Reject Modernity, Reject Tradition
At some point while scrolling through Instagram or perusing TikTok in the last two years, you may have come across a post featuring baked goods, rustic decor, or needlepoint crafts and wondered: what the fuck is cottagecore? We can trace cottagecore as an organized subculture back to 2017, but the aesthetic possesses a cultural lineage extending from the “Tumblr witch” scene all the way back to the pre-industrial era.
In essence, the design and decorative elements that typify cottagecore are meant to evoke the lifestyle of European peasants living in the early modern era. Flowing dress, pressed flowers, an abundance of greenery, timbered homes, baking bread, gardening, and small-scale animal husbandry are all identified with cottagecore. The subculture is based in idealizing the simplicity, wholesomeness, and-for lack of a better term- innocence of that earlier mode of social organization. However, it didn’t take long before the subculture attracted a more sinister element.
To avoid any charge of Godwin’s Law, I want to clarify one point up front: my purpose is not to suggest that cottagecore is, in any way, fascist. That would be an absurd claim. Instead, I want to examine how fascists have been able to leverage the cottagecore phenomenon to their own ends, why this happened, and what the rise of cottagecore aesthetics can tell us about contemporary social relationships under capitalism.
The Nazi Village
Jamel is a small, rural village in the far north of Germany. Although we have evidence of the village’s existence dating as far back as the Thirteenth Century, Jamel acquired an infamous reputation in recent years as “The Nazi Village.”
Neo-Nazis began a coordinated effort more than a decade ago to take over the village. They bought up property in Jamel, sequestering themselves and turning the sleepy hamlet into a stronghold of both the National Democratic Party of Germany and the Blut und Boden politics they advance.
The Jamel experiment has allowed committed white nationalists to carve out a space in which their aspirations can be manifested; a traditionalist enclave free of the sort of “modern” (read: Jewish) influence that corrupted a previously “pure” Deutschland. Given enough time, resources, and social media influence (ironically enough), these volkisch traditionalists would seek to purify the country, one village at a time.
Of course, not every Nazi has the opportunity to take over a small German village and create an “Aryans only” town. To those lone wolves, the cottagecore community represents an opportunity to create a synthetic version of this. By embodying the cottagecore aesthetic, fascists can manifest the pre-industrial, idealized, sanitized, and illusory “lost glory” they desperately seek. Not only that, it presents an opportunity to sneak far-right propaganda into an otherwise apolitical aesthetic community.
Writing for Honi Soit, Claire Ollivain gave a basic rundown of the situation:
“Cottagecore’s fantasy of escaping to an idyllic life on a farm has roots in the cultural division of the urban and the rural. While the modern city has been constructed in discourse as a site of degeneracy and moral decay, rural life has been imagined as a more ‘natural’ and wholesome way of living. This is a common right-wing dog whistle. Visions of national identity and traditional, patriarchal gender relations are often grounded in a mythology of the rural. This distinction is also heavily racialised; immigration to cities has been met with fears of the deterioration of the ‘white race.’”
Fascism & Spirit
In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote a review of Leni Riefenstahl’s photography collection The Last of the Nuba for the New York Review of Books. Riefenstahl had, by that point, pivoted into a career as a nature and anthropological documentarian. Of course, decades before opening this chapter in her life, she occupied a position as the chief crafter of visual propaganda for the Nazi regime.
Riefenstahl was a visual auteur who pioneered techniques like the tracking shot with films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Given her position in the Nazi regime, though, one might be confused as to why Riefenstahl would choose to spend her later career lovingly documenting the lives of indigenous people in an arid region of East Africa. However, we can see a sort of thematic resonance in the manner in which Riefenstahl documents her subject. As Sontag notes in her review:
“Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical. A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupting ‘critical spirit.’ The book bonfire of May 1933 was launched with Goebbels’s cry: ‘The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.’ And when Goebbels officially forbade art criticism in November 1936, it was for having ‘typically Jewish traits of character’: putting the head over the heart, the individual over the community, intellect over feeling. In the transformed thematics of latter-day fascism, the Jews no longer play the role of defiler. It is ‘civilization’ itself.”
We have a tendency in pop culture to typify the Nazi mindset as mechanical and highly-regimented. They are automatons; the “bug men” who are content to live as part of a hive rather than as fully-realized humans. In truth, though, Nazi propaganda was highly enfused with appeals to an inherent spirit that transcends the crass boundaries of our material existence. We can see this reflected in the way the Nazis idealized the pre-industrial German lifestyle.
Blut und Boden (translated as Blood and Soil) is more than an empty rallying cry. It is emblematic of the Nazi’s belief in the intrinsic forces that create “a People;” the blood of a shared culture and ancestry, and the land that those people call “home.” This call to the traditional, transcendent roots of das volk led the regime to fetishize the “purity” of the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist peasant.
We can banally describe fascism the logical endpoint of capitalism; as colonial tactics of control and oppression applied to the homefront as necessitated by deteriorating conditions. The committed fascist, however, conceptualizes the movement’s ideological framework as being a clean break with capitalism, or at least from the highly-leveraged, financialized, cosmopolitan (read: Jewish) brand of capitalism that dominates today. This has been true from the early days; Benito Mussolini wrote in his 1932 work The Doctrine of Fascism:
“If it is admitted that the Nineteenth Century has been the century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy, it does not follow that the Twentieth must also be the century of Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy. Political doctrines pass; peoples remain. It is to be expected that this century may be that of authority, a century of the ‘Right,’ a Fascist century.”
Fascism has always pitched itself in opposition to, in Mussolini’s words, the “flabby materialistic positivism” of both capitalism and socialism. It borrows elements of each, but chooses to imbue itself with a mystical sense of spirit inherent in “the people.” This was not something unique to fascists in the 1930s, though. It continues into the present day.
Rejecting Modernity
The logic of capitalism dictates that the optimal state of any thing that exists is as a commodity which can be exchanged through a market interaction. All relationships are transactional under capitalism; a state of affairs that has the veneer of being “natural,” yet is profoundly unnatural.
We love the conveniences of modernity in the abstract. However, friction arises when the same principle mode of acquisition applies equally to air conditioning, vital medications, and a cheap toy like a Funko Pop figure. We may instinctively understand that there’s not an equivalence between healthcare and a plastic toy, but the market does not care. To the logic of the market, all is a commodity, and must be acquired through the same mode of market relations.
We are all “liberal subjects,” regardless of our bespoke political allegiances. Communist or arch-reactionary, the conditions in which we live force upon us an understanding of the individual-rather than the collective-as the prime political unit. We understand ourselves as atomized individuals existing next to one other, rather than as part of one another. The Self is fundamentally disconnected from The Other. But, even though we’re incapable of recognizing The Self in The Other, we still have to interact with The Other. Thus, we have to create a medium through which we can interact. For the liberal subject, market transactions become the only way to navigate the relationship between ourselves and the world in which we live.
Marx described the alienation from our gattungswesen or (“species-essence”) that occurs as the result of this marketization of the interaction between people. He noted that, as we become alienated from one another, we lose a piece of ourselves that is formed through our connection. Even if we’re cognizant of it and despise it, this force still poisons us so long as we’re forced to participate in the market.
This is the root of why the presiding understanding of “freedom” inculcated under capitalism is merely one’s freedom to make consumer choices. I propose that we have an innate understanding of the spiritual hollowness of this arrangement, but for the most part, we’ve been stripped of the ability to imagine any better future. This is why, on a profound and spiritual level, most people seem to hate contemporary society, even if they can’t express why.
A Heartless Condition
Fascists correctly diagnose the life experienced by the liberal subject under capitalism as a spiritually-deadened one. They innately perceive that we, the atomized liberal subjects, are devoid of understanding of The Self as pieces of a much larger whole, and that we suffer because we are unable to even name the nameless horror that eats away at our core. However, an astute observation does not guarantee a coherent conclusion.
Given the heartless conditions in which the liberal subject lives, it’s not hard to understand why such a person can come to believe the problem is modernity in concept, and to view the simple, pre-industrial mode of life that cottagecore presents as a balm for the soul. That individual might begin to believe that we would be better off living a simpler lifestyle that harkens back to the greatness which we lost somewhere along the way. To the fascist, modernity becomes the problem, and racialized traditionalism is the only thing that can fill the void. The fascist insists that we must reclaim spirit by a return to a pre-industrial understanding of The Self; that we have lost some inherent greatness, and that we may reclaim it if we choose to by turning back to an earlier, better time. To them, the solution is simply-as the saying goes-to reject modernity and embrace tradition.
This is, of course, a category error. The rejection of material analysis which Goebbels characterized as a preference for feeling over intellect leads the fascist to conclude that, because some cultural forces of modernity appear to cause their misery, the negation of those forces would solve the problem.
What they miss is that forces like technology and “degenerate” culture do not lie at the core of the matter; these are superstructural forces. So, the problem is not industrialization, modernity, or cultural Marxism (read: the Jews, again). Rather, the problem lies in the force which gives shape to the contours of the liberal experience. The problem lies in capitalism.
Therein lies the challenge: despite our dissatisfaction, we seem incapable of imagining a way forward; a way in which we can build a better future. In fact, as climate catastrophe looms over our heads, it gets harder for most of us to even imagine a future at all.
We find ourselves wishing to go back to the past, and write off this future as a mistake. This is not something intrinsic to the human experience, though. Instead, it is the product of the stripping away of peoples’ social and political imagination. This is a phenomenon which Mark Fisher dubbed “capitalist realism” in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative?
Fisher describes the way in which the underlying ideology that substantiates capitalism makes it easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. When we look at the state of affairs imposed by the forces of capitalism, it’s no suprise that so many people can only envision the future as a dystopian hellscape, and the past as a glorious, lost ideal.
The Radical Soul
Again, this is a point which must be reiterated to avoid misunderstanding at all costs: cottagecore is not fascism. Cottagecore is not conducive of fascism; it does not cause fascism. It is merely an aesthetic which harkens back to a pre-industrial mode of social life. If one finds that style appealing, there is absolutely nothing sinister or wrong about that. However, there is a relationship between cottagecore and fascism because the same force that propels people to one could also propel them to the other, depending on how their alienation exteralizes. This force drives people to idealize the pre-industrial lifestyle insofar as they do so as a conscious repudiation of modernity.
Now that we’ve plumbed that idea, though, we face the most terrifying question of all: where do we go from here?
We have to remember that history is not a series of discrete incidents. History is a dialectic; it is shaped by the constant conflict of theses and antitheses. Trying to unwind that process to recapture some lost glory is literally impossible. We cannot live as people might have done in an earlier epoch, because our understanding of The Self in a historical context would still be shaped by the present moment. Even if we did try to recapture some sort of pre-industrial purity, it would only be performative; in the end, it would be about as spiritually fulfilling as an extended stay in Colonial Williamsburg. Thus, our only option is to move forward.
Rather than looking to a sanitized and illusory ideal of a pre-industrial lifestyle that never existed, we should work to shape a future based on principles of mutual thriving and freedom. This can’t be achieved by going back to yesterday. Instead, the only option is solidarity in a shared struggle for a better tomorrow and against capitalism, which is the force that keeps us in material and spiritual bondage.
Technology presents us with incredible opportunities for a future of universal human thriving. However, it also presents the opportunity for self-destruction against a backdrop of total ecological collapse. The factor which will skew our future in one direction or the other is the conflict between capitalism and democratic control over our resources. Therein lies the trouble: the key to forging solidarity is the very spirit which capitalism sucks from its subjects.
How do we come to recognize The Self in The Other, when the logic of capitalism dictates that no such thing exists? How do we share in political struggle when the logic of capitalism insists that no two people share any mutual interest beyond preserving the market through which they interact?
We have no choice but to seek out ways to claw back our spirit from the maw of unfettered, soul-destroying capitalism. It sounds cliche, but in a sense, the antidote to the soul poison with which capitalism constantly doses us may be-simply put-joy. Not the fleeting joy found in acquiring a commodity, but a more transcendent joy that can only be found through the recognition of The Self as part of something greater than the precise point in space-time we occupy. Joy found in our connection to the world not insofar as we perceive it, but in its totality.
Community is the bedrock of solidarity. If that community happens to be predicated on a shared love of rustic design and decor…more power to you. Just remember that the aesthetics of tradition cannot be substituted for the politics of tradition.
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.
