Pettycore
& The Sorrows of Young Werther
The decade anniversary of normcore brought out some petty low-stakes resentments. A certain quote tweet commenting on an establishment journalist linking to a fashion e-tailor’s history of a PDF seemed steeped in bitterness. And actually this affect (let’s be dumb and call it pettycore), as much as I’d like to move on from it, seems in lock step with the anxieties of post-recession mass sameness. My epiphany inspired by my own history of petty feuds, and the self-interested idea I could maybe use this anniversary to finally release an unpublished normcore-adjacent photoshoot commissioned and then reneged upon, never seeing the light of day due to power struggles and bad vibes. The more I thought about it, the proximity of normcore and pettiness seems not a coincidence. The scramble for relevancy and self-seriousness over claiming a stake in identifying that beatniks were/are wearing tourist merch is intimately related to a moment of growing economic instability and exacerbated inequality when we started having to perform more in exchange for less. To quote myself (mostly out of laziness, but also to get in the game and assert I, too, was part of the discourse back then): “the net-art world is preoccupied with brands that evoke malls, mainstream culture, and middle-class America, just at the moment that it rapidly disappears” (Personal Ads, The New Inquiry). The first sentence of the now infamous K-HOLE report: “It used to be possible to be special.” And yet, the anachronistic rat-race of capitalism still demands us to prove we are, even if it’s just that we are special in noticing it isn’t possible to be special anymore. I try not to hate the player, just the game.
I’ve been thinking a lot about sincerity and sentimentalism lately (thank you Diane Severin Nguyen for turning me onto the book The Biopolitics of Feeling), and chewing on some of these ideas with Isaiah, I found myself scanning the wikipedia page on The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), where I was reminded of a few ways that normcore echoes Werther Fever / Wertherism, the trend which Goethe’s love-triangle novel inspired. After the book became a bestseller, young men across Europe started dressing like the protagonist. The story’s universe even prompted porcelain, a perfume, and copycat suicides. While the “acting basic” liberal arts college grads of the 2010s aspired to dress like midwestern moms, the whole plot of the novel which the 1770s trendsters were cosplaying revolved around Young Werther visiting a little village and becoming enchanted by the peasants’ simple ways. The novel makes clear Werther is neither an aristocrat (he’s humiliated by their set) nor a peasant, but something in between and alienated. +Back then there was pettiness too! A satirical spinoff by Friedrich Nicolai, The Joys of Young Werther, spurred a literary war between the two writers that lasted a lifetime and included a poem in which Nicolai defecates on Werther’s grave.
What’s changed in 10 years, because maybe not much has in 250?
