What Is "the Small" Anyways?

One of the best ways to begin an inquiry into any subject is to start by formulating questions. The questions our class seems to be asking is "What is the trope of the small?" and, "What does it mean and why does it matter (why is the trope of the small worth studying at all)?" For each of these questions, of course, we can ask further questions and refine our inquiry. I feel it is necessary to ask these questions and find some preliminary responses to them, if for no other reason than to bring the texts we read and media we watch to these questions and see how they address and complicate them.

Starting with the first question, what is the trope of the small? First, we need to have some understanding of what the small is. Small is a relation. When we say something is small, we are comparing it to at least one other thing. To us, small things include bacteria, viruses, cells, atoms, subatomic particles; anything we cannot see or cannot be seen easily. We are small, however, to trees, mountains, continents, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. Each of these examples may represent their own scales that are each progressively larger than our own all the way up to the Universe, which is so big that it is a place to be big in!

Small is also a property. How, then, is it instantiated? That is to say, in what ways can things be small? There are spatially small things, temporally small things, things that possess or exert little energy or force, and simple things (that is, possessing very few or no proper parts). There are also things that are small in terms of the amount of information they contain: simple images, sentences, and thoughts for example. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it is interesting to note that when we use the word "small," we tend to refer almost exclusively to those things that are spatially small.

What are small things able to do? They operate on a different scale from other (non-small) things. One feature of operating on a smaller scale is that these things can affect things operating on larger scales, often in ways that the things on these larger scales cannot; the alchemical task of turning lead into gold is extremely difficult on a chemical level, but if we can manipulate the lead at an atomic level, say with nanobots, it becomes just as easy to make gold or diamonds or anything else from lead (which is, of course, the premise behind Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age). They can also conglomerate to form larger things that operate on larger scales; for example, many millions of tiny cells conglomerate to produce organisms like human beings. In some cases small things can also produce emergent behavior when they conglomerate; if you are a Physicalist, then you may accept the example that the human mind emerges from extremely complex interactions between neurons and the other small things that make up your brain. A less controversial example would be Langton's Ant, which follows a very simple set of instructions but produces very complex and surprising patterns (it follows a very simple pattern for the first 2-300 steps, followed by 10,000 steps of chaos, followed by the emergence of a 104 step "highway" that continues forever).

But what does the trope of the small mean? And why does it matter? Naturally, as a trope it does not have a single meaning. Nor does it seem to have a single type of meaning. Any answer to this question of the form "The trope of the small means _____." is neither completely correct nor interesting. There is also no single context through which to interpret the small: What does the small mean for me? The author? "Society today"? (Of course, the last one is a completely fictitious entity used by students who want to make sweeping generalizations instead of cite sources, so we will have to say exactly which parts of society and at what time, expanding the list further) However, it is always good to note preliminary observations, if only to correct for selection bias. Some of my preconceived notions on the matter:

Small things affect big things in important ways. There is a good reason why so much research goes in to miniaturizing machines and looking at and learning to manipulate things on the cellular or atomic level. They enable us to do so much more with what we have. If we can pick out individual stem cells and influence them to grow in a certain way, we can replace essential organs and nervous tissue. If we can make nanobots or at least genetically program bacteria or viruses to identify and attack certain kinds of cells, we can cure cancer or turn lead into gold. And of course, there is the power and horrors that come with nuclear power. This is the alchemy that for so long chemical and macroscopic science denied us or rendered infeasible. And of course, with our modern Promethean ambitions come new Frankensteinian horrors. The ethical considerations of this technology are new for our generation but, as my earlier choice of words may have suggested, these ethical considerations have, in many respects, been with us since the dawn of mankind and are being retold through the interpretive lens of technology.

We understand the big in terms of the small. Science and many other subjects of human study have almost always been reductivist in their approach. To understand the human body take it apart and study its parts; to understand the atom take it apart and study its parts. Hey look: These quarks make up all atoms, these atoms make up all molecules, these molecules make up all chemical compounds, some of these chemical compounds make up these cells, these cells make up organs, many organs make up an organism, and we are back to the human body. But wait, we can go far beyond ourselves with this knowledge, we can figure out what those big bright things in the sky are and where they came from. As below so above: from our understanding of the tiniest particles we can discover how the largest things work, which leads me to my last point -

In considering the small we are forced to change perspectives and think on scales far smaller or larger than the ones we are used to. This may not seem terribly important on the face of it, but it allows us to overcome our own mental limitations. We are a proud species and not normally aware of how small our minds really are; after all, we spend most of our time operating on a scale that is just right for us. When it comes to learning more about our Universe, however, the human scale is woefully inadequate for both small and large things. The Powers of Ten demonstrates this the best I think: it is not the awesome size of super galaxy clusters at the 10^23rd scale, nor the equally amazing tininess of quarks at the 10^-16th scale, but the fact that several times throughout the movie you will undoubtedly lose your sense of how small or large the man in the park or even the Earth itself in relation to the things you see at these different scales. The horrible truth is that these tiniest of particles, which are a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks to us, make up everything in the Universe; of which we are also a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks. The scale of the Universe is at least 10^-16 to 10^23 meters, and probably far, far wider than that. We cannot think in a scale that large. We cannot even think in most scales many orders of magnitude smaller than that scale. What we can do is think in our scale and apply the range of that scale to whatever we plan to study. We consider the subatomic scale by itself, or the astronomic scale by itself, and then we compile these discoveries. Our understanding of the world around us can be thought of as many of tiny human-understanding-sized cross-sections on the grand scale of the Universe. Although my examples have been scientific ones, this applies just as well to literature. Literature is composed of many books, journals and other writing, these books are composed of chapters, these chapters are composed of paragraphs, these paragraphs are composed of sentences, these sentences are composed of words and finally, these words are composed of symbols (which can be pictograms that represent even more basic concepts, but are more commonly second-level abstractions that no longer refer to any particular object). Even for comparatively simple writing (this post for instance) we are forced by the limits of our tiny little minds to break the writing up into many bite-sized thoughts in the form of sentences or even focus on individual words.

Rather than viewing this pessimistically as a way to demonstrate to ourselves just how stupid and unaware we are, I prefer to think that by recognizing our limitations, our "smallness," and devising ways to circumvent these limitations (such as developing scientific notation to deal with extremely large numbers, which is essentially reducing a large number to many smaller ones), we are transcending these biological limitations and, like Langton's Ant, becoming something more than the sum of our parts.