ABSTRACT
A significant aspect of academic activity in the social sciences is the cyclical recurrence of self-surveying images painted on a large canvas, which integrate scattered motives, snippets, or fragments into a collage, the parts becoming instantly smaller than the whole. The capacity to let the pieces fall into their place, to create coherence, and the sense of programmatic purpose of which such efforts are sublime expressions, are pervasive – and the stuff of which textbooks are made. Invariably, and perhaps inescapably, this activity leads straight into another, which is the business of differentiation. The whole in which the parts participate is not one in which any part may participate; some things must be kept outside the frame.
