The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive but its most perishable aspect.
—Susan Sontag
We saw them at the restaurant: a group of women, dressed up for a night out. They were the only other occupied table in the restaurant, shortly before the first lockdown, and even though they did little to attract our attention, we both observed them closely. On our walk home, we analyzed their appearance and speculated about their lives. I noticed that the conversation gave me a particular pleasure. Our analysis assumed a distinction between us and them, but it was also, you said, a disavowal of something in ourselves. This combination of distinction and disavowal has characterized one of the most important aesthetics of the current era—the basic.
Last summer, in the soft messianism of trend-forecasting, it was announced that ‘vibe shift’ was imminent. A vibe shift is a paradigm change in aesthetics: in fashion and related forms of life, including music and self-expression online. This prediction came from Sean Monahan, onetime artist and diagnostician of trends, most famously the ‘normcore’. The prediction was reported some months later in an interview with Monahan by Allison P. Davis for The Cut, entitled ‘A Vibe Shift is Coming: Will Any of Us Survive It?’ The language of survival is not accidental – Monahan notes that the vibe shift remained obscure because of the suspension of normal life during the pandemic – and it also suggests a way of viewing history: not as arcing towards justice, or progress, but as a movement from catastrophe to catastrophe. Faced with the vibe shift, the cultural critic resembles Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, looking back at the past, which is piling up like carriages in a train wreck, except these catastrophes are not political events but aesthetic decisions a few years old.
Whether it is the American flag unfurling at the end of a disaster movie, or God’s promise after the Flood not to destroy the world again by water, we often look to catastrophes for redemption. Accordingly, some commentators hoped that the vibe shift would involve the redemption of the basic. Cycles of fashion always involve the recuperation of older styles, but these hopes were expressed in a moral, even eschatological way, as if the collapsing meaning of the basic might involve the end of fashion itself. On her Substack, the writer Ayesha A. Siddiqi accused those commentators of confusing their obsolescence as ageing millennials with meaningful predictions. It does seem to be true that some objects once considered irredeemably basic (i.e. Uggs) have been taken up by a fashion vanguard. A vanguard can recuperate aesthetically unpromising things – in her essay ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964), Susan Sontag remarks that there is a ‘good taste of bad taste’ – but this doesn’t mean that the basic as such has been ‘redeemed’. Nevertheless, at this transitional moment, when the objects classically associated with the basic are being revalued, its historical meaning may have come to light.
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The basic has been a popular aesthetic category for nearly a decade. It usually refers to cultural objects that have outlived an initial prestige but persist, as well to those people – almost always women – who express a preference for those objects. The term involves a blurring between person and object, since it implicitly compares a type of person with a type of commodity: specifically, a range of lower-price, everyday items in a store (i.e. Gap t-shirts). In her important study Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai writes that her three chosen aesthetic categories – the zany, the cute, and the interesting – speak to ‘everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption’ in a uniquely ‘direct’ way. Since 2014, however, the basic has become an ever-more dominant term in everyday discourse. A term of comparison, it refers to a style of consumption, marked as unsophisticated, viewed from a perspective that is implicitly capable of a greater sophistication. Its meaning is best understood through its characteristic scenes of judgment, and the social distinctions and antagonisms that they enfold. Instead of offering a unified definition or theory of the basic, what follows is a series of notes on an aesthetic that is historical, fleeting, and that has played its own role in the conceptualization of the present era.
1. A look of contempt
The recent fate of the basic is illustrated by a post on the Instagram meme account @on_a_downward_spiral. Unlike conventional memes, combining word and image, accounts like this mostly post images without words (or captions), which means the joke is implicit in the selection. The humour involves the cynical sophistication of ‘extremely online’ communities, almost always inviting contempt. In September 2021, the account posted a photograph of a woman in an autumnal landscape. She wears thigh-high, light brown suede boots, crossed over each other, blue jeans, and a wool sweater that reveals her left shoulder. Her hair is fluted, luscious. The image is carefully, almost exquisitely posed. Its posting here means there is a joke to be found. The woman’s face is concealed by a leaf, which she holds up, as if pretending to hide from the photograph that she is nevertheless posing for. What we can see of her face seems to be smiling, but what she thinks is the joke is not the reason it has been posted, which is that the picture is basic. A way of looking characterized by contempt is the most obvious meaning of the basic, and the over-familiarity of this image makes this post so predictable as to be guilty of what the basic also is: the uncritical repetition of something that is meant to be spontaneous. What happens when a judgment loses its original force? It draws attention from the object to the judgment itself.
2. A term of dependency
The term ‘basic’ entered mainstream discourse in the early 2010s, having been used in rap lyrics some years before that. If the term originally possessed the charisma of Black American slang, it soon assumed the degraded aspect of mainstream circulation (as in the case of ‘cool’). A primal scene of this transition is from 2015, when supermodel Kate Moss drunkenly called the pilot of a budget airline flight a ‘basic bitch’. She had already used it in an Instagram video with the designer Mark Jacobs, where the pair jokingly abused their followers. The fortunes of fashion elites depend on maintaining both an Olympian height above and a deceptive intimacy with their fans, so that the fruits of their work can – in the words of The Devil Wears Prada – ‘trickle down’ to a consumer who wants to imitate them, and the term ‘basic’ establishes a distinction that disguises elites’ economic dependency on consumers. It is not a term of absolute distinction but one of deceptive relationality. After all, Moss herself was on that budget flight. The fact she used the term to abuse a male pilot also suggests that it gains force by application beyond its initial association with women.
3. An unsublimated state
To be basic is to participate in the consumption of mass culture. It is particularly associated with white American women, and its palette – cream, beige, autumnal browns – are those of the foodstuffs associated with Middle America: white bread, Kraft cheese, margarine, under-seasoned meat. Its symbol is the pumpkin spiced latte (tellingly, a spice that is not spicy). At lunch with the New Yorker, the theorist of black aesthetics Fred Moten is served a hamburger with aioli, despite having asked for one without aioli. He makes a characteristically brilliant improvisation: ‘I think mayonnaise has a kind of complex relationship to the sublime’. Being neither solid nor liquid, it resists sublimation (the process by which gas turns into solid or vice versa). The joke is also presumably that mayonnaise (which Moten hates) can’t be aesthetically sublime. Likewise, the basic is what is not sublime—it remains unacceptably itself, incapable of change. But, as anyone who has tried to make mayonnaise can attest, an unsublimated state can also be subtle, miraculous, just right.
4. A desire and an absence of desire
To be basic is to want to identify with mainstream culture and it is also, perhaps, the absence of desire to be other. But this doesn’t preclude a mimicry of other cultures. It is possible to be basic in appropriation, where the appropriated object is already normalized. We see this in a video by the popular YouTube channel, Yoga with Adriene. In their staging, Adriene’s videos maintain a carefully generic appearance: the interiors are bright, plain, and overwhelmingly white, like Airbnb photography. The real estate is aspirational but not exclusive, and almost entirely lacking in cultural specificity. At the end of one video, located in an unidentified American park, Adriene tells her viewers: ‘The light in me recognizes the light – the rockstar – in you.’ This is a translation of Namaste, into the language of twentieth-century secular culture, when the rockstar was the closest thing to a deity, which has itself been subsumed into a more contemporary, therapeutic spirituality. To be basic is to be the rock-star Adriene wants to see in me, and this could be seen falling short of a more authentic yoga practice, but it could also be an accomplishment: the recognition of self-sufficiency in an alienating world.
5. An analysis that is itself basic
Soon after its subsumption within mainstream discourse, the basic was theorized on websites such as Refinery29 and Urban Dictionary. Jezebel commented that the analysis of the basic is itself basic. This shows how much the cultural analysis practiced by mid-century theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag has itself become part of mainstream culture, subsumed within the system it was invented to critique. A host of articles identified the guilty objects: the Holly Golightly poster, the ‘Live Laugh Love’ ornament, etc. These lists made the aesthetic judgment into a game, inviting readers to identify what is or is not basic, leaving the social context of the term as untouched as a Tiffany’s window display.
A second wave of articles identified the misogyny frequent in the term’s use. Alongside numerous quizzes (ten, by my count) to help its readers discover if they are basic, Buzzfeed published an editorial that insightfully argued that this was a displacement of anxiety about consumption into an aggression towards women. Even this more critical kind of article assumes that the basic is a negative judgment, something to be rejected or recuperated, rather than something that simply exists. Historians debate whether a polemical designation – i.e. ‘Puritan’, ‘Cubist’, ‘Social Justice Warrior’ etc. – is a usefully descriptive term or merely an insult for a scapegoated group. These polemical names, even as they are over-stated, misguided, or malicious, may survive because they identify a more-or-less coherent set of tendencies. If ‘basic’ identifies a real sensibility, what is it?
6. A sensibility
In a recent novel, the protagonist – a white woman in her early thirties – gets ready for a night out while listening to Dr Dre’s 1992 track ‘Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang’. The song comes on as part of an old playlist called Good Times. This scene of consumption privileges comfort, familiarity, and pleasure—a combination of motives that might be identifiable as basic. The novel doesn’t invite critical commentary, and it feels like an imposition to apply the term here, where it would be little more than an insult levelled at a moment of private exuberance, to puncture rather than illuminate. The heavy machinery of critical theory might not be able to make this word – which is, in its origin, insulting – useful. As an aesthetic judgment, the basic describes an uncritical submission to the status quo—a catastrophe of minor decisions. As a sensibility, it surely means something quite different—a sensibility turned against the pretensions intrinsic to the term sensibility, and the high bourgeois puritanism that once dictated what was permissible to enjoy.
7. A plot and a counter-plot
If there is a plot nestling in the basic (what the literary theorist Hayden White called ‘emplotment’), it appears to be that of the romantic comedy. As a negative judgment, the term often implies that an unmarried woman must be in search of a husband, and that her aesthetic choices are merely ways to achieve this. The countless romantic comedies culminating in happy marriage appear to confirm this. Other contemporary fictions (i.e. The Worst Person in the World) offer a kind of counter-plot, exploring a financially independent woman’s ambivalence towards marriage, for which her aesthetic choices are not designed to win a husband. This plot culminates in a threateningly autonomous pleasure.
8. A mode of being
The pleasure of the basic is exhibited in Netflix’s mid-pandemic offering, Emily in Paris (2020). The 29-year-old protagonist moves to the French capital, where she has been seconded, thanks to the pregnancy of her older boss. In each episode, Emily catwalks a series of flamboyantly cute outfits resembling those of Carrie Bradshaw (the show’s creator, Darren Star, was also responsible for Sex and the City), except zanier, as if acting out an ambivalence about the idea that her clothes should attract possible husbands rather than engage her followers. In her new workplace, Emily catalyzes a series of antagonisms between French elitism and American populism that have been stereotypical since de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). In one confrontation, the cartoonishly haughty fashion designer Pierre Cadeau calls Emily ringarde, and a colleague translates this for our monolingual heroine as ‘basic’. Later, someone consoles her, saying: ‘It’s basic to call someone basic.’ Instead of integrating into French snobbisme, Emily embraces the basic part of herself. Just as she wins over her colleagues with her charm and corporate credit card, so does this show seduce us with such flashes of self-consciousness.
Emily in Paris signals a turning-point in the history of the concept, which took place some years before the show. Some early theories described it as a category lacking in self-consciousness, in which the one judged as basic is always another. This is clearly no longer the case. Perhaps the basic is not a fixed identity but a mode of being, available not only to women but all consumers with enough disposable income to make choices that express social distinction, one way to participate in the tawdry collective life available to us in a capitalist world.
9. An uncritical critique
By remaining true to her own basic desires, Emily wins over the French fashion elite, and this is confirmed by an episode in which she organizes a triumphant catwalk show in the Palais de Versailles—the ultimate invasion of social media culture into the halls of the aesthetic ancien régime. Like Emily, the basic exhibits a curious power to defang critique.
At the end of the working day, when we close our work laptops and open our personal laptops, many of us submit to platforms that offer culture that is digestible and just about desirable enough. It’s tempting to wonder if Emily in Paris, with its perhaps intentionally irritating protagonist, was designed to be an object of abuse. If we don’t like it, we can always post about it and gain hormonal rewards from the likes our little critiques garner on platforms owned by billionaires and designed to compel us to further acts of consumption. That we want to comment on it is part of the logic of a culture industry that offers up such gendered objects for judgment in an increasingly cynical discourse, where the once-emancipatory practice of cultural studies – for thinkers like Barthes and Stuart Hall – is put to the service of spoiling.
The basic often associates women with unthinking consumption, reinscribing into gender the old metaphysical dualism of body and soul, for which women are more body than soul, more consumption than critical thinking. This association is itself uncritical. Something similar happens in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, a work of critical theory by the French anarchist collective Tiqqun. The text, translated into English in 2012, argues that the figure of the ‘Young-Girl’ (who represents innocence, beauty, happy consumption etc.) is a medium of capitalist ideology. The analysis drips with misogyny, as if the ‘Young-Girl’ were herself to blame, over-shadowing its anti-capitalist critique with a seemingly unexamined resentment. In a response to Tiqqun, published in The New Inquiry in 2013, Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern argue that book illuminates more about the theorists than their intended object. They describe it as symptomatic of a class of male intellectuals motivated by envy at professionally successful women. Tiqqun failed not because the practice of radical critique has run out of steam, as is often claimed today, but because it was not critical enough.
If Tiqqun’s critique confuses the figure for the system, this is also true of discourses of the basic. Interpreting the basic as a symbol of capitalist consumption in general overlooks the misogyny of the judgment, which singles women out as consumers only to belittle them. There are desires in the basic that make it no mere sign of submission but a subtly antagonistic form of life. What would a critique that was on the side of the basic look like?
10. A temporality
The basic is not quite nostalgic: instead, it emerges pre-distressed like a pair of jeans, a symbol of post-industrial decline, signaling its belonging to an older era even as it exists in this one. As the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote: ‘Not all people exist in the same Now’. This is perhaps most visible in fashion, which offers us an accelerating sequence of Nows.
When it becomes self-conscious, however, the basic surely starts to mean something different. As in the populist phrase ‘coastal elites’, the basic as a self-identity displaces ‘progressive’ culture from a temporal realm into a spatial one, exposing it as the product of cosmopolitan cities, and implicitly the culture of wealthy liberal elites. In departing from the preferences of a cosmopolitan elite, it might also be thought to resist the developments of multi-cultural society in general. This could be its true political meaning, its populist and fascist valences inter-twined. The aesthetic corollary of an unsublimated rage.
11. A reactionary aesthetic
The basic centers North American culture in a world where the political power of the USA is perceived (perhaps both rightly and wrongly) to be waning. Our polycentric world is still dominated by a superpower where a wealthy white minority still holds disproportionate, undemocratic power.
The emergence of the aesthetic could even be said to have anticipated the reactionary victory of 2016, when 45% percent of white women voted for Trump. It would, however, be incorrect to view the basic as a party-political identity. After all, many white women vigorously resisted Trump’s government. What’s more, the basic was often associated with Hilary Clinton’s two campaigns for the presidency and the centrist-progressive enthusiasms of her supporters, especially in contrast with the resurgent socialist electoralism of Bernie Sanders.
It is telling that the aesthetic flourished between 2014 and 2020, a period in which the progressive idealism of the Obama era dissipated, and political discourse seemed to reach new depths of cynicism. This cynicism happened, among other places, in online communities that pioneered new forms of cultural commentary (memes, podcasts etc.), where spoiling language was often used freely. It was also a period in which the limitations of white feminism were increasingly exposed by radical intersectional critiques, and the emergence via social media of a cultural-political vanguard that is predominantly not white, which made the cultural expressions of even a moderately progressive white feminism appear conservative.
12. An avant-garde attitude
The basic might also be avant-garde in its own way. As a refusal of the cynical sophistication of elites, it resembles an attitude going back to Courbet and nineteenth-century Realist painting, if not earlier to Beethoven’s bombastic early symphonies and even Shakespeare’s sonnets, published a mere decade after the craze for sonnets had ended, running through Fauvism and Cubism, and culminating in Pop Art, either as its spiritual inheritor or as its ultimate parody. Warhol’s distressed repetitions of celebrities are the essence of the basic. Matisse is perhaps the basic artist of our age: witness the way that scammer-influencer Caroline Calloway copied his late style. Sianne Ngai notes that the simultaneous disappearance and ‘zombielike’ persistence of the avant-garde is a feature of the postmodern age; likewise, the convergence of avant-garde art and the Instagram shop is characteristic of the aesthetic: the point at which art becomes mainstream and loses its counter-cultural energy, which might also be the condition of its survival.
The recuperation of avant-garde art also indicates, retroactively, that their work addresses something that could not ever be enjoyed exclusively by an educated elite. In 1980, explaining the use of racist and homophobic slurs in his titles, the black queer composer Julius Eastman spoke of wanting to evoke ‘a basicness, a fundamentalness’ in his work, something that ‘eschews that thing which is superficial or, what we can say, elegant.’ The basic is avant-garde where it undermines the grounds of social distinction, getting to something disturbingly fundamental.
13. A love of the common
In 1891, in a moment of high aestheticism, Oscar Wilde declared that the sunset was passé. Today it might be basic to post pictures of sunsets, meadows, blossoms, or flowers. But it would also be a mistake to think that most people using social media are not themselves in some way also basic.
In a poem written in his early thirties, William Wordsworth worries that the world has lost a ‘gleam’ that it had for him as a child. Like an ageing millennial commentator, the poet complains: ‘The things that I have seen I now can see no more.’ By the end of the poem, however, his spirits have restored. He declares that the ‘meanest flower’ can move in him ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ For readers picturing a gun-toting daffodil, ‘meanest’ means the most common—we could say ‘the most basic’. To love the most common thing risks contempt, but it is also an attachment relatively well secured against loss. We could object that the basic aesthetic is simply not common enough.
As a style of attachment, the basic strains against the cynicism, shame and self-defensiveness that prevent people from expressing a passionate investment in the world. For some, it is encroaching, normalizing, flattening; for others, it might be the secret to happiness.
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The future of the basic is a question that can be left to the trend forecasters. Online the discourse has turned its insatiable gaze to other topics. The vibe shift was quickly ironized, turned into a boring joke format (‘Maybe the real vibe shift is …’). Concern with not surviving the vibe shift might prove a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the ageing millennial critic might witness something important at this anxious crossroads: the difference between a kind of beauty that adorns youth, and a kind of beauty that endures. It’s surely one of the benefits of ageing to recognize what is valuable because it survives. To love the same thing year after year is to risk becoming outmoded, but it is also surely also a part of wisdom.
For whom is the basic a catastrophe? People on the edge of a certain status (class, youth, wealth etc.) who fear falling into a terrifying ordinariness. On closer inspection, the pleasures of the basic might reassure us that ordinariness is not a terrible fate. It might even be a kind of good fortune. In the face of a pervasive cynicism, the basic gives itself over to wonder at this world, this life. This might be the deeper significance of the image of the woman with the leaf: an aestheticized relationship with nature that at the same time signals an immersion in a capitalist system that has been relentlessly destructive of nature. The same is probably true for most of us and much of what we tell the world about ourselves in the cities where non-capitalist forms of life seem distant. The blossoms are back this spring, which feels like a miracle. This isn’t cause for complacency, as species creep towards the poles, a few metres every year. In view of this catastrophe, to be moderately progressive is reactionary.