The CSISP Salon is an ongoing forum for discussion that seeks to provoke dialogue between (un)complimentary objects. Our theme in the 2011/12 season is scale. Subject matters such as climate change, electronic waste, brands and branding, disasters, or life science data manifest themselves on and in multiple scales (the home, the nucleotide sequence, the environment, the United Nations, the T-Shirt). For the sociologically inclined enquirer, such scales occasion many vexing questions: What to analyse? Where and what to observe? How to integrate different scales? Seeking to grapple with matters and materials of different sizes, visibilities, durations and complexities, we explore the practical and ethical implications of doing and accomplishing scale.
The first Salon of the season met on 26th October. Here, the first three chapters of Jean Ricardou’s late 1960s novel encountered an STS informed provocation piece, written by the organizers of the Scalography event that took place in Oxford in 2009. What follows is a retelling and reshaping of the session, co-organised by Tahani Nadim and Joe Deville.
CSISP Salon 2011/12 poster
Provocations on ants and scale Tahani Nadim
In their conclusion Woolgar and others suggest to look at the “natural sciences” to escape the conventions of scale and learn about how to do scale somewhat differently. In this Salon, literature, or more specifically, Jean Ricardou’s Place Names (1968[2007]), shows us some interesting even inventive but certainly different routes into the lands of scale.
Jean Ricardou, born 1932, is an author of both fiction and theory. He is one of the key figures in the nouveau roman, a literary genre or rather movement that emerged in the 1950s in France. The new novel rejects – in some cases spectacularly ejects – such things as linear chronology, discernible plot and coherent characters. Readers learn very little about inner motives or the psychology of protagonists and so the nouveau roman collapses the panorama of the novel. There is no evident order, no rational space-time context or other intelligible frame of relations. It is thoroughly disorienting, for readers and characters alike, hence it is particularly apt that this book should offer itself as a guide book.
A guide book is of course a scalar device that allows acting at a distance and makes problems doable: a vast region, too big to take in, becomes neatly ordered for us to peruse. In our case however perusal quickly turns into fluster as this guide book offers little if anything in matters of direction and location. And the meagre bones it does throw quickly disintegrate without leaving even a spot of dust for triangulation. Rather than mapping a region and its sites and sights, Place Names unfolds strange worlds – in pictures, recollections, parks and antique shops – which it is only too happy to collapse at a moments’ notice. The valley’s chequerboard landscape introduced in the beginning pages, is reminiscent of another equally confounding chequerboard – the one encountered by Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Like her, we oftentimes feel as if we’re peering through a looking-glass, we’re not really granted the proper, proportional, proportioned vista. This is not necessarily detrimental to our travels: discrete things such as ants, white flags, mirrors, the crusades, red cars and slightly crazy park wardens enter into fanciful associations and demand of the reader too to entertain curious entanglements.
By denying us a congruous panorama, Place Names and the nouveau roman in general, constitute a provocation. So here we arrive at one possible intersection for Ricardou, Woolgar and others: They can all be considered as provocations. They provoke by confounding our expectation and experiences of scale. Scale requires a vantage point from where to put things in perspective and establish an order, a vantage point that Place Names denies us. Similarly, Woolgar and others provoke on multiple fronts, demanding, among other things, an end to imprudent use of adjectives of scale and an investigation, preferable ethnographic, of scale as an effect of scalar practices. Also, their provocation piece is written, as so many provocations (from Luther to Wittgenstein) were, as a number of theses. Scale is often associated with comfort: objects, relations and ratios of relations are scaled in such a way as to fit our bodies, please our senses and spare our minds. In both texts, scaling or the practices of doing scale perturb some convenient positions.
The second junction I’d like to suggest for the texts relates to their respective or mutual topography: The novel precipitates between two seemingly opposite poles, projecting a “garden of opposition”: On one hand, the belief that things emerge from words, that discourse is generative of reality, that the name precedes the object. On the other hand, the contrary: It is words that name things, and language is but a translation of a prior real reality. Ricardou’s book itself is a product of this very struggle, continuously changing from guide book to novel and back. Woolgar and others too begin by presenting an opposition. Here, this “fundamental split” is between those social scientists that study the macro and those who observe the micro. More fundamentally, this is perhaps the tragedy of scale, locked into a matrix that by default distributes value, worth and relevance unevenly.
Between the two camps, there is not much common ground but there are ants. Lots of them. We encounter them throughout the book. They’re usually in peril: encircled by raging, furious waters, encased in cellophane glued to a plane tree, or subjected to microscopic flamethrowers, they struggle and they perish. Yet they steadily re-appear, sometimes as non-ants as in the figure of the woman in the red car named Atta, a name which also describes leaf-cutter ants. Or the protagonist Olivier Lasius, Lasius referring to a genus of boreal formicine ants. The ants then represent not so much an intractable opposition of scales but point to the fictitious nature of the split between micro and macro. This is not to say that this split has no material consequence. But it suggests some relevant questions, not least of which concern the possibility of ethical practice in incommensurable and incongruous entanglements with words, ants, wars and reading groups.
Scalar frustrations Joe Deville
Ricardou’s traveller frowns at a painting, bending closer to get a better a look at a detail that has drawn his attention. In getting closer, what had seemed so important – a clue to the painting’s meaning perhaps? – changes. He wonders if it is an effect of his shadow. But he can’t be sure. He is left, Ricardou tells us, “disappointed”.
I don’t think it would be a surprise if, in trying to scrutinise our two objects, we too are left with a tinge of disappointment. One way of seeing Ricardou’s account (there are inevitably plenty of others) is as a meditation on the frustrations that accompany the search for clarity and closure. Ricardou toys with his traveller, resists satisfying him with answers, denying him the authority of events, places and history. Many of the things that might help ground his journey, that might provide him a place, a time to think from, to live from, are made to slip and slide around him. And then up pops the poor ant, similarly striving to keep his (six) feet on the ground, as the stone he is on threatens to be engulfed by a miniature flood. This ant is engaged in a very real life and death struggle, to whom the questions which so perplex Ricardou’s traveller seem wholly irrelevant.
Bringing this to this Salon’s themes, one question of the many in the Scalography team’s provocation piece, that perhaps speaks to this sense of frustration, is the following:
“How and why is it so difficult to think scale differently?”
On the one hand, such difficulties are unexpected – they speak to the challenges that often accompany attempts to pin down slippery concepts. On the other, as the provocation piece points towards, there are ways in which, as a social scientist, the frustrations of working with scale matter in some quite particular and important ways. It speaks to the extent to which the problems we explore can come loaded with forms of scalar awareness that shape and are shaped by well worn, stubborn, value-laden patterns of thought. There are also the pressures we might feel for, example, for our work to scale – in particular – up. To speak, for example, to ‘big’, ‘important’, ‘wider’, and ‘relevant’ issues. Or there are the frustrations that accompany the way in which our own work is scaled in particular, unwanted trajectories by others, in REF matrices, for instance.
Here are some areas where the politics of the scalar thinking – both our own and others’ – become apparent to us. These operate around the question of what matters and how this matters (and to whom) (on this, see Isabelle Stengers). Here we can return to Ricardou’s ant. Ricardou seems to pose the reader a question: what is more important: the life of a tiny ant, struggling for security, or the traveller’s struggle for security, manifest in his attempts to pin down the character of the world through which he moves. In these chapters Ricardou does not offer an answer. Instead, the question becomes more specific. Should a traveller, seeing the plight of the ant, extend it a leaf and transport it to safety? Or should he or she, as Ricardou puts it, “on the pretext of shortening the animal’s agony”, crush the ant, judging it as an irrelevance (to the human world anyway) and keep walking? In both cases, the choice is not without consequences. In the first, the ant threatens to “run hither and yon over the guidebook’s pages” – disrupting the attempt by the author to communicate to potential travellers a clear account of the world around them. In the second, the crushed ant’s unwitting revenge is the damp spot left on the traveller’s shoe. This will become a series of guilty footprints marking a trail back to the scene of the minute murder.
One likely lesson from Ricardou is that we shouldn’t look too closely for a meaning behind this apparently ethical allegory, that seems to ask us to compare the value of the small to the value of the big. Perhaps our attention should instead be focused on the value of the question – here brought to the ethical questions that surround the scaling of things: what does matter, to whom, and in what way? And how do things that are variously scaled as small and big interfere and disrupt one another – or not? It is the value of such questions that also cross cuts the Scalography team’s provocation piece. These questions include trying to interrogate how and why things are scaled – but at the same time being attentive to the ways that some things do not scale or are not scaled. This is what they refer to as the ‘uneven play of scalar ethics’ (I’m paraphrasing). It is this uneven play we are confronted by (and confront?) in our own research.
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