“Scale Jumping as a Semiotic Tool”

The aim of this proposition is to answer to the political and scientific need for extension-integration processes in the social life by elaborating a new semiotic tool, which may have the potential to relate and monitor different phenomena in space and time. This methodological tool is based on the theory of the insights that a twofold vision, from near and from far, provides us with for making meaning in the identification and understanding of empirical things (Fabbri 2020). It is the scale jumping, a procedure that professionals and academics are exploring today in architecture, urban planning, economy and policy making in order to “regenerate” our environments (Reith, Brajković, eds., 2021). Semiotising it implies changing sequentially and alternately both the representative and productive scales of such things to explain and better comprehend them. At an epistemological level, the scale jumping revolves around the awareness of the tension between autonomy and heteronomy, around the feel that one can not determine alone the course of events, but that s/he has to “make and match” (Gombrich) with other individuals and higher intelligences. The recent developments of nanotechnologies and satellite technologies have had a radical impact on the modes of representation as well as the conceptions of things and space. The new geographies from afar (the home, the city, entire territories, the Earth itself, the Moon, Mars, and beyond) and from close-up redefine subjectivities and practices in terms of powers of intervention. We are surprised to see how much any object changes seen from below or from above, together with our microscopic and macroscopic approaches to them, with our proxemic movements of coming close to and receding. The scale jumping shows on the one hand the common sense, the relations that structure historical and social consciousness about it, on the other its own body, the relations that structure its meanings from the perception of those who explore it. Whatever form of expression and content is no longer the same under different scales, but results from cognitive frames that are the product of concrete “keying activities” in the social life (Goffman 1974). Our purpose is to transform the scale jumping from a phenomenological way to perceive the world (remembering that we are in state of flux and nothing is as it seems!) into a metalinguistic tool to describe and discover. Clearly, it is a question of “viewpoint”, that is not only an orientation based on the perspective of a subject, but “an adjustment of the relationship between a source and a target” (Fontanille 1999). What the viewpoint regulates is a correlation of intensity or sharpness and extension or distance. Four main strategies arise: englobing, cumulative, elective and particularizing (ibidem). The scale jumping calls into play non-isomorphic and “disjunctive” logics to be reckoned with respect to things (Appadurai 1996), apparently contradictory visuals that we have to compare by taking a “glocal” position (Sedda 2012). The scale chosen for each object is an option that has been realized among others that remain virtual or potential. They can be actualized at any time, in order to calculate the effects of the metamorphosis they would produce. Learning to use different lenses to consider each single situation provides a competence that offers enough knowledge to themselves and to the others to carry out the right decisions. How do such visualizations intersect with concerns of ecology? The challenge of ecological conversion requires us, before making decisions, to understand how a change made on one scale affects another, with even physical reversals. Single-use face masks and gloves protect people but harm animals and increase plastic pollution. “The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas” (Lorenz 1963). In ecology, small and large scales have long been opposed on a paradigmatic axis, especially about the renewable technologies: those who abhor wind farms or photovoltaic power stations point to the use of solar energy to cover buildings. A “cross-eyed look” should be necessary here: the small scale encourages grassroots control by citizens, reduces authorisation problems and the impact on the landscape, but must be reconciled with the production of large-scale plants which, in addition to being indispensable in the scenario of climate neutrality, drives down the price of materials. We will test the efficacy of the scale jumping as a semiotic tool by examining three case studies in the fields of contemporary art, ecology and health.