Panel Description

Friday, 10 January 2014, 10:15–11:30 a.m.

Presiding: Jennifer Yirinec, University of Iowa

Speakers: Derek Woods, Rice University; David Wittenberg,
University of Iowa; Oded Nir, Ohio State University

The aesthetics and poetics of scale are currently of great interest to a number of fields within the humanities. Recent work by such diverse theorists as Timothy Clark, Mary Ann Doane, Mark Dorrian, Jussi Parikka, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Devin Fore, and Mark McGurl has brought issues of scale to the foreground of the contemporary critique of representation. Questions of magnitude are especially pressing in an era of simultaneous globalization and digitization, during which the scale of political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships between human beings is vastly expanded even as industrial technology achieves unprecedented levels of miniaturization. Arguably, contemporary critics and theorists must now catch up with longstanding inquiries about the significance of magnitudes and scales already undertaken within the self-conscious stylistic practices of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and art. Furthermore, questions about the political role and responsibility of intellectuals increasingly involves issues of scale and size, whether with respect to the very large (geopolitics, climate change and ecocriticism, “mass destruction”) or the very small (digitization, gene technology and biopolitics, nanotechnology).

The work of all three panelists considers theoretical problems of size or scale with respect to both aesthetic representation and political significance. Derek Woods’s presentation analyzes, through several genres of scientific writing, the literary technologies that produce meaning about relations among disparate scales. Contending that literary art has always been polyscalar, Woods references the poetics of size from the atomist work of Lucretius, through early modern insect-political allegories, to postmodern nano-horror, time travel, and catastrophe narratives. He contends that any comprehensive study of the poetics of scale would encompass the range of tropes that program our imaginary of the imperceptibly small or the immeasurably large object, and would also address the topos of “levels” that mediates theoretical distinctions among the physical, biological, and social.

Selecting three paradigmatic texts and three corresponding scales, Woods discusses Werner Heisenberg’s efforts to write the sub-atomic probabilistic blur in Physics and Philosophy (1958), Primo Levi’s interwoven historical and chemical narratives in The Periodic Table (1975), and Lewis Thomas’s cellular “biographies” in The Lives of a Cell (1975). Woods analyzes the disjunctures and continuities as their rhetoric shifts from sub-atomic to molecular to biological scales, shifts that tell us about the nesting-order of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena. Taking note of the rhetorical patterns in each of these texts provides an outline of a post-WWII moment in which language organizes the scale-bound objects of study claimed by different disciplines of knowledge—in this case, physics, chemistry, and biology. Ultimately, Woods’s paper synthesizes and supplements recent critical work toward a scale-critical theory that can begin to address, for example, Chakrabarty’s claim that in the era of climate change, we need to be able to think the human across multiple scales.

David Wittenberg’s presentation analyzes rhetorical strategies used to depict the scale of atomic bomb explosions, both in survivor narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in witness accounts of early U.S. a-bomb testing. The immense physical and emotional impact trauma of an a-bomb explosion necessitates a specific scale and distance of viewpoint in its narration—both sufficiently near to enable a persuasive phenomenological account, and sufficiently distant to allow adequate aesthetic framing and perspective (in addition to mere survival). The complex, even symptomatic effect of this struggle over scale is readable in the characteristic repetition of certain rhetorical devices—synaesthesia, severe ellipsis and paralipsis, violent catachresis—each of which marks a moment of productive scalar “failure,” and therefore simultaneously a phenomenological crisis and a narratological coup.

Wittenberg considers survivor accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Kenzaburo Oe, Toyofumi Ogura, John Hersey, and the Hiroshima Digital Archive. In addition, he compares similar—but obviously differently motivated—narratives by witnesses of U.S. nuclear tests at White Sands and Bikini Atoll, including canonical texts by Fermi, Rabi, and Generals Farrell and Groves. Invoking and revising both trauma theory (LaCapra, Caruth, Leys) and the sublime (Kant, Lyotard, Zizek), Wittenberg argues that discourses about a-bomb explosions—inherently charged with the quandary of conveying impossible magnitudes of violence—are simultaneously “too-big” and “too-small,” a paradox that makes them exemplary for analyzing more general problems of the literary representation of violence. Wittenberg concludes by briefly comparing photographs of the bombs at Nagasaki, Alamogordo, and Bikini Atoll, reconsidering how the bomb is “resized” and reframed for aesthetic consumption within postwar propaganda about nuclear power.

Oded Nir’s presentation draws upon Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic and other texts. Jameson sheds new light on the relation between spatial scale and aesthetic representation: many imaginative projects that attempt to connect seemingly disparate events or contexts, according to Jameson, have a totalizing impulse at work in them. Whether or not the finished product expresses a failure to totalize, as in postmodern conspiracy movies, the totalization process itself must always confront the difficulty of finding a new aesthetic language through which to codify the connections or disconnections it illuminates. When figured spatially, this process must pose scale itself as a problem: How can different contexts be related to each other? How can local processes find expression on a larger scale? How does imagining a change in scale modify the aesthetic solutions through which totalization takes shape?

Nir’s paper, referencing work by Phillip Wegner, Nicholas Brown, Caren Irr and others, explores the relation between aesthetic totalization and scale in the TV series The Wire and in the movie Babel. Nir argues that these two imaginative worlds represent antagonistic aesthetic solutions to problems of totalization and scale that each faces. While The Wire invokes generic conventions of organized crime and police procedural narratives to imagine a hidden systematicity at work, Babel actively situates the accidental chain of events it maps against an image of a closed global geopolitical system. As a result, Nir asserts, while The Wire attempts to solve the problem of scale by inventing new ways for different juridical systems to operate, Babel negates a reified way of figuring geopolitical scale in order to mark a new set of aesthetic coordinates for approaching that scale.