let loose!
Individual judgments that become collective judgments, no matter how, will shape our material and our social realities.
image: a very bad picture I took in April of Becca Rothfeld speaking about her essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, in Washington, D.C.
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December 11, 2024
One of the most clarifying things I’ve ever read about the power of criticism, of judgment, comes from―who else?―Andrea Long Chu. In an interview with fellow star critic Merve Emre, Chu asserts, “When I say of a piece of art, ‘This is good,’ what I mean is the rest of you should think so, too―not necessarily in a dictatorial way, but it’s why anyone else should care.” When Chu judges, her knives are out; she’s here to cut up anyone who might disagree with her, chew up their arguments, and to swallow their understanding of the world into her worldview. Because it’s better. Obviously.
For her part, Emre clarifies that “part of criticism is always to make that subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure available to others, to get them to assent to it by presenting the object to them through your words.” Chu is more blunt about what that does to people: “It’s hard to be the subject of an aesthetic judgment. It’s hard to be the subject of a judgment of taste.” And she’s right! It’s hard to learn that other people think your opinions are wrong or your choices are cringe; it’s easy to be assimilated into agreement. Good criticism is tough; chewing requires incisors.
There’s a third critic who’s quite relevant to this conversation: Becca Rothfeld, whose latest essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, defends all the chewing and the swallowing. Rothfeld elevates Chu’s and Emre’s arguments into a broadside against what she identifies as aesthetic egalitarianism, the notion that we’ve got to accept everyone’s thoughts and preferences as equally valid, that we, as critical thinkers, shouldn’t be biased against appreciating everything put in front of us. She’s asking, “Must we esteem everyone to the same degree, or judge each artwork equally beautiful?” The whole essay collection militates against the notion that we should “let people enjoy things.” In no uncertain terms, Rothfeld thinks this is categorically stupid; it “leaves open the possibility that the things in question may be terrible.” With this in mind, she takes aim at a host of subjects, some of which are definitely in vogue these days: takedowns of “mindfulness,” “decluttering,” and Simone Weil, as well as analyses of Amia Srinivasan’s Right to Sex, eroticism and David Cronenberg films, and even beloved aspects of Sally Rooney’s books.1
All Things Are Too Small wants you to agree with it; its pages are teeth, champing at your perception of the world and swallowing it into her worldview. Beyond just critiquing specific people and arguments, Rothfeld leads by example, by thinking in these pages how she’d like everyone else to think: calling balls and strikes from a position of totalizing bias, passing judgment and defending it with clear argumentation, subsuming our minds into hers. It’s refreshing how she makes Being a Hater seem both socially justifiable and quite fun.
The first essay, called “All Things Are Too Small,” is Rothfeld’s introductory invective against aesthetic egalitarianism. She employs the distributional justice philosophy of John Rawls to build the intellectual framework upon which she rests her entire essay collection―the argument that, while our political and economic institutions must advance economic egalitarianism, “principles of economic justice apply only to public institutions. We are taxed with an eye to promoting equality, but we are allowed to love or loathe without reference to fairness. … Even the most uncompromising political egalitarian understands that nepotism is a requirement of the heart.” This is a distinction between how political institutions and our personal lives should be structured that Rawls recognized. Rothfeld takes this claim a step further: insofar as material egalitarianism allows everyone greater freedom, flexibility, and education with which to more productively engage in the messy, biased, judgmental, human worlds of culture and aesthetics, “interpersonal inequality is the point of economic equality.” Rothfeld is taking her argument down this path for one very particular reason: she thinks that “the logic of justice,” Rawlsian egalitarianism, “proper to the political and economic domain, has infused the whole of contemporary existence. While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact, we insist on equality in love and art.” Provocatively, she suggests that the political left insists on aesthetic egalitarianism precisely because its politics have failed to achieve material egalitarianism: “The ‘democratization of culture’ is a consolation prize, offered up in place of a political order in which people could exert meaningful control over the circumstances of their lives.”
Essentially, people who tolerate bad art and cringe takes as part of their commitment to aesthetic egalitarianism―people who think it’s bad manners to badmouth anyone’s artistic work―don’t do anyone any good, materially or aesthetically. Rothfeld’s alternative is to get into fights about what’s good in the world; it might not help us win our political battles, but the alternative―not getting into fights―only leaves “consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.” In the end, a world without aesthetic judgment is a world without aesthetic discernment. It’s a world where, in Rothfeld’s words, we remain existentially hungry in our atomization. So: let loose!
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This October, for reasons that initially had nothing to do with this essay, I was looking back on an email argument I had some months ago with a friend over Som-Mai Nguyen’s “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility.”
The essay is about Ocean Vuong, and about the influence that well-regarded artists of color can have over the wider American cultural landscape. Nguyen argues that Vuong, whether he wants to be or not, acts as a cultural entrepreneur whose writing (and speaking about his writing) shape how non-Vietnamese Americans treat Vietnamese people and, more generally, Asian Americans and their heritages. She thinks that he plays fast and loose with essentialist and generalized judgments of Vietnam’s culture vis-a-vis essentialist and generalized judgments of American culture, and that his endorsement of a suspect new translation of a popular Vietnamese epic suggests that he’s being irresponsible with his cultural influence: “The case of The Song of Kieu also offers the opportunity to consider how tokenistic praise from prominent diasporic and non-White authors can be used as a blunt cudgel to suggest value more broadly.” After a point, the essay is less about Vuong, and more about the material reality of identity politics among readers and writers and the publishing industry placed between them. The delightful throughline is Nguyen lashing out at the instrumentalization of authenticity, how “the misty, random reality of being alive is distorted and deadened.”
I love this essay―but my friend did not. Their criticism was more or less as follows: Whatever Vuong chooses to write is above this kind of criticism, because art is about the freedom to express oneself, especially if people find value in what he writes. Ultimately, there’s no wrong way to hold a diaspora identity. If a diaspora artist ends up appealing to white American audiences, it’s not worth policing; rather, we should support both their subjective validity as creators and, more generally, anyone’s choices to live fully within their subjective experiences. In other words, because there is never any one authentic experience, there’s no way to say that Vuong’s work is not authentic, nor that his readers are not organically engaging with his work by way of their individual experiences. While my friend acknowledged Nguyen’s claim to subjective validity, too, particularly with respect to Nguyen’s own experiences in the context of her Vietnamese American-ness, they thought that Nguyen’s own judgments couldn’t invalidate or call into question Vuong’s artistic and professional choices.
Because I’m writing an essay about Becca Rothfeld, I think this defense of subjective validity is categorically wrong, regardless of whether Nguyen’s argument holds―though, for what it’s worth, though, I think it does hold. Nguyen is breaking down Vuong’s craft and his stated relationship to his work. I don’t think Nguyen would argue that Vuong shouldn’t be writing or creating; rather, she’s taking it upon herself to do what Vuong as a writer is asking of her as a reader: She’s reading his work attentively and with care. This is something any good literary critic should be doing all the time.2
To be sure, Vuong should not be held responsible for the politics of the publishing environment that publishes and distributes his work. But that doesn’t warrant a laissez-faire tolerance for his craft decisions, especially if he (or others) might defend his decisions on grounds of subjectively valid “authentic” experiences and emotions.
Insofar as Rothfeld is arguing that the lack of material equality in our daily lives has prompted progressives to transfer their demands for equality onto the social sphere, it makes perverse sense that a winning way to empower yourself materially is to assert your equality socially and culturally. One potent way to do so is to use the language of authenticity to argue that nobody else can invalidate you, as if your lived experiences necessarily insulate you from critique of your actions or your artistic works. As Nguyen makes clear, claiming authenticity itself is a demand that others understand certain facets of the world around them in certain ways amenable to you.
Performing authenticity carries suspect consequences. Some are political and material: Vuong’s endorsement of a translated Vietnamese epic, for example, will certainly influence who buys it and perhaps their overall perception of Vietnamese-ness, too. But some are personal. In Tony Tulathimutte’s new book Rejection, the narrator of my favorite story (“Main Character”) identifies the instrumentalization of authenticity as one of the three Asian American “survival strategies”: option one is accepting second-class citizenship, option two is appropriating some other minority cultural or ideological subculture, and “option three is this sort of cosplay of one’s own heritage, expressed in the consumption of its exports, ramen and roti, boba and bhangra, mochi and manga, an auto-orientalism that, sincerity notwithstanding, only affirms ideas of inherent racial traits, and sometimes devolves into reactionary fake nostalgia.” This argument that the material rewards of cultural entrepreneurship (cultural opportunism?) come at a real cost to self-actualization is, to me, a more intense expression of an understated nugget of truth in Nguyen’s essay: “I suppose people over-assume authority and overclaim belonging for fear of being denied both altogether.”
In other words, aesthetic egalitarianism applied here of all places, to how we market ourselves, boils down to a refusal to admit not just how power structures the world that we produce, consume, think, and play in, but how power reshapes us in the process. To be clear, I’m only connecting Nguyen and Tulathimutte because I happen to have read them both recently. Still, these insights about Asian American identity have helped me flesh out what’s crucial in Rothfeld’s book: that judgments shape the world―and that people making judgments ought to be making better ones.
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A few weeks after I finished All Things Are Too Small, I read Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation and found Polanyi’s concluding argument that “power and economic value are a paradigm of social reality” to be pretty Rothfeld-core. Mixing Polanyi into Rothfeld kinda seems like it comes out of left field, but, really, Polanyi’s politics prefigure Rothfeld’s pretty neatly.
For Rothfeld, making judgments is an obligation of being human. For Polanyi, making judgments is an exercise of power. As he puts it, human society and the material economy it calls forth are structured by nothing more than peoples’ value judgments: “Any opinion or desire will make us participants in the creation of power and in the constituting of economic value. No freedom to do otherwise is conceivable.” Judgment is the source of power entirely because it creates value. Individual judgments that become collective judgments, no matter how, will shape our material and our social realities.
Ultimately, the Rawlsian separation between the material economy and the needs of human society appears to be the ideal end state of Polanyi’s liberal socialism: “Thus will old freedoms [of personal discretion] and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedom generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all. Such a society can be just and free.”3 Because Polanyi only advances this argument in the last few pages of his book, he doesn’t really clarify what he thinks anyone should do about this beyond, like, advocating for his vision of liberal socialism. We know that there’s at least a wrong way to react: telling someone that, whatever they think, their opinion is valid and right, to them. Perhaps the intention is that embracing peoples’ subjective validity will ensure that society respects everyone’s values.
Of course, this response is explicitly not Rothfeld-core. But more important than the observation that people can be wrong or have bad opinions or hold bad values is the fact that accepting “subjective validity” means assuming that people are blank slates with respect to how they see society. Applied to politics, this argument is actually Polanyi’s biggest critique of liberalism as a political ideology: it refuses to admit that social and economic power structures shape peoples’ subjectivities and desires such that free choice is hardly “free” in any liberal sense. Our desires are socially constructed and contested; they are individual reactions to collective narratives.
Finance is a good example. The rise of retail investing on Robinhood and the growing popularity of r/WallStreetBets have empowered everyone to take more bets on the stock market―to make judgments about what’s valuable. The so-called “democratization” of finance, however, doesn’t improve our collective material standard of living very much; rather, it just gives a lot of suckers an opportunity to get burned by charismatic Reddit influencers (or to become the influencers). Of course, it’s not just a financial phenomenon―BookTok influencers have almost certainly infiltrated many of my peers’ reading lists, because all of a sudden I’ve got multiple friends telling me about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo within the same month, and I know that’s the source.
To be clear, I’m not saying these are bad books (I haven’t read either one) just because they’re big on BookTok, nor that a decision to invest in something is necessarily bad even if Redditors want to take it to the moon. I think both Polanyi and Rothfeld would agree as well that popular things are not necessarily bad just because they are popular. (So many friends’ Spotify Wrapped playlists include Charli XCX and Chappell Roan in their top five this year—and they are indeed very good!) But I am saying that trends like these help highlight how nobody’s choices are really all their own. Where Polanyi would identify how peoples’ opinions and desires about books and stocks and stuff create social and economic value through these kinds of crowdsourcing processes, Rothfeld would push us to be unafraid to criticize what influencers in these spaces recommend―even if there’s no counterfactual way to tell what would be popular absent the force of the market, or influencers, or whatever other forces structure how we interpret the world.
After all, if making judgments is both an obligation of our humanity and a source of power over value creation, then it sounds like it’s pretty much an ethical obligation to judge and keep judging, to interrogate the desires and values of both ourselves and those around us, as Nguyen’s essay identifies. Of course, judgments, too, are socially constructed: advancing a truly original line of critique that stands up to scrutiny, perhaps the pinnacle type of judgment, still requires deep engagement with others’ opinions and frameworks for thinking.4 But blurring the line where individuals end and where society begins does not change the fact that our choices remain, at the end of the day, our choices. And their being our choices, our desires and judgments, is not, in fact, an excuse to write off everyone’s actions and opinions as subjectively valid. After all, regardless of how we come to our actions, they come with consequences―including being just plain wrong.
The reach of our rationality will always be bound by other people―but that means other peoples’ rationalities are bound by ours. In the end, we have the capacity to sway others, and, even if there’s no one correct worldview to get swallowed into―or, if you’re confident enough, to swallow others into―there are still personal and societal benefits to arguing over what’s important. At worst, you put in a lot of effort to get smarter; at best, you help shift the material basis of the global economy and the cultural basis of human society. Either way, you understand why you yourself believe something.5 So there you have it: Let loose!
footnotes
She didn’t think they’re perfect? How could she?!
As Rothfeld herself articulates in her recent critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new essay collection: “But we are — or should be — in the business of registering the words on the page, not feeding the hype machine. ‘The Message’ is framed as a letter to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, and it is not a monograph about the Palestinians but a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as a kind of travelogue. … Patently, this is a book that asks to be evaluated as a piece of writing, and I will pay it the homage of holding it to the standard it sets for itself.”
I don’t know for sure if John Rawls, or Becca Rothfeld, for that matter, read Polanyi―I am not going to look this up; tell me if you know; it’s definitely more likely than not.
It is possible to judge people based on whether or not their desires seem morally good. This type of judgment would of course be socially constructed along the lines of what counts as good morals. But it’s didactic to do this. (Rothfeld strongly warns against it in her essays, as well.) We are allowed to make more nuanced judgments about what other people think!
This is part of what Rothfeld herself concludes in her book’s final essay.