by Mark Greif
This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term “hipster” is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of “poseur,” “faker,” “phony,” “scenester,” and “hangeron.” The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc. It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives. He does not earn them.
It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent any traditional bohemia are hangers-on. Somewhere, at the center, will be a very small number of hardworking writers, artists, or politicos, from whom the hangers-on draw their feelings of authenticity. Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core. Among hipsters, the skills of hanging on—trend spotting, cool hunting, plus handicraft skills—become the heroic practice. The most active participants sell something—customized brand-name jeans, airbrushed skateboards, the most special whiskey, the most retro sunglasses—and the more passive just buy it.
Of course, there are artists of hipster-related sensibility who remain artists. In the neighborhoods, though, there was a feeling throughout the last decade that the traditional arts were of little interest to hipsters because their consumer culture substituted a range of narcissistic handicrafts similar enough to sterilize the originals. One could say, exaggerating only slightly, that the hipster moment did not produce any artists but tattoo artists, who gained an entire generation’s arms, sternums, napes, ankles, and lower backs as their canvas. It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers: LastNightsParty, Terry Richardson, the Cobra Snake. It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts. And hipsterism did not make an avant-garde; it made communities of early adopters.
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The most confounding element of the hipster is that, because of the geography of the gentrified city and the demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly anti-authoritarian youth countercultures. Thus, baby boomers and preteens tend to look at everyone between them and say: “Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture?” To which folks age nineteen to twenty-nine protest, “No, these people are worse.” But there is something in this confusion that suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.
True countercultures may wax and wane in numbers, but a level of youth hostility to the American official compromise has been continuous since World War II. Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anticapitalist communities. One glimpses behind them the bike messengers, straight-edge skaters, Lesbian Avengers, freegans, enviro-anarchists, and interracial hip-hoppers who live as they please, with a spiritual middle finger always raised.
And hipster motifs and styles, when you dig into them, are often directly taken from these adjacent countercultures. The fixed-gear bike came from bike messengers and the anarchist culture of groups like Critical Mass and Bikes Not Bombs. Hipster approval of locavore food (because local cheeses and grass-fed beef are expensive, rare, and knowledge-intensive) brings elitism to the left-environmentalist campaign for deindustrialized agriculture. Even those trucker hats were familiar to those of us who first saw them on the wrong heads in 1999; they’d been worn in punk rock in the late eighties and early nineties, through the Reagan-Bush recession, as an emblem of the “age of diminished expectations.”
Can the hipster, by virtue of proximity if nothing else, be woken up? One can’t expect political efflorescence from an antipolitical group. Yet the mainstreaming of hipsterism to the suburbs and the mall portends hipster self-disgust. (Why bother with a lifestyle that everyone now knows?) More important, it guarantees the pollination of a vast audience with seeds stolen from the counterculture. Granted, they have been husked of significance—but couldn’t a twelve-year-old with deep Google skills figure out what they originally meant? And might they still germinate?
Something was already occurring in the revivification that transpired in 2003. The White Hipster was truly grotesque, whereas within the Hipster Primitive there emerged a glimmer of an idea of refusal. In the United Kingdom, American-patterned hipsters in Hackney and Shoreditch are said to be turning more toward an ethos of androgyny, drag, the queer. In recent hipster art, Animal Collective’s best-known lyric is this: “I don’t mean to seem like I / Care about material things, like our social stats / I just want four walls and / Adobe slats for my girls.” The band members masked their faces to avoid showing themselves to the culture of idolators. If a hundred thousand Americans discovered that they, too, hated the compromised culture, they might not look entirely unlike the Hipster Primitive. Just no longer hip.
[2010]
VI
ANAESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
(THE MEANING OF LIFE, PART III)
A year ago, I wrote an essay about a modern crisis in experience. I defined experience as the habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them. Questing after an ill-defined happiness, you are led to substitute a list of special experiences and then to collect them to furnish your storeroom of memories: incidents of sex, drinking, travel, adventure. These experiences are limited in number, unreliable, and addictive. Their ultimate effect can be a life of permanent dissatisfaction and a compulsion to frenetic activity.
Since then, I’ve felt I paid too little attention to a phenomenon which is the opposite: the desperate wish for anti-experience. The connection between the quest for experience and the wish for anti-experience isn’t chronological. You don’t wake up the morning after some final orgy of experience and discover that you can’t stand any more. It seems to be, instead, arbitrary and eruptive. You reach points in life at which you can no longer live like other people, though you don’t want to die. Experience becomes piercing, grating, intrusive. It is no longer out of reach, an occasional throb in the dark. It is no longer a prize, though it is the goal everyone else seeks. It is a scourge. All you wish for is some means to reduce the feeling.
This anaesthetic reaction, I begin to think, must be associated with the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment. For those people to whom a need to reduce experience occurs, part of their discomfort seems to be strongly associated with aesthetic intrusions from fictional or political drama—from the television, the newscast, the newspaper, the computer headlines, or any of the other unavoidable screens of pixels or paper. “I just had to turn the TV off. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” This is the plea we accept, more or less, as we mirror the strange look on the sufferer’s face with an odd look of our own. We will accept it this far and no farther, because much more of the suffering comes from us—the “normal” others—who obnoxiously recount our daily lives, too, as a series of rare adventures. The anti-experiencers will want to turn the TV off; then they’ll want to turn us off. There comes a point at which they will want to turn the sights and sounds of life off—if life becomes a nightmare of aestheticized, dramatized events.
The hallmark of the conversion to anti-experience is a lowered threshold for eventfulness. You perceive each outside drama as your experience, which you could not withstand if it really were yours. It leads to forms of total vulnerability, as if the individual had been peeled or deprived of barriers. I don’t know what word can connect the three levels of unavoidable strong experience, broadcast and recounted and personal, except the omnipresence of drama.
I also don’t know why the nightmare comes for some people and not others, at some times and not others. After considering it, it surprises me that this breach, the fall into painful overexperience, isn’t more common. Why of a hundred seekers of experience and dwellers in the total aesthetic environment do only two, or ten, turn? Unless there are features of the aesthetic environment which are themselves also anaesthetic and that manage to regulate the exper
iential lives of the majority, to keep them from cracking.
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Suppose you have reached that point. You no longer feel you are among those whom William James called the “healthy-minded.” You can tell because you watch the healthy ones gaping with laughter at violent movies or sitting calmly across from you at the table, over dinner, recounting from that day’s news a sex scandal, an airplane crash, an accidental shooting. You hear from the healthy-minded the battles they have fought that day and the experiences they have won. You detect them questing after the things they desire, talking about them with natural spirit, nourished by hope and aggression like their natural milk. They are nature’s creatures, in the full grace of modernity. The sad truth is that you still want to live in their world. It just somehow seems this world has changed to exile you.
In that previous essay, I spoke of solutions to a first crisis, the endless quest for experience, in practices that redeem experience by expanding it: aestheticism and perfectionism.* The solutions to this second crisis in experience, the wish for anti-experience—both from tradition and in the present—are the anaesthetic ideologies. They diminish experience’s reach. They “redeem” experience by weakening or abolishing it. They are, in a sense, aestheticism’s and perfectionism’s inverse.
Anaesthetic ideologies are methods of philosophy and practice that try to stop you from feeling. Or they help you to reduce what you feel. Or they let you keep living, when you can no longer live, by learning partially how to “die.” I preserve the word “ideologies” because of the methods’ potential duplicity—and also because of our perhaps justified suspicion that such undertakings are, at some level, inhuman.
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The gallery of heads in the West, marble smooth, marble eyed, begins near the entrance with Plato and Aristotle. Plato put a megaphone to the mouth of Socrates. Thus we learned of the Forms, the permanence of Justice, and the objectivity of the Good. Aristotle held the dissecting tool to nature and the yardstick to man, systematizing all the forms of matter and the forms of life. We learned man is a political being whose good lies in the fulfillment of his potential. Plato led to Aristotle as the only alternative to himself, and the two of them together gave us Western philosophy as a line of action and actualization.
In the ancient world, though, rival traditions competed with theirs. These philosophies did not lead toward our modernity, defined by the quest for experience. They created traditions of nonstimulation, nonsusceptibility, nonexcitement, nonbecoming, nonambition; also antifeeling, anaesthesia. Thus at the origins of philosophy, thoughts were devoted to the restriction of experience. These traditions were at least as central to the concerns of the West, once upon a time, as were the lines we have received as active common sense and normalcy. They can help us at least as much today as the “Eastern philosophies” that have been for many moderns the only, marginal way to attain some distance from one-sided Western ambition.
The students who followed the example of Socrates did not all join Plato’s Academy. (My account of Socratic successors draws on the writings of A. A. Long, the great scholar of Hellenistic philosophy.) One of the earliest, Diogenes of Sinope, called Diogenes the Cynic, led a beggar’s life, upheld the example of Socrates’s insulting speech, and taught Socratic freedom from “property, fine appearance, social status,” while preaching, unlike Socrates, nonallegiance to any city. Philosophy for him was the use of reason for each individual to talk himself out of the material needs that everyone else claimed, and thus to be free of the fears to which everyone else was subject. This freedom from conventional need and this freedom from fear—even when they meant a refusal of the world—came to be combined with the philosophical hedonism of Aristippus of Cyrene, one of Socrates’s direct pupils. Cyrenaic hedonism said that pleasure and pain are prior to all other motivations, and should be, too. These views made a different founding to philosophy than the one mediated by Plato.
In moods of peaceful hopefulness, I think that Epicurus, a genius of the next Greek generation, should be our perfect philosopher now, for America. He was a hedonist, as we are today. But he would have freed us from the pain of our search for experience, our mistaking of the most valuable pleasures for the rarest and hardest to attain. He came to maturity while Aristotle was still alive, and began teaching a very different doctrine: that pleasure is the goal of life, but pleasure defined as the end and absence of pain. “For we are in need of pleasure only when we are in pain because of the absence of pleasure, and when we are not in pain, then we no longer need pleasure.” The Epicurean ideal was ataraxia, imperturbability and mental detachment. This imperturbability couldn’t be accomplished through avoidance—pain would come whether you wanted it or not—but only through the right way of thinking about all unavoidable experience.
Unsought pleasures, whatever they were—a lavish banquet, a night of erotic love—were never bad in themselves. The difficulty with most positive pleasures, however, was that “the things which produce certain pleasures bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures.” Luxuries of experience involved you in uncertainties and pains—whether you would ever have them again, or whether you could sustain them. If pain is more to be avoided than positive pleasures are to be sought, it is “the freedom of the soul from disturbance” that is “the goal of a blessed life.”
Everything natural is easy to obtain and whatever is groundless is hard to obtain….Simple flavours provide a pleasure equal to that of an extravagant life-style when all pain from want is removed….So when we say that pleasure is the goal we do not mean the pleasures of the profligate or the pleasures of consumption, as some believe, either from ignorance and disagreement or from deliberate misinterpretation, but rather the lack of pain in the body and disturbance in the soul.
“For we [Epicureans],” the founder wrote, “do everything for the sake of being neither in pain nor in terror.” Epicurus, on the outskirts of Athens, began the Garden, where his friends and followers “included household servants and women on equal terms with the men,” as the scholar D. S. Hutchinson has noted—arrangements inconceivable to the rest of Athenian society. There they lived in peace and tranquility. They took their pleasure from a little wine mixed with water, and if you ever wanted Epicurus to enjoy an extravagance, he said, you could send him a little pot of cheese. Friendship mattered. Friends reminded one another that true happiness was freedom from fear, that death was meaningless and pain tolerable. They sought to help one another to resist being touched by any disturbance, to win a gentle victory over strong experience.
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In more tempestuous or harsher moods, my thoughts for the hidden sufferers in America go over to the tougher anaesthetic of the late Roman Stoics. The Stoa existed in Epicurus’s time as a place of conversation and teaching in Athens, like the Academy, the Garden, and Aristotle’s Lyceum; but Stoicism seems to have come into its most emphatic and lasting form many generations afterward. If you want a simple program and definitive dogma, you look to Epictetus. He is a much later figure than his Greek predecessors, and much better documented. The violence of Epictetus’s rhetoric can be tonic. Really, we will eradicate experience, not just learn to be happy with barley cakes and watered wine. Then we can withstand anything, the richest luxuries or the heaviest blows.
The Stoic system is not so different from Epicureanism in its methods of controlling needs. It disposes of the feeling for pleasure, however, as a root for the mind’s disciplining of experience. Epictetian Stoicism tells you to divide the world into what is up to you and what is not up to you. All that is left for a person to do, then, is to master his desire and aversion—so that he will never have either desire for or aversion to anything not up to him. He must never desire what he cannot control—not honors, not events, not other people’s thoughts, behavior, or reactions, not all the good experiences of his body. And he must have no mental aversion to anything that comes to him without his choice, like illness, death, or the bad experiences of his body. He can
groan in illness, but he must not care about it. The fates of things are up to nature, not to you.
In the case of everything that delights the mind, or is useful, or is loved with fond affection, remember to tell yourself what sort of thing it is, beginning with the least of things. If you are fond of a jug, say, “It is a jug that I am fond of”; then, if it is broken, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say to yourself that it is a human being that you are kissing; and then you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.
Life, Epictetus intimates at one point, is like a tourist visit to Olympia; you go because, well, who doesn’t go? But it’s bound to be incredibly annoying. “Do you not suffer from the heat? Are you not short of space? Do you not have trouble washing?…Do you not get your share of shouting and uproar and other irritations?” You will shrug it all off. “What concern to me is anything that happens, when I have greatness of soul?”
The only thing the Stoic should invest any emotion in is his own choice, which determines that “greatness of soul.” He will feel pride when he remains absolute master of his choice and of his desire and aversion. He feels displeasure when he fails temporarily to be master of himself. Stoic reason makes a man absolute master of his judgments and eradicates everything that is bad while clarifying the only thing that is truly good: the right use of choice.
It is the denial of any meaning to immediate experience, apart from the judgment one places upon it, that is truly anaesthetic—a will to control one’s judgments and minimize their effects, to make experiences not matter except for the inner experience of mastering experiences. The Stoic ideal was apatheia, release from passion and feeling, but it freed itself from everyone else’s cares precisely in order to be able carelessly to do what everyone else did. It became supermilitant, because it continued to live in the world while denying it. “Practice, then,” Epictetus teaches, “from the start, to say to every harsh impression, ‘You are an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be.’ ”
