Scale as a Force of Deconstruction
Timothy Clark
There are many ways in which “they have eyes but do not see.”
—David Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?,” in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, 215
All this, this open and non-self-identical totality of the world is deconstruction.
—Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 193
“Scale critique”: this term has recently been proposed by Derek Woods to name an emerging tendency within the environmental humanities.1 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mark McGurl, Ursula Heise, and others have found that attempting to engage environmental issues of a dauntingly global nature entails a reconsideration of the concept of scale and that this leads to a surprising reconceptualization of once seemingly familiar issues.2 Thinkers have started to map out an intellectual practice in which we “need to think human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.”3 “Scale critique” would also include David Wood’s work to expand eco-phenomenology beyond the scales of normal human perception and intuition.4
“Scale critique” is a response to one of the most challenging aspects in thinking the so-called Anthropocene: the way it highlights anew the question of the ontology of the human. The term should also embrace Baird Callicott’s work when he argues that the global environmental crisis has a root cause in a scalar disjunction between human activity and the rest of the natural world.
What renders strip mines, clear-cuts, and beach developments unnatural is not that they are anthropogenic—for, biologically speaking, Homo sapiens is as natural a species as any other—but that they occur at temporal and spatial scales that were unprecedented in nature until nature itself evolved another mode (the Lamarckian mode) of evolution: cultural evolution.5
So it is not just that the technical and the prosthetic are, paradoxically, inherent to what the human is, but that the speed of change in these things (“cultural evolution”) means that the human inhabits a very different time scale from the vast majority of the natural world. In this sense, a latently destructive scalar discrepancy underlies human inventiveness. The human names the particular site of a capitalization of information and energy far speedier than in the rest of nature, making it a capricious force of interference in earth-system processes, notably in the exploitation of fire and combustion.
Callicott’s argument raises further questions. Is the Anthropocene, with its attendant collapse of biosystems across the world, still an accident—that is, something that might be mitigated or addressed by cultural measures, by the putative construction or retrieval of a supposedly more “ecological” human culture, as some eco-thinkers like to argue? Or is it in some sense inherent or inevitable in the kind of creature we are? If the latter, then any viable new environmental ethic can only arise out of a recognition of that tragic reality, rather than the advocacy of more nostalgic forms of humanism. Or is it something else again, a new event not susceptible to being conceived or traced as the revelation, extrapolation, development of anything that preexisted it?
Let us return to the specific issue of scale. Writing in 1997 to illustrate a social constructionist understanding of geographic scale, David Delaney and Helga Leitner wrote that “‘scale’ is not simply an external fact awaiting discovery but a way of framing conceptions of reality.”6 This statement led to an investigation, characteristic of the 1990s, into the way various geographical scales, as they correlate to objects of study or of government, are not given but are produced by various social and political factors, which they deeply influence in turn. Such an emphasis now seems apt but incomplete. The concept of scale now at issue is at least as much ontological as epistemological in emphasis, and its provocation is often to hover undecidably between the two.
Scale does not constitute some sort of background to experience: it inheres in and effects its basic structure, categories, and openness to phenomena. The factors that determine the nature of a phenomenon considered at one scale may give way to quite different ones, in a nonlinear way, at a larger scale, just as the properties of a crowd differ from those of an individual, the potential of a complex processor from that of one microchip, or the structural properties of a plane from those of its small-scale copy as a model. The issue of scale is something that particularly marks ecology, where longer-term processes of climatic or geographical change emerge as decisive over a longer time scale but that yet may have seemed incidental or contingent at a lesser one, where immediate issues of survival of offspring and rates of predation seem to hold the stage.
Scale must thus be a crucial issue in any proposed eco-phenomenology that attempts, in David Wood’s words, to think those “non- or pre-intentional characteristics of nature”7 that yet structure or condition the intentionality of immediate human experience. Human intentionality is neither reducible to nor independent of such physiological facts as those that structure the sensorium at certain scales: no insect could be scaled up to the size of an average human without suffocating, nor could the functions of the human brain exist in a body with the dimensions of an insect. The expanded sense of the natural that emerges in such eco-phenomenology entails “a world in which the relation between present experience and the complexity of what is being experienced has always been deeply complex and stratified,”8 something “hidden from view by our ordinary experience,”9 such as the way the nature of trees, encompassing processes of growth over decades or even centuries, cannot appear in the immediate snapshot of the present.
A given scale is not part of a world in the sense of the latter as some recognized nexus of significances or field of meaning; rather, it inheres in any world as a dimensionality that is all-structuring. It is a kind of grammar whose presence is overlooked in our habitual attention to individual things, to the semantics, so to speak. It both eludes and conditions normative concepts of consciousness as self-presence, as this “deflects us from proper acknowledgment of structures within the heart of our situated openness to the world that cannot be reduced to what is ‘at present’ alive or ‘immediately’ available to those who are at home in it.”10
“Scale variance means that the observation and operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities.”11 Logically, it is assumptions of scale invariance that would be the first object of scale critique. What Derrida called “Western metaphysics,” or the metaphysics of “presence” or “proximity,” may now appear anew in terms of false norms and assumptions of scale invariance.12 Scale, ontologically considered, is a constitutive feature of all temporalization, which now clearly cannot be reduced to the homogenous continuity of some hypostatized present. Heidegger’s argument on the vulgar concept of time as “the homogenous medium in which the movement of daily existence is reckoned and organized” (MP 35/38) and on the ontotheological determination of being as presence—as that which is near, which persists, exposed to vision, at hand [vorhanden], etc., entailed what Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme” described as “this strange epoche of Being hiding itself in the very movement of its presentation” (MP 34/36). Scale is likewise an element hiding itself in the “givenness” of any phenomenon, a facet of its necessary finitude, an inherent element of contingency, unreliability, and incalculable metamorphosis.
Scale Effects
Many forms of thinking previously taken for granted, or certain norms in politics, ethics, and in relation to physical or other systems, must increasingly be recognized as operating only under certain, usually unexamined assumptions about their scale. Jim Dator writes, “Environmental, economic, technological and health factors are global, but our governance systems are still based on the nation state, while our economic system (‘free-market’ capitalism) and many national political systems (interest group ‘democracy’) remain profoundly individualistic in input, albeit tragically collective in output.”13
The way issues of scale have been imposing themselves in numerous fields would yet be another instance,14 fifty years after Derrida first saw the symptom in the proliferation of notions of writing of our living in an epoch that “seems to be approaching what might be called its own exhaustion” (OG 8/18). To be aware of scale variance and the ontological discontinuities entailed by varying determinations of scale is to find unsurprising Derrida’s project of “determining the possibility of meaning on the basis of a ‘formal’ organization which in itself has no meaning” (MP 104/161). This last phrase could be as succinct a definition of the role of scale in this context as one is likely to find and describes simultaneously its challenges to anthropocentrism and narrow forms of humanism.
Many forms of environmentalism are loose manifestations of scale critique—they highlight now disjunctive or anachronistic assumptions of scale in, say, treating environmental problems solely as a result of underinformed consumer choice, and try to engage the counterintuitive nature of thinking of climate change in relation to any individual taken as such. They often consider current forms of human behavior, such as deforestation or pollution, and extrapolate from present trends into a broader time scale. The result is that, along with patently destructive practices such as deforestation or overfishing, some activities that seemed normal or relatively innocuous or even praiseworthy in the present (increased prosperity, more car ownership, even increased longevity) acquire another destructive face at broader scales. This discrepancy in scale is not just the object of an intellectual exercise, but is now a source of day-to-day evasions, contradictions, and tensions, as when, for instance, an environmental scientist weighs the benefits of her attending a conference on another continent against the environmental impact of air travel, or, more controversially, when the reproductive rights of a young couple are juxtaposed against the increasingly destructive effects of population pressure.
What of scale effects specifically? A change in scale may constitute the element of metamorphosis in emergent properties. Again, animal ecology offers the most graphic instance: reproduction rates, survival of offspring, and so on may meet a scalar threshold at which the mere factor of increasing numbers becomes newly significant, either positively self-reinforcing in the form of swamping out possible competitors or autoimmune in the form of exhausting available sources of self-sustenance—or, at different time scales, both.
If issues of scale are becoming more prominent, it is primarily because scale effects are an elusive and underconceptualized form of agency. Their elusiveness is at work in the way increasingly dangerous and latently destructive levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are traceable not only immediately to visible problems such as deforestation but also to the emergent effects of innumerable actions that are in themselves insignificant and largely innocent. The so-called Anthropocene could itself be in part defined by the threshold or scale effect whereby, at the counterintuitive scale of the whole earth, even once environmentally insignificant behaviors (emitting an amount of a pollutant, chopping down a tree, and even having a baby) now feed into nonlinear material processes that have become both problematically decisive and incalculable.
Scale effects manifest themselves primarily in effects of interference, discontinuity, the unexpected, the multivarious. They add a supplementary and potentially sinister dimension to what Wood describes as that “essential temporal articulatedness of things” that is “not itself obviously presented in their immediate temporal appearance.”15 In effect, it is through or as scale effects that newly emergent, destructively powerful agencies, conditioned by the finitude of the earth, become relatively autonomous in relation to the individual human acts or natural events that might have first seemed to comprise them.16 My own singular carbon footprint only matters because there are so many other footprints of various sizes, now and in the past and the future, with incalculable scope and effect—like the destructive and seemingly self-generating vibrations that can emerge as if from nowhere when, for example, a certain number of people happen to walk over a metal bridge at the same time, threatening its structural integrity.
Scale effects manifest materially the priority of alterity within iteration. They would thus add themselves to the series of related but not identical terms in Derrida’s work, “différance,” “the trace,” the pharmakon, etc., each operating in a slightly different context. A scale effect is a thing, or force, or more precisely a difference of things and forces, with decisive effects while remaining “that which in the presence of the present does not present itself” (PI 83/89).
This brings us to a terminological point most readers will have anticipated. Would “scale critique” be better named “scalar deconstruction”? Because we are largely dealing with effects of discontinuities in nature and discordances and interferences in human thinking and policy, “critique” may not be the best term here, with its stricter philosophical sense looking back to Kant and the aim of a systematic and skeptical/rational inquiry into the limits, presuppositions, and conditions of a concept. Rather, scale effects entail events that do not “await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed [Ça se deconstruit]” (P2 4/12). “Deconstruction is not a critical operation; it takes critique as its object; deconstruction, at one moment or another, always aims at the trust confided in the critical, critico-theoretical agency, that is, the deciding agency, the ultimate possibility of the decidable; deconstruction is a deconstruction of critical dogmatics” (PI 54/60).17
In issues of scale, the kinds of discontinuities, refusal of homogenous sense, and mockery of conceptual synthesis that intellectuals have long engaged in the texts of Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, and others become increasingly fraught and contentious practical issues in daily life. Thinking through the slippery issue of scale effects in environmental politics also helps to overcome the inadequacies of a term like “environment” or “nature,” projecting as they do some sort of external and even homogenously encompassing setting or reliable context for a central, usually human, reference point. The relative contingency, seeming caprice, incalculability, and counterintuitive nature of scale effects make them less easy to accommodate to talk of reestablishing some kinship between the human and nature. The latter relation becomes less a groundedness than an element of deeper uncertainty, a sliding of the once seemingly solid or reliable.18
One reason environmental issues are so difficult and fraught is that scale effects entail spectral agencies that present no easily identified target or simple object in empirical reality for politics or law—hence the tendency for environmental arguments to move in two polarized directions, either toward an evasive identification of green politics with individual lifestyle choices, a kind of moralized consumerism, becoming a new and often mildly irritating code of correct behaviors, or, on the other hand, toward a sweepingly general diagnostic of the crisis in terms of such monoliths as cultural anthropocentrism, patriarchy, or modern capitalism. It is not to dismiss the value of any of these approaches to suggest that the stridency and uncertainty of much environmental politics are precisely because of the importance of scale effects, the resistance of such spectral agencies to being resolved into empirically identifiable people (“spectral” here meaning something quite different from “illusory,” as in Derrida). In environmental politics and ethics, scale effects may inhabit an area of particular discomfort or incalculability, “places where discourse can no longer dominate, judge, decide: between the positive and the negative, the good and the bad, the true and the false” (PI 86/92), for changes of scale may entail the emergence of different or even clashing determinations of an entity’s nature or value.
As Nigel Clark writes, “Researchers in the social sciences and humanities still tend to treat natural and social agency as sliding points on a linear scale.”19 Yet scale effects are something beyond any one individual horizon, perception, or even calculation, also resisting the model of eco-phenomenology given by Ted Toadvine and Charles S. Brown in 2003 that, “for phenomenologists, experience must be the starting point and ultimate court of appeal for all philosophical evidence.”20 Scale effects also correspond more to the thought of a materiality that exceeds and resists conceptualization than to classic Marxist materialist arguments about “ultimate determination by the mode of production.”21
In sum, to delineate a scalar deconstruction is to add force, specificity, and clarity to critiques over the past fifty years of the deep presupposition that reality itself is continuous or that being can admit of synthesis in some overarching conceptual unity: “Why should not man, supposing that the discontinuous is proper to him and is his work, reveal that the ground of things—to which he must surely in some way belong—has much to do with the demand of discontinuity as it does with that of unity?”22
Methodological Individualism and the Anthropocene as a Scale Effect
Callicott’s argument on cultural evolution underlines how deeply notions of scale are crucial to definitions of the human. This is an issue that the so-called Anthropocene or “epoch of the human” makes newly salient and unavoidable.
Francesco Vitale, in an essay on Derrida’s mid-1970s seminar on the biology of François Jacob, describes the genetic realm in the animal kingdom as one cybernetic-biological program operating at varying levels of complexity, with the far greater complexity of the human brain having entailed a jump in capability. In effect, Vitale is reading Derrida’s work on Jacob as describing the human mind as a scale effect of such programs:
[A] difference in degree [of complexity] consists in the greater or lesser flexibility of the program, in its greater or lesser opening to possible variations in response, that is, in the ability to integrate the possible choices dictated by the influence of the environment and the group on the individual. But these possibilities are ultimately inscribed in the structure of the program. In the annelid and the amoeba, mentioned by both Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida, the program and its execution are very restricted because of the extreme simplicity of the nervous system; in man, the program is very open because of the great complexity of the system and the brain, which is able to operate a much greater number of connections than the brain of the other animals.23
Vitale contrasts two stages of complexity in the passage just quoted, between the annelid and the amoeba and the human (with doubtless innumerable other creatures and scale effects in cognitive possibility in between). Beyond the two levels of complexity that Vitale highlights in Jacob (between the annelid, the amoeba, and the human), does not a further level of complexity insist itself beyond the visible boundaries of the organism, at scales that acknowledge the fact that all creatures are constituted in the fact of living in groups, as these in turn interact with other groups? It has become a common gesture in posthumanist arguments and related kinds of ecocriticism to refer to the very small—to the fact that nonhuman bacteria and microorganisms are what make up a large percentage of any person’s body mass, or to the way a multispecies genetic landscape underlies the minute biosemiotics of biological functioning. Less considered, but now unavoidable, is the issue of how human nature and its originary environmentality must be reconceived if one changes scale in the other direction. If “the living is a text which produces texts in order to survive in relation to its environment,”24 then why privilege so strongly the level of the individual and its genetic makeup when defining the nature of a living entity?
Why, when trying to define the human, is the focus almost always on that relative abstraction, an individual person and his/her capabilities? What would it look like if the primary scale for thinking human nature were instead ecological, the larger scale of populations and ecological dynamics as distinct from individual or group behaviors, scales that may be global and encompass decades or millennia? Of supplementarity, Derrida writes:
This property [propre] of man is not a property of man: it is the very dislocation of the proper in general: it is the dislocation of the characteristic, the proper in general, the impossibility—and therefore the desire—of self-proximity; the impossibility, and therefore the desire of pure presence. That supplementarity is not a characteristic or property of man does not mean only, and in an equally radical manner, that it is not a characteristic or property; but also that its play precedes what one calls man and extends outside of him. Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. (OG 244/347)
In effect, whether one defines “the human” with primary reference to the capacities and propensities of an individual human being (as Derrida is still doing provisionally in his work on the human/animal distinction) or ecologically, understanding the individual as in part an abstraction from the functions of large groups over various scales of space and time—any such definition entails an element of decision as a matter of pragmatic convenience, cultural prejudice, or political norms (forms of individualism, for instance). Thinking of the Anthropocene must affect this, as we now live in a time in which we know that we cannot not consider things on the larger temporal and spatial scale, even if we have as yet no adequate inherited ethics or even language for doing so. A scalar deconstruction, whether as a practice or as modes of thought that simply impose themselves in these newly realized contexts, highlights the contingency and hidden epistemic and ethical assumptions and decisions at work in thinking or acting absolutely on any one scale.
One obvious effect of the change of scale involved is to render newly questionable the presumed human/animal distinction. At the larger scale—the spectacle of human populations expanding to fill available ecological niches, to maximize energy consumption, or acquire new territory—is very plausibly still that of a manifestly “animal” dynamic, and each member of the human community, however individually rational, responding rather than mechanically reacting, is still living as part of that. It is a scenario in which innumerable people, to quote Eileen Crist, now “appear blind to the meaning and significance of their activities and interactions, and the production of their behaviors . . . [and how these are] determined by forces beyond their control and comprehension.”25 In fact, this quotation is from Crist’s overview of accounts of the human/animal distinction and is describing the latter, not the former. This highlights the contingent nature of the distinction and suggests that the seeming privilege of the human in comprehension, response, etc., is in part a matter of prejudging the scale at which these issues are framed.
To question methodological individualism is also to query Vitale’s statement that the possibilities of behaviors and interaction “are ultimately inscribed in the structure of the program.” For individual behavior is not coherently conceived as the externalization of an inner script that is supposedly activated by external inputs. Vitale’s summary here contrasts markedly with work in modern anthropology, as well as with Bernard Stiegler’s Derridean argument that the essence of the human has never been separable from technicity and that the history of the human is one of the exteriorization of memory or, more specifically, of memory becoming such only through exteriorization, in sign-systems, archives, tools, infrastructure.26 Qualities and capabilities become human only in this same originary supplementation and prosthesis. This is an exteriorization that is not preceded by an interiority but that determines it, or, in Derrida’s words, “The dis-junction is the relation, the essential juncture” between so-called living interiority and technics.
Tim Ingold offers a related argument: that individual human behavior, recognized now as a fairly abstract or abstracted object of analysis, exists within a constrained space that is an emergent property of biosocial relations, inherited “traditions,” or sets of practices inscribed in variously stable material environments:
We can no longer think of the organism, human or otherwise, as a discrete, bounded entity, set over against an environment. It is rather a locus of growth within a field of relations traced out in a flow of materials. As such, it has no “inside” or “outside.” It is perhaps better imagined topologically, as a knot or tangle of interwoven lines, each of which reaches onward to where it will tangle with other knots.27
Ingold describes a “logic of inversion” in the widespread and still dominant misconstruing of human agency as a central, sovereign determinant of events. This model inverts what are really outer multiple, contextual factors into the supposed act or nature of a unitary human agent whose actions are then understood as the outer expression of an interiority, intention, or character.28
Callicott, Ingold, and Stiegler’s different but mutually supporting arguments offer a suggestive context in which to highlight Derek Woods’s incisive point against now widespread accounts of the Anthropocene as a change in the earth’s large-scale systems brought about by human activity. Woods does not contest the fact of this change, but argues that ascribing it solely to the agency of the human or to humans as a terraforming species is deeply misleading: “Scale critique shows the sleight of hand whereby accounts of human agency from familiar (individual, novelistic, small groups) scales get scaled up across disjunctures to become (in the present case) terraforming subjects.”29
“The ‘human’ appears as a grammatical subject, agent, or population of agents that wields technology as an instrument,”30 in a context in which it has actually become a complex and sometimes even marginal part of a broader assemblage, one lever of geomorphic change along with cattle, microbes, melting tundra, ocean currents, and so on. So it makes little sense “to narrate the subject of the Anthropocene as a species identity that works across scale domains.”31 Many of the factors matter in turn as scale effects that come to possess a perplexing autonomy in relation to any simple or initial human—or other—cause.32 Yet it is difficult and perhaps too disconcerting to get away from discussing human action as the sole factor.
Read in terms of the biocybernetic conception of the human developed by Callicott (on cultural evolution) or Stiegler (on technics), the Anthropocene emerges as a culminating manifestation of the human as anachronistic in the strict sense—as living in disjunctive time scales. But it is also the moment of a profound dehumanization, for the Anthropocene is also the emergence of a new, dispersed, or nonunitary form of agency arising through the capricious force of scale effects of which human agency is only one part. The global scale is not simply that at which the human species, entwined in its various technical and infrastructural prostheses, becomes an unintended force of disruption in the earth’s systems. The bizarre fact is that it is the accelerating development of technics, of cultural evolution, that is breaking down the distinction between human and nonhuman, on which it may seem to have been based.
So what is happening at the world scale clearly is only partially captured in Immanuel Wallerstein’s well-known thesis of a relative unification of human societies under the hegemony of capitalist systems of production.33 This account still effectively assumes a homogenous entity at the human scale growing into an expanded area. What in fact also happens at the world scale is that many of the constitutive elements of concepts of a world itself dissolve—not just because human cultures remain plural, with capitalism being absorbed or resisted in so many different ways, but because the once-foregrounded thinking of human agency gives space increasingly to more impersonal forms of dynamic. The Anthropocene should not then be seen as the external manifestation of something already “in” humanity, some essence or fundamental characteristic, but as a contamination, interference, and working together of various forms of happenstance (the finitude of the earth, short-term simplistic systems of economics, the absorptive properties of the atmosphere and oceans, hierarchy and exploitation in human societies, the unknown thresholds of various ecosystem functions, population growth, the unmeant effects of innumerable small human actions).
To return then to the question at the start of this essay: is the destructiveness associated with humanity an accident in some sense, is it inherent to what human beings are, or is it a new event not susceptible to being conceived or traced as the revelation, extrapolation, development of anything that preexisted it? One would now argue that it is a new event that cannot be adequately conceived or traced as the revelation, extrapolation, and development of anything that preexisted it. This presents a newly tragic and imponderable context for environmental ethics, for, effectively, human nature, if considered on a scale that eschews methodological individualism, has changed. It cannot be adequately the object of inherited systems of ethics developed for an entity at lesser scales.
Conclusion
Modern humanity lives increasingly in a counterintuitive unworld of scale effects. This context of excessive resource use, pollution, the incalculable or catalytic effects of the sheer and growing numbers of other people and material impacts involved means that we now live in a changed environment in which old, once innocent norms—on expectations of personal space, resource use, and even the desirability of children—acquire an autoimmune quality.
Any “green” thinker making appeals for a more truly human relation to the natural world, for living on a human scale, or being more fully human is confronted with a sense of how empty such uses of the word “human” are now becoming. A person living in 2017 may well be living a life very much like that of his or her parent a generation before—working, consuming energy and resources, producing waste, occupying so much space—but nevertheless, in this changed context of so many other people now doing the same thing and increasing sections of the world devoted to rampant capitalist accumulation, what this person is actually doing now is significantly different from anyone in the previous generation because of various and often opaque threshold and scale effects.
The specific force of a putative scalar deconstruction would be first to highlight the assumptions of scale inherent in given ways of thinking that grant them a spurious coherence—whether this is how certain conceptions of space, of what presents itself to us, are conditioned by a certain time scale, or, conversely, how conceptions of unfolding events or processes (the working of a “national economy,” for instance) achieve coherence and noncontradiction only through kinds of unacknowledged scale framing. Second and more pointedly, scalar deconstruction highlights the contradictory determinations of being and judgments of value that emerge as scales are shifted.
The Anthropocene is so morally and politically dangerous because it is a situation in which the mere continued existence of some entities (e.g., seven billion human beings) has become already incompatible with that of the existence of others, so that many of the players, human as well as nonhuman, can only be pushed over the edge.34 Increasing recognition of this situation must induce a heightened sense of responsibility, even as its stress already challenges any ethics of care based on notions of interdependence or of recognition of the other.
Notes
1. Derek Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 133–42.
2. Dipesh Chakravarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 533–53; Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
3. Chakravarty, “Climate of History,” 1.
4. David Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?,” in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 215.
5. Baird Callicott, “Lamarck Redux: Temporal Scale as the Key to the Boundary between the Human and the Natural Worlds,” in Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 36.
6. David Delaney and Helga Leitner, “The Political Construction of Scale,” Political Geography 16 (1997): 94–95.
7. Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?,” 212.
8. Ibid., 213.
9. Ibid., 217.
10. Simon Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2007), 183.
11. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” 133.
12. Derrida, in arguing that “this is my starting point. No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation” (P 108/125) is effectively denying the authority of scale invariance. As a mode of reading, deconstruction is often a refusal to take things in “normal” proportion—the context at issue is simultaneously miniaturized, with the focus on a minor aside in text, a footnote or a mere snippet such as Joyce’s “he war” from Finnegans Wake (see Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce [Paris: Galilee, 1987]), and vastly expanded, to embrace that large-scale entity known as the “Western metaphysics of presence.”
13. Jim Dator, “Assuming ‘Responsibility for our Rose,’” in Environmental Values in a Globalizing World: Nature, Justice and Governance, ed. Ian Lowe and Jouni Paavola (London: Routledge, 2005), 215–16.
14. “For example, distinctions are made in biology between micro- and macro-evolution, in economics between micro- and macro-economics, and in history between micro- and macro-historical processes. The physical sciences use the term ‘scale’ to denote a regime or domain. Astronomers refer to ‘the large-scale structure of the Universe,’ while particle physicists talk about the sub-atomic scale. Scale is implicit in all measurements, e.g. the temperature scale, weight scale, Richter scale, etc. In this sense it is related to the concept of units, and the invention and adoption of various systems of units of measurement have many manifestations in the physical sciences as well as multiple implications for social, political and historical analysis. In each disciplinary area, there are deep questions about the relationships between different scales and whether principles and laws describing behaviour at the micro level can account for macro-level phenomena. Knowledge and understanding are often more certain at smaller scales than at larger scales. Is the apparent similarity in problems of scale real or superficial?”; “Introducing Scale,” theme for 2016–17, Institute for Advanced Study, Durham University https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/themes/scale/; accessed August 1, 2015.
15. Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?,” 215.
16. The inhuman semiautonomy of scale effects, arising in part out of the total force of human actions, correlates with what David Wood says of the emergence of rhythms in the happening of natural events, such as the emergence of some species of cicada over a period of seventeen years. These are processes in which “time acquires sufficient autonomous efficacy to generate its own relational differentiation” (ibid., 216), something that is not “the result of the synthetic or constitutive activity of any kind of subject, nor any simple causal mechanism” (ibid., 217).
17. See also PI 212/226.
18. Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?,” 215.
19. Nigel Clark, “Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene,” Sociological Review 62 (2014): 26.
20. Brown and Toadvine, “Eco-Phenomenology: An Introduction,” in Brown and Toadvine, Eco-Phenomenology, xi.
21. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 45.
22. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9. Compare Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “When a multiplicity [of the kind of a rhizome] changes direction, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis”; A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.
23. Francesco Vitale, “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 102. It is suggestive to ask what the earlier reception of Derrida’s work would have been like, with the accusations of textual idealism, etc., if Derrida had chosen not “writing” in the 1960s as the significant term for the workings and unworkings of différance, but one that did not have a potentially misleading implication of an exclusively human/cultural reference, such as “reproduction,” “replication,” or “duplication.” Such terms would legibly undermine at a stroke fantasies of human autonomy by stressing the human’s constitution through an incalculable physical and informational embeddedness in tangled networks of chemical and energy exchange, microbiological, chemical, meteorological, and geological—in effect an originary environmentality. In some ways “originary environmentality” might seem a stronger term of deconstruction than the familiar “originary trace”: its immediate inference is multidimensional, a circle or environing sphere of relations, whereas “trace” still suggests a residually linear figure, a trail, marked line, or path. This misleading implication, at odds with Derrida’s actual argument, is perhaps behind the reductiveness in Vitale’s reading of Derrida on “‘an exteriorization of the trace, that has always already begun, and yet, becomes larger and larger’” (ibid., 101)—a way of putting this that risks still sounding like a homogenous and continuous process, not one involving scale discontinuities and unpredictable retroactive effects.
24. Ibid., 111.
25. Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 5. The admittedly sometimes simplistic talk about the “population bomb” in the 1960s and 1970s, when world population was half current numbers, arose in part from applying to human beings results derived from the study of other animals, producing Paul Ehrlich’s and others’ “population ecology”; see Sabine Höhler, “The Law of Growth: how Ecology Accounted for World Population in the 20th Century,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 14 (2007): 45–64.
26. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
27. Tim Ingold, “Prospect,” in Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10.
28. Diana Coole endorses Nietzsche’s argument about the way concepts of the subject as unitary and intentional agent are a kind of pragmatic illusion made credible when life forces are turned back upon themselves, “internalized,” in a fold that effects a notion and seeming experience of interiority and reflexivity: “Modern ideas of agency have elided a series of phenomenal processes—such as consciousness, meaning-generation, reflexivity, will, reasoning—that are then unified in the figure of the ontological individual or transcendental subject”; Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53 (2005): 128.
29. Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” 137.
30. Ibid., 138.
31. Ibid., 139.
32. Woods suggests that “as subject of the Anthropocene the species concept can . . . do little work here”; ibid., 139.
33. For Wallerstein’s work, see Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, ed. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
34. See, for example, the report of a study by the UN Environment Programme of 2007, finding that “the human ecological footprint is on average 21.9 hectares per person. Given the global population, however, the Earth’s biological capacity is just 15.7 hectares per person”; https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12834-unsustainable-development-puts-humanity-at-risk/, accessed August 1, 2015. It should be noted that the maximum biological capacity here for human life on earth is a concept that acknowledges no right for nonhuman life also to exist except in the service of humanity.