Anthropoetics 8, no. 2 (Fall 2002 / Winter 2003)

French and Italian Studies
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington 98195
dcollins@u.washington.edu

It is the minute detail that blocks the infinite invasion.
Bataille, Manet

You know of the expression: "The trembling of a branch against the sky is more important than Hitler."
Malraux, Les Chênes qu'on abat

Who didn't find shelter in the huge looks to the small.
Adam Zagajewski, "Kierkegaard and Hegel"

The mandate was minutiae--specks on or against the horizon of angry process. At the point of near invisibility, garrulously joined is the diversity of art's ethical claims, expressed in the only way they can be, through the temporalities of negligibility, the visibilities and agencies of negative increment. Things almost no things, oppositely pulling the connective tissue of the mass, now whim and now woe, those that take and those that unknow the measure of the responsibility for calamitous change, the ones causing to be unnecessary a story that others--with the status of blood debt--to scare us tell. King and economy-sized smalls, belittling littles of the "big house"--evidence of merited suffering--and those of its revolving door, the bread crumbs or body parts with which Hegel's return path to self-love is strewn. There was the sequence that made a point, and the point that unmade the sequence of Hegel's negativity cycle, the blazing appearance and disappearance of the master--small of the vanishing point and small of the missing of the point of vanishing. Small minus the recall of a splendid atrocity, and small as caput mortuum, the forensic small--the too-much-too-soon that became the too-little-too-late. A splitting of the function--memory of a mistake, the small as baleful vestige of an arrogance that had invited an overcoming, or the mistake of memory, small of explanation, small of interpretation, fine print of the dialectic. To them attached are differently tasked, as differently timed, the now dispersed, now coalesced, more and less ritualizable possibilities of insolent unconcern. There at the flex point of the life cycle of negativity, always. Always about surface construction, the detail--but inviting in and out, or slickening to touch and go? "Hero dust" (Byron)--indelibility of the reminder remainer, the tainted remnant of the festive bounty of the post-prandial group can--context depending--wheel to become the sign of the muddling of what had been the moral clarity of the unforgiving choice celebrated in collective feast. The small is always the sign of a splitting of a difference, but to contrasting effect, either its liquidation or proliferation, mediation either of the self-love that was the torpor of the compact many, or that of the invulnerably animated one. Broker of recursion, always, but for the one or the many does it cause the world to disappear? The near nothing was the trophy or the undoing of whose persecutorial zeal?

A comfort, always, these auspicious omens, but for whom?--had through murderous trial or the mistrial of the innocenting finding of what had never been lost? Pathetic evidence of the action of a social law of gravity or the sign of its transformation into untroubled forward movement? Some smalls mock the process that others (those that have earned their humility) cause to fearfully serve. A detail chauvinism, art is a nanotechnology, minutely perceptive of the spoils of, or what spoils into, the absence of a fight. "What is the virtue of reduction either of scale or in number of properties?" asks Lévi-Strauss.(1) Upon an agency of insignificance does the answer depend. What separates the small from the small--the long from the short of the sequence of negativity, longest or shortest shadow of a reversible cruelty--is what serves or spares the cognition of violent potential. The site of fallibility--it is either within the form, or what the witness, from the vantage of his or her misery, is summoned to foresee as the result of whose ambivalently imagined doing?

2

A small thing is one of the locations of greatness, Bachelard said.(2) But whose greatness? we will really need to know. The greatness of America? "The beauty of the American landscape: even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country."(3) Nothing good about this mocking fund, for Adorno, stash vault of smalls in the rapture of big love: "If . . . oneness . . . inevitably implies the use of force against the many . . . then it follows that the many must also fear oneness. Oneness is like the ephemeral but alluring images of nature in ancient myth. The unity of logos is caught up in a complex of blame because it tends to mutilate what it unifies."(4) Size matters, Heidegger said--art was about relative scale, about seeing oneself against what was larger, a larger that did not become smaller. It is in poetry that "man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being."(5) The temporality, that is, the stringency of comparison eluding him, the entire economics of it did as well. The presence or absence of guilt will be about the timing of the sizing of self-enjoyment, the spacing of the pulse of negativity. Nanoaesthetics was the study of the hemophobic art that was the business of charismatic disincentive--the small that had never been anything other than itself. None of either your, or my own doing--the stork brought it.

The antidote to the small of American monstrosity was France, Adorno said. There was no getting over the greatness-guilt relation, feature as it was of negativity itself, but the redeeming mitigation of a sublimation seemed to have its home address:

Everything happens here. The small--final light that permits seeing that confounds with not seeing--mediates a self-appreciation to differing "American" or "French" effect. Scene of an intersection anxiety, the small is the crack through which there is passing back and forth from a zero-sum affective economy to one of infinite good. What frees into distraction can also be rallied to form the crust that exposes to avenging fracture, that guilty imagination of the great that is the coming to appearance of the small that we see coming, as a result of a going, small that was the experience of the disappearance of the great. (This the fate of the opportunistic small--André Green: "The search for greatness requires that one make oneself small before it."(7)) Free smalls, strong only through their scattered fragilities, root out the trace of development from the image imposed by the "climactic" small, small as relic of the short work of the impassioned community, cautionary memory, reminder/remainder of dissolutive process. If there is an "iconology of the interval," as Aby Warburg said,(8) correspondingly there is an "interval of the icon," the disastrous becoming of the image, or the timeless, hence guilt-free unknowing of the violent embarrassment of an offending greatness.

The processual small was the sign of the terrible work you have already done, or could flip to be that of the work (of resentment) you will never know, much less do. It can be the sign of what, in the unknowing of transfer anger, is always mine, or that of the unmediated relation that was once yours. The small takes time in both senses of the phrase.(9) Oppositely transnarcissistic smalls, mediating passage from the narcissism of the one to the compact many, or from the one to the dispersed many, unaccountable smalls and those spread abroad but charged with the memory of the violent conditions of their dispersal. Opposed, in smalls of construction, and those of accident that cause surface and depth to not connect, the time sensitivities of the destruction of objects, the two bodies of Freud's ego ideal and the relations with the world attached. The evidence of the almost-not-seen is the indispensable reference in the encounter.

I begin my summary of what will follow with Lyotard, who speaks of "the accomplishment of the loss of the object without which there is no literature."(10) This is to be put in touch with the point of Lévi-Strauss who argues that the aesthetic always has a relation to the miniature. The pleasure attached to it has to do with the absence of effort: "Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance."(11) The small would be the object that is the sign of the absence of an object, the end of effort communicating the pleasure of the end of a degrading irritation of a desiring attention. But does not Lévi-Strauss's argument immediately prove vulnerable to the vast evidence of the monumental? His point is rescued with reference to Generative Anthropology's knowledge of the relation of the aesthetic to resentment. What is great is always imagined by me to have been violently replaced. Key in the experience of art is the presence or the absence of the transition to the small, the presence or absence of a temporality, an agency of reduction. This sense that my happiness--that is, my absence of effort due to my experience of the small before me--is or is not due to a violent replacement in turn determines the extent to which I learn or do not learn the lesson of the reversibility of my potential violence, the lesson that my insistence upon my personal centrality, as a replacement centrality, will prove contagious to my terminal disadvantage.

3

Art happens at the point of interaction of a witness's desire for a missing strength with the illusion of a narcissistic form's power to compensate for this lack. The small is the indication that a humiliating identification with this ambivalently viewed structure has come to an end, that the illusion of a compensation for personal failure has been revealed as such, and that self-love has been restored through the liquidation of the external power upon which, at least for a moment, I had come to depend. In this sequence--that mirrors Hegel's negativity cycle--everything hinges on how this condition of anobjectality (that is communicated through one's relation to the small) is imagined to have been brought about, the agency of that success that is the disappearance of the obstacle for which the small stands, whether or not I imagine myself to be or not to be a guilty party in its disappearance. Decisive is the presence or absence of a locatable agency of the distress of a narcissism that once provocatively contrasted with my own perceived inadequacy--whether violence is perceived to be immanent to the form, or is something for which I imagine that I am responsible. Aesthetic theory is gap analysis, the study of the source of the trouble that is the condition of my self-reconnection.

To say that in representation the object is at once present and not is to say that involved are at once an identification and its negation. Contrasting smalls are the products of contrasting regimes of representation that differently manage the relation of identification to its end: one that spaces the moments of its onset and end and one that destages the split by causing the identification and its end to appear to occur at the same time. While in one case the moments of identification and its conclusion are markedly spaced, in the other the two moments blur into indistinction. Critical theory is about the search for a vocabulary to describe this split, and to demonize one form of identification to the advantage of the other.

I illustrate my point with two scenes of destruction from Bataille, scenes oppositely socializing, illuminating in their confusions of the destructions of the self involved. In the first passage there is the lesson of the reversibility of violence: "On the basis of the principle of negation that one finds in Sade, it is strange to notice that the unlimited negation of the other amounts to the negation of one's own self."(12) But modern poetry is not the same thing as this interpersonal struggle: "The profound importance of poetry consists in the fact that from the sacrifice of words and images, and on the very account of the misery of this sacrifice (and in this respect poetry is no different from any other sacrifice), there is a gliding that takes one from the impotent sacrifice of objects to that of the subject. What Rimbaud sacrificed was not only poetry as object but the poet as subject at the same time."(13) In one case there is a violence emerging from without, while in the other, the violence is always already present in the misery of the form. Two sacrifices here--the distinction being that between the becoming-small and the already small. Two negations of the subject--while in the Sade case one is negated as antisocial, negated back into the social, in the other one is negated as social--through the identification with useless junk--but one is preserved as antisocial, resident alien. Two identification regimes: "identify then don't identify" versus--through the mediation of the miserable thing--the simultaneity of the two moments ("identify/don't identify"). If it is indeed the case that the small "maintains itself as the energy of disappearance,"(14) it can do so to contrastive effect, either--through the becoming small--by imposing the brutal news of the necessity of the reversibility of violence, or--through what is always already small--by indemnifying the witness through the unschooling that is the agencylessness of the violence that makes possible its (now unbloody) pass through Hegel's negativity rotation.

To continue my preview of what follows, it will be my eventual point that at the same time that Critical Theory discovered its task to be that of posing the timelessness of the "identify/don't identify" pattern against the "identify then don't identify" narrative, it became anxiously aware of the antagonistic complicity that characterized the relation between the two, the fragility of the border that separated one from the other. Derrida and Adorno, and, as we have just seen, Bataille before them, were all aware of the how their favored lesser negativities seemed an excruciatingly vulnerable resource, always in the process of slipping into the modernly inadmissible greater. The cunning of what was always already insignificant, the discovery of the shrinkability of negativities, proved an insufficient power, threatening in its volatility, at least on its own, in that--and this was the no less the whole point of Deconstruction than it was that of "the negative dialectic"--it was always in the process of fainting into the pattern from which it had been emancipated, into a return of the sacred, or history in the strong sense, those regressions into the market-dissolving lessons of the reversibility of violence. The company of an ideal of immanence--rather than the entire collapse into it!--was then sought to block the potential to slide, to disconnect one negativity from another, one of Bataille's sacrifices from the other. The goal was the discovery of the Eldorado of that reliability of a lesser negativity reservoir, the stabilized affectivities of which were the condition of the existence of a market. In the company of immanence, Critical Theory, we shall see, discovered its hybrid vigor--not the liquidation of negativity but the negativity cap. Critical Theory seeks a final disconnect from the controlled or uncontrolled, overfocused spasms of its Dark Side by becoming a heterology, finding alliance without dissolving into that selectively exploited blessing that was its opposite. In anticipation, an example of the blur of moral sympathy and contempt from Susan Sontag: "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of 'character.' . . . Camp is a tender feeling."(15)

4

Our "good" small is not big enough to finish the job it had been assigned--the selectivity of the exclusion of exclusion. Post-modern logic involves the cross action of yoked safeties: two ends of the end--two forms of identification harnessed to block a third--"identify/don't identify" in no elapsed time, bonds with but does not dissolve into the imperative to seamlessly, timelessly "identify," in order to discipline the "identify then don't identify" pattern. With the friendly ghost of immanence--containing, without proceeding to entirely dissolve negativity's stray from its grace--at once narrowing and exploding the range of the expression of negativity, limiting its vertical leap while unlimiting the energies of its lateral animation, the small, now the perfect crime, achieves the status of resident rather than excludable alien, a negativity at once widely suffused yet strongly repressed. The negativity cap--the imperative to "identify" (the endlessness of it)--is summoned by the "identify/don't identify" regime to assist in an outflanking operation, summoned to put the "identify then don't identify" pattern into a box from which its antieconomic volatilities cannot emerge, while at once allowing to the lesser negativity--now the constancy of a practical negativity--the fullest display of its animating potential. For the A Team of Critical Theory, negativity was a snap. Our eventual point--the lack of correspondence between the body parts of Critical Theory, between its defensive jouissance and its victimology, is the mirror of the heterology of the market itself.

The small was said to be the greatness of Proust. "A little patch of yellow wall." murmurs the fading Bergotte, "a little patch of yellow wall with an awning."(16) The critic expires in the course of a final visit to the Vermeer he so admired. A dash into a world he said that he had loved but a single day and from which he had long shied was motivated less, pointedly, by the requirement of the Dutch villagescape as anchoring whole than by the need to borrow final spontaneity from a single dab that had a diffident life of its own within the "View of Delft," a spot not near-lost into a hoarding, but neglected into indifferent availability--inalienable possession for each and all, inalienable out of indifference. Neither the great public rooms of the hotel at Balbec nor the structure of the building itself sustain attention. In full scurry, details not turned towards the expressionless face of the ego ideal in an architecture in flight from itself: "One was moved," instead, "to a greater level of curiosity by the tiny rooms which, without regard for symmetry, were scattered around the main hall, which, numberless and astonished, fled in all directions. . . . "(17)

Swarming through the novel, these and their unincorporated like leave one poised for assent when told that "In Proust . . . the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced from above, that Proust revolted."(18) But there is not, here, just the model of Bergotte's détournement of the painting. The novel's activities chaotically resist the flattening of the drama upon which Adorno in his remark insists, where discouraged is acknowledgment of the split decision that is instead foundational, a garbling of microallegiances, a conflicted deployment, a two-way traffic of smalls, the richness of a tense exchange between details saddled to contrary purpose, some fuzzing the outlines that others produce, tokens of differently plotted redemptions, each differently assembling a moral world, undoing the education offered by the contending other, each summoned before the judgment of the other, abridged and unabridged forms of the sequence.

Louis Marin spotted this elasticity, this close-quartered struggle, in his notice of what he called the "opacities" of painting--its spots of colors, textures, varnish effects, fluxes, explosions, viscosities, drops. Fluid loyalties, the variously treacherous nothings, wholly owned subsidiaries, "made" and unmaking smalls, can be taken in either direction--liberated from or galvanized into the service of a story. Nothings that precede representation in painting are that through which the whole is constructed and perceived. They can be recruited to dissolve into the transparency, the remainderlessness of the sign in classical communication. But the truancy of modern painting, allergic to this service, autonomizes "those opacities that have, in artistic practice, the characteristic of--through the processes of representation--subverting the transitive operations of representation."(19) Able to express only themselves, the details are available in no-fault release. The result: the unmediated relation absent the necessity of exposure to the intimidating lesson attached to the transfer of happiness that occurs in the course of a zero-sum game.

Sartre: "The smallest piece is several, but, inversely, the largest plurality seems to be one. For the multiple requires distinct individualities which frankly oppose each other."(20) Volatile frontier of artistic and moral risk, the small comes large and small, happy and unhappy to drift in resolvent, gaseous diffusion--there is the "wrong note" small with no known address, no visible means of support, and the ingratiating small basking in reflected celebrity, the integrated part relating to the general rule in the mode of mere illustration or example (something that can always be "cut out"), the harmonistic small that hastens a maddeningly gorged fund to its reckoning, priming it with a destiny, death-bound difference, this the small as feature of a tale of repossession that poisons the prosperity of the whole and its unsensed witness with a shared fate--weapon-grade insignificance--detail as plenipotentiary of a whole in which the particularity of the particular is effaced, extinguishing itself as it carries out the synthesis that is its humble work, integrated by a formal law and thereby confirming of it. Met with indeed is what Adorno hoped exclusively to see--heterozygous twins, the ones for which the question of power is not posed, ones that insist that there is no fantasy behind their (or our) happiness. But we can only be aware of others staked against it: the shape-serving smallnesses of a red-bordered roundness of the self-love that is the charismatic focus of the morbid longings of the noneconomic mass, those working smalls of connected space and time that one can only feel less free to describe in Adorno's insufficiently complicated terms.

5

Of Proust's Bergotte: "C'était surtout un homme qui au fond n'aimait vraiment que certains images. . . (comme une miniature au fond d'un coffret.) [He was above all a man who in the last analysis loved nothing but certain images . . . (such as a miniature at the bottom of a jewelry box]"(21) Was this lost small, plunged in after, the same as the found small, with the same scattered status of "les petits faits vrais," those discrete challenges to massiveness and nostalgic concentration favored by ("the first") Swann? But to no single effect does the adjective of the dying author--used with near comic frequency passim--spray through A la recherche. It is from "la petite madeleine" that the novel as conquering whole is born, its crumbs compared to "les petites boules de papier japonais [little Japanese paper balls]" that when dropped into a cup of water produce a world in miniature. It is less Vinteuil's sonata than it is "la petite phrase" that moves Swann, but this fragment, steadied in a whole, stands in for a now inaccessible, subordinating reality, as does the centripetal "petit chapeau plat d'Albertine," the church at Balbec described as "une petite vieille de pierre," or "le petit concert" offered to Marcel by the flies on a summer day. But often triage is just not possible. In fluid patterns of exchange there emerge overlapping, ambivalent cases--the distinctions between smallnesses are often in the process of being diluted and washed away.

A la recherche is the site of the struggle where jostling small things fall short, or play big, fluctuating as signs of unschooled happiness, or, as forfeit objects, of the existence of a symphonically presiding whole. The novel, based as it is upon the centrality of the almost nothing, is always splitting, blurring judgment over its proper use. Indignant before the pressures attached to Elstir's little painting of a wretched vegetable, Basin de Guermantes complains to wife Oriane:

Lessing condemned the painting of miniatures because the attention of the viewer strayed alarmingly from the referent, fixing instead upon the materiality of the sign. The small could tend against the story, but didn't have to be its absence. That scale was not itself the problem, is clear, as the Duke preempts the charge of undivided prejudice:

The whole little poem was the whole little story that the other was not. The perspective of objects decreasing in scale within a visual field of shifting remove constitutes an experience that is morally identical to that which occurs in narrative. And therefore decisive will be the intimidations attached or not to smalls, telling details, details of depth and intrigue, the smalls at the end of an angry space or time path, details of untelling, the smalls of suspended animation that annul laws of perspective, avoiding thus a wedge aesthetic, unmoralizing the going-outside-oneself, unmoralizing negativity. Dots--connectable and not; the small as synecdoche versus the small as syncope. There is the small that is the residue of our time-line, indication of the completion of its mortal transfer, the small of the trouble of the becoming small. The becoming visible of the small was the relief attached to the becoming invisible of the great. Adorno: "Enlightenment leaves practically nothing of the metaphysical content of truth--presque rien, to use a modern musical term. That which recedes keeps getting smaller and smaller. . . ."(23) Through storm or stealth, the small is variously involved in our two economies, the determining role being the presence or absence of a temporality and culpable force of disappearance. The causality, the presence or absence of a narrative of lessness, will be the basis for all relevant distinctions. At issue will be the socioeconomic work of the renunciation of objectality within objectality that expresses those different relations between proximity and distance that communicate contrasting relations between delinquency and punishment.

Herder said that the fable was the paradigm of original and direct aesthetic creation because it is a miniature. Gans supplies a basis for this, taking note of an evolution that assumes the form of a reduction in elapsed time of an experience of resentment:

6

Resentment is time critical. De Man's remark on this trajectory's destination--"It is the persistent temptation of literature to fulfill itself in a single moment"(24)--must be understood as ethically related to the critique of a succession of which Nietzsche here speaks: "Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison."(25) Through use of a contrastive ego-ideal-interrupting small, made possible is a knotting of preconditions and consequences that results in the avoidance of the lumbering acknowledgment of destructive impulse. The achievement struggled for is that of the wizardry of the spontaneity that emerges from minimizing the umbrage that would be incompatible with dynamic patterns of social development.

"The parasite produces small oscillations of the system, small differences. . . ."(26) And Serres continues: "[T]he parasite is always small; it never exceeds the size of insects. . . . In fact, the most numerous are protozoa or bacteria or viruses. Their small effects are usually well-tolerated by the organisms, which quickly rediscover their health, that is to say, their silence (at least relatively). This equilibrium that is well taken care of, thanks to the defense systems, is more solid than the preceding one."(27) This last mentioned structure would be the scarifying sequence, involving the small of the story, undone by the stealth of the self-countervailing of distance and proximity in interaction with another collapse, that of self-pleasure and protection, of the subterfuge of a form that is in a dialectical relationship with itself, rather than with other elements in a contrasting social field, making possible "a small consciousness upon waking, a small creak, a short run to safety and then immediate return."(28) The goal of this minimal pass through a threshold of visibility will be to produce the "soft" sequence that decouples, that suppresses the historically vital element of the dialectic while striving at once to give autonomous life to the economic.

"Envying down," a "mimetics of social inferiority" (Kenneth Burke) brings about the immediate return of desire to the self, a return unschooled in violence because unmediated by violence. Listing taboo figures, Freud overlaps omnipotences that are to be distinguished: "The king or chief arouses envy on account of his privileges: everyone, perhaps, would like to be a king. Dead men, new-born babies and women menstruating or in labor stimulate desire by their special helplessness."(29) And in the 1914 essay on narcissism, contrasted with impressive cases of self-enjoyment are those relatively pale figures, also constituted narcissistically, that provoke the shrug or laughter instead--infants, cats, comedians. No explanation is offered as to why these last are described weakly as "charming," but the reason is clear enough. The infant, or kitten's indifference is already demystified, its claim enfeebled by the certainty that subhumanity embarrasses the co-present illusion of autonomy. The powerless figures are the negative, inert mirrors of omnipotence, but figures of omnipotence just the same. These mutilated tyrants marked at once by deficiency and self-completion are osmotic of the threat posed by any anticipated rival. The two smalls, it will be my point to develop, are the two mediations for achievement of these oppositely corrected self-appreciations. From small to small--the story of the ritually targeted one who cannot tell the difference, is replaced with the absence of the story, or deritualizing indifference to the one who cannot tell the difference.

"The immaterialization of the thing--its becoming invisible--that is what modern art, in its most radical gesture, seeks to make visible."(30) Nothing--hence my italics--could be more misleading. There is only sequence--the aesthetic always involves commitment to contingency, but the vicissitudes surrounding its demonstration are what matter. The specificity of the literature of the successfully freest market is to be found in the occulting of the process falsely underscored here as characteristic. Edmund Burke wrote that: "A great beautiful thing, is a manner of expression scarcely ever used."(31) But reason for uneasiness emerges when it is added that: "We submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance."(32) Unsettling is that contrast is centralized in this centralization of the small: "Beautiful objects are comparatively small."(33) (my emphasis) Thus the small here does not rescue from a narcissism in (of) crisis. An indifference is achieved through a process, instead of being found there at the beginning. Burke was not able to take what would soon become a commonplace notice of a double life of the small.

The vanishing point absent the painful process of vanishing--a come-upon rather than the schooling of the come-to, inversely matched to the scale of my malice. In Kafka's letter to his father we learn of two smalls: "Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say inactivity, the first is being, that is to say action." (emphasis added) The same distinction between smalls of shrinking and those preshrunk had already been the basis of Kant's Third Critique, minus the ranking that now appears. Schlegel remarked that many works of antiquity have become fragments, but many modern works are fragments at the moment of their birth. A conflict of the smalls, then, over whether or not they are seen to be processual between the poles of the visible and the invisible. "Endosmosis" (Bergson's term for spatialization(34)) versus temporalization, shifts the location of ego ideal, and the social costs of its realization. The temporalities of disengagement: The good-as-gone that mediates our location within the humbling of a corrective unfolding, is replaced by good as almost gone. Crucial are conditions of arrival, the business of how reduction of scale is achieved. One detail seeks and finds refuge in itself from the other; one will be harvested, the detail that is an anticipation of violence to come, that the other, a disconnected happiness, causes us to unknow, its lesson unlearned. The experience of comparative scale is the vehicle of transfer, and the transfer is the rude school of the limits that constrict my individual powers, Melanie Klein's "envious superego." If indifference is to be subtracted from a zero-sum game--if I am to see small, but to appear small as I see it, risk avoidance through risk inflation--the small needs to be subdivided away from the small of catastrophic temporality.

7

Just how much fun is the small and whose fun is it? Northwest humor helps in seeing that the issue is whether it serves as a passage to a shared or a hoarded indifference. We find in Jules Feiffer--in the becoming small of the immense, thus the detail of transfer--a parody of the sequence-based sublime that stands brutal forfeit. This is a small that doesn't measure up, product as it is of the work of a sizing up and down. Bill Griffith focuses instead on that which is already small, appearing in his last frame as the no-longer-available talisman that wards off figural distraction, dividing one away from it without incident. The small is used against the becoming small. Through the small of a not-knowing, one becomes invulnerable to a seduction. Freedom is available from charismatic bearings through the collapse of distance and proximity--one catches the sun that the other enables us not to know.

Smalls in Breton and Flaubert clarify the contrast. The issue in the passages below is the assignment of the privilege of seeing small--in the former it is the beloved, in the latter it is the reader; in Breton, one, in Flaubert, all. Their details broker differently addressed, differently fated self-satisfactions--those contrasting and those not. Whose detail settles whose indifference. From Nadja: "I am but an atom that dies if not allowed to breathe at the corner of your lips."(35) The small here, in dependency absolutely threatened, is an eagerly recombinatory deficiency, and thus not forfeit is the sentence to anxiety. From the scene of the fiacre in Madame Bovary, in the midst of the description of the rounds of the amorously turbulent coach: "Continuing on its way, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai des Curandiers, by the Quai aux Meules, and once again by the bridge, by the parade grounds, and behind the gardens of the old folks' home, where black-jacketed old men strolled in the sun, along the terrace entirely greened with ivy."(36) More than simply dishing up the coarse fun, Flaubert graciously provides the disengaging specks that atomize happiness for the reader, causing her or him not to look amare conspectu upon any image of happiness not shared. These details bring an egalitarian, atomized indifference, achieved by the reader at the moment that it is also experienced by the reciprocally absorbed lovers. In terms of Freud's "On Narcissism," this small permits the unknowing of the ego ideal, because one now is the ego ideal, but, as we shall see, in the form of "his majesty the baby." The blessing of Perec: "To force the flattening of attention."(37)--the small of undedicated focus, of generalized substitution and accelerating displacements that put at one's disposal a uniformly indistinct world of the interchangeability of the objects of (the absence of) desire, dizzying one into all innocence, and out of the conviction of the existence of a morally consequential event, evenly allowing the joy in the world as an undifferentiated state, that of the indifference of not being able to tell the difference.

Homeopathic identification, then, a.k.a. Adorno's "mimesis,"--an identification, through an effect of scale, that solves the problem of identification. Flaubert's list of insignificant places does for the reader the trick noticed by Beckett, who anticipates the Bill Griffith point that the small enables avoidance of identification, the horror of belief and stable group formation: "And without the company of these little objects that I have picked up by chance in the course of my wanderings. . . I would have perhaps been reduced to associating with decent folk, or to seeking solace in some religion. . . ."(38)

Baudelaire on a derelict commotion, the relation of the detail to a proper group, confirming the point while reversing Beckett's valuation. The artist who lies down with the small fails in his concentrating duty to impose conquest over chaotic insurrection:

This older hostility survived in the influential Paul Bourget who, recalling the upset of Baudelaire, saw in this errant matter an affront to a compact community that was a symptom of la décadence: "A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book is undone in favor of the independence of the page, in which the page is less important than the autonomy of the sentence, a sentence that decomposes in favor of the word." This misused language in turn is the mirror of "a society that reduces itself to a collection of individuals."(40) The point was taken up by the careful Bourget reader Nietzsche, who noticed that "The preferred theme of the moment is the great effect of very small things."(41) An excess of dexterity was no mastery:

8

But then for Nietzsche, who could marshal the strength to turn, Wagner remained worthy, not as a charismatic, but only as a composer of details that had acquired their own rights: "Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music. . . ."(43) "But quite apart from the magnétiseur and fresco-painter Wagner, there is another Wagner who lays aside small gems. . . ."(44) "What can be done well today, can be masterly, is only what is small. Here alone integrity is still possible."(45) And Adorno explains the basis of the dignity that requires the reversal of the judgment of Bourget: "The detail can be understood as the representative of the individual, and the whole as the universal, namely that which has received social approbation. . . ."(46)

When so much is there, so much is missing. The small employed against the becoming small is the small against the group. Adorno's affection for the reduced scale in Proust had to do with its deployment for undoing the crowd so despised by the novelist. (Proust writes that "The spirit of imitation and the absence of courage govern society just as it does the crowd."(47)) Interrupting the ego-ideal food chain, the small separates imitation from imitation, dissolving reversal of the mass. Bataille, author of "Le Petit" (that interested Derrida), wrote of "The misunderstood sovereignty of the small, the divinity of its impossible certainty."(48) And he added, in unpublished notes: "There is the sense that society in no way touches the core of being, that one can touch it only as an individual. Hence the meaning of the sovereignty of the small, and its impossibility in society."(49) At once it conjures away the nondetachable indignities of imitation and the group. Vico, anticipating Proust and Derrida, saw the small as an instrument of unherding, noting that an index of modern detachment from the senses, from a primordial "sympathetic nature," was use of "diminutive signs."(50)

Horkheimer made the general point concerning the relation between the small and the group-undoing "pure" aesthetic feeling of Kant:

Hegel, upon whom this is based, had complained of the deceit involved in the focus upon the insignificant, and remarked approvingly that in ancient Greece public spaces were adorned and described as beautiful, while private areas were barren of aestheticizing intent. Perpetuated here was an old critique--the ancients did not usually admit, or at least encourage attention to diminished forms. Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) said that greatness of soul implies impressive size. Small things may be neat and well-proportioned, but they cannot be described as beautiful. The shaming of curiositas that extended from early Christian thought to the late seventeenth century, and beyond, to Heidegger, prominently involved criticism of attention to the small. Augustine, in the Confessions, associates the vice with a pleasure involving reduced scale. The small was a problem because it could not be used, he argued elsewhere, anticipating Kant's point. The condition of an unmoralized self-love: The return of love to the self, following the brevity of its investment in the insignificant, because this inconsequential thing is already diminished, diminished not on account of my own real or imagined violence. La Bruyère continues the tradition in defining curiosity: "It is not an amusement but a passion, and often so violent that it yields nothing to love and ambition except in the diminutiveness of its object."(52) The man for whom "The whole is the untrue" noticed the problem of the bad small in Hegel and the solution to it:

But Frankfurt School smalls had been already understood by Hegel, those smalls from which nothing could come--smalls just too small. The drive to conceptualize could be blocked through effects of scale: "Physics with its molecules and particles suffers from the atom, this principle of extreme externality, which is thus utterly devoid of the Notion, just as much as does the theory of the State which starts from the particular will of individuals."(54) And: "[The artist] must omit little hairs, pores, little scars, blemishes, and grasp and represent the subject in its universal character."(55)

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But before we misread this dismissal as grounds for finding Hegel to be at odds with those who preceded and immediately followed, we must notice that it is easy to imagine how, given his terms, a beautiful small thing could be said to exist. A divinity's detail might well qualify. Jean-Paul Richter offers a view of its function: "The aesthetic sublimity of the action . . . always stands in inverse relationship to the importance of the sensuous sign. Thus, while the person and great actions of the god Jupiter may be merely majestic, it is only the smallest twitching of the god's eyebrow that is worthy of being termed sublime." The eyebrow, as germ of the heliotropic plague of the charismatic, draws into an identification based upon contrast, as does that of Burke. His and Kant's approval of the small do not seem distant from Hegel's condemnation. Kant is more advanced in that the charismatic result he seeks (society-wide in the beautiful, pan-species in the sublime) is achieved in the absence of (figural) charismatic conditions. But, as noted in Burke, the small could be turned to for perpetuation of contrast, and represent a continuation of the Hegelian position by other means.

Kant was reluctant to remain anything other than (furtively) contrastive in focus. Aesthetic judgment upon the sublime "is a might enabling us to assert our independence as against the influence of nature, to degrade what is great in respect of the latter to the level of what is little, and thus to locate the absolutely great only in the proper state of the subject."(56) Examples of the beautiful tend also be reduced in scale: "Our sympathy with the mirth of a dear little creature is confused with the beauty of its song."(57) In Kant there is always the small--both Kafka's what is small and what becomes small (the sublime). The beautiful is said to be in the object because it was always already small, and thus one is little tempted to match, best or borrow its limited strength. But the sublime comes to reside in the subject because it, the subject, has been agitated into stealing power from an object that becomes small through forcible transfer of authority. We here answer Derrida's question: "Why would the sublime be the absolutely large and not the absolutely small? Why would the absolute excess of dimension, or rather quantity, be schematized on the side of largeness and not of smallness?"(58)

Smallness alone, then, does not do the job as it can be a simple transposition, allowing for a change in address of enormity. Size is not everything--contrast here remains. There can be a shift in the location of its framing, of an arrogant vantage. But simply to shift scale is not so much to attack an idealizing transference as it is to alter the address of its occurrence. And thus refinement was required in the habits of smallness. The small would contain the virus of the contrast unless it could be self-divided. To complete the undoing of idealizing transference, the small had to be split, freeing one small to be activated against that other that makes of us the witness of the successful work of invidious process.

A small ever more insistently divided against itself is required, and hence checked must be any praise that might appear to be undiscriminating. Nancy, revealingly confused, on the now familiar triage:

And, reminding of Marin: "There would thus be two extremes in fragment types: the one of exhaustion and finishing, the other being that of the event and presentation."(60)

The small is the name of a proliferation--"rhopography."(61) A constellation of smalls, filling an entire landscape: "Little wheels, little stars, little screws, little worms, little nails, gobs and gobs of thingamabobs, little springs, sparrows wings, cigarettes. . . ."; Derrida is happy to quote Genet.(62) Thinking today is necessarily compelled "to abide with minutiae," Adorno said. (63) Here, as in Baudrillard, there is relation between the small and the Kantian beautiful: "[Miniatures are] liberated from human reference."(64) Metaphysics and theology, which once had the power to contest worldly absolutes, Adorno argued, have migrated into secular consciousness where they survive only as the most minute and inconsequential particulars. Anticipating the practice of Deleuze and Derrida: "Micrology is the place where metaphysics finds a haven from totality."(65) And, with another Third Critique-related point: "The infinitesimal, that which escapes the concept."(66) The insubordinate because inassimilable small avoids reification, exposing the fraud that the particular is merely an example of the universal, so goes Frankfurt School logic. In Adorno with Horkheimer, the break-away miniature is promoted as disorganizing an oppression: "When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious, and in the period from romanticism to expressionism asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organization."(67) Not the small of exclusive possession (eyebrow of the god), but that of possibility. We know that Lévi-Strauss is not with Kant and Burke when he says that only the small can be beautiful, for he remarks of the viewer of miniatures: "In a confused way, he feels himself to be their creator with more right than the creator himself because the latter abandoned them in excluding them from his creation."(68) Brevity was the soul of critical theory--it was about how to guarantee the authorless arrival of the small--more and more eyebrows, but not those belonging to a god.

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Tocqueville said that in democratic America "Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth." Ionesco: "Art brings a tiny, a very tiny light, a tiny grayish light, a little tiny beginning of illumination." Barthes describes himself and adds the politics: "Propensity for division: fragments, miniatures, partitions, glittering details. . . . This propensity is labeled progressive: art of the rising classes proceeds by just such framing." Chiming with Adorno, he notices that reduction of size constitutes a designification--it results in "an excision which removes the flourish of meaning." Malraux: "Classical aesthetics proceeded from the part to the whole. Ours, after proceeding from the whole to the fragment, finds a precious ally in photographic reproduction."(69) And Barthes too saw photography as involved with the small--the punctum.(70) Derrida describes this as the basis of alliance with Barthes: "Like him, I sought the freshness of a reading that was associated with the detail."(71) "My interest in the detail was also his."(72) The affection expressed in his synonyms: "sting, little hole, little stain, little cut."(73)

The insignificant telescopes a great cluster of issues. In its work of calling the small so many things, theory appears a pointillism, capable of renewing itself exclusively through the recycling of the motif in a fresh scattering of synonyms whose numbers only grow luxuriantly. Benjamin, in affection for the citational mode, approved of Giedion's saying that montage played the role of the unconscious of the nineteenth century.(74) Could the substitution of the word small permit a justification and amplification of the point? Sorting through the sheer embarrassment of examples: "Le petit récit" of Lyotard is to be used against the homogenizing powers of "le grand."(75) Oppressive structures are said to be given the slip if we accept the advice: "Seek always the molecular, or even the submolecular particle, with which we can make alliance."(76) Deleuze and Guattari praise the "minor qualities of minor characters--part of the project of a literature that wants to be deliberately minor and draws its revolutionary force from that."(77) "Only the minor is grand and revolutionary."(78) Appearing also to justify the supplement to the point is Deleuze and Guattari's contention that Kafka's desire to be a small animal constitutes deculturation. They quote from "The Bucket Rider: "In the thick, hard frozen snow, I walk along the tracks of small arctic dogs, my movement has lost all direction." The comment, recalling Kafka's own description of the relation of the small to process:

And Foucault on Deleuze, recalling Hegel's own view of its function: "To reverse Platonism with Deleuze is to displace oneself insidiously within it, to descend to its smallest gestures. . . . To pervert Platonism is to search out the smallest details, to descend (with the natural gravitation of humor) as far as its crop of hair or the dirt under its fingernails--those things that were never hallowed by an idea."(80) And : "He points out its interruptions, its gaps, those small things of little value that were neglected by philosophical discourse. He carefully reintroduces the barely perceptible omissions, knowing full well that they imply a fundamental negligence."(81)

Designed to sustain the myopia of which Baudelaire complained, an attention that is only a squinting, that does not become a squinting after having been something else, to guarantee an indifferentiation in the ubiquity of the small, that there is no shifting in scale, that the small substitutes only for another small, is enthusiasm for such matters as embarrassment concerning "the substantialist illusion," "the subject that would be almost invisible," the search for a minimal term, heightened present consciousness, literature as the question of itself, narrative as an act of language, the suspension of narrative movement that causes details to be focused upon for themselves, the intricate, small, smart moves of theory, the project of demonstrating how at every moment a discourse loses strength it was presumed to possess (versus the biography of the hero in which strength is lost at the end), the writer's erasure of his or her own capacity to adhere to statements, an interest in the material features of writing (or art's focus upon its own instrumentalities, in general), the minutiae of everyday speech, and other examples of intentional banality (the cliché, bêtise, the exhaustion of forms), the effort to isolate and identify the minimal units of narrative, parataxis, the insistence upon the image as the most prominent dimension of style, an ideal of style itself. (See Queneau who described the literature of OULIPO as "une petite musique chinoise,"(82) and Céline, who referred to his "petite musique.") There was the ellipse, the search for the mytheme, flat characterization, consciously contrived plots, noncausal and antilinear sequences of events, Benjamin's allegory and his "distracted perception," or Deconstruction's efforts to name the smallest differential event. Also Bakhtin's vocabulary: "the microdialogic," the "intra-atomic counterpoint." Also, the supposed decline of the cultural place of narrative, narrative seen as an act of language rather than plot and character. The small umbrellas the idea that a text can be decomposed into a set of interwoven fragments that belie definitive reconstitution as an intentional whole, the idea of the work that divests itself critically of all the determinants not immanent to its own form.

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Bengt Hasselrot readies us for a versatility of temperament, compressions of mercy and contempt. In a study of the diminutive in the Romance languages, he describes "the multiplicity of qualities that diminutive suffixes express: smallness, perhaps, but also and especially admiration, love, affection, compassion, modesty, scorn, irony, obsequiousness." The downsize-seeing Nietzsche and Bourget found that the crisis of the modern spirit was to be noted in terms of the perversity of effects of scale. Valéry: "the universe is breaking up, losing all prospect of being viewed as a unity. The world of extreme smallness seems strangely different from the big world of which it forms a part. Even the identity of bodies is being lost in the process. . . ."(83) In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger, recalling Hegel's example, writes that "Everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously as the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear." The essay can be said to concern the small, the problem of the becoming small. We are said to live in the age of the reduction of experience to the picture, a project of conquest. Man has become a certain kind of depicting animal, the agency of the becoming small. The position reminds of Foucault, always attentive to the sinister use of detail, the micro-physical strategies unflaggingly employed to objectify and manipulate: "A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born."(84) While Adorno associates the small with the victim, he can also be found linking it with the violent equivalence of the malevolently normal: "Freud and Rank have pointed out that in fairy tales, small animals such as bees and ants 'would be the brothers in the primal horde,' just as in the same way in dream symbolism insects or vermin signify brothers and sisters (contemptuously considered as babies)."(85)

"Why the small?" Nancy asks, "this, of course, requires reflection."(86) Survival is its first instinct, we would guess from the frequency with which such point is made. Insisting upon the primacy of the defensive crouch, here is Quignard with the beginning of an answer: "The fragment is a hedgehog."(87) Canetti describes Kafka as an honorary member of the ancient Chinese civilization that so enjoyed tales of small animals and insects, and in particular produced a tradition of games and stories surrounding the cricket. A predilection for small things (the creature in "The Burrow," "Josephine the Mouse Singer," etc.) is described as protection. Dreading involvement in the great unison currents of his time, Canetti writes, recalling Beckett's argument, "[Kafka] trained himself to disappear." "By means of physical diminution, he withdrew power from himself, and thus had less part in it; this asceticism . . . was directed against power. The same penchant for disappearing reveals itself in his relation to his own name."(88)

Deleuze: "A force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles."(90) Bataille quotes Nietzsche: "If someone aspires to greatness, he thereby betrays himself. The most substantial of men aspire to smallness."(91) Cioran: "While works die, fragments, never having lived, cannot further die."(92) Deleuze: "You can never get rid of ants, because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed."(93) And similar lines in Adorno: "What guarantees the aesthetic quality of modern art? It is the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by them on the smooth surface of the immutable."(94) "Art partakes of weakness no less then strength. In fact, the unconditional surrender of dignity may even become a vehicle of strength in modern art."(95) "Modern art would become the subject of ridicule if it were to affect the pose of solemnity or of grandeur and power."(96) Was this the strategy of family romance, in which the new aristocratic parent bore the trace of a humble real one? Apotropaic synergy of omnipotence and failure.

Already Brandes described romanticism's glorification of desire as involving an argument for "impotence as a power."(97) Here is Giovanni Vattimo: "The techniques of art, for example, and perhaps above all else poetic versification, can be seen as stratagems--which themselves are, not coincidentally, minutely institutionalized and monumentalized--that transform the work of art into a residue and into a monument capable of enduring because from the outset it is produced in the form of that which is dead. It is capable of enduring not because of its force, in other words, but because of its weakness."(98) Invulnerability also had appeal for Derrida, quoting Bataille, from Le Petit: "I am myself the 'little one,' I have only a hidden place."(99) Genet, quoted by Derrida: "Nevertheless, I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all of the police in the world; it would draw down upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages."(100) And there is a relation between the small as redoubt to literature in general. Derrida writes: "Life negates itself in literature, in order to be better able to survive."(101) Wallace Stevens: "[Poetry] is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from without."(102) Bobin:

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"The philosophy of fragments is a by-product of war but equally a technique of conservation. Museums are stuffed with bits and pieces, with disparate members," Serres writes. And here on the anxious destroyer:

Constituted of what would otherwise be its overthrow, the small contains its own safety, confiscating violence in avoidance of external threat, like "the self-punishing paranoid" of Lacan, who kills the eminent person she wants to be and is simultaneously cured of the obsession, punishing herself at the very instant of the execution of the crime. This immanent shaming is termed in Freud "the reversal of an instinct into its opposite," or "the turning round of an instinct upon the subject."(105) The beleaguered organism, the argument goes, seeks to remain in an unstimulated condition. A kind of peace is purchased by transforming this threat into its own thing, by taking it under its jurisdiction, by remaking stimulus into instinct: "The instincts are, at least in part, the precipitates of different forms of external stimulation. . . . "(106) Through tactical capitulation to external irritant, the noxious effects of stimuli are indeed regularized, but a definitive escape from the threatening pressure is quite impossible because of the imperfectly mastering interiorization of the threat. "As it makes its attack not from without but from within the organism, it follows that no flight can avail against it."(107)

Related is Freud's analysis of the psychosomatic epilepsy of Dostoevsky, where offered is a model of the endosmosis of the story of the individual who negates the other, and is then self-punished for the crime. In the case of the novelist, the significance of the attack of epilepsy lies in the victim's identification with a resented father. It is against the background of a wish to see him dead that this identification occurs. The epilepsy of the novelist is said to realize both the parricidal wish as well as the imagined retribution. The seizure expresses that one has wished another dead, and now is this other person and is dead already. This autoregulatory, gridlock sublime that is the small, contains the passionate entropy that is sacrifice in both senses of the word "contain," while not exposing either in either sense of the word "expose."

Each of these figures becomes then a kind of armored beast, protected as immobilized by an immanent death. The assimilation of violence by the small, the completion and reversal of paranoia, has the character and motivation of instinct formation. All of this amounts to saying, as does Nancy, that the small is the undoing of ritual violence: "The fragment is the opposite of sacrifice, because it is the opposite of this continuity, this cohesion of essence that the Western representation of sacrifice seeks to present (that of the Eucharist that brings together and incorporates the fragments of its grace."(108) And Sartre's words for this: "To introduce the notion of the fragile into the world. What is fragile resists synthesis and, when pressed by force to form a whole, always tends towards the multiplicity of juxtaposition."(109) Adorno praised "Berg's principle of the infinitesimal; the principle of the smallest transition."(110) And thus the logic of his cringe at what happens in Stravinsky, where music submits "to the rhythmic blows dealt it from an external source."(111)

What is already small, by preserving a mobility that lessens distinctions within "a field of variable distance," is continuously involved in a struggle to resist its own moralizability. Robert Musil, from his story "The Mouse": "But that's all for this little story, that had already come to an end every time you tried to end it."(112) The issue of the location, source, temporality of the crisis of nonparticipation in a whole has an ethical consequence. Benjamin: "Real time is not experienced in the dialectical image as lived time. . . . It rather enters in most reduced form possible."(113) As narrative is punishment, the struggle between the smalls will be about subtracting time from space. Adorno, referring to Parsifal: "What Gurnemanz says about time becoming space is true of art-works, those of the so-called temporal arts included." "Everything happens by way of a shortcut. . . ." (Mallarmé, "Un Coup de dés")(114) It was all a matter of collapse. To tell the difference between classical and modern comedy, Hegel says, we must be sensitive to "Whether the folly and one-sidedness of the dramatis personae appears laughable to the audience only or to themselves as well, whether therefore the characters in the comedy can be mocked solely by the audience or by themselves also."(115)

Was the small merely a widow tied to a railroad track, just a bagatelle contre un massacre? "On how many occasions," asks Bachelard, "has not the poet or the painter . . . escaped through a crack in the wall?"(116) (Slip through a crack in time, rather.) Does the small merely predict rude acts and scheme its precautions? Is it merely this palliative struck with circumspection, a figure of self-beset resiliency realizing itself only in retreat, in so far as it packs the forces of its undoing? Is it only homeopathic, merely an apotropaic stoop, the frontloading of disenchantment, the incompetent because internalized lightning on the brow of Harry Potter? Serving what end is genius for lying low?

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Could it at once be a wealth, and if so, of what might it consist, and how could it and this misery be a single thing? Not to lose can only be half a strategy--multiple are "the tasks of the least."(117) We have it from another, more complicated hedgehog that the contempt built into smallness is inseparable from self-pleasure. Walzer's recluse has a flair for self-enjoyment:

Unavailable to ritual through the contraction of its moments, the attrition of sheltering modesty, Derrida's hedgehog, metaphor for poetry, at worst is candidate for Kant's roadkill status--natural form slaughtered by the automatisms of human proxy: "This thing that at once exposes itself to and protects itself from death--in a word, the skill, the withdrawal of the hedgehog, like an animal that rolls itself into a ball on the highway. The temptation is to take it into one's hands, to instruct and to understand it, to keep it for oneself, near to oneself."(119) "The accident that can happen to a hedgehog is without the status of sacrifice, for sacrifice is never an accident."(120) Not entirely unprovoked is any threat it averts--cf. the sufficiency with which the imagery is charged. But the creature is a provocation minimalist: "The propensity to amplify the disastrous quality of the accident is foreign to what I have called the humility of the poetic aspect of the hedgehog: low, very low, close to the ground, humble (humilis)."(121) The simultaneity of the double satisfaction.

Nietzsche's hedgehog is a "poor doctor of the spirit," figure of a stabilized, because embarrassing happiness:

Innocuously does the small give all access to its not entirely unmalicious self. And relating to another Nietzschean theme, that of the eternal return: repetition is reflexivity (i.e., self-enjoyment) lived without decisive incident--the temporality of hedgehog happiness.

"The point is the space that does not take up space," Derrida says, "the place that does not take place; it suppresses and replaces the place, it takes the place of the space that it negates and conserves. It spatially negates space."(123) The question we must answer, however, is how to then translate this negation of space by what is almost not space into the terms of social experience, that is, into the terms of the sacred and the profane. For what groups and individuals and to what effect can the point be allowed to undo space; in other terms, can there be access to an object that is the sign of the end of objects of desiring attention?

Michel Serres argues for the centrality of size: "There is no such thing as the attractive and the unattractive, the beautiful and the ugly: there are large scales and small scales."(124) And this would be the point made in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in effect an entire nanoaesthetic founded in relative size, a logic that parallels the bimetallism of the Third Critique. Mirth, Freud insists, always involves the revelation of the small. "Brevity is the body and soul of wit, it is its very self," Jean-Paul is quoted.(125) And so is Spencer, adding the experience of sequence that will be resisted and cause what it produces to be no joke: "Laughter naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small. . . ."(126) (my emphasis)

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Attention to the small is said by Freud to permit laughter in two ways. There is the censor function:

But if transfer of consciousness from great things to small were simply defensive, then it would not provoke hilarity, since we laugh only when inhibitions have been released. Required is an economy in the expenditure of affect, when there is impression of effortless satisfaction, when a cathexis that was formerly present has ceased to exist. In a passage of the greatest interest for us, Freud (seeming to reproduce an argument of Burke) contrasts the sublime with the relation to small forms:

And elsewhere this behavior is explained:

Eliciting a gesture that takes in the scale of what is witnessed, "The idea of something large demands more expenditure than the idea of something small."(130) Blind spots--smalls that permits the seeing of oneself as not seeing are the "more than enough:"

And the book concludes that the small involves reliving of that period in life when "we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy--the mood of our childhood when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life."(132) An omnipotence that does not have to be exercised, invulnerable as it is the atomization of the forgetting of the world, a forgetting that does not occur before deprived witnesses. In the face of that which is small we close our eyes, Freud wrote, we become windowless monads, desire having come to an end. And energy is the issue for Nietzsche as well. On free spirits: "They expend as little energy as possible on all . . . things. . . .  Such a spirit prefers be happy to take in only the fringes of an event; he does not love things in all the breadth and vastness of their folds; for he does not want to entangle himself in them."(133)

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Agency of infantilization, this impairment: "The man with a looking glass," noticed Bachelard, "is an innocent glance at a new object. The magnifying glass of the botanist is childhood rediscovered."(134) Other terms are used by Lyotard to make the point of Freud: "The eye is the symbol of desire--its perpetual movement is the movement of desire."(135) The small does the work of transfer for you; it is, through incorporation, the agency of the transfer of the absence of expenditure, and thus minimizes the extent to which one is conscious of one's own grievance. And, as noticed by Nietzsche, diminished in the same stroke is the resentment of the other: before the small power need not manifest itself as such--expressing itself as a passivity, it appears as an invulnerability. The small was about the location of still life. As it makes available to each co-child a uniform, indistinct world in which no power need be exercised, it is the unresentful undoing of the experience of virtuosic skill, of talent that is unshared efficiency, the effortlessness of the contrasting one, not your worklessness, but another's to be gawked at from the perspective of the loss of our self-loving life. Benjamin quotes Nietzsche: "The economy of art has as its origin the masking of work."(136) (Mauss and Hubert said "mana" expressed "automatic efficacy.") But it is always more or less about the charismatic dissimulation of work. "One must try . . . to see in order to see, and no longer in order to act," Bergson said.(137) The deritualized small is the infinite good of the effect, not the memory of its intimidating passage, the injurious transfer of the status of still life from one point to another.

Derrida would appear to be making the point of Freud. Before writing, because it is a miniature, as it is experienced at a distance, and does not penetrate me violently, Derrida writes, "One can more naturally close one's eyes or distract his glance than avoid listening. Let us not forget that this natural situation is primarily that of the child at the breast."(138) "Man has thus put out his eyes, he blinds himself [with writing]."(139) And he too takes notice of the issue of effort unknown: "Yes, it was from a detail that I demanded a revelatory ecstasy, a direct channel to the one and only Roland Barthes, grace-filled access to that which is alien to all labor"(140) (my emphasis). Derrida approvingly quotes Ponge's Proem: "If I prefer La Fontaine--the slightest fable--to Schopenhauer or Hegel, I certainly know why. It seems to me . . . less tiring . . . "(141) The temporality of punishment is not present--as this is infantile omnipotence, Freud's "his majesty the baby."

Important, as Freud notices, is "the position of the unproductive one,"(142) who is without effort, and the means for achievement of this enviable position. Theory is not the comic because it involves no downward movement of the becoming small. Thus Derrida unsequences it--the small never having been other than itself. There is a split in the object function--symmetrical reversal of the splitting of the paternal function--what places it close to hand rather than at vulnerable distance. And of this Freud makes us aware when he writes of a process-oriented experience of reduced scale that recalls the degradation that occurs in Kant's sublime: "By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him. . . ."(143) These remarks we must see in terms of the following:

The separating issues are the temporality and agency of the small. Critical theory is no joke--no revelation of the small--for the small is always already. While one small blocks catastrophe and lives spontaneously by conjuring up (through incorporation) its neutralized image, the other leaves us unshielded from exposure to the contrast that is disaster's provocation. The same instinct that caused Adorno to say that Mahler's vast compositions were simply frames for saving particulars, has the author of Grammatology arguing that the book is always a miniature: "Writing reduces the dimensions of presence in its sign. The miniature is not reserved to illuminated capitals; it is, understood in its derivative sense, the very form of writing. The history of writing would then follow the continuous and linear progress of the techniques of abbreviation."(145) There is not the voice against writing, as the voice is always already writing. In Derrida there is no progress towards closed eyes. Eyes don't close at the end of a story of degradation. There can be no process of disillusionment--this is the entire logic of Deconstruction.

While the small might always have "the quality of always being destroyed," there is the possibility of neutralizing culpability through the elimination of an unfolding embarrassment, the disappearance of a specific culpable agency. The small of Derrida is a joke without a punch line, for he detemporalizes it, removing it from a stage of contrast by describing it as always already existing in a condition of reduced scale. The small may be the sign of an identification come to an end, but the ending can never be distinguished from its beginning. Différance cannot be defined through its oppositional relation to presence. Described as "older" than presence, différance is within auto-affection. Derrida: "In opposition to a metaphysical, dialectical and Hegelian interpretation of the economic movement of différance, one must allow for a game in which the loser wins, and in which one at once wins and loses on each occasion."(146) If there is only the small there is no experience of a successor still life and the learning curve that it is the intimidated product of. There is winning and losing in this small, but the moments are experienced in simultaneity. As there is only the noncustodial volatility of the small, there is no prevailing of one element over another, disclosure of the small in time, relay relation, no interruption of the life of one ego ideal for the sake of giving birth to another.

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Barthes was praised by Derrida for focus upon the small, but the alliance is finally based on common insistence upon seeing it uncontrastively. We have noted Barthes happily describing Japan as the land of miniatures. Here "all is small." Consequent with himself he praises it as the utopia of permanently closed eyes. Where the diminutive reigns we find "eyes lowered, eyes closed, eyes 'asleep,' a closed line closes further in a lowering of the eyelids which is never ended." Opposed is said to be "the Western eye . . . subject to a whole mythology of the soul, central and secret, whose fire, sheltered in the orbital cavity, radiates toward a fleshy, sensuous, passional exterior."(147) Adorno: "Art can do no better than close its eyes."(148) And now Blanchot, alive to the requirement of the rescheduled small, also saying that there should only be the small, one that does not lure into a domesticating sequence that is always finally the biography of the hero: "All beauty lies in details: so Valéry said. . . . But this would be true only if there were only an art of details that would no longer have the art of the whole for its context."(149)

The whole point made by Beckett: "I can see me quite tiny the same as now more or less only tinier quite tiny no more objects."(150) The small allows me to see myself as not seeing, as in the case of the experience of the angry god of Lacan, but one is now not involved in a shift in the location of happiness. The small does not disperse the imperative "identify/don't identify" over several persons--the imperatives are collapsed, caused to appear in each individual at once. In the blindness before the small--I do not see indifference, for that is what I myself am, more certainly than with Hegel's master, for before the small there is the possibility of the parallel experiences of indifference, the parity of being fulfilled in every instant. The co-achievement of this still life subtracts from it the terror before the Other who would seek to occupy my exclusive space. In a field of contiguous self-appreciations, a there is becomes indistinguishable from an uncontested I am. That happiness is in the observer position is the Freud/Derrida confirming point made by Bachelard as he writes that the small "causes there to be a shift from the experience of the image that one sees to the condition of the image that one lives."(151) The small always permits me to see myself as not seeing--to occupy the still-life position--but its timeline settles the matter of whether or not there is a threat of shift in location of happiness.

Reconciled are positions noticed here as Lyotard quotes Heraclitus: "Those who are awake (vigilant) share a single, common world, but every sleeper falls back upon his own idiom."(152) Proust locates the genius of Impressionism in its having produced an atomized squinting. In Jean Santeuil, writing of the project of Monet who seeks to share an inability to see, in this case to ascertain whether a ship, depicted as sailing in a fog, does or does not have port-holes: "In this place in the picture there is a painting neither of what one sees, for one sees nothing, nor of what one does not see, for one must paint only what one sees, but rather a painting of the experience of a not seeing, a painting of the failing of the eye unable to cut through the fog that is imposed in the picture as it is on the river. This is really beautiful."(153) Instead of the seeing who is not seeing, one is doing the not seeing oneself. When shared is a not seeing, there is no seeing, imagining seeing the becoming small. The function of critical theory has been that of saturating the field with the small, to the exclusion of the process of becoming small--an identification with a prehumiliation vs. the identification with an agency of humiliation that is always subject to at least the imagination of the reversibility of its violence. Absent is thrust towards the vanishing point, gone the killing lines of approach. The relation of viewer to form now constitutes a "flat organization." Absence of effort is lived simultaneously as omnipotence and sheltering inadequacy.(154) There is only a successor blindness in the aesthetic, but it becomes unpunitive when the small is always already small, when it makes possible a not seeing that is not a punishment of a not seeing.

Hand-Eye Coordination

This split in the experience parallels the one in the undecidable function. Distance is required for spontaneity--the path to the free subject being through the free object. Writing of Kant, Zizek speaks of "his fundamental insight according to which I retain my capacity of a spontaneous-autonomous agent precisely and only insofar as I am not accessible to myself as a Thing."(155) A familiar Frankfurt School position, here. As in Adorno, for example: "Natural beauty is defined by its undefinability, which is an aspect of the object as well as of the concept thereof. As an indeterminate something, natural beauty is hostile to all definition."(156) The hostility excites a hostility, as we see in Hazlitt, who says that not just any remove can assure the stability of difference:

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Discernible here is our familiar envious superego pattern. Precious spontaneity cannot be guaranteed by exciting the traumatic antagonism attached to the process of the descending of an incongruity. But there is the double bind of distance, the issue of the durability, the vulnerability of this power one acquires through contact with variously scaled obstacles to knowledge.

Balthus liked to quote Ingres: "What one knows, one knows sword in hand."(158) An example from Hegel, who sees only this reification in cognition:

The goal is for the object to be a feature of self-consciousness, to have "no other moments or definitions than the I itself."(159) Conquest of the strange assures no spontaneity, for the possibility of mastering seizure surely rebounds against any subject proving successful in any work of seizure. The anxious knowledge of Critical Theory. It is through an object that is no object, the availability of which is not contested, either by another or by itself, that one is not accessible to oneself as a thing. In this situation, one will not risk being gutted of one's difference. Derrida: "'I' can only save an inner self by placing it in 'me,' separate from myself, outside."(160)

Malebranche's De la Recherche de la vérité has a role in the history of the legitimation of curiosity, for found here, albeit in dismissal, is an alternative to difference as self-limiting trap, as set-up moment of the experience of the reversibility of violence:

Insistence--in this civil war of strangeness--is on coarsening rules of engagement, heightening competitive metabolism, a hardening of resolve that is the condition of the reversibility of violence, of the maintenance of a tension that risks being resolved, ultimately, to my own disadvantage. In order for an object to have a role in a scientific story, an important degree of difficulty needs to be retained, it has to "stand up" to scrutiny, that is, to supply the killer with energies required for redeeming death. Awe must command wonder in order to block the meeting with unmastered materials, unmastered merely as unworthy of my self-defeating strength. Descartes describes as condemnable "those who seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them." "When we are astonished in looking at things which merit little or no consideration, this may entirely prevent or pervert the use of reason."(162) Deweaponization of attention--an incompetent curiosity, curiosity denied its juice, disinclination to the projection of force, the blessing of a defense from defense.(163)

There is only the playing off the object's challenge. Assuring fullest pursuit, die-hard difference supplies ardor for a hungry ascendance. Valéry: "I cannot see, feel or depict anything to myself without there being some sense of greatness. Willing, doing and perceiving, each have something to do with greatness."(164) And then, Bachelard: "In scientific work, on must first of all, psychologically, digest the surprise."(165) (my emphasis) The climbing point is developed by Malebranche who held that the object had to be artificially charged with difference if it were to not corrupt into that inert response attached to what would be the lazy infinity of Hegel.(166) And what is the obdurate material of the oddity that stood its ground, provoking the failure of tenacity, if not the unmediated relation as not yet detached from the provocation of a hoarding matrix? A ramping up of wonder for the sake of its productive beating down. The mind inflames itself in order to move to adequately maddened levels of m