COLLOQUIUM - GPS, AFS and Universities Paris Cité, Tartu, Middlesex
25-27 June 2025
Scale, measure, excess... incommensurability
Semiotic issues
Organised by: Juan Alonso Aldama, Denis Bertrand, Jean-François Bordron, Valérie Brunetière, Bernard Darras, Verónica Estay Stange, Paul Cobley, Kalevi Kull.
Colloque GPS-Grand Paris Sémiotique, AFS-Association Française de Sémiotique, and the universities of Paris Cité, Tartu and Middlesex London: 25, 26 and 27 June 2025.
Place: Paris Cité, rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris
Orientation text
More than thirty years after the publication of the collective work La quantité et ses modulations qualitatives (1992) edited by Jacques Fontanille, two years after the work edited by Tiziana Migliore and Marion Colas-Blaise, Semiotica del formato. Misure, peso, volume, proporzioni, scala (2022), we propose to renew semiotic reflection on the question of scale. This problem, which is also that of reference criteria, of measurement and excess to the immeasurable, is a central issue both for the humanities and social sciences from the point of view of their conceptualization, and for the understanding of the natural and geo-political phenomena of our time.
Let's compare the experiences of the mountain and the ocean.
Mountains. If the ascent is subject to the ‘measure’ of the world (“Will this ice bridge support my weight? Is this rock strong enough to hold a belay?...”), the summit brings the mountaineer quite the opposite: excess, immensity, infinity. At this point, the need to find a ‘reason’ and a ‘meaning’ for this vision almost always turns to transcendence, whether theological (the divine essence) or aesthetic (the sublime) or even moral (with its clichés: ‘the leader of the rope’).
Ocean. In the open sea, when the perceived world is reduced to two unlimited elements, air and water, which often merge into a single colour through a mirror effect, the sailors on watch, faced with this excess, often engage in cosmic and metaphysical meditation: “Who are we? Where are we?”… Novels of the sea, from Herman Melville to Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad, make this impossible grasp of the immeasurable a central theme.
These examples illustrate the more general fact that the notion of scale is that of a ratio, a proportion (necessarily gradual), between a basic value and one of its parts. So we measure time in time, space in space and commodity in commodity (money). This raises many questions. What values are likely to have a scale? Of course, values without measurement (cf. Zilberberg) seem to escape scales. It is generally assumed that the basic value, space for example, cannot vary without a paradox in its measurement. But does pain, which seems to be measured in hospitals (on a scale of 1 to 10), have a stable, non-subjective basis? And what about pleasure, which was said to have no measure? There are some curious scales, such as the salary scale, which in truth measures nothing, since it can only establish a mid-point. As for the school mark scale, with the ‘macabre constant’ identified by André Antibi (La constante macabre (…), Math’Adore, 2003), it reflects classificatory and discriminatory presuppositions.
So this vast question of scale seems to us to be imposing itself on semiotic reflection today.
- First of all, because of the theoretical question: scale is a condition for understanding all meaning. Semiosis - the constitutive relationship between a plane of expression and a plane of content - presupposes a perspective (prescribed by our Umwelt), and this forms the basis of all measurement. In pragmatist semiotics, semiosis is conceived as a relationship between a sign, its object and its interpretant; since the latter is also a sign, the ‘passage’ from the first sign to its interpretant logically raises the question of measurement and proportion, a question that is very relevant in Peircian diagrammatics. The question becomes: by what measure do we apprehend and analyse meaning? How does meaning adjust to our perceptual scales? How do the scales ensure that we are at the ‘right’ distance? How does it become maladjusted?
- Because of disciplinary and epistemological transversality. Whether we are talking about the ethics of measurement or quantification to grasp the measurable, the observable or the hypothetical-deductible, all disciplines are concerned, according to their own epistemology, by the question of scale. This ‘dimension’ states the problem of the ‘adaptability’ of models, which are by definition abstract and general, and of how to adjust them to the ‘roughness’ and ‘granularity’ of the objects of analysis.
- Because of empirical experience. Knowledge of the world is based on the extension of the perceptible in space and time, from the micro- to the macro-, crossing the boundaries of the representable: the duration of nuclear waste well beyond that of any civilization, the geological changes brought about by the Anthropocene, the visibility of astronomical spaces where, behind clouds of dust millions of light years away, galaxies are revealed which in turn reveal new clouds of dust (cf. the James Webb Space Telescope).
- And finally, because of the political and climatic experience of our time, with the disruption of all scales caused by extreme events, invalidating all known measurements (cf. statistics) known to date. The pressing issue of climate disruption therefore implies this crisis of measurement. The new dimensions, the obligatory confrontations, and so many other aspects that have gone unnoticed until recently, require new ways of measuring, or of thinking about measurement.
Based on these observations, several lines of research emerge, in the form of questions:
- The question of the relationship between perception, semiosis and scale. Consider, for example, the relationship between the totalizing operations of contemplation and the singularizing operations of identification (cf. Pierre Ouellet in Fontanille 1992, 185).
- The question of moralization in a socio-semiotics of passions, of the order of empirical analysis, which manifests itself in the form of the ‘limits’ that frame, in this domain, the feeling of rightness and that of non-adjustment by default or excess.
- The cognitive question of schematism and models with procedures for adjusting between the local and the global. What is the relationship between the excitement of detail in a very large-scale representation and the excitement of a panoramic view in a small-scale representation, which allows a glimpse of the general lines of an object but in which accuracy is lost?
- The sensitive question of Intensity: how do we apprehend the quantity of quality? The gradation of quantity and its threshold effects, with the irruption of discontinuity, opens up a new paradigm and a new quality. The semiotic models of tensivity may provide an answer to this question.
- The pragmatic and methodological question of the relationship between the scale of experimentation (that of the laboratory) and that of the sensitive experience of the world: the model, the sample, the illustrative case... leading to the problem of typicity and the prototype.
- The ethical question of proportion, proportionality and disproportion. The wisdom of nations says: ‘Keeping things in proportion’, the ‘proportionality’ of retaliation, of justice, of war. The point at which disproportion goes as far as the disappearance of the object.
- Finally, the question of vertigo when the world becomes immeasurable.
Submitting proposals
Proposals should be submitted using the form accessible via the following link:
The form asks you to specify the name and institutional affiliation of each author, together with the title and summary of the proposed talk (1500 characters maximum) and a list of 4 key words.
Location: Université Paris Cité
Deadline for submission: 28 February 2025
Date of notification of acceptance to authors: 15 March 2025
Dates of the Colloquium:
- Wednesday afternoon, 25 June 2025, Salle des thèses, Université Paris Cité, 45 rue des Saints Pères, 75006 Paris
- Thursday 26 June 2025, idem.
- Friday 27 June 2025, idem.