This paradoxical practice is especially prevalent in the work of recent progressive cultural critics who pick apart systems of injustice in their writing. The tricky thing about criticizing systemic injustice is that there inevitably comes a point when the writers have to account for their own entanglement within the structures they seek to critique. That’s when they turn to ambivalence. The prevailing theory seems to be that it’s OK to do the bad thing as long as you’re self-aware about it. But of course, the performance of moral superiority without putting in the necessary work does little to correct real political and societal wrongs. On the contrary: it makes things worse. Ultimately, these cultural critics do little more than provide playbooks for political complacency.
Ambivalence reigns supreme in Katy Kelleher’s The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, the latest essay collection that attempts to tackle the quandaries of complicity in this modern world. The collection comprises pieces that attend to various objects of beauty, such as mirrors, precious stones and flowers, and then exposes their sordid history or the bloody price of their production. In spite of the “ugly history” Kelleher excavates, she ultimately comes down on the side of beauty, offering not a rejection of the desire for beauty but an ethics of enjoying beauty responsibly (spoiler alert, the answer is ethical consumption: buy secondhand, go outside and enjoy nature). What culminates is the blandest possible critique of consumerism, one that leaves readers both uninspired and bored.
Ambivalence trades in vague gestures, mitigating the possibility of offending someone. It’s scary to take a stand especially today, when the stakes of getting something wrong seem so high. The Ugly History of Beautiful Things is not moralistic, which is the charge often leveraged against the left these days. Instead, Kelleher’s collection exhibits a mode of cultural criticism spawned in response to popular moralism: a turn to the personal that leverages vulnerability as a shield against critique.
Kelleher isn’t the first to promote such ambivalence. We first encountered this, masterfully practiced to humorous effect, in Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. In the collection’s most famous essay, “Always Be Optimizing,” Tolentino launches a damning critique of “mainstream feminism,” which encourages women to adhere to stringent beauty standards and aspire to be optimized capitalist workers for the cause of self-empowerment. Barre, a fitness regime loosely derived from ballet, is one especially ghoulish instantiation of mainstream feminism. We are told that its overpriced classes, which comprise torturous routines, are especially “good at … getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life.”
And yet, Tolentino confesses she too is a religious adherent of barre. The difference, she implies, is her self-awareness. She goes to barre, but at least she knows that she should feel guilty about participating in this absurd hyper-capitalist nightmare (unlike, presumably, the rest of the mindless barre robots — that is to say, other women — in her classes). But notice how Tolentino’s self-awareness doesn’t actually amount to anything concrete except for the existence of a viral essay about optimization.
Affecting ambivalence isn’t always so droll. Sometimes it takes the form of aching earnestness, such as Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had. In this collection of essayistic fragments, we find Biss agonizing over her new status as a homeowner. She is guiltily tempted by “unbearably luminous” paint priced at $110 a gallon. She is “upset by the gravy boat” that her husband purchased, because her ownership of such an object makes her feel indulgent. Biss’ tone is measured and thoughtful, and I am almost wooed by her perfectly rhythmic sentences. But the underlying move is the same: The collection enacts an ambivalence that allows its writer to claim the moral high ground without making any sacrifice.
Naming the woes of capitalism on the one hand and confessing complicity on the other is an act akin to donning a chic, thrifted leather jacket: both are concerned with performing a certain kind of voguish knowingness. Just as we live in a time when aesthetics is politicized and moralized — a glut of novels, television shows and movies are rushing to tout their liberal credentials — our politics and ethics are also becoming aestheticized, relying more on the performance of being a good citizen rather than acting on it. This approach isn’t entirely new — Tom Wolfe skewered the “radical chic” for being frivolous back in 1970 — but it’s even more prevalent today.
The trend is dangerous. As Walter Benjamin observes, the aestheticization of politics is what makes fascist regimes possible: People find freedom in expressions of their discontent rather than in actual action. Something has gone awry when our most prominent cultural critics — instead of delivering real critique — offer inoffensive, stylish commentary, ultimately achieving little beyond providing models of complacency for the broader public. As their inoffensive performances shore up ambivalence as a cool girl aesthetic, readers — who are, of course, also citizens and voters — become increasingly and disturbingly inured to the injustices the critics say they want to rectify.