What is CoreCore? - In 777 Words or Less
Conceived online in the post-2020 malaise, corecore -known variously as ‘nichetock’ or ‘nichecore’- is a
spontaneously avant-garde artistic movement which animates the sensibilities of a generation born into a
spectacle-culture hypersaturated by images. At first encounter, CoreCore is essentially a pseudo-Dadaist
mixed-media genre of audio and video elements which, while exploring certain tonal themes, remain without explicit
narrative, structure, or topic. Corecore is avant-garde in the precise etymological sense of being an ‘advance guard’
-a vanguard- sent in advance towards enemy lines: the vanguard is not designed to survive or remain itself - its
function is to make contact-with the field, to encounter and modify the limit of possible movement - but what is this
movement of which CoreCore expresses a limit? In order to fully grasp the potential of CoreCore, it is important to
distinguish it from –Core, from which it makes its dialectical leap. “Core” might be defined as a suffix which indicates
its object as an aesthetic category (or to fully embrace dialectical language, a ‘category of the understanding’). Thus
‘cottage’ remains an object until it becomes cottage-core; at that point ‘cottage’ becomes a means by which
experience can be rendered coherent qua a given network of associations. Wool socks, hot water bottles,
mason-jars, beef tallow candles, and the smell of sawdust enter into a sort of synthesis of association built up from
childhood memories, cultural phantoms, and so on – this synthesis is the ‘core’ of which ‘cottage’ serves as its hinge
element. Crucially, however, ‘cottage’ also retains the status of one of the elements of its own ‘core’, which renders
the ‘cottage’ in ‘cottage-core’ a sort of void or ‘Zero Signifier’ which indicates only the meaning-bearing property of the
group while not assuming any particular meaning itself. The universal proliferation of ‘Cores’ (prefigured somewhat by
the ‘moodboard’ explosion in Tumblr circa 2014) includes every conceivable coordinate of meaning and assigns them
the status of a center : Horror-Core, Walter-White-Core, Regret-Core. CoreCore, rather than identifying and
expressing a category of the understanding, pushes into the very Form(Reason) of this understanding. Rather than
assembling a series of appearances which exist in reference to some object (as the socks, sawdust, and hot-water
bottle did to the ‘void’ of Cottage), CoreCore abandons the opposition between reference-and-object and presents
appearance-as-appearance - in this exact sense, CoreCore qualifies as a ‘dialectical’ advance from –Core. To the
consciousness caught up in this movement, this is why CoreCore seems to be ‘missing a topic’ or that it ‘excludes
having an essence’. This is because CoreCore, in presenting appearance-as-appearance, does not operate as a
logic of appearance-essence as –Core would. CoreCore has no absent element in an external sense but rather
attempts to demonstrate how the ‘gap’ between the elements of –Core and their ‘missing essence’ (the
cottage-as-void) is inscribed into the very means of expression itself. CoreCore is ‘without theme’ for the very same
reason it ‘resists interpretation’ - it does not hide anything, and in so doing, its surface contains the stopgap which lies
‘between’ ‘the cottage itself’ (cottagecore) and the elements of said Core. The two ‘Cores’ in Core-Core, can thus be
read as the ‘speculative moment’ in which essence and appearance find dialectical coincidence. Crucially, however,
this coincidence is not an identity but again an inclusion of the radical gap between essence-and-appearance into
being itself — what does it mean of a culture for it to spontaneously generate such a genre? We might speculate that
CoreCore is an inevitable consequence of a society which has been overtaken by phantasies and images designed
to forcefully assume the position of the means by which its citizens enter into thinking and relating. When the
relationship to others and oneself is mediated by the proliferation of memes, narratives, images, and various other
late-modern spirits which constitute the ‘society of the spectacle’, an attempt to form a vanguard -to throw oneself at
the limit of movement on the field- can be seen as both an attempt to express the emptiness of such a habitus and an
attempt to supersede said limit. In other words, CoreCore is what you get when a society of images, a society
constantly shelled by the appearance-essence gap constitutive of the paranoiac quest for identity, brand, and
authenticity; attempts to think itself out of itself. Is it not possible to read CoreCore in this purely abstract sense as
appearing also in Meta-Irony, another genre particular to our generation? The fact that CoreCore remains barely
coherent, constantly dipping back into Core, is all the more proof that CoreCore has not fully ‘arrived’ yet – but we
can begin to imagine the alternative for which it is a symptom.
Conceived online in the post-2020 malaise, corecore -known variously as ‘nichetock’ or ‘nichecore’- is a spontaneously avant-garde artistic movement which animates the sensibilities of a generation born into a spectacle-culture hypersaturated by images. At first encounter, CoreCore is essentially a pseudo-Dadaist mixed-media genre of audio and video elements which, while exploring certain tonal themes, remain without explicit narrative, structure, or topic. Corecore is avant-garde in the precise etymological sense of being an ‘advance guard’ -a vanguard- sent in advance towards enemy lines: the vanguard is not designed to survive or remain itself - its function is to make contact-with the field, to encounter and modify the limit of possible movement - but what is this movement of which CoreCore expresses a limit? In order to fully grasp the potential of CoreCore, it is important to distinguish it from –Core, from which it makes its dialectical leap. “Core” might be defined as a suffix which indicates its object as an aesthetic category (or to fully embrace dialectical language, a ‘category of the understanding’). Thus ‘cottage’ remains an object until it becomes cottage-core; at that point ‘cottage’ becomes a means by which experience can be rendered coherent qua a given network of associations. Wool socks, hot water bottles, mason-jars, beef tallow candles, and the smell of sawdust enter into a sort of synthesis of association built up from childhood memories, cultural phantoms, and so on – this synthesis is the ‘core’ of which ‘cottage’ serves as its hinge element. Crucially, however, ‘cottage’ also retains the status of one of the elements of its own ‘core’, which renders the ‘cottage’ in ‘cottage-core’ a sort of void or ‘Zero Signifier’ which indicates only the meaning-bearing property of the group while not assuming any particular meaning itself. The universal proliferation of ‘Cores’ (prefigured somewhat by the ‘moodboard’ explosion in Tumblr circa 2014) includes every conceivable coordinate of meaning and assigns them the status of a center : Horror-Core, Walter-White-Core, Regret-Core. CoreCore, rather than identifying and expressing a category of the understanding, pushes into the very Form(Reason) of this understanding. Rather than assembling a series of appearances which exist in reference to some object (as the socks, sawdust, and hot-water bottle did to the ‘void’ of Cottage), CoreCore abandons the opposition between reference-and-object and presents appearance-as-appearance - in this exact sense, CoreCore qualifies as a ‘dialectical’ advance from –Core. To the consciousness caught up in this movement, this is why CoreCore seems to be ‘missing a topic’ or that it ‘excludes having an essence’. This is because CoreCore, in presenting appearance-as-appearance, does not operate as a logic of appearance-essence as –Core would. CoreCore has no absent element in an external sense but rather attempts to demonstrate how the ‘gap’ between the elements of –Core and their ‘missing essence’ (the cottage-as-void) is inscribed into the very means of expression itself. CoreCore is ‘without theme’ for the very same reason it ‘resists interpretation’ - it does not hide anything, and in so doing, its surface contains the stopgap which lies ‘between’ ‘the cottage itself’ (cottagecore) and the elements of said Core. The two ‘Cores’ in Core-Core, can thus be read as the ‘speculative moment’ in which essence and appearance find dialectical coincidence. Crucially, however, this coincidence is not an identity but again an inclusion of the radical gap between essence-and-appearance into being itself — what does it mean of a culture for it to spontaneously generate such a genre? We might speculate that CoreCore is an inevitable consequence of a society which has been overtaken by phantasies and images designed to forcefully assume the position of the means by which its citizens enter into thinking and relating. When the relationship to others and oneself is mediated by the proliferation of memes, narratives, images, and various other late-modern spirits which constitute the ‘society of the spectacle’, an attempt to form a vanguard -to throw oneself at the limit of movement on the field- can be seen as both an attempt to express the emptiness of such a habitus and an attempt to supersede said limit. In other words, CoreCore is what you get when a society of images, a society constantly shelled by the appearance-essence gap constitutive of the paranoiac quest for identity, brand, and authenticity; attempts to think itself out of itself. Is it not possible to read CoreCore in this purely abstract sense as appearing also in Meta-Irony, another genre particular to our generation? The fact that CoreCore remains barely coherent, constantly dipping back into Core, is all the more proof that CoreCore has not fully ‘arrived’ yet – but we can begin to imagine the alternative for which it is a symptom.
by @the.ontological.turnt
