"Hipster" as pejorative.

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

ya, unlike the hipster-hater of today Adorno couldn't have felt he was above receiving such a critique, though he's in no position to make it of himself. A position that perhaps isn't always evident from his caustic haughtiness.

I think it's also easy to forget, as he generally reads to us as a very modern thinker, that most of his best known cultural criticism and analysis is distinctly of an era prior to the revolution that field had in the '60s. I think the later pieces like those in Quasi una Fantasia are a bit more measured if not any more positive in spirit. That people can still find those early analyses interesting and useful is remarkable in itself.

Theres a collection of adorno essays titled "the culture industry". Is that a good place to start with him? I don't want to dive into negative dialectics or dialectic of enlightenment right now, but adorno keeps coming up more and more in conversation and i feel i should know a bit more about him. I am sympathetic, btw, to his left wing antipopulism from what i know about him; i was just put off by the dismissiveness in those quotes and wondered where it might be coming from.

even though I semi-defended them there I think it's a bit unfortunate that the culture industry stuff is so predominant in a lot of people's image of Adorno, no doubt there's a lot of brilliant thought in those essays but it's shrouded in a very singular and what now seems myopic worldview. I don't know him especially well but I'd recommend Aesthetic Theory, though if anything it's even tougher and more uncompromising than the two you mention.

I recently read a good secondary source on Adorno called "Art and Enlightenment" by David Roberts. Was actually kind of blown away by it. A bit older. 1991 or so.

aesthetic theory is not what anyone would call a readable book.

the essays in critical models, on the other hand, are fairly approachable (some were even written for radio presentation).

reading minima moralia would not be the best way to get a clear picture of adorno's 'doctrines', but its intermittent, quiet personal elements might surprise you.

Yeah, Minima Moralia is the thing of his I've found most readable – short (couple of paragraphs) thoughts about things. Every one of them made me think about stuff. Best place to begin, I'd say.

He's got a good essay called 'Commitment' too.

I'll pick up minimamoralia tonight. I am intrigued by the quiet, personal elements. Those are my favorite parts of books.

Thx

Philosophy of Modern Music is also a good one, especially if you are a fan of Stravinsky/Schoenberg

http://www.realtytrac.com/Content/news-and-opinion/top-20-zip-codes-for-flipping-to-hipsters-7980

saw this sweatshirt for sale in target the other day. can i just...

http://img2.targetimg2.com/wcsstore/TargetSAS//img/p/14/98/14983960_201311112003.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Cool-Hipster-Elite-Their/dp/0804138532

Inevitable product of Fox News commentators having to live in NYC

There are four states of being in the cannabis society: cool, groovy, hip, and square, in that descending order.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/22/the-hipster-war-on-you-how-liberals-use-cool-as-a-weapon/

"Icons of cool like Robert Redford, Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse James and Yoko Ono get shredded in the book" - Mark Zuckerberg AND Yoko? What an iconoclast!!!

jesse james the kinda nazi-ish biker?

"Cool kids party it up at the Coachella Music Festival."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pca8wpUIzSg

^^^ predictably, use of the word "hipsters" marks the nadir of this terrible song. (don't worry, it happens in the first verse)

okay lmfao at this appalling cynicism:

How do the cool enslave you? By convincing you that:
- If you don't agree with them no one will like you.
- If you don't follow them you will miss out on life.
- If you don't listen to them you will die a lonely loser

How do you vanquish the cool and discover your own true self? Read this book.

it's like, yes, okay, when I was middle school I used to worry that I was literally retarded, and "a great conspiracy / Of books and people" had been constructed with the aim of making me *think* I was normal while everybody secretly laughed at the ape parading around in human clothing using the telepathic that I was also worried everyone but me possessed--fortunately I aged out of these fears before anybody gave me a book deal

Three cheers for hipsters, hip hip hooray!

Fast-forward to today, when, writes Gutfeld, "the Labor Department reports that only 47% of Americans have a full-time job. That’s because it’s hard to get full-time work as a maker of artisanal tricycles."

... and you wanna call *me* the hipster!

Now a few groovy artisanal types are sounding the alarm about vaccines

yes, it is the """"cool"""" hipster people doing this, they are doing it to be cool, like noted hipster jenny mccarthy

it's all the same though. anyone who objects to anything about the status quo is the same, no matter the content of their objections. they need to take a chill pill and get with the program. a chill vaccine even.

shoot me up

does obamacare cover the chill vaccine?

haha i was coming here to post about this book. looks like a scream!
http://brokelyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/greg-gutfeld-not-cool.jpg?width=156

i really love how the american right wing describes every cultural rift as a "war". so fun.

They like war

still #1

https://sites.google.com/a/beardleague.org/rva/home/CR%206342281613_91f1f1ae12_b-cropped.jpg