I've always felt like cringe is a young person's experience. As you age, most cringy things fade away in (hopefully) the light of one's increased wisdom and empathy. Most of the things that make a...
I've always felt like cringe is a young person's experience. As you age, most cringy things fade away in (hopefully) the light of one's increased wisdom and empathy. Most of the things that make a teenager feel sympathetic shame, it turns out, aren't shameful at all. And what remains can be better classified using more specific monikers.
I vascillated between utterly detesting this writing style and finding it charming, which seemed somewhat on point for the conversation. (At least it reads deeply human. Nothing more cringe than...
I vascillated between utterly detesting this writing style and finding it charming, which seemed somewhat on point for the conversation. (At least it reads deeply human. Nothing more cringe than AI, né.)
The sympathetic shame of cringe is the price of sociality. We live among others and have the extraordinary capacity to sometimes suffer as they do. Who would want the callous world that successfully cloistered the feelings of others? Cringe may be excruciating, but post-cringe would be pure horror.
I do wonder if we are already there. For all this was posted, what, yesterday?, I missed the lack of discussion of camp-by-that-name, and the overt camp-and-cringe of the current US administration, Elom Musk, even the aesthetics of fascism. Is there something to be said about what cannot be held as ‘cringe’ because it is too powerful? I don’t know. But I want to.
I don’t find anything “detestable” about this piece and I appreciate the variety of its citations. Yes, this is a valuable observation. The author refers to cringe as “a new term for an old...
I don’t find anything “detestable” about this piece and I appreciate the variety of its citations.
Is there something to be said about what cannot be held as ‘cringe’ because it is too powerful?
Yes, this is a valuable observation. The author refers to cringe as “a new term for an old thing.” For all the centuries that we’ve felt embarrassed for someone else, powerful people have attempted to elevate the public idea of themselves beyond human emotion. In some royal courts, looking at the monarch without permission was criminal. The will to power obfuscates innate social connection.
It is said that today’s poor taste is tomorrow’s high art. Cringe works in reverse: What was high art yesterday can seem like a lapse in taste today.
The US executive attempts to occupy the superposition between aurelian and everyman; between classical statuary and disregard for formal convention; between gilded private clubs and press conferences at a landscaper’s garage; between ostensible displays of military might and a stream of consciousness on Twitter, straight to the masses.
In doing so, he manages to produce a new sort of cringe, which is the revealed tastelessness of an entire nation of people. We can try to cringe at the head of state, who is constantly embarrassing himself, but it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for such a powerful and unpleasant person. I think it’s more embarrassing to watch a hundred million of my neighbors, enthralled by the parasocial intimacy of presidential online-ness, sleepwalk into economic rejection. The earnest, desperate confusion that the most clueless among us now express (“I thought we were going to have lower prices!”) is difficult to bear; it’s cringe to put so much faith into a candidate so dishonest when the financial stakes are actually high. It’s like inviting someone to dinner with colleagues and then being personally ridiculed by that very person. One feels schadenfreude until one remembers that these voters are also just human. I think the resulting feeling has all the hallmarks of cringe except that it can’t really be funny, as you allude. At best it’s more like a cynical empathy. Or maybe just a new antisocial detachment.
The “post-cringe” we refer to might not be a rejection of cringe per se, but—not dissimilar from other elements of the postmodern—an electronically enabled dispersion of cringe so vast that it subsumes the original context of social error. It’s not about one person’s faux pas anymore, but the collective failure of every institution (social, spiritual, governmental, and otherwise) that leads to an industrial-scale, irrecoverably cringeworthy screw-up. What’s more socially awkward than embarrassing yourself in front of someone important? Maybe the destruction of global energy infrastructure and the collapse of international trade norms, followed by the slow decline of your country, and all loss of life that arises from a rejection of vaccination and global aid and the principle that war is bad.
I’m not sure if you misunderstood what I wrote or are attempting to make another point, but what I found “detestable" was her writing style, only to find a following passage to be charming in its...
I’m not sure if you misunderstood what I wrote or are attempting to make another point, but what I found “detestable" was her writing style, only to find a following passage to be charming in its idiosyncratic phrasing. I found nothing about the argument of the essay to be detestable, and I also appreciated the citations.
It seemed a strong word for the style, which would be indelicate in an academic journal, but felt ordinary in a magazine. It's whimsical and not really aggressive/condescending so I didn't find it...
It seemed a strong word for the style, which would be indelicate in an academic journal, but felt ordinary in a magazine. It's whimsical and not really aggressive/condescending so I didn't find it offensive. I was being too pedantic. The substance of your comment was very good and provoked a line of questioning (the rest of what I commented) that I hadn't considered yesterday when I first read the article, so thank you.
I read this hoping to learn something about culture that I was oblivious to, but I guess remain oblivious. I knew almost nothing about the works referenced here, so spent the time pretty much lost...
I read this hoping to learn something about culture that I was oblivious to, but I guess remain oblivious. I knew almost nothing about the works referenced here, so spent the time pretty much lost and got nothing out of the article other than the realization that some people make art specifically to make others cringe. Curb Your Enthusiasm doesn't seem cringy to me at all. I guess that is what Nathan Fielder is up to, but all I remember is that he's funny. I don't recall him making me cringe. The only things that genuinely make me cringe are certain memories of my own past. I have no solution to that feeling; I just let it fade. I can't take back the things I've done, and there's no coming back from the most embarrassing of them.
Because I don't know where this is going, I'll just end with a quotation from a philosopher I like, Emil Cioran, that might be relevant. I used to aspire to it as a writer, though in retrospect the main reason I wanted to be a writer was out of desperation to figure out my own mind and get past my emotional problems, so a desire to confront the worst of those is probably my real motivation rather than anything more profound. Anyway: "Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
I think the culture the article refers are like high art, since the site focus is about art collection. What I like is that the writing seems more like an exploration of what cringe means....
I think the culture the article refers are like high art, since the site focus is about art collection. What I like is that the writing seems more like an exploration of what cringe means. Probably much is lost without us having seen the references but I thought the ideas mentioned are interesting enough.
I've always felt like cringe is a young person's experience. As you age, most cringy things fade away in (hopefully) the light of one's increased wisdom and empathy. Most of the things that make a teenager feel sympathetic shame, it turns out, aren't shameful at all. And what remains can be better classified using more specific monikers.
I vascillated between utterly detesting this writing style and finding it charming, which seemed somewhat on point for the conversation. (At least it reads deeply human. Nothing more cringe than AI, né.)
I do wonder if we are already there. For all this was posted, what, yesterday?, I missed the lack of discussion of camp-by-that-name, and the overt camp-and-cringe of the current US administration, Elom Musk, even the aesthetics of fascism. Is there something to be said about what cannot be held as ‘cringe’ because it is too powerful? I don’t know. But I want to.
I don’t find anything “detestable” about this piece and I appreciate the variety of its citations.
Yes, this is a valuable observation. The author refers to cringe as “a new term for an old thing.” For all the centuries that we’ve felt embarrassed for someone else, powerful people have attempted to elevate the public idea of themselves beyond human emotion. In some royal courts, looking at the monarch without permission was criminal. The will to power obfuscates innate social connection.
The US executive attempts to occupy the superposition between aurelian and everyman; between classical statuary and disregard for formal convention; between gilded private clubs and press conferences at a landscaper’s garage; between ostensible displays of military might and a stream of consciousness on Twitter, straight to the masses.
In doing so, he manages to produce a new sort of cringe, which is the revealed tastelessness of an entire nation of people. We can try to cringe at the head of state, who is constantly embarrassing himself, but it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for such a powerful and unpleasant person. I think it’s more embarrassing to watch a hundred million of my neighbors, enthralled by the parasocial intimacy of presidential online-ness, sleepwalk into economic rejection. The earnest, desperate confusion that the most clueless among us now express (“I thought we were going to have lower prices!”) is difficult to bear; it’s cringe to put so much faith into a candidate so dishonest when the financial stakes are actually high. It’s like inviting someone to dinner with colleagues and then being personally ridiculed by that very person. One feels schadenfreude until one remembers that these voters are also just human. I think the resulting feeling has all the hallmarks of cringe except that it can’t really be funny, as you allude. At best it’s more like a cynical empathy. Or maybe just a new antisocial detachment.
The “post-cringe” we refer to might not be a rejection of cringe per se, but—not dissimilar from other elements of the postmodern—an electronically enabled dispersion of cringe so vast that it subsumes the original context of social error. It’s not about one person’s faux pas anymore, but the collective failure of every institution (social, spiritual, governmental, and otherwise) that leads to an industrial-scale, irrecoverably cringeworthy screw-up. What’s more socially awkward than embarrassing yourself in front of someone important? Maybe the destruction of global energy infrastructure and the collapse of international trade norms, followed by the slow decline of your country, and all loss of life that arises from a rejection of vaccination and global aid and the principle that war is bad.
I’m not sure if you misunderstood what I wrote or are attempting to make another point, but what I found “detestable" was her writing style, only to find a following passage to be charming in its idiosyncratic phrasing. I found nothing about the argument of the essay to be detestable, and I also appreciated the citations.
It seemed a strong word for the style, which would be indelicate in an academic journal, but felt ordinary in a magazine. It's whimsical and not really aggressive/condescending so I didn't find it offensive. I was being too pedantic. The substance of your comment was very good and provoked a line of questioning (the rest of what I commented) that I hadn't considered yesterday when I first read the article, so thank you.
I read this hoping to learn something about culture that I was oblivious to, but I guess remain oblivious. I knew almost nothing about the works referenced here, so spent the time pretty much lost and got nothing out of the article other than the realization that some people make art specifically to make others cringe. Curb Your Enthusiasm doesn't seem cringy to me at all. I guess that is what Nathan Fielder is up to, but all I remember is that he's funny. I don't recall him making me cringe. The only things that genuinely make me cringe are certain memories of my own past. I have no solution to that feeling; I just let it fade. I can't take back the things I've done, and there's no coming back from the most embarrassing of them.
Because I don't know where this is going, I'll just end with a quotation from a philosopher I like, Emil Cioran, that might be relevant. I used to aspire to it as a writer, though in retrospect the main reason I wanted to be a writer was out of desperation to figure out my own mind and get past my emotional problems, so a desire to confront the worst of those is probably my real motivation rather than anything more profound. Anyway: "Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
That’s a good quote. Thanks for sharing.
I think the culture the article refers are like high art, since the site focus is about art collection. What I like is that the writing seems more like an exploration of what cringe means. Probably much is lost without us having seen the references but I thought the ideas mentioned are interesting enough.