An open letter to the hipster

Dear Hipster

I've been meaning to write for a while, but couldn't hold off any longer. I wonder if you'll allow me to offer some constructive criticism. I actually admire you in a strange way. Turning up to work with a handle-bar moustache is genuinely funny. Unlike the sixty-eighters or the punks, you're precisely as subversive as you think you are (answer: ever so slightly subversive). One thing that can always be said for knowing irony is that it is, at the very least, knowing, and for that you deserve credit.

But why not also take a moment to reflect, catch your breath, and perhaps draw a line under the last decade or so? Surely you can't carry on with the trajectory that you're currently on. What started as knowing tributes to various white subcultures has splintered into knowing tributes to various white elite cultures (Barbour jackets and tweed), unknowing tributes to various white cultures (Urban Outfitters), then finally a satire of its own white culture (London Fields, Hackney). Knowing you've reached a dead-end doesn't alter the fact that you've reached a dead-end, and it's not too late to back out. Tony Blair may have had "no reverse gear", but I'm sure that you guys do, even if it is also a fixed gear.

Here's a thought for you to chew on: how we plunder the past for cultural artefacts and lifestyles tells us a great deal about our unarticulated, perhaps unconscious, frustrations and yearnings in the present. The 1960s will continue to offer the hope and iconography for societies that feel themselves to be morally and culturally constrained. For those with untapped desire for sexual, racial, chemical and libidinous self-expression, it is the promises of 1968 that still need to be fulfilled. During the conservative counter-revolutions of the 1980s, when ageing white men were fighting back, channelling a moralistic fear of inner cities and recreational drugs, it was the 1960s that appeared to be in danger and needed reviving.

If there was a perfect icon for the youth who tolerated Margaret Thatcher, it was Shaun Ryder, a drug-addled mess, wearing flares and working class labels, who spoke for ravers and indie kids alike with a weirdly articulate nonsense. Don't tell us how we can and can't enjoy ourselves. But for this injunction to create a youth movement, there need to be authorities trying to tell people how to enjoy themselves in the first place. That many senior Tory politicians were still outwardly homophobic, still believed Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, criminalised certain types of parties, and had honestly never taken cocaine (unlike the current bunch) meant that the baggy-house-rave-indie scene could make an impassioned appeal to the spirit of the '60s, and not come across as a tired pastiche.

We don't need any Shaun Ryders now, or at least we don't feel that we do. While the Thatcherites weren't noticing, we turned into a pretty liberal nation: most of us have taken some recreational drugs, and very few of us care what others get up to in their bedrooms (other than the lurking anxiety that it might be more exciting than what get up to in ours). As Zizek repeats, the pre-1960s moral injunction 'thou shalt!' has been replaced by a neo-liberal hedonistic injunction 'thou may!' To enjoy oneself is now a greater obligation than to obey the rules, meaning we have less need for Shaun Ryders these days.

Experiencing Primal Scream's 20th anniversary tour of Screamadelica this month must be a little like inverted Victoriana. As the famous sample "we wanna be free! We wanna be free... to do what we wanna do!" booms through another O2 academy, thousands of 19-year olds (viewing the event through the viewer of their digital camera, instantly sharing it on facebook) must each be wondering - can you imagine living in a society when you weren't free to do what you wanna do? What must that have been like?

If I were to tell you, my dear hipster, that you represent a post-liberal youth movement, you probably wouldn't have a clue what I meant. You have probably never met anyone who wasn't a liberal. You have scarcely heard of The Daily Mail, for which I envy you. Your idea of a conservative is someone who suggests you wear a bicycle helmet. Your boss doesn't even notice your tatoos, which must register as something of a shame. You are so liberal as to not even know it. So what is it you yearn for? What is your equivalent of the 1960s?

Some have suggested it is the 1950s, which is maybe true to the point of adopting various Beat styles and poses. But really, I suggest, it is the post-punk period of circa 1977-84, the years between The Sex Pistols ripping up the rule book, and The Smiths piecing it back together again. And let me go one further, with a proposition that might (or might not) offend some of you: what you yearn for is the fulfillment of the promises of Thatcherism. What frustrates you about Britain (and, for your American progenitors, New York and California) in the early 21st century is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of economic freedom. You have been seeking to renew economic liberalism, just as baggy and rave renewed social liberalism.

Your imaginations are fuelled by images of urban abandonment, with all of the entrepreneurial-cultural opportunities that went with it. You fantasise about the cheap rents, disused warehouses, vacated city centres of the late 1970s. When Pete Doherty developed a self-mythologising social scene in his Bethnal Green flat circa 2002, full of art students with guitars and charity-shop suits (after the Strokes had done the same in the Lower East Side), inner city bohemia was just on the edge of affordibility. But you didn't have to be Robert Peston to see which way the economic trends were heading. And the trick for the next decade was to create cocoons of economic freedom, enterprise and free labour, nobly assisted by Myspace, within an economic-urban edifice dominated by capital and rent-seeking. Where the ravers escaped by dropping a pill, you did so by taking the easyjet to Berlin.

If Shaun Ryder was dredging up the ghost of Jim Morrison, you hipsters were hoping to summon Ian Curtis. Actually - no. You were hoping to summon Tony Wilson, founder of Factory in Manchester. Wilson is the real icon of hipsterism, the visionary who saw delapidated factories and bricky backstreets, and re-imagined all of it as a free market in subculture. We know that Thatcher and punk made a similar moral-economic pitch: do-it-yourself, put your back into it, screw the old lefties, screw the New Lefties (when Norman Tebbitt famously ordered the unemployed 'on yer bike', he can scarcely have envisaged the tow-paths of Hackney). As Owen Hattherley's book explains, the Sex Pistols' legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall gig in 1976 was the real turning point for that city, which led via a chain of events (assisted by Wilson and the IRA) to regeneration by Urban Splash and 'canal-side loft-style' living complexes.

The revolution of neo-liberalism was eventually thwarted by it's central flaw: that capital can absent itself from free market competition when it suits it, but labour cannot. An honest version of neo-liberalism (which I am not entirely against) would not tolerate Bob Diamonds and Fred Goodwins stealing from the public purse, simply because 'the market' allows them to do so. It would recognise that accumulations of power within the economy are anathema to free markets, which means that certain forms of capital must be controlled by the public or otherwise kept outside of circulation.

It might also see a revival of some type of labour theory of value, such that individuals were rewarded for their effort, social value and imagination (I'm afraid the word 'creativity' is so implicated in the failed business-oriented neo-liberalism as to now be best left alone). And isn't the labour theory of value what you stand for, hipsters? With your supper clubs, your yukelele-playing,  your pop-up knitting shops and your unlikely alliance with the cycle-courier scene, are you not trying to reconnect 'worth' and 'effort', in a way that your grandparents would have recognised, even if your parents (with their over-inflated house prices) do not? To paraphrase Morrissey, 'Smith and Marx are on your side, while Milton Friedman is on their's'.

There is nothing silly about this. You are right in your economic instincts, it's the flippancy that is so hard to stomach. Dressing up like a rural aristocrat is what's silly; joining the Women's Institute for a laugh is silly; plundering the 1950s for iconography, without any criticism of its (social) illiberalism is silly. You are being widely laughed at, not least by each other. Why don't you even care?

There is a critique lurking here, but at the moment it is being expressed in ways that only reinforce the problem. The house my parents bought in Hackney for £40,000 in 1979 goes further up in value, with every moustachioed graphic designer who cycles nonchalantly past on his way to Dalston. But doesn't that also tell you something about the illusions of your nostalgia? My dad isn't Tony Wilson or Iain Sinclair, but a retired civil servant. His contribution to bohemia is using a cafetiere at weekends. But he's the winner from all this, and indeed the initiator, not you. You are valorising self-authored, inner-city, artistic bohemia at precisely the moment in modern industrial history when it has become technically impossible.

 So what to do? Where to go next? (And please don't say 'Hackney wick'). You and I are agreed on the need to reinvent economic liberalism, to defend certain rights against capital. But maybe it's time to take a leaf out of Plato's Republic, and kick the poets out of the polis. I'm not sure they're helping (Iain Sinclair can stay on the dodgy grounds that he's a geographer). Artists have had too much access to political debate over the past twenty years, and where have they got us? Tracey Emin threatening to leave Britain if taxes go up. Damian Hirst making his own accumulation of capital into an exhibit. And frankly, hipsters, it's not mathematically possible for all of you to be culturally employed (nor, for that, matter, artistically talented). So lets cut off some dead wood.

Second, stop being so bloody ridiculous. Take yourselves seriously. Read The Wealth of Nations, and then Capital. Once you've discussed these, have a read of Envisioning Real Utopias and, for ways of contributing your innovative 'creative' skills, this Open Book of Social Innovation. You are welcome to reinvent yourselves in doing so. In fact that would be a wonderful outcome.

Third, if you stop being so bloody ridicolous, we will promise to laugh at you less. Things like Park Slope Food Coop are to be applauded. Pentagram is a serious, non-capitalist form of economic organisation. Why must hipsterism be all about consumption and soft acts of 'creativity'? If Hardt and Negri are right about 'immaterial labour' becoming 'hegemonic', the opportunities for new socialist forms of ownership and organisation must be mostly untapped as yet. Innovations in production and ownership will be taken seriously.

Of course there's an argument that you're not politically useful in any way. I disagree, especially as the economic battle lines become more and more generational. I sense a sincere economic critique in this turn towards bohemia, yet one that is currently smothered by aesthetics. Best of luck.

Yours sincerely

Will

Comments

[Dick Pountain]

Will - a useful addition to your reading list for hipsters who want to get serious might be Daniel Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism", from which I quote this rather lengthy excerpt:

"the expansion of higher education and
the extension of a permissive social atmosphere has widened the scope of discretionary social behaviour.’ On this basis, youngsters of relatively modest background break free from the restrictions of class and begin to think that for them too, life might be a terrain of unlimited possibilities and participation...As the traditional class structure dissolves, more and more individuals want to be identified, not by their occupational base (in the Marxist sense), but by their cultural tastes and lifestyles."

Bell's paper was ruthlessly dissected in a powerful 2005 NLR article by Kees van der Pijl called "A Lockean Europe?" where he comments:

"The solution that emerges from Bell’s analysis is to restore micro-economic rationality in each individual’s life-cycle, eliminating the social dimension of Keynesian demand management, social service provision and redistribution. The removal of ‘free riders’ would leave only those who can afford to pay for the privilege to experiment and toy with radical change; others would be held back by the limits of their
spending power. Roughly: do you want to demonstrate under a red banner whilst studying at university?—well, make sure you take out a very large student loan."

The market really is self-healing where it matters the most - in starving out its opponents.

[Kate]

You're a bit more optimistic about the political descendents of Tony Wilson than I am. I was at lunch with one of them the other day, who kept quoting the great man to the effect that, 'people get the cities they deserve.' It took another lunch guest - from Sao Paulo - to point out that, er..everyone in a city doesn't really have the same sort of power and er..living without necessities isn't just a form of self-realisation.

[Hipster]

TL;DR

[Will Davies]

Dick - thanks. It occurred to me that Bourdieu's Distinction is the other obvious text for this topic.

Kate - yes, fair enough. I don't really imagine these people read my blog anyway. But I'm generally minded to spot forms of critique where they happen to exist, and then think about how they can be nurtured, developed and so on. It may be that they can't, but in which case we're doomed.

Hipster - nice to hear from you. Now pull yourself together.

[Tom]

You really nailed it, man! I can only the depth of your hipster knowledge beyond what you absorb from the NYT Brooklyn-bashing weekly.

A good rule of thumb when criticizing large groups of people that don't count you as a member: if you can apply your criticism to one person you know well, and it's valid - you're doing great. If you can't, let's just say that you aren't.

But, I'll heed your advice! Going to a top school and applying my much-maligned 'creative skills' to a well-paying job that helps the world is clearly not what I'm doing. Or... it is, but, I'll stop being "ridicolous," improve my spelling (or, wait, is it yours?) and get off your lawn.

[Seth]

What I find most interesting in these critiques of the youth, how they're going awry or wasting their potential, is the absence of criticism of the writer's generation or the one before it. Considering how magnificently fucked the last three generations have made the world, that ironic self-awareness is the overarching theme of youth culture is to be thanked.

[Will Davies]

Tom and Seth - I'm not sure what I've written is all that damning actually. Sincerely, I think there is a desire for an alternative economic system that is expressed in (what can be broadly referred to as) hipster culture. It is more than about clothes. The problem is, it's also a little buried in concerns about haircuts. That is all. I'm not quite sure how my generation fits in yet. I'm 34, so my lot haven't quite had their moment to fuck things up (yet).

[Jim]

God this is pathetic.

[Jason]

I like how your making huge asumptions about these hipster people's upbringing, their attitude etc etc. I mean, i wouldn't like to meet you. You sound like a really unpleasant person and also a militant twat. What do you want? Do you want the 1950's back or something? Besides i bet your one of them anyway.

[Will Davies]

This is the first time one of my blog posts has ever been met with such vitriol. I seem to be particularly guilty of 'making assumptions' about people. This isn't much of a defence, but I'm afraid that's basically what I do: I come up with theories about society, post them here, and when nobody responds, then assume that they're probably wrong. At least some of my assumptions on this occasion must be correct, or it wouldn't have stirred you all up like this.

What is so awful about making certain assumptions about people, when they are quite evidently in the business of projecting various statements? Surely cultural artefacts demand to be judged! If a Victorian dandy walked down the street in bright pink trousers, and nobody noticed, that would be a failure. The worst thing that one could do to any cultural or subcultural movement would be to ignore it all together. The alternative is to criticise it (which is the opposite of dismissing it).

Also, there's scarcely any reference to class in this blog post (other than my own) that I can see. But that seems to be some sort of sore point nevertheless.

[IanC]

The symbiotic affinities between Thatcherism and punk, neoliberalism and DIY cultural dandyism are clear and deserve more exploration. Not knowing any hipsters, I hesitate to theorise, but I think it likely that many of the counter-cultural children of the Long 1980s (1980- now and counting) are by and large just that - would-be 'subversive' in a purely cultural sense. The revolution starts and ends with dressing up and partying, and must be that way, since the post-80s economic system is taken to be so hegemonic as to be part of the natural order. If the economy is unchallengeable, politics is pointless. We need some credible hipster economics and , as Kate says, a sense of where power really can be challenged and redistributed.

[1978]

Mate, just live your own life instead of smugly picking apart other peoples.

[Will Davies]

Again, I'm kind of baffled by the idea that comment, critique or judgement on other people's (public, cultural) lifestyles is intrinsically off-limits. If I was commenting on their private lives, their physical or mental health, their families or their bodies, then I could understand it. But offering an analysis of a fairly ostentatious, highly visible, aethetically thought-through, and politically consequential (insofar as it affects previous residents of the neighbourhoods it colonises) movement seems entirely justified. In fact, I'm surprised it's not thoroughly welcomed by the people I'm seeking to describe.

[Rverwaayen]

Hey will, does this resonate?

"Intellectualization is a defense mechanism where reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress, by 'using excessive and abstract ideation to avoid difficult feelings'. It involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event. Intellectualization may accompany, but 'differs from rationalization, which is justification of irrational behavior through cliches, stories, and pat explanation'."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectualization

[Will Davies]

So now I'm guilty of a) commenting on how other people live and b) being an intellectual...

This is worse than I suspected.

[max]

I'd like to add George Simmel and Veblen to the hipsternomics reading list. Also, I think that a) comment and b) structured thought are both OK.

[Leebryant]

Hilarious! TL;DR was such an obvious and brilliant response from Hipster. LOL. 1978 above also has a point, but you have an OK defence for this and also some kind of territorial issue - feeling "swamped"? ;-) i guess there are downsides to your parents' house rocketing in price.

I really enjoyed it, FWIW, but then I have read probably all of your previous posts which, as you say, have not elicited such a response.

The words that stood out for me as traces of an inherited old way of thinking were myspace, socialism and battle lines ;-) They sound like flares and moustaches (so arguably hipsterish). Also: who does "we" refer to in the penultimate para? Local residents? Intellectuals?

Anyway, hipster's ain't so bad, and are no better or worse than _insert prejudices here_ -- peace!

Thanks for sharing - good piece :)

[twitter.com/jamesb]

I'm not sure a call-to-action to be more serious and read Zizek or Marx is going to inspire anyone to fight for better economic liberalism. Can't it be a *bit* more fun (but not flippant or silly, no not at all)? Please...? ;)

[Will Davies]

To be quite honest, James, one of the disappointing things about the ire that this post has attracted in the comments (not yours) is that this whole 'letter' is pretty tongue-in-cheek in the first place. I mean - of course people aren't going to read this, and suddenly have a moment of enlightenment. And of course I don't have any entitlement to tell people how to live. This is me poking fun at something in a slightly deadpan way.

But yes, I agree. Zizek and Marx aren't likely to sweep the studios and cafes of Hackney any time soon.

[Dick Pountain]

I'm not that surprised at all the vitriol Will - Dave Robins and I got the same when we published Cool Rules. When you analyse this subject people feel you're stepping on their identities. (I imagine a fish who criticises water would get a similar response).

[kirmy]

Bourdieu said that if you make explicit the implicit, uncomfortable, but still recognisable realities of a social situation, the people involved will likely hate and dismiss you for it. Its a bit of an elitist, circular argument (I must be right if they say I'm wrong), but maybe there's something in this that explains the vitriol.
I thought this was actually a rather thoughtful and respectful piece - the crux being that while hipsters hold, represent and enact values, they lack any conscious political will to institutionalise these values. In short, hipsters are too fun, cool, and ironic to threaten anyone or anything.

[twitter.com/jamesb]

It was laugh-out-loud funny BTW, I didn't mean to infer it wasn't.
"But yes, I agree. Zizek and Marx aren't likely to sweep the studios and cafes of Hackney any time soon." You know one of the ironic things I find is how academic discourse (certainly in the social sciences) and policy discourse is itself very faddish. The uncritical take-up of Zizek is a case in point. I've not met many people who could espouse his name and one or two aphorisms as the 'key thinker' or offering a solution to (x or y). It's idea fashion. For every barbour jacket in ad-land in hoxton, there's a disingenuous peddler of ideas in other institutions of power.

[Will Davies]

On this issue of 'what is the optimal level of seriousness', I might also throw in this review I did of the Olin Wright book I mention in the above post. In that, I more or less inverted the criticisms I make of hipsters, and suggested that Olin Wright's very exciting vision is somewhat hampered by being so bloody serious.

It seems to me that there is an optimal level of seriousness, between analytical Marxism and hipster irony, in which institutional innovations occur because they are new, exciting and politically transformative. Socialism can be deadly when it offers no jolity or excitement with the new. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, 'fashion without politics is empty, but politics without fashion is blind'*. Or something.

*I realise this is ridiculous

[CharlieMcMenamin]

...there is an optimal level of seriousness, between analytical Marxism and hipster irony..

Forget Hackney. You should come to Brixton more often Will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9lwKgoc5i8

[IanC]

I see that a reading list in hipsterology and hipsternomics is building up.

Here's another for the list: George Walden, 'Who's a Dandy?'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview3

[BlogsAreHip]

Telling people what to do and how to change is ignorant of their history, plight, and goals. This entire thing is nearsighted to the point of running into walls of irrelevancy. Your language is just as pretentious as you see hipsters if not more with it's copious ridiculousness.

You can whine about any group of people or you can stop seeing what makes you different and start seeing what makes you the same. I hope you take this not as an attack but as an illumination of possible growth.

[Will Davies]

'Plight'...!!!

[thisguysadick]

Why do you assume that everyone you describe comes from money, does some job that you think is worthless and is automatically an arsehole. You sir are a an assumptive tosser.

The hipster is no different from the the ted, the beatnik, the rocker, the mod, the hippy, the punk, the new romantic, the raver etc. The spent money getting the look, they went to right clubs/gigs, they lived in certain areas (i.e Hippies of Haight Ashbury San Francisco) and did certain jobs. Why don't you write a historical article about how awful hippies were aswell.