Repartay

So some dude named Alex Payne (linked to through the Daily Dish) has interesting things to say about the decline of western civilization vis-a-vis the hipster rejection of creativity. He sums up the problem:

What distinguishes hipsters for me is that they believe in nothing, but unconsciously so. It’s not nihilism, because nihilism is well-considered position. Hipsters are, to my mind, the first utterly apolitical, a-philosolphical subculture of the postwar era.

Even the slacker generation believed in, well, slacking: they valued an opposition to the competitive mindset of the preceding generation. That may be a shallow thing to value, but it provides the groundwork for some sort of political/cultural stance. Hipsters have no such political or philosophical foundation. I’d go on to argue that they lack even the cultural foundation to contribute meaningfully to the arts.

I think this is right. But then he says this:

Adbusters noted the signature peculiarity of hipster culture: hipsters refuse to identify as hipsters. They failed, however, to explain this phenomenon. The explanation is that hipsters are the mainstream, and the mainstream is incapable of identifying itself as such.

This seems to be wrong, by Alex’s own definition. It’s not that hipsters comprise the mainstream — this is demonstrably false — it’s that because as Alex points out, if hipsters don’t believe in anything, a belief in “hipsterdom” construes a self-referential repudiation of their own beliefs. It’s a cataclysmic catch-22 of the existential order. It’s why hipsterdom is fucking stupid.