Against hipsters, left and right. A figure of cultural elitism and social anxiety

As the story of the hipster has ceased to be a matter of hip knowledge, the politics of hipster derision and hipster hate may well be more relevant for cultural analysis than its object, the hipster him- or herself, who remains an elusive entity, loosely defined by taste, attitude, knowledge or sociological attributes – with shifting contours in different places and at different times. The critique of hipster culture is indicative of the ways in which (popular and sub-) cultural capital was and is being accumulated, recognised, (de)valued and converted. Ridiculing or confronting hipsters tends to have strong anti-elitist overtones: The common thread is that hipsters are believed to “think they’re better than others”, they are wannabe cultural elites and in that sense anti-democratic, anti-common sense, anti-common people. But, crucially, in that logic, their pretensions are easy to demystify for those they look down upon. Using examples from field research and other observations gathered in the US, the UK and Germany in the last 20 years, the chapter argues that the hipster figure’s objectification (its becoming-an-object of discourse and reflection within popular culture) has given rise to specific types of anti-hipster discourse in different circumstances which allows the problematisation of a variety of concerns, corresponding to broader conjunctural shifts, that coalesce in the hipster figure: distinction, privilege, consumerism, conventionalism, depoliticisation, gentrification, but also cosmopolitianism, transnational lifestyles and antitraditionalism. While hipster derision for quite some time was broadly a question of subcultural and/or intellectual, inner-left critique, its political articulations and cultural resonances are much less clear in the present moment.