Chapter4 ThePostmodernHipster

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The Postmodern Hipster
Chapter · October 2017

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_3
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CHAPTER 3
The Postmodern Hipster
Abstract In this section, hipsterism is examined through the lens of post-

modern theory, which provides an historical context for the hipster in terms
of subcultural politics, irony, camp, conceptual practice, pastiche and the
sociology of taste as class distinction.
Keywords Postmodernism • Irony • Pastiche • Infrapolitics • Anatole

Broyard • Hipster
HIPSTER ORIGINS
The hipster’s preoccupation with a refined aesthetic “language” might
suggest that he or she has no capacity to be mindful of the dispossessed or
the downtrodden. However, we know that this is not true, especially for the
original jazz hipster, who stemmed from the subjugated environments of
Harlem’s black dance halls, jazz and blues clubs, and house parties. The
hipster that emerged in 1940s America was embodied by black male jazz
aficionados whose artistic experimentations, drug-taking, fashion sense and
dialect aided the establishment of an “art jazz” that also served as a defence
tactic against repression. British sociologist Paul Willis’s notion that “cul-
tural forms may not say what they mean, nor know what they say, but they
mean what they do—at least in the logic of their praxis” is instructive here,
pointing to the ways in which subversion can take the strangest of forms.1
© The Author(s) 2017 47

W. Hill, Art after the Hipster,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_3
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
48 3 THE POSTMODERN HIPSTER
As Robin Kelley has shown, the modern bebop hipster’s creativity,

flamboyance and outlandish behaviour undermined the work ethic
expected of the lower-class black communities and challenged middle-
class decorum. In these subterranean music spaces, black Americans
asserted their right to leisure and pleasure. Such practices are considered
by Kelley as a form of “infrapolitics,” which he defines as dissent by mar-
ginalized and oppressed communities that adopt the appearance of “daily
confrontations, evasive actions, and stifled thoughts.”2 Here, a political
language of resistance was enunciated publicly but in coded ways that
were not obvious to political authorities, nor to the eyes of a predominantly
white mainstream public.
Early bebop—claimed by Francis Davies as “precariously balanced on the
thin line between madness and black rage”—began a musical revolution
that coincided with the era of the zoot-suiters.3 This was an African-
American and Latino street style and subculture that emerged in the late
1930s and 1940s, stemming, aesthetically at least, from the big band
traditions of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, as well as the drape suits
popular in Harlem dance halls in the mid-1930s. Wearing flamboyant
tailored suits with high collars, broad shoulders and pants tapered at the
ankles, the zoot-suiters spread from the black urban areas of New York and
Chicago to infiltrate the Mexican-American youth culture of Los Angeles
and other towns on the West Coast, furthered by the pachucos who popu-
larized the look. They came to broader public attention in America with the
Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, where American servicemen on leave in Los
Angeles attacked pachuco zoot-suiters in the street, prompting a police
crackdown on the movement, under the guise of a crackdown on gang
culture. For Stuart Cosgrove, the zoot suit was more than just a style of
exaggerated gentility; it was also a symbol of pride, resistance and the public
promotion of one’s heritage or ethnicity. He states:
These youths were not simply grotesque dandies parading the city’s secret
underworld, they were ‘the stewards of something uncomfortable,’ a spectac-
ular reminder that the social order had failed to contain their energy and
difference. . . . The zoot suit was a refusal; a subcultural gesture that refused to
concede to the manners of subservience.4
The origin of “hip,” from which “hipster” is derived, remains a subject of

debate amongst linguistic scholars. The Oxford English Dictionary dates
the first documented use of “hip” to 1904, where it meant “well-informed,
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
HIPSTER ORIGINS 49
knowledgeable, ‘wise to’, up-to-date; smart, stylish,” as a variation of the

slang word “hep.” However, John Leland argues that the term can be
traced to eighteenth-century slave communities, specifically to the West
African Wolof verbs hepi (to see) and hipi (to open one’s eyes).5 This
indicates that, beyond style, “hipster” was originally linked to the promo-
tion of self-consciousness, referring to someone who could read a social
situation and know how to react to it. The hipster also emerges here as
figure tied to slang speech, using insider-talk, irony and ambiguity to pass
unnoticed by the eyes of slave owners. In 1940s American jazz circles, “hip”
signified “cool” or “in-the-know,” with “hep cat” appearing in band leader
Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary (1939) as “a guy who knows all the
answers, understands jive.”6 For Gayle Wald, jive talkers indulged in the
artificiality of the language: “the hipster stays conscious of the fraud of
language” and manipulates it for his own purposes, where it is “jammed
with a fine sense of the ridiculous that had behind it some solid social
criticism.”7
The bebop hipster was a romantic avant-gardist on the fringes of popular
culture rather than a popular entertainer. As opposed to the standard
tuxedos that swing musicians wore, hipsters such as Thelonious Monk,
Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis—who emerged throughout
the 1940s and 1950s—followed in the footsteps of bebop pioneer Dizzy
Gillespie, wearing loose neckties, wing-collar shirts, drape-shape suits,
berets, horn-rimmed glasses and other outlandish accessories that commu-
nicated distinctiveness, street-smarts and a mode of authenticity through
artificiality. Thelonious Monk—whose idiosyncrasies in artistic expression
and fashion are now iconic of the bebop hipster—has been described by
Robin Kelley as someone who
demanded originality in others and he embodied it in everything he did – in

his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he
danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in
his compositions. ‘Original’ did not mean being different for the hell of it. For
Monk, to be original meant reaching higher than one’s limits, striving for
something startling and memorable, and never being afraid to make
mistakes.8
From a contemporary perspective, Monk and his fellow jazz hipsters such
as Miles Davis hold their reputation for authenticity and originality firmly
intact; however, the label “hipster” acquired more negative connotations
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
when it became identifiable in white American subcultures in the latter

1950s. With its popularization and appropriation, “hipster” would go on
to describe someone who was doomed to forever perform this search for
authenticity and distinctiveness, existing abstractedly from their race or
from their actual identity.
The British cultural theorist Dick Hebdige claims that the advent of
bebop laid the foundation for the hysteria generated by rock ‘n’ roll. This
hysteria signalled the rise of an alternative, rebellious and artistically minded
white subculture that was enamoured by the mythologies of black culture,
filtered through the eyes of “sympathetic liberal observers.”9 He continues:
“This unprecedented convergence of black and white, so aggressively, so
unashamedly proclaimed, attracted the inevitable controversy which cen-
tered on the predictable themes of race, sex, rebellion, etc., and which
rapidly developed into a moral panic.”10
BROYARD’S HIPSTER: THE INAUTHENTICITY OF BEING BLACK

Responding to the rise of this rebellious figure in experimental jazz, in 1948
Anatole Broyard defined the hipster in the Partisan Review as “the illegit-
imate son of the Lost Generation,” presenting a romantic black jazz figure
who strove to be the embodiment of transgression.11 For Broyard, hipsters
bypassed the mainstream system that would have afforded them little social
status, locating themselves in the ambiguous space of “nowhereness” that
strives for “somewhereness.”12 Distanced from the community where he or
she once belonged, the hipster was destined to have their flamboyant
artificiality read as playing to the masses, where, across racial lines, their
propensity to live life as a performance was an external confirmation of their
internal Otherness. Broyard regarded the black hipster as so embattled that
this figure had lost touch with his own authenticity, trapped, unconsciously,
in a mode of personality distortion. The essay ends with Broyard’s account
of the co-option of this subcultural sensibility, claiming that “the hipster –
once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla – had
become a pretentious poet laureate.”13
It is here, in 1948, that the hipster was first defined as a trope that was at
once a counter-mainstream phenomenon and symbolic of mainstream
exploitation, reflecting a push and pull between progressiveness and regres-
siveness. The white beatniks’ appropriation of the black hipster in the years
after Broyard’s essay was published is made even more poignant by the fact
that Broyard, a literary critic for the New York Times, concealed his own
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BROYARD’S HIPSTER: THE INAUTHENTICITY OF BEING BLACK 51
African-American ancestry for most of his adult life, cutting off contact from
his mother and his siblings, and never revealing his true identity even to
members of his new family.14 This has posthumously given Broyard’s piece
a poetic depth it might not have otherwise had, imbuing the concept with a
profound sense of identity transcendence. The hipster’s “inevitable quest
for self-definition” is, in this light, pursued not by direct political action—as
if this would even have been possible for many artists from the impoverished
neighbourhoods of Harlem—but by aligning aestheticization with a form of
identity escapism.15
Broyard continued his denunciation of the black hipster two years later,
in the 1950 essay “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro.” Here, he compared
the bebop performer to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “inauthentic Jew,” whose eva-
sion of identity—their ethnicity—is viewed as an “avenue of flight,” describ-
ing someone who runs away from their unbearable social and ethnic
identification.16 “Inauthenticity” is not meant by Sartre and Broyard as a
moral deficiency but as a neurotic symptom, one that is
understandably engendered by rejection at the hands of the all-powerful

privileged majority. To appreciate the universal nature of inauthenticity, one
need only examine the reaction patterns of any unfavored minority. And, to
go further, it can even be shown that, in our society, almost every individual
characteristic that radically tends away from the norm results in a degree of
personality distortion.17
This frames the essay as describing the struggle of subcultural identities

who must manage the personality distortions that come with the territory of
being an “unfavored minority.”
Broyard’s argument was influenced by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
(1943), in which Sartre set out to conduct an ontological analysis of human
existence. The publication, combined with essays written over the next
decade, including Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), launched the philosophical
movement of existentialism that resonated around the Western world in the
post-World War Two period, where it became popularly associated with the
idea that alienation is an essential aspect of human existence.
Key to existentialism is the resolution of “bad faith,” the condition where
one uncritically accepts the social mask one must wear as if representative of
one’s true character. “I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my
actions,” Sartre wrote.18 In order to step out of bad faith (to stop conflating
our ingrained sense of being with our social mask), we must realize that the
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social role we are lulled into is a lie, conflicting with what we really are—
complex beings who exist. Sartre believed in the very fullness of this term
“exist” as something that is naturally free and socially constricted, whose
expression is akin to the free-play of beauty in art. He writes:
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances.

And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the
freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own.
[. . .] [W]hen I recognize, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose
existence precedes his essence, and that he is a free being who cannot, in any
circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I realize that I cannot
not will the freedom of others. Thus, in the name of that will to freedom
which is implied in freedom itself, I can form judgments upon those who seek
to hide from themselves the wholly voluntary nature of their existence and its
complete freedom. Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of
solemnity or with deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards.19
To escape one’s bad faith is to have consciousness of one’s being.

Therefore, to commit to this consciousness requires, paradoxically, a certain
acknowledgement of the social burden or restraint that one feels. The
authentic person is one who sees through the authentic appearance of social
realities and expectations. In contrast, a person who lives in bad faith will
not transcend the social role he or she has been prescribed, and will
therefore fail to see his or her life in the broader context of human existence,
which, in the end, is meaningless. Being “a moral person” is one of the most
severe forms of bad faith, as it implies belief in a set of a priori values that
apply to all. Instead, human beings, for Sartre, are analogous to works of art,
where there are no pre-defined rules, no a priori aesthetic values. Both art
and morality involve creation and invention: “Man makes himself; he is not
found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he
cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon
him.”20
While the inauthentic Jew is represented by Sartre as extremely self-
conscious—stemming from forcing himself by his whole conduct to (suc-
cessfully) deny the traits ascribed to him—Broyard thinks “the inauthentic
Negro” is less aware of the exact nature of the social conflict in which he is
situated, and cannot so easily conceal his physical identity to escape the
social prejudices inflicted upon him. Broyard writes:
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
BROYARD’S HIPSTER: THE INAUTHENTICITY OF BEING BLACK 53
Since he cannot hide from society, he often hides from himself. In fact, one
can say that, in many cases, the inauthentic Negro almost entirely occupies
himself with either affirming (ingratiation) or denying by his behavior what
the anti-Negro says about him, until his personality is virtually usurped by a
series of maneuvers none of which has any necessary relation to his true self.
[. . .] Admittedly then, authenticity is difficult to attain. To make it even more
difficult, no one seems to know exactly what it consists in. Authenticity, as I
take it, would mean stubborn adherence to one’s essential self, in spite of the
distorting pressures of one’s situation. By the Negro’s essential self, I mean his
innate qualities and developed characteristics as an individual, as distinguished
from his preponderantly defensive reactions as a member of an embattled
minority.21
For Broyard, the hipster epitomizes Sartrean inauthenticity. In fleeing

from “his innate qualities and developed characteristics as an individual,” he
effectively identifies with his oppressors, and, consequently, empathizes
with their contempt and hatred.22
Aligning “minstrelization” with “romanticization,” Broyard condemns
the black artist’s self-identification with the rootless, alienated individual of
romanticism, which turns him into an “exotic creature, oppressed by our
society like a handsome black panther in our cruel zoo. [. . .] The inauthen-
tic Negro wears his skin as a uniform, [. . .] encouraging a belief in the
essential ‘difference’ of Negroes.”23 Given that Broyard himself was
“inauthentically” passing through the world as white, we can detect a
distinct tone of resentment in the essay, as if covertly justifying the authen-
ticity of his own avenue of flight. He adopts a definitive stance against the
black artist who readily claims their blackness for social mobility – as in those
who establish “exclusively Negro art projects”—while also condemning the
black artist who aesthetically exploits the white perception of their traits as
social rejects or beasts.24
Enamoured with child-like spontaneity, the bebop hipster, according to
Broyard, refuses the regulatory beat in music like a child that disobeys their
parents; they adopt jive as an assumption of primitive speech; and they dress
like dandies to perform effeminate cultural inversions—all of which are
seized upon by progressive white folk as exotic traits—“virtual principle
[s] by those who would help him.”25 Instead, Broyard suggests that black
identity should promote an authenticity of the self that would “prove
themselves fundamentally ‘different’ only in appearance – this would be
an extremely important step in validating their desperately needed
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
identity.”26 Refusing “black distinctiveness,” he laments the fact that this

figure is “very careful to distinguish himself from you, sometimes spending
his whole life making that distinction explicit and emphatic.”27
Broyard’s argument against the hipster might be said to have an affinity
with the tendency behind normcore if it wasn’t so philosophically and
culturally profound. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it, speaking of Broyard:
“Here is a man who passed for white because he wanted to be a writer, and
he did not want to be a Negro writer.”28 Broyard essentially asks the black
hipster to fit into society, to not play to the caricature, and to let one’s racial
differences be revealed as merely skin deep rather than accentuated through
their aesthetic choices.
HIPSTER INFRAPOLITICS
Broyard’s view that assimilation was the solution to racial conflict
overlooked the differences between black and white society, and he pro-
vided no practical guide to suggest how black culture would actually retain
its sovereignty and heritage in the face of an oppressive white culture. On
the other hand, the more radical hipster celebration of black culture that
Broyard despised did result in the romanticizing of black traits for white
audiences, who could view them as if closer to nature, uninhibited and
sexual. These two positions would converge in Norman Mailer’s concept of
the white Negro—reversed as the white man who could become a black
man, in spite of his skin colour.
For mainstream America in the late 1950s, the hipster-beatnik was a more
primal image of the nineteenth-century flâneur and dandy, who took cues
from the modern abstract artist, the black bebop musician, and the disaffected
rebel-adolescent in the aftermath of World War Two. All this added up to
what Mailer called the birth of the “American existentialist.”29 This was a
white man who knows that “if our collective condition is to live with instant
death by atomic war . . . then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms
of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from
society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the self.” Mailer’s analysis rested clumsily (and
obnoxiously) on the notion of African-Americans as distinct subaltern beings
of cool knowledge, exoticized passion and violence. Addressing the post-war
divisions between those who were hip and those who were squares, he argued
that the period after World War Two in America was an age of intense fear,
and it was hipsters—white hipsters—who possessed the courage to withdraw
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
HIPSTER INFRAPOLITICS 55
from the conservative mainstream, adopting the “in-flux” and “on-the-

fringe” lifestyles of black Americans as markers of creative rebellion.30
By the mid-1960s, hipsters were no longer synonymous with beatniks.
Ned Polsky observed in 1967 that hipsters had acquired a “pejorative
connotation” “among Village beats today. . . . In their own eyes, beats are
hip, but are definitely not hipsters.”31 In 1979 Dick Hebdige described
hipsters as part of a social practice which abstracted elements of black
culture in order to enact a “freedom-in-bondage” from the expectations
of middle and upper class life.32 Against the beatnik, the hipster became
imbued with the elitism of the dandy, whose has traditionally been associ-
ated more with affected difference and disengagement than with avant-
garde rebellion. However, this was challenged by Albert Goldman, who
described the hipster as a “typical lower-class dandy, dressed up like a pimp,
affecting a very cool, cerebral tone – to distinguish him from the gross,
impulsive types that surrounded him in the ghetto – and aspiring to the finer
things in life.”33 In contrast, the beat was “some earnest middle-aged
college boy like Kerouac, who was stifled by the cities and the culture he
had inherited.”34 Rather than splitting hairs between authentic and inau-
thentic hipness, we could say here that beat and hipster alike were built on
Broyard’s earlier treatment of arty affect as prone to co-option. The white
hipster by the late 1960s was someone who at first sets out to represent hip
resistance yet is unconcerned about their participation in the co-option of
black culture or the commodification of their aesthetics. For Hebdige,
hipsters were more strategic than the beats in terms of their ambition, and
did not share the beatnik’s expression of “a magical relation to poverty.”35
Although Broyard repudiated the idea that there was a black essence,
today we recognize the ways that oppressed identities can be specifically
constituted in their experiences of oppression and struggle. This is lived out
in all of its diversity, comprising life narratives that entail the bebop hipster’s
embrace of aesthetic affect as an expression of a right to equality and even
Broyard’s shirking of his own African-American heritage.
The very question of style, while it has been around as long as there have
been social groups, changed significantly with the early twentieth-century
advances in capitalist production, arguably becoming more complex and
porous. Because identity and status is dominated by visual codes, these
signals could, especially from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, be more easily
spotted, imitated and circulated. This makes possible what Thomas Frank
describes as “hip consumerism,” defined as a “cultural perpetual motion
machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-

accelerating wheels of consumption.”36
Hipster style, while having potential to be regarded as a mode of
infrapolitics, also carries with it this potential for fraudulence—to be
deemed as mere cultural appropriation. The concept of infrapolitics, coined
by anthropologist James C. Scott in 1990, has primarily been developed by
anthropologists interested in so-called subaltern populaces, particularly
those who are deprived of access to legitimate channels of expression.
Those people who might be racial minorities, with limited rights and limited
political and cultural representation, cannot vent their frustrations in con-
ventional ways, but are forced to be more discreet, their goal being “not to
gain official legitimacy, for which they are somehow disqualified, but to
make a claim for dignity either by upholding, or, paradoxically, by challeng-
ing internal group cohesion.”37
Infrapolitical acts operate insidiously, sharing an affinity with Michael de
Certeau’s assertion that common activities can be vehicles for political
expression. We could understand this in a contemporary sense as the small
subversive acts of the bricoleur who creatively operates in the gaps and the
contradictions of dominant culture. Infrapolitics works beneath the thresh-
old of political detectability, which makes such acts more reliable as vehicles
of resistance due to their ability to be sustained, operating under the radar to
unite and mobilize community members in times of oppression. However,
such acts of subversion, depending on what these are, can be difficult to
discern from indicators of “acting out,” which can reinforce cultural or
ethnic inferiority in the eyes of oppressors.
There is no easy, non-relativist solution for this issue of how to determine
true political agency in certain cultural forms over others. However, if the
hipster has taught us anything, it is that one should read more into the
restricted forms of cultural expression imposed on marginalized and
oppressed communities, while being extra vigilant of the practices of
privileged identities who profess marginalization. The current zeal for
condemning forms of cultural appropriation that take from marginalized
identities exemplifies how political and cultural spaces are inseparable. It is a
battle over the different rights of the same image. The image can reinforce
an existing norm, or make visible what was previously invisible or unclear.
Thus, the bricoleur culture of an unrestricted flow of ideas and images can
also turn out to be the masking of cultural sovereignty and tradition.
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AESTHETIC RIVALRIES 57
AESTHETIC RIVALRIES
The roots of hipster rivalry can be traced to Sigmund Freud’s “narcissism of
small differences,” who used this term to describe how people with minor
differences between them can be more combative and hateful than those
with major differences, grounded within the context of a broader discussion
of the link between human aggression and private property. Just as Freud
reflected on how those who share similar values can be embroiled in
disproportionately large disputes, the nineteenth-century economist
Thorstein Veblen, author of Theory of the Leisure Class, observed how
“conspicuous consumption” in the 1890s was driven by a desire to rival
the consumption patterns of other individuals, typically those situated at
more aspirational points in the social field.
Of course, we know today that the pacesetters of consumption trends
may also be those at the bottom of the social field, and that the social norms
governing such practices change as the economy and its social fabric evolve
over time. This includes changes in the usefulness of being conspicuous in
our consumption, to the point that stylistic nuance, and even “confor-
mity”—normcore—can now be a more potent signifier of cultural capital
today. Nonetheless, Veblen, who was decades ahead of his time, pinpointed
the cultural changes that extra leisure time would offer, situating cultural
practices in relation to the intent to trigger envy, and aligning cultural value
with one’s remove from labour.
Influencing Pierre Bourdieu, Veblen predicted the dangers of art becom-
ing a luxury commodity, where artists are unaware of their social and
economic complicity; the avant-garde as a self-generating cycle of presti-
gious taste, driving the demise and constant renewal of products as they are
appropriated along the social chain. If Veblen revealed how consumption
patterns are motivated by a value based on the perception of the Other’s
desire, the “Other” is, in the words of René Girard, “the neighbor on the
other side of the fence, the school friend, the professional rival.”38 Girard’s
conception of mimetic desire holds that people have no authentic self and
no authentic desire. Desire is, therefore, always learnt, or mediated. For
Girard, desire is not that of a single line of force between the subject and the
desired object, but is triangular: desire activated via an intermediary, who
renders that object desirable in the subject. Whereas feudal and religious
hierarchies formerly restrained and moderated competition in societies, the
rivalrous condition of triangulated desire is in modern times played out in
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
consumer behaviour. This is exemplified by art historian Rosalind Krauss’s

description of the
paradox of thousands of teenagers asserting their individualities, for example,

by wearing the mass-produced badge of a celebrity, so that in ‘wanna-being’
Madonna as a way of sharing in fame’s release from the crowd, they participate
ever more resolutely in mass behavior.39
Krauss sees the structure of Girard’s mimetic rivalry as applying, on a

sociological level, to the male cliques of 1940s abstract expressionism in
America. However, in Krauss’s description we can recognize a similar logic
underpinning the phenomenon of the hipster, as “a multiplicity of signature
styles announcing so many different identities in a rivalrous struggle over the
prize for originality.”40 Such dynamics are, for Girard, prominent among
the middle classes, those who, despite being “free from want and even more
uniform than the circles described by Proust,” are also
divided into abstract compartments. It [the middle class] produces more and
more taboos and excommunications among absolutely similar but opposed
units. Insignificant distinctions appear immense and produce incalculable
effects. The individual existence is still dominated by the Other but this
Other is no longer a class oppressor as in Marxist alienation; he is the neighbor
on the other side of the fence, the school friend, the professional rival. The
Other becomes more and more fascinating the nearer he is to the Self.41
Amongst creative groups—communities of peers—this form of mimetic

rivalry is played out less in terms of consumption and more in terms of a
competition around style. As Krauss writes, the American expressionists, in
finally realizing they were equal with their former European idols, began
“basking in the very equality that is necessary to internal mediation’s most
desperate forms of rivalry, born of a need to create distinctions where no
external hierarchies seem to establish them.”42
What the “professional rival” from the creative class wants in the twenty-
first century is to discover something new, even if that “new” is something
old that has been forgotten. Thus, the hipster appeared in the 2000s as the
artist who rode the treadmill of uniqueness, who prided themsleves on
determining what is “culturally interesting” in advance of the rest of the
world—a mode of creative-insight as capital. In contemporary art, this
desire still wavers between aesthetic, critical and ethical matters, implicating
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AESTHETIC RIVALRIES 59
the first artist who paints using a fire extinguisher, as well as the first artist
who, say, examines the impact of the Iranian Revolution on the develop-
ment of post-conceptualist art in the Middle East.
Given its “ubiquitous yet invisible” qualities, the hipster is almost an ideal
representation of Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital,” which he defined
in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Here, he opened
with a characteristic move to bring Kantian aesthetics down to the same
level as the popular and sensuous pleasures of everyday life. He writes:
The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression

that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes
legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible
relations which unite apparently incommensurable ‘choices,’ such as prefer-
ences in music and food, painting and sport, literature and hairstyle. This
barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary
consumption abolishes the opposition, which has been the basis of high
aesthetics since Kant, between the ‘taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection,’
and between facile pleasure, pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, and
pure pleasure, pleasure purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a
symbol of moral excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation
which defines the truly human man.43
Combining culture—or the cult of the beautiful—and class within a

classificatory schema of social distinction, Bourdieu developed his analysis
of cultural capital to refer to the particular stock of cultural competencies
that serve, often unconsciously, as mechanisms in the processes by which
relationships of class inequality are regulated and reproduced in societies.
Bourdieu conceptualized culture as a system of symbols that encode and
establish social difference, aligning cultural participation and consumption
with the reproduction of hierarchical class divisions.
The “habitus” became Bourdieu’s primary “thinking tool” through
which he attempted to overcome the opposition between ontological indi-
vidualism and constituted practice.44 Described as “an acquired system of
generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in
which it is constituted,” the habitus for Bourdieu encompassed cultural
subjects with socially constructed sets of embodied dispositions, located in
contexts that are differentiated into diverse fields, networks and positions,
depending on one’s possession of different forms of capital. In Bourdieu’s
schema, capital is not granted a solely economic meaning, but is instead
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something that yields power. Therefore, in addition to economic capital he

pointed towards its immaterial forms of capital: cultural, social and
symbolic.
THE PITFALLS OF HIPSTER CRITIQUE

The hipster can be seen in Bourdieu’s eyes as an archetype who adopts arty
taste as class distinction; however, we must also remember that the hipster
archetype provides its own point of distinction for the hipster hater and the
sociological critic alike, who pride themselves on being able to identify—but
not to belong to—such “blind” individuals who are unable or are unwilling
to grasp the hidden class inequalities perpetuated by their tastes. In
establishing how progressive or discerning taste was not the result of innate
superiority of passionate individuals, Bourdieu’s work was vital for Mark
Greif’s account of the hyper-distinctions that constitute hipsterism, which
he locates in the naming of an inauthentic and pretentious person from an
elevated site of difference. He writes:
Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes
and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those
below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; [. . .]
they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of
course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those
who read him in effect become responsible to him – forced to admit a failure
to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and
distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world.45
Although implying his own proximity to the hipster—the entanglement

between the self-declared non-hipster and the hipster accused—Greif fails
to uncover how sociological analyses of taste have, in fact, contributed to
the logic of the hipster. In fact, it might be the ubiquity of this concept of
Bourdieuian distinction that constitutes the very idea of the hipster as the
authentic anti-hipster—where to show an ability to read cultural signs as
masking socio-political circumstances, capitalist biases or inequities of any
kind is to show one’s distance from blind fetishes. In speaking on a podcast
about why, in 2008, he was so fascinated with the hipster, Greif was asked if
he was ever a hipster. He quickly replies: “I was not. [. . .] As my then wife
said to me once, after looking at me up and down, she said: ‘you’re no
hipster, you’re not hip at all.’”46
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THE PITFALLS OF HIPSTER CRITIQUE 61
For Greif, the hipster is someone else, someone that he can label at a
distance, in spite of recognizing, via Bourdieu, that the hipster is born not
from self-identification but from the justification of our privileges via an
inauthentic scapegoat. But this inauthentic identity could just as easily be,
like Greif, a liberal intellectual who is critically invested in culture, doesn’t
just want to be an aesthete, hates gentrification and detests hipster codes so
much that normcore might even present itself one day as an option. The
point here is that anyone invested in identifying the limitations of cultural
taste implicates their own discerning skill at detecting such limitations, often
perpetuating the opposition between social truth and ideological illusion—
the very gaps that the critic and sociologist want to close.
Highly mobile and ever-changing as a cultural stereotype, the hipster
wants to oppose cliché but eventually falls victim to it in the eyes of another
who thinks they understand the identity games that the former participates
in. The hipster is one who wants to be distinct, but is read as generic; who
wants to be local and authentic, but is read as global and inauthentic; who
wants to be global and multicultural, but is read as local and monocultural.
To look beyond Bourdieu’s important work, as a form of cultural ideology
the hipster is an even better symbol of the uncertain ground of ethical/
political taste and ethical/political condemnations of taste. It comes to the
fore at a time of cultural “superdiversity,” when it is foolish to be confident
about being able to locate the malignant forces of power as separate from
the powers that inform and are wielded by one’s own analysis. As such, it
might be a question of choosing a worthy enemy, and we should ask
ourselves if people who hold “distinctive” cultural preferences that appear
unwittingly conservative are really worth the effort of our condemnation.
The covert advancement of sociological distinction found in hipster
critique, and embodied by hipsters themselves, is reflected in Bourdieu’s
writings on fine art and aesthetics, which he sometimes conveyed as if fields
that were intrinsically aspirational and elite. According to Tony Bennett and
Elizabeth Silva, Bourdieu could be impeded by “his own tendency to accept
the validity of conventional hierarchies of the arts by attributing universal
value and significance to those forms of cultural activity which comprise
their apex (visiting art galleries, reading or listening to the classics, going to
the theatre or to art cinema etc.).”47 In other words, he was prone to
reading cultural customs precriptively and, at times, polemically for the
sake of argument.
Even more forceful is Rancière’s criticism of Bourdieu in L’Empire du
sociologue [The Empire of the Sociologist] (1984), and Le Philosphe et ses
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pauvres [The Philosopher and his Poor] (1983), in which he argued that
Bourdieu, and sociology itself, merely confirms what everyone knows in
some form or another: that those who are economically subjugated are at
the same time under the symbolic, cultural domination of the wealthy.
Rancière’s point is that the sociologist assumes the existing inequalities
from the outset and finds an abundance of evidence for it in the social
field. This has the effect of necessitating class domination, where to uncover
and criticize the source of inequalities is to portray those who are unfairly
implicated in the system as those who do not have the means of
comprehending the grounds for their exclusion.
In Bourdieu’s framework, it is the fact of misrecognition that fixes agents
in their sociological location. Rancière thinks that if Bourdieu’s discourse
has resonated, it is because it fitted with a time that supported the “fervor of
denouncing the system with the disenchanted certitude of its perpetuity,”
fulfilling the paradoxically authoritarian ideology of critique associated with
critical postmodernism.48 Bourdieu raises the prospect of our lives being
dictated by class and hegemony while portraying those who are dictated as
unable to see it or to do much about it. The diagnosis thus splits society into
those who participate in, and are aware of, the necessary distinctions that
underpin the system, and those who naively reproduce the system’s inequal-
ities. Above them both is the sociological thinker who possesses the insight
to know how things are and can dramatize this truth for the dubious benefit
of those who cannot grasp it or repress it. This tautology of the sociological
explanation of social exclusion is described by Rancière as follows: “they are
excluded because they don’t know why they are excluded; and they don’t
know why they are excluded because they are excluded.”49
Rancière draws a line from Plato, Marx and Sartre to Bourdieu, arguing
that what Plato accomplished, and what these other thinkers replicated, was
to devise a discourse in which the origin, purity and legitimacy of philosophy
serves to legislate social divisions from above, as hidden truths. Whereas for
Bourdieu, belief in the aesthetic gaze is to buy into the shrouding of class
inequality, for Rancière it is to contemplate and participate in an indeter-
minate zone where the destiny of class is thrown off. Politics for Rancière is
the act of self-determination, summarized by Slavoj Žižek, who claims that
“political conflict designates the tension between the structured social body
in which each part has a place, and the ‘part of not part’ that unsettles this
order on account of the empty principle of universality.”50
The political act conceived by Rancière shares the impulse of aesthetic
play, emulating the human claim to happiness in spite of the “habitus” one
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BAUDRILLARD’S HIPSTER AS POSTMODERN CONSUMER 63
finds oneself in. The aesthetic gaze is therefore located as the enactment of
an “as if,” where one seeks to speak for oneself as if one could transcend
one’s socially prescribed role, in order to participate in an unprovable
universal right. Rancière states: “what is at stake in emancipation
[is] getting out of the ordinary ways of sensory experience. This thought
has been important for my idea of politics, not being about the relations of
power but being about the framing of the sensory world itself.”51 Here we
can see how sociological studies of dominated class identities can take away
the right to freedom from these identities, entailing the policing of inequal-
ity from above instead of focusing on the conditions for self-realization. For
Rancière, the social and cultural sphere is not simply a question of class and
its transcendence, but rather the inevitability of misclassification: the impos-
sibility of a dissensus-free ordering of society into a stable image of
democracy.
BAUDRILLARD’S HIPSTER AS POSTMODERN CONSUMER

Jean Baudrillard, like Veblen and Bourdieu, saw the commodity as a marker
of social standing; however, his semiotizing of the commodity lent itself to a
more systematic and detailed analysis of consumption. His writings centre
on the idea that the capitalist system operates around encoded differences,
communicating messages about status and significance that absorb all in its
wake. Because in their function as relational markers commodities are
exchanged as signifiers, the circulation of commodities comprises a semiotic
system, whereby “things” in the marketplace function like “words” in a
language.
While production was central to early capitalism in Marx’s times, in post-
1960s capitalist societies consumer capitalism was more than just an eco-
nomic system, and the problems it faced had more to do with “sign value,
whereby commodities are valued by the way that they confer prestige and
signify social status and power.”52 Consequently, desire and the significance
of signs overshadow production, with the self-understanding of the prole-
tariat replaced by the progressive detachment of the sign from production
and from use-value, mirrored by the establishment of arts, cultural and
media services as key economic sectors.
Baudrillard’s signification model of society effaces distinctions—like that
between truth and falsehood—by giving everything a relational sign value,
turning any non-relational idea prescribed by terms such as “meaning,”
“ideology” or “real” into that which cannot but exist as part of a larger
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semiotic chain. The idea of production itself even joins this consumerist
system, whose role is reversed by Baudrillard to be “invented on the basis of
signs.”53 The code comes to dominate us, to enchain us, operating through
brands or in brand-like ways by “imposing a coherent and collective vision,
like an almost inseparable totality. Like a chain that connects not ordinary
objects but signifieds, each object can signify the other in a more complex
super-object, and lead the consumer to a series of more complex choices.”54
This situation for Baudrillard creates a world of magic-like interconnected-
ness, where objects exercise a seductive hold over their percipients, and
desire becomes everything: “everything breaks out in connections, in seduc-
tion; nothing is isolated, nothing is by chance – correlation is total.”55
For Baudrillard the apparent collapse of the power of distinctions—into
simulation or hyperreality—was a result of the world feeding on itself,
turning everything into things to signify and exchange, feeding on differ-
ence only to reduce its power. Anchoring his critique of capitalist culture is
his claim that the ubiquity of the semiotic code leads to, and depends upon,
the destruction of symbolic exchange. He defines symbolic exchange, in
part, as a form of exchange not calculated in monetary terms but in terms of
its structuring of social relations, as in the act of doing someone a favour, or
an act of wastefulness, which has no place in the system of consumer objects.
Symbolic, spontaneous and reciprocal human relations stand as Other in
Baudrillard’s account of life in a capitalist system that is marked by specta-
cles, appearing as self-generating and enchanting signs devoid of deeper
significance. He writes: “The drive to spectacle is more powerful than the
instinct of preservation,” which is “no longer the same spectacle situationists
denounced as the height of alienation” but is instead its opposite: “closer to
the enchantment (féerie) of commodities described by Baudelaire.”56
With enchantment drowning out symbolic exchange, something is lost;
nothing is exchanged anymore, the terms of exchange are simply exchanged
among themselves. Here, the notion of hipsterism, and hipster entrepre-
neurialism, as elusive sign-making in a totalizing consumer culture is laid
out by Baudrillard, who sees societies as consumers absorbed in the codes of
consumption so completely that they lose the capacity for critical reflection.
Furthermore, any form of dissent is readily incorporated and assimilated
back into the code, as in the commodification of hipster rebellion. Rather
than allowing opposition, such processes maintain order.
Writing in 1990, Baudrillard claimed that the “current revolutions” were
themselves nostalgic fantasies that provided “the ideal content for the
system to devour in its successive revolutions and which it subtly brings
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POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AS NIHILISTIC REVELATION 65
back to life as phantasmas of revolution. These revolutions are only transi-

tions towards generalized manipulation.”57 It is in this sense that his at
times incisive accounts of capitalist society were mired by statements that
eliminated subjectivity and human agency. To some extent this goes hand in
hand with his preferred treatment of social contexts as abstract philosophical
determinations. For all the alleged pluralism and sensitivity to the Other
assumed by Baudrillard, one finds little discussion of the actual experience
and practice of, say, how different groups in different settings watch televi-
sion or experience art. Rather, consumers and citizens are combined as
systemic agents, not as individual and social subjects who think, feel,
judge, decide and act upon their various needs and desires. Turning con-
crete, everyday social practices into desire-fuelled semiotic associations, the
alienated consumer found in Guy Debord’s writings becomes, after
Baudrillard, a narcissist as well as a mere statistic.
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AS NIHILISTIC REVELATION

In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière locates Baudrillard in a line of
critical thinkers who took it as their job as social critics to unmask the
realities behind appearances in more complex ways than their predecessors.
Like the shackled prisoners in Plato’s cave, Rancière claims that the post-
modern citizen in the eyes of Baudrillard surveys their surrounds only to
mistake images for reality, “ignorance for knowledge, and poverty for
wealth. And the more the prisoners imagine themselves capable of
constructing their individual and collective lives differently, the more they
sink into the servitude of the cave.”58 To know this capitalist scenario is to
know “the way in which it endlessly reproduces the falsification that is
identical to its reality.”59 The “critical” answer to this problem is to reverse
everything, to see truth for falsehood, freedom for domination, wealth for
poverty. Whereas Debord sought to reveal the manipulations that cause the
spectacle, Baudrillard’s legacy is more akin to that of a giddy diagnosis of a
never-ending capitalist apocalypse in which nothing can cut through the
market logic of the world.
In describing the “obsessive concern with the baleful display of com-
modities and images” that emerged in the nineteenth century, Rancière
acknowledges that he could also be describing the “blind, self-satisfied
victims” invoked in “Barthes, Baudrillard and Debord.”60 The paternal
concern held by the noble class towards the multitudes and their incapac-
ities—born from newly won democracies—diagnosed that in modern life
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too many thoughts and images are invading brains that have not been pre-
pared for mastering this abundance; too many images of possible pleasures are
held out to the sight of the poor in big towns; too many new pieces of
knowledge are being thrust into the feeble skulls of the children of the
common people. This stimulation of their nervous energy is a grave danger.
What results is an unleashing of unknown appetites producing, in the short
term, new assaults on the social order; in the long run, exhaustion of solid,
hardworking stock. Lamentation about a surfeit of consumable commodities
and images was first and foremost a depiction of democratic society as one in
which there are too many individuals capable of appropriating words, images
and forms of lived experience.61
Rancière aligns the nihilism attributed to the “postmodern tempera-

ment” with the “disjunction at the heart of the critical paradigm,” the
“hidden secret of the science” which claims to “reveal the hidden secret of
modern society.”62 Here, the role of the postmodern critical theorist is akin
to a doctor, who, in requiring sick patients to look after, lulls people into
believing in their inflictions.
To be fair, the critically defective “patients” that Rancière sees in
Baudrillard’s writings are more elusive than those conceived by Debord or
even Bourdieu. They are those masses of consumer society who are strategic
exploiters themselves, who avert the attempts of those in power to inform or
educate them by means of their spontaneity, their fluctuations, their sheer
pluralism and the enormous uncertainties they generate. The maximization
of public participation (public speech) that is celebrated as mass culture is
equated by Baudrillard with a mode of “hyperconformist simulation” that
actually results in the mass refusal of meaningful speech.
The consuming masses are represented by Baudrillard in the manner of
the Other whose disappearance can be gauged through the unreliability of
opinion polls and the weekly, if not daily, swings of mass taste. This is not a
sign of their alienated withdrawal; rather, it is the outcome of a simulated
society, where, for example, the political class become effective servants of
the masses, who summon them to “order things” at their whim, just as
entertainers become servants to their boredom. The masses are seen by
Baudrillard as “delegating in a sovereign manner the faculty of choice to
someone else by a sort of game of irresponsibility, of ironic challenge, of
sovereign lack of will, of secret ruse.”63
Baudrillard claimed that the absence of democracy and the “non-existence
of equality” is concealed in consumer society by the apparent democracy of
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POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AS NIHILISTIC REVELATION 67
social standing—the “social success and happiness” seemingly afforded by

easy access to consumer culture, which, through the lure of personalization,
becomes conflated with “the formal democracy enshrined in the constitu-
tion.”64 To portray the masses as a collection of contrary narcissists is to go
against earlier proto-Marxist claims of a discordance between mass individu-
alism and democratic government, only to demonstrate, for Rancière, “a
much more profound evil. It meant positively establishing that democracy
was nothing but the reign of the narcissistic consumer varying his or her
electoral choices and his or her intimate pleasures alike.”65
Baudrillard’s approach ends up only confirming the “firmly fixed identity
between democratic man and individual consumer,” the latter marked by
individuality and greed, which overrides the former.66 Aligning the com-
modity and its spectacle with the disruption of all social bonds, Baudrillard
aligns the destruction of the symbolic with the impossibility of intelligible
political disruption. Rancière writes:
Critical discourse on commodification and the spectacle in this way becomes

the resentful denunciation of a world in which greedy democratic individuals
lead us all toward apocalypse. This inverted account thus becomes a spiral that
denounces all forms of struggle against the existing order as accomplices to
disaster.67
Against the postmodern assumption of a common identity between the

global time of capitalist production and the particular time of individual
consumption, Rancière proposes an account of politics as a weaving
together of a combination of times that disrupt the dominant—consen-
sual—combination of convergence and divergence. The postmodern time
of pluralist disorientation that supposedly constituted the end of historical
periodization paradoxically reinforces a mode of historical determinism and
a politics of monotonous denunciation, where plurality equals the incapacity
of intelligibility—the inability to produce and recognize a definite sense
of time.
Baudrillard’s archetypal postmodern consumer is echoed in the figure of
the hipster as a fetishist of consumer distinctions whose generic individual-
ism unwittingly conflates “democratic man” and “individual consumer.” It
is not surprising then that in Baudrillard’s account of the way the masses
seem to defer their democratic responsibilities as citizens, he used the
example of the late eighteenth-century British dandy Beau Brummell,
whose dress and demeanour informed the self-designing tendencies of
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British romantics, and established many of the hallmarks of dandyism—a

precursor to hipsterism—in the nineteenth century that Oscar Wilde would
make famous. Baudrillard claimed that nothing is more seductive to the
unconscious than to be unsure of what one wants,
to be relieved of choice and diverted from its own objective will. It is much
better to rely on some insignificant or powerful instance than to be dependent
on one’s own will or the necessity of choice. Beau Brummel [sic] had a servant
for that purpose. Before a splendid landscape dotted with beautiful lakes, he
turns toward his valet to ask him: ‘Which lake do I prefer?’68
The ironic, and even camp, sensibility of the postmodern masses is

invoked by way of an analogy about deferring one’s own subjectivity, to a
servant no less. The masses in this guise are at once authoritarian and
flippant, highly personalized yet in the mode of deferral, unable to be
truly pinned down.
DANDIES AND FLÂNEURS: THE ORIGINAL HIPSTER IRONISTS

When we think of “postmodern irony” in art or culture, it conjures
Baudrillard’s sense of the flippant masses who are at once powerful and
individualized yet devoid of any obligation. In art, postmodern irony can be
understood as a boldness of style that demands attention only to shirk clear
conveyance of intention, or, echoing Baudrillard, to defer an ultimate
meaning for someone other than the artist to determine. The eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century dandies focused on a life of refined consumption
coupled with the transformation of one’s life into an aesthetically pleasing
whole. At the same time, we look at such stances and we wonder if “life”
here is an aesthetic bubble—an avoidance of socio-political responsibility.
Similar suspicions have never been too far away from the hipster.
There are, of course, many different types of irony, and the term itself is
notoriously flexible, capable of meaning insincerity or facetiousness, as well
as a veil of ignorance posed strategically in a mode of Socratic argument. For
Jean-François Lyotard, irony was postmodern conceptual play, where it is
less about the internal relation of the object of irony to the ironizing subject
than it is about instituting a destabilizing movement from concept to
concept. Here, irony is not a position so much as a tool for including a
surplus of meaning and references in one’s language, echoing the meta-
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DANDIES AND FLÂNEURS: THE ORIGINAL HIPSTER IRONISTS 69
narratives and multiple open-ended quotations attributed to the postmod-

ern cultural ideal.69
The dandy is described by Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern
Life as aspiring “to cold detachment.”70 He continues: “a dandy may be
blasé, he may even suffer pain, but in the latter case he will keep smiling.”71
In contrast, a flâneur is the artist as “passionate spectator” who sets up
“house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement,
in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”72 Walter Benjamin portrays the
flâneur as caught up in a distinction between active production and
consumerist reception, which he addressed in terms of the difference
between Erfahrung—something learned (created) from life and travels—
and Erlebnis—the broken, immediate, limited and disconnected experi-
ences of memory and community. The pursuit of excitement that is the goal
of the flâneur is the pursuit of the shock that constitutes Erlebnis. But, because
this shock is only an illusion, it can only result in boredom, leaving Baudelaire’s
artist-as-modern-hero incapable of escaping their world-weariness. Connected
experience—Erfahrung—is missing. The flâneur is left to be fuelled by empty
ideas and failed reinventions, their mode of passionate irony drowned out by
capitalist spectacle, which produces a profoundly melancholic and detached
state.
Full of activity, the urban spaces of modernity induced a new and
imposing sense of anonymity. The flâneurie therefore developed their
bored and blasé personality as a defence mechanism, giving them comfort
from alienation and protecting against an overload of stimuli. Embodying
the city’s potentiality, the flâneur wanders about with few expectations,
between boredom and imagined future greatness. From the outside, the
bored subject appears distant and reserved, their exterior sensorial façade
not matching their inner dreamworlds: “Boredom is a warm gray fabric
lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks.”73 Benjamin
considered the new urban landscape, nowhere more enthralling than in
nineteenth-century Paris, as the extreme visual representation of what
Marx, cited by him, called the fetishism of commodities, wherein “a partic-
ular social relationship between people takes on the phantasmagoric form of
a relation between things.”74 Becoming addicted to boredom, the flâneurie
fill their lives with culture and leisure activities to provide the illusion of
individualistic escape from life under capitalism. However, this deceptively
cool and calm search for gratification remains firmly under the spell of the
commodity, with boredom threatening the leisure classes as much as it does
factory labourers. Benjamin continues: “[The flâneur] takes the concept of
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being-for-sale itself for a walk. Just as the department store is his last haunt,
so his last incarnation is as sandwichman [human billboard].”75 In other
words, rather than realising the amazing conditions and potentialities of
urban life, the flâneur would end up performing, and falling victim to, the
banalities of capitalism, helping to transform the social inequalities observed
and illustrated into objects of consumption.
The debate between the authentic and inauthentic creative—or the
innovative and the commodified hipster—finds its precedent here in the
wavering between dandies and the flâneurie. The dandy—a personification
of the fetishized object—and the flâneur—the artist as marketplace pur-
veyor—morph into the contemporary artist-as-entrepreneur, confronting
boredom through irony, and becoming willing participants in the capitalist
system. To the ironic idler who strolls the streets of the capital of modernity,
things appear divorced from the actuality of their production, and their
chance-like interactions with urban life suggests a mystical connection to
commodification. For Susan Buck-Morss, the flâneurie was seen by Benja-
min as a form of perception that “is preserved in the characteristic fungibility
of people and things in mass society, and in the merely imaginary gratifica-
tion provided by advertising, illustrated journals, fashion and sex magazines,
all of which go by the flâneur’s principle of ‘look, but don’t touch.’”76
WARHOL AS PROTO-HIPSTER
The term “irony” has its origins in the Greek terms eiron (dissembler) and
eironeia (simulated ignorance). Here, we will recognize Benjamin’s bored
flâneur as at once taking culture apart and masking its realities. The bored
irony of Andy Warhol—who Dayna Tortorici calls “the illegitimate father of
hipsterdom”—would come to emulate this dual idea of deconstructing
consumption and feeding it, wavering between the (hyper)productive artist
and the blasé observer.77 Warhol is at once an active reflector of mass culture
and its symptom, doing little more than collecting his fetishes. With Warhol,
as with the hipster, such fetishes are regarded in terms of productive
consumption, as profane and individualized emulations of mass culture
that appear as subcultural irony.
Early on in his career, Warhol’s works were underwritten by the legiti-
macy of camp as a form of “critique as anti-critique,” blurring farce and a
documentary, or document-like, aesthetic to give voice to an array of
non-mainstream and countercultural identities. Warhol, and pop art in
general, operated in a mode of ironic simulation that reverberated with
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WARHOL AS PROTO-HIPSTER 71
the emergent exemplars of French critical theory, echoing, if taken at face

value, Derrida’s technique of “deconstruction” in philosophical writing as
an intervention in the text, reversing accepted binaries of knowledge. The
employment of camp in post-1960s pop art was debated as a quirky stylistic
fetish, but it was also seen as “a gesture of self-legitimation” whose “failed
seriousness” assumed a critical response to the specific historical problem of
being a “culturally over-saturated” subject.78 Variations on this argument
between fetish and anti-fetish characterize Warhol’s entire career, situated
between critique and complicity, as well as between the exploitation of the
market and what Rainer Crone called an “anaesthetic revolutionary prac-
tice” that short-circuited the “elitist” forms of middleclass idealism.79
Susan Sontag—a close friend of Warhol—wrote in her 1964 essay
“Notes on Camp” that camp is an inversion of high culture’s affinity with
depth, seriousness and heterosexuality, an artistic meddling with the “logic
of taste” that enabled depth to become surface.80 Importantly, Sontag
claims that camp possesses a sense of love that kitsch lacks—an ironic love
akin to loving something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she
writes that whereas
the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp

is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to
his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink
and prides himself on his strong nerves.81
Camp, as an artistic device, wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Benja-
min lamented of capitalism. However, it also retains a tone of elitism, or
rather an element of insiderness, as if communicating secret messages about
its “stink.” At once exclusive and “lite,” or open to all, camp typically retains
an aspect of “something else”—an aesthetic surplus. For Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, camp is not just critical of culture but acts alongside it in order
to be “additive and accretive.”82 Her descriptive use of language defending
this point mirrors the sense of excess of camp itself, which she defines as
the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate,
often hilarious antiquarianism; the prodigal production of alternative histori-
ographies; the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover
products; the rich, triloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtaposi-
tions of present with past, and popular with high culture.83
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Aligned with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity,

camp foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same
time suggesting that such impulses, stemming from socio-political circum-
stance, are more than what they seem, positioned at once as aesthetic
fetishes and responses to marginalization.
Sontag’s analysis of the critical indeterminacy that camp promotes was
informed by an earlier essay—an anti-hermeneutic polemic titled “Against
Interpretation” (1963). Here she distinguishes between two kinds of art
criticism—that which concentrates on the pleasures of formal analysis and
that which digs deeper to find evidence of socio-political intention or
resonance. She claims that reactionary and overtly critical interpretations
distort the primary values of art, which are the feelings and intuitions art
inspires. “Abstract painting,” she writes
is the attempt to have, in an ordinary sense, no content; since there is no

content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the opposite means
to the same result; using a content so blatant, so what-it-is, that it, too, ends
up being uninterpretable [original emphasis].84
Sontag warned critics against placing too much importance on the

content or meaning of an artwork, claiming that they should be “letting it
speak for itself.”85 She cites Plato’s idea that culture merely reinforces the
illusions of reality, and claims that “critical excavations” push aside manifest
content in order to interpret a truth of the way things “really” are. “Inter-
pretation,” she argues, “means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y,
the Z, and so forth) from the whole work.”86 Against this, she advocates a
“mindless” approach, asserting that we ought to “feel more” and think
less.87 Art does not “contain” meaning, it simply “is.” The critic is assigned
a peculiar and impossible role in this scenario, tasked with the job to analyse
the work of art while intending not to provide the viewer with any form of
guidance or socio-political assumptions.
As in “Notes on Camp,” Sontag stresses the aesthetic value that can be
ascertained from the “failed seriousness” of works of art. Her treatment of
the art work as operating on face value and being completely open to
meaning conveys a belief in the absence of any singular essence of self or
reality, for viewer, artist and object alike. Sontag portrays culture as a
performance of meaning-making that never gets fully resolved. The idea
of “pretending,” or of engaging with art under “false pretences,” is there-
fore regarded as potentially fruitful. Art and culture become opportunities
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DUCHAMP’S IRONIC KNOWINGNESS 73
to try things out—to test how far one can take such play and pretence
without incurring any risk. Warhol’s work and activities affected this sense of
“knowing” play yet also seemed somehow relatable. He sorted through
society’s trash heaps to blur everything—parties, paintings, polaroids, tele-
vision and film—into a proto-hipster practice that contributes to culture by
reading it, compelled by a fetish for the insider status signalled by ironic
double entendres.
DUCHAMP’S IRONIC KNOWINGNESS

If Warhol can be defined by a mode of camp irony, Marcel Duchamp—that
other dominant figure of ironic twentieth-century art—can be understood
in terms of a more normative mode of irony, one closer to humour than to
camp. Duchamp’s irony is based around puns and wordplay—a humour
that requires precision, of using precisely the right amount of vulgarity and
ambiguity to bring about a knowing smile, but not to be too funny. Much
of Duchamp’s work revolves around sexually charged “incommensurabil-
ities” of word and image, echoing Lyotard’s account of the postmodern
condition: the fragmented language games that, charged with desire,
become attached to incommensurable forms of life. As Thierry de Duve
has noted, Duchamp, in contrast to “a Kandinsky, a Mondrian, or a Klee,”
was never tempted by a serious and reductionist abstraction, preferring
instead to navigate a path through cubism, futurism and eventually through
painting itself by means of irony.88 He writes:
Duchamp always showed himself to be in opposition to any pictorial practice

and theory that made taste, whether good or bad, or conventional or provoc-
ative, into the motorforce of a strategy. His choice would be to try to escape
taste and to practice a ‘beauty of indifference,’ a strategy impossible to
implement fully but for which the readymade nevertheless provided the
theory.89
This “beauty of indifference”—indistinct from the Kantian stance

required for aesthetic ideas—was fundamentally motivated by an ironic
attitude. De Duve continues:
With implacable irony, Duchamp reveals the naivete of all the dreams of the
plasticians who, like Kandinsky or like the functionalists, imagined themselves
to be the founders of a language at the same time that they wanted their work
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to speak directly, without delay. [. . .] Like all the great artists of his genera-
tion, Duchamp had the desire for a foundational language. But he was perhaps
the only one to whom it was revealed that the ‘foundational act’ was not in a
subject who would be the producer of a new and specific language, but in
language itself, immemorial and general, as it produces the subject; that this
‘act’ did not have as its condition a ‘me’ centered on a feeling of ‘inner
necessity,’ but did have as its consequence an ‘I’ that would leap into existence
out of the ‘ground’ of anonymous language; that this ‘act’ was of the order of
the wo es war, soil ich werden by which the ‘voice of no one’ opens up the
possibility of saying ‘I’ or, in other words, the possibility of simultaneous
destruction and creation.90
Irony, for Duchamp, enables him to place acute attention on the oper-
ations of language through the subject—posing language as making the
subject, rather than the subject making the language. Like the idea of
aesthetic judgement defined by Kant, Duchamp’s selection of the ready-
made was done in the “total absence of good or bad taste,” it was unreliant
on skill or utilitarian pathos, and it exercised a “freedom of indifference”
that epitomizes the rhetorical basis of philosophical aesthetics.91 Duchamp
stated: “Irony is a playful way of accepting something. Mine is the irony of
indifference. It is a ‘Meta-irony.’”92 The “indifference” here is Duchamp’s
indifference to art itself—an indifference to its unspoken rules and an
indifference to the ways in which its “tastes” operate as hidden directives.
In light of Bjørn Schiermer’s description of “hipster irony” as “a form of
collective enjoyment of ‘failed’ objects,” one can see Duchamp’s own
preoccupation with failure as a key part of his ironic disposition—affirming
the failure of art to retain the credibility it once had in Western culture, or to
be more than just “pictorial thought” or aristocratic language games. As
Elena Filipovic has observed, Duchamp’s irony was invested in exposing the
“legitimizing function” of the art institution and its “rational, objective, and
scientific” suppositions.93 To “expose” here, through the use of irony, is to
parody art’s mechanics of false transcendence.
In Duchamp’s notes for a “hilarious picture” in his Green Box of 1934, he
wrote: “Ironism of affirmation: differences from negative ironism depen-
dent solely on laughter.”94 “Negative ironism,” which Duchamp distanced
himself from, is presented as irony in which two ideas appear in contradic-
tion, cancelling each other out. Against this, he thought of himself as
adopting “affirmative ironism,” which allows two or more significations to
remain linked and significant, as a form of ironic indeterminacy that inspires
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HIPSTER IRONY AS AESTHETIC FEELING: DE DUVE ON DUCHAMP 75
meaning rather than reduces it. The British pop artist Richard Hamilton
once termed this approach as a “peculiar mixture of reverence and cyni-
cism.”95 For de Duve, the affirmative aspects of Duchampian irony exem-
plify a faith in art, despite much evidence to the contrary that his intent was
to gleefully expose it as a bourgeois hangover of the past.
HIPSTER IRONY AS AESTHETIC FEELING: DE DUVE ON DUCHAMP

In front of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—a urinal posed pseudonymously
in an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists, of which
Duchamp was a board member—de Duve thinks the viewer is unlikely to
account for the work’s quality on the basis of the aesthetic affect it gener-
ates, or on the basis of its art-historical precedents. Fountain appears as if
without taste and without precedence. Given this, the viewer also never gets
to ask themselves what kind of artwork is posed before them, because what
is before them doesn’t even seem to be art. In Kant after Duchamp, de
Duve argues that with this work Duchamp makes the logic of modernist art
practice its subject matter, registering a shift in Kant’s aesthetic judgement
that replaces the claim “this is beautiful” with “this is art.”
De Duve thinks we cannot deem Fountain a work of art unless we
entertain the idea that there ought to be something common to all the art
in the world. Seeing the work as lacking in this point of commonality leads
one to confidently assert “this isn’t art”—a judgement that makes claim to
knowing what art is with more-than-subjective certitude.96 Duchamp’s
urinal therefore asks us to accept it as art by also accepting that anything
can be art. This, for de Duve, is “both a theoretical necessity and a quasi-
ethical obligation, because there is no empirical proof that we live in a world
where anything can be art and where anyone can be an artist.”97 Duchamp
therefore signals the start of what he calls the “art-in-general” system, where
anything can be art. This opens art to numerous demonstrations of this
belief.98
Art for those that believe that anything can be art requires an open mind,
but de Duve insists that rather than viewers blindly following this rule as a
social convention, art often works to confront the limits to this “unlimited”
mindset. Despite the undermining of Kantian beauty in his schema, de
Duve still sees art after Duchamp as operating within a Kantian framework,
where feeling is a guide for taste. This “feeling” is not a feeling of beauty but
a more general feeling—a feeling that de Duve claims is at play before
judgement. In keeping with Kant’s notion of the intuitive, sensorial and
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non-cognitive character of aesthetic judgement, de Duve poses this post-

Duchampian feeling as the “feeling that this is art.”99 Once felt, the objects
in front of the viewer go through a kind of baptism through which they
acquire the name “art” as if a proper name. This act that echoes the
subjective as well as the sensus communis elements that Kant underscores
in the beautiful judgement of the arts, under the feeling of the universality of
the uniqueness the aesthetic encounter inspires. Just as the class of persons
called Tom need to have no common properties to legitimize their name, so
it is that works of art do not require properties in common in virtue of them
being called “art.”
Duve argues that the judgment “this is art” does not subsume an object
under the concept of art, but rather confers the name “art” on any object
judged accordingly under a faculty of feeling that is measured against the
feelings that past aesthetic encounters have occasioned. This upholds the
idea, pace Kant, that art is a proper name which is conferred without regard
to other bearers of the name. De Duve tries to evade contradiction here by
holding firm to the fact that the viewer compares the “feeling” with past
aesthetic encounters rather than “reflects” on them as models for one’s
determination. This reinforces Kant’s claim that the role of discrimination
or discernment in aesthetic judgement “does not contribute anything to
cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with
the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious
when it feels its own state.”100 Here Kant underlines how an aesthetic
judgment is not itself a cognitive one because it contributes nothing to
our store of knowledge, just as de Duve sees Duchamp as able to “break-
through” the chain of past aesthetic encounters on the basis of exception-
ality, revealing that this “store of knowledge” of past art is inadequate for
aesthetic judgement.
De Duve portrays aesthetic judgement as a leap of faith; however, at
times he underplays the significance of the universal basis of his account of
aesthetic judgement—the “do whatever” imperative he sees as guiding
artistic freedom, which informs his leanings towards art as a transgressive
act that generates a feeling of liberation beyond any exchange value. He
thinks that the perception of art as a form of free-play, without a determin-
ing concept, is important to liberal democracies because “we cannot rely on
the faculty of agreeing in order to construct civil [cosmopolitan] soci-
ety.”101 For de Duve, this togetherness must instead be based on a “feeling”
of shared sensibilities, in spite of the evidence that the world is composed of
a magnitude of differences and diversities that are incommensurable.
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THE HIPSTER’S SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AS SOCIAL CONNECTION 77
It is in this way that de Duve’s depiction of the “heterogeneous sensible”

in art that Duchamp advanced appears, on occasion, to be instrumentalized
as a metaphor for cosmopolitan open-mindedness—as an outer limit that
serves a similar role as morality in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement. De
Duve emphasizes “feeling” and “art” much more than Rancière does in his
theory of the politics of aesthetics. While sharing many affinities with de
Duve, Rancière is less inclined to fixate on the feeling of the aesthetic
encounter or the necessity that this encounter be named as art, highlighting
instead the more general appearance of the aesthetic encounter as a resis-
tance to signification that stages new possibilities for establishing connec-
tions between feeling, speaking, thinking and acting that disrupt the
distribution of the sensible. He thus connects the transgressions of the
sensible to communities of people, avoiding de Duve’s very specific focus
on the history of fine art and its (empty) universal identity. Rancière writes:
“Human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain
distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together; and
politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being
together.’”102
If, for de Duve, the transgressive appeal of the readymade—where an
ordinary object is aligned with the maxim “this is art”—lies in the reciprocal
tension created between art and non-art, today there is no such tension.
With the institutionalization of Duchampian techniques in postmodernism,
ironic detachment and conceptual practice have combined to evoke the cool
hipster conceptualist. This is someone who poses their arty taste as above all
taste, who underwrites their supposed transgressions as progressively cos-
mopolitan, and who positions their historically informed art as
unexplainable even if artefactual—the bricoleur-artist as hip philosophical
priest who need only point to things as art to make them so.
THE HIPSTER’S SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AS SOCIAL CONNECTION

According to Baudrillard, the significance of Duchamp and Warhol lies in
how both artists made works that implied an enigmatic withdrawal from the
world as clearly defined subjective beings, becoming icons of postmodern
art as agents “for the ironic disappearance of things.”103 He continues:
All of these modern artefacts, from publicity to electronics, from the

mediatized to the virtual, objects, images, models, networks, have a function
of absorbing the identity of the subject much more than a function of
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communication or information, as is usually said. [. . .] These banal objects,

these technical objects, these virtual objects, thus seem to be the new strange
attractors, the new objects beyond aesthetics, transaesthetic – fetish objects
without signification, without illusion, without aura, without value – the
perfect mirror of our radical disillusion of the world. Pure objects, ironical
objects, just like Warhol’s images.104
This describes a contemporary world in which the artistic strategies of

Duchamp, Warhol and their followers have spilled out into the entire
mediated environment, symbolizing “a mastery of the radical illusion of
the world.”105
In the shadow of postmodern irony, R.J. Magill Jnr argues that a new
mode of irony came to define the dominant modes of cultural and political
engagement since the early 2000s, born from “a certain cultural bitterness
legitimated through trenchant disbelief.”106 Magill analyses the promi-
nence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The
Colbert Report, noting the pervasiveness of irony as a twenty-first-century
worldview—a distancing that performs a “private revolt against the
world.”107 Rather than denouncing sincerity through facetiousness or
parody, this form of irony “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals
of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own
appearance.”108
For Magill, such shielded interactions with contemporary culture—in
which “ironic critique [. . .] seems at times an alternative, in our cosmopol-
itan minds, to actual revolution”—are rooted in Romantic ideology. He
continues:
instead of being fundamentally antieverything, [romanticism] is, then, at root

a Protestant stance: it attempts to critique exteriorities and convey the hidden
truth of inwardness. Thus, efforts by some pundits to oppose irony and
cynicism with sincerity or earnestness have not understood that sincerity of
moral vision can no longer, in a cultural moment that so often seems a
frightening yet absolutely predictable joke, be spoken literally to have any
effect. Moral vision loses its power—for those deeply aware of its recurrent
misuse—when it is cheapened by ready-made, cliché-laden, speechwriter-
prepared, pedantic literalism.109
In response to mass digital information, 24-hour news cycles, and the

climate of suspicion brought on by terrorism threats, this mode of speaking
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THE HIPSTER’S SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AS SOCIAL CONNECTION 79
distantly provides much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist

cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype—“a sort
of psychic armor against a dominant political and commercial culture trying
to smother existing ways of life with ever-increasing expediency and
absorption.”110
According to Mark Greif, the twenty-first-century hipster borrows from
the blank irony described by Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson and instead
turns it into an affective, nostalgic and connective force. Greif writes that the
hipster pushes irony towards the “reconstruction of past aesthetics and
techniques more perfect than the originals, in an irony without sarcasm,
without bitterness or critique; reflexivity is used purely to get back to
emotion, especially in the drive to childhood.”111 Although conflicting
with Magill’s notion of irony as a form of bitterness that preserves sincerity
as an ideal, both writers associate hipsterism’s nostalgic and diversionary
means of expression as responses to the commodification of everything. In
this context, heartfelt and sincere expressions can seem immediately appro-
priated when uttered, rendered ridiculous by the ways in which the very
same words could have been used to promote anything from life insurance
to Airbnb to Fruit Loops.
This form of “survivalist” irony—irony as a neoliberal coping strategy—is
also a product of the abundance of tertiary-educated liberal arts graduates
and the reality of the work environments that they face upon completion,
where one must suspend one’s creative ideals or supposedly cultivated tastes
for the sake of earning a minimum wage. At times Baudrillard’s pessimism is
understandable, portraying a world most of us recognize today, “a world
where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear, and at the
same time to mask this disappearance.”112 Hipster irony operates in the face
of this apparent disappearance, which in Rancière’s terms constitutes the
indistinctions of the ethical regime that stem from a loss of faith in radical
egalitarian politics.
In wrestling with the fact that any sincerity uttered is a sincerity that can
be distorted, David Foster Wallace was celebrated for taking a stance against
irony and the “cynical postmodern aesthetic” proffered by 1990s American
television even while becoming something of a hipster sage himself.113 In a
previously unpublished contribution, Wallace makes the connection
between irony and belief explicit. He states: “Ridicule, nihilism, sarcasm,
cool, and irony worked for the USA’s young when there were big adult
hypocrisies for the young to explode and thus transcend [. . .] But now there
are no really interesting hypocrisies left: you can’t be a hypocrite if you don’t
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even pretend to believe in anything. Irony and cool keep us from believing
in stuff.”114 Wallace marks a shift from 1990s cynicism to a 2000s-era
model of post-authentic authenticity, where heartfelt nostalgia was posed
with slight ironic remove to express “the dead energy of loftier political
ideology.”115 For Wallace, the style of postmodern metafiction was a Trojan
horse through which real emotion and confessions could be perceived as
cutting through—a counter-cynical irony constructed by setting up ten-
sions between postmodern knowingness and a capacity to wear one’s heart
on one’s sleeve.
PASTICHE AS PEJORATIVE POSTMODERNISM

Echoing the idea of postmodern irony as a blank gesture, the hipster has
been derided for emptying cultural forms of their historicity, representative
of what Fredric Jameson called the “perpetual present” that was the result of
late capitalism’s triggering of “multiple historical amnesias.”116 The hipster
clearly shares the qualities of Jameson’s “nostalgia film,” which he defines as
cinema that registers its “historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized
fascination, in lavish images of specific generational pasts.”117 It is in this
sense that Jameson thought that postmodernism was, above all, a culture of
pastiche, marked by the “complacent play of historical allusion.”118
In distinguishing between pastiche and parody, Jameson argues that,
while both are practices of imitation and mimicry, parody has a purpose—
to mock, ridicule, satirize, with polemical, critical and comic potential—
whereas pastiche is “blank parody,” a mere imitation that has no apparent
critical directive.119 Pastiche took the place of parody at the moment when
public and linguistic norms began to recede. Jameson writes:
Supposing that modern art and modernism, far from being a kind of special-
ized aesthetic curiosity, actually anticipated social developments along these
lines; supposing that in the decades since the emergence of the great modern
styles society has itself begun to fragment in this way, each group coming to
speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its
private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of
linguistic island, separated from everyone else? But then in that case, the very
possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private
languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and we would have nothing
but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.120
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PASTICHE AS PEJORATIVE POSTMODERNISM 81
Resembling parody performed in a context in which any common

ground cannot be assumed, Jameson presents pastiche as “neutral practice,”
“without the satirical impulse,” and “without that still latent feeling that
there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is
rather comic.” The stereotype of the hated hipster has been built on this
postmodern notion of pastiche, presenting as a lack of self-awareness that is
ripe for parody, seen most conspicuously in the comic hipster characters of
Nathan Barley (2005), Portlandia (2011–15) and Bondi Hipsters (Van
Vuuren Bros 2011), who are radically out of step with how most of the
population perceive them.
Jameson’s prescient but at times conspiratorial analyses of postmodernity
tapped into the narcissistic, expressive and individualistic fantasies that
reverberated in the cashed-up American art world of the 1980s. Artist and
critic Thomas Lawson wrote in a 1984 issue of Artforum that the modernist
tradition of “expanding” upon the work of prior artists had been replaced by
a postmodern mode of “repetition.” In a language that sounds very
Jamesonian, Lawson claimed that art was entering “that vast plain of
indifference, a continuous present, with no discernible past, and no way
yet to speak of the future.”121
In his introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic—a now canonical book of
collected essays on postmodernism in the arts—Hal Foster applied
Jameson’s ideas to emergent forms of “neo” art in painting and photogra-
phy, characterizing artists who were reliant on nostalgia, plagiarism and
pastiche—in the medium of painting in particular—as exemplars of uncrit-
ical postmodern subjects. These were posed in contrast with the “resistant”
postmodern subjects who approached art as if a mode of “critical decon-
struction.”122 Foster developed this polemic in his subsequent publication
Recodings (1985), where he grappled with the limitations of pastiche and
questioned why so much new art in this early-1980s period assumed histor-
ical forms rather than engaged with them. He writes:
This ‘return to history’ is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is
disregarded, its continuum is disavowed, and conflictual forms of art and
modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity
of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded. Such a disregard makes
the return to history also seem to be a liberation from history.123
Perceiving “aesthetics” as representative of an ahistorical “space of reso-

lution,” Foster wanted “anti-aesthetic” to refer instead to contemporary
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art’s vicissitudes, allowing for a de-emphasis on style and symbolic unity in

line with critical postmodernism’s suspicion of the image. Artists such as
Julian Schnabel, who epitomized postmodern pastiche and the provocation
of critical uncertainty through apparently empty historical iconography,
were seen by Foster as promulgating “art that is made popular by cli-
chés.”124 Such work “exploits the collapse of art into the mass media; the
cliché renders the work historical to the naive and campy to the hip, which is
to say that the cliché is used to codify response.”125 Through such practices,
postmodernism was viewed as a rethinking of the entire notion of reference,
as if artists were responding to the legacies of modernism by showing that
the modernist striving to unmask a reality beneath appearance was itself
stuck in a system of signs à la Baudrillard.
The pluralist and culturally contingent condition of judgement that
Jameson and Foster both agreed was fundamental to postmodernism sug-
gests that there must be a level of uncertainty about assigning cultural value.
How do we definitively gauge whether an aesthetic posture actually has a
satirical intention? What exactly constitutes the “radical revision” of
so-called critical art?126 How do we go about determining if an artist
“seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather
than conceal social and political affiliations”?127 Although for Foster “the
line between the exploitive and the critical is fine indeed,” he failed to
convey the nuance of such issues, turning a sceptical eye towards cultural
pluralism due to its implications for critical judgement—its capacity to
render judgements on art and culture “merely relative.”128
It is for these reasons that Foster thought he was witnessing not a
progressive collapse of high and low culture in the 1980s so much as the
neutralization of art’s critical capacity—the impossibility of accounting for
the dearth of “minor deviations” and “isolated gestures” that a pluralist
culture must produce, leaving criticism reduced “to the homogeneity of
local advocacy.” He claimed that art was in danger of losing the “critical
edge” it had inherited from the avant-garde.129 He continues: “Art [in an
era of pluralism] becomes an arena not of dialectical dialogue but of vested
interests, of licensed sects: in lieu of culture we have cults. The result is an
eccentricity that leads, in art as in politics, to a new conformity: pluralism as
an institution.”130 Here, Foster puts his finger on the “problem” of the
hipster; however, given the failure of his anti-aesthetic, which
unintentionally placed caveats on visual pleasure in favour of validating a
critical distance that was more presumed than justified, what, exactly, is the
solution?
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PASTICHE AS PEJORATIVE POSTMODERNISM 83
From a contemporary standpoint, Foster’s and Jameson’s polemical

separations of “critical” from “uncritical” postmodern culture can be under-
stood as attempting to mask their disdain for the emergence of emboldened
capitalist personalities in the early 1980s. This animosity was directed
towards those artists who conceived of their craft not as a tradition of the
historical avant-garde so much as an alternative commercial industry
(or advanced form of popular culture) that was nonetheless relative to all
forms of cultural expression. Jameson located the proliferation of pastiche as
feeding into his broader argument about style in the era of late capitalism,
which, he claimed, no longer presented itself as a reliable index of sociohis-
torical conditions. But style nonetheless played an important role in his and
Foster’s accounts of the postmodern condition. Against the modernist idea
that style in art and culture is a significant bearer of meaning and content,
not merely a taxonomic tool, style was portrayed as something to be
distrusted, even if relying heavily on chaotic and fragmented imagery
themselves.131
As any art history student of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg
knows, cultural distinctions between innovation/authenticity and
genericism/inauthenticity are rarely straightforward, and usually tell us
more about the critic’s concealed subjectivities than they do about the
objects of their critiques. The concept of the hipster is endemic to this
paradox. Its utterance was first used as a condemnation of creative forms
of inauthenticity that masquerade as forms of authenticity, but now “hip-
ster” also serves as a distancing device for those who want to shirk similar
accusations.
While it is noble to reject the ahistorical, ironic, nostalgic, exploitative or
“in-the-know” postures of the hipster, it should also be acknowledged that
if you are concerned enough to negate or take distance from something,
some part of you might also be trying to deny something that would reduce
this distance. Like a hall of mirrors, the hipster can signal uncritical pastiche;
however, the disdain this figure tends to generate itself suggests a longing
for the authority of critical theory. Rather than being an embodiment of
postmodern pastiche and irony as spent forces, “hipster,” as utterance,
signals nostalgia for the postmodern cynic as authoritative critic, longing
for a time when condemnations of style weren’t as forcefully contested as
veiled condemnations of socio-political identities.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
NOTES
1. Paul Willis, Common Culture (Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1990), 135.
2. Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class
(New York: The Free Press), 8.
3. Francis Davies, “Bud’s Bubble,” The Atlantic vol. 277, No. 1 (1996): 100.
4. Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop,
no. 18 (Autumn, 1984): 81.
5. John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, 2004), 5.
6. Cab Calloway, “The Hepster’s Dictionary: Language of Jive,” Of Minnie
the Moocher & Me, ed. John Shearer (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976
[1939]), 255.
7. Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U. S
Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 72.
8. Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Orig-
inal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 452.
9. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The meaning of Style (New York: Methuen &
Co, 1979), 47.
10. Ibid.
11. Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of a Hipster,” Partisan Review, vol. 15, no.
6 (June 1948), 721.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 725.
14. Broyard’s ancestors on both sides were defined as black, but his father, a
light-skinned black man married to a light-skinned black woman, during
one period passed as white in order to join a union to get work in Brooklyn.
Anatole Broyard passed as white for his entire adult life. Henry Louis Gates,
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (London: Hachette, 2012), 345.
15. Broyard, “Portrait of a Hipster,” 721.
16. Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” Commentary,
10 (July 1950), 57.
17. Ibid., 58.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956[1943]), 103.
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Existentialism from
Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (Meridian Publishing Company,
1989[1946]), 345.
20. Ibid.
21. Broyard, “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” 59.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 61.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
NOTES 85
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 63.
26. Ibid., 64.
27. Ibid.
28. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “White Like Me,” New Yorker, June 17 (1996),
143.
29. Mailer, “The White Negro,” 276.
30. Ibid., 285.
31. Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Com-
pany, 1967), 151.
32. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 48.
33. Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce (New York: Panther,
1974), 133.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture,
and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997.
31.
37. Guillaume Marche, “Why Infrapolitics Matters,” Revue française d’études
américaines, no. 131 (2012), 15.
38. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1965), 122.
39. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994),
283.
40. Ibid., 282.
41. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1965), 122.
42. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 283.
43. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6.
44. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society
and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), 95.
45. Mark Greif, “The Hipster in the Mirror,” New York Times (November
12, 2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/
Greif-t.html (accessed 1/4/15).
46. Mark Greif, “The Art of Criticism: Mark Greif on Why He’s “Against
Everything”,” To the Best of Our Knowledge, January 19, 2017. https://
www.ttbook.org/book/art-criticism-mark-greif-why-he’s-“against-eve
rything” (accessed 1/2/2017).
47. Tony Bennett and Elizabeth B. Silva, “Cultural Capital and Inequality:
Policy Issues and Contexts,” Cultural Trends, 15 (2006): 91.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
48. Jacques Rancière quoted by Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), x.
49. Ibid., xi.
50. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 2000), 187.
51. Jacques Rancière, “Art is Going Elsewhere and Politics has to Catch it,”
Krisis issue 1 (2008): 71.
52. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interroga-
tions (New York, The Guilford Press, 1991), 114.
53. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 59.
54. Jean Baudrillard, “Consumer Society,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings,
ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 31.
55. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983), 278.
56. Jean Baudrillard, “Fatal Strategies,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings,
ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 202.
57. Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Deaths,” Jean Baudrillard:
Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
1990[1987]), 202.
58. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009),
44.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 45–6.
61. Ibid., 46.
62. Ibid., 45.
63. Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: the Implosion of the Social in the Media,”
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press. 1990[1987]), 216.
64. Ibid.
65. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York:
verso, 2006), 23.
66. Ibid.
67. Jacques Rancière, “In What Time Do We Live?” Política Común, 4 (2013).
https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0004.001 (accessed 1/3/
2014).
68. Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 216.
69. Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1984), xxiv.
70. Charles Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Lit-
erature, trans. P.E. Charvet (London: Viking, 1972), 312.
71. Ibid.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
NOTES 87
72. Ibid., 319.

73. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 106.
74. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 938.
75. Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the
Whore: The Politics of Loitering”107.
76. Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering” New German Critique, No. 39 (1986), 105.
77. Dayna Tortorici, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n þ1
Foundation, 2010), 124–5.
78. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and other essays (London: Picador,
2001), 290.
79. Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 211.
80. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 292.
81. Ibid., 293.
82. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 149.
83. Ibid., 150.
84. Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 10.
85. Ibid., 11.
86. Ibid., 14.
87. Ibid., 12.
88. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage
from Painting to the Readymade, trans Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 88.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., 128–9.
91. Ibid., 159.
92. Marcel Duchamp quoted in Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and
Poets (New York. 1951), 311.
93. Elena Filipovic, “A Museum That is Not,” E-flux Journal No. 4, March
2009: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68554/a-museum-that-is-no
t/ (accessed 1/3/16).
94. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet
and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 30.
95. Richard Hamilton, Collected Words: 1953–1982 (London and New York:
Thames & Hudson, 1983), 78.
96. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT, 1996), 53.
97. Thierry de Duve, “‘This is Art’: Anatomy of a Sentence,” Artforum (April,
2014): 126.
98. Ibid.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
99. De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 53.

100. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1987), 204.
101. Thierry de Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal Reflections on Art and
Culture in the Global World,” Third Text 21.6 (2007):683.
102. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2009), 56.
103. Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art,
1997), 15.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid., 18.
106. R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness (Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press, 2007), xi.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness, xi.
110. Ibid., xii.
111. Mark Greif, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n þ1
Foundation, 2010), 11.
112. Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, 21.
113. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993): 151.
114. David Foster Wallace quoted by Lee Konstantinou, “We had to get beyond
irony: How David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and a new generation of
believers changed fiction,” Salon March 28, 2016: http://www.salon.com
/2016/03/27/we_had_to_get_beyond_irony_how_david_foster_wal
lace_dave_eggers_and_a_new_generation_of_believers_changed_fiction/
(accessed 1/3/17).
115. R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness, 40.
116. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 125.
117. Jameson, Postmodernism, 296.
118. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the
Postmodern Debate,” The Ideologies of Theory Essays, Volume 2 (London,
Routledge, 1988): 105.
119. Jameson, Postmodernism, 17.
120. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. By Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1983), 119.
121. Thomas Lawson, “Forum: Generation in Vitro,” Artforum 23 (September
1984): 99.
122. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, xii.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
NOTES 89
123. Foster, Recodings, 16.

125. Ibid.
127. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, xii.
128. Foster, Recodings, 29, 31.
129. Ibid.
131. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 32.
wes.hill@scu.edu.au
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The Postmodern Hipster

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The Postmodern Hipster

Abstract In this section, hipsterism is examined through the lens of post-

Keywords Postmodernism • Irony • Pastiche • Infrapolitics • Anatole

© The Author(s) 2017 47

As Robin Kelley has shown, the modern bebop hipster’s creativity,

The origin of “hip,” from which “hipster” is derived, remains a subject of

knowledgeable, ‘wise to’, up-to-date; smart, stylish,” as a variation of the

demanded originality in others and he embodied it in everything he did – in

when it became identiﬁable in white American subcultures in the latter

BROYARD’S HIPSTER: THE INAUTHENTICITY OF BEING BLACK

understandably engendered by rejection at the hands of the all-powerful

This frames the essay as describing the struggle of subcultural identities

We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances.

To escape one’s bad faith is to have consciousness of one’s being.

For Broyard, the hipster epitomizes Sartrean inauthenticity. In ﬂeeing

identity.”26 Refusing “black distinctiveness,” he laments the fact that this

from the conservative mainstream, adopting the “in-ﬂux” and “on-the-

oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-

consumer behaviour. This is exempliﬁed by art historian Rosalind Krauss’s

paradox of thousands of teenagers asserting their individualities, for example,

Krauss sees the structure of Girard’s mimetic rivalry as applying, on a

Amongst creative groups—communities of peers—this form of mimetic

The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression

Combining culture—or the cult of the beautiful—and class within a

something that yields power. Therefore, in addition to economic capital he

THE PITFALLS OF HIPSTER CRITIQUE

Although implying his own proximity to the hipster—the entanglement

BAUDRILLARD’S HIPSTER AS POSTMODERN CONSUMER

back to life as phantasmas of revolution. These revolutions are only transi-

POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AS NIHILISTIC REVELATION

Rancière aligns the nihilism attributed to the “postmodern tempera-

social standing—the “social success and happiness” seemingly afforded by

Critical discourse on commodiﬁcation and the spectacle in this way becomes

Against the postmodern assumption of a common identity between the

British romantics, and established many of the hallmarks of dandyism—a

The ironic, and even camp, sensibility of the postmodern masses is

DANDIES AND FLÂNEURS: THE ORIGINAL HIPSTER IRONISTS

narratives and multiple open-ended quotations attributed to the postmod-

the emergent exemplars of French critical theory, echoing, if taken at face

the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp

Aligned with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity,

is the attempt to have, in an ordinary sense, no content; since there is no

Sontag warned critics against placing too much importance on the

DUCHAMP’S IRONIC KNOWINGNESS

Duchamp always showed himself to be in opposition to any pictorial practice

This “beauty of indifference”—indistinct from the Kantian stance

HIPSTER IRONY AS AESTHETIC FEELING: DE DUVE ON DUCHAMP

non-cognitive character of aesthetic judgement, de Duve poses this post-

It is in this way that de Duve’s depiction of the “heterogeneous sensible”

THE HIPSTER’S SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL AS SOCIAL CONNECTION

All of these modern artefacts, from publicity to electronics, from the

communication or information, as is usually said. [. . .] These banal objects,

This describes a contemporary world in which the artistic strategies of

instead of being fundamentally antieverything, [romanticism] is, then, at root

In response to mass digital information, 24-hour news cycles, and the

distantly provides much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist

PASTICHE AS PEJORATIVE POSTMODERNISM

Resembling parody performed in a context in which any common