The Opulence and Liberation of Maximalism

AHP Note: Every so often I get a great pitch for a guest interview and hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it, of course — your subscriptions made it possible for me to pay significantly above the going industry rate).

This week, Hannah Steinkopf-Frank interviews Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld about the consequences of minimalism and “creative austerity” — and the bounties of maximalism. It’s a fascinating conversation and deeply Culture Study. Enjoy, and if you have a spectacularly good idea for a future interview, you know where to find me (aka, my email: annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com)

Have you ever found yourself turned off by the decluttering mantra of Marie Kondo, lacking the mental clarity that mindfulness is supposed to provide or uninspired by the shallowness of contemporary literature? You might not be alone, as Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld argues in her new book All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. 

As the title suggests, the essays inside are a rebuttal to the pervasive doctrine of minimalism that penetrates not only culture but also our homes and mental health practices. Rothfeld, who is completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, argues this creative austerity has left us “spiritually impoverished,” whether in our media consumption, innermost thoughts or even in the bedroom. While maximalism may be connotated with over-consumerism and the consequential exploitation of limited resources, she writes that minimalism too often produces cultural output that’s “flattened and sanitized,” lacking the emotion and excess to provoke. 

HS: Let’s start with the cover, which features a section of Hieronymus Bosch’s opulent “Garden of Earthly Delight” escaping from a beige covering. I love Bosch and even have a tattoo inspired by the painting. You’ve written about Bosch, an artist embracing the most maximalist vision. I know authors don’t always have control over the cover image, but I’m wondering if you did, and if so, why Bosch?

BR: I did. In fact, I demanded Bosch specifically. They were really good about it. I mean, you hear horror stories about people who asked for something for their cover image and then no one listens to them. (…) Some of the original proposals for the cover were just the painting with words over it. That seemed a bit too frenetic to me. I couldn’t have come up with this cover design myself. It’s better than what I could’ve imagined. I thought, is there a way to represent that the culture is sterile and there’s sensuous delight bursting through it? That’s exactly what they gave me. I also love Norman Rush, as I write about in the book. And all of his covers except for one have Bosch on them. 

In the picture on the cover, he’s not imagining heaven, he’s imagining sinners on Earth who are going to go to the insane hellscapes that he also painted. But I read that as a picture of Heaven. It’s just one that’s chaotic, where everything is happening at once. What I love about Bosch is that his paintings are otherworldly. They’re fantasies of a different world that’s more exuberant and bursting than our world is. I think that’s what we should seek in our lives, whether it be in interpersonal relationships or artworks.

What specific cultural phenomena helped you come to the diagnosis of over-minimalism?

I think more contemporary fiction than I was able to treat in the book gives me the sense that we live in a culturally impoverished landscape. I just finished The Ambassadors by Henry James, for example. Whenever I finish a book by James or a book from an older time, obviously not all of them are better in every way, but they feel so much more opulent. James writes such long, intricate sentences. He has so much to say that he interrupts himself constantly. There are clauses within clauses. It’s at times even hard to read but in an enjoyable way. And it’s so starkly different from a lot of contemporary fiction, which used to be the primary thing I wrote about. Now I write a lot about nonfiction, but I still read a ton of contemporary fiction and I think about it a lot. It just feels really sparse and lacking. That was my primary point of contact. And then I started to see this phenomenon everywhere: in normcore clothing and no-makeup makeup.

I also started seeing it everywhere, like in the film Challengers, which was sold as this erotic love triangle. I hated it, largely because it felt so sterile. This is what we get from what’s billed as the sexiest film of the year?  

But then I was happy to see Love Lies Bleeding a week later, which felt like the polar opposite in that it oozed queer sensuality. Kirsten Stewart’s relationship with an aspiring body-builder (played by Katy O’Brian) reminded me of a line from your book: “What does eroticism consist in if not the impossible urge to smash through the skin and reach all the way to the beloved’s bloody core?”

I haven’t seen Challengers yet. Now I’m really curious to see it. I think there’s some measure of cultural backlash to minimalism because it’s so pervasive, even just the visual aesthetics of culture. Kyle Chaka at the New Yorker calls it AirSpace, which is the look of this cafe that’s replicated globally, which has avocado toast or whatever. The cafe is furnished in a minimal style. It’s inescapable. I think people are tired of that in lots of domains. Like, I think no-makeup makeup is basically done. There’s a really good book about the history of Glossier that came out last summer called Glossy and it’s about lots of things that led to its demise. But one of them is that people are sick of the aesthetic that was originally Glossier’s calling card, which was the no-makeup makeup aesthetic. Basically, skincare is makeup. They’re more interested in heavy makeup, maybe drag-inspired makeup. So other makeup brands with more opulent, campy makeup are surpassing Glossier. That’s just one manifestation. I feel this hasn’t quite hit literature yet, so I’m waiting for it to hit.

Do you have any sense of why it’s lagging for books?

It’s a good question. I can only speculate and because my husband is a sociologist, I’m cautious now about making empirical claims without verifying them. Whenever I do that, he’s like, “Well, have you done a survey?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” But one thing might be that literature tends to lag behind other art forms because it takes so long to produce. Cultural trends that begin at an earlier point generally are not reflected in fiction until a little bit after they’ve become apparent in the rest of culture. I wonder if the glut of online writing has affected the way people write fiction as well. Not necessarily in a bad way. It might not be that people’s brains are addled by being on Twitter, although they’re addled by being on Twitter. What happens is people are trying to represent accurately what life online feels like. And life online feels really clipped and discursive. There’s not the kind of meaty substance that you find in a Henry James novel that you just have to sit in front of and pay attention to. So it might be they’re trying to represent the way culture is. People are reproducing the minimalism they see, which isn’t exactly bad. It’s not their fault. But maybe they should be using fiction to envision a better world instead of just recapitulating the bad one we have.

The difference with literature is also its longevity. Mating, a 1991 novel you write about meaning so much to you for its depiction of an egalitarian romantic relationship, has regained popularity in recent years. I’m wondering if you find hope in the fact that we can always turn to these texts of the past in the way we can’t turn to an ’80s makeup palette. 

I think you can turn to an ’80s makeup palette, actually, and I do think people are. Because of a recent thyroid surgery, I’ve rediscovered vintage shopping. I have a scar you’re not supposed to expose to the sun for a year. So I thought, I guess I’m going to invest in a bunch of vintage Hermès scarves. But I think it’s true that with literature, it’s helpful that there are so many enduring models of maximalism that remain on the literary horizon maybe in a way that fashion doesn’t to an ordinary person. Of course, people who are invested in the history of fashion and know a lot about it have maximalist models of fashion from the past in mind. But I think that a broadly culturally literate person is aware of Moby Dick or Henry James. And that’s a reminder of a richer mode of life.

I recently read Independent People by Halder Laxness. It’s this incredibly long, epic Icelandic novel about people who’ve never left their country. But it’s so encompassing that you feel you’ve immersed yourself in a full universe. What works like this stand out to you?

They don’t all make it into the book because space is limited, unfortunately, I wish it could be infinite. But a kind of novel is the encyclopedic novel, which began to emerge in the early 20th century, like fin de siècle super long novels in particular in German. That’s my wheelhouse: I studied German in college, and I love German literature. Stuff like the Magic Mountain, The Sleepwalkers or Berlin Alexanderplatz. Sometimes it’s called the German language Ulysses. These are all really long novels that clearly have maximalist ambitions. They’re trying to represent everything about a place, time or moment in history. Like Berlin Alexanderplatz is, in a way, fragmented, but it’s not fragmented in the way I don’t like. It’s not short snippets. It’s rather that he wants to represent everything about Berlin at this moment in the early 20th century. He has parts where he’s speaking from the perspective of the city itself. There are sections where you hear the sounds of the U-Bahn, like the stations are being called out. It’s such a poly-vocal novel. In the book, of course, I talk about Moby Dick, which is kind of the American version of that from an earlier time period. The long sections about all the kinds of whales — it really displays a desire to encompass everything, which I love.

Your book delves into personal experiences, whether it be your sex life, internet stalking an ex or mental health challenges. Why was it important for you to include these details?

One reason it’s important for me to do so is because I have a background in academic philosophy. The reason why I didn’t ultimately find the mode of writing that’s prevalent in academic philosophy satisfying is that it’s extremely impersonal. I think in a way, that’s disingenuous. Because obviously, the questions that philosophy is asking are pertinent to our lives, and if you take their answer seriously, that would have an enormous effect on how you live. It might even uproot your life entirely. Yet the discussions are so cold and abstract that there was a dissonance between the mood of discussion and the gravity of the topics that were discussed. That always bothered me. There were things I enjoyed about the philosophical mode of writing. I enjoy analytic argumentation, and there’s something really satisfying about the cleanness of logic. But I always was frustrated by this stylistic tic of removing yourself from the philosophical discussions. I wanted to put myself back in maybe as a methodological experiment. I wanted to show what a philosophy could be like if you felt that it had stakes and you expressed the stakes that it had for you.

I think it adds such power to your arguments and can be so relatable, particularly for women. As you write, “…if you’re embarrassed to recall that you’re embedded in a body and that the body is imperfect, to say nothing of impermanent, if you’re disgusted at the thought of shitting next to someone you wish would find you beautiful but who instead hears you farting and flushing, if you think your lactose intolerance will make you regret the ice cream, if you’re afraid to eat what you love and humiliated by your own appetites for the objects of your affections—well, hunger won’t help you. There’s no reason not to try to make the scraps into a fleeting feast.” 

That’s a good point and one that I wish more people asked me about because I do feel an emphasis of the book is gender. I think women are the ones who are pressured to be minimalist to a greater extent than men are in some ways. Women are supposed to suppress their bodily appetites or their bodily appetites are regarded as more disturbing. They’re pressured to shrink themselves into a physically small form. Women are generally not historically the people who’ve had the epistemic and literary authority to write these gigantic multi-volume novels that I love. That’s a very male subgenre of fiction writing. And women are the ones whose lives are caught up by all these domestic tasks, so they find themselves in the position of having to write these unsatisfying fragment novels.

But I also think that in some ways, historically, maximalism has been the preserve of women and that women are the ones who are allowed to make beauty their business. I think my second book, which I’m supposed to start working on soon, is going to be about personal beauty and the way in which personal beauty is a matter of constructing your life in the way that you would construct an artwork. I think women are the ones who historically have had, I don’t want to say an excuse, but who’ve been allowed to do that, who’ve been allowed to and encouraged to self-stylize. And of course, that’s also been bad. Women are accused of being vain and being superficial. Women are also pressured to beautify in ways that are bad for them. But I also think there’s something opulent and potentially liberating about the maximalism involved in styling your life into a work of art. I need to think about that more and that’s what I’ll do in my next book, but those are my nascent thoughts.

Switching to another topic of the book, sexuality, why did you draw inspiration from the gay community, such as the bathhouse being a place of consent and liberation? 

I think the minimalist aesthetic that’s so inescapable is kind of a placeless, global, neoliberal nothingness. Any community that really has a sense of place or a sense of culture or a sense of tradition is going to be a rebuke to this flattening, homogenizing, global minimalism. One of the book’s arguments is that this minimalism in various manifestations represents a desire to be placeless, to divest yourself of personal entanglements. The subject that’s envisioned by these decluttering manuals, for example, or by mindfulness guide is a subject that’s completely isolated, that can pick up all their belongings and move somewhere else in the world and basically find themselves in the same place again.

I think individuality — even at the level of a community, like communal personality, the kind that’s involved in having an actual community — is anathema to this kind of minimalism. A particular marginalized community I’m obsessed with and that I’ll write about much more in my second book is drag queens. I love them. I think they’re maximalist in all the right ways. They’re honest and clever about the self-fashioning they’re involved in in all the right ways. 

There’s one line you wrote about sexuality that I found so great: “Desire is democratic because it can afflict anyone. And it’s revolutionary because it so thoroughly displaces everyone that afflicts without regard for status or station.” 

One other concern in the book and in my life in general is the relationship between the disheveling forces of desire and aesthetic appreciation and equality or inequality. Because I think a healthy romantic relationship is one of equality, it’s a relationship between equals, I’m alway interested when I read — just for pleasure, when I read anything — in whether equality manifests in it. For many years, I’ve been noticing that. It’s been a personal quest throughout my life to be in a romantic relationship where I feel like the other person regarded me as an adult, which is possibly a unique challenge for a woman condemned to heterosexuality.

I first read the Lais of Marie de France in college, which is 10 years ago now. I was fascinated to see in this medieval text a lord who was at the height of every kind of authority in that society. He’s saying to this woman that he’s her servant. That was such a striking line to me. Ever since seeing the way in which love in that context can refer to all the other hierarchies, I’ve been interested in that idea. Controversially, another place where I think this shows up is in the movie The Night Porter, which lots of people hate but I love. It’s about a Nazi who has an affair with a Jew in a concentration camp. But he’s as affected by their love as she is, and so it’s an equalizing force in their relationship. That’s one of the things I think is beautiful about the movie, even though lots of people think it’s Nazi exploitation porn, which I think is an unfair reading.

Connecting those two points, what role do you see cultural depictions of relationships playing in real-life relationships?

It’s not totally clear to me what role they have because of the question of what relationship art has to life is a bigger one. In the book, I say that the sort of fantasy world of a sexual relationship between two people isn’t unlike a fiction. You’re creating a world outside of the usual social reality, in which the usual hierarchies can be reversed. I appeal to the concept of carnival, which is found in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, to make this point that in sexual role-playing, normal hierarchies dissolve. I think fictions — movies, literature and the like — can play a similar role. They too are outside of the normal structures of reality. Sometimes they reflect reality and that’s a helpful function for art. But sometimes art imagines a new reality, one in which the old ways of relating to each other dissolve. A good example of this is The Duke of Burgundy, which is this weird movie about a lesbian couple in a world that’s inexplicably female. And they have this sadomasochistic relationship. You think the person who’s in the dominant role in the relationship is bullying the other person. But then over the course of the movie, it emerges that actually, the sub in the relationship is the one with all the power. That’s envisioning this weird female utopia. 

I want to touch on another central topic of the book: mindfulness. You discuss the idea of right thinking as an alternative to mind emptiness. What does that mean to you? 

I think a lot of the writers of the mindfulness books characterize thinking basically as a scourge. I have been accused of cherry-picking the ones that make mindfulness look bad. But I just picked the 20 best-selling ones, so I think I picked a representative sample. They characterize thinking as something that it’s obvious that you should want to avoid. Whereas it seems to me that thinking is a pleasure. There’s many things that are good about thinking. One of which is that it puts you in contact with reality. I think there’s something intrinsically useful about thinking your way to the truth that’s not useful about the escapist practices of mindfulness. But I also think one of the things that’s great about philosophy is it demonstrates to us that thinking is a pleasure. You can turn a problem into something almost pleasurable just by thinking through it, or at least that’s what I found. My impulse whenever something bad happens to me is to read everything about it and write an essay and that’s the most effective therapy I know. 

You argue that mindfulness is often a panacea of providing individual solutions to societal issues, which dates back even to Victorian women and the 19th century concept of mind cure (combining Christian Science and New Thought). Why does it continue to be so pervasive? 

One reason that it’s unique to women, why mind cure appealed to women and why it was advertised to women to a greater degree than to men, is that women were not allowed to do anything. So the only way for them to act politically was to act inactively. Mindfulness was really the only form of action available to them. I think that’s in some ways true of mindfulness as well. These kinds of crank remedies due tend to appeal to marginalized populations. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I have all these chronic diseases and thyroid cancer. I’ve been reading all these memoirs about chronic disease, many of which are written by women, many by women of color. These are people in communities who don’t have a lot of voice. They don’t have access to power, and people won’t listen to them. So of course, it’s particularly comforting for somebody in that position, particularly somebody with an ailment that might not be medically recognized, as a lot of the people who engaged in the mindcare movement have, to feel that they have direct control over what’s going on with their body. It’s often the only form of political expression that’s readily available to them.

It’s not unlike Kondo’s decluttering and asserting control over a small aspect of life. 

I think it’s a domain where you can assert a kind of artificial control that’s a facsimile of actual political power. That’s understandably comforting to people. But I think it’s actually not good for people because the kind of control that’s represented by those movements is undesirable. It’s actually better to be vulnerable with other people to some extent than to have complete control over your environment because it’s only a facsimile of actual political control.

As a counterpoint, you write about the excessive horror of David Cronenberg films, like the parasite that turns the average inhabitants of an apartment into a cannabalistic orgy in Shivers. Where do you set the limits of when abundance dissolves into chaos?

One way is by delineating the domain in which I think excess is positive. I say at the beginning of the book that I think egalitarianism, which requires proportion and that everybody beget what is their do, is the appropriate framework for thinking about political and economic life. I don’t think it’s good to have disproportion in the distribution of wealth, which we do have in America and in the Western world today. I think that’s extremely negative. Those are domains where the logic of the book doesn’t apply. I limit its logic to the domain of interpersonal relationships and culture, which is not rigidly separable from political structures. But I think it’s a domain in which different normative principles apply. 

What I mean by maximalism isn’t just having more things. What I mean by maximalism is something like gratuity. The book is in praise of having things you don’t need or things that aren’t only instrumentally valuable. So of course, I think it would be a misinterpretation of the book to think we should just go out and buy lots of things and destroy the planet. That’s the kind of maximalism I don’t endorse. But when it comes to the possibly disruptive consequences of interpersonal disproportion, I do feel that the only way to stand in genuine relationships with other people is just to be vulnerable to them. And that might sometimes be devastating, but I think if you’re going to be changed by other people, which is the point of interacting with them, you have to be open to being upset.

Vulnerability is so hard to achieve but it can also be a source of openness and excess. 

I think that’s definitely right. Throughout the book, I frame excess as kind of a compensation for the deficiencies of life on Earth. I think in the most extreme iteration, this is the mystical idea. This is the idea of Hadewijch of Brabant (the inspiration for the book’s title): Life on Earth is finite and you only have one life and you can’t be doing everything at every time. So Heaven is this domain of excess, and it’s comforting to think there’s a domain beyond this Earth where we can have the excess that we can only imagine here. I think we should try to replicate that as much as we can on Earth. And one way to do that is to buy consignment Hermès scarves. ●

You can buy All Things Are Too Small here.

Hannah Steinkopf-Frank is a freelance writer and photographer in Paris, France. She likes stories that take her on historical deep dives, as well as allow her to explore issues of gender, faith and identity through the lens of culture. In her free time, she enjoys sewing her own clothes, playing guitar and biking around what is becoming one of Europe’s most cycle-friendly cities.