Applying that hoary chestnut “form” and “content” to the Instacore sensibility, we can make the bald statement that Gen Z values “content” over “form.” Such an attitude contrasts with Modernist works, such as Beckett’s Trilogy or Stein’s The Making of Americans, for instance: Those old doorstops could be said to have valued form almost at the expense of content. If my students claimed such Modernist works appear to be empty, large blocks of impenetrable text, most days I would be inclined to agree with them. Gen Z creatives are not “artists” so much as, in their own terms, “content creators.” While the distinction between content and form can quickly become fatuous, perhaps it is most intelligible at its extremes.
The work of Gen Z, not from a clumsy lack of craft but from a studious disavowal of it, surfs on vibes and feels and pure affect. They are short on structure, framing devices, intricacies of reference. In short, form. If a critic like Sontag once envisioned a late Modernist novel of unadulterated crystalline formalism, then young people today envision an advanced virtual reality—or better yet, Neuralink—program that can download pure content directly into their consciousness.
Oddly, Gen Z works that are “all content” can appear equally empty, static, and indomitably one-dimensional as Beckett or Stein—they’re formless flashes of TikTok titillation or action flicks, “digital fentanyl” without any further optative aim or enriching tension.
Perhaps another way of saying this is that any overt use of rhetoric, craft, or prosody only produces distanciation between the “creative” and their audience. Instead, confessional intimacy is one of the drives of Gen Z, but there is nonetheless a deep-set ambivalence about “realness” being at once both artificial and genuine. Because any complicating overtures of rhetoric (for example, meter, rhyme, persona, play between registers of diction, or ambiguity) are eschewed, an incommensurable affective gap is produced between the inward feeling—i.e., big, swoony emotions—and their outward expression, such as in a banal text message.
If everything must be simplified, straightforward, focused, how can wildness and inwardness be depicted? Realness of almost any variety is performative, of course, and yet the production of “realness,” as it might be called in our contemporary parlance, demands a sprezzatura in which it seems effortlessly self-fashioned. Nineteenth-century syntax, Modernist shifts in points-of-view, Postmodern contradictions and pastiche—such convolutions are strategies to not only represent but to enact in the reader a labyrinthine interiority or critical doubling back of self-examination. They are techniques to create an intimacy with one’s own thought. And yet, all these techniques, one might even say any obvious technique at all, feels “flowery” or false to most youth today, like so many purple patches that distract from the payoff, the upshot.
Another way to see the Instacore resistance to form is to realize that today most artworks translate across media: a book, a podcast, a reading, a gallery installation, a multimedia performance, a workshop, a lecture may all be iterations of the same artwork as the occasion demands. There is no singular, definitive text. Rather, there’s an endless array of multi-platform versions that instantiate the work in different media, in different contexts, to different audiences. Thus, form as such doesn’t matter. And where form doesn’t matter, matter doesn’t need to be informed.
Affect and Its Ectoplasms
The sensibility of Gen Z is uncritical and anti-intellectual: instead, uplift and mutual support are championed—there’s a baseline assumption that others suffer from crippling anxiety and trauma, a sensitivity which any criticism might imperil. Ultimately, comfort, relatability, and political solidarity are more important than aesthetic pleasures or any dubiously theoretical goals. Debate and philosophy appear extraneous in comparison to one’s existential survival, and the stakes are framed in terms of survival so that any counterviews can be excluded to make the space “safe.”
I exhibit, for the skeptical reader, a recent review from the literary journal DIAGRAM, which is (or claims to be?) merely a transcript extracted verbatim from the chat comments from an online Zoom reading by a young poet.
I target no asperities at DIAGRAM nor any aspersions to Hannah Emerson, the young poet in question (who happens to be a nonspeaking autistic poet) when I say the review reads like satire: a found text which works by recontextualizing extemporaneous comments at an online poetry reading. The review “performs” them in an ironic fashion, pointing out their lack of critical engagement and frivolity with the poems they presumably comment upon. See, for instance, the final sentence that gives away the biting lampoon: “My favorite line is” which is followed by yawning blank space. One registers it as an inarticulateness, a failure of language, but, if read literally, the claim may be that the empty page is better than the words written on it. Generally, the comments feel too upbeat, too rah-rah superficial, to take seriously. The recontextualization therefore could be seen as a rather savage takedown.
But to read it that way would likely only reveal my own jaded, mean-spirited mindset to Gen Z audiences. I am the one, perhaps, who is all-too-serious. My surmise is that the review, in fact, shares in the sensibility of cheerleading of the voices it co-opts. It is meant to be a positive review by showcasing the positivity of those the poems affected.
Even more than postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s “subaltern” who cannot speak because she lacks resources or education, the nonspeaking autistic poet is a figure who overcomes their very voicelessness while paradoxically being valued for giving voice to their condition. Their efforts alone are worth applauding. Perhaps we have even transcended content itself in this review—arriving at unmediated affect.
Such an upbeat comment thread for a younger poet’s Zoom reading is nothing unique. In the context of a sidebar during a reading, it may not even appear mawkish. But to transpose this offhand commentary into a published review—that’s more demonstrative of the state of an anti-critical orientation. The review lacks any rigor, preferring shallow affirmation and goopy heaps of praise. It is pure boosterism, a cheering squad suspended in an ectoplasm of inarticulate emotionalism. Vibes and feels that substitute for any more rational discourse.
Aporias of Polarization
Alternatively, consider these lines at the end of “Poem (Let Us Live)” by young trans poet Joshua Jennifer Espinoza:
The piece admits it’s not really trying to be poetry, that it’s been covert political activism all along. And it also poses—imposes—its position as the only acceptable one: if you don’t agree with me, it suggests, then you must be siding with the people who murder trans women. Such absolutist rhetoric shuts down the public sphere, doesn’t offer itself up for serious discussion but only “us” or “them,” the epitome of polarization.
The context of the poem is a moment when the constructed “you” character hesitates whether to share a post about a dead trans woman on Facebook. Social media occupies the affective groundwork of the piece; it’s not a pretext or afterthought—it’s the lifeblood through which the poem’s emotions circulate, much like the way that (in a completely different context) chivalric romance happens to be the fishbowl which Quixote’s imagination swims in. Social media’s apps and platforms, reposts and impact metrics shape the emotional landscape of this “you” the poem addresses.
In my reading, both reposting and not reposting are condemned. Reposting would only superficially represent another dead trans woman, for the sake of one’s own performative virtue signaling, thereby representationally “murdering” her again. However, not reposting would be an act complicit in the silencing of the threats against trans women and so a tacit “murder,” as well. Both actions are “wrong,” that is, potentially perceived as politically incorrect by the social media audience.
The paralyzing aporia the “you” faces can act as a touchstone of the implied reader’s inability to have a politically efficacious option. There is no solution offered here for structural violence and transphobia. The damned-if you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation induces the real reader’s condemning the murders through their own self-imposed complicity with them no matter what they choose. No action is advocated; rather, the liberal guilt the poem invokes is its purpose.
But who is this “you” the poem constructs; and who is the real reader it’s addressing? The poem is preached to the choir, and not the reputed murderers. Poetry almost never speaks truth to power except by means of the trope of apostrophe, which is to say “performatively,” since poetry in fact speaks to readers of poetry, of course, who tend to be relatively powerless. The performative nature of the apostrophe, however, is rhetorically compelling here precisely in fomenting feelings of liberal guilt, self-doubt, allyship, or solidarity. In this, the poem’s provocative ending could be viewed as quite effective.
Furthermore, the poem plays on the trope that trans women are “tricking” people in other senses, too, not just in sugarcoating their advocacy as art: they are stereotypically portrayed as sex workers (“turning tricks”) and they are merely masquerading as another gender. The poetry, by the terms set out in the text itself, is valued only for its assertion of a political cri de coeur (one which, in fact, may not even be politically progressive when examined closely) and representing its speaker’s identity group, the “us” of the last line.
The text is framed in terms of “survival” so that if you disagree with its viewpoint, you are immediately an enemy and guilty of implied hate speech—the poem “otherizes” diverse viewpoints and squashes any substantive conversation about its subject matter. Cancel, shadowban, boycott, shut out, and shout down—the tendency is to cheerlead, on one hand, or pile on those with whom one disagrees, on the other.
In the prior poem in this sequence, the speaker declares, “Use words I don’t have to go back / to college to understand.” It strikes an anti-intellectual attitude. Yet, in the larger context, the lines could also refer to how the speaker, Tiresias-like, might understand words differently if they had to “go back” to a period pre-transition, a remark showing how language is inherently gendered. Every gender or subculture speaks a different language although they use the same words. If this is our premise though, then will we forever be condemned to solipsistic grandstanding, talking past one another into the echo chamber of those who already share our identities and ideals.
If such remarks make me sound like a conservative crank, crank though I may be, I can assure you I am by no means conservative. Your suspicion, however, may be chalked up to the success of the very contemporary discourse—polarized and affective rather than nuanced and critical—which I am trying to describe. The Overton windows have been pushed so far to the left and right that they’ve become tiny peepholes which don’t allow for much leeway for different points of view. Happy quibbles with those whom we admire or critical forays into interpretation as a means of showing appreciation seem lost on those who want responses to fit some prefabricated opinion, whose viewpoints are expressed in a form as pointblank and blinkered as emoticons.
What Is Art Good For?
The artwork of Gen Z is author-centric, identity-driven, authentic, sincere. Constructing “personas” is, as the kids say, sus’. Raw pathos about one’s lived experience is the most desirable mode of presentation. One has no right to speak in the voice of another, to represent things which one can’t claim as one’s own, one’s cultural inheritance.
Still, speaking in the voices of others—whether Keat’s negative capability, Eliot’s depersonalization, or the Japanese principle of mono no aware—has long been part of the bedrock of poetry; it is the foundation of the art of acting; and it’s the backbone of depicting varied characters in fiction. Perhaps artfulness consists not in simply finding one voice but in throwing many. But this is far from the way most would-be artists who share what I’ve characterized as the Instacore sensibility see things.
When a marginalized author speaks about their own lived experience, they are unimpeachable. When someone describes their trauma, they cannot be challenged in what they say or how they say it; the room goes quiet with affirmative nods and gestures expressing empathy. We are taught to believe the victim. We don’t question their viewpoint or means of representation. Yes, this may be perfectly worthwhile in a therapeutic context. But it often becomes more problematic in, say, a creative classroom where the ostensible goal is to improve a piece of writing. A therapeutic orientation can come into conflict with productive discussion and offering constructive criticism of the artwork in question. It focuses on the author’s emotions rather than the piece itself.
Likely, there are many who would claim that so-called “productive” discussions have never been all that productive for the marginalized; perhaps not even for the many. Such discussions are simply a mode to belittle, exclude, or silence. Its supposed rationality is based on systems of oppression. Good riddance, they might say.
Nonetheless, where such contending worldviews collide, classrooms may well become implicit battlegrounds in larger culture wars. Values are at stake in these exchanges. Feelings get hurt. The whole business can turn cantankerous and embittered. Maybe younger writers believe that the workshop itself is an outmoded medium; sharing their work in welcoming community spaces and slams might align with their ends, not the critical nitpicking that takes place in an academic forum since such “elitist” readers are not their target audience anyway.
Younger writers may adopt the supposition that their work is intended as political advocacy, therapeutic self-care, or market-driven promotional materials. The frowsy, half-fossilized teacher may glibly presume that his student’s work is an aesthetic production, a pedagogical tool to improve their craft, or a resource for ethical reflection. In these circumstances, the question of what art is—or is for—is not merely sterile metaphysics. The answer shapes how all parties involved conduct themselves and (mis)understand each other.
I admit to having no ready answers. Only more notes, contending perspectives, further questions. Isn’t culture itself perpetually a negotiation, always subject to revision? So, one very tentative solution is to begin with this problem of incommensurability at the outset. To recognize the different aims of art. To admit upfront that a pluralistic culture has no easy cohesion; it is riven, ragged, on the verge of rioting—but this is also part of its unique strength over a monoculture. It has the ability to change and adapt.
We could propose that the purpose of a creative workshop—or, for that matter, any collective activity, the goals of any community—should ever be renegotiated anew, remaining a space that’s fluid while its principles get tested in practice. All values are provisional. Allow that the terms of engagement are terms that are always open to being redefined, and that the destination is not—despite any supposed lesson plan or objective—one which can be known in advance. In other words, one way to approach such a workshop is to turn back to examine the often-unacknowledged frameworks, ideologies, traditions, commitments, and cultural viewpoints that students are bringing to the table when they make interpretations and evaluative judgments. Reckoning with these larger questions, in fact, is the onus that the most profound artworks must bear. At least, that’s one way to see things.
But even this dialectical coyness, this Socratic moving target, undercuts the attitude of self-certainty or polemic righteousness that some may feel is their entitlement. It’s a method that already excludes some worldviews and favors others. It begins from the existing power structure, rather than razing it. Such a method can never be perfectly equitable. This playing footsie with every point of view or feel imposes a positionality of power relations that may close off more productive possibilities, depending on what’s meant by “productive.” No stance is truly neutral.
The emerging generation has a new attitude towards art, a sensibility rooted in the unique conditions permeating our disruptive cultural moment. We shouldn’t dismiss this generation as one that no longer needs “real” art; rather, every generation creates the artwork it needs.
This piece is part of a three-part series by Randi Foyl. Please check out Part 1 and Part 2 to see the author’s analysis of Gen Z’s “social horizon of sensibility.”