This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

Probably no development tempers the subcultural consciousness of our present moment more than the death of the hipster. Like the death of god, it does not herald the sudden, quiet exit of a world-historical force, but rather that force’s manic dinosaurian conniption against the awareness of its own belatedness. Evangelical Christianity enthuses benighted masses only in secular modernity; Urban Outfitters turns a profit only after most of the decent vintage places have closed shop. Skinny jeans, reckless PBR binges, and reckless-er theoretical dilettantism will likely plod on with coelocanthine inertia for some time, just as clerical robes, the eucharist, and theology have. Still we’re bound to pick up pieces, laboring to arrange the cultural fragments at-hand at the beginning of 2011, secure in the faith that whatever the shape of the post-hipsterism to come, its propositions will have to make good on the best parts of hipsterism itself:

• Look at this fucking hipster. The one in the mirror. Do it. And make your peace. The more you squirm at the imperative, the more desperately you need to hear it. A defining trait of hipster demeanor was a self-conscious sense of performativity, the awareness that one is in final and total control of one’s dress, speech, tastes, and so on, and that these things could be otherwise. By 2011 this should strike us as suspect: to extend a line of argument first advanced by n+1’s Mark Greif, if hipsterdom started as a loose constellation of musical interests, tattoo patterns, and denim-taper tendencies, it ended as an ethnicity.  Surely “hipster” as a signifier makes a bigger difference in the day-to-day lives of the signified than any pin of race, gender, or nationality. Hipster is not (just) social costume; it is existential project, as much a matter of other people’s recognition as our own self-description. What Sartre said of the Jew becomes relevant: “Thus [the hipster] is in the situation of [a hipster] because he lives in the midst of a society that takes him for [a hipster.]” The selfish voluntarism of “taste” is bankrupt – hipster by now is an ontology we’ve all helped build, an identity that stains deeper and more lastingly than a full sleeve tattoo, a way of totalizing our lives that we ignore only at the risk of inauthenticity.

• Eat a fucking sandwich. The underfed aesthetic that made Dov Charney a rich man has made the rest of us contemptible. Deathcamp-chic is the fetish of a generation bloated with undue self-regard. Quoth Nietzsche: physical anorexia is spiritual obesity. Starvation of the body is the ugliest gluttony of the soul. Whitman: Democracy is omnivorous and loves the full and hearty.

• Read a fucking book. Anything on the table at Urban Outfitters between piles of Salinger and mustache calendars does not count, and should be burned in a public place. The people who told you books are furniture, recreation, or a ticket to a comfortable tenure position, lied. Books are weapons. Do something with them. If your bookshelf is organized by color, pay special attention to the red section.

• Get a fucking job. A terrible one, in service economy wage-slavery, because there’s nothing else left. And hate it, passionately. Hate it because you are above it, because you have something better to give the world, because you  did not spend tens of thousands of dollars and hours on a humanities degree to wait tables or bartend or pour lattes this far into your 20s. America deserves a poet and a philosopher on every city block: that we’re told otherwise by the stooges of austerity has nothing to do with economic necessity and everything to do with the fact that, right now, rich people are working very hard to suck this country dry of the wealth produced by the rest of us. The assholes who made powerpoints over in the business school while you were busy writing essays on Gramsci are helping them. Taste the bitter fruit of alienated labor, bury forever the founding hipster myth of romantic poverty, and slowly, carefully kindle the flame of class consciousness.

• Talk to your fucking neighbors. The monstrous reeking dead albatross that is American racial history means they’re probably as poor as you, if darker. Virtuously, they are almost certainly more desperate. Learn from this. Never before has the invisible hand of Capital saw fit to bring the disparate casualties of neoliberalism into such close quarters, casting the burgeoning surplus of educated, downwardly mobile middle class youth into apartments and group houses adjacent the sociological dregs of urban poor. “I Love Gentrification” declares a wheatpasted skinnyjeaned graffiti caricature on DC’s 14^th street. He doesn’t get it, and neither does the hipster who put him there. We hipsters are as the creole merchants of the early bourgeois age who, after a few rounds of colonialism, figured out they’d be better off without the mercantile powers who funded their migration, and hoisted flags and bayonets accordingly. Our historical interest lays not with the class who sent us to pacify the American city, to make the urban world safe for townhouse imperialism, but with the poor people we found here, the ones with their own histories of resistance, the ones with a stake in keeping rent cheap and neighborhoods livable and America sane.

• Get fucking serious.  Nihilism was the spiritual malady of Generation X before us, as pointless as it was honest. Irony is the soulsickness of the present age, subtler and much more dangerous. Irony is not playful vigilance against dogmatic excess nor spirited embrace of finitude, whatever its architects hoped. Irony is window dressing for the worst kinds of reactionism, the hip conversational tertium quid that lets small-minded assholes get away with political backwardness as ugly and retrograde as trucker hats. Friederich Schelling, intellectual godfather of all hipsters, spent the beginning of his career theorizing irony and the end of it propagandizing for Metternich. Gavin McInnes founded Vice Magazine and within a decade was filling column inches for The American Conservative, without the decency to grow old first. Both deserved the Jacobin’s guillotine, and both got fame and salaries instead. This should make you angry in a way that isn’t fashionable.

“All power to the proletariat!” announced a classical Marxism certain of its own crystalline economism and content to evade the thicket of cultural indeterminacy. By the 21^st century we know better.  Antagonism, the kind that makes for real change, can spark across any social frontier: working class/bourgeois, colonized/colonizer, feminist/patriarchy  are all dualities that have made a difference for democracy. To this we might add, in our place and time: hipster/yuppie. Progress has known stranger names and dynamics. The bicycle of history is not a fixie.

With a little more courage and thinking and a little less self-absorbed self-destruction, we might get something done in this dark and uncertain decade.  Hipsters of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your chain-smoking.

 

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