Mark Carrigan

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The sociology of ‘hipsters’

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

This is much more interesting than many articles of this form (the bit about punk vs hipster dancing made me laugh). But I’d still love it if some cultural sociologists did real work on this. I’m really interested in a convergence of subcultural style which doesn’t permit identification. There clearly is a cultural tendency here (on my two visits to Berlin last year I was fascinated by how easily I could have been in East London at points) but one which seems to engender little subjective identification and often inculcates disidentification. It’s an emptying out of (sub)cultural content, until all that is left is pure pose. Then you get Normcore and there’s no longer even a pose.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that hipsters are the “end of Western civilization” but, as someone whose trajectory of identity development was intimately bound up in performing anarchism and performing punk, they do rather irritate me. As a sociologist however I find my own irritation rather fascinating and something succeptible to analysis. So please cultural sociologists: do some work on this. Otherwise I’m going to have to take a year off, read shit loads of Jeffrey Alexander and start spending my free time lurking around East London watching and talking to hipsters. I’d rather not do this if possible but the topic becomes ever more interesting as a I think more about it.

There is the ‘hipster’ as cypher for socio-cultural change:

This is because hipsters are a recognition that something larger is happening – change is happening; neighborhoods and cities are looking different and are being inhabited by different people. The need to understand what is happening seems to drive much of the hipster debate. The logic seems to be – if we can figure out who is changing the neighborhood then we can stop them or make pleas to their humanity to join our way of doing things.

http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/09/19/what-is-a-hipster/

There is the hipster as cultural response to emerging adulthood.

There is the hipster as a cultural style tied to a stage of the lifecycle, with a meaning internal to that biography.

Matt Lodder just made some really interesting points on Twitter:

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