Carlos
Spoerhase

The issue of scaling and rescaling texts has gained new relevance today due to profound technological transformations. Artificial intelligence tools can now summarize long texts at the push of a button. Yet the desire for shorter versions of complex works is ancient: literary summaries were already being produced and valued in antiquity, especially in education. This practice has always been controversial, however, with critics accusing summaries of distorting, simplifying, and robbing works of their essence. This talk will try to shed light on the genre of the summary, examining its diverse forms and using current examples to show why it has a right to exist despite all the criticism. Furthermore, engaging with summaries can also help to address more general problems of cultural practices of scaling and rescaling.

Carlos Spoerhase holds the Chair of Modern German Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied German literature, philosophy, and political theory, before completing graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 2006. He completed his Habilitation at the same institution in 2016. Spoerhase has held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, among others, and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In the spring of 2025, he will be lecturing as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

ICI Berlin

Scales are used to quantify properties such as length and temperature, or also to measure popularity and affect. But as Alice discovers in Wonderland, a change of scale can also have dramatic qualitative consequences. It disrupts customary ways of perceiving, acting, and being — to the point of feeling as ‘queer’ to her as a caterpillar’s metamorphoses. Helped by the arguably inextricable intertwinement of different meanings and aspects of scale, Alice’s experiences continue to provide apt metaphors for the disorienting importance and effects of scale and scaling at a time of hyperglobalization and the so-called anthropocene.

Scale is indeed a highly ambiguous notion, even when one only considers the meanings deriving from the Latin or Italian scala, ladder. It simultaneously denotes the whole ladder, one of its steps, and the relation between two steps: The scale of a cartographic map is the ratio between a distance on the map and a distance on the ground, but any particular length also defines a scale, and the range of scales from the subatomic to the planetary scale is part of the spatial scale. Paradoxically recursive, scale combines and helps mediate quantity and quality, as well as subjective perception, objective material properties, and contingent construction.

If different disciplines, discourses, and dispositives each have their privileged scales to which they tend to reduce others, what may be gained by thinking them together, acknowledging both the relative autonomy of particular scales — each with their own affordances, limitations, rules, even laws and ontologies — and their interdependence — each affecting and being affected by other scales? What is the critical purchase of developing multiscalar architectures or patchworks of scale-specific, mutually inconsistent and irreducible descriptions, theories, and models? How might the tensions be made productive where they overlap or come into contact? The ICI’s Lecture Series ‘Scale’ will address such questions by reflecting upon the critical role of scale within and across a wide range of different fields.

• At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 17 Sep 2024.
• Public livestream here (no registration required) with the possibility to ask questions via chat.

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