I was bumped into Dorian Lynskey's blog 33 Revolutions Per Minute yesterday. I've pretty much always liked the things he's written (though not bought his book - I'm not made of money!), and was pleased to find his website.
Amongst other things it has a version of his article from earlier this year, yet another attempt to nail down the protean problem of the hipster.
"Hipster-hating is seemingly a victimless crime because nobody will admit to actually being one, although if you’re at all bothered by them then you’re probably somewhere on the spectrum".
Indeed. One of the aspects of modern culture people are most concerned with is esoteric knowledge:
"Norman Cook recently said on 6Music that when he started DJing he could unearth a floorfilling obscurity and it would take months for a rival DJ to identify it and track down a copy".
This quality of The Scene is destroyed by pseudo-democratic forms of technology:
"If today’s cratedigging DJ plays a new discovery it’s on a thousand hard drives on the other side of the world by the next morning".
I say pseudo democratic, the audience, the mass have a much bigger role now in shaping culture than ever before. This is why, amongst other things, hipsters are fucking everywhere. They are the recycling agents of late capitalism, exposing and promoting cultural artifacts at a faster and faster rate. The greater the turnover of cultural capital the faster new forms of capital have to be appropriated and turned out. But this is not agency, let alone emancipation. There is still a sharp division, class-based, between those who can and can't participate. In the example given, you need access to a computer (and computer literacy). Not everyone has this.
Esotericism stems from the Middle Ages. It was a solution to passing on knowledge before mass education and mass media. Craft guilts were built on this kind of knowledge and ritual. It was also a response, in religion, to the counter-reformation. These days it is an anti-capitalist urge, to resist commodification and conformity. It fails (though it can produce great art) because it is an elitist outlook.
