in Sylvanshine’s second major appearance in the novel, the bus
ride to the exam center in §7, that we witness the kinds of affective ency-
clopedism that this character might have yielded. Late in §7 we first
hear that Sylvanshine “realized that he had very little emotional or ethi-
cal ‘read’ on” fellow passenger Gary Britton “or anyone [else] on the
bus but Bondurant, who was having some kind of wistful memory.”73
Before this explanation of point-of-view in the scene, though, we read an
elegiac passage of Bondurant’s memories that would not be out of place
in a multi-character novel of third-person omniscience. This Updikean
moment, without mentioning Sylvanshine’s presence, commingles a tale
of Bondurant’s failed attempt to have sex in a car with his prom date,
Cheryl Ann Higgs, and his “life’s greatest moment so far,” his game-
winning hit in a college baseball game. I will pick up in the middle of
one of Wallace’s many long, beautiful sentences:
296 J. Severs
[H]e’d hit [the ball] so hard he’ll feel it forever but can’t summon any-
where near that kind of recall of what Cheryl Ann Higgs felt like when he
slipped inside her on a blanket by the pond out back past the stand past
the edge of the pasture of the small dairy spread Mr. Higgs and one of his
uncountable brothers operated, though he does well remember what each
of them had been wearing and the smell of the pond’s new algae near the
runoff pipe whose gurgle was nearly brooklike, and the look on Cheryl
Ann Higgs’s face as her posture and supine position became acquiescent
and Bondurant had known he was home free as they say but had avoided
her eyes because the expression in Cheryl Ann’s eyes, which without ever
once again thinking about it Tom Bondurant has never forgotten, was one
of blank terminal sadness, not so much that of a pheasant in a dog’s jaws as
of a person who’s about to transfer something he knows in advance he can
never get sufficient return on.74
Is Sylvanshine getting a “read” on these memories? Do random-fact

intrusions sometimes take this lyrical form for him? The scene is ulti-
mately ambiguous on these questions, but in the passage’s dense, highly
plausible interweaving of remembering certain details and not remem-
bering others—Bondurant “can’t summon” the feeling of sex, “does
well remember” the clothing and the pond’s smell, and “has never for-
gotten” the look of sadness he seemingly would like to forget—a reader
recognizes the slips, slides, and shifts of minds far less chaotic than
Sylvanshine’s exam-addled or random-fact-riddled mind in §2 or §15.
Such a reader recognizes that human memory is itself, at every moment,
a kind of random fact intuition, even for the so-called “possessor” of the
memories; moreover, uncanny associations such as those between “home
free” and the baseball memory that collides with the memory of sex, or
between “return” and the tax context, bring up perhaps shameful con-
nections in the way memory often involuntarily does. Add to this com-
plexity the question of who in the text is the vehicle of the memories
we see: might Wallace have used the sharing of psychic material, perhaps
in further developments of Sylvanshine’s ability, not only to dramatize
exformation but also to re-vivify the process by which readers become
attached to characters’ intimate inner discourses in reading novels?
Wallace had placed enormous weight in Infinite Jest on the essen-
tial therapeutic equation offered by the oral mechanism of Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings: listen to the stories of others and see your plight
reflected, a process evoked by his advice to a friend, in my epigraph,
about noticing that his own specialness was shared by the guy raising two
kids sober (thanks to A.A.?) and rebuilding a Mustang. The new chal-
lenge for Wallace was to somehow extrapolate this therapeutic model
in telepathic form, whereby a connection could be wrought with the
stranger across the table, apparently without storytelling and conversa-
tion ever taking place—a group therapy carried out in total silence. Such
mysticism had appeared in Infinite Jest, in telepathic interactions between
hospitalized and mute Don Gately and the wraith, as an elliptical cli-
max to a talk-filled novel. Was Wallace’s new goal to explore even fur-
ther, and grant greater power to, the silent, isolated work of the reader,
alone with his big novel for hours? Or perhaps, just as paying taxes into
the Treasury represented a civic bond with countrymen one would never
meet, Wallace had the sense that an encyclopedic novel of US democracy
ought to explore the unspoken ways in which, as §1 says, “We are all of
us brothers.”75 Perhaps democracy for Wallace depended on exformation
on a massive scale—a common culture of mental associations. We cannot
know his precise intention, but, as I have argued here, Wallace’s under-
standing of just how little the conscious, speaking brain could capture
exerted a major influence on the ratios of material he put on his pages.
A narrative that captured everything (and more) was beyond any writ-
er’s capacity, Wallace knew. After all, this was a writer who dedicated an
early short story to Kurt Gödel, a tribute to the mathematician’s ground-
breaking theory that any logical system is necessarily incomplete.76
But Wallace seemed over his career possessed by the question: incom-
plete in what precise sense? He writes in “Good Old Neon,” published
in Oblivion, of “the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals
of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can
never show another soul”—another massive denominator that forms,
along with the numerator of the expressible, “the tiny fraction anyone
else ever sees.”77 Such lines seem to represent Wallace’s disowning of
the mission of fiction-writing or linguistic expression in general, because
why bother, his terms suggest, when the ratio of what could be stated
to what went unglimpsed in one’s identity was as overwhelmingly small
as the ratio between conscious and unconscious information? The later
Wallace seemed to be, little by little, working toward a peace with such
proportions, or a mystical relationship to these facts that expressed the
awe they deserved—and to be showing readers that they had to come to
such peace and awe too.
One of Wallace’s earliest attempts to render a fiction of slow time and
reality’s disappointments, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
298 J. Severs
Way,” updates the tropes of Barth’s famous essays on postmodern litera-

ture by describing the 1980s as “an age suspended between exhaustion
and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too
intense to bear.”78 As Wallace continued to analyze his culture over the
next two decades, I have argued here, his impulses swung in the direc-
tion of the too-ordinary-to-process, finding that it possessed its own spe-
cial intensity. Such work had an inherently ethical valence for Wallace,
since, as he forthrightly claimed in This Is Water, training selective
attention would allow one to mitigate solipsism, attune to others, and
experience even the quotidian environment of an annoyingly crowded
supermarket as “not only meaningful, but sacred.”79 The fellow with two
kids and the’73 Mustang—and a dozen or a hundred other unique indi-
viduals—is in the supermarket or coffee shop with you right now. While
he did not propose that people become more like Sylvanshine, we can
see the cascades of random detail about others in many scenes of his late
fiction as a kind of gateway to this greater sense of compassion, to the
imagining of others’ lives in all their quirks. Becoming a prodigy of inter-
personal stimulus was possible; every brain was big enough for the job.
In his notes on The Pale King he wrote of a similar state of
semi-rapture:
It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of

being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing bore-
dom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax
returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known
will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like
stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the
desert. Constant bliss in every atom.80
Such ecstatic opportunities for awareness had only become visible to the
writer because he had fixed his mind on the 11,000,000 bits of infor-
mation available on a “second-by-second” basis. No human mind could
ever attend to (that is, pay attention to) more than the smallest frac-
tion of those. And yet one aspiring to the fundamental mission of fic-
tion as Wallace saw it—writing “about what it is to be a fucking human
being”—would have to at least provoke a reader to consider deeply what
an awesome mass of stimulus was passing by her conscious awareness.81
This reader would humbly know that her consciousness—and her ency-
clopedia of each second—had been cut down to size.
Notes
1. Wallace, Pale King, vi.
2. “Author’s Final Book,” n.p.
3. Max, 257. Chap. 4 of David Hering’s David Foster Wallace contains the
most comprehensive overview to date of the composition of The Pale
King but appeared while this essay was already in press.
4. Max, 289.
5. Ibid., 294.
6. Wallace, Pale King, 548.
7. Burn, Conversations, 60.
8. Wilson, 24. The first scholar to note Wallace’s study and use of this par-
ticular fact from Wilson’s book was Stephen J. Burn, who demonstrates
that Wallace’s IRS is meant to resemble the unconscious filtering mecha-
nism that allows brains to operate without being overwhelmed (Burn, “A
Paradigm,” 161).
10. Mendelson, 1270, 1271. I should note that Infinite Jest would not qualify
as an encyclopedic novel under the limiting (and dated) terms of nation-
hood Mendelson deploys, in which “[e]ach major national culture in the
west, as it becomes aware of itself as a separate entity, produces an ency-
clopedic author, one whose work attends to the whole social and linguis-
tic range of his nation” (1268; emphasis in original). But these are not
the terms of Mendelson that subsequent critics of encyclopedism have
taken up.
11. Max, 239, 242.
12. Karmodi, n.p.
13. Miller et al., n.p.
14. Burn, “A Paradigm,” 373, 386.
15. Max, 323n15.
16. Burn, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, 21.
17. Letzler, 127.
18. See LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction.”
19. Letzler, 135.
20. See Cioffi. For a reading of Infinite Jest based in a math expert’s under-
standing of infinity, see Natalini.
21. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 190.
22. Ibid., 32–33.
23. Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing, 23.
24. Ibid., 22, 32.
25. Ibid., 39.
26. DeLillo, 189.
300 J. Severs

28. Ibid., 876.
29. Wallace, This Is Water, 40, 36.
31. Ibid., 837.
33. Ibid., 12–25.
34. Ibid., 82.
36. Max (257, 323n16) compares the porn plot briefly to the Infinite Jest film
and also notes that the material probably dated to a novel about pornog-
raphy that Wallace attempted and abandoned in the late 1980s. All these
claims further support the idea that Wallace had moved on to new aspects
of attention in The Pale King.
38. Burn mentions in passing that Nørretranders’s title is a basis for The Pale
King’s project in “A Paradigm of the Life of Consciousness” (166).
39. Nørretranders, 137.
40. The University of Texas online catalog for Wallace’s copy of The User
Illusion has a note: “Advance Uncorrected Proofs” (see call number BF
311 N675 1998p DFW).
41. Wallace, “Laughing with Kafka,” 23; emphasis in original.
42. Nørretranders, 93.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 95.
47. Ibid., 33.
48. Wallace, Both Flesh and Not, 301.
49. Ibid., 303–304.
50. Wallace, Brief Interviews, 145.
51. Boswell, “The Constant Monologue,” 152.
52. Ibid., 151.
53. Ercolino, 73.
54. Letzler, 139.
55. Nørretranders, 30–31.
56. Wallace, Pale King, 342–347.
57. Ibid., 342.
58. Letzler, 132.
61. Ibid., 95.
62. Wallace, Pale King, 542–543.

63. Ibid., 545.
65. Ibid., 8.
66. Ibid., 16.
68. Ibid., 122.
70. Wood, 179–180.
72. Ibid., 122.
73. Ibid., 53.
74. Ibid., 52.
75. Ibid., 5.
76. Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair, 149.
77. Wallace, Oblivion, 179.
78. Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair, 254.
79. Wallace, This Is Water, 93.
81. Burn, Conversations, 27; emphasis in original.
Works Cited
Author’s Final Book a Tale of Boredom. National Public Radio. Apr. 2, 2011,
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/02/135022736/authors-final-book-
an-unfinished-tale-of-boredom.
Boswell, Marshall. ‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and
the Nightmare of Consciousness. In Boswell and Burn, 151–170.
———, ed. David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the
Novels. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Boswell, Marshall, and Stephen J. Burn, eds. A Companion to David Foster
Wallace Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Burn, Stephen J. “A Paradigm of the Life of Consciousness: The Pale King.” In
Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace, 149–168.
———, ed. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012.
———. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. 2nd ed. New
York: Continuum, 2012.
Cioffi, Frank Louis. “‘An Anguish Become Thing’: Narrative as Performance in
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Narrative 8, no. 2 (2000): 161–181.
302 J. Severs
de Bourcier, Simon. “Forms, Punchcards, and LETTERS: Self-Reference,

Recursion, and (Un)self-Consciousness in The Pale King’s Representation of
Bureaucracy.” English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 40–58.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s
Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666.” New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Hering, David. David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form. New York: Bloomsbury,
2016.
Karmodi, Ostap. “June 13th, 2011 [Interview with David Foster Wallace].”
Blog Entry. Livejournal.com. N. p., 13 June 2011. http://ostap.livejournal.
com/799511.html.
LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann,
and David Foster Wallace.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no.
1 (1996): 12–37.
Letzler, David. “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s
Endnotes.” In Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace, 127–148.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New
York: Penguin, 2012.
Mendelson, Edward. “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon.” MLN
91, no. 6 (December 1976): 1267–1275.
Miller, Laura, Michael Pietsch, Rick Moody, and Sandro Veronesi. “Everything and
More: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.” Panel discussion at the PEN
World Voices Festival, 268 Mulberry Street, New York, April 26, 2011. http://
www.pen.org/video/everything-and-more-pale-king-david-foster-wallace/.
Natalini, Roberto. “David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity.” In
Boswell and Burn, 43–58.
Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size.
Translated by Jonathan Sydenham. New York: Viking, 1998.
Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2012.
———. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
———. David Foster Wallace Papers. Harry Ransom Center, University of
Texas-Austin.
———. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
———. Infinite Jest. 10th Anniversary ed. New York: Back Bay, 2006.
———. “Laughing with Kafka.” Harper’s (July 1998): 23, 26–27.
———. Oblivion. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
———. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. 2011. New York: Back Bay, 2012.
———. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. New
York: Little, Brown, 1997.
———. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about
Living a Compassionate Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 2009.
Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Wouters, Conley. “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters
of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” In Boswell, ed., David
Foster Wallace, 169–186.
Index
A Anthropocene
Aarseth, Espen, 255 and aesthetics, 143
abstract art, 115 and agency, 222
Adam Smith in Beijing, 167 discourse of, 19, 21, 156, 161–163,
Adler, Gerald, 16 170
Adorno, Theodor, 243, 248 and displacement in place, 219
aesthetics, 4 as engineering problem, 37–39, 55
and the Anthropocene, 143 and epistemology, 143
of cognitive mapping, 267 as geological epoch, 144
of human stature, 166 in humanities scholarship, 38–39,
and scale, 18, 65, 74, 151, 213 146
of scientism, 163 as knowledge practice, 35, 38
and the sublime, 5 and knowledge production, 37
and systems theory, 169 periodization of, 166, 169
Ahmed, Sara, 212 and planetary scale, 203
Alaimo, Stacey, 162 and population bomb discourse,
alchemy, 41–42, 44 146
and medicine, 41 and scale, 39, 40
Paracelsian, 41, 43, 44 and space race discourse, 146
and scale, 44 and speculative totalization, 267
Alexander, Christopher, 14 and technoscience, 55
Alice in Wonderland, 65 and time, 266
Allport, Gordon, 125 and the universal, 55
Alphabet Man, The, 262 Anthropocene Working Group, 166
Althusser, Louis, 226 anthropogenic global warming
Anderson, Benedict, 231 (AGW). See global warming
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 305

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0
306 Index
Antonopoulou, Aikaterini, 21 and reconstruction, 190

Appadurai, Arjun, 9 and spectacle, 178
Apter, Emily, 231 Western, 183
Archigram, 14
architecture
and authenticity, 192 B
and Bigness, 185 Bachelard, Gaston, 6, 64
computer aided, 15–16 Badiou, Alain, 177–178, 180
and mimicry, 179, 189 on “passion for ignorance,” 178
postmodern, 15, 16 Balzac, Honoré de, 256
replication in, 179 Banham, Reyner, 14
and reproduction, 21, 181 Barad, Karen, 219
and scale, 13, 181 Baran, Paul, 273
traditional Chinese, 183 Barth, John, 283, 294, 298
Arendt, Hannah, 21, 64, 68, 79 Barthes, Roland, 164–165
on expression/description Baudrillard, Jean, 180
distinction, 77 Bayley, Stephen, 189
on human condition, 165 Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, 85
The Human Condition, 147 Bergson, Henri, 98
on human hubris, 161 Berlin City Palace, 21
human lifeworld of, 81 architectural history of, 190
operation/description distinction as microcosm, 192
of, 87 and place, 195
on phenomenology of scale, 74–78 reconstruction of, 192, 193
on space exploration, 143, 147–150, Bernardi, David Leonard, 273
162 Bernheimer, Charles, 239
on stature of man, 163, 164 Bigger Picture, The, 73
Aristotelianism Big K.R.I.T., 73
and Galileo, 1 bigness, 15, 25, 180
Armstrong, Howard, 109, 133 and literary maximalism, 17
Arnold, Frank, 111 Bigness (Rem Koolhaas), 179, 195
Arnold, Jack, 150 and erasure, 185–186
Arrighi, Giovanni, 167 interiority of, 186
Asimov, Isaac, 145 Birth of a Nation, The, 113
Aubry, Timothy, 285 blackface
authenticity and the ape costume, 126
and architecture, 192 in The Jazz Singer, 125
Eastern, 183 Blanchot, Maurice, 269
mythologizing of, 181 Bloch, Ernst
and place, 195 on deorganization, 80
and postcolonial studies, 238 on technologies of deorganization,
and the real, 177, 178 70
Index 307
Blonde Venus, 126 and speculative criticism, 260

Boeke, Kees, 19, 40, 56 as system, 262–265, 268
Cosmic View; The Universe in 40 and technology, 271
Jumps, 50–55 Torah Ball, 253, 256, 266, 272
and individualism, 51 and the total book, 271
and subjectivity, 51. See also Cosmic as transcendental, 271
View; The Universe in 40 Jumps; unreadability of, 254, 259, 261,
Powers of Ten 262, 268, 272, 275
Bohr, Niels, 68, 75, 77 as unwritable, 256
Bolaño, Roberto, 242, 285 working paper of, 256, 259, 260,
Bonaventure Hotel, 194 262, 270, 272–274. See also
Book of Lazarus, The, 262 Grossman, Richard
Book to Come, The, 269 Brenner, Neil, 226, 246
Borges, Jorge Luis, 253 Brilmeyer, Pearl S., 85
Bosker, Bianca, 181, 183–185, 197 Broderick, Damien, 255, 273
Boswell, Marshall, 290 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 273
Boulding, Kenneth, 154, 166, 169 Brooks, Peter, 248
Boy and His Atom, A, 69 Brouillette, Sarah, 230, 235, 240
Bragdon, Claude, 110, 113, 126, 136 Brown, Denise Scott, 180
on scale in film, 127 Brown, Harrison, 21
Braidotti, Rosi, 7 on space exploration, 143
Brand, Stewart, 166 Brown, Nicholas, 248
Brannon, Monica, 73 Brown, Robert, 85
Brathwaite, Kamau, 210 Brownian motion, 84–86
Breeze Avenue, 23, 254–255 Bryan, William Jennings, 121
“Annual Cloud Narrative,” Burke, Edmund, 5, 6
265–268 Burn, Stephen J., 284
and cognitive mapping, 268 Burnet, Thomas, 4
collective reading of, 259
commodification of, 270
as data program, 262 C
and death of speech, 261 Cadbury, Beatrice, 51
distant reading of, 274 Cadman, Samuel Parkes, 110, 115
and the end of the book, 261 Cantor, Georg, 285
and global capitalism, 270 Cantril, Hadley, 125
as hyperarchival, 271 capitalism, 38, 167, 268
and hyperarchivalism, 262, 263, and aesthetics, 226
268, 270 and democracy, 168
and hyperobjects, 268 end of, 276
limits on reading, 259 global, 12, 25, 226, 241, 270
as megatext, 255, 258 and hyperarchival accumulation, 269
as posthuman text, 271 as hyperobject, 264
308 Index
and interiority, 194 and Bigness, 185

and popular culture, 248 and the real, 180
and space, 226 reproduction of, 180
and technology, 271 Clark, Timothy, 8, 17, 212, 213
and totalization, 240 on climate change, 7
transcendental, 115, 122 on human scale, 66, 70
carrying capacity, 157, 158, 161 on phenomenology, 84
cartography and scale, 218
history of, 96 Clarke, Michael Tavel, 170
in The Hungry Tide, 208 climate change
and nation-states, 96 discourse of, 21, 55, 162, 164, 165
and optics, 94 and the humanities, 163
Western, 210 and humanity, 144
and zoom effect, 94 as hyperobject, 268
Carver, Raymond, 212 and politics, 167
Casanova, Pascale, 22, 230–232, 234, role of humans in, 164, 165
247 and scale, 143, 165
on national literatures, 235 and zoom effect, 96. See also global
Cervantes, Miguel de, 254, 283 warming
CGI (computer-generated imagery), Club of Rome, 155
16 cognitive mapping, 226, 241
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 8, 10, 21, 39, aesthetics of, 226, 267
162 and scale, 226
on the Anthropocene, 38, 147, 168 Colebrook, Claire, 38, 39
on climate change, 149, 164 colonialism, 210
on global warming, 147, 149, 167 and narrative, 228
on Hannah Arendt, 147, 162 and the novel, 227, 228
on stature of man, 164 and scale, 36
Chamayou, Grégoire, 6 and world literature, 230
Cheah, Pheng, 240 comic books, 257
Cheney, Sheldon, 115 commodification, 248
China and otherness, 236–237
gated communities in, 181 common sense
and globalization, 186 and scale, 93
middle class of, 184 comparative literature, 248
replication in, 181–186 as anti-nationalist, 228, 229, 239,
Chipperfield, David, 187 247
Chow, Rey, 237, 248 and cultural studies, 248
on theory in postcolonial studies, and distant reading, 228
237 as ethical project, 238
Cioffi, Frank, 285 and globalization, 237
cities and postcolonial studies, 238
Index 309
theoretical turn of, 238. See also and architectural reproduction,

literary studies; literature; world 187
literature and end of history, 193
Conger, George Perrigo, 41 and interiority, 194
connectivity, 98–100, 101 and place, 195
and hierarchy, 20 reconstruction of, 179, 186–189
Contact, 73 relocation of, 187
Cooper, Merian, 122, 127, 129, 131 reproductions of, 189
Coover, Robert, 283 as symbol of capitalism, 192
Copernicus as symbol of crystallization, 193
cosmology of, 1 Cubitt, Sean, 7
corporations Culler, Jonathan, 248
“corporate liberalism,” 138, 139 cultural studies, 4
identity of, 107 and comparative literature, 248
invisibility of, 119–120 Cybertext, 255
and invisible labor, 122
and public relations, 108
self-representation of, 107 D
Cosgrove, Denis, 36 Damrosch, David, 22, 229–230, 233,
Cosmic Eye, 73 239, 247–249
Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 on commodification of otherness,
Jumps, 50–55, 71, 73, 168 236
atomic imagery in, 68 on refraction, 229, 231, 235
film adaptations of, 55, 58 Danielewski, Mark Z., 258
scale in, 52–54. See also Boeke, Kees; Dante, 254, 283
Powers of Ten Darger, Henry, 273
Cosmic Voyage, 73 Day, Gail, 241
Cosmic Zoom, 58, 72, 73, 168 Debating World Literature, 231
cosmopolitanism de Bourcier, Simone, 288
and modernism, 243 de Forest, Lee, 109, 113
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), 68, De Landa, Manuel, 7
73 Deleuze, Gilles, 49
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014), DeLillo, Don, 262, 285, 295
68 Ratner’s Star, 293
Costa, Lúcio, 14 White Noise, 286
Coughlin, Charles, Fr., 121 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 210
cruft, 270, 285 DeMille, Cecil B., 120
and Breeze Avenue, 270 Democritus, 68
Crutzen, Paul, 37–38, 155 Dennis, John, 4
and technoscience, 40 deorganization, 70–71, 76
Crying of Lot 49, The, 67 and phenomenology, 79
Crystal Palace, 21 and scale domains, 79
310 Index
and scale variance, 80 ecomimesis, 215

Derrida, Jacques, 64, 83 Ehrlich, Paul, 21, 152, 156
on death of the novel, 269 Einstein, Albert, 75
on end of the book, 261 Elden, Stuart, 220
exhaustion of language, 260 Eliasson, Olafur, 20, 93, 97, 101
Grammatology, Of, 80, 260, 269 and disorientation, 96
on logocentrism, 261 Ellis, Bret Easton, 290
on phenomenology, 80–81, 84 Ellul, Jacques, 55
theories of writing, 260 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 135
on the trace, 84 Emperor Jones, 137
Dimock, Wai Chee, 162 Empire, 265
Di Palma, Vittoria, 62, 68 Empire State Building, 117, 120, 138
Divine Comedy, 254 in King Kong, 131, 132
Don Quijote, 254 Encyclopedia Britannica, 21, 143
Dorrian, Mark, 78, 79 engineering
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 192 and the Anthropocene, 37–39, 55
Duino Elegies, 211 large-scale projects, 10, 181
Dune, 73 and scale, 4, 16, 65, 66
dystopian fiction, 249 English, James, 230
environment
and scale, 7
E environmental criticism
Eames, Charles, 58, 61, 67, 71, 77, 97 and scale, 17
holism of, 87. See also Powers of Ten environmentalism
Eames, Ray, 58, 61, 67, 71, 77, 97 and scale, 19, 212
holism of, 87. See also Powers of Ten epistemology
earth alter/native, 210
and humanity, 148, 162 and the Anthropocene, 143
as biological system, 145 of the bomb, 169
ecology of, 161 and scale, 76, 79, 154
Eco, Umberto, 180, 263 Ercolino, Stefano, 17–18
eco-criticism on the maximalist novel, 17, 18, 22,
and scale, 212 23, 242, 285, 291
ecology Essay on the Principle of Population,
and difference, 45 An, 157
of Earth, 161 eugenics
and economics, 157, 158, 167 and American imperialism, 153
and modernity, 87 and population discourse, 152
and mythology, 210 and race, 169
and scale, 37–38, 40, 54 European Union, 193
scale domains in, 65 Everything and More: A Compact
and social formation, 145 History of Infinity, 285
of Sundarbans, 210 exformation, 289
Index 311
as discarded information, 289 and “spaceship earth,” 154. See also

definition of, 289 “spaceship earth”
and the encyclopedic novel, 290
and encyclopedism, 282
in Wallace, 290, 292, 297. See also G
Pale King, The; Wallace, David Gaddis, William, 261, 262, 294
Foster Gaia theory, 36
Galileo
experimental methodology of, 1, 25
F and scale, 2–4, 16
Faerie Queene, The, 254 Galloway, Alexander R., 222, 267
Familiar, The, 258 on poetics of control, 267
Fantastic Little Girl, The, 159 geography
Fantastic Voyage and nation, 225
scale in, 145 and scale, 162, 218, 226
Faust, 254 and verticality, 220. See also human
feminist science studies, 76 geography
feminist theory, 39 geology
ecofeminism, 56 and mythology, 207
Ferriss, Hugh, 106 and scale, 207, 208
Fest, Bradley, J., 23 as story, 207
film Ghosh, Amitav, 22, 203, 220, 222. See
and scale, 16 also Hungry Tide, The
scale in, 127 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 218, 222
and the sublime, 286 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 12
Fleischer, Richard, 145 Glissant, Édouard, 216
Flusser, Vilem, 79 globalization
Fore, Devin, 66, 67, 70 and China, 186
formalism, 147 and the environment, 7
and the Anthropocene, 146 and global warming, 8–10, 167
mathematical, 75, 147, 151, 161 and inclusivity, 194
the new formalism, 146 as neoimperialism, 238
and stature of man, 165 and place, 195
and world literature, 227 and “planetariety,” 238
Foucault, Michel, 120 and replication, 184
Franzen, Jonathan, 282 and scale, 7, 12–13
Frederick I, 190 and undemocratic institutions, 9
Freeman, Morgan, 73 global warming, 19, 147
Freud, Sigmund, 160 and globalization, 8–10, 167
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 14, 62 and global nuclear war, 149
holism of, 87 as hyperobject, 264. See also climate
Operating Manual for Spaceship change
Earth, 155 Gödel, Kurt, 297
312 Index
Goethe Hardt, Michael, 10, 16

Johann Wolfgang von, 254 Harman, Graham, 7, 162
Goldberger, Paul, 137 Harrison, Henry, 158
Google, 8 Harry Potter book series, 258
remake of Powers of Ten, 73 Haussmann, Baron, 14
Google Earth Haver, Ronald, 119
use of zoom, 63, 64, 73–74, 94, Hayles, N. Katherine, 273
218 Hayot, Eric, 162
Google Maps, 20, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 212, 263
use of zoom, 73–74 Heise, Ursula, 162, 212, 213
Gould, Stephen Jay, 70 Helmreich, Stefan, 210
Gravity’s Rainbow, 242, 254, 261, Herbert, Frank, 73
285 Hering, David, 282, 299
as systems novel, 262 Herod, Andrew, 12
Great Ideas Today, The, 21, 143, 157 Higashi, Sumiko, 120
Greenspan, Elizabeth, 180 Hobbes, Thomas, 67
Greif, Mark, 156 and rhetoric of size, 9–10
and the death of the novel, 261 Hodder, Ian, 162
Greimassian rectangle, 232 Homer, 254
Griffith, D.W., 113, 136 Hooke, Robert, 62, 81
Grossman, Richard, 23 Horton, Zach, 19, 65
The Alphabet Man, 259 Howard, Ebenezer, 14
The Animals, 259 Howitt, Richard, 226
The Book of Lazarus, 259 Huggan, Graham, 230, 235, 236, 247
Boswell Speaks, 259 on commodification of otherness,
commodification of Breeze Avenue, 236
270 human body
on end of the book, 261 as microcosm, 42–44, 55
and postmodern literature, 261 and physics, 16
Tycoon Boy, 259, 270–271. See also and scale, 46, 70, 78, 196
Breeze Avenue stature of, 166
Groys, Boris, 180 in war rhetoric, 6
Guattari, Felix, 49, 71 Human Comedy, The, 256
Gulliver’s Travels, 65 human geography, 27, 97
Gunn, Giles, 239 and scale, 11–13. See also geography
humanism
and formalism, 147
H and scientism, 146
Hadid, Zaha, 187 humanities
Haldane, J.B.S., 4 climate change discourse in, 147,
Haraway, Donna, 39, 63, 79, 162 163, 165
on situated knowledge, 76 environmental, 38
Harding, Sandra, 79 and the human, 38–39
Index 313
and scale, 162 Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem

and scientism, 163 of the World: System, Scale,
humanity Culture, 17
and scale, 44, 45, 79, 156 imperialism
Hungry Tide, The, 22, 205–212, 215, and eugenics, 153
217–219 and narrative voice, 228
exposition in, 205 and realism, 240
falling water in, 204–206, 211, 212 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (film),
historical loss in, 205 149, 150, 159–161, 169
home in, 220 and Cold War, 160
mapping in, 208 discourse of scale in, 159
myth in, 207, 209, 220 Freudian readings of, 160, 170
navigation in, 204, 209 impotence in, 160
opacity in, 215 as parable of scientism, 163
orientation in, 204, 210, 214 scaling of man in, 158, 159
scale in, 204, 210, 211, 214, 216 unproduced sequel to, 159
textual opacity of, 218 Incredible Shrinking Woman, The, 158
tidal rhythms in, 205, 209, 211 Independent Group, 62
vertical aesthetic of, 204, 208 India
words in, 217 damming in, 218
Hurley, Jessica, 169 sea level rise in, 218
Huxley, Aldous, 21, 151 Infinite Jest, 242, 270, 282
on population explosion, 151, 152 as encyclopedic novel, 284–285,
on space exploration, 143 295, 299
Huyssen, Andreas, 22 endnotes of, 285
hyperobjects, 7, 257, 268 mental prodigies in, 294
and abstraction, 267 mysticism in, 297
in Breeze Avenue, 266 scale of, 285
incomprehensibility of, 264, 266 and skimming, 292
and megatexts, 272 television in, 286, 287
temporality of, 266–267 therapy in, 296
visibility of, 265. See also megatexts; visual media in, 285–287
novel, encyclopedic visual technologies in, 286. See also
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology Pale King, The; Wallace, David
after the End of the World, 264 Foster
hyperspace Infinity of Lists, The, 263
and the technological sublime, 267 Inner Life of a Cell, The, 65
International Commission on
Stratigraphy, 144
I internet
Iliad, 254 as hyperarchive, 269
IMF (International Monetary Fund), 9 as hyperobject, 264
314 Index
as limitless, 257 as allegory, 106

and the real, 177 and blackness, 129
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The and capitalism, 120
(1978), 63, 72, 73 as confessional text, 107
Izenour, Steven, 180 and corporate populism, 133
fluctuating scale in, 127
and race, 126, 139
J The Son of Kong, 123–125, 130
Jacobs, Jane, 14 Kinkle, Jeff, 225, 241
James, Henry, 136 on realism, 240
on skyscrapers, 110 Kittler, Friedrich, 80
Jameson, Frederic, 194, 231–232, knowledge
240, 267 empirical, 45
on capitalism, 276 microcosmic, 45
on cognitive mapping, 226, 241 Koolhaas, Rem, 15, 21, 180
on realism, 240 on Bigness, 179, 185, 195
on the technological sublime, 23,
257
on utopian narrative, 234 L
Jazz Singer, The, 119 Lakoff, George, 211
blackface in, 125 Latour, Bruno, 7, 20, 162
Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 73 agency in, 164
Jodorowsky’s Dune (film), 73 on the human body, 196
Johnson, Mark, 211 Leach, Mark, 258
Jones, John Paul, III, 12 Leaves of Grass
Joyce, James, 254, 283 preface to, 50
J R, 261 LeClair, Tom, 18, 262, 285, 292
as systems novel, 262 Le Corbusier, 14
Jue, Melody, 22 Lefebvre, Henri
on space, 11
Letzler, David, 270, 285, 291, 292
K Levi-Strauss, Claude, 208
Kafka, Franz, 289 Lewis, C.S., 165
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 6, 8, 212 Limits of the Earth, The, 155
on the sublime, 5–7 Limits to Growth, The, 155–157
Kapp, Ernst, 70 population growth modelling in,
Kaufman, Philip, 63, 72, 73 157
Kennedy, John F., 75 literary studies
Kennedy, Joseph, 118 and close reading, 17
Keyhole software, 73. See also Google and globalism, 17
Earth and globalization, 17
King Kong, 21, 106–107, 120, theory in, 237. See also comparative
128–133, 136 literature; world literature
Index 315
literature Marienbad My Love, 258

ergodic, 255 Marin, Louis, 234, 241
and global capitalism, 22, 257, 270 Marston, Sallie, 12, 226
and globalization, 237 Martin, George R.R., 258
literary maximalism, 17–18 Marvel Cinematic Universe, 269
and nation, 225 Matheson, Richard, 149, 150, 158
and scale, 18, 22, 23, 225, 226 Max, D.T., 282
and space, 225. See also comparative Mayer, Louis, 123
literature; world literature McGurl, Mark, 20, 21, 162, 274
logocentrism, 261 McInerney, Jay, 290
Long, Huey, 121–122, 127, 132 McLuhan, Marshall, 70
anticorporate populism of, 134 medicine
and race, 138 as alchemy, 41
use of radio, 121 as astronomy, 44
Longinus, 4 megatexts, 23, 255–256
Long Twentieth Century, The, 167 and abstraction, 267
Lord of the Rings, 273 collective reading of, 259
Love, Heather, 163 comic books, 257
Lubin, Joan, 21 and the computer age, 273
Lucas, Peter, 73 defined, 256
Lucretius, 67, 69 and digital technology, 256
On the Nature of Things, 78 and dominant cultural narratives,
Lukács, Georg, 240 269
on the epic and the novel, 257, 274 as ergodic literature, 255
on realism, 244 as finite, 257, 266
Lustig, R. Jeffrey, 138 and hyperobjects, 268, 272
Lutz, Christopher, 69, 85 as hyperobjects, 275
Lynch, Kevin, 14 limits of, 264
and neoliberalism, 270
as posthuman, 272
M in SF studies, 255, 273
Maas, Oedipa, 262 soap operas, 257
MacInnis, Marion, 110 and speculative criticism, 258
Make Room! Make Room!, 158 and speculative totalization, 267
Malthus, Thomas, 21, 144, 156 as systems, 264
and carrying capacity, 157 temporal scales of, 268
Essay on the Principle of Population, transmedia megatexts, 258
157 as twenty-first-century form, 257,
population growth model of, 157 258
Mandelbrot, Benoit, 63 unreadability of, 255. See also hyper-
Mandiberg, Michael, 257, 274 objects; novel, encyclopedic
316 Index
Mellaissoux, Quentin, 7 Morton, Timothy, 7, 23, 215, 257,

Mendelson, Edward, 283, 299 264
Men in Black, 73 on the Anthropocene, 38
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 64, 79 on hyperobjects, 266, 275
on epistemology, 83 Moses, Robert, 14
on epistemology and scale, 76 Muller, Herbert
human lifeworld of, 81 on space exploration, 143
on ontology of scale, 77, 78 Muller, Thomas, 21
operation/description distinction Mumford, Lewis, 14
of, 87 Museum of Innocence, 245
on phenomenology of scale, 75, Musk, Elon, 155
77–78 mythology
on physics, 76 and ecology, 210
Metabolist group, 14 and scale, 207–208
microcosm, 41
and the Anthropocene, 55
human body as, 43–45, 55 N
as mimetic, 41 NAFTA, 12
and Paracelsus, 41–45 Narmada Diary, The, 218
Miyoshi, Masao, 237, 238 narrative
Modern Epic, 17 and colonialism, 228
Modernism, 115 in maximalist fiction, 18
modernity and place, 215
and myth, 186 and scale, 207–208, 226
narratives of, 62 nation
and replication, 186 and historical consciousness, 237
and scale, 10 Negri, Antonio, 10, 16
and upscaling, 9–11 Neimanis, Astrida, 221
Moore, Hugh, 21, 152, 156 Neimeyer, Oscar, 14
More, Thomas, 241 Ngai, Sianne, 7
Moretti, Franco, 17–18, 22, 231–233, 1984, 249
239 Nieland, Justus, 62, 63, 77, 87
on distant reading, 228, 230 Nir, Oded, 22
Modern Epic, 17, 249 Nixon, Rob, 10, 14, 26, 219
on the modern epic, 18, 254 on neoliberal globalization, 10
on national literatures, 235 Ni Zhaoxing, 187
on the novel, 227–228 No Man’s Sky, 257, 274
on peripheral novels, 230, 236 Nørretranders, Tor, 288–289,
on traditional epic, 18 291–292, 294
on world literature, 228–231 novel
Morrison, Philip, 58, 61, 67, 70 and global capitalism, 257
narration of, 69, 79, 85 hybridization of, 228, 233
Index 317
and local consciousness, 227 excess information in, 285

maximalist, 17–18 and exclusion, 291
and the nation state, 243 exformation in, 292
and planetary scale, 227 information processing in, 288
realist, 257 mental prodigies in, 292–294
and representation of the world, 243 selective attention in, 291
novel, encyclopedic, 17, 23, 242, and skimming, 292
261–262, 282–284 time in, 282
characteristics of, 283 visual technology in, 287–288. See
and exformation, 282, 290 also Infinite Jest; Wallace, David
and information, 292 Foster
knowledge in, 283. See also Pamuk, Orhan, 245
megatexts Paracelsus, 19, 40, 57
and alchemy, 41–44
on the body, 43
O on the microcosm, 41–45
O’Brien, Susie, 237 Parikka, Jussi, 7, 39, 67
O’Brien, Willis, 127 pathetic fallacy, 221
On Longing, 166 Pavich, Frank, 73
On the Nature of Things, 67, 78 Pearl, Raymond, 157
On the Sublime (Longinus), 4 perception
opacity and scale, 4
and identity politics, 217 Peters, John Durham, 7
and language, 217 Peters, Kimberly, 208
of the Other, 205, 216 phenomenology
and scale, 217–219 and agency, 164
Orientalism, 237 of the atom, 68–69
orientation Derridean, 80–81
in The Hungry Tide, 204 object-oriented philosophy, 82
and scale, 205 of scale, 6, 74, 76–78, 205
and stories, 205 of scale domains, 67, 79
and verticality, 212 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
Orwell, George, 249 of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Osborn, Fairfield, 153–156 Beautiful, A (Burke), 5
Our Plundered Planet, 153–154 physics, 64, 68, 76
and the human body, 16
and scale, 3, 4
P and scale domains, 66
Palast der Republik, 190 Pietsch, Michael, 281, 284, 287
Pale King, The, 281–282, 284 Planck, Max, 68, 76
boredom in, 287–288 Plumwood, Val, 56
computers in, 288 Poe, Marshall T., 254
as encyclopedic, 295 population bomb, 21, 166
318 Index
and the Cold War, 152 phenomenology of, 78, 84

discourse of, 146, 153, 169 as post-Einsteinian, 70
and human stature, 147 remakes of, 73
and the space age, 151 scale domains in, 70, 81, 83, 87
Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich book), scale variance in, 63
152 space-time in, 98
Population Bomb, The (Moore pam- as time-travel text, 70
phlet), 152 traces in, 84–87
population explosion traditional ontology in, 78
and capitalism, 152 use of voiceover in, 79
discourse of, 144, 153, 158 use of zoom in, 63, 65, 67, 70, 78,
and economics, 168 81. See also Cosmic View: The
and epistemology, 154 Universe in 40 Jumps
modelling of, 161, 169 Powers Project, The, 73
postcolonial studies, 237 Prendergast, Christopher, 231, 235
and comparative literature, 238 Pupin, Michael, 109
and Orientalism, 237 Purdy, Jedediah, 222
theoretical turn in, 237 Pynchon, Thomas, 67, 105, 242, 254,
posthumanism, 87 262, 283
and nuclear war, 149 as encyclopedic novelist, 283, 294,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic 295. See also Gravity’s Rainbow
of Late Capitalism, 194, 257, 267
postmodern literature, 246, 285
as cybernetic, 261 Q
and Grossman, 262 queer phenomenology
and hyperarchivalism, 263 and orientation, 212
and the novel, 261, 262
postmodernity, 262
and cognitive mapping, 267 R
and culture, 248 radio
encyclopedism of, 263 incorporation of, 108–110
and stream of consciousness, 294 invisibility of, 112–113
Powers, Richard, 262, 285 and populism, 136
Powers of Ten, 23, 58, 61–64, 73, and power, 111
97–98, 168 psychology of, 125
allusions in, 68 RCA (Radio Corporation of America),
and Brownian motion, 86 108, 119, 130, 131, 133
collage in, 63 film business of, 118
and Cosmic View, 71 realism, 240–241
and epistemic things, 83, 84, 86 on global scale, 243, 244
and epistemology, 79 and modernism, 240
influence on Keyhole, 73 reconstruction
Index 319
and erasure, 191. See also and scale, 219, 220

reproduction Saussy, Haun, 239, 240, 248
replication scalar collapse, 36–38, 40
of cities, 181, 184 and universal overview, 37
reproduction scale
architectural, 187 aesthetics of, 213
in China, 181 and cognitive mapping, 226
of cities, 180 and colonialism, 36
in Europe, 181 economics of, 10
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 64, 79 in engineering, 4, 16, 65
and Derridean phenomenology, 80 and environment, 7
on “epistemic things,” 81–83 and epistemology, 7
Riffaterre, Michael, 248 etymology of, 204
Rilke, Rainier Maria, 211, 212 in film, 16
RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), 108, in Galileo, 2–3
130, 132 and globalization, 7, 12–13
logo of, 108, 115, 131 and hierarchy, 216
Road to Survival, 153 and human imagination, 3
Robinson, Kim Stanley, 245 and literature, 16–18, 23
Rogin, Michael, 125, 127 and narrative, 208
Rohrmann, Andy, 73 and opacity, 219
Rosenberg, Jonathan, 73 and orientation, 205, 219
Rough Sketch of a Proposed Film Paracelsian, 45
Dealing with the Powers of Ten and and perception, 4
the Relative Size of Things in the phenomenology of, 75, 79–80, 205
Universe, A, 58, 72 in physics, 4
Rowling, J.K., 258 planetary, 217
Rushdie, Salman, 295 politics of, 10, 12–13
Ruskin, John, 221 and representation, 7
and resolution, 53, 54, 62
and saturation, 219, 220
S social construction of, 11
Sacred Theory of the Earth, The scale domains, 63–66
(Burnet), 4 human, 74, 79
Sagan, Carl, 68, 73 invisible, 69
Said, Edward, 237, 238 nonhuman, 19, 75, 78, 81
on theory in postcolonial studies, and phenomenology, 67, 79
237 phenomenology of, 79
Sarnoff, David, 108, 109, 119, 132 in Powers of Ten, 70, 87
Sassen, Saskia, 14 and scalism, 19, 79
saturation scale invariance, 63–65
media saturation, 23 scale variance, 63, 65, 77
320 Index
and deorganization, 70, 80 Sloterdijk, Peter

and smooth zoom, 64–67 on capitalism, 194
Scarry, Elaine on the Crystal Palace, 192
on war imagery, 6 on globalization, 194
Schlüter, Andreas, 190 Smith, Al, 138
Schoedsack, Ernest, 123 Smith, Neil, 226, 246
Schrader, Paul, 70 on jumping scale, 12
Schuldenfrei, Eric, 71, 78 on globalization and scale, 24
Schumacher, E.F., 26 on scale, 233
science fiction Smith, Zadie, 295
and scale, 160 soap operas, 257
scientism, 162 Song of Ice and Fire, A, 258
and formalism, 147, 149, 161 “Song of Myself,” 46–50
and humanism, 146 Sonnenfield, Barry, 73
Selznick, David O., 130, 131 Son of Kong, The, 123–125, 130
Severs, Jeffrey, 23 Sontag, Susan, 63
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 75 on science fiction films, 160
Shrinking Man, The (novel), 149–151, Soylent Green, 158
159, 161 space
Sidney, Sir Philip, 63 and connectivity, 98–100
Silleck, Bayley, 73 Euclidean, 113
simulacrascapes and literature, 225
Bigness in, 185 and nation, 225
in China, 181 and scale, 98
and cultural power, 183 and verticality, 208
and financial power, 183 and zoom effect, 93–94
and scale, 182 space race, 151, 166
and spectacle, 195 discourse of, 144, 146, 169
tourism in, 184 “spaceship earth,” 144, 154, 166
Siskind, Mariano, 242, 244 and climate change, 155
skyscrapers, 10, 20, 106, 108, and ecology, 145
110–111, 113 and economic stability, 152
aesthetics of, 113 and human stature, 147
as American form, 110, 125 and population explosion, 155
in China, 181 and scale, 145. See also
Chrysler Building, 117 Fuller, R. Buckminster
and corporate power, 117 Spenser, Edmund, 254
and crank philosophy, 113, 136 Spielberg, Steven, 73
Empire State Building, 117, 120 Spivak, Gayatri, 237, 239
and population density, 15 on marginal languages, 249
and power, 111 on the theoretical turn, 237
visibility of, 115 Star Trek
Woolworth Building, 110 as megatext, 273
Index 321
Star Wars, 269 in Infinite Jest, 286, 287

Star Wars Expanded Universe in The Pale King, 287
as megatext, 258 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 137
Steichen, Edward, 164 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 3
Steinberg, Philip, 208 Thorne, Christian, 243, 249
Stella, Franco, 190 on Austen, 243
Stengers, Isabelle, 85 and realism, 244
Stevenson, Adlai, 154 tidalectics, 210
Stewart, Susan, 6, 166 epistemology of, 210
Stiegler, Bernard, 80 vertical, 210
Stoermer, Eugene, 37 Tillich, Paul, 21
story on space exploration, 143
and discourse, 228 time
and environment, 204, 205 in Breeze Avenue, 265
as orientation technique, 205 and connectivity, 98–100
and scale, 212 Einsteinian, 113
subjectivity geologic, 210
collective, 51 oscillating ocean time, 210, 221
and scale, 51 and scale, 98
subjectivation, 71, 74 and zoom effect, 94–96
sublime, 4–7 Tolkien, J.R.R., 273
discourse of, 4 Toscano, Alberto, 225, 240, 241
technological, 23, 257, 262, 267 on realism, 240
Sullivan, Louis, 105, 113 transcendentalism, American, 110
Sundarbans, 203, 208 Tsing, Anna, 10, 16, 64
ecology of, 210 on upscaling, 10
opacity of, 203 Turner, Fred, 74
sustainability, 37 Two New Sciences, 1
Swyngedouw, Erik, 24 2001: A Space Odyssey, 72
systems theory, 18 2312 (novel), 245
Szasz, Eva, 58, 72 2666 (novel), 242, 285
Szeman, Imre, 237 Tyndall, John, 85
on theory in postcolonial studies, Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, 68, 73
237
U
T Ulysses, 254
technoscience, 37 Underworld, 285
post-WW II, 62, 78 urban planning
and subjectivity, 62 and bigness, 15, 17
television, 132, 134 and scale, 16
development of, 133 urban renewal, 14
322 Index
User Illusion, The, 288–289, 291–292 Oblivion, 284, 290, 297

Utopia, 241 reading, theory of, 289
utopian fiction and scale, 282
displacement of contradictions in, short works of, 283
241 Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do
and national space, 225 Again, A, 284
and space, 241 as systems novelist, 262
as totalizing, 249 on television, 286, 288
This Is Water, 298
time in, 297
V unfinished projects, 284. See also
van Leeuwen, Thomas A. P., 110, 135 Infinite Jest; Pale King, The
Venturi, Robert, 180 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 17, 228, 229
Verhulst, Pierre François, 157 War of the Worlds, The (1935 radio
videogames broadcast), 137
as megatext, 257 War of the Worlds, The (2005 film), 73
virtualization, 178 Ward, Barbara, 154
and America, 180 Warhol, Andy, 265
and the city, 180 Wark, McKenzie, 162
and scale, 179 Wegner, Phillip, 234, 241
Vogt, William, 153, 154, 156 Welles, Orson, 138
Vollmann, William T., 262, 285 Wells, H.G., 136
von Uexküll, Jacob, 66 use of zoom, 71
Western Electric, 119
Whissel, Kristen, 16
W White Noise, 286
Walkowitz, Rebecca, 247 White, E.B., 111
on comparison literature, 233 Whitman, Walt, 19, 40
Wallace, David Foster, 23, 242, 270, democratic vision of, 51
281, 295 difference in, 50
boredom in, 293 scale in, 46
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, serialized cosmic view of, 46, 49,
284, 290 50, 54
on computers, 288 “Song of Myself,” 46–50
on consciousness, 288 Whole Earth movement, 166
as encyclopedic novelist, 283, 285 Wiens, J.A., 65, 71
on exformation, 289, 290, 292, 297 Wikipedia, 257
Girl With Curious Hair, 284 Williams, R. John, 63
on human attention, 282 Williams, Raymond, 74
infinity in, 292 Wilson, Timothy D., 283, 288, 299
mental prodigies in, 292–293 Wittenberg, David, 70
and neuroscience, 283 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 290
Index 323
Wolfe, Cary, 80 World of Warcraft, 257, 264

Wood, James World Republic of Letters, 243
on hysterical realism, 295 world-systems theory, 17
Woods, Derek, 19, 20, 23 World Trade Center, 139
Woodward, Keith, 12 Wouters, Conley, 288
Woolf, Virginia, 63 Wright, Melissa, 12
World, The, 184 writing
World Bank, 9 and spoken language, 260
world literature in the digital age, 269
aesthetics of, 228
as anti-nationalist, 247
and colonialism, 230 Y
and commodification, 236–237, Youngblood, Gene, 63
248
and dialogue, 231, 232
and difference, 229 Z
emergence of, 239 Zemeckis, Robert, 73
and formalism, 227 ZhongRong Group, 187, 189, 193
and globalization, 227, 237 Žižek, Slavoj, 180
and global capitalism, 236 on the real, 178
global scale of, 245 on virtualization, 179
as mode of reading, 229 zoom, 20
and nation, 234, 237 and cartography, 94
and national literatures, 235, 236 in Cosmic View, 55
as non-totalizing, 235 in film, 63, 71–73
and postcolonialism, 236 industrial uses of, 73–74
and scale, 227, 233, 234, 241 in optics, 94
and space, 230 in Powers of Ten, 61, 62
and struggle, 231, 232 Zylinska, Joanna, 22, 205, 219
as totalizing, 22, 236, 240–244, on scale, 218
246. See also comparative litera- on universal scale, 218
ture; literary studies; literature

Scale in Literature and Culture - Michael T. Clarke & David Wittenberg PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Scale in Literature and Culture - Michael T. Clarke & David Wittenberg PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

More information about this series at

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949203

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: NASA Earth Observatory

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

We wish to thank the contributors to this collection for their patience,

Part I Scale: History and Conception

2 Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives

3 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s

Part II Scale in Culture

5 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong 105

6 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb

7 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural

Part III Scale in Literature

8 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav

9 World Literature as a Problem of Scale 225

10 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative

11 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David

About the Editors

Michael Tavel Clarke is an Associate Professor of English at the

David Wittenberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Aikaterini Antonopoulou is the Simpson Postdoctoral Fellow in

Bradley J. Fest is an Assistant Professor of English at Hartwick College

Mark McGurl is a Professor of English at Stanford University in the

Fig. 1.1 An earth that can fit into our hands, a widely-circulating

Fig. 7.3 The New Berlin City Palace: Sample Façade,

Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Now, all reasonings about mechanics have their foundations in geometry,

What Sagredo neglects to take into account—but which any artisan

The revolutionary character of these insights about scale certainly

infinitely pleas’d, I trembled.”13 With Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise,

subjectivity, is detectable throughout later discussions of the topic. For

Contemporary theorists of globalization and the environment owe

The Anthropocene, Globalization,

Unquestionably, climate change and the emergence of the related con-

Dramatic instances of our effect on the planet are apparent in impres-

conceptions of the human itself—then AGW is wholly consistent with

introduced by Hobbes at the origins of Western modernity, Hardt and

and government go back to the foundations of the country.38 Such dis-

In addition to their recognition that scale is socially constructed,

neoliberal globalization.55 According to these scholars, “globalization

Urban Development, Architecture, and Film

trend in high-modernist and postmodernist design toward scalar audacity

artistic, and academic. In historical studies—a realm that has impor-

argues that the modern epic is long, encyclopedic, polyphonic, digres-

an atom’s electrons to an insect swarm) that may actually interfere with

radio towers risked exposing corporate influence as a physical embodi-

space. Antonopoulou concludes that “the ‘real’ in the [contemporary]

Bradley J. Fest’s essay “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative

there are undeniable gaps in the collection that deserve acknowledg-

and determined view (sometimes explicit, always at least implicit) toward

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

Latour, Bruno. “Anti-Zoom.” In Contact (exhibition catalogue), edited by

Scale: History and Conception

Composing a Cosmic View: Three

The Anthropocene’s Universal Overview

© The Author(s) 2017 35

for Westerners, the scale of the rational, autonomous individual of

to the projections of religion, Empire, or technoscience, has animated

3 Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s

5 Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong 105

6 The Stature of Man: Population Bomb

7 Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural

8 From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav

9 World Literature as a Problem of Scale 225

10 Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative

11 Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David

Fig. 1.1 An earth that can fit into our hands, a widely-circulating

Fig. 7.3 The New Berlin City Palace: Sample Façade,

Urban Development, Architecture, and Film

Fig. 2.1 Interactive “object ecology visualization” of Walt Whitman’s Song of

Events: Apple-peelings, a regatta. (57, 40)

Plants: pecan-trees, “the running blackberry.” (41, 54)

22. Deleuze and Guattari, 10.

Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray

Smooth Zoom and Scale Variance

“They Appear in Quantum Motion as a Swarm

Epistemic Things from Other Scales

“At the Atomic Scale, the Interplay of Form and Motion

Fig. 4.1 The Two Powers of Ten, by Anne-Sophie Milon, SPEAP, 2014/15

With respect to the concept of connectivity, temporal and spatial

Fig. 5.1 RKO Pictures logo