Same Difference
Losing yourself in style
Losing yourself in style
A thought experiment: the global surveillance scandals from the past year were baseless. Turns out, no one is listening in on your mobile phone calls, or Angela Merkel’s.
Feel better now? In the end, it might not change much whether surveillance is real or just in everyone’s head. Surveillance has already become a given; as a form of thought control, it functions through the imagination of being surveilled. As a form of visualization, surveillance is a way of imagining power as it seeps into collectivity. Power has always been the ability to regulate between reality and illusion. But what happens when that same power puts on a hat and says, ‘hey, I’m just like everyone else’?
During a press briefing in February 2002 concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the justification of the US invasion there – then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld distinguished among ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’. Those phrases have been seen as examples of sophistic equivocation by a figure of authority – as power’s stealth or disguise. Others have dismissed these terms as platitudes. Perhaps these are not so different. Are platitudes a new form of stealth?
The term ‘known unknowns’ recently appeared in discussions by the trend forecasting/artist group K-Hole, who cited Rumsfeld’s phrase as a ‘big source of inspiration.’ K-Hole were the originators of the phrase ‘normcore’, a term which went viral after being discussed on a New York magazine blog on 26 February. Headline: ‘Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion.’ In a PDF published on their website in 2013, K-Hole described ‘normcore’ as ‘mov[ing] away from a coolness that relies on difference to a post-authenticity coolness that opts into sameness.’ In fashion, ‘normcore’ would mean adapting one’s appearance to any situation, while bearing in mind that self-expression (in clothing and beyond) is no longer a stable marker of individual identity.
As a concept, ‘normcore’ seemed designed to go viral. ‘Normcore’ makes a claim on collectivity, sameness and anonymity; going ‘viral’, likewise, is predicated on a structure of networked collectivity, on repetition and user anonymity. Suddenly everything was ‘normcore’. The logic seemed to be: if there’s no such thing as difference anymore, then everything is the same; if ‘normcore’ is an index of sameness, then everything is ‘normcore’. At the time of writing, there are 3,222 Instagram posts tagged ‘normcore,’ as well as many spin-off categories: normcore4life, normcoreselfie, normcoreisdead.
K-Hole maintained that ‘normcore’ was simply a theory, with no intrinsic image. So what did ‘normcore’ look like when it went viral? Sports gear, ‘mum’ jeans, trainers, baseball caps: a generic, deliberately bland look that’s both vaguely retro (loose-fitting blue jeans, white tube socks) and vaguely athletic (Nike). Supposedly the look of ‘normal people’, ‘normcore’ was more accurately the look of celebrities on the street who don’t want to look like celebrities.
Besides comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the most circulated ‘normcore’ icon was US President Barack Obama. Images were shown of Obama disguised in relaxed, quasi-leisure attire: a polo shirt, stonewashed jeans, black sandals. ‘Is Obama too Normcore to defeat Putin?’ read a Gawker headline from 6 March amid the crisis in Crimea.
On 12 February, Matthias Matussek, former Culture editor at Der Spiegel, debuted his column in Die Welt with the headline ‘I am homophobic. And that’s just fine.’ In this text Matussek polemically described gay love as ‘deficient’. A long debate ensued in the German media about political correctness, the position of journalists and the whereabouts of a supposed cultural ‘middle ground’.
On 2 March, German novelist Sibylle Lewitscharoff gave a speech at Staatsschauspiel Dresden in which she denounced test-tube babies as ‘half-beings’ and artificial insemination as ‘disgusting’. She justified her statement in an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: ‘one should still be allowed to say that’.
At a time when political correctness would seem to be the norm, Matussek and Lewitscharoff argued precisely the opposite: everyone knows that gays and test-tube babies are not normal; it’s just that no one dares to say it out loud. Matussek and Lewitscharoff claimed to conscientiously object to the politically correct mainstream media on behalf of an unheard, underrepresented majority whose shared values have no voice there. Such statements, then, were just open secrets.
It’s likely that these are all simply just news stories that will be forgotten by the time you read this. In any case, present in all these media cases is a disquieting appeal to ‘everyone’ – to a secret, invisible and silent collective. Such a collectivity, in each of these cases, was repeatedly summoned as not only powerful, but hidden.It was cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek who diagnosed the fourth term originally omitted in Rumsfeld’s diagram: the ‘unknown known’, i.e., the ‘repressed.’ This term – itself ‘repressed’ – suggests a truth about collectivity that might relate to stealth today. As we all know, the repressed – the unknown known – has a tendency to flare up virulently when dragged into the light.
