Ecologies of Scale in the Age of Satellites and Television

Abstract

This essay presents a theory of scale as a nonrepresentational interface, or crossing-point, to reappraise distance in approaches to remote viewing. To do so, it turns to the idea of “action at a distance,” particularly as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as to the year 1968, when the photograph Earthrise, the Whole Earth Catalog, and shouts of “the whole world is watching” put a fine point on matters of scale for media such as satellites and television. Variously revered or reviled in this historical moment, these devices implied totalities for some and total fields for others, though in either case, it was distance that assured hierarchy and homogeny, according to critics and scholars. In the years since 1968, this distrust has typically held sway, shaping calls for immediacy as opposed to abstract distance in most accounts of scale. By contrast, this essay argues that distance preserves difference and, emphatically, dependence across vast and variegated milieus, making scale a site for mutual responsibility in addition to variance or invariance. Bearing this out, the essay concludes with considerations of scale in the films Medium Cool and 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein distance ensures the entangled conditions by which just and unjust circumstances are made and unmade.