112 113 SCALES OF THE EARTH chemical elements.” 23 In other words, the Phantom Captain breathes creative life into the seemingly vegetative world of physical bodies. The body and other technolo- gies, including architecture and means of transportation — two primary exemplars of creative endeavors, according to Fuller — are nothing but machinations of the Phantom Captain in its bid to harness the environment for optimum human growth. If architecture provides a kinesthetic metaphor of the Phantom Captain’s ship, “the goal is not ‘housing,’ but the universal extension of the Phantom Captain’s ship into new areas of environment control, possibly to continuity of survival without the necessity of intermittent ‘abandoning ship.’” 24 Fuller’s esoteric argument boils down to this: It was with, and only with, the attain- ment of super-consciousness — the Phantom Captain — that the modern man could ensure an expedited self-development, while the architecture/technology network as an extension of the physical body proffered the means of environmental control. If the Phantom Captain meant a self-conscious cognitive leap across normative evolutionary cycles, then such irrationalities as reaching the moon enter the mental domain of pos- sibilities, or “miracles, once irrational, will be continually rationalized and set under service to man by man.” 25 In the period following the lunar conquest in 1969, Fuller wrote the foreword to a book on space photography and included a quote by Scottish poet Robert Burns: “Oh wad some Power giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” 26 Human ingenuity and technology had finally simulated a reflected gaze on Earth by planting a mechanical eye on the moon and relying on an astronaut’s eye. Decades earlier, however, Fuller had already articu- lated this possibility in Nine Chains, through the attainment of higher consciousness, the sacrosanct province of the genius. NOTES 1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1938). The manuscript is in the Buckminster Fuller Archive, Green Library, Stanford University, Series 2, Dymaxion Chronofile, Box 38, Vol. LIX, 1938. A decade earlier, Fuller self-published his mimeo- graphed manifesto, 4D Time Lock. 2. Sinclair Lewis, Newsweek (Sept. 12, 1938). 3. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Saturday Review of Literature (Sept. 17, 1938). 4. R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, xiii. 5. Ibid., 66. 6. Ibid., 67. 7. Alexis Carrel, Man, The Unknown (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1935). Fuller read the book and quoted from it to justify many of his own ideas on human progress. 8. Fuller, Nine Chains, 68. 9. The science of rocketry was, by the 1930s, still primitive at best or mostly in the realm of fantasy. America would wait another twenty-five years for a realistic space vehicle or rocket able to carry even the smallest object into space. For American romance with space exploration, see, for example, Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) and Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space (New York: Viking Press, 1968). 10. David Kyle, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction (London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd., 1976), 38. Fuller understood aviation’s potential to win wars from Wells’ The War in the Air (1907); see Nine Chains, 293–294. 11. H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (New York: MacMillan Co., 1933), 348. 12. The Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, ed. (New York, Saturday, June 2, 1934). 13. Wells was a student of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s acolyte. In setting up the clash of civiliza- tions, Wells endeavors to show that the more evolved or “fit” a race becomes, the better its chances of emerging victorious from the planetary battles of survival. 14. Fuller, Nine Chains, 325. 15. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, 16–20. 16. For biographical accounts of Goddard, see Milton Lehman, This High Man: The Life of Robert H. Goddard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1963). 17. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, 17. 18. A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998), 226. 19. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, 20. 20. For a similar explanation of Fuller’s argument, see Betty Franks, “Futurists and the American Dream: A History of Contemporary Futurist Thought,” Doctor of Arts Dissertation, Carnegie- Mellon University, 1985. Franks argues that Fuller expressed “faith in the individual whose genius would provide the knowledge necessary to alter the future.” 21. William Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets: Interpretations of Technology (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971), 232–233. 22. Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets, 232–233. 23. Fuller, Nine Chains, 18–30. 24. Ibid., 41. 25. Ibid., 69. 26. Paul Dickson, Out of This World: American Space Photography (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), 1. Portrait of Robert H. Goddard, Credit: Courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Is Scale Thinking Still Useful? The scale of the world has in recent years come to coincide with the scale of the Earth. 1 In others words, a world society has come into being. It is constituted by a global interconnectedness in terms of economic and cultural flows and by the slow but certain emergence of global political institutions and agendas. One may question, however, to what extent that world society can be considered as a scale? And if there is something like a scale of the world, what are its constitutive elements? Scale thinking and mapping is a favorite hobby of geographers, past and present. Recently, scale talk has been revivified in the discipline through calls to think about and practice human geography without using the concept of scale. 2 Unsurprisingly, other geogra- phers have spoken in defense of scale. 3 Some even wish that such supposedly “dangerous” discussions (for the future of the discipline, not for you and me) would not reach the ears of non-geographers. 4 In a nutshell, the arguments of the authors proposing this radical erasure from our spatial vocabulary are the following: scale is not an ontological category but an epistemological one. There is no such thing as a nested hierarchy organizing the social world. Scale is rather a tool that pre-organizes the analysis and leads to scientifically fallacious and politically problematic interpretations. Scale thinking invites us to see global-local determinations between phenomena where in fact there are complex assemblages with emergent proper- ties. It is also politically disempowering because it portrays local life-worlds as dominated by placeless and largely uncontrollable global forces. We should therefore abandon scale and imagine a flat ontology where entities (spaces, objects, institutions, actors) are a priori given an equal status. Non-geographers such as Bruno Latour and Arturo Escobar have developed broadly similar arguments. 5 Pursuing his associational socio-technical network theory of all things possible, Latour has called for abandoning the local-global distinction in favor of a flat vision of the world. This is the only route, he argues, if we want to understand the production of scales, dimensions, and localities, instead of attributing them a priori to the phenomena we investigate. Like the deconstruction of other mega-categories such as culture and identity, the deconstruction of scale is both helpful and unsatis- factory. It is helpful because it alerts us to the possible confusions between things in the world and things in our heads, and because it opens up new and more complex ways of seeing the social and spatial organization of the world. Nevertheless, political institutions, administrative borders, ordinary thinking and talking are filled with scales, Russian doll hierarchies, “locals and globals,” and the like. Scalar thinking has produced scales and relations of power between large spaces (such as national territories) and smaller ones (regions, communes, etc.). The International Criminal Court, for instance, thinks of its action and works at a global scale. We should therefore not avoid talking about scales, scaled institutions and territories, but do it while considering these elements as constitutive of complex assemblages. 6 Our task in the social sciences is to analyze the constitution of these assemblages without presupposing a scalar organization of the world. It also means trying to understand how the scale of the world becomes a relevant and efficient category for thought and action. If we accept this stance, we must observe that the extent to which the tools, through which the world is becoming a relevant and efficient scale for thought and action, vary according to the social spheres considered. In other words, there is a differential timing and there are different (socially produced) substances to the world scale. 7 The advent of a substantial legal world scale is, for instance, OLA SÖDERSTRÖM IS PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEUCHÂTEL, SWITZERLAND. HIS RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE VISUAL CULTURES, URBAN GLOBALIZATIONS, COSMOPOLITAN- ISMS, AND THE MOBILITY OF URBAN POLICIES. HE HAS PUBLISHED A MONOGRAPH ON THE VISUAL IN URBAN PLAN- NING, DES IMAGES POUR AGIR, AND HE HAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED AN INQUIRY INTO URBAN CHANGE IN PALERMO: URBAN COSMOGRAPHIES. HE CO-EDITED (WITH MICHAEL GUGGENHEIM) RE-SHAPING CITIES: HOW GLOBAL MOBILITY TRANSFORMS ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN FORM. HOW IMAGES ASSEMBLE THE URBAN WORLD MORSHED