A Business Doing Pleasure with You: On Becca Rothfeld’s “All Things Are Too Small”
Becca Rothfeld | All Things Are Too Small | Metropolitan Books | April 2024 | 304 Pages
There are nefarious forces at work in the sphere of taste. Dislike and possibly judgment itself have been outlawed. Phalanxes of stans stand ready to dox critics and unbelievers. Haters are held at post-point until they recite, and believe, that article of anti-critical faith: “Shhh. Let people enjoy things.” Those endowed with a special sensitivity to great and obscure works are identified and converted to MCU fans, perhaps via a mechanism resembling the government-mandated “handicaps” in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” A few renegade tote-bag-carriers on the train hide their NYRB Classics behind the latest Sarah J. Maas novel.
This, more or less, is the grim scene Becca Rothfeld sketches at the beginning of her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small. Why, Rothfeld wonders, are thinking and feeling people pressured into behaving as if “all art objects are created equal and any suggestion to the contrary smacks of snobbery”? Why, for instance, would anonymous Rotten Tomatoes users send death threats to the film critic who ruined The Dark Knight Rises’s perfect score on that website? Does criticism really pose that much of a threat to the pleasure they feel when watching the films of Christopher Nolan—“as if,” Rothfeld writes, “anyone could forbid them, perhaps irrupting into their living rooms and holding guns to their heads”?
These are hard questions in part because there is no good word for the situation they try to identify. In previous decades, some called it a rising tide of poptimism; today, some might call it a problem of stan culture—or, depending on their political persuasion and commitment to grift, a symptom of “postmodern cultural relativism” run amok. Maybe it’s enough just to call it an anti-critical mood.
Rothfeld offers a hazy account of how this mood descended on us. “The logic of justice, proper to the political and economic domain,” she writes, “has infused the whole of contemporary existence.” At some point in the struggle for equal treatment of all people, the doctrine of equality—vaporous non-thing that it is—broke containment and entered the world of art, where it does not belong. Maybe this was a simple matter of unchecked fuzzy thinking, or maybe it was a more complex process of compensation for what she calls “the Left’s dispiriting failure to equalize resources and political power in the public sphere.” With the prospect of a better world disappearing behind the choked horizon, at least we can make a little earthly paradise where all tastes are equal and all pleasures are inviolable. Just don’t call the new Beyoncé album mid; then you’ll know hell.
A culture that treats art like this must suffer from a deeper sickness. Rothfeld describes this affliction as an aversion to surfeit; an allergy to the excessive passions and prejudices that make us human. Which is to say, an allergy to aesthetics itself. As she puts it, sounding a bit like Georges Bataille, “The aesthetic resides in excess and aimlessness, in wants that spill far beyond the narrow bounds of need.” Elsewhere, sounding more like the literary critic John Guillory, she writes,“democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics. It has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.” The essays in All Things Are Too Small find symptoms of this deprivation in increasingly intimate parts of modern life, from interior decoration to sex to the very workings of our moods. Everywhere we turn, we find our insatiable longing for more blocked, and we are browbeaten into pretending the scraps we have are more than enough.
All Things Are Too Small is just as concerned with the scraps and the blackmail as it is with the life-affirming power of excess. Some of the avatars of deprivation that come in for takedowns are Marie Kondo–style minimalism (textbook denial of extravagance); the fragmentary fictions of Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill (the literary equivalents of a KonMari’d room); theorists who construe sexual consent as a rational choice (for discounting sex’s transfigurative power, its ability to surprise and fundamentally change us in ways we could never agree to in advance); theorists who consider sex to be a disenchanted means to some practical end, mainly procreation (for more or less the same reason); and most of all, the novels of Sally Rooney, which according to Rothfeld deploy a smug sleight of hand where preternaturally brilliant, effortlessly successful characters proclaim that they are just normal people, all the while reciting glib slogans about how we should love everybody equally. These, the essays take pains to show, are the drab furnishings of a self-defeating culture.
One of the book’s strongest essays takes aim at “mindfulness,” which Rothfeld presents as the ideological backwash from a half-remembered eastern mysticism, filtered through western New Agers and precipitated out into the contemporary mental healthcare industry. For Rothfeld, the problem with today’s pop-psych version of mindfulness, despite all its airy talk of “being present,” is that it reduces the overflowing mess of the human psyche to a bare mechanistic system for registering inputs and letting them pass: “The urge to detach from every emotion, every judgment, every preference, every wish that the world were otherwise, every fit of temper, every bout of petulance, is the urge for death itself. To live at all is to yearn to be somewhere besides where we are, and to make every effort to get there.” In our management of our psychic lives, as in criticism, we are asked to suspend judgment and let an unjust world buffet us with a stream of indignities.
Rothfeld’s targets tend to share the dull-matte finish of the middlebrow. Mindfulness talk and Kondoid minimalism both wear a thin philosophical veneer—Zen and the Stoics are invoked and diluted in service of shallow self-help—while Rooney’s novels, which anglophone literary critics take more seriously than those of pretty much any other author in recent years, are at their core what Rothfeld calls “normal novels,” which is to say book-club-adjacent novels, “populated by well-educated, financially comfortable millennials” and organized around “romantic plotlines and uplifting endings.”
Within this just-sub-prestige culture, something strange happens, beyond the mere gestural appropriation of the signifiers of high culture. More and more, art objects insist stridently that they are not just art, but also a meaningful arena for political struggle at the level of representation; instruments for instilling virtues. Rooney, as critics seem never to tire of complaining, places Marxist slogans in her privileged characters’ mouths, apparently (and this is highly debatable) with no sense of irony; Offill’s and Kate Zambreno’s fragmented novels, which Rothfeld reads less as “normal novels” than as “gesture[s] at a novel,” give the reader highly directive snippets that can read like think-piece commentary on themselves, distilling the political point the reader should take away. In this account, middlebrow art compensates for its dimmed aesthetic qualities by doubling down on what it shrilly announces as its political qualities.
Art that undergoes this operation isn’t just bad or disappointing. At worst, according to Rothfeld, it surrenders its very status as art. As she writes: “The moment an artwork is directed at some handy end, the minute it is made as edifying or improving as a pilgrim in a painting, the second it acquires the kind of ‘point’ that can be trotted out in precious homilies, it ceases to be what it is and becomes a mere implement, no more exalted than a broom or a pedometer.” This is a nice riff off Immanuel Kant’s account of “disinteredness” in his Critique of Judgment—though infamously Kant couldn’t be much bothered with artworks, and instead was making his point about the distinction between different types of assessments we make, of art or nature or whatever. For Rothfeld, however,this distinction is explicitly about policing the boundaries of capital-A Art, not about ways of interpreting sensory input, and it carries normative weight: art objects are higher and nobler than the degraded virtue-pedometers of middlebrow culture precisely because they are endowed with an unassimilable excess that can’t be harnessed toward any end, political or otherwise.
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What is a critic to do when faced with so much disappointing art, so much loud pseudo-politics, so much chatter about living in the moment? One option, almost the reflexive option, is to denounce it all. All Things Are Too Small dedicates a fair amount of real estate to this. Rothfeld, an analytic philosopher by training, is often convincing in this prosecutorial mode, dissecting multiple arguments at length. A signature feature of a Rothfeld essay is the inky cloud of interlocutors’ names that gathers over a stretch of such indictment. At several points I wondered, Are these the names of philosophers I should know? Then, on flipping back, I was reminded that “Singer” is Michael A. Singer, a self-help author, and “Perry” is Louise Perry, a conservative sex columnist.
Shadowboxing with such minds only gets you so far. All Things Are Too Small recognizes this on some level. Accordingly, it also spends time pursuing another option: proposing an alternative to all this degraded culture. A life that shuns wan art and the mechanical existence it expresses; that leans into partisanship, to the point of obsession; that embraces rather than suppresses all manner of messy and excessive desires: sounds pretty good! One of Rothfeld’s methodological assumptions is that art and aesthetic experiences more generally, when interpreted just so, can give us glimpses of this good life.
A non-exhaustive list of the artworks and experiences she finds instructive on these terms: films, both French New Wave and Cronenbergian glam-camp; cinema-going in general; the voluble novels of Norman Rush; marital sex; the philosophical writings of Simone Weil. And a non-exhaustive list of the critical and philosophical authorities enlisted to make these arguments: Susan Sontag, Ellen Willis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell. At this level of remove, you’d be forgiven for inferring that Rothfeld’s vision of a life that embraces the shattering force of excess is more or less the life of a blandly hip literary-intellectual person living in a coastal city, who prefers NYRB-approved art and mostly turns to the magisterial pronouncements of leftish midcentury critics as a decoder ring for the problems of the present.
But maybe things are different at ground level? When it comes time to discuss the good art and what we stand to learn from it, the texture of the prose changes. Pointed critical sentences turn greasy and laden. Aphorisms pile up, some sharp (“This is what waiting is: the transformation of time into misery”) but many opaque and pseudoprofound (“Remain pristine and preliminary until the end is inconceivable: until beginning becomes being and being becomes enduring”). Painfully awkward phrases start to appear, such as “Before long, the doctor, too, becomes sexual” and “My magnificently perverted marriage.” Descriptions acquire a sweaty density, and alliteration coagulates in awkward clumps, often in an essay’s final act when the argument reaches for a conclusion: “Across the Atlantic loomed the blandishments of the Baroque”; “what could be better than this glittering gratuity”; “perturbation is a small price to pay for the privilege of a point of view”; “the crimes continue, bringing us back to the blue-lipped body above the blot of blood, back to the blessed beginning."
Underneath all the alliteration, there is a feeling of profound strain. This sense partially has to do with the pressure of the task the book sets for itself. In order for the book’s positive normative argument to work, it has to make us see the good art both as aesthetically lively, roiling with sensory excess that we can never domesticate or instrumentalize, and as a repository of teachings about the good life—or else, as in a few of the essays, as a source of data for solving some metaphysical problem about the nature of love, beauty, and so on. The characteristic recourse to purple prose near the end of an essay often coincides with a shift to the second-person imperative, or else the first-person plural: “Try to savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger”;“Don’t make the mistake of muddling into middle”; “a lifetime is not enough for all we have to tell each other.” These are life lessons, distilled from the art object or elevated experience that was supposed to resist such a reduction. To compensate for this tension, the prose takes on a cartoonishly stylized quality, as if it could preserve that excess, that sense of Big Art Feelings.
Or, less generously: all the alliteration and suggestive aphorism is an attempt to disguise the fact that Rothfeld’s approach to art is just as extractive as those of the moralizing critics and artists with whom she takes issue. The only difference is that instead of statements about politics—“equality” in Rothfeld’s parlance—her method returns nuggets of universal humanistic wisdom.
This is not to say that Rothfeld has nothing of substance to say about directly political matters. “Only Mercy,” a long and thorough essay about the politics of consent, lays out an alternative program to “post-consent” feminisms on both the right and the left. That essay, at least, is refreshingly forthright about its instrumental use of art: readings of novels are mobilized as “proof” of certain shortcomings within the post-consent program, chiefly a lingering puritanical vibe. It is only when the essays try to have it both ways, insisting on the irreducibility of the aesthetic while treating artworks not as formed objects but as containers for propositions about the good life, that the register slips into the pseudoprofound.
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There is another option available to the critic faced with a bad and confusing present. In the conclusion to his landmark Postmodernism, the late Fredric Jameson distinguishes among three types of critical procedures:
"‘Taste,’ in the loosest media sense of personal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be nobly and philosophically designated as ‘aesthetic judgment’….. ‘Analysis’ I take to be that peculiar and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that constitutes the specific task of literary and cultural study; to describe this further as the investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of specific forms may perhaps convey the way in which these twin perspectives… can be said to constitute their object and thereby to be inseparable…. [And] ‘evaluation’ which… tries to keep alive (or to reinvent) assessments of a sociopolitical kind that interrogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individual work of art.”
Jameson goes on to point out that it is easy to mistake evaluation—the careful process of unfolding a text’s relation to the social world it mediates—for taste—simple pronouncements about value, aesthetic or moral. Many readers of Jameson’s original essay on postmodernism made this blunder, taking his patient, circumspect evaluations of architecture, film, and theory as straight-ahead denunciations of his objects’ aesthetic and moral quality. All Things Are Too Small does something like the opposite: it tries to pass off general moral-aesthetic judgments of taste as precise acts of historically specific evaluation, of diagnosing a sick culture. Abstract problems—an aversion to surfeit, an allergy to aesthetics—beg abstract solutions: more surfeit, more aesthetics. We learn nothing from this.
More simply: to really diagnose a sick culture, you have to be actually curious about it. You can’t just reflexively disdain it. One can’t shake the sense that these essays are deeply incurious about the varieties of aesthetic experience, both transformative and banal, that proliferate in a broken world filled with mid art. Aside from one grudging admission that she can sort of see the appeal of Kondo-style minimalism, Rothfeld prefers to avoid considering the qualities of her targets that might appeal to people, that jack into certain psychic structures in ways that may be instructive for us to understand what art is in the present and what people want out of it. “Try to savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger”: bad prose, good advice. Rothfeld might have taken it.
Which isn’t to say that ten million Sally Rooney fans can’t be wrong. Rather, it is to say that real evaluation—patient evaluation informed by careful historical work, by “analysis” in Jameson’s schema—works through its objects, not above or against them. One of the greatest and most symptomatic flaws in this book is a discomfort with the low, the common, in favor of an elevated, philosophized idea of the humanity we all share in common. I read with great interest the segments of All Things Are Too Small that deal with humiliating and unglamorous experiences: letting it be known to your boyfriend that you are a human creature who shits; online stalking an ex’s ex. But both segments lose their punch when followed up immediately with leaden readings of Bergman films and quotations from medieval mystics. It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.
All Things Are Too Small ultimately suffers from the philosopher’s disease: the compulsion to turn one’s nose up at the world as it is in favor of airy reflection on how it should be, on lessons and maxims and virtues. The thesis of the book remains true in an abstract sense: we should demand more. We ought to demand more of criticism, too.