As I suggested earlier, small is a slippery, uncertain word, always relative and heavily dependent on context. We use it oppositionally to measure an object by contrasting it with its surroundings. More than anything else, its use is a question of approach. We approach small things in a special way, in tentative fashion and with some hesitation. Yet by the same token our approach to the small object is perhaps closer than the approach we take to larger things. For the sculptor, performance artist, and critic Robert Morris, the latter consideration is an article of faith. He sees in smallness a guarantor of the personal quality of perception: “The quality of intimacy is attached to an object in a fairly direct proportion as its size diminishes in relation to oneself. The quality of publicness is attached in proportion as the size increases in relation to oneself ”.

~ Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature

With cuteness out of the way, small things are free to take on significance. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard seems to have thought so. The chapter of The Poetics of Space he devotes to miniature is quick to put aside the idea that to discuss miniature is merely to discuss scale (the teddy bear as tiny little bear): “The geometrician,” he writes, “sees exactly the same thing in two similar figures drawn to different scales. The plan of a house drawn on a reduced scale implies none of the problems that are inherent to a philosophy of the imagination.” And before the chapter gets fully underway (if you’re willing to wade through pedantry to get to poetry, which you sometimes have to do with Bachelard): “Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.”

~ Suzanne Menghraj @ Guernica (via)