Abstract Small things matter, especially in the so-called ‘arts’. From the visual arts to music and literature, ‘miniatures’ are a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon that involves our aesthetic attitudes but also our everyday life, our emotional, social and cognitive life. Miniaturisation characterises our cognitive life and, of course, the ‘cognitive life of things’ that we produce, manipulate and discard. My paper is articulated into two sections: the first gives a quick overview of the miniatures of Homo sapiens, especially those of the paleolithic age, and a brief survey of the very challenging history of miniature-interpretation in twentieth-century philosophy of culture. In the second part I focus on five cognitive interpretations of miniature, which are supported by some experimental evidence.
Keywords: Miniaturization; paleolithic figurines; perceptual primitives; off-line cognition; animism; liberated embodied simulation
The miniature, then, is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God.
‒ Steven MillhauserSmall things matter, especially in the so-called ‘arts’. From the visual arts to music and literature, ‘miniatures’ are a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon that involves our aesthetic attitudes but also our everyday life, our emotional, social and cognitive life. Miniaturisation characterises our cognitive life and, of course, the ‘cognitive life of things’ that we produce, manipulate and discard. We can study miniaturisation as a particular way of handling things that characterises the whole evolution of Homo sapiensand, to the same degree, all human cognition.
In a certain sense, we could say that all ‘art’ is a kind of miniaturisa-tion—from palaeolithic Venuses to Japanese netsuke, from bonsaito Chinese micro-mountains, from miniature portraits to daguerrotypes and stereoscopies. I use the compromised term ‘art’ as a provocation only to challenge our aesthetic theories because, like Tim Ingold, I am con-vinced that in order to study miniatures it is much better to move outside the history of representation or to concentrate on ‘the material form of representation’—as Randall White puts it—especially if we consider the ‘aesthetic behaviour’ of Homo sapiensin the wider context of ethology and evolutionary theory.