Nowaday’s hipsterism. It’s all about boredom and abundance, the arbitrariness of signs and meanings, everything getting ironic and interchangeable, an irony without aim and wisdom, smiling at itself as a complacent pose, the dead end of postmodernism, the absence of the liberating mephistotelic king, the regnancy of last men, as Nietzsche foresaw them, cuddling themselves in their little neuroses, narcisms and validity claims, precluding true schizic and transgressing forms of being.
It’s the age of Wes Anderson and Slavoj Žižek, mistaken for filmmaker and philosopher respectively, childish indie music, the arty-lascivious indulgence into supposedly smart consumerism and capitalism, semiconsciously justified by a misunderstood Warhol.
Hipster family: 2001 Wes Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums
Whilst the so called elites of politics and business have detached themselves from society and deformed into para-mafia structures, occupied by the self-assertion and broadening of their privileges, the remnants of society at some point got tired of resistance which didn’t seem to work no more, stopped caring and began loving the slowly ticking bomb of social disintegration, boosting themselves their slide down into cultural and financial precarity, shown with miserable pride by imitating the underclass’ insignia. And a strange feeling of apocalyptic festivity ran rampant.
At this point, the rich kids, bored by their privileges, joined the carnevalesc precarity-camouflage. The whole hipster-community turned into a coolhunting fauxhemia of the too lazy or too wealthy to care. Whole meanings of resistance were stolen and neutralized into consumer goods, everything got ironic and interchangeable. It’s the age of boredom and repetition. It’s the dead end. The opening of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1955), the first generation of hipsters' manifesto, then needs to be significantly rewritten:
A young Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night [...].
I saw the mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by boredom, starving hysterically overdressed,
dragging themselves through the webblogs 24/7 looking for a lousy hype,
Empty-headed hipsters burning for the newest socialize-connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of fashion [...].
Is there still hope? Is there a world after the dead end? Every downfall is also a transit. Let’s bury these cultural zombies.
bury 'em
