Some Thoughts on Cringe as an Aesthetic Category
There has been a lot of commentary on and discussion of cringe recently – the Contrapoints video on cringe, as well as the New Inquiry article on trans assimilation, cringe, and dysphoria. Both of these, however, focus on cringe as a social phenomenon, whereas I want to argue that there is something distinctively aesthetic in how we engage with cringe today. I advance two theses. First, that cringe functions as an aesthetic category with a characteristic set of feelings and ways of relating to the cringe object. Second, that cringe is a major lens through which we (or at least those of us who are terminally online) organize and judge our aesthetic experiences, even if that takes the form of attempting to deflect or resist either our own possible sense of cringe, or the cringing judgments of others. I conclude by suggesting (very tentatively) some reasons for cringe’s cultural moment.
What is Cringe? [Sianne Ngai voice]: “Cringe is an aesthetic category”
What do I mean when I say something is an aesthetic category? I mean that it refers to a type of aesthetic experience. The main conventional categories are things like beautiful, sublime, monstrous, but more contemporary work (here I refer chiefly to Sianne Ngai) posits a wider array of “minor aesthetics” – there is something distinct in appreciating an object as “cute” as opposed to “beautiful”: it has a different feeling to it, and involves a different judgment about how people ought to relate to the object. I argue that today cringe also functions as an aesthetic category of this latter sort.
There are two parts to cringe as an aesthetic category. The first is the feeling that we associate with cringe; the second is the set of objects and relations in the world that we understand to cause those feelings.
[80s power ballad chords]: “I wanna know what cringe is!”
Regarding the first – cringe feels like cringe (it’s a good word). There’s a physical clenching sensation, perhaps shivers, a feeling of mild pain, embarrassment. Generally, we want to avoid the feeling of cringe. When we think about our relationship to the cringe object, we usually experience a sense of vicarious embarrassment, but there is also often a sense of pleasure: “couldn’t be me!” Contrapoints’ video is instructive in this regard. She distinguishes between two types of cringe: self-cringe, and other-directed cringe. Self-cringe is the moment when you realize you’ve transgressed, and experience a “jolt” of stepping outside of yourself and seeing yourself as others see you – and you don’t like it. Usually, this involves the realization that you’ve violated an (often implicit) social norm (On an aesthetic level, the norm violation in question is the norm of so-called good taste). We also have other-directed cringe, which Contrapoints defines in terms of a sense of vicarious embarrassment or empathy because the other person doesn’t realize that they are cringe. When we respond to this, we cringe with someone. She also points out another kind of other-directed cringe, “contemptuous cringe,” which is similar to the above, except that we are cringing at the other person rather than with them. The relation of cringing at, I argue, is more relevant when we talk about cringe aesthetics (or cringe as an aesthetic).
So much for cringe as a social judgment. But what makes it distinctly an aesthetic judgment (or an aesthetic experience)? I argue that it is adjacent to disgust: there is a moment of recoil (or if not direct recoil, the learned effort to produce distance), and then taking pleasure in the judgment that something is cringe and you have distinguished the object as such and distanced it from the realm of good taste. The aspect of self-conscious distancing, when we talk about cringe in aesthetic terms is important. Cringe also often involves a sense of either “there but for the grace of god go I,” or a sense of wishfulness: “If I weren’t subject to the burdens of my good taste, I would like this thing, but I cannot – it’s too much, too cheesy, too cringe.” Suffice it to say that cringe often reflects an ambivalence towards the object that is deemed cringe; there is an uneasy interplay between reflexive distancing, and the desire for there to appear to be a greater distance: I wouldn’t like my friends to see me as the kind of person who likes cringe, but I wish I could like it, if it didn’t entail being that kind of person. Cringe is, more than usual for aesthetic judgments, social: we can acknowledge differences amongst the things people find beautiful, but to have one’s tastes deemed cringe is especially damning.
[Dril tweet: “None of you are free from cringe!”]
So what makes something cringe? What objects do we judge as being cringeworthy? The first and most significant way a thing can be cringe is if it’s trying too hard, being overly earnest, or just being too much (too unironically sentimental, no limits, too extreme man). The most widespread cultural example of this would be romance novels, which are, as far as genres go, extremely sincere. (This also connects to the idea that “women’s interests” are marked as cringe, largely because of the group they are associated with, rather than any content internal to the interests). Similarly for YA novels.
The second way something can be cringe is if it fails to accomplish what it seeks to accomplish (for example, TNI article about trans cringe points to “failing to pass” as an example of cringe because of the gap between how you are trying to present yourself and how others see you.)
The third way something can be cringe (or the person liking a thing can be cringe) is if it is just bad – bad artwork, being interested in something uncool, getting humiliatingly shot down after an extravagant romantic gesture. This one is more about deeming people who like cringe things themselves cringe.
The best way to understand cringe is through examples of some popular things that have been widely deemed cringe (by myself and a friend at the hipster coffee shop).
Consider:
Twilight
Adults who watch children’s cartoons
BBC Sherlock
Middle-aged men in streetwear
“Cool Guys”
Too much or too little Nabokov, DFW, Pynchon, or Franzen on your bookshelf
Guys on the internet who defend Marvel movies
White guys who loudly claim to have good taste in rap
Foodies
Natural wine snobs
Tesla enthusiasts
Tech bros at Burning Man
The thought of least one of these probably made you cringe.
How do we Interact with Cringe?/Cringing Towards Bethlehem:
The second part of my argument concerns the idea that at least for the too-online, cringe is a now unavoidable lens through which we have our aesthetic experiences. Regardless of what we do, we have to nod at the spectre of cringe and position ourselves in relation to it. There are three main ways people interact with cringe as a category or label.
The first of these is to resist the judgment of cringe as applying to the thing you like. This position tends to assume that cringe is merely an assertion of social power, and calling something cringe is only about its low position in the aesthetic hierarchy, rather than referring to any components internal to the work. So, for example, this is a popular position to take for members of nerd culture: “superhero movies aren’t cringe! The culture is made for us now!” Some people who point to the newfound respectability of fanfiction to justify reading and writing it also use this strategy.
What’s interesting about this group is that while resisting the judgment of cringe for their own tastes, they are also willing to impose it on others. Being a snob is cringe. Let people enjoy things! The underlying disciplinary impetus remains, and it only understands cringe in terms of the status of the cultural commodity. It’s not a genuinely transformative strategy (treating cringe, or at least things that are cringe, as good, actually).
The second strategy is to overtly embrace cringe. This is best exemplified in the meme, “I am cringe but I am free”. These people acknowledge that a thing is – either in terms of its status as “uncool” or its internal content – probably cringe, but resist the judgment that often goes hand in hand with this. This may be complete, or only aspirational (we still cringe at ourselves, but we don’t want to. We are trying not to cringe – much like in the meme that instructs us to, “kill the part of you that cringes”). This is distinct from the guilty pleasure insofar as the person who cringes but is free does not accept the broader premise that it is really a bad thing to be cringe. Cringe pride!
The third strategy is to wallow in cringe, and indeed to explicitly seek content out because it is cringe first (and not because you enjoy a thing that is only incidentally cringe). For example: extremely online people getting into boomer memes. This can be either with respect to cringe as a social judgment (“I’m cool enough to like cringe and make it interesting through the power of my personality”) or enjoying it as an affect (I think this is slightly different than watching fail videos, for instance. It’s more like, “guy who grows an ugly beard and delights in others’ opprobrium”). People who have gotten into SPN ‘as a bit’? Online art subcultures that are post-aesthetic, “how ugly can I make this” – cousins to the ugly shoe trend happening a few years ago. This can also transform into sincere enjoyment of cringe (it doesn’t even need to start as ironic – it can just be signaling indifference to “cringe” as a judgment at the outset).
Why Are All of our Experiences Filtered Through Cringe?
I want to suggest that this is largely a response to online culture (the panopticon of online culture), and ways in which “cringe culture” was an ongoing disciplinary tool/way of forming in groups and out groups. Significantly, cringe culture had ever-shifting and often inscrutable standards. Consider some mainstays of the hipster era on the internet: VICE Magazine’s “Dos and don’ts” column, as well as the blog Hipster Runoff, which effectively presented everything as cringe. We also now have a constantly accelerating cycle of what is cool versus passé (the hipster must be into the thing before it is cool), leading to a hypertrophy of hipster judgment, which I also link to the idea that it was seen, pretty universally on the internet until a couple of years ago, as extremely vulgar to show enthusiasm about anything.
Another component is the exhausting psychological burden of always keeping up with good taste; cringe as the new aesthetic responds to this. It also offers a degree of permission: if you acknowledge something is cringe, even embrace it, you’ve taken the sting out. And sharing in cringe with friends can also be a way to build relationships and share vulnerability. We are cringing together. We are allowed to feel things again.