Keene Short, "Erin Dorney and an Ontology of Ambivalence" (Assay 12.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2

Keene Short

Erin Dorney and an Ontology of Ambivalence

My difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
—Virginia Woolf, letter to Ethel Smyth, 28 August 1930

Erin Dorney’s Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering (Autofocus Books, 2025) demonstrates the utility, and not just the study, of ambivalence. The text is organized as a daybook of thirty short entries paired with collages juxtaposing sidecut views of geodes, nature imagery, and minimal text, amounting to how Dorney uses ambivalence as an organizing principle that implicates the reader as a co-constituent observer in the author’s personal experience with lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.

The expression of ambivalence in literature is commonplace, to be sure, and CNF authors frequently use the genre to articulate mixed, contradictory, inconsistent, or simultaneously opposing feelings. What makes ambivalence worth interrogating now is its potential as a model of expression (and not just as a subject that is expressed) which can contradict the ideological capture of rationalism in service of imperialism—that is, ambivalence has the potential to challenges hyper-rationalist and binary thinking that has structured colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. This confrontation is complicated further by the origins of the term ambivalence itself as a symptom of schizophrenia, first theorized by early twentieth century psychologists who were involved in the era’s eugenicist movement that was itself a descendent of Enlightenment hyper-rationalist ontology.

In this context, ambivalence was originally framed as a problem to be fixed, a sign of social and cultural incongruity and neurodiversity. These were among the many experiences that centralized power structures abhorred for their capacity to puncture what those power structures dictated as the status quo, a dictatorial status that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as an “ontology of the assertion,” or a western organization of language that values authoritative declaratives—about gender, about ability, about race—over subjunctive pluralistic modes of expression that then allow for subsequent plurality. According to such an ontology, singularly declarative syntax serves existing hierarchies by continually proclaiming as objective truth, their presence as rational observations, with no regard for who is observing, who is being observed, or why.

What, then, does an ontology of ambivalence look like? Erin Dorney’s short book utilizes ambivalence at structural level, not just as a subject of discussion but a mode of being in the world, a status that positions the nature of truth in stark contrast to the hyper-rationalism that positions objective truth as fixed and stable according to those with the power to profess their observations. If creative nonfiction is worth celebrating for its resistance to singularly authoritarian diagnoses of meaning—the authorial “I” telling the reader how to think and feel about reality, underpinned by the work of memoirists who blur boundaries, ask questions, and poke holes in superstructural logic through subjective and subjunctive language—what does it mean to impose the author’s own experience of ambivalence onto the reader in the same way, to implicate the reader in a shared sense of ambivalence that goes beyond stating and becomes an act of pluralistic collaborative meaning-making?

Contrasts, Juxtapositions, and Contradictions

Each entry in Dorney’s daybook is titled simply “Day 1,” Day 2,” etc., and each one begins with the address “Dear Adriene,” a reference to the popular online yoga series, Yoga with Adriene. Taking the form of a daily diary addressed to a yoga instructor, Dorney’s text and image collection explores the day-by-day sense of ambivalence she felt toward her own approach to coping with isolation, creating a series of collages that blend together elements of memory, reflection, contradiction, criticism, and interrogation. The text leaves the reader alone with the narrator’s thoughts in the company of an Internet personality the narrator witnesses but who cannot herself witness back. The situation itself is not particularly unique, as many people experienced increased isolation and Internet usage in 2020. Instead, Dorney’s juxtaposition of contradictory feelings and actions and structural brevity—short sections compiling a relatively short page range—work to impose the narrator’s ambivalence onto the reader while recounting the experience of ambivalence from the past for the reader to witness in the present.

The most imposing juxtapositions in Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering are the book’s visual collages paired with the daily entries. Between “Day 1” and “Day 2,” for example, the first collage in the book creates a physical separation between the first two days and comprises multiple layers of text, color, and image. Overlaying a background depicting leafless shrubs poking up from a white field of snow is a series of overlapping texture-heavy fragments. At the center of these are the words “the year lumbered in and never left.” Situating collages between days calls to mind recurring dream sequences with a heightened sense of fantasia and excess and mystery, all of which contrast the visual simplicity in the daily entries. Juxtaposing day and night like this, Dorney emphasizes the sparseness of each day’s entries, suggesting that the waking world is dry and sparse compared to the colorful and exuberant intrigue that both follow and precede each day.

But each day’s entry is a knotted, entangled collage of meaning on its own. Like Adriene’s yoga videos that Dorney witnesses, the reader becomes a witness to Dorney’s experiences. The entry titled “Day 20” reads as follows:

Dear Adriene,
What’s bad for me is good for you—tension, stress, that whinge in my shoulders. I sit at home and you welcome it. What does it feel like to have everyone tune you in? I watch a tick climb until I lose track of it, like time. Each day recirculates. The system is go. It breaks down every twenty minutes. Milkweed to seed and some wrinkled fern. I watch myself watch you and hate every second of the sensation (49).

The section is as compact and economical as a poem, a series of parts that would ordinarily amount to several different wholes. Dorney stitches together several different declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentiments, beginning with the observation that her bodily aches are both the result of and inciting desire for Adriene’s yoga videos. Her attitude here is distinctly negative, expressing physical discomfort and “hatred” she feels catching herself in the screen crosscut with Adriene herself. The computer screen becomes both a mirror and a window in which the narrator is confronted by herself while trying to confront a woman instructing her with imperative commands, but the screen cannot be described as a palimpsest in which Dorney’s presence fills up space that has otherwise been erased. The video plays a recording of the past in the narrative present; nothing about it has been altered or diminished, but is instead presented to Dorney—and the reader by extension—as an intact artifact that simultaneously reflects Dorney’s image back to her.

The clash is not one image filling in the gaps in another image, but two images simultaneously occupying the same space. What Dorney sees on the screen, then, is Adriene the yoga instructor and herself as the yoga student, and through that simultaneity, the reader is indicted as a witness in second-person as both the observer and the observed, as the reader takes the space of the addressed “you” that Dorney uses to direct her attitude toward Adriene: “I watch myself watch you and hate every second of the sensation.” From the page, Dorney reminds the reader that the reader is watching Dorney, like every reader of every work of nonfiction. The observation that “What’s bad for me is good for you” works in the same way, creating a textual schematic in which the “you” is simultaneously the direct addressee (Adriene) and implicitly the reader. Both statements are confronting for the same reason. Nonfiction readers bear witness to the discomfort of nonfiction writers. What’s good for the audience is what was, at least once, bad for the narrator.

More importantly, Dorney notes at the beginning of the book that every italicized passage that follows is a direct quote from the yoga instructor Adriene, reformatted as internal monologue that the narrator has with herself. Dorney never provides the reader with any information about which lessons, videos, or dates the quotes come from, completely stripping them of context beyond their original speaker. The phrase “The system is go,” then, is a decontextualized quote whose meaning is entirely reshaped by its juxtaposition between Dorney’s own words, “Each day recirculates” and “It breaks down every twenty minutes.” These two phrases together might refer to the length of her yoga videos on a daily basis, but what matters is that the meaning falls entirely under Dorney’s control, transforming Adriene’s voice into a part of her own as a way of expressing her sense of stress and displeasure. In this sense, Dorney retrofits Adriene’s voice, at least in part, to construct an ambivalent version of her own social media persona.

Meanwhile, the experience of taking a virtual asynchronous yoga class and hating the experience of watching yourself on the screen triangulates the narrator’s ambivalence about space (which is empty but material), the internet (which is infinite but immaterial), and the body (which is material and finite). The daybook structure lends itself to how one changes, and how one perceives oneself changing, over the course of time, a document that accumulates versions of the self that, in total, reveal selfhood to be fluid and unstable, or full of gaps and contradictions.

These constituent components of juxtaposition and contradiction amount not to a series of incomplete expressions but the complete expression of simultaneously existing versions of the self. The version of Dorney who wrote “Day 1” is simultaneously the same Dorney who wrote “Day 30” at the end of the book, and a changed version at the same time, revealed through the text by how Dorney attends to her circumstances, to herself and her writing, to the degree that even her audience is implicated in the ambivalence. But is this just the expression of ambivalence, or the use of ambivalence as a structural technique that organizes the text itself?

Genealogy

It is noteworthy that the word ambivalence originally comes from early twentieth-century psychology as one of several theorized symptoms for diagnosing mental illness. In this context, ambivalence described non-normative expressions and desires, a tool for marking patients as pathologically Other and therefore worthy of study at best, isolation and sterilization at worst. In stark contrast to its deployment today, a century ago ambivalent language was a sign that some clinicians sought to uncover in patients because ambivalence—as simple as being uncertain about something or as complex as holding multiple contradictory beliefs—was assumed to indicate deeper psychological problems.

In the early twentieth century, the Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler coined the term Ambivalenz to describe what he thought was a symptom of schizophrenia, which is another word that Bleuler coined, along with the word autism. Its deeper roots come from Latin--ambi, meaning both, from which we get the bi in words like bifurcation and bisexuality—and valiance, similar to valiant, meaning strength. Bleuler articulates his theories regarding schizophrenia in his 1910 book Dementia Praecox. Following “Association” and “Affectivity” as the primary symptoms, Bleuler writes that ambivalence is the “tendency of the schizophrenic psyche to endow the most diverse psychisms [sic] with both a positive and negative indicator at one and the same time,” or as he clarifies, “holding pleasant and unpleasant feelings” (Bleuler 53).

At the turn-of-the-century, the long roots of the eugenics campaign that preceded the Holocaust were evident in Bleuler’s rhetoric. He worked closely with Emil Kraepelin, another groundbreaking psychiatrist who was also influential in the eugenics movement upon which the Nazi euthanasia program was built, though Bleuler’s work was much less overtly fascistic than Kraepelin’s. The evidence that Bleuler provides when explaining ambivalence is dated and problematic in the usual ways. In one example, Bleuler points to one male patient wanting to “commit fellatio” on other patients as a sign of “affective ambivalence,” though it also appears that the broader problem was the patient’s simultaneous desire to end his own life and to keep living. Today, we would recognize the patient as having depression and likely at risk of suicide, regardless of the patient’s sexuality. But in Bleuler’s analysis, homosexuality, depression, and suicidal ideation all fall under the same symptomatic categories as (from his perspective) contradictory beliefs and desires, all equal signs that the patient was in need of clinical intervention from a powerful institution. Here, then, is the first and most obvious demarcation between how ambivalence was conceived by psychologists in the early 1900s and how memoirists utilize it in their craft today, from a symptom to a commonplace emotion worthy of expression and reflection. For Bleuler, it was symptomatic of nonnormative behavior that needed some kind of fixing, whereas today, memoirists might examine their own ambivalent attitudes to showcase how common—or how normative—ambivalent feelings actually are.

Although Bleuler’s Dementia Praecox does not explicitly advocate for eugenicist policies such as forced sterilization, the last paragraph is unsettlingly vague: “Most of our worst restraining measures would be unnecessary, if we were not duty-bound to preserve the patients’ lives which, for them as well as for others, are only of negative value” (488-489). However, years later, in 1924, Bleuler finally did call for forced sterilization in his Textbook of Psychiatry, writing that “the more severely burdened should not propagate themselves” (244).

This is not to say that the origins of the word ambivalence should shape contemporary uses—to suggest, for instance, that the word needs to be reclaimed. Instead, the etymology of ambivalence demonstrates that what the word signifies (uncertainty, contradictory feelings, mixed emotions) has historically fallen under psychological, medical, sociological, legal, and ultimately political frameworks. This remains true today, but outside the realm of strictly clinical psychology. Expressing uncertainty, hesitation, or doubt is often viewed along political and gendered lines. Absolute certainty and unshakeable confidence are framed as masculine, while mixed emotions are conversely treated as feminine traits. The most recent wave of anti-intellectualism that has taken hold in American politics operates on similar assumptions, that it is masculine to act without thinking—to shoot first and ask questions later—and that taking into consideration a variety of possible responses or potential contradictions is a sign of flawed, clouded thinking. This is why expressions of ambivalence in creative nonfiction can still be culturally and politically fraught. Ambivalence is far from neutral, and it should be noted that authoritarian movements often thrive on the termination of trust in public institutions, the press, and higher education. The ubiquity of phrases like “post-truth” and “alternative facts” in the last decade demonstrates as much.

Giorgio Agamben describes the way that unambiguous certainty serves power at an institutional level according to two ontological modes of expression. “The ontology of the apophantic assertion,” he writes, “is expressed essentially in the indicative; the second, the ontology of the command, is expressed essentially in the imperative” (59). For Agamben, these ontologies are reducible neatly to their linguistic origins in the Greek form of to be, either esti (is) or esto (be): One is a declaration, the other is a command. Both ontologies are arguably necessary in power structures—first to diagnose the patient, drawing on Foucault’s body of work, and then enforce the patient’s agency thereafter. But Agamben nevertheless draws a distinction between a declarative ontology and an imperative one, shuffling “science and philosophy” into the former and “law, religion, and magic” into the second. This, too, aligns with a Foucauldian framework, in which a scientist describes a problem that requires law enforcement to solve through confinement or coercion.

Agamben noticeably does not allow space for an ontology of uncertainty, though one can assume that philosophers in his tradition might assume that an ontology of interrogation necessarily leads to definitive statements. Nevertheless, his analysis points to why ambivalence has been viewed in western societies as a signifier of trouble. Ambivalent declarations challenge longstanding philosophical and scientific assumptions and can erode the social and interpersonal imperatives dictated through religion, magic, and law.

Challenging any of the above power structures is certainly a bedrock of literature through interrogation, but often through the production of other declarations and imperatives. In its simplest form, saying no in the face of fascism is powerful as a counter-imperative, but it remains, ontologically speaking, another imperative, directed, if at nobody else, to the self. The lyric essay, on the other hand, allows for interrogations that do not arrive at conclusively declarative statements or propositions. An ontology of ambivalence is not solely descriptive or imperative—not “you are” or “you do”—but instead goes beyond both modes of expression into a wider, more encompassing ontology of the simultaneous, the juxtaposition of mixed feelings, or to use Bleuler’s original definition, an ontology that allows for both positive and negative traits simultaneously, but without the need for resolution. Allowing tensions to remain unresolved, then, is when ambivalence in memoir can function as a structure and not just as a subject.

Reader, Author, Self

Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering is organized according to a set of rules that Dorney outlines for the reader. If the text is italicized, the reader is told that those words are quotes from Adriene. If the text is written in second-person, then the reader understands that the addressee is Adriene. If second-person text is italicized, we understand that the addressee is Adriene guiding her online pupils, including the author, in a yoga class, but because of the rules established by the book’s repeated logic, the reader also can interpret italicized second-person as a contradictory address to Adriene herself, and because of the nature of second-person in literature as a way of implicating the reader in a text, there are numerous moments where these same rules established by the text fail to help clarify for the reader how to make sense of a given passage. For example, “Day 14” reads as follows:

There are so many people doing this with you right now. This brings me as much comfort as finding a stag head mounted on a magnificent stone hearth with its tongue dangling out. We are the taxidermied trying to twist. Like, okay, I’m not alone, but now I am suspicious. I can’t control anything anyway. I can only control how I move. My mat reeks of jealousy, and still, I make plans to meet you again tomorrow (34).

The italicized quotes explicitly confront the reader with what the reader is engaged in doing: asynchronously observing Erin Dorney’s daybook. The “you” from the yoga instructor used to address Dorney becomes, through Dorney’s appropriation and juxtaposition of it within her own narrative structure, simultaneously a way for Dorney to address her own readers. By taking on the guise of the yoga instructor she addresses for her own audience, Dorney imposes her ambivalence about watching Adriene onto her own reader. “I make plans to meet you again tomorrow” becomes literally true for the reader who turns the page to encounter the words, “Day 15 Dear Adriene.” Just as Dorney volunteers to witness Adriene again the next day, the reader likewise volunteers to witness Dorney witnessing Adriene in the next daybook’s entry.

While the substance of her writing expresses her own ambivalence about how she spent her time during the Covid-19 pandemic’s first wave of lockdowns, the reader is made to share in her ambivalence through the structure of the book itself, and more importantly, the reader is not simply a witness to Dorney’s ambivalence about daily yoga videos, but is additionally forced into a recreation of her ambivalence. It is by the structural conceit itself that the reader is positioned to feel about Dorney the way Dorney feels about Adriene.

This narrative conceit is that each entry is an uninterrupted series of days under isolation, thirty days amounting to a single month. The structure itself allows Dorney to juxtapose many different threads against one another from one day to the next, so that structurally speaking, the full manuscript allows for the seemingly contradictory nature of mixed emotions contained in a single space. This is distinct from narrative arcs implying character development, though, because the ambivalence that Dorney expresses is constant. There is no linear progression of her attitude, no ascent or descent, no discernable arc. Instead, the repetition of “Dear Adriene” and the fluidity of imagery in the collages that accompany each entry pair competing imagery with each other in the same space, from section to section and across the course of the manuscript as a whole.

The second-person address remains both accusatory and anticipatory—another contrasting clash of emotions—in “Day 24.” Here, Dorney writes “You say, notice how you feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying” (57), placing the reader in the space of Adriene being addressed in the narrative present after having addressed the author from the narrative past via video instruction, while reinforcing a double-meaning in the instructional use of second-person by telling the reader to “notice how you feel.” By now in the text, the reader’s double position is thrown back at the reader with what is simultaneously a statement—“you say, notice how you feel”—and a command—“notice how you feel!” The reader can be seen as giving an instruction and receiving one at the same time. The contradictory and fluid nature of this double position in these moments is imposed on the reader strictly by the rules Dorney establishes about how to read italicized text, about who the “you” is intended to address, and how Dorney herself feels in a given moment about watching another person give her instructions. These rules do not create a technical guide for the reader, but a series of endlessly crossing paths that have the potential to entangle, envelope, and confound. For a work of memoir about the author’s experience with the pandemic, this process of imposed entanglement helps to demonstrate Dorney’s experience with lockdown not just through representation, but through replication as well.

Dorney’s language is primarily directed at herself, which is why so much attention to second-person addresses—and implied quotations play an important role in—understanding the powerful effect of her structure’s exploration of collective experiences. By pulling in the reader as an implicit collaborator in her own pandemic story, Dorney brings the work of memoir out of its private, isolated space and into the public sphere. This is why it matters that her work demonstrates the experiences of simultaneity, that the reader and addressee and author all collapse into one another not in spite of structural rules, but exclusively because of them. The guiding principles that are meant to organize the text become engulfed in their own contradictions, freeing the reader to share in Dorney’s articulated experiences.

“Day 30” provides the reader with final observation imposing ambivalence. Dorney writes, “Take a bird’s eye view of yourself. Is this a mirror or a mimic?” (68), juxtaposing Adriene’s invitation to observe with Dorney’s response in the form of a question, which itself pairs two images that replicate one another. The image of a mirror suggests a literal reflection of the self, a device that lets the viewer see themself. A mimic, on the other hand, is an imitation, rather than a reflection. A mimic might be a recreated or reconstructed version of the self, but is not the self seeing the self. However, by now, the text has exhausted all possible ways of triangulating the reader, the author, and the self.

While logic is not the best word for what the final entry follows, the structural ambivalence that punctuates the daybook suggests that the “bird’s eye view” is simultaneously a mirror and a mimic, that any vision of the author’s experience cannot be reduced to a single view. “An illusion,” she adds, “describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation.” Such a clear statement acts as a kind of misdirection. This short declaration envelopes a contradiction in deceptively conclusive language. A “true sensation” is a concrete, tangible experience that one can name and study, while the word “illusion” typically connotates outright fabrication. The separation between illusion and sensation is “misinterpretation,” a bridge that is neither a mirror (a reflection of what is visible) nor a mimic (a replication in the shape of what is visible). If misinterpretation alone transforms sensation into illusion, then the confusion—a form of misinterpretation—that results from the contradictions baked into the structure of the book can be read as the boundary separating concrete experience and outright illusion. In other words, the structure of the book produces the potential for misinterpretation, neither illusion nor sensation but both and neither. We are simultaneously reading about Adriene while taking the space of Adriene as witnessed by Dorney while replicating Dorney’s vision of Adriene. In such a framework, misinterpretation is expected.

While it might seem like Adriene gets the last word in the text, there is one final act of ambivalence that Dorney imposes on us. The last sentence of the last entry reads, “Finish this sentence: I choose__________.” The yoga instructor’s quote is framed as an instruction for the reader as much as the viewer of her video. Here is one more layer of contradiction through the simultaneous space that the reader occupies in Adriene’s quotes, as both the person being invited to “finish this sentence” and as the implied second-person character commanding Dorney, “you, finish this sentence.” The simultaneous narrative once again imposes ambivalence on the reader through linguistic structures alone. However, the introduction of an italicized (meaning directly quoted) first-person declarative is unique: “I choose” creates one more layer of simultaneous space. The “I” is not a narrative authority, but a temporary, hypothetical “I” that the reader is meant to fill up on their own. But it nevertheless acts as Adriene speaking in the first-person declarative, a relative abnormality in the preceding 30 entries. For the first time, the reader is told to act in the first-person. The final phrase is not framed as an imperative, or “You, choose!” but rather as an open-ended first-person declarative, “I choose.” According to the logic Dorney has constructed (and continuously pulled, deflated, and overlaid throughout the book), the “I” can be read as the literal speaker, Adriene, or as the immediate recipient, Dorney, or as the implied recipient of Adriene’s quote, who is the reader. Ontologically, these three perspectives are demonstrated to be simultaneously present, not as three possible options but as identical, functionally mirroring one another.

On one hand, the layering of subject over author over audience allows Dorney to further elaborate on the theme of pandemic-era parasocial relationships, demonstrating what for many readers might amount to a universally recognizable experience. There are, after all, various instances in which Dorney speaks directly to Adriene’s lessons with sardonic, self-deprecating jabs, paired with her simultaneous desire to continue practicing yoga with Adriene, to turn the page and go to the next day, the next day, the next day. But Dorney’s short text moves beyond the mere expression of ambivalence by pulling the reader into the parasocial equation that Dorney describes, through the linguistic and narrative structuring of ambivalence.

We’re All in This Together

Dorney’s structure partially reverses the enforcement of legal structures onto the subject by imposing ambivalence, as opposed to certainty, onto the collective. This is arguably the enforcement of empathy onto the reader, going beyond the authoritarian “I” of memoirs that are confined to the individual’s experience. The effect of this structuring might simply be rhetorical, to more productively put the reader in the author’s shoes and help advance the themes the memoirist seeks to unpack. But tackling memories of the Covid-19 pandemic through a lens that is structurally antithetical to certainty brings with it a whole host of cultural and political connotations that shore up other memories from 2020. In that year, cultural and political shifts fed on collective uncertainty about the future, expanding the reach of conspiracy theories and distrust in medical expertise and democratic institutions.

While it might seem counterintuitive to call forth memories of 2020 with intentionally confounding and uncertain modes of expression there is a patience in Dorney’s writing that suggests an underlying curiosity. Rather than shying away from a degree of ambivalence that, if utilized poorly, could be used to reinforce paranoia and collective distrust, Dorney confronts her own ambivalence as a given that she and her reader likely share. Honest reflections on the pandemic certainly must take into account the shared sense of uncertainty that drove so many people inward—literally and figuratively—and recognizing that if nothing else, we all share the same potential for ambivalence.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Keene Short is a writer, editor, and teacher. His recent work has appeared in phoebe, Peatsmoke, Barzakh, Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States, and elsewhere. He is also the author of Frightful Harvest: Food, Landscape, and Agriculture in Folk Horror Films (McFarland, 2026) and he still blogs at keeneshort.com.

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