Post-Cringe Manifesto or, The Death of Cringe
Calcifying the Post-Cringe Aesthetic
“In a society of commodified cringe, delusion is a radical act.”
I’ve been long joking about the need for a post-cringe aesthetic in the wake of (what I experience as) an increasingly commodified '“cringe aesthetic” used to dominate rather than subvert. It’s the equivalent of a person paying a Liberal Arts institution an inappropriate amount of money to learn the work of Augusto Boal - cosmetically correct, but spiritually and fundamentally fraught.
The joke is that cringe is no longer cringe the minute it’s used to accumulate rhetorical power, and so to maintain the initial functionality of cringe, a person must now work in what I consider to be the post-cringe aesthetic. It’s totally a gag. It’s a joke.
The post-cringe has been particularly on my mind, however, in writing about the work of Derek McCormack, through my work with Fake Friends, and during my dramaturgical work on Matthew Antoci’s upcoming play. How can a person articulate long-diluted transgressive aesthetic without losing its initial subversiveness? How can a person capture cringe without commodifying it? The answers, I humbly posit, are to be found in the post-cringe.
So below you’ll find the Post-Cringe Manifesto - a real fists-swinging document outlining what exactly is post-cringe, what the post-cringe seeks to accomplish, and how to post a post-cringe cringe post.
Eat your heart out, Roland.
POST CRINGE MANIFESTO or, THE DEATH OF CRINGE
Cringe has become a neoliberal aesthetic tool of power assertion. Transgression that seeks to undermine and challenge the hegemony must exist now in the post-cringe.
Cringe is the new Sincerity. It exists within the hegemonic structure and only presents the illusion of subverting it. Cringe enforces the structure by asserting power within the structure. Posting cringe now insists : I am top of this system because I am the most detached, the most outside, the most secretly knowing. If it says ‘I am outside of this system’ it says so by way of ‘I am the top of this system because I am outside of it.’
Cringe is now as subservient to capitalism as the new new sincerity - which posits a meritocracy of vulnerability (and by extension morality) as opposed to the meritocracy of ability suggested by the old new sincerity.
Queer ennui and apathy have been bought and sold to us on Instagram’s marketplace.
The queer nihilism of the early-90’s has been processed, injected with chemicals, wrapped up and sold to us in polythene bags for NYU-graduates to flaunt and compare like Furbies. This brand of apathy carries the scream, but the scream has been polished, neutered, and made palatable in our ability to create hierarchy from it.
The new queer transgression is in the post-cringe.
The post-cringe rejects the assertion of rhetorical power within a failed structure. It rejects the contextualizing of its power in relationship to other artifacts. It exists wholly in the rejection of power.
Cringe is knowing something is bad and doing it for the sake of commodifying its badness. The post-cringe is knowing something is bad and doing it for the sake of your own humiliation.
The post-cringe embraces abjection, failure, delusion, and embarrassment as radial acts.
Gaze is only necessary internally for the post-cringe. The post-cringe object must watch itself, but it need not be watched. It kills neither the cringe nor the part that cringes, but rather repackages both into something which may or may not be observed. The closet drama is post-cringe.
A post-cringe artifact therefore must meet three expectations.
A post-cringe artifact exists in disruption or critique of the hegemony.
Internal gaze is integral to the post-cringe object’s identity, but external gaze is not.
A post-cringe object must reject power and its own contextualization in regard to power.
Thereby to post cringe in the post-cringe aesthetic, the object of posting must be disruptive, without power, and self-watching. As soon as the post-cringe cringe post is contextualized by terms of spectator’s gaze or the rhetorical power of the poster, the post is no longer post-cringe but merely just cringe.
Nakedness, esotericism, certain autofictions, mirrors, prayer, hidden semiotics, and ephemera are all post-cringe.
External violence and cruelty is not post-cringe because it exerts power. Sentiment is not post-cringe because it enforces a hegemonic structure. Pornography is not post-cringe because external gaze is part of its identity.
The post-cringe object exists in the space the contemporary cringe object purports to exist in.
Posting about the post-cringe is merely cringe.
But by God, I’m doing it anyway.