"Hipster" as pejorative.

I had a bf with a trust fund once! His trust fund consisted of $25,000 to pay for college tuition once he turned 21 (which paid for one year of tuition at the time), and another $25,000 once he turned 25. This trust fund obviously meant that he did not have to work an honest day in his life.

that's not the kind of trust fund that minimally furnished social media tech start-ups / recording studios are made of, for sure, but it sure beats nothing

"Trust fund" is just a legal designation -- it doesn't really speak to the amount of money involved. It's just used as shorthand here, obviously.

And being "retro-obsessed" isn't true of all hipsters. The concept of "slumming" is -- that part of the comparison is one I'd agree with.

I had a bf with a trust fund once! His trust fund consisted of $25,000 to pay for college tuition once he turned 21 (which paid for one year of tuition at the time), and another $25,000 once he turned 25. This trust fund obviously meant that he did not have to work an honest day in his life.

― clueless mom complaining about miley Cyrus (sarahell), Friday, 18 October 2013 22:37 (56 minutes ago)

http://funandgooddotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/article-2262100-16efd587000005dc-781_634x558.jpg?w=750 ?

different guy!

this one was a relatively distant relative of a founder of Polaroid

just imagine being someone who was more moved by the plight of children with kwashiokor than service sector employees in the wealthiest country in the world

$50k not bad! I feel like I should have gone to a school where it'd take $25k per year. I might write in complete sentences on ilx.

he writes steampunk erotica iirc

better than arcade fire slashfic

neither activity is a hipster thing to do

darnit

neither is publishing a book of vaguely-incisive statements underneath pictures of dogs, but it is closer

have never knowingly known someone with a trust fund, is that a thing people know about

trustfundamentalism is like opus dei. they don't talk about their membership to outsiders.

not true -- they talk about it to their lawyers and accoutants

A facebook thread I got sucked into recently (excerpted)

[blah blah old leftist fb comments complaining about "hipsters" in "brooklyn"]
Hurting: I honestly don't understand who people are talking about when they say "hipsters" anymore.
JF: I was thinking the same thing. At least they should care about something that matters.
Hurting: No what I'm saying is that I just don't understand what supposedly defined group of people the word "hipsters" is used to refer to anymore. I just don't understand what it means at this point, it seems like a dead signifier.
JF: People who wear trucker hats ironically.
Hurting: Ashton Kutcher?
JF: Ha. Maybe. He's a hottie.
JF: I read an article where one signifier of hipster coolness was the I Love Bacon trucker hat. Isn't that sweet?

Am I talking to a bot?

"Their sole ambition consists of finding their way in the accepted canon, of saying the right thing. The outsider status of the initiates is an illusion and mere waiting-time. It would be giving them too much credit to call them renegades; they wear overlarge horn-rimmed glasses on their mediocre faces, solely to better pass themselves off as “brilliant” to themselves and to others in the general competition. They are already exactly like them. The subjective precondition of opposition, the non-normalized judgment, goes extinct, while its trappings continue to be carried out as a group ritual."

(or: "fuckin hipsters" - Theodor Adorno, 1951.)

that just sounds like a definition of "poseurs" to me, the "hangers on" in any arty or intellectual "scene" throughout history

Hurting you shouldn't clown Johnny Fever like that

who would adorno be on ILX?

hstencil? adam in nyc?

are those dated references? i don't know who's around here any more.

I remember 'trucker hats ironically' from way, way back in my youth, a different era

And while that Adorno quote is wonderful I think it's way too easy to place people in the category he outlines there on the basis of their appearance or selected quotes, without really knowing anything about them

Which is an obvious point probably made better many times upthread, but that's why I keep away from 'hipster' as a pejorative anyhow.

have not seen a trucker hat on anyone ironically or unironically since 1992

poor ironic trucker hats have been taking a beating for a good fifteen years now.

(yeah adorno's a wee bit mean, though he's at least equally mean about everything and everyone. that bit, on "intellectuals", is section 132 here - http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch03.htm. good fun. 'mediocre faces' is especially harsh - it's not bad enough that you're living the bad life, you're also ugly.)

adorno's meanness or rather his lack of generosity is one of the things that makes me struggle with taking him all that seriously as a cultural critic.

a lot of it is just that his own cultural horizons were fairly limited and he's writing about a lot of stuff w/o anything resembling intimate knowledge. but a lot of folks before me have pointed this out.

On the wall, deceptively original color prints of famous artists, such as Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or the Café at Arles, on the bookshelf derivative works on socialism and psychoanalysis and a little sex-research for the uninhibited with inhibitions. In addition, the Random House edition of Proust – Scott Moncrieff’s translation deserved a better fate – exclusivity at reduced prices, whose exterior alone, the compact-economic form of the omnibus, is a mockery of the author, whose every sentence knocks a received opinion out of action, while he now plays, as a prize-winning homosexual, the same role with youth as books on animals of the forest and the North Pole expedition in the German home.

sheesh, you can't win with this guy.

^ at least this sort of thing is just him doing a round the houses criticism of how broken capitalist society is as a whole, and, in this section, spending time on the case of young bohemian intellectuals

Maybe the outrage against hipsters is what we're left with when you subtract the broad scope and the marxism from Adorno

(I have genuinely never met anyone who had Proust and Kafka on their shelves purely for some malicious, showing-off purposes. I have met like, I don't know, a one-in-twenty person who would namecheck books as a way of showing off. And this is in cardamon's 'sophisticated social world' of literary evenings and book launches in a big city.)

(A lot of anti-'hipster' people seem to think this is the only reason one might have P or K on a bookshelf, or even have a bookshelf at all, but I think today's real tools of showing off and fakery are quite different – doesn't it have more to do with your physical posture, how you speak, whether you really listen to others, etc?)

today a basketball hit me in the face and knocked my horn rimmed glasses off my mediocre face, smashing them.

I was just mentioning to a friend that I remember seeing a sticker that said "Foam Free in '03" with a line through a trucker hat. So definitely even the backlash is at least ten years old.

hipsters dont exist anymore

neither does adorno

think about it

Adorno kind of sounds like the typical guy-who-knows-how-much-more-brilliant-he-is-than-all-these-tools. He may have happened to be right, in his case.

With the internet, we all have a chance to show that we know more than each other.

it seems shitty that adorno thinks he can size people up based on their appearances and what books are on their shelves. isn't this what capitalism does? shouldn't marxism view individuals more holistically, and not as alienated embodiments of certain social types/marketing demographics? or is the point of adorno that under capitalism people simply *are* these stupid roles they fall into, voluntarily or not? what's that he said: "wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

The thing is, Adorno was always right, but it didn't make him any less of a dick

treezy

"Their sole ambition consists of finding their way in the accepted canon, of saying the right thing. The outsider status of the initiates is an illusion and mere waiting-time. It would be giving them too much credit to call them renegades; they wear overlarge horn-rimmed glasses on their mediocre faces, solely to better pass themselves off as “brilliant” to themselves and to others in the general competition. They are already exactly like them. The subjective precondition of opposition, the non-normalized judgment, goes extinct, while its trappings continue to be carried out as a group ritual."

yeah, he is saying they are posers. but who are "they", how does he identify them, and how can he be so confident that this is what they think and how they see themselves in the world? i think people can be trendy and share interests and sensibilities and hairstyles with a peer group -- even one that superficially seems "avant garde" -- and not necessarily give their subjectivity completely over to the bland, conformist dictates of this groups. i guess he is saying that the literati are not really opposed to a society in which they in some sense flourish, and i guess that's right. but he is saying more than this: he is dehumanizing them by saying they are all "exactly alike."

I think you really need to read Adorno in light of the fact he lived through fascism, Hitler, Stalin, and the major rise of post-war consumer culture.

Those bolded parts are what stop Adorno from being like a lot of similar but lesser people imho – for example, given we're talking about the use of hipster as pejorative, how many people who so use the word are really questioning people's 'ambitions' or think we should fight to maintain a 'non-normalized judgment'?

And also @ Treeship whatever condemnation he's making of his 'intellectuals' he is still viewing them as damaged victims of capitalism - there's a sympathy there, which perhaps isn't clear in his excellently bitchy quotes here

I have tried before to define hipsterism as a kind of process whereby authenticity is ironized (which is to say authenticity is deployed as a signifier). didn't really work though. But it's like this paradox of knowing authenticity perhaps.

the word "pose(u)rs" presupposes a particular authentic identity being mimicked that i don't think Adorno thought existed