Following what I tried to say previously about the falsity of the ‘hipster’ identity – false beyond its perceived superficiality, false in its origins and social position – it is interesting to read this piece on Crass, who have attracted a sort of myth of anarcho-punk puritanism. Where I was trying to say that anyone looking towards the hipster for a contemporary incarnation of a politically oppositional youth movement is being duped by sophisticated marketing; Gavin Burrows hints that even the most anti-mainstream subcultures are often perpetuated by a unified aesthetic rather than a coherent and hermetic polemic. Likewise, the standards we use to measure political engagement – like Haddow’s disappointment at ‘hipsters’ carrying Polaroids rather than rocks – may well be more complex than the simple distinction between politics and culture. Quoting Aufheben:
“Far too many anarchos simply changed their clothes, diet, drugs and musical tastes, deluding themselves that by doing so they were creating a new world within the belly of the old which would wither away once it recognized its comparative existential poverty.” Of course, if we were to wonder how well that worked out then hindsight could be our guide. But the beauty of Aufheben’s critique is that it continues at the point so many others stop… “But most of the criticisms of lifestyle politics, then and now, were and are mere defences by militants prepared to accept the continual deferral of pleasure in favour of the ‘hard work’ of politics. The desire to create the future in the present has always been a strength of anarchists. How one lives is political.” Or as [Penny] Rimbaud commented, when asked in the fanzine Mucilage if some weren’t going to the gigs just to have fun: “So fucking what? It’s better than not having fun.”
Following some good news regarding funding for my DPhil, I am soon to hand in my MA dissertation. I have included a finalish draft of this as a PDF below, if you are not too burned out on May ‘68 already. Its title is ‘”In the Service of the Struggle”: The Posters and Graffiti of May ‘68′. I quite like it, although I’ll be happy to hand it in. A previous post containing an old essay seems to get a lot of hits, and I don’t know who reads this, but be careful if you choose to plagiarise any of my work, and I’m sorry in turn if posting things here contravenes any sort of copyright.
Filed under: journalism | Tags: adbusters, devo, fashion, hipster, hipsters, hoggart, vice
I’m pretty late off the blocks with this one, but there’s been a fair bit of attention recently to ‘hipsters’, or at least a couple of articles trying to construe the hipster identity as some sort of cultural dead stop. A bit like that Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge try to ascertain from Lisa and Bart exactly what makes someone cool – ‘Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool’ ‘Well sure you do, how else would you know?’ – I suspect that how people react to the hipster label depends on how distanced they consider themselves to be from that imagined (non-)community of people. For example, although I could tick a number of the boxes of the Scenester Bingo, I would be insulted if I was called a hipster.
Hipsters, of course, are nothing new, and neither – it would seem – is the way they are reported. Compare Douglas Haddow’s Adbuster article with Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy from 1957:
…the milk bars indicate at once, in the nastiness of their modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so complete that, in comparison with them, the layout of the living rooms in some of the poor homes from which the customers come seems to speak of a tradition as balanced and civilised as an eighteenth-century townhouse… Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life (‘The Juke-Box Boys’, pp.203-204).
The revelation that young people dress similarly and seem apathetic and politically or morally vacuous is both outmoded and bogus. I don’t mean to defend hipsters (if they even exist), but rather attack this essentially conservative style of journalism. The type of cultural investigation as propagated by Hoggart and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and replicated by Haddow – this amongst-us ethnography much better suited to 1957 than 2008 – is too eager to construct taxonomies rather than acknowledge difference. The Haddow article is a cultural ethnography in reverse: working from the label ‘hipster’ backwards to push young fashion-conscious people under that umbrella. That mainstream fashion seems to be adopting an indie aesthetic may also be what is throwing people off the scent here; and despite the supposed political apathy of the hipster, neither article investigates American Apparel’s seemingly successful project of combining ethical manufacturing and mass production, or how far the popularity of cycling may relate to considerations beyond fashion.
Ultimately, though, the hipster identity eludes these articles’ authors because they are confusing a well-disguised culture industry for an oppositional youth movement. Haddow, if you want to find today’s incarnation of your nostalgic image of a rock-wielding angry youth, you are looking in the wrong place. ‘Are you a hipster?’ ‘Fuck no’. Hipster is not a unified identity comparable to punks, skinheads, mods or similar, at best it is a marketing demographic composed of young, predominantly middle class urbanites at leisure with a relatively easily-attainable fashion sense. K-Punk suggests that, ‘the problem with “hipsters” is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries’: but this takes the self-propaganda of Myspace, Flickr and all those much-touted magazines too honestly. These channels – the only place the hipster truly exists – are devoted to hedonistic and indulgent displays of Self. Don’t lay the blame for a perceived apathy at the feet of young people. Blame marketing, in all its forms.
Yes, we are seeing a globalisation of taste (‘global cooling’, very well done Independent) and the dissemination of a specific, American Apparel and Vice approved aesthetic at a rate more rapid and widespread than previously, but this is all to be expected. Identities have been formed through consumption for a long time now, and the promise of choice offered by capitalism was long ago undermined by homogeneity and false individualism. The real novelty of the hipster identity is self-referentiality and irony. Where today’s trends are picked indiscriminately from yesterday’s fashions – clothes, language, music, all recycled – we are also aware of the discrepancies and contradictions of claiming a recognisable identity like punk, hippy or beatnik. The hipster is, and always has been, a demographic for consumption and symptomatic of modern capitalism: we must not get confused between the images we are sold, and real, active sites of cultural resistance.
From October 123 (Winter 2008), pp. 122-124.
Hopefully a longer post on Raymond Pettibon and his recent ‘Here’s your irony back‘ turn will be shortcoming.
Another below the cut…
