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Full Description
A philosophical exploration of our relationship to large objects and their outsized psychological effects.
Big Culture asks a simple question: why do big things give us big feelings? Skyscrapers, disasters, and other large phenomena can elicit fear, attraction, and awe. David Wittenberg argues that these feelings cannot be explained through objects' size alone. Instead, he contends that an encounter with bigness is a primal, even violent sensation like little else that we experience in our well-proportioned adult lives.
Drawing on examples as commonplace and as singular as atomic bombs, cinematic effects, pornographic "macrophilia," monstrous creatures, and more, Wittenberg demonstrates how big things tap into our earliest experiences of the world, reigniting our most fundamental feelings about reality. In doing so, Wittenberg offers a new aesthetics of magnitude and of the special role that bigness plays in our everyday perception of objects and images.
Contents
1. Fear of Bigness
2. Postulates of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Taxidermy
What Is Big Is Too Big
What Is Big Is Small
Uncompromising Bulk
3. Unsublimity: The Atomic Bomb
The Bomb Is Too Big
Middle Distance
The Sublime
The Bomb Is (Too) Small
Marketable Euphemism
4. Antinomy of an Aesthetics of Magnitude
Could Be Bigger
Size Is Relative
Size Is Absolute
5. Hyperfacticity: The Big-Budget Film
Waste
Monster
Toy
Scale Is a Euphemism About Size
6. Macrophilia: The Bigness of the Body
Microscopical Vision
Our Ravish'd Eyes
7. Racism: The Bigness of Michael Brown
Hulk Hogan
To Cry Like Children
Super-Predator
8. Architecture Without Space: The Skyscraper
Automatic Architecture
Cartographical Vision
The Value of Monotony
Weapon
Barad-dûr
9. Disaster: The Titanic
Live News
Expenditure Spectacle
Monad
Monstrous Day Residue
10. Living with Bigness: Kazuo Shinohara
Against Comfort
Against Space
Against Security
The House Is Bigger Than the City
11. Perception and Illusion
Bigness Before Size
Moon Illusion
Man in the Street
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
