AGAINST DELUSIONAL HIPSTERITY -- OR NOT

unless you follow the "laughing squid" link blog or, less likely, the webcomic "toothpaste for dinner" authored by drew (just drew) from columbus, ohio, you're probably as yet unfamiliar with a new term recently coined in the nationwide scurry to classify eraly twenty-first century hipsterdom before its extinction -- and no doubt soon to be added to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. per drew's february comic (no link, because it's as easy to get stuck there as at "laughing squid"), "delusional hipsterity" denotes the belief that wasted potential is more important than actual success. and that's also the comic in its essential entirety (just without a couple of box heads talking about being in a band that doesn't release records or play shows), in case you want to spend your semi-meaningful distractions time elsewhere. (no links, because you'd never come back.)

the comic was funny, but seen in more sterile isolation, drew's definition is also a keen commentary on the state of young culture over the course of the last decade or so. the same kitschy primitivism that accessorized the hipster with low tech trappings for her high tech lifestyle also informed her ethos of cultural dissemination. kids might not have gone so far as to, say, as musicians, entirely eschew recording or performance, but the diy aesthetic that still dictates cool -- if not absolute rightness of behavior -- for a certain set definitely mandates a style of production and limits performances to certain venues. maybe. because of course that same set uses the internet to advertise and to sell itself and enlists its designer friends to digitally craft appropriately styled fliers, but only for distribution at appropriate locations so as to appeal to an appropriately sympathetic crowd. which is just marketing. but it's the way it's done, you see? maybe not. circularly defined: simply having a sense of it means having experienced it, and not wanting to disclose incriminating details of that experience means not wanting to accept a moniker that has been most popularly placed on those individuals who were most reluctant to accept it. why's it still so hard? coming out was supposed to help us shrug off all that hipster nonsense and give in to liking pop music again.

at the same time, a generation's collective nostalgia for its own early experience, as evidenced in its taste for pre-digital av playback devices and the entire american apparel catalog before american apparel declared the hipster over, is also a symptom of limited social and economic mobility for a group of people raised on prosperity but come of age in an era of increasingly diminished opportunity. the hipster looked back because cultural production in the forward direction seemed futile. the monotone platitudes of teddy ruxpin were far more comforting than the cultural pastiche that the ruers had themselves helped create. (everyone had also gotten really good training in talking about postmodernism.) in that sense, delusional hipsterity is symptomatic of a neurotic fear of failure by which the perception of reduced payoffs thwarts desires for productive participation in society. in economic terms, then, (scientifically, that is) a large scale submission to delusional hipsterity (or a small scale submission by a large percentage of the talented) would effectively be impetus for a cultural deflation spiral, hence the frequent casting of the hipster as the dead end of western civilization.

then again, the same aesthetic that lets the delusion take hold is of certain artistic importance. if not directly productive itself, the pursuit of aborted perfections is at least a stimulating consideration for the general discussion of aesthetics. the cultural anthropology of the hipster may be difficult to trace across such a varied topography of scattered hard evidence, but her demonstrated and romantic will to live in recognized obscurity is an alluring reason to pick up the trail. perhaps the spread of delusional hipsterity actually represents a broadening movement of intellectual acuity and maturity. the symptoms of the delusion aren't unsimilar to the contemplation of suicide, the aesthetic passion toward/implications of which often pop up in continental conversations on art and philosophy but rarely here. to act against one's objective better interest is truly a desirous (desired?) act. the question of what culture might have become is anyway more exciting than an established history of what it was. and that questioning might very well spur us to new heights of cultural production. accordingly, the hipster might prove to have been an important step in the evolution of the history of the new information culture after the dust settles on the ruins of postmodernity.

it's also possible that she was just lazy and bankrolled. probably, actually. the shrinks will likely just count up the beer cans and nondescript wine bottles and structure their diagnostics for delusional hipsterity around the ones for alcoholism. just like homosexuality. that comic is funny 'cause it's true.