An etiology of the hipster

The instinctive revulsion kids feel towards suburbia--its materialism, its intellectual poverty, its cabin-fever cloisteredness, its reactionary politics, its complacency and xenophobia--is inevitably coopted by the same capitalist value system that produced these dreary phenomena to produce hipsterism, a homogenized and codified form of superficial reaction to a stultifying life of empty entitlement. This entitlement derives not merely from economic privilege but from the insistent right to be entertained that suburban kids instictively feel, a product of having watched too much flattering media that announces constantly that it is made just for them and sycophantically pleads for their appproval. They will usually develop apolitical aesthetics (politics is "beneath them" because it will ultimately come around to the source of their entitlement, and their ultimate guilt) preoccupied with surface charms and "universal" themes of self-realization, as though that can occur in a socio-political vacuum. When it does, the hipster is what is produced.

Hipsterism is a quaint, neutered form of rebellion that allows post-teens to fret endlessly about how they come across, worry constantly about their indviduality quotient, preparing them for a successful life as a middle manager or a functionary in one of the glamor industries, where such self-involvement is de rigeur. Hipsters are a plague of locusts on any scene in which young people are trying to figure out new approaches to life; they swarm in when word gets out and obliterate those new approaches, turning neighborhood sidewalks into catwalk preening contests, ushering in trendy bars and restaurants, encouraging the sense that one is perpetually a tourist within the hallowed aura of one's own lifestyle. They imagine themselves fellow travelers but they are more like a bomb squad, defusing revolutionary potential and reestablishing the status quo motives of the pursuit of fashionable positional goods, status in the form of cultural knowledge, and a vaunted sense of one's uniqueness that always needs blostering from serially acquired identity goods, the T-shirts and DVDs and such that remind you who you are. Hipsters, though frequently sneered at as ironic, are never actually ironic. Ironic is not synonymous with hyper self-awareness. Irony requires a detatchment, a negative capability, a lofty persepctive. The Wall Street Journal exhibits far more irony than does The Village Voice.

Hipsters are typically nostalgic for childhood, which is thee idyllic time when total self-involvement is not marred by the more pernicious aspects of intense self-consciousness, when no critical consciousness yet exists to question or resist the way the media flatters and seduces. So they pursue the tchotchkes and retro junk of their youth, from the time when they were already consumers against their will but not savvy enough to have an opinion about it. The trauma of discovering you're already a consumer, that your consciousness was limned by consumerism, is such that it muust be obsessively repeated, and the hipsters bray for those same things they cried for when they were six.

Philistine digression about Cy Twombly

I know I'm not alone in thinking that Cy Twombly's infantile crayon doodles are a puerile fraud the art world perpetrates on itself and culture at large. They are at once imbecile and impossibly pretentious, with their labored allusions to Ancient Greece and Rome and Don Quixote and so on, rendered in his eminently imitable spastic misbehaving child style. I suppose his defenders praise him for being able to reach pre-symbolic modes of creation, and to capture some sort of primal artistic urge, but these are probably the same sort of critics who praise Pollock's "transgressive" use of his own piss and shit in paintings, as though that was some sort of brilliant message.

Lee Siegal is usually an interesting critic to read, but this piece on Slate seems pretty half-hearted. The best Siegel can do is muster a claim that doodling is some pure form of countercultural expression that Victorian aesthete Walter Pater would endorse (he wouldn't) and to assert that Twombly can only be understood as a gay artist, which seems both patronizing and false. Twombly seems inspired by the unself-conscious creations of children and the insane and wants to parasiticallly co-opt such innocuous forms of expression for profit, making such thoughtless bursts of non-artistic creativity occasions for ponderous art-critic pontification. In Siegal's hands, Twombly becomes one of those artists we are supposed to celebrate for his hard-earned meaninglessness, his transcending ideas altogether. I've never understood why this is supposed to be a good thing, or how this makes Twombly any more artistically significant than other vacant productions like a Mariah Carey album or an Adam Sandler movie, both of which are laborious efforts that yield no ideas. About Twombly's painting called "Malevich," after the Russian artist, Siegal writes, "Malevich the theoretician, imprisoned in his ideas about art and freedom, is reborn as a gesture liberated from ideas." I suppose having your legacy become a gesture rather than a body of ideas is supposed to be a good thing, more "true" because more spontaneous. But really, one's memory is obliterated if reduced to a gesture, it becomes an instinct, a habit, something denied moments of reflection. We think and remember in terms of ideas, not in terms of gestures, which are reserved for action in the present moment. Abstract Expressionist painting, in wanting to celebrate thoughtless action, carries water for consumer culture which also champions (preys on) unreflective impulseiveness and anti-intellectualism. In their desperate attempts to convey vitality, they reify the traces of life itself and seem to snuff it out completely, leaving no motions of the human spirit outside the grip of commodities.

Efficient families

Family is the enemy of efficiency. There is nothing particularly convenient about child care or housework. And to foster a sense of family takes patience, open-ended committment to doing nothing in particular, being mindful and respectful of each member's different rhythms. It takes a lot of time to build a core sense of family identity; this can't be rushed, and no commodities offer a legitimate shortcut to this. The processes of intimacy are simply inefficient. There's no way around it; in fact, we may understand and recognize intimacy through noticing our sudden willingness to be inefficient.

But as workers absorb the values of their workplace, begin to cherish efficiency and convenience as ends in and of themsevels, they start to hate their families and their home as a source of ceaselesss hassle and whining, and see the workplace as a relative haven. Sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild discusses this at length in The Commercialization of Intimate Life. The workplace suddenly seems to have room for joking and reassuring and praising that the home, squeezed for time like never before by two-job households and whatnot, has no room for. Thus they work longer hours, to avoid having to be at home, which, of course, only exacerbates the time squeeze on the family. And they look for shortcuts, ways to replace the time needed for intimacy with goods. This too perpetuates the sense that the family is harder work than work is. Writes Hochschild:

"Consumerism acts to maintain the emotional reversal of work and family. Exposed to a continual bombardment of advertisments though a daily average of three hours of television (half of all their leisure time), workers are persuaded to 'need' more things. To buy hat they now need, they need money. To earn money, they work longer hours. Being away from home so many hours, they make up for their absence at home with gifts that cost money. They materialize love. And so the cycle continues."

Consumerism thus exacerbates the problem it is supposed to cure: Goods cannot provide the happiness that comes from relationships, they can only serve to replace those relationships, or mediate them so as to reduce them to merely instrumental exchanges -- to make them efficient. And capitalism, voraciously sucking up all prodcutive energy in to its profit machine, leaves no energy behind for the production of family space, family life. No one has the time to make real families, so they end rapidly in divorce. Hence, as Hochschild points out, many people have more spouses then they ahve jobs over their lives, amking family the source of upheaval and insecurity while the workplace remains stable and comforting. Never mind that the workplace initiates the pressures that ultimately blow apart families.

The reactionary traditionalism of American family-valuies advocates stems from a wish to reverse this by freezing time at the point before which women were sucked in to capitalism and their labor became doubly exploited. But by allying themselves with the plutoratic right, they have assured themselves of continual failure and more outrage as families will continue to split apart, exploded by economic pressures unameliorated by any kind of pro-family national labor policy.

Bourdieu's "Forms of Capital"

Though his prose (in translation anyway) is turgid, jargon-laden and very nearly unreadable, Bourdieu is worth reading for his analysis of the different forms capital takes in a capitalist society beyond cold hard cash -- namely, social capital, the network of connections a person has, and cultural capital, the various status goods one either possesses or knows how to use and the number of academic degrees one has. Bourdieu's goal is not to economize everything, but to emphasize how different forms of social leverage are convertible into each other -- into money if the final analysis demands it, but into status or power or automony or class or whatever particular form of distinction you're interested in. His analysis reminds us the various subtle ways discrimination is reproduced without recourse to explicit economic injustices, which are very obvious and can be eaily documented. Systemic inequality is more insidious than that largely because it plays out in these non-monetary forms of capital, forms that are difficult to translate into money without the background to know how the translation works (having the old-boy's network and knowing how to conduct yourself within it, having the ability to appreciate contemporary art to even feel comfortable enough to buy it, and thereby impress people with it; knowing who to contact to get your articles published with a complete sense of entitlement -- with social and cultural capital it would never occur to you that your every thought wasn't publishable). These are the cues that preserve the perogatives of the already powerful while barring opportunity to the lower classes. These non-monetary forms of capital keep society's invisible walls up while shielding them from undue attention.

This relates to Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, the virtually unconscious ways we betray our class, the way we carry ourselves that ultimately circumscribes our social experience unless we work hard to change it. Of course, most people don't find it in their best interests to change it -- the habitus is what allows one to see one's own prejudicial view of the world as perfectly natural and superior, what allows the Gammas to enjoy being Gammas as much as Alphas enjoy being Alphas, to put it in Brave New World terms, and preserve social harmony. The habitus is what allows some people to recognize cultural capital as a kind of social leverage, and others to simply be in awe of it. It is what allows artists and intellectuals to have no real income to speak of yet have an enormous sense of self-confidence and social power. The habitus is what allows some people to use their education to get good meaningful jobs, while others never really figure out what college was for.

One of Bourdieu's more devestating points seems to me his view of educational systems in general, which exist not to level the playing field and promote meritocracy, but to provide a phoney meritocratic veneer to a patently unfair society that continues to reproduce itself through its old-boy networks and inarticulable cultural know-how. Skeptical about this? Just check the resume of the current American president.

The Hawthorne effect

One of the more interesting events in the annals of management psychology involves a serious of studies performed in the late 1920s and early 1930s in a GE plant in Chicago. The workers were polled on various preferences, and working conditions were altered systematically to see what effects there would be on productivity. It turns out that with every variable studied -- pay, shop-floor temperature, length of coffee breaks, etc. -- productivity went up no matter the direction the variable was altered. The only thing that seemed to matter for productivity was the fact that the workers knew they were being studied.

One way to interpret thisis that workers just want to be cared about, that they are like infant children flattered by any kind of attention, and unable, ultimately, to tell the difference between good and bad attention. This seems to be how management theorists have interpreted it, and it leads to all sorts of inadvertant worker punishments like meetings where guys in suits explain to workers how they've tinkered with the corporate mission statement, or special breakfasts with management, where workers are forced to come in early and eat stale bagelettes and be told how much they are appreciated. Management loves this because it makes their self-interested gestures of largesse seem meaningful, signs that they really care, instead of being simply the short-sighted tokens that they really are. Management would love it if they could make up for deficits in fair wage with a surfeit of niddling attention; then they could feel there was something generous about their surveillance. Because that seems the more likely significance of the Hawthorne effect -- when workers know they are being "studied" -- that is, watched -- they are likely to be more productive. Nicey-nice meetings and such are displays of the corporation's soft power, allowing them to monitor without seeming to threaten.

The same results also prove, at Braverman pointed out in Labor and Monopoly Capital, that work performance and pre-existing worker skills aren't necessarily correlated -- workers will adjust their performance in response to the class antagonisms at work in the factory. That is, workers should always regard the demands of management with skepticism, and management's demands are only carried through when there is a palpable threat behind them. This should be remembered anytime Wal-Mart workers "vote" to not form a union.

The Two Totalitarianisms

Where I grew up, there's this bunch of guys we've always called the Freddies. One of them is named Fred, and the others all seem to do what Fred does, so they're just the Freddies. For a long time, the main claim to notoriety for the Freddies was an incident that took place in a Pizza Hut parking lot, where one of the Freddies intimidated someone who had insulted his car or something by pulling a gun on him. But recently, word is that the Freddies have gone Commie. Apparently the Freddies have taken to listening to the Internationale on the stereo in their trucks, to spouting Marxist slogans, and wearing T-shirts that read CCCP or are emblazoned with the sickle and hammer. But unfortunately they aren't doing anything useful with their communism; they're not unionizing Wal-Marts or exposing media bias or even protesting Bush or Santorum's idiotic shenanigans with Social Security. Apparently, they are into Soviet kitsch because it is the current cutting edge in oppositional chic, the emblems to brandish to show a nihilistic contempt for the society in which you live, the token of your own anti-social outrageousness, much what Nazi paraphenalia used to be.

This is symptomatic of the widespread fallacy that equates Nazism with Bolshevism, in an apparent attempt to disccredit all Marxist aims. An article from today's Journal plays on this when it gratuitously mentions in an article about the National Bolshevik party in Russia the similarities betweeen its flag and the Nazi flag. In this article from the LRB Zizek does a good job explaining why Stalinism and Nazism must be considered as distinct without apologizing for the barbarism of the Soviet regime. His key point is this: "Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; fascism displaces this essential antagonism." In other words, Nazism tries to nullify real class conflict by trumping up phoney racial differences and using these to explain society's inequities. Bolshevism correctly identified the source of social problems but pursued a tragically wrong course in trying to remedy it. Nazism maufactured power out of racism and xenophobia.

Vicariousness

As the pressure to individuate and isolate oneself has intensfied over the centuries of capitalism's hegemony in the West, as individualism (and the supposed convenience of eschewing social interaction) has taken its place as the consumer society's chief value, as pan-optic societal institutions have increasingly atomized people to better subject them to its codes, there has developed a shadow desire to maintain connections to other people, to ease the burden of isolation.

This is usually played out through entertainment consumption. Most entertainment hinges on vicarious identification, which is the refied form of a personal relation with another person. Vicariousness becomes a way to seem as though you are having a relationship with someone while at the same time allowing that relationship to be efficient, convienient, ends-oriented, and so on. It allows the relationship to function as a commodity. Eventually the vicarious relation we learn from entertainment comes to govern our actual realtions to people, so we sympathize with people while remaining aloof, a spectator of our own relationships.