The New Gnostics: the Semiotics of the Hipster
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The New Gnostics: The Semiotics of the Hipster A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Sociology at the University of Canterbury Benjamin John Elley 2014 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 6 Methodology Semiotic analysis 8 Tumblr 12 Music 15 Literature 15 Chapter one: Who is the hipster? 1.1 Introduction 17 1.2 Too much literary criticism: a conceptual introduction 17 1.3 The average hipster: a précis 20 1.4 The ideal hipster: Cayce Pollard 21 1.5 The attributes of the hipster 25 1.6 Is the hipster modern or postmodern? 35 1.7 A brief genealogy of the hipster 40 1.8 Conclusion 42 Chapter two: A new gnosis 2.1 Introduction 43 2.2 Twentieth century gnosticism 43 2.3 Hipster gnosticism in practice 51 2.4 The Authentic 58 2.5 Irony 60 2.6 Cultural appropriation 64 2.7 The hipster and death 68 2.8 Conclusion 73 Chapter three: The hipster and space 3.1 Introduction 74 3.2 The Hyperreal 74 3.3 Location one: The City 82 3.4 Location two: The Outdoors 87 3.5 Imaginary America 92 2 3.6 Conclusion 94 Chapter four: Hipster businesses 4.1 Introduction 96 4.2 1924.us 96 4.3 Sanborn Canoe and Best Made 98 4.4 Naked and Famous Denim 102 4.5 RELIC NYC 103 4.6 Conclusion 105 Chapter five: Vice and the City 5.1 Introduction: VICE Magazine 107 5.2 Cosmopolitanism 109 5.3 The death of culture 111 5.4 Gnosis and City discourse 115 5.5 Conclusion 119 Conclusion: The Motor City and the future of the hipster 120 Bibliography Primary Sources 124 Works Cited 126 3 Acknowledgements I wish to sincerely thank my supervisors, Michael Grimshaw and Lyndon Fraser, for their invaluable help and input with this project. I also wish to thank my friends and family for putting up with a year of erratic behaviour and unclear answers to the questions “what are you actually studying?” and “aren’t hipsters a kind of underwear?” 4 Abstract This thesis forms a sociological investigation of the ‘hipster’ subculture that has grown in importance in recent years. Using the methodology of semiotic analysis, it examines the trends and themes shown by the images that hipsters post on the microblogging website Tumblr, as well as analysing hipster journalism, texts and companies. This communication is conceptualised with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality in order to show that hipsters communicate in a way that distorts the perception of real space and results in the abstraction of the meaning of ideas like “global” and “local”. It also explores the importance of secret knowledge in a community that manages to be both secretive and extremely open, comparing this example with the historical case of the Beat Generation, who hipsters have adopted as their progenitors, and discusses how their influence drives the hipster to view the world as a literary text to be re-read and re-interpreted. 5 Introduction A strange new creature walks the city streets, an alien hiding behind dark glasses and a handlebar moustache. Dressed like a time-traveller caught between a rosy past and a rude, unintelligible future, they watch the world through coffee shop windows and over the tops of well-read books and are deeply dissatisfied. The hipster is uncomfortable, and it shows. The hipster is a young person in skinny jeans, a bourgeois bohemian, a New Yorker, a skate punk, an elitist, a consumerist, a rich kid, a poor kid, a fan of retro clothing, an environmentalist, an Apple customer, a hypocrite. The hipster is them, but it isn’t me. Depending on who you ask, the hipster is almost anyone, and also no-one. Nobody will admit to being a hipster, but everybody is ready to say who is – it is always somebody strange, and more often than not there is an implicit criticism. Still, there is something at the heart of all of this confusion. The hipster definitely exists, or at least, there is definitely a culture that bears the majority of the brunt of these accusations, and in spite of an unwillingness (unsurprisingly) to accept the name ‘hipster’, this culture is an extremely interesting one that is growing to be exceptionally significant, both in terms of membership and cultural impact. These people are postmodern and intensely ironic, but also deeply concerned with the nature of the world around them and the path that has been taken by consumer culture. Rejected by society and yet somehow also leading its trends, the hipster works, in their own flawed way, to find a new and more authentic way of life for the twenty-first century. Who are these young people? What defines a hipster? Their numbers on the streets seem to increase by the day, and their influence on culture is growing alongside, not only through the popularity of their distinctive fashion, but also their ideology and distinctly twenty-first century way of viewing the world. What is this worldview – is it one of meaningless consumerism and market-driven elitism, or is it something more? Is there really anything new about the hipster at all? Confronted by this millennial spectre in skinny jeans, the average person recoils in confusion and anger, as though the hipster represents everything that is wrong with the world. Confusingly the feeling is mutual, and generally for the same reasons. Without a doubt, the hipster’s distinctive nostalgias and ironies have become some of the defining aesthetics of the last few years, and their influence on the arts – particularly in film and television – has been similarly significant. This raises a further question: if this worldview is becoming commonplace, how is the hipster distinct from the general culture of the age? This thesis will attempt to come to grips with the hipster and their motivations by disentangling the ways in which they communicate. If it is their signs – their strange clothing, purchasing habits and art – that alternately enthrals and infuriates the world, then it is these signs that we must address. I will 6 explain and deconstruct the hipster’s communication, using an understanding primarily derived from their image-based communication online, but also learned from the study of hipster journalism, books and companies, and discuss why their habits of communication are so important. This thesis will deal with the hipster in their emerging nature as a global phenomenon, rather than as a uniquely American or local one. Hipster culture is notoriously local, but crucially it is also growing into something entirely more interesting through the medium of the internet and websites like Tumblr and Instagram. As such, the understanding outlaid here will also give us the tools not only to make some educated guesses at the hipster’s future but also to understand the hipster as they change and develop – an understanding that may prove crucial to our cultural future as a whole. 7 Methodology Semiotic analysis Semiotic analysis is the major analytical tool that will be used in this thesis. The discipline of semiotics is, in essence, the study of the language of signs, be they verbal, visual or otherwise. A sign is a linguistic symbol – something that, when interpreted by a viewer or reader, has a meaning. This is a necessarily broad concept: almost anything can become a sign if it is used in communication somehow. For the most part, signs communicate to us on a very immediate level: as with the individual words on this page, most signs are interpreted instantly without any consideration. As with words strung into an essay however, signs in practice also form a complex web of interaction between authorship and interpretation. By analysing this interaction and the purpose that it serves, the study of semiotics allows us to determine a lot about the individuals who use them and, of particular importance here, the groups that they belong to. Ferdinand De Saussure (Saussure, 1916/1983), who first proposed the science of semiotics, divides the sign into two components: the signifier, which is the sound, shape or thing that signifies something (for example, the word ‘dog’, or an image of a dog) and the signified, which is the concept to which the signifier refers (such as an actual, living dog). Although this concept is simple, signs become interesting when the relationship between signifier and signified is less direct: because the association between the two is generally “arbitrary, and based on convention” (as with the sound dog, which bears no real relationship to the animal), the meanings of signs are subject to change and interpretation, and can often tell us a lot about the culture that uses them (Berger, 2013, p. 22). Berger makes the example of long hair worn by men, which once “used to signify ‘artistic’ but now long hair has lost that meaning; it can mean anything nowadays: poets, truck drivers and baseball pitchers now often have long hair”. An example from hipster culture would be large-framed, horn-rimmed glasses, which were once unfashionable but now signify a complex mix of nostalgia, pseudo-intellectualism and non-conformity in their wearer. Because some signifiers have a more direct relationship to their signified than others, C.S. Peirce breaks the sign down further into three categories – iconic, indexical and symbolic: Every sign is determined by its objects, either first by partaking in the characters of the object, when I call a sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty 8 that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition), when I call the sign a Symbol, (quoted in Zeman 1977, p.