Bigness as the Unconscious of Theory

I. too big

When my daughter was about two years old, we took her to the Farm in the Zoo in Chicago. The Farm in the Zoo is a miniaturized replica of the sort of American family farm that probably scarcely exists outside the fantasies of urban dwellers like ourselves: colorfully painted sheds and silos, tidy vegetable beds, corrals full of congenial pigs, chickens, ponies, and so on. Wandering around, we eventually entered a small barn containing a single animal behind a heavy metal gate. I leaned over and said to my daughter, "It's a cow." Her reaction to this cow, the bulk of which dominated both the interior of the barn and my daughter's tiny figure in the stroller, was a stiff hush, which I immediately interpreted as a sign of real fear, followed by this anxiously voiced appeal: "Daddy, can we see a different animal, come this animal is too big."¹

For my daughter—of course, I now reconfigure her response even as I recollect it—this was a primal experience of what Immanuel Kant calls the "absolutely large" [schlechthin gross], an immensity surging up amidst otherwise manageable spaces and objects, overwhelming her immediate environment.² Prior to our excursion to the Farm in the Zoo, my daughter already knew what cows looked like, more or less. But her acquaintance with them, as with most animals big or small, was through her picture books, in which all creatures are depicted roughly the same size or at least in the same order of magnitude: cows, horses, mice, elephants, birds, bumblebees, dinosaurs, dragons. In other words, my daughter's understanding of big animals was purely formal, an "aesthetic" comprehension, in the restricted sense in which we have come to use that term, since Alexander Baumgarten's Aesthetica in 1750, to refer to constructed and framed representations of objects or scenery.³ This living beast in the Farm in the Zoo was something quite other than a carefully formed visual image. It was an all-too-material thing, a looming, synaesthetic threat of flesh, heat, odor, and shuddering weight. Not merely big, it was, in my daughter's precise words, "too big," or in Kant's corresponding terminology, a "magnitude that is equal only to itself" (CJ, 134).

As a strictly amateur cognitive psychologist, I would suppose that every child, even one less cloistered by town sidewalks and overcautious parents, must at some point have undergone a primal experience of the "too big," shattering the cozy perceptual schemata through which humans are initially prepared to assimilate their worlds. The possibility of appraisal or comparison with the prepared aesthetic image ("it's a cow, like the one in your book") is outstripped, and what lingers is the emotional charge of bigness itself, the singular and disquieting thrill of the proximal entity distilled to sheer enormity and menace. But I am equally interested in what happens when my daughter grows out of such terror and comes to realize that cows are never really "too big." Among other accomplishments, a child presumably learns to reckon the sizes of objects in their appropriate scales, so that nothing is—nothing ever can be—a "magnitude equal only to itself." Large animals become relatively unremarkable amidst the plethora of stuff in the child's broadening environment, measurable and classifiable by what Sigmund Freud calls "secondary process thinking" or what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the "fiction" of a "world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us."⁴ Cows, then, are bigger than some animals, smaller than others, but generally speaking the proper size of themselves, a happy medium given even sketchy parameters of physics and biology. We might say that the adult's sense of scale, in its modulation of the primal threat of the very big thing, is an acquired skill in taxidermy: by measuring and classifying objects and their relative magnitudes, humans learn to kill the imposing materiality of the thing and preserve its mere form.

The elemental terms for a scalar taxidermy are given by G. W. F. Hegel in the early sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The initial response...