Group 1: Mediatization and Language
Sebastian Haselbeck: Dem Wald zu nah. Cringe als Verfahren und Schicksal in Maren Ades „Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen“
Der Vortrag untersucht die filmästhetische Funktion von Cringe in Maren Ades Debütfilm Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (2003). Im Zentrum steht die Lehrerin Melanie Pröschle (Eva Löbau), deren soziale Fehltritte, zunehmende Isolation und unbeholfene Versuche der Kontaktaufnahme beim Publikum nich nur Mitgefühl, sondern insbesondere Scham und Fremdscham hervorrufen. Diese Reaktionen offenbaren ein komplexes Verhältnis von Nähe und Distanz sowohl in den sozialen Interaktionen der Filmfiguren als auch in der filmischen Darstellung.
Ausgehend von Linda Williams’ Konzept der Body Genres (1991) wird Cringe als ein körperlich-affektives filmisches Genre verstanden, das, ähnlich wie Horror, Melodram oder Pornografie, gezielt intensive körperliche Reaktionen hervorruft. Im Fall von Cringe sind es Gefühle wie Scham, Beklemmung und Verlegenheit, die im Zentrum stehen.
Der Vortrag zeigt, dass Cringe in Ades Film nicht bloß eine emotionale Zuschauerreaktion bleibt, sondern als zentrales erzählerisches und inszenatorisches Verfahren fungiert. Melanie Pröschles Scheitern erscheint damit nicht nur als individuelles Drama, sondern als Symptom normativer gesellschaftlicher Anforderungen der Selbstoptimierung, der sozialen Kompetenz und emotionalen Kontrolle. Anhand ausgewählter Szenen wird analysiert, wie der Film Cringe als Effekt übermäßiger Nähe oder des falschen Abstands gestaltet – als tragisches Schicksal der Figur wie auch als präzise eingesetzte filmische Strategie.
Ana Deumert: „My favorite things” – Transforming the cringe
An early critic described the The Sound of Music – at the time a Broadway production –as ‘not only too sweet for words but also almost too sweet for music’; thus, pointing to the rather saccharine feel of its lyrics and compositions. Reception was not much better when the movie came out in 1965, during the heydays of the civil rights movement, the era of decolonization, anti-war protests and the early days of student uprisings in Europe. The movie was described as a ‘sugar-coated lie that many seem want to eat’, as a film that is filled with ‘sickly goody-goody songs’. Watching the movie today is hardly possible without experiencing a sense of ‘cringe’ – a strange mix of enjoyment and discomfort – as one watches sweeping technicolor shots of the Swiss Alps and sees Julie Andrews dancing and singing in green meadows, crossing brooks and gazing longingly at the sky. Yet, the images, sounds and lyrics are strangely addictive – one quickly hums along; and indeed, the movie produced one of the most successful sound-track albums in history.
For many people in the 1960s and 1970s, The Sound of Music was part of growing up and nostalgic memories of watching re-runs as a family are, for example, shared in the comment sections on YouTube and TikTok. In this talk I focus on one (famous) song from the movie: ‘My favorite things’. The song has been celebrated as well as parodied online; the latter focusing – especially – on its implicit (and explicit) celebration of innocent whiteness. I will look at some of these online parodies and how they make visible and audible the ‘cringe’ through a skillful replacement of the lyrics, thereby allowing for metapragmatic reflection and the formation of new, often subversive, political aZects. However, at the core of my argument stands the most famous recontextualization of the score: John Coltrane’s extended improvisation (with soprano saxophone, drums, bass and piano), which keeps only the title and plays with the original composition in unexpected ways. Coltrane ignores the lyrics entirely (thus shifting attention away from language and towards aZect), thereby transforming the musical theme from cringe into art, from saccharine whiteness into a black aesthetics (Monson 1997, Seery 2021).
Yaiza Otero: Zwischen Lachen und Cringen. Die ARD-Miniserie Sexuell Verfügbar (2024) als Feminist Cringe Comedy
Der Begriff Feminist Cringe Comedy beschreibt ein neues Genre der Komödie, das weibliches Begehren humorvoll thematisiert. Durch Cringe und Lachen hinterfragt dieses Genre Geschlechterrollen und gesellschaftliche Erwartungen, wobei bewusst Unbehagen bei der Zuschauer*innen auslöst wird. Die ARD-Miniserie Sexuell Verfügbar (2024) ist Teil des wachsenden Erfolgs dieses Genres. Sie nutzt Cringe nicht nur, um Lachen zu erzeugen, sondern auch als Mittel, Sexualität aus der Perspektive des weiblichen Begehrens durch die Hauptfigur Miki Walter zu thematisieren. Das Ziel dieser Vortrag ist es, die Serie Sexuell Verfügbar aus der Perspektive der Feminist Cringe Comedy zu analysieren und zu untersuchen, wie ästhetische und narrative Elemente eingesetzt werden, um Cringe zu erzeugen und gleichzeitig eine feministische Gesellschaftskritik zu formulieren. Anhand zentraler Szenen wird gezeigt, wie Humor, Cringe und Scham miteinander verwoben werden, um Erwartungen an Weiblichkeit und Sexualität zu dekonstruieren. Die Protagonistin wird dabei als subversive Figur gezeigt, die soziale Normen hinterfragt, indem sie sich weigert, sich zu schämen. Der Zusammenhang zwischen diesen Aspekten wird durch verschiedene Situationen erforscht, die bei den Zuschauer*innen sowohl Unbehagen als auch Empathie hervorrufen. Über fünf Episoden hinweg spielt die Serie mit humorvollen Elementen wie dem bewussten Umdrehen der Geschlechterrollen, der Umkehrung des freudschen Witzschemas und der symbolischen Inszenierung eines Dildos, der gleichzeitig als komisches Objekt, Symbol der Macht und Zeichnen für Mikis Befreiung fungiert. Darüber hinaus verdeutlichen Flashbacks auf Mikis Kindheit die zentrale Rolle von Scham bei der Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit und wie diese als Kontrollinstrument eingesetzt wird. Der Höhepunkt der Scham in der Serie findet jedoch im Prozess gegen Miki statt, der sowohl ihre Handlungen als auch ihre Sexualität verurteilt. Doch wird auch deutlich, wie sie durch subversive und herausfordernde Handlungen ihre Autonomie und Macht einfordert. Sexuell Verfügbar wird somit als Beispiel der Feminist Cringe Comedy verortet, die Cringe gezielteinsetzt, um Geschlechternormen zu hinterfragen und gleichzeitig eine kathartische Befreiung für Protagonistin und Publikum zu ermöglichen.
Keynote
Teresa Pratt: Language and affect in interaction and performance
This talk invokes and invites ways of thinking about affect and language. Numerous conventionalized(Western) epistemologies treat mood as ephemeral, and emotions as individualized experiences. But affect is a social and intersubjective phenomenon accomplished through interaction. Affect thus reflects and reproduces conventionalized displays of emotion and also the ideological rendering of styles and personae. Further, affect is always already implicated in the embedded racialized, gendered, and classed meanings that map from and onto emergent social meaning in interaction. Of interest to me, and to this interdisciplinary convening of scholars, is the fact that affect is accomplished across multiple semiotic channels.
Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the intertwining of linguistic and bodily practices, and illustrate how assemblages thereof constitute the semiotics of affect. Among adolescents at a California high school, affects of ‘chill’ and ‘tough’ are culturally valuable and also, semiotic achievements. ‘Chill’ affect is enacted through both sociolinguistic signs (e.g. creaky voice, vowel quality, vowel space) and bodily practices (e.g. jaw setting, posture) to reproduce styles laden with ideological meaning (Pratt 2021, 2023).
More recent work analyzes TikTok creators’ parodic performance of Karens, the label used to name and critique the trope of middle-aged white women who enact and exact white supremacy in interactional moments. In both lived interactions and ideological abstraction, Karen represents the ever-present threat of racist violence, and social media creators frequently perform Karen parodies using a range of linguistic and embodied elements. These elements include phonetic resources such as pitch and speech rate, enregistered discursive resources (e.g. ‘I need to speak to your manager’), as well as bodily displays of energy (e.g. fast, repetitive gestures; tensely pursed lips).
Notably, across both ethnographic and media analyses, many of the linguistic and bodily resources which cohere and circulate affective meaning are iconized (Inoue 2004, Calder 2019b): low pitch, creaky voice, and slow speech rate are regularly iconized as low-energy, whereas high pitch and fast speech rate are used to perform high-energy affect. Similarly, overall bodily movement (more/less) in addition to the kinds of movement (repetitive gestures vs. tensed facial features) are recruited to cohere these alternate energy-based affective styles.
After presenting my empirical work, I will connect these ideas with decolonial theory and praxis. I suggest that centering affect and the body works to resist mind-body dualism that has dominated much of 20th century linguistic theory, and accordingly the colonial logics which elevate and separate the civilized(able), ‘rational’ mind from the unruly body and its emotions.
References
Inoue, Miyako. 2004. What Does Language Remember?: Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of Japanese Women. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14: 39-56.
Calder, J. 2019. From sissy to sickening: The indexical landscape of/s/in SoMa, San Francisco. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29: 332-358.
Group 2: Irritation and Trouble
Lars Hinrichs: Co-constructing CRINGE in sociolinguistic interviews: Ambivalent affect elicitation and vernacular styles in dialectological fieldwork
The danger-of-death question (Labov 1972a; 2013) is a canonical technique in sociolinguistic interviews used to elicit personal narratives, which are likely to contain interviewees’ most vernacular speech (Labov 1972b). Researchers have frequently explored alternative ways of targeting involved speech styles, e.g. by asking about personal experiences during catastrophic events such as hurricanes (Carmichael, Clark & Hay 2022) or earthquakes (Clark et al. 2016). Simultaneously, sociolinguists have pointed to the psychological complications, and their ethical dimensions, arising from the elicitation of trauma narratives, highlighting the need for less standardized and more locally and individually calibrated approaches to narrative elicitation. Sneller and Barnhardt (2023) discuss a range of innovative interview questions in which interviewers ask culturally current and socially appropriate questions to prompt narrative.
One activity that can serve in this function is the elicitation of CRINGE narratives. In recent dialectological fieldwork on Texas English, interviewers invited participants to construct a CRINGE narrative frame with the prompt: “Have you ever spoken about another person only to turn around and notice that they were standing near you where they could hear you the whole time?” Such narratives, given their inherent ambivalent affect and potential for self deprecation (Speer 2019; Page 2019), were a presumed opportunity for lively narrative. The success of the method was mixed: in 72 interviews that contained the question, only 11 elicited any stories at all. Nonetheless, ambivalent affect talk did emerge in numerous instances. Strategies that participants deployed in the place of narratives included literalism—insisting on the formal polarity of the question and offering only a “no” answer—and “moral indignation” (Labov 1984) about the perceived immorality of the act of talking about others. This presentation reviews the viability of the CRINGE frame invitation in sociolinguistic interviews by (a) reviewing successful instances of narrative elicitation to gauge the CRINGE question’s effectiveness as a vehicle for involved narrative elicitation, and (b) taking an interpretive approach to strategies of avoidance in the unsuccessful instances, ending with a classification of the discursive actions that were offered instead of the requested narratives.
References
Carmichael, Katie, Lynn Clark & Jennifer Hay. 2022. Lessons learned: the long view. Linguistics Vanguard 8(s3). 353–362. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0050.
Clark, Lynn, Helen MacGougan, Jennifer Hay & Liam Walsh. 2016. “Kia ora. This is my earthquake story”. Multiple applications of a sociolinguistic corpus. Ampersand. Elsevier 3. 13–20.
Labov, William. 1972a. Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia:U of Pennsylvania P.
Labov, William. 1972b. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(1). 97–120.2
Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In J. Baugh & J.
Sherzer (eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics, 28–66. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Labov, William. 2013. The language of life and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/core/books/language-of-life-and-death/5C8B49307E49B65AD994267ECD2C6E4A.
Page, Ruth. 2019. Self-denigration and the mixed messages of ‘ugly’ selfies in Instagram. Internet Pragmatics 2(2). 173–205. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00035.pag.
Sneller, Betsy & Adam Barnhardt. 2023. Sociolinguistic prompts in the 21st century: Uniting past approaches and current directions. Language and Linguistics Compass 17(3). e12484. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12484.
Speer, Susan A. 2019. Reconsidering self‐deprecation as a communication practice. British Journal of Social Psychology 58(4). 806–828. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.123
Heide Volkening: Über Schamlust
In den Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften ist Cringe vor allem mit Blick auf Serien- oder filmische Formate thematisiert und unter dem Begriff Cringe Comedy als ambivalentes Vergnügen diskutiert worden. Der Vortrag möchte ausgehend von dieser Beobachtung den Fokus auf literarische Cringe-Verfahren richten und diese im Kontext kulturwissenschaftlicher Diagnosen einer aktuell zu beobachtenden mediatisierten Schamkultur (Ulrich Greiner, Robert Pfaller, Lea Schneider) diskutieren. Auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise wird Scham hier einerseits als politische Strategie der Beschämung und Schamlosigkeit oder andererseits als patriarchale Machttechnik der Naturalisierung von Weiblichkeit beschrieben. Ästhetiken der Schamlust möchte ich vor diesem Hintergrund als eine Form der Störung konturieren, deren Ambivalenzen sowohl Geschmacksurteile als auch Schamgrenzen irritieren (Andrea Büttner, Immanuel Kant). Kurze Einblicke in den Gender Trouble der männlichen Protagonisten in Jonas Lüschers Frühling der Barbaren (2015), Johanna Adorjáns CIAO (2021) und Christian Krachts AIR (2025) sollen abschließend zeigen, wie Cringe in literarischen Erzählungen als Verfahren einer ästhetischen Sensibilisierung durch Schamlust genutzt wird.
Lindsay Preseau: “But are they cringe?”: Cross-Cultural Affective Responses to Neopronouns in English and German
In the last decade, the introduction of neopronouns such as xier/xien/xim has become commonplace in German language courses at universities in the United States. German textbooks for the American market such as Impuls Deutsch and Grenzenlos Deutsch present students with grammatical tables explaining the morphological pros and cons of different neopronouns. The social and affective dimensions of neopronouns, on the other hand, are rarely discussed; at most, some textbooks footnote that neopronouns “might not be recognized by all German speakers” (Grenzenlos Deutsch).
American students of German, particularly those who use neopronouns themselves, are thus surprised to find when they travel to Germany that neopronouns are not only unknown, but elicit unexpected affective responses. As one student put it, “even queer Germans think they’re cringe.” One one hand, this paper will contextualize such metalinguistic commentary on (inter)cultural cringe as it relates to neopronouns, drawing on A. A. Phillips’ formative conceptualization of The Cultural Cringe to elucidate the political power structures inherent to these differences in affective response.
On the other hand, this paper will address a practical question: what are the English-German cross-cultural differences in the everyday aesthetics of neopronouns, and how can they be taught? I will present a collection of didacticized cultural materials that I use to enhance students’ understanding of intercultural difference in the aesthetics of queer language practices which includes, for example, excerpts from Stefanie Sargnagel’s Iowa, YouTube comments, and German news coverage of U.S. debates concerning neopronouns.
Abel, Britt; Berroth, Erika; Gallagher, Maureen; King, Adi; Mueller, Isolde; Pfleger, Simone; Schreiber-Byers, Elizabeth; Stewart, Faye; Wegener, Tessa; Young, Amy (2018) Grenzenlos Deutsch. Books 3. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/books/3
Phillips, A. A. (1950). The Cultural Cringe. Meanjin, 9(4), 299.
Tracksdorf, Niko; Coleman, Nicole; Rarick, Damon; Weidauer, Friedemann; Geithner, Anett (2019) Impuls Deutsch 1. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Sprachen.
Group 3: Communality and Taste
Chloé Thomas: Creating bad verse: the need for cringe in the reception of poetry
At roughly the same time, Julia Moore (1847-1920) and Friederike Kempner (1828-1904) rose to fame as “bad poets.” They were both marginalized in the literary field, for reasons based on gender, geogrraphy, education, and religion, among others. According to legend, people went to hear them and bought their books because their poetry was so bad it was good: it made audiences and readers cringe, in a pleasurable way. Looking more closely at the history of their reception, it becomes apparent that both Moore and Kempner were not only “discovered” and singled out as bad poets among a crowd of humble poetasters; they were also fabricated as such, in the way their poetry were introduced and edited, and even, in the case of Kempner, through mean parodies which were then reprinted as Kempner’s own works. This reception helps understand that cringe, in the case of bad verse, relies on the supposed intention attributed to the author, or rather the supposed lack of intention: Moore’s and Kempner’s poems were all the more pleasurably embarrassing that readers and audience believed they did not intend to write funny poetry, and that they tried too hard to emulate what they saw as good verse. Freud used Kempner as a case in point in his analysis of “involuntary comic.” This paper will explore the connection between cringe and the supposed intention of the author in the case of bad poetry. It will also address the “need for cringe” which may explain why these bad poems were constructed and widely disseminated.
Ryan Fountain: Uncouth Gurgitators: The Ambivalence of Competitive Eating-as-entertainment
In recent years, the act of eating as a form of entertainment has exploded onto the digital scene (cf. Rüdiger 2021 on mukbang) and the aesthetics of food sharing been expanded to include aspects of food-eating which (Western) society at large perceives as unaesthetic, unhealthy, and uncouth. In my talk, I focus on two subtypes of eating-as-entertainment, competitive eating and food challenges, approached via corpus-based discourse analysis and digital ethnography. In the videos I examine, performers eat extremely large portions of food (speed-based and quantity-based) while talking to an (imagined) audience. The corpus is compiled from 100 YouTube videos of prominent eating entertainers. I also include an analysis of YouTube comments and enrich my analysis with perspectives from interviews with individual performers. Together, these construct an insider view towards over-eating-as-entertainment as a form of cringe. I argue that these performances constitute examples of cringe theater (cf. Schwanebeck 2021 on cringe humor), particularly given that over-eating and its aesthetic are anti-normative in nature. Etiquettes of dining and concepts of healthy eating are replaced by the messy gorging on of low-class and highly caloric foods. However, it is unclear whether cringe – as is the case with cringe humor – is intentionally evoked by competitive eating entertainers. Regarding the perspectives of viewers, the data suggests that excessive consumption produces an ambivalent affect regarding its cringe factor. For outsiders, aestheticized food-sharing elicits hunger and encourages participation, while excessive eating stifles hunger and elicits feelings of cringe, namely disgust, shame, and embarrassment. Viewers watch on, unsure of whether performers will regurgitate their meals, and physically cringe at their uncouth manner of eating and what they are eating. A general concern regarding health and food waste predominates. Insiders, conversely, suggest that viewing excessive eating videos may help those with food disorders and subverts oppressive societal norms about eating. They lionize the performers as dedicated athletes in their sport, and for them, cringe equates rather to an over-adherence to societal norms of eating where one is imprisoned by notions of civility.
References
Rüdiger, Sofia. 2021. “Digital Food Talk: Blurring Immediacy and Distance in YouTube Eating Shows.” Anglistik 32(2): 111-130. https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2021/2/9
Schwanebeck, Wieland. 2021. “Introduction to Painful Laughter: Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe.” Humanities 10: 123. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10040123
Theresa Heyd: Oddly Satisfying: the sociolinguistics of ambivalent affect
If awkwardness has emerged as an important cultural category in recent years (Berkers and Wijngaarden 2025, Plakias 2024, Smith-Prei and Stehle 2016), then cringe is its popular linguistic formulation. Cringe is a core element of digital linguistic practice, used in metadiscursive framing, as a genre label in Try Not To Cringe compilations, and as a multimodal, embodied item in reaction pics and memes. In line with others, we have described cringe as an ambivalent affect of awkwardness that is uncomfortable, yet enjoyable and consumable (Heyd and Volkening 2025). The ambivalence of affective cringe practices seems to be particularly useful for doing sociolinguistic boundary work: diagnoses of cringe bring forth communities of taste, and the discursive work of distinction done around cringe very often plays out along lines of gender, class and age.
In this talk, we will look into ambivalent affect and some of its sociolinguistic detail in digital discourse more broadly. I want to discuss a number of digital practices and phenomena that encapsulate ambivalent affect in their vernacular names: epic fails, humblebragging, unpopular opinions, oddly satisfying videos, hate-reading and hate-watching, guilty pleasures. By zooming in on Oddly Satisfying, we can explore both of the performance of this discursive practice of communal consumption, and of the contexts of use for the metalinguistic label. I argue that the ambivalent affect expressed in Oddly Satisfying as a digital practice is more than just the use of a negative polarity item for intensification (as in constructions like fucking amazing, Nouwen 2024). Instead, its semantic ambivalence acts as an element of pleasure and enjoyment that constitutes its popularity. With Lauren Berlant, we can understand such digital practices of ambivalent affect as affective genres, “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation, an institution or formation that absorbs all kinds of small variations or modifications while promising that the persons transacting with it will experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected” (Berlant 2008: 4). In my conclusion, I connect this interpretation of ambivalent affect in digital linguistics to ongoing debate about incorporating notions of vernacular aesthetics into our sociolinguistic reasoning (Ngai 2004, Meyerhoff & Mendoza-Denton 2022)
Berkers, P., & Wijngaarden, Y. (2025). A Sociology of Awkwardness: On Social Interactions Going Wrong. Routledge.
Berlant, L. (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press.
Heyd, T. & Volkening, H. (2025). #cringe. Geschichte der Gegenwart. https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/cringe/
Meyerhoff, M., & Mendoza-Denton, N. (2022). Aesthetics in Styles and Variation: A Fresh Flavor. Annual Review of Anthropology, 51(1), 103-120.
Ngai, S. (2004). Ugly feelings. Harvard University Press.
Nouwen, R. (2024). The Semantics and Probabilistic Pragmatics of Deadjectival Intensifiers. Semantics and Pragmatics, 17, 2-EA.
Plakias, A. (2024). Awkwardness: A Theory. Oxford University Press.
Smith, C., Smith-Prei, C., & Stehle, M. (2016). Awkward politics: Technologies of popfeminist activism. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Group 4: Transference and Distinction
Niklas Barth: I cringe retrospectively“ – Medienkulturen der Fremdscham und Lächerlichkeit
„I cringe retrospectively.“ Taylor Swift hat in ihrer graduation speech an der NYU eine weithin geteilte Erfahrung von Social Media-User*innen pointiert: Im retrospektiven Blick auf die im Profil medial gespeicherte Selbstdarstellungsgeschichte erscheint der abgelegte Housewife-Look, die Skinny Jeans, ein auf Edgyness getrimmter Humor, oder die revolutionäre Pose als eine Mode von gestern. Die Aufschreibesysteme der Sozialen Medien erstellen ein kulturelles Archiv, das die Zeitgebundenheit von Moden, die Relativität kultureller Konventionen und die Historizität der Moral sichtbar macht. Die These des Vortrags ist, dass sich damit heute z.B. auf TikTok eine Erfahrung machen lässt, die schon die Moralistik des 17. Jahrhunderts ins Zentrum ihrer Beobachtungen stellte: Man empfindet (Fremd)Scham über abgelegte Moden und Konventionen (der anderen), die gerade dann ins Peinliche abwandern, sobald sie als „historisch“ erkennbar werden. Der Vortrag nimmt das Phänomen Cringe also aus einer medien- und kultursoziologischen Perspektive in den Blick, wenn er es mit dem Topos der Lächerlichkeit in der Salon- und Hofkultur des 17. Jahrhunderts sowie ihrer Reflexion im Medium der Moralistik kontrastiert. Ich werde 1) zeigen, wie digitale Medienkulturen Beobachtungs- und Vergleichsmöglichkeiten der Konventionen, Moden und Stile heterogener sozialer Gruppen hervorbringen. Sie stellen damit die Kontingenz kultureller Codes aus und bringen zugleich neue Formen ihrer kulturellen Repräsentation und Kritik hervor. 4 Ich werde 2) zeigen, wie Cringe eine Komik des Scheiterns (der FAIL) an Konventionen der Selbstdarstellung impliziert, die gleichermaßen anziehend wie abstoßend zu beobachten ist. Cringe bildet dabei ein Affektkontinuum zwischen den Polen der Scham und der Peinlichkeit. Cringy ist es z.B., wenn wir erleben, dass andere handeln und wir mitbeobachten müssen, dass dabei eine vom Publikum wahrgenommene Differenz zwischen der Selbstdarstellung und Konventionen des Darstellens vom Handelnden selbst nicht bemerkt wird. Die Komik des Cringe zeichnet sich zudem durch Kippmomente aus, in denen nicht eindeutig ist, was oder wer eigentlich als peinlich erlebt wird, wodurch eine komische Spannung entsteht. Es ist oftmals weniger das individuelle Scheitern, sondern die soziale Situation selbst, die cringy wird – zumal gerade dann, wenn man der Situation entfliehen will, aber gleichzeitig zu deren Fortsetzung verpflichtet wird. Ich werde schließlich 3) zeigen, wie das Urteil cringe dabei auch als Rhetorik der Herabsetzung und Beschämung zur normativen Kontrolle von Abweichungen genutzt wird.
Crispin Thurlow: Aaaawkward! Elitist stancetaking and judgy sentiments as symbolic violence
Bourgeois distinction is still defined, both in speech and bearing, by relaxation in tension, ease within restraint, a rare and highly improbable combination of antagonistic properties. (Bourdieu, 1984: 311)
This paper seeks to develop a sociolinguistic perspective on the “affective politics” (Thrift & Amin, 2013) of cringe by attending to its close cousin, schadenfreude. Without splitting pragmatic hairs around the specious discomfort/enjoyment distinction, I take both cringe and schadenfreude to have in common (a) the recognition of another person’s social faux pas or norm violation, and (b) the elitist pleasure derived from being “in the know” – in other words, positioning oneself as somehow superior vis-à-vis others (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009). These complex affective orientations and normative alignments are often expressed – and rendered discernable – in acts of stancetaking: subtle, often implicit evaluative verbal and nonverbal actions. The discourse-analytic focus of my paper is a single episode of the critically acclaimed television show Frasier (NBC, 1993 to 2004; specifically, S10:E11). Although dealing with a “heritage” media format, the social-political logic of schadenfreude (and cringe) is qualitatively germane and revealing. In this particular episode, and while toggling between diegetic and non-diegetic keying (Goffman, 1974), the protagonists’ status anxiety and shameless aspirational strivings are parodied. Viewers are thereby nicely schooled in what Bourdieu (quote above) considers to be a defining feature of the bourgeois habitus: “relaxation in tension”. (A kind of restrained ease akin to the ideals of propriety and emotional control Stoler, 2007, labels “proper sentiments”.) Notwithstanding, I propose that this mediatized schadenfreude – possibly/probably like other kinds of “squirm humour” (Carroll, 2014: 241) like cringe – is a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1984). However joyful or reflexive, the transgressive potential of Frasier is attenuated by its inherent legitimation of class formations.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.
Carroll, N. 2014. “Ethics and Comic Amusement.” British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (2): 241–253.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. HarperCollins.
Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2009). Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction. In A. Jaffe (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 195–226). Oxford University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2007). Affective states. In D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (pp. 4–20). Blackwell.
Thrift, N. & Amin, A. (2013). Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left. Duke University Press.
UEBER CRINGE 