Social figure hipster: Hipster: On the disappearance of a social type

It wasn’t that long ago that talk of hipsters was omnipresent. He was vehemently told to “fuck off” in graffiti, stickers and loveless cardboard signs in shop windows. People denounced him as an agent of gentrification, of which they were often a part, and were amused in bar conversations and in feature articles about the mustaches, trucker hats, jute bags, belt buckles and subcultural know-it-alls.

The Chemnitz band Kraftclub became famous with the song “I don’t want to go to Berlin,” which is about the – quite paradigmatic – Berlin hipster, without naming him: he had moved from the provinces, had “projects”, and drank latte macchiatos Soya milk, preferred to work in a café and belonged to the creative industry in the broadest sense.

The hipster was an object of hate and a projection surface, hardly anyone claimed to be one, but everywhere, especially in the big cities, they were in the majority. While in 1931 Walter Benjamin praised the creative destruction of the “destructive character” – “young and cheerful”, “always fresh at work”, an “enemy of the case people” – with admiration, people were sure at the beginning of the 21st century agreed that only bad things could come from the destructive nature of hipsters.

The hipster disappears

The hipster discussion reached its peak around 2015, after which it steadily declined. When the French essayist Grégory Pierrot once again launched a polemical all-round attack against the hipster in 2022, he used decolonial diction in a very contemporary manner and accused the hipster of not only gentrification but also cultural appropriation and discrimination, which Chris W. Wilpert correctly described in a review simplistic scapegoat theory. But Pierrot’s invective was anachronistic, because the social figure of the hipster had long since lost its symptomatic character and its affective cathexis. As far as could be perceived, people neither felt addressed nor could they be outraged by it.

The interest that was first shown to the hipster in the USA at the end of the noughties and, somewhat belatedly, in Germany and was reflected in numerous articles, radio reports, anthologies and lectures is, in retrospect, just as remarkable as its gradual disappearance since 2015. Even when the New When the York magazine “n+1” dedicated a moody symposium to the hipster in 2009, he figured there as a social type that was in the process of disappearing, which in turn was only supposed to have been the distorted and white return of the hipster of the 50s, which Anatole Broyard impressively described in 1948 had.

The volume in which the symposium was documented and some other texts on the topic were printed was originally published under the title “What was the Hipster?” The fact that the Suhrkamp publishing house published the volume again in 2012 under the title “Hipster”, which was stripped of its temporal dimension, may have had something to do with the need for topicality, but it corresponded to the late arrival of the hipster in Germany. While the “n+1” volume still showed an attempt at historicization, in this country the hipster was considered purely present.

The hipster’s core reality

Social types are always congealed clichés. However, without liability to actual fragments of reality, they remain silent. They become socially virulent when they are suitable for the projection of hopes and fears, when often uncomprehended social tendencies condense in them, which stimulate defensiveness or imagined symptoms. Like any ideology, such projection figures are never just false, but rather have a core of reality, albeit distorted. Two fixed points in particular could be identified in the discussion at the time: the decline of subcultures and the change in working conditions, the processing of which was always carried out on hipsters.

While the “bourgeois” was a figure who was accused of narrow-mindedness and bad conservatism, people always loathed the hipster for seemingly being one step further – be it in matters of fashion or music, even if the hipster was himself not characterized by innovation, but often by the recycling of past forms. The braggadocious boasting about secret cultural knowledge was criticized again and again; he always knew the newest band before anyone else. At the same time, the hipster mixed insignia and stylistic elements that were previously limited to – long since commercialized – subcultures such as punk or hardcore, and transported them to a larger, culture-industry public, much to the annoyance of those who still clung to the subcultural promise of authenticity.

The resentment against the cultural and creative workers working in the café may have been based on the suspicion that permanent employment and office space are on the decline in neoliberal capitalism and that more and more people are threatened by the precarity that the figure of the hipster conceals in the constant project-making.

Harbinger of singularization

Looking back, it is striking that both the resentment against the hipster and the deeper discussions with him were concentrated almost exclusively in a liberal, in the broadest sense, left-wing milieu. Attention-oriented right-wing groups such as the Identitarian Movement tried to achieve a stylistic approximation and were sometimes hardly distinguishable from their liberal counterparts on the street. The fact that Gavin McInnes, the founder of the pompous hipster magazine “Vice,” became the progenitor of the Proud Boys did not go unnoticed. But hardly any right-wing or conservative media considered it necessary to focus so excessively on the social figure of the hipster. This suggests that it was primarily about the liberal milieu itself, about upheavals that particularly affected that class. The fact that the hipster was repeatedly accused of being apolitical could easily be interpreted as a self-assurance gesture from those in an environment concerned about the climate and critical of consumption.

But why has the hipster’s affective cast shrunk so noticeably? The thesis suggests itself that the hipster has not simply disappeared, but that the processes and tendencies that arose in him as a social figure and were fended off have generalized and become second nature. It is no coincidence that the hipster’s short career coincides with the time at the beginning of the 21st century in which Andreas Reckwitz identified a social structural change towards singularization: individuality and specialness were established as social goals, not without ideologically compensating for the dismantling of the welfare state.

The hipster’s perceived exaggerated need for distinction can be understood as a harbinger of the new status quo. The cult of the singular, which is ultimately driven by economic necessity – the exquisite taste, the special furniture and the distinguished interests, in short: the curated life – affects significantly more people today than the isolated offspring of the middle class who were found in the big cities back then. The hipster became a projection surface for the unease against this social development, which was only unconsciously perceived at the time.

But the hatred that sometimes greeted him directed social anger against the desire to be an individual, which was definitely worth defending. With the generalization of this desire as an imperative, the need to work on the hipster also disappeared.

Climate glue, terfs, old white men

But if the hipster is gone, what took his place? In any case, there is currently no discernible destructive character that can be agreed upon in a comparable way. Rather, a milieu-specific feralization of social types on the one hand and the way they are treated on the other can be observed: the old middle class and a conservative to right-wing milieu find their opponents in “climate stickers” and in “woken social justice warriors”; the targeted environment sees the “old white man” everywhere; For some time now, the “anti-Germans” have been rediscovered in circles that are finally trying to regain legitimate criticism of Israel, and parts of the queer feminist scene have identified “Terfs” as a new enemy.

Although not devoid of reality, all of these characters are as exaggerated as the hipster was. But they too could be deciphered as personalized condensations of ununderstood social contradictions, as defensive struggles and hypostatization of real developments and ideological distribution struggles in which people often behave as authoritarian as the society in which they live. This could possibly be a first step towards counteracting the social polarization that is not wrongly diagnosed. Whether those who attack such and similar social types are currently approachable is, of course, another matter.

Robert Zwarg is a philosopher and lives in Leipzig. In 2017, together with Chris W. Wilpert, he published the volume “Destructive Characters. Hipsters and other crisis phenomena” is published by Ventil-Verlag.