Richard Florida responds to my last post by referencing a 1948 essay by Anatole Broyard, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” via this article:
Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels, and saw the attempts to escape from the restraints of society through narcotics, jazz, and general disaffiliation, as merely ways to a new conformity. People who were once shadowy presences in the jazz underground began to take themselves seriously and to crave the adulation others gave them…
Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham.
I’ve never bought into the notion of cultural rebellion. It’s more about self-assertion than anything — putting oneself into whatever vitalizing opportunities are available. It may have a rebellious posture but that isn’t what it’s ultimately about.
Articulate reasons like “rebellion” or “making a statement” always come second. We simply get the urge to do things in a biased or spontaneous way — sort of pre-consciously, via moral and aesthetic impulses — and only then do we come up with supposed explanations why.
These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. [Jonathan Haidt]
“Signaling” is more accurate than “making a statement.” The New York Times had a good article on signaling last week, based on evolutionary psychology:
Suppose, during a date, you casually say, “The sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term.” Here’s what you’re signaling, as translated by Dr. Miller:
“My S.A.T. scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my I.Q. is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.” …
Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.
It doesn’t all have to be reduced to motives of procreation and survival. It doesn’t even have to be a signal to others. Some things can be a signal to reassure oneself of one’s own relevance, importance, competence, individuality, and belonging…
Now referring back to the last post, what about hipster-bashing: what does that signal?
Bandying the word “hipster” around is often just as ironically or arbitrarily inappropriate as wearing purple stockings with a plaid lumberjack coat and an Arafat-lookalike kaffiyeh. It’s a tongue-in-cheek metaphor that doesn’t have to make much literal sense. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than, “Look at me!”
