http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1404/1/
Written by Dave Monaghan
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
This article is a response to "Hipster: The Dead End of Western
Civilization" (Adbusters #79, Cover Story).
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
--
At a bar a few months ago, I overheard a conversation between two
women who, to my mind, were the very epitome of hipsterdom. Their
asymmetrical haircuts, tight jeans, vintage T-shirts, fashionable
jewelry, Parliament cigarettes and bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon
formed one seamless ensemble of hipster aesthetic so perfect that I
knew that one of them had to have a Vespa parked outside. They were
engaged in a vigorous debate, striking charismatic poses as they
gestured to underline points. I turned my ear to them and strained
to decipher their words through the thundering sound of a Journey
song somebody had chosen, no doubt in a moment of ironic inspiration,
to call forth from the jukebox.
"No, no, Beth, you are definitely not a hipster!" one of them was
assuring her friend. She then proceeded to provide a list reasons
why this friend, who was clearly writhing in the thorns of
self-doubt, simply did not meet the criteria of the dreaded category.
It went something like this. Though the friend, Beth, was an artist,
she produced sculptures which displayed a seriousness utterly lacking
from hipster art. The latter tended to be characterized by incessant
pop-culture reference, comic-book style drawings, and a penchant for
shocking violence and sexuality for its own sake. Further, Beth was
a political activist, devoting considerable time outside her job to
anti-war and environmentalist causes. And finally, though Beth had a
MySpace page, she had made it reluctantly and only because it happens
to be a good place to market her sculptures.
This seemed to convince Beth.
These arguments, though they may be laughable, are indicative of a
phenomenon pointed out by Douglass Haddow in his recent essay
"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization" (Adbusters #79, Cover
Story). That is, there are very few, if any, self-avowed
hipsters. The term hipster is, in fact, almost universally a term of
derision. But despite what Vice Magazine founder Gavin McInnes
insists in Haddow's article, the epithet is not most commonly used by
"chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid anymore". The term is more
commonly than not used by people who are themselves quite open to the
charge from others.
In fact, ask just about any white urban twenty-something in a hoodie
what a hipster is, and he will proceed to give you an elaborate
definition full of backtrackings, qualifications, and
equivocations. And the goal of this tortuous definition will be to
specifically exclude himself and his closest friends, but still to
preserve the category for use against others.
I have decided that hipsters, who are nothing less than the four
horsemen – or fixed-gear bike riders – of the apocalypse in Haddow's
paranoid hallucinations, are in need of an advocate. Or if not an
advocate, at least of a little demystification.
Haddow's article, taking the genre form of a lurid journey into the
heart of stylish darkness, derides hipsters for many reasons. They
dance self-consciously. They ape working-class fashion. They
photograph each other constantly at parties and then view the
photographs the next day on Flickr-streams. They blog about their
inane exploits. They are shallow and superficial and they
appropriate the fashion tastes and musical styles of previous
ages. But in general, all of Haddow's kvetching can be boiled down
to a single complaint: hipsters don't really believe in anything.
This, according to Haddow, sets hipsters apart from all of the youth
subcultures that preceded them. The hipster's antecedents – punk,
hip-hop, hippie culture – were movements that "energetically
challenged the status quo," that existed to "smash social standards,
riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art,
government and civil society". In contrast, hipsters are merely "an
appropriation of different styles from different eras… a youth
subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society".
Haddow believes that what he has found is a youth subculture of
nihilism. And not the self-conscious nihilism of late-70's punk
rockers, but an unconscious nihilism that is all the more dangerous
for not understanding what it is. Hipsters, for Haddow, embody the
nihilism that reeks deep in the core of capitalist consumer
society. Just as capitalist market commodifies all, reducing
everything, regardless of its nature, to the level of object for
sale, hipsters will consume and assimilate material culture without
distinction, without regard for its history or meaning.
But is Haddow right to be so concerned? His writing seethes contempt
for hipster art-parties, their drinking, dancing, late-night
carousing and drug use (stopping short of commenting on loose sexual
morals, though this is absolutely central to the hipster
lifestyle). But none of this is new. In generation after
generation, segments of the youth population have drifted through
their twenties indulging one desire after another, finding creativity
and sensual gratification to be as important if not more important
than imbuing life with meaning through self-sacrificing political
struggle or individual achievement. Haddow simply does not know what
to label to give this phenomenon. It is not nihilism, but
old-fashioned youthful bohemianism.
The bohemian lifestyle has a long history, originating in 1840's
Paris among young artists and socialites of the bourgeoisie and
aristocracy, and winding its way down to us through the ages. There
was a bohemian aspect to nearly every important youth subculture from
then until now, from the leftist intellectuals of Greenwich Village
in the 1910's to the flappers and swingers of the Prohibition era,
from the Beatniks to the "free love" radicals of the 1960's. Note
that many of these youth subcultures are viewed by Haddow wistfully,
and are held up to the youth of today as examples of what they ought to be.
Not only is bohemianism not new, but hysterical condemnation of
bohemianism – in the vein of the article in question – is likewise
nothing new. The very first appearance of the original Bohemians in
1840's Paris was accompanied by proclamations that Bohemianism
represented nothing less than the beginning of the downfall of
society. This derision of youthful hedonism and irresponsibility has
reappeared in various forms throughout history, typically annunciated
from the viewpoint of moral conservatism. For Bohemians were known
to disdain traditional monogamous sexual relations, to have greater
tolerance for homosexuality, to fritter away time partying and
creating art rather than leading respectable lives. Until the
1970's, it can be said that bohemianism was a direct challenge to a
status quo that required sexual repression and delayed gratification
to power the engines of capitalist growth, and thus was frequently
married to movements for more fundamental social change. This
convergence was clearly expressed in infamous slogans of the 1960's
such as "Make love, not war", and "Drop acid, not bombs". Quite
frequently, Bohemian lifestyles and anti-capitalist ideology walked
hand-in-hand.
This was, however, certainly not always the case. Many previous
youthful hedonists – such as the swingers of the 1920's, and to a
lesser extent, the Beats – were largely apolitical. And of course
many a humorless communist or anarchist disdained art, drug use and
free sexuality as so many bourgeois indulgences or opiates of the
people. Only occasionally throughout history did strands of leftist
philosophy advocate sensual indulgence as "liberation". And cultural
developments since the mid-1970's have definitively disentangled
leftist politics from such hedonism, showing this marriage of private
vice and public virtue to be one of convenience – the result of
historical contingencies - and not of necessity.
Economic, cultural, and political changes since 1970 have brought
about a dramatic realignment in the relationship between the economy
and desire. Whereas prior to about 1970 the US economy was primarily
powered by production, since this time we have seen a shift towards
an economy in which consumption is central (at least in the First
World, as production moved to the Third). In order to encourage and
endlessly expand consumption, capitalism, through advertising and
media, stokes the flames of desire for sensual gratification. As a
result, desires that were once transgressive – for multiple sex
partners, for nights of drinking and drug use at psychedelic dance
clubs – are now harnessed in service of the consumer economy.
This in turn has resulted in an odd but perhaps unavoidable
puritanical turn in anti-capitalist critique of which Haddow's essay
is typical. Beginning with Marcuse and Adorno, who in the 1960's
theorized the increasingly intimate relationship between desire and
consumption as "repressive (or mechanical) desublimation", a segment
of Leftist cultural criticism has reversed its sometime stance of
calling for the full liberation of desire to critiquing
manifestations of such liberation as co-opted and manipulated.
And so it is not so much that the hipster is the manifestation of a
new trend. It is rather that the hipster is simply the bohemian in a
world in which bohemianism among the young is not only tolerated but
encouraged. Hipsters cannot really be blamed for this, and there
isn't anything inherently progressive in bohemianism's opposite,
sensual renunciation. In behaving hedonistically, hipsters are
simply taking advantage of the freedom of youth in the same manner as
generations of young people before them.
So hipsters, in all their pettiness and vice, are not really breaking
any new ground. But isn't something different still going on
here? Didn't past generations of youth still have goals and values;
didn't they still believe in something? Isn't the uniqueness of
hipsters that all they have left is the hedonism? And so, even if it
is acknowledged that partying and screwing are neither new nor
objectionable in themselves, can't we still condemn modern youth –
hipsters – for being concerned with these things to the exclusion of
all else?
The answer is no, for reasons that will become clear later. But
first we need to listen to what exactly is going on when people
contrast the youth of today – hipsters, hip-hop urban kids, and other
groups – to the youth of previous generations. For often when this
is done – and Haddow's article is a prime example of this – the
previous generations are painted in an overly charitable light.
Youth movements of the past were far from simple phenomena; they were
as varied and multifaceted as youth culture is today. Punk-rockers
were not uniformly revolutionary; punk-rock articulated a wide
spectrum of political ideologies, from anarchism to nihilism to (in
its close cousins) anti-immigrant racism. The "counterculture" of
the sixties included not just SDS activists and Black Panthers but
apolitical "drop-out" hippies, reactionary Hell's Angels, and New Age
spiritualists. Young people in the 1950's were more famous for car
races and rock-and-roll than for progressive political commitment.
When these complexities are pasted over in the interest of a negative
characterization of the present, what is going on is
nostalgia. Nostalgia, a longing for the lost past, reconstructs an
ideal past that never existed in order to flee from the unavoidably
complex present. It occurs on both sides of the political spectrum,
though left-wing and right-wing nostalgia differ slightly in form and
function. Right-wing nostalgia tends to long for an earlier
historical epoch as a whole or its dominant culture, a time when
"things made sense" and a more traditional morality prevailed. As
such, it generally expresses a desire to recreate the dominant power
relations of the past – between men and women, whites and minorities,
middle-class and working-class – and hides inconvenient aspects
(racism, oppression of women) of the time in which these relations
prevailed in order to make the time appear in ideal form.
Leftist nostalgia, by contrast, does not long for a former time,
being all too aware of the oppression that characterized any given
moment of the past. Instead, leftist nostalgia longs for the return
to a given social movement and its historical context of vital and
authentic struggle (the Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War, the
1960's anti-war and black liberation movements, etc.). It looks not
to an era but to a given historical moment, and longs not for the
past but for the possibilities that a moment in the past
contained. Thus it longs for a moment when a radically different
future seemed possible, more possible than it does now. In order to
do this, it idealizes the past movement and moment, repressing
inconvenient aspects (racism among past labor leaders, naiveté among
youthful activists, poor leadership decisions, fundamentally
unrealizable visions). Leftist nostalgia tends to create saints and
martyrs, and in its light past failures will appear as the result of
nefarious actions from those in power and not of mistakes made by
leftists movements themselves.
This sort of nostalgia is unhelpful to modern leftists for two
reasons. First, it allows us to absolve, through deliberate
forgetfulness, our ancestors in struggle of their grievous mistakes
in order that we may retain their visions and strategies
intact. That is, we forget their errors in order that we may repeat
them ad nauseum. But more importantly, nostalgia is fundamentally a
flight from the present, a refusal to live fully in the here and now,
because of an unwillingness to reckon with its irreducible complexity
and difficulty. It leads us, as it has led Douglass Haddow, to look
upon the present with undue despair and to reject the world around us
in toto. We owe it to ourselves and to our present moment, the only
one we have a choice of living in, to do better.
Let us finally turn to the reason why hipsters do not believe in
anything (and they don't), and why this is actually not a
problem. In doing so, we will have to approach doing the impossible
– actually providing a definition for what exactly a hipster is.
The fundamental mistake made when one compares "hipsters" to 1970's
punks or 1960's radicals lies in the elementary insight that while
punk-rockers called themselves such and radicals loudly proclaimed
their revolutionary identities, nobody claims to be a
hipster. Hipsters are always labeled as such by others, never
themselves. And yet they exist, as a definite social subgroup,
clearly distinct from non-hipsters within the general population
(though who exactly they are is up for debate). This is because
while punks and radicals were countercultures, hipsters are merely a
subculture.
To make a provisional distinction between these two terms, consider
the distinction Marx made (using Hegelian terminology) between a
class in-itself and a class for-itself. For Marx, the proletariat's
existence was a matter of clear social fact, undeniable and
unavoidable. But the proletariat did not necessarily know that it
was a class, and it definitely did not typically understand what
(according to Marx) its interests were. As unaware, it was a
class-in-itself, an object of sociological knowledge. Not until it
became self-aware would it become a class for-itself, a fighting
force capable of articulating its desires and interests and carrying
on conscious political action.
A counterculture is a social group for-itself, conscious of
themselves as different, as distinct from "mainstream society", as
promoting a competing vision of how to live. Hipsters are simply not
this. They are a subculture, a social group only in-itself, labeled
and described by others, differing from the mainstream only
haphazardly or unconsciously, because a large number of its
individual members as individuals happen to choose to differ from the
mainstream in the same way.
As such, as a group that does not consider itself a group, whose
members continuously loudly disaffiliate themselves from it, hipsters
are by nature incapable of having consciously shared beliefs. And
this is why a critique of hipsters as "not believing in anything" is
utterly disingenuous. What they are being faulted with here is not
having an ideology, a set of beliefs that bind them together as a
group and allow them to express common goals and aims. Hipsters, as
a subgroup ashamed of their own existence, cannot have an
ideology. In this sense it is true – in fact, axiomatic – that
hipsters as hipsters don't believe in anything. This is also why
this fact simply does not matter.
What Haddow seems to fault today's youth with is not forging a
genuine youth-based movement for radical change. Perhaps he wishes
such a movement were happening right now so he could participate in
it. But asking "Why don't the youth rise up?" is really no different
than asking "Why don't the workers rise up?". There is no shortage
of social problems for a movement of youth, workers or whomever to
address. But the existence of social problems does not in itself
occasion social movements. Social movements are historical
singularities, produced through a complicated convergence of
historical contingencies, unpredictable and utterly impossible to
recreate. But for our intents and purposes, as people residing in
the here and now and who see the need for such a movement, the
essential element, the only one with which we need concern ourselves,
is conscious organizing. Mass-movements are made, not born, brought
about by long and hard work by committed activists (who happen to be
lucky enough to live during a particular set of historical circumstances).
And so in this context, let us figure out who these hipsters are and
whether they are potential material for progressive political
organizing.
What is the hipster? In most general terms, she is a college
educated, (generally) white urbanite in her early 20's to mid-30's,
who works in a somewhat non-corporate environment and has not yet had
children. That is really all you can say without muddying the water,
and there are exceptions even to these few general rules. But some
cultural and ideological corollaries flow directly from this brief description.
First, the hipster is in the demographic most likely to be
politically progressive: college educated, young, and living in major
urban areas. This means more tolerant toward homosexuals, more
likely to favor green policies, more questioning of traditional
authorities such as police, big business people and the Republican Party.
Second, since the hipster lives in cities, and particularly in the
most desirable cities, she pays high rents, especially considering
her non-corporate income. This means she seeks places to live in
more affordable, traditionally working class neighborhoods, often
crowding into a small, run-down apartment with a number of other
adult residents. This makes the hipster both more likely to favor
progressive housing-rights legislation and the ideal shock-troop of
gentrification.
Third, the hipster will seek means to reduce expenditures on many
items. Thus hipsters' fixation with used items via craigslist, their
patronizing of used and vintage clothing stores, and preference for
bicycling over cars, and buying the cheapest beer and food
available. From this is derived the tendency of hipster culture
toward pastiche, which is not primarily cultural cannibalism but
rather making the best of a bad situation. It also accounts for the
adoption of working-class styles (Pabst, burritos, v-neck T-shirts),
because they initially tend to represent cheap options.
In both cases – the pastiche of hipster dress and the adoption of
working-class symbols – the adaptations take on a life of their own
and become fetishes, so that certain "looks" and items become
desirable in and of themselves and not because they are a cheap way
of looking good or getting drunk, for example. At this point, the
hipster is susceptible to manipulation by advertisers. After all,
hipsters are young, childless and tend to be employed, and so have
disposable income. They are, like all subgroups before them, a
niche-market in the eyes of the capitalism, and so are, like
everybody else, constantly prey for the forces of
commodification. It can be said of hipsters, though, that they offer
more resistance than is the societal average to these forces.
Finally, hipsters, like ages of bohemians before them, have generally
chosen to postpone marriage and family indefinitely. This results in
more openness to sexual experimentation, more sexual promiscuity, and
more of a tendency to question to traditionally prescribed
life-paths. Further, this allows more time for hipsters to focus on
themselves, their interests, their artistic projects, and to develop
their desire for self-creation. They will tend to be better read and
informed than the population as a whole, will know more about obscure
cultural artifacts (art films, old music, etc). This latter tendency
can often devolve into the use of cultural knowledge as snobbery, to
exclude others who are less "in the know". But is can also result in
hipsters discovering more creative or inspired music, film and books,
works that allow for a reframing and re-conceptualization of the
world outside the prescriptions of commercial mass-culture.
So, in the end, I ask, what is so bad about hipsters? Sure, they are
ridiculous, but no more so than anybody else. Sure, they dress
similar, but actually less so than most people. They like irony more
than is healthy, and there are some among their ranks who are the
worst kind of self-serving, politically apathetic, vapid,
pleasure-seeking, pretentious wastoids imaginable. But there are
also many "hipsters", though they would shrink from the term in
horror, who are deeply engaged political activists on every important
progressive front, who are genuinely good musicians and artists, who
think deeply about social and philosophical issues, and who – dare we
say it – have subscriptions to or even write for Adbusters
magazine. They also like to party and have a good time, to dress so
that they look good, to be as sexually liberated as their parents'
generation, to listen to music that makes them happy. Why hate them for this?
Yes, of course, young mostly white college educated people are
massively privileged by world standards. And no, the hipster
lifestyle is not revolutionary, and it does not consist of renouncing
privilege in order to bring about justice. But in a fight for a
better world, these people are some of our most likely allies. In
many ways, if we get over our hang-ups, we will realize that they
simply are us. It is time to get over it and to get over our
generation's interminable and counterproductive self-hatred. Take a
look in the mirror and say the following with me: "The kids are alright".
--
Dave Monaghan is a full-time social worker from San Francisco,
CA. In his official capacity, he works with formerly homeless adults
to try to maintain their housing and to move them towards reaching
their goals. He is also an activist and (aspiring) writer in his spare time.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment