Échelles d’(in)finitude / Scaled (In)finitude

The current news-cycle offers numerous scenes of global warming and its paradoxes. In June 2023, at the time of the conference that gave rise to this dossier, edited by Pierre Schwarzer and Marcus Quent, the city of New York had been covered in the smoke of burning Canadian forests, oozing a dystopian glow onto skyscrapers disappearing in fog, exhibiting the worst air quality in the world for two days before the wind carried the fine particles out into the Ocean. The forests that burned in the north of Quebec, ironically, were monocultures grown as carbon-offsets for corporations. This was but one of the many disparate events whose growing frequency signals how central the question of ecology has become for our time. Its newsworthiness hinged on it being a global metropolis with exceptional ties to the global networks and hegemonies of the present. Elsewhere, in Jakarta, Algiers, or Lagos, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels, fires, and storms have already become a frequent occurrence.

In our everyday lives, we most often encounter the ecological question in the face of such extreme weather events and in the discourse around global warming. But the ensuing consequences of rising temperatures are just one of the ways in which human activity transforms the Earth. Both a system impacting our lives and an object of study, the Earth has become an almost unavoidable concern for our present, given that human activity has taken a systemic role in its recent and ongoing transformations.

Simultaneously, this dual emergence of the Earth has brought to the fore two aspects of finiteness: the finitude of modernity as a project, and that of the species as such in the figure of ecocide. Modernity, as a linear understanding of progress and narrative of industrially driven ascent, has been confronted with its violence in structural ecological terms. Its symptom, the “autonomous”, self-producing subject, has encountered its consequences and costs. Ecocide, as an image of rupture, breakdown, and loss, has become the “negative universal” of the present.

The humanities, drawing on the natural sciences, reacted to this predicament by theorizing environments as media, reviving philosophies of nature, and attempting to rethink the role of infrastructure. Conceptual and political overhauls abounded, along with new theories of planetary climate systems, extractivism, ecological milieus, and other investigations into the effects of the Anthropocene. Many of these convergences were productive. Yet, they unwillingly highlighted problems of translation between a planetary understanding of ecological transformation and its lived experience.

In spite of its use as a prophetic ultimatum, ecocide never manifests itself as such. We feel the impact of climate change on our ways of life, experience its effects in particular catastrophes – but climate change as a whole or even the extinction of all life as such remain barred from experience. The end of the species remains experientially disjunct for its subjects caught in modernity’s wane.

In addition to the experience of its absent whole, the ecological or planetary question confronts our knowledge with seemingly infinite variables and the difficulty of delineating its objects which, at times, exceed any scale. Thus, critical vocabularies have become symptomatically incompatible. Methods and diagnoses have entered an unruly concurrence. Within these tensions, the concept of scale has become an implicit mediator for both experience and action. If scale determines the delineation of its objects, the ecological turn not only presents us with new objects, but also linkages indiscernible prior to its advent.

The Threefold Intervention of Scale

The conference scaled (in)finitude – Problems of the Ecological Turn, held at NYU’s global campus in Paris in June 2023, sought to address these issues converging in the concept of scale. The starting point for our discussion was the observation that many disputes in current ecological discourse are attributed to aspects of scale, but fail to account for the tensions and contradictions it implies. Wherever we attempt to delineate and define the object of ecological change, to search for its unit of signification, to ask whom or what it addresses – we find ourselves already in the field of scale. Underlying observation, scale functions as an implicit mediator of both experience and action. If ecology poses a problem of translation, surfacing in other discourses, in other regimes, it is its scale that determines the delineation of its objects – and their very existence, reworking our understanding of processes, relations, and organisms.

Scale intervenes in the ecological question on three intertwined, yet analytically distinct registers: time, space, and technics. It first appears on the level of temporality. The ecological turn clashes at least two disjunct historicities together, that of the human and that of the planet. Both temporalities and historiographies collide in the flaws of the narrative of modernity. Different perspectives come into conflict, resulting, for example, in an indeterminacy as to how to delimit our era, as evidenced by competing concepts such as those of Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The temporality of man-made finitude meets a temporality of the planetary, seemingly beyond history, through the figure of an ecocide that knows no event. On its temporal level, the problem of scale entails questions like: How can one translate human and planetary historicities into one another without a loss of scale? What constitutes an action, an event, and a collective within the manifold temporality of the planetary? How can we shape the history of the planetary, both from a disciplinary perspective but also as a result of our intentional future actions?

Secondly, scale affects spatiality. Debates on ecology often proceed from the assumption that planetary processes and local specificities meet without forming a unified whole. If the logic of modernity is that of the universal, tied to a logic of identity and difference, the logic of the planetary is one that distinguishes between the partial and the total. This logic of distinction is at odds with the geographical unit of political action we have inherited from modernity, aka the territory, founded on the logic of the universal. So, at the end of that encounter stands an agency both dispersed and total, such that the dynamic, processual nature of its emergence, precisely the locus of politics, seems out of reach. In a time of fractured universals, what would the “geopolitical” unit of the planetary be?

Lastly, scale implies a technical dimension. The end of unilateral globalization marks a return of geopolitics within renewed technological acceleration, such that the question of ecology cannot be confined to the narrow scope of what was deemed natural within modernity. Tools and technics, as actors and increasingly information-centric systems against which the concept of the human has thus far been carved, encounter the differently non-human actants of tempest, thunder, and drought. Just as well, ecology itself requires models, images, and figures. As an attempt to re-scale the problem of climate change, it is inevitably technical and rhetorical. Hence, it risks the reproach of arbitrariness, while at once relying on the facticity of phenomena and their aggregation. How can we re-think technics, science, and political economies without merely pointing out the gaps in each of these media through the prism of another one of them? Which epistemic interrelations have these systems relied on in modernity, and how can they be reconfigured?

This three-fold problem of scaling indicates that ecological discourse requires a transformation or reconfiguration of our epistemes. As much it decenters, its politicization demands an epistemic inquiry, a novel alphabet. What are the epistemological conditions of a politicized ecology? How can one step out of the oft symptomatic concurrence of critical frameworks, and make space for new linkages? What are we to make of the new eschatology of doom against our prior one? Adding to an increasing canon of a critical ecological turn with both revived and new references, this dossier seeks to provide insight into the tensions of the field. While its contributions at times take different, if not opposing directions, all of them seek to think through the rhetorics of ecology as medium, border checkpoint, and political cartography. Scaled in finitude – scaled infinitely.