This post is about homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben has written about the plight of the exiled, the persons who are excluded from the customary protections of the law that come from belonging to a state and thus attaining a sanctioned personhood. Such persons are reduced to "bare life," devoid of rights. Carles, in retracing the steps of a promulgated taxonomy of the hipster, attempts to reveal how such categorization is perhaps the first stage in an effort to purge the hipster from the social field, to make the hipster into homo sacer in preparation for an ultimate liquidation. "Will the US Government ever decide to eliminate us?" Carles asks, in a gesture of radical solidarity with the threatened class. He admits to being "worried" about this possibility. The growing tide of tribalistic, reactionary rage across countries suffering economic setbacks seems to make such an outpouring of violence against a privileged class that prefers to set itself apart all too thinkable. A "breakdown" in the meme content is tantamount to a breakdown in the social fabric.
This "scientific/sociological/cultural timeline," as Carles designates it, epitomizes the "annihilation of space through time" that Marx attributed to the specific relations of production under capitalism. A teleology of the development of the hipster is posited and the uneven development and distribution of the cultural capital that hipsterism represents is suppressed. But this suppression serves to exacerbate the perception that hipsters have achieved a hegemonic condition of domination instead of themselves being dominated, in the sense of being determined and stripped of autonomous development from within the given social order, as is precisely the case. Carles notes with euphemistic discretion that "mainstreamers who don’t consume the internet and fringe alts who ‘would like to be more culturally relevant’ use exposes like this to plan their future adventures into the heartland of Altmerica" -- naturally those "future adventures" may include any and all of the repressive measures used to stifle dissent in totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. By rendering the hipster as Other, to be zoologically classifed and mocked, publications catering to the malcontented medocrity in our midst can symbolically declare open season on "alts", tacitly encouraging atrocities and brutality. Carles seems to be worrying: Can a Krystallnacht of vinyl record stores and American Apparel outlets be far behind?
The really radical idea of homo sacer is not that certain bodies come to be placed outside of the political order and thereafter come to be treated as bare life, raw human biological substance. No. The really radical dimension of it, which no one in the US seems to take interest in, is that today WE ARE ALL HOMO SACER, that undergirding our fantasmatic experience of contemporary liberal 'democracy,' we are all at the most fundamental level today registered and maintained just as lifeforms. (think of 'the matrix' - we have the experience of something like liberal democracy, but then underneath and sustaining this, there is the 'real' scene in which we are actually just being sustained and cataloged as bio substance.)
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm sorry, but - "The growing tide of tribalistic, reactionary rage across countries suffering economic setbacks" (you posit this, not 'Carles') - what kind of racist, anti-mob bullshit is this? I think many of the most vocal victims of actual uneven development are enraged, and I think they have a right to be, but I also think they're quite aware of who the enemy is (e.g. not vinyl record stores and American Apparel).
I think there is something going on here with these magazines along the lines of crystallizing, visibilizing the hipster as a sort of Enemy, one is totally inchoate until we theorize/visualize it into existence. But I don't think this is really going to lead to any kind of substantial violence (maybe some bullying), the whole thing with hipsters is that they are so obviously totally estranged from the working of political/economic power circuits.