Hipness Through the Ages
I see that Scott McLemee has a link to B&W on his site – on account of how I had links to his site. It’s like ping-pong. No but really, I feel like mentioning it because he mentions the hipness thing.
We share a distaste for that “hipness unto death” which has become such a nuisance of urban life. Maybe it always was? I don’t know. On reflection, it does seem that Rousseau was complaining about it, quite a while back.
Yeah. And Elizabethan satirists, too, come to think of it. Ben Jonson had great fun with the subject in ‘Every Man in his Humour’ and Ditto Out of his Humour. He was really interested in fashion, and wickedly funny about it. His friend (and slightly resented rival) Shakespeare was not as interested as he was (to judge by his chosen subject matter at least) but he was interested. Hamlet has some pointed things to say about the fashion for child actors at the Blackfriars Theatre (not surprisingly – they were the competition). ‘There is Sir an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for ‘t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages – so they call them – that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.’ Sounds very hip, doesn’t it? A little kinky? And there’s a fair bit about fashion in the Sonnets, too, especially the dread of more fashionable – hipper – new poets displacing him in the affections of Lovely Boy. And Juvenal had some dyspeptic things to say about fashion and hipness, if I remember correctly – well he must have, it’s such a Juvenal kind of thing, hipness.
It’s not a completely unserious point though. Even apart from the sheer irritatingness of the lust for being hip, there is a real epistemological issue underneath. It’s too obvious to bother saying, of course, and yet it doesn’t seem to be universally understood: hipness is not a good criterion for what’s true. But there are people whose writing would lead one to swear that they think it is. ‘Naive and old-fashioned’ is a phrase that’s used a lot to discredit opponents – a phrase that always makes me feel as if someone has emptied a jar of ants down the back of my shirt. Itchy.
Haven’t yet got far enough into the MCLemee site to find his words on hipness, b/ what you allude to has a familiar ring (like my bathtub.) I think that the craze for hipness came about because our need for newness–curiosity, the urge to learn, one of the key parts of a Mind–got short-circuited somehow. I can’t explain it very well, but it reminds me of how some radio stations play a song real often for a week or so and then you hardly ever hear it. Novelty without continuity–makes me also think of decadence. (My co-workers favor those “classic rock” stations that play the same 100 songs over and over–a complementary evil. Stagnation. N.B.,it isn’t rock per se I dislike, but the lack of intelligence in programming.) The concept “coolness”, which I think is related, was explained by someone whose name I forgot, as an illusion of invulnerability and imperviousness, just the thing for people at a vulnerable or uncertain stage of life to seize on.
This is only part of the puzzle, I can’t well explain it all, or prove anything for that matter, but it sounds like it might pertain to those po-mo academostars, or whatever you want to call them. If they think there is no truth to be found, their hipness and coolness, rather, the adulation of those who believe in it, might be the only thing they can find to hold them together. And it is a good thing you pointed out that this isn’t just a late 20th century phenomenon–it probably goes clear back to when clothes and fire were the latest thing. Once it was lions we had to fear, now it is either hegemonies or an epistemological void–but all along there have been a few good minds to stand off and see it for what it is.
Coolness, indeed. Tom Frank has written great stuff on that. I keep meaning to do him for In the Library.
Well I certainly think it pertains to the academostars. I think that’s what got Scott and me talking about it in the first place, that article he wrote on the subject that I did a N&C on. And it does matter, because it is part of what’s behind FN. It’s no accident that it’s called Fashionable Nonsense. Trendiness does play a role here.
Funny, I wrote another N&C on Hipness in History yesterday but then didn’t bother posting it. But since you mention the ancient roots…perhaps I will.