Where were you on April 11, 2009? On that day, writers for and readers of the lit-journal n+1 participated in a symposium at NYC’s New School on “the contemporary hipster.” Papers were read, then a panel discussion was held to which audience members—there were 175 attendees—were invited to contribute. I missed it. But now there’s a book called What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation that has the papers presented on 4/11/09 and a complete transcript of the panel discussion, responses to these by writers such as Pulitzer-winning Margo Jefferson, and essays on hipster-related “sub-topics.”
Its key sentence, which appears in n+1 co-editor Mark Greif’s opening statement, is: “The hipster is by definition the person who does not create real art.” This definition is also n+1 and Co.’s main beef with hipster culture. Hipsters do not create, they merely consume: fashion, art, ethnic neighborhoods, and the sexy dangerousness of urban counterculture. The book is built on this assumption and its implicit longing for the reclamation of a counterculture purloined by ironists. In 44 pages of transcribed debate it is never once challenged, but is the accusation true? More to the point, what is “real art”?
Of course, art does come out of Williamsburg. There are also many hipsters living in Williamsburg and Bushwick who are not professional artists themselves but preside over the creation and distribution of art from their desks at publishing companies, marketing departments, talent agencies, etc. For the purposes of n+1’s analysis, it appears that none of this constitutes real art. Why this counterintuitive conflation of skinny jeans and creative inertia?
Elsewhere in Greif’s opening statement, we find these words on hipsters’ politics: “the watershed moments [hipsterdom] particularly jeers at, and may have been shaped and periodized by, were […] the 1999 protests at the WTO Ministerial conference in Seattle and the ignored 2003 protests against the promised invasion of Iraq.” The word “ignored” is interesting here. Again, one wonders what planet Greif is living on, and trying to save. The protests were covered by mass media around the world, and dilated on throughout Bush’s presidency by pundits and op-ed writers. Instead of “ignored,” shouldn’t Greif have said “unsuccessful”? Unsuccessful because, like it or not, in 2003, they were unpopular.
The important distinction between “ignored” and “unsuccessful,” between the art around us in 2010 and “real art,” is this superficial book’s real but unacknowledged subject. In fact, almost everything in What Was the Hipster? is designed to distract attention from what really went down on 4/11, including the insufferable image its commentators present of the contemporary hipster. Who wouldn’t hate, want to hit, a sneering, gentrifying anti-political hyper-consumer? Sure, the picture n+1 paints corresponds to no reality, but it makes a great scapegoat for an overeducated crowd bemused by its own irrelevance.
“Are hipsters progressive?” worries one of n+1 ‘s panelists. Later on in the discussion we encounter the following exchange:
GREIF: Do we believe an attachment remains – a genuine attachment – between hipster culture and anti-capitalist, environmentalist— LORENTZEN: Feminist.
GREIF: — feminist, thank you – feminist, progressive culture?
What’s needed, then, is for hipster youth to wriggle out of their skinny jeans and become nice “progressives” like the panelists. Problem is, from a purely aesthetic standpoint the spectrum of hipster irony from trucker hats to Charles in Charge T-shirts is preferable to Lorentzen and Greif’s p.c. recitation (complete with li’l-sister feminist interjection).
And I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way. “Political correctness” may be an even more despised term in our culture than “hipster,” but little has been written about p.c.’s utility, the source of its infernal staying power. Leftists may try to jazz up its drabness with a little radical rhetoric, but, as the exchange quoted above shows, progressives need the cordiality of p.c. to quell the fractiousness of any Left coalition. We won’t be getting rid of it anytime soon because we have no functional social contract to replace it with.
Contra n+1’s subtitle, I would argue that, in 2010, “hipster” is not a sociological term but a cultural tendency that can be seen almost everywhere in the USA. The hipster tendency is almost universal among elites who spent formative years during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Goes without saying that some have more of it than others, and some display more of it than others. Young New Yorkers who wore trucker hats at the turn of the century were flaunting the tendency, but it extends beyond clothing into vocabulary, behavior, and aesthetics. It is (again, contra n+1) not a rebellion against politics but an adaptation to stultifying ideological demands (hypocrisy) in the age of p.c.
From mumblecore to Mad Men, perverse denial of emotional catharsis is the hallmark of hipster art. Intense scrutiny of surfaces (the period furniture and clothes in Mad Men, the perfectly replicated speech patterns of awkward youth in mumblecore) replaces exploration of the social or psychological states of characters. P.c. sentimentality doesn’t dominate, but nothing in the art dares contradict it outright. Mass audiences get a sense of hipness without worrying about being put in a false position; we are not turned into hypocrites within our hypocrisy.
Back to 4/11. To his credit, Greif admits “the hipster[ …] exists on our ground, in our neighborhood and particular world, and is an intimate enemy.” Even better is PopMatters blogger Rob Horning’s observation, “If you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism.” More roommates than neighbors, hipsterism and progressivism sit at opposite ends of the seesawing sensibility of NYC’s young and literate.
This oscillation forms the irregular heartbeat of 4/11. Greif: “When I describe this project to people who think hipsters are just fashion victims or something fun, I say its purposes are social-scientific. When I talk to people who are more serious, I sometimes describe it as a parody of academic proceedings.” This, um, “nuanced” approach might explain the surprisingly small amount of anecdotal information in the book. What little there is is interesting (e.g., a panelist reports that Slavoj Zizek was the only intellectual her former co-workers at American Apparel cared about), but a five-minute stroll along Bedford Ave. or through almost any hipster-hating blog is more educational than all of 4/11. Between the ideological purity of progressivism and the aesthetic purity of nihilistic irony, there’s practically no room for unclean things like facts to squeeze through.
The progressive-vs.-hipster debate is a fun game for all who play it. It protects the debaters from having to face the fact that there are no more “progressives” and no “hipsters”; both are both, and both have failed. Perhaps every generation must rewrite the social contract, and the Clinton generation would have practically had to invent one from scratch. We (young literary artists) failed to find the language.
So Greif’s first principle, “The hipster is by definition the person who does not create real art,” is not only the most important sentence in the book but also a devastating (if veiled) generational indictment. We have been unsuccessful at what we were called upon to do, not because we were ignored but because we ignored the qualities that true, uncorrupted art and politics require. I have a good quote to remind us of those. It’s from David Foster Wallace’s famous 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which is about the explosion of postmodernism onto TV screens and the emotional implosion of prose fiction as practiced by late-‘80s literary hipsters.
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels” […] who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction.
It didn’t happen. But because What Was the Hipster? means to confound seriousness, it might be appropriate to end this – not with a smile, maybe, but hope for one. Greif’s prose occasionally stops spinning long enough to indicate that he does have a firm-enough grasp on the basic issues. In the book’s preface, he writes:
The hipster represents what can happen to middle class whites, particularly, and all elites, generally, when they focus on the struggles for their own pleasures and luxuries – seeing these as daring and confrontational – rather than asking what makes their sort of people entitled to them, who suffers for their pleasures…
I wish that Greif had approached the issue of American elitist arrogance directly instead of attempting to grapple with a “representation.” A book like that might have actually earned n+1‘s mock-lofty subtitle. Be forewarned, however: An excerpt from that unwritten book wouldn’t sit very comfortably in New York Magazine, which recently devoted a few pages to Greif’s “social-scientific” analysis of hipsterdom. There goes the neighborhood.
From November, 2010