What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation is the title of the latest entry in the small book series from the journal n+1. The book presents the journal’s attempt to understand and even define the phenomenon of the modern hipster, that skinny-jeans-wearing, indie-rock-loving emblem of our time. Or, as n+1 editor Mark Greif contends, of a time just past. Greif and others hosted a symposium at the New School in April 2009 to kick off the inquiry, and transcripts of the papers and discussion from that afternoon are presented in the book. Also included are some journalistic reactions to the symposium, as well as responses and commentary solicited by n+1. Harvard University Press is listed only in the bibliography of What Was the Hipster?, but, like good people of the crimson, we see ourselves everywhere.
Greif says in the book and in a recent essay for the NYT Book Review that the whole investigation would’ve raised far fewer hackles and elicited much less defensive flailing if everyone would have simply read one particular book. That book? Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Distinction was first published in French in 1979, but didn’t appear in English until we commissioned a translation with Routledge a few years later. As Greif explains, the book is an analysis of taste during a particular moment in France, but is really a broadly applicable study of where taste comes from. We may think that our own interest in the finer things shows our personal cultivation of a superior sensibility, but, according to Bourdieu, we’re really just following the dictates of our station. From Distinction’s introduction:
Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin… To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers.
Bourdieu’s position as something of a patron saint to n+1’s analytic assault on the irony-clad hipster lends the story of HUP’s history with Distinction an irony of its own. That’s because, according to Lindsay Waters, our Executive Editor for the Humanities, the book was actually acquired in an effort to make the press more hip. As Lindsay recalls, former HUP Director Arthur J. Rosenthal would stalk the stalls of the Frankfurt Book Fair, looking for projects to import. He found Distinction there right around when he hired Lindsay away from the University of Minnesota Press. As Lindsay recalls, Rosenthal had been after books like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which Lindsay brought to Minnesota after Viking’s initial publication. Rosenthal handed Distinction off to Lindsay, and the new editor presented it at his very first HUP sales conference. The book has had a long life for us, and, perhaps thanks to the nod from n+1, has seen a nice little bump this month.
To be fair here, we can’t really stake a claim to some of the credit offered to Bourdieu in What Was the Hipster? without owning up to our relationship to the project’s bogeyman, Norman Mailer.
Much of n+1’s work lay in trying to parse the connection between this new model and its earlier incarnations: the black hipster of the 1940s and its derivative, the white 1950s hipster. Why did this label so forcefully reappear in the early 2000s, and what does the relationship signify? Greif et al wanted to examine this most recent entity now, in earnest, to save it from the sort of historical distortion visited on the earlier hipster, whose legacy has been too shaped, they say, by Mailer’s 1959 essay “The White Negro.” Greif, in agreement with much of today’s opinion, dismisses Mailer’s essay for its fetishization of blackness, and labels it an “embarrassing declaration” of the white hipster “freeing himself from white squareness by Negro sexiness, spontaneity, naturalness, etc.”
Mailer’s essay appeared originally in Dissent, and was then collected in Advertisements for Myself, published by Putnam in 1959. It had gone out of print, though, and Lindsay Waters brought the book to HUP in the early 1990s. Ours remains the only edition available in English. Of “The White Negro,” which, Greif acknowledges, “clumsily championed the violation of racial and class boundaries,” Lindsay remembers an invigoration. And, contra n+1, he wonders if perhaps Bourdieu’s work in Distinction isn’t as timeless as we may have believed:
These questions of hipsterdom have a long past life. Historically, some people (like Saul Bellow) have disdained people trying to be hip, but I find that approach cruel, and blind. That’s why Mailer’s approach seemed so important, and however bumbling his acknowledgment of the racial dimension may seem today, at the time it seemed outrageous and liberating: better to acknowledge the struggle and silliness and affectedness of trying to take a walk on the wild side.
When Distinction came out in English in the early ’80s, intellectuals were in the midst of another debate that was ultimately about cool: the deconstruction versus Marxism debate. I always sided with the deconstructionists who fought aesthetics but considered it worth fighting, and I violently objected to the pseudo-Marxists who talked as if they thought Kant was a right-wing reactionary. At the time, I found Bourdieu’s condemnation of activities that conferred distinction, like jogging and skiing, to be itself snobby. Bourdieu sounded like the academic who pretends to lordly taste, who condemns the poor sniveling lower middle class for hoping that if they went to an exhibit of Impressionist paintings they would join the upper middle class. Now that the upper middle class seems to have permanently excluded the lower middle class from power, perhaps criticism like Bourdieu’s does not matter so much. Now that the lower middle class can never ever catch up with the super-rich, Bourdieu seems like a relic from a time gone by.
