Hal Foster, “Post-Critical,” October 139 (Winter 2012).
Whilst once the critique of critical theory was the preserve of methodological and social conservatives, its most persuasive proponents today are located firmly on the Left. The Right, in the United States as in Europe, has instead now discovered the virtues of diversity, subjective relativism, skepticism of truth claims—all key aspects of what was once known as “theory”—throwing themselves with gusto into disputing climate science and playing the role of embattled white male minorities facing unfair discrimination due to all the immigrants, women, queers, and black presidents taking their jobs and tax dollars. For a pungent example, one need only look at the flurry of commentary sparked recently by the brave Princeton boy who, growing sick of being asked to “check his privilege” as a white male, penned a letter to The Princeton Tory that was picked up by theNew York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and other major bastions of the “liberal media” to say their dirty work for them.
Alex Williams made this useful distinction in an article that appeared in, of all places, the New York Times. See his “Normcore: Fashion Movement or Massive In-Joke?,” New York Times, April 2,2014 →.
Available at →. K-Hole was founded by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron, and Dena Yago.
The “89plus Marathon,” curated by the loquacious ever-presence of Hans Ulrich Obrist, brought together “emerging practitioners born in or after 1989” with the usual eclectic jumble of old hands to discuss important questions facing the present and future in an “optimistic and generative tone.”
Fiona Duncan, “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” New York Magazine, February 26, 2014 →.
Jeremy Lewis, the founder and editor of Garmento and freelance stylist and fashion writer, quoted in Duncan.
Thomas Frank, “Hipsters, They’re Like Us! ‘Normcore,’ Sarah Palin, and the GOP’s Big Red State Lie,” Salon, April 27, 2014 →.
Simon Doonan, “Beware of Normcore: The Bogus-Sounding New Fashion Trend is All Too Real,” Slate, April 7, 2014 → . Doonan, who holds the amazing title of “Creative Ambassador of Barney’s New York,” has “been moving in fashion circles for decades,” as the Los Angeles Times reminds readers in its own article on normcore (May 18, 2014) →.
Duncan, “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion.” More recently, Gap has run a campaign called “Dress Normal,” with expensive adverts directed by David Fincher, attempting to capitalize on the normcore trend to revitalize their brand.
Nor is it because I assume fashion to be inherently stupid, frivolous, or unworthy of serious attention, common misapprehensions about a domain that is not only a fine instrument for reflecting broader social, economic, and cultural changes, but one that can occasionally put in a turn as a realm of aesthetic invention, creative experimentation, and social comment that far outshines the visual arts. Indeed, the response to normcore from the fashion press has not been without interest, especially given that a trend for “dressing normal” has the potential to undermine the industry’s imperatives, if, say, too many people got swept up in the trend and realized that they preferred to “dress normal” and stopped buying in to the idea that new markers of difference are needed on a “seasonal” basis. A financial and aesthetic shudder has been perceptible. Some tried to knock things on the head before they got out of hand, with Elle leading the industry backlash with a piece entitled “Why the ‘Normcore’ Phenomenon is a Fraud.” Others attempted to accelerate the trend and move on to something else entirely. Just two weeks after normcore “broke” in New York Magazine, Vogue asked, “What Comes After Normcore?,” referring to the still nascent trend as a “useful palate cleanser,” and identifying an “exit strategy: keep the sneakers and your ability to walk, wearing them with anything—even couture dresses!” Those craftier set out to instantly gentrify normcore, recuperating it for the top end of the market. As Adam Tschorn wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “a pair of off-brand heather grey sweatpants from Big 5 Sporting Goods won’t cut it. The key is to wear a super-luxe high-end designer version … that only looks like you’re slumming it,” and indeed Chanel has had two seasons of couture sneakers (although you can’t blame Karl Lagerfeld for wanting some comfy shoes at his age). Thomas Frank and Benedict Seymour both picked up on the fashion-eats-itself potential of normcore, the former seeing in it the possibility of a “cultural-commercial Armageddon … a complete collapse of the imperium of cool,” and the latter, a more melancholic “end of dressing up.” However, they both discuss the fashion industry as if it were the preserve of “the One Percent,” led by a cabal of elite tastemakers—Frank: the “aristocracy of the tasteful”; Seymour: the “oligarcho-aristo-creative” class—whilst the rest of us presumably walk around in the nude except for our now faded blue collars. This vastly underestimates the scale and diversity of the industry, and fails to acknowledge the way in which social media has allowed trend formation to slip out of well-policed channels, even if the great brand leviathans are now learning how to make an amplification chamber of it, slipping in collections (resort) and seasons (pre-fall) to fit the social-media-enhanced pace of the fashion cycle.
K-Hole insists that youth is no longer to be strictly identified with the young, given that biological, economic, and cultural clocks having long fallen out of sync. Youth is thus “ageless.” In fact, the first section of Youth Mode, which most clearly satirized the language of brand analysis and marketing reports, is entitled “The Death of Age.” “Youth,” they declare, “is a mode. It’s an attitude.” Being in “Youth Mode” is “about being youthfully present at any given age. Youth isn’t a process, aging is. In Youth Mode you are infinite.” Yet, this infinite, ageless youth seems to be the lifelong companion of an indebted, jobless future: “when Boomerang kids return to their parents’ Empty Nests and retirement fades into the horizon, the bond between social expectations and age begins to dissolve.”
Benedict Seymour, “Notes on Normcore,” Mute, May 29, 2014 →.
Of Glazek’s comments the group said, he “nails it.”
See “Curating the Internet,” moderated by Karen Archey (Kaleidescope, Summer 2014). Of K-Hole’s practice, Yago wrote, “our platform looks to consumer trends, and attempts to identify the larger motivating forces behind why and how decisions are being made. This is why we focused on anxiety and individuality on our past two posts.”
Frank, “Hipsters, They’re Like Us!”
Members of K-Hole have tried to address this confusion in interviews with HuffPost Live and Dazed & Confused, and as reported in a number of other articles, the Los Angeles-based writer and friend Christopher Glazek noted on K-Hole’s Facebook page that Fiona Duncan’s initial piece in New York Magazine had conflated the two concepts and hence misrepresented what K-Hole had meant by normcore—something for which Duncan apologized, complaining that she had been forced to edit her article a number of times to make it more about fashion (which in itself hardly explains why the ideas had been confused).
It is not only in the fashion press that normcore and Acting Basic have been erroneously conflated. The two most substantial critical reflections on the phenomena, Thomas Frank’s article in Salon and a subsequent piece in Mute by Benedict Seymour, both repeat this mistake, despite otherwise interesting interpretations.
The cinema setting also seems to evoke the mass shootings that have also been a fixture of American youth culture since the 1990s, although here too it seems that panic has subsided into ambivalence.
Or what Benedict Seymour refers to as the “final dregs of the punk negativity/self-fabrication process.”
A logic that might actually work better for K-Hole’s argument would be that because there was so much difference, its value was reduced, making it harder to achieve the type of individualism that traded on unique difference, or the type of difference that makes one really special.
K-Hole notes that in Mass Indie times, “mastering difference is a way of neutralizing threats and accruing social status within a peer group”; the master of Mass Indie was not the look-at-me mall punk with the last of the mohawks (although they were cool too), but the quiet comps connoisseur who told you about Awesome Tapes from Africa.
Farrell, “Meet Norma Normcore.”
With Acting Basic, K-Hole of course reference the idea of being “basic,” most frequently heard in relation to being a “basic bitch,” an idea that emerged first in hip-hop (more specifically a 2009 release by Lil Duval) but has gone on to achieve more mainstream popularity, and somewhat shifted meaning, as a meme. Hence, “basic” might be considered alongside other terms like “twerk” and “shade” that mainstream culture has likewise appropriated from African American subcultures, hip-hop and drag respectively, in recent years. There is of course an interesting discussion to be had about the fact that hip-hop, or a certain hip-hop, has in fact long been one of the dominant aspects of mainstream pop culture. At any rate, as Glazek noted, for K-Hole, being normcore means being “unbothered by the politics of appropriation” (see Glazek above).
One of the most potentially interesting lenses through which to understand Acting Basic, or indeed the normcore trend in fashion, is that of the broader desire for anonymity—however perversely attention-seeking it might be—in a period of ever-more invasive and pervasive surveillance, not only from the state and other institutional powers (the NSA; CCTV cameras; police drones; Google street view; marketing algorithms that track online behavior, consumption patterns, etc.) but also from ourselves, our own constantly updated and geolocated social media feeds and well-curated spreads of publicly accessible selfies. Of course, wearing Birkenstocks is probably likely to attract less attention than a plastic V for Vendetta mask, but whilst it’s relatively clear who anarchist protestors might want to conceal their identities/seek attention from, it remains to be seen what type of anonymity Acting Basic might be seeking. A number of authors have likewise referred to camouflage, understanding normcore (or rather Acting Basic) as the “latest urban camouflage” (Duncan) or even a form of “wealth camouflage” (Seymour), although of course whilst camouflage may always be used to conceal, the reasons for wanting to be concealed are many.
This point was not lost on all the fashion press. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lizzie Garret Mettler, author of the 2012 book Tomboy Style, noted that “it’s a bit condescending to wear normal clothing as a joke, like it’s a costume, but maybe that’s the next natural iteration of the hipster.” See Adam Tschorn, “Normcore is (or is it?) a fashion trend (or non-trend or anti-trend),” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2014 →.
In what follows I will capitalize “Normcore” to indicate that it is K-Hole’s conception of the term rather than the wider understanding, which will remain as “normcore.”
“The ‘Normcore’ Fashion Trend,” interview with Sean Monahan, HuffPost Live, March 6, 2014 →.
I owe thanks to Suhail Malick for the comparison to Zelig.
Adaptability and empathy are key virtues for such an outlook, and these terms recur throughout Youth Mode in a variety of forms, like branded keywords.
Duncan, “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion.”
In fact, even older models of social thought, such as Freud’s “narcissism of small differences,” may offer some insight on the bubble economy differentiation that characterizes Mass Indie. Indeed, even Thorstein Veblen had long ago noted that “David Riesman and Vance Packard … have shown that even the vast American middle class, which is as free from want and even more uniform than the circles described by Proust, is also divided into abstract compartments. It produces more and more taboos and excommunications among absolutely similar but opposed units. Insignificant distinctions appear immense and produce incalculable effects. The individual existence is still dominated by the Other but this Other is no longer a class oppressor as in Marxist alienation; he is the neighbor on the other side of the fence, the school friends, the professional rival. The Other is more and more fascinating the nearer he is to the Self.” Quoted in Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Thanks to Eva Kenny for this point.
This doesn’t even factor in the other side: the fact that there may be very many individuals, even adaptable and empathetic specimens, that do not wish to find belonging or embrace sameness in every situation, whether because they just like to keep to themselves or because some situations are built around social norms that they cannot empathize with or don’t want to adapt to. You don’t have to be a hater to not chill with racists. Not everyone is always happy to chant for the other team.
Seymour, “Notes on Normcore.”
Another powerful instance of the contemporary return to normativity is to be found in the work of the philosophers Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani. Brassier and Negarestani are both engaged in an attempt to develop a rationalist project of universal emancipation based around a concept of collectively generated and revisable norms that govern behavior along the lines of commitments to rational experimentation, testing en route the very limits of the human as such. As fascinating and persuasive as their abstract accounts of rational normativity are I need to do further work to grasp their implications for the processes of political subjectification, and vice versa, before I can discuss their political value with confidence.
Needless to say, force here should not be solely or even principally understood as physical force, even if this language evokes it. Rather, this terminology is used to highlight the fact that society is not a neutral sphere, and acting in it means engaging with a play of other forces, some of which will offer resistance, whether symbolic, physical, ideological, legal, and so on.
Povinelli talks of “extinguishing others,” indeed “without reason,” and even notes that extinguishing forms of existence can be equated with killing forms of existence. I would rather not affirm the language of extinguishing other social groups, given the history of this idea. I nonetheless take Povinelli’s point that unless we accept the power in our actions and take responsibility for putting our shoulder into what we think ought to be over and above other forms of existence—without any transcendental or ultimate regulative ground—we will be petrified in discourse, paralyzed in disdain for those who dare do (an all too recognizable malaise today).