CRINGE. A good friend of mine recently said – in passing – that ‘writing is cringe’... In fact, they said: ‘...writing is cringe, isn’t it…?’ An addition which is important because it exposes, in a small way, the meaning (or rather the function) of the word – ‘cringe’ – itself. Isn’t it? A question asked not to be answered, but to enforce a kind of normative self-justification. Writing is cringe because we all agree it is. And if you don’t agree? Well…!

Interestingly this conversation was on the topic of my friend's own writing – so, perhaps the comment was made to ‘get ahead’ of any negative feedback, to indicate sardonic detachment from their work, to provide an assurance of self-awareness: ‘If my writing is cringe, then you know why.’ These signals are the mirror image of what ‘cringe’ means today, a quality that we might identify through a person's lack of self-awareness and their inability to ‘detach’ or adhere to the ironic norms of digital culture.

The contemporary preoccupation with ‘cringe’ is certainly a product of social media platforms, and the militantly policed – yet constantly moving – boundary between over- and under-sharing. ‘Cringe culture’ is defined on Wikipedia as “[an] Internet phenomenon characterized by the mockery and ridicule of content, behaviors, or expressions deemed embarrassing or awkward…”, starting up alongside content posted on platforms by people “who did not seem to understand that anyone in the world could see [it].” Think: a love poem addressed straight to camera; or a boy swinging a lightsaber in a basement. In the ‘Global Village’ content that might previously have been a localised expression of admiration must now be identified – tagged? – as a universally acceptable or unacceptable form of cultural expression. Perhaps this is most evident in recent shifts from ‘cringe’ the verb (“don’t make me cringe!”) to the adjective slang (“you’re so cringe!”).

Part of cringe’s normative strength is derived from its etymology, and the idea that one's authentic, toe-curling reaction to such behaviour is both universally shared and ‘involuntary’ (i.e. natural). In tracing the verb back into Old English we find a connection to the term ‘cringan’ meaning ‘to fall’, or yield, or die in battle; and following this thread into Middle English ‘crengen’, to ‘bend haughtily’, or condescend. An extreme case of this Middle English phrasing can be seen in a C13th account of the life of St Margaret (part of the Katherine Group), in which a monster cranes menacingly over a young maiden:

He strahte him ant sturede toward tis meoke meiden, ant geapede with his genow upon hire ungeinliche, ant bigon to crahien ant crenge with swire, as the hire walde forswolhe mid alle.¹

Here ‘crenge with swire’ – translated as ‘arch his neck’ – is written as a deliberate physical gesture, one intended to make the maiden herself cringe, cower or flinch in fear. And over the centuries this (involuntary) reaction to fear is what ‘cringe’ came to signify most strongly, so that by the 1700’s the methodist preacher John Nelson could recall his father’s reading of the bible thus:

As my father proceeded, I thought I saw every thing he read about, though my eyes were shut ; and the fight was so terrible, I was about to stop my ears, that I might not hear, but I durst not; for as soon as I put my fingers to my ears, I pulled them back again. When he came to the 11th verse, the words made me cringe, and my flesh seemed to creep on my bones… ²

In addition to this development, from the C17th, a secondary sense of the term came into circulation; an idea of ‘cringing’ as “bending the body in a timorous or servile manner”, to bow obsequiously or sycophantically. And here emerges, perhaps, the origin of the term’s relationship not only to an explicitly physical order (one of strength) but to a social and emotional order as well (one of embarrassment). For our purposes, the most direct example of this usage comes in 1853, and the nonconformist minister Thomas Toke Lynch’s Lectures in aid of Self Improvement, on the subject of such a bow, he writes:

You should bow to most people, but cringe to nobody. Do not respect any one in such a way that you must cease to respect yourself. A man is never greater than when he wisely makes a bow; for he then shows his appreciation of all that is good, the service he would render it, and his desire for union with it. Classes who possess external beauty and ease of life, will always be in repute and admiration. [...] Admiration is a means of maintaining the subordinations of life, and of making the desire and aim of life selecter. ³

So, to cringe is to display a ‘false’ admiration, to place oneself at the mercy of those ‘classes’ who live at ease with others and themselves, to subject oneself to yet another kind of social hierarchization – where have I heard this before…?

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The word ‘cringe’ was suggested to me this month by another good friend (also a writer) with whom I have often discussed the term. Teaching together we have – over the years – seen cringe hard at work in the classroom, a means of establishing some kind of pecking order predicated on taste, knowledge and a capacity for complex forms of disavowal. However, more recently, we have also seen some kind of counter-trend against this mode of social ordering, a blossoming of mantras:

“to be cringe is to be free”, “let people enjoy things”, or “it's cool to care”.

This is viewed by many online as a kind of cyclical tendency, where ‘cringe culture’ (making fun of skinny jeans) exhausts itself and morphs into a ‘post-ironic’ desire for sincerity (Timothy Chalamet). This is what one might tentatively call The Dialectics of Cringe, where culture ‘progresses’ through evermore complex forms of self-reference, self-discipline and – eventually? – self-acceptance. And so we arrive at the point in which branding studios – obsessed with the overproduction of minor distinctions between generational cohorts – have taken to labeling this the ‘meta-sincerity’ of Gen-Z: ‘embracing earnestness in full awareness that it may look cringe.’

But – even if it is true – how long can such a situation possibly last? It is clear that, to a large extent, this is a fabricated discursive frame – suiting the ‘class’ of advertising agencies and social media platforms that have established lucrative products for managing (and manufacturing) people’s fears of (self-)perception; a means, as Rob Horning writes, of creating consumer demand in the midst of abundance. In a world of ‘dynamic stabilisation’ – in which everything must grow, innovate and improve, to stay the same – it is difficult to see how such cycles do not accelerate into a vanishing point.

Perhaps the contradictions of the external world, beyond internet discourse, can slow a drift back into a new ‘cringe culture’? Perhaps phrases like ‘it's cool to care’ can take on some political valence? Political action? Might the growing rejection (or disintegration) of social media platforms open a space – either offline or online – for more authentic and earnest forms of self expression? Or might these new forms of sincerity morph from a relatively harmless ‘cringe culture’ into a more aggressive ‘culture war’ (and then actual civil war)? If being earnest in the face of ‘cringe’ is about taking risks – social but also physical – what risks are we willing to take?

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. He moved and made his way toward this meek maiden, and gaped with his mouth over her threateningly, and began to stretch and arch his neck, as though he would swallow her completely. https://metseditions.org/read/r3GqKMYU9dKqup7KcwR6pIKXbygeP3A --- ↩

2. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_an-extract-from-john-nel_nelson-john_1791/page/n1/mode/2up ↩

3. https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Thomas_Toke_Lynch_Lectures_in_aid_of_Self_Improvem?id=Jdz2EGBprF0C ↩