Unscale : Necessities of a history

Rodrigo Garcia, Mercedes (2025) Unscale : Necessities of a history. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The thesis argues that the prevailing perception of the world as a scalar space is more fundamental and consequential than phenomenology concedes. It also questions the inevitability implied in Kant’s analysis of a reason-transcending spatial intuition. This Euclidean perception defines an epistemological situation manifest for instance in the geographical basis of the international order. Scalar logics organise society around ideological systems of collective faith and allegiance while the efficacy of democratic and justice-oriented institutions appears increasingly uncertain. The thesis explores a level of interpretation without the traditional projection of a scalar space onto reality, extending beyond truth-based axiomatic approaches consistent with this projection. Instead, method and subject matter converge within the immediate social context. This level of problematisation elicits sustained and seamless enquiry through the domains of language, geometry and normativity. A logic of interpretation emerges which connects social decline with scalar interpretation. The enquiry engages phenomenological traditions in the field of transcendental logic and potentiality. These traditions utilise logics of geometry or language to release existence and potentiality from what they construe as a human condition fraught with falsity. Yet, the implied concept of truth warrants scrutiny. Truth concerns qualities of things that are ´sustained´. This concern necessitated Descartes' projection of a model of constant space onto things themselves prior to Kant relocating that space to the human mind. The correspondence between truth and geographical space invokes the concept of eternal existence. Doubting the necessity of that space shifts the concept of being ´sustained´ from the constancy of truths to capabilities, suggesting a concept of sustained enquiry or sustainability. Heidegger´s critical phenomenology had introduced a field of discursive potentiality prior to de facto falsehood. Contemporary logics foreclosed that field by subordinating the potentialities to exist or ´live´ to redemptive strategies. Agamben´s logic of spatial indication of the utterance (deixis) as impotentiality suspends signification to forestall falsehood. Badiou´s algebraic logic of localisation uses unexpected events to demonstrate the material existence of truths. The two logics— retroactive and proactive—transcend the social context that causes discourse in each instance. The thesis mobilises performative devices of linguistics and geometric syntax to articulate a missing logic that relativises truth through contextualised orientation. The role of the context in Aristotle's analysis of potentialities as abilities — a role neglected within Agamben´s analysis — lays groundwork for a missing logic consistent with the concept of sustainability. Emerging findings within Francophone ethnographies in the fields of linguistics and custom articulate a concrete condition for probing an alternative possibility of interpretation not reliant on Euclidean space as deictic referent of place. A discursive logic evolves from contexts that are immediate and meta-stable. Two intertwined histories — the geographically undefined extent of a multi-millennial society and its study, Saharan Studies — converge within a level of interpretation prior to the scalar. Concurrent social changes orient the construction and transmission of tradition. The same findings expose constitutive vulnerability to scalar concepts. The concept unscale addresses this constitution while investigating a possibility of interpretation of declining situations. This possibility fosters sustained inquiry within the immediacy of the social context, detracting from delegation within assertive/belief systems.

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