I wonder whether, underlying all of these powerful causes, lies an ultimate one: a new anxiety about the worthiness of aesthetic experience as such. In closing, I want briefly to consider the twenty-first-century hipster as the dandy’s pale afterlife, perhaps as the dandy’s terminus. By “hipster,” I am not speaking primarily of the hard-partying nightlife creature celebrated by the early run of Vice magazine, but of his more erudite older brother, the Brooklyn-centered intellectual hipster whose image and persona have become a dubious icon of the intellectual life of the early twenty-first century. The intellectual hipster shares a certain look with the Vice hipster (skinny jeans, etc.), though he is less hedonistic and more obviously a part of the professional-managerial class, bohemian wing. I speak of “him” advisedly. As Jennifer Baumgarden puts it, hipsters “are feminized (skinny, fashion-y, coiffed) but they are also . . . mostly men.” She goes on to wonder “whether there is homophobia in . . . hipster-hating.”1 Analogously to the dandy, from whom he is descended, the hipster is an originarily male figure who is, in his essential constitution, suspected of both androgyny and queerness. And like the dandy from Pelham through the Hemingway hero to Patrick Bateman, the hipster is associated not just with a sartorial style but with culinary aestheticism. As one commentator put it, “Portland is a really great place as a sort of metaphor [of hipsterism]—It has a really great restaurant scene.”2 In its cruder orientation as represented by Vice, hipsterism’s emphasis on consumption can sound decadent, in the specific nineteenth-century sense, as Mark Greif points out: “The big publication of the early hipster moment was called Vice precisely because that was the hipster schtick, to lump consumer and Gothic into the same category of transgression: We will show you how to buy pleasures which some liberal prude of our fantasies considers immoral.”3 But just as, for dandyism proper, the prerogatives of consumption can provide, paradoxically, the tools for an oppositional subjectivity, so too can hipsterism provide a refuge for people disconnected, for reasons sexual or intellectual, from the dominant requirements of the culture.4
In a scene that has become an instant classic in the contemporary literature of consumption, the hero of Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, having recently signed an exciting book contract, enjoys a celebratory meal with his agent in a hip Chelsea restaurant. (Lerner’s narrator is unnamed and shares many features with Lerner himself—as ever in the history of the dandiacal novel, the collapse between author and character is aggressively courted.) The meal “included baby octopuses that the chef had literally massaged to death. We had ingested the impossibly tender things entire, the first intact head I had ever consumed.”5 Like the meals in American Psycho, it’s hard to tell whether this luxury item exists in the real world; unlike in American Psycho, the satire is rueful and self-skeptical rather than savage and self-loathing. In Lerner’s delicate (not to say precious) autobiographical metafiction, a critique of the privileges and habits of New York’s gentrifying classes is elaborately buffered by ironic involutions. “I’ll project myself,” the narrator imagines himself saying of his own authorial strategy, “into several futures simultaneously . . . I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.”6
Like Hemingway before him, Lerner’s aestheticist sensibilities play out around culinary connoisseurship, which might at first seem like a mere digression but in fact offers something like the heart of 10:04’s sensibility. Unlike Hemingway, Lerner offers an overt interpretive agenda right alongside the evocation of rarified consumption. “It was quiet enough to hear the bartender shaking an artisanal cocktail,” the narrator says, and the joke is that the language of advertising has infected the narrator’s perception. “Sharon ordered what I thought was a simple drip coffee that turned out to be an exorbitantly priced single-origin Chemex affair.”7 This, like many other lines isolated from their context in 10:04, could be Bret Easton Ellis. As could this: “Dessert was a yuzu frozen soufflé with poached plums. Money was a kind of poetry.”8 But this, on the miracle of the commodity during the run-up to a hurricane, is pure Lerner:
. . . the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellin and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate. . . . It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura.9
Lerner contributes to the literature of hip consumption a somewhat maudlin but nevertheless highly precise analytic self-reflexivity. For all his intellectual sophistication, Lerner’s protagonist is a transparent variation on that debased and apparently ubiquitous type, the twenty-first-century hipster. As Greif puts it, “The ‘hipster’ is the name for what we might call ‘the hip consumer,’ or what Tom Frank used to call ‘the rebel consumer.”10 At bottom, the rebelliousness of this hip consumer is what separates him from the yuppie, and also what connects him to the longer history of the dandy.
Greif’s astute characterization of the hipster as a member of “a subculture of people who are already dominant” resonates particularly well with the history of the dandy, who is, in his most recognizable form—at Oxford or Cambridge at the fin de siècle or in the first decade of the twentieth century—precisely a subcultural member of the ruling class.11 More broadly, this position links the dandy to the intellectual, who is, as Bourdieu has it, “the dominated fraction of the dominant class.”12 Indeed, like his cousin the flâneur—“the flâneur is, in fact, the critic”13—so too the “dandy’s immaculate self-consciousness and disdain for sentimental effusions is perfectly attuned to the scholarly zeitgeist, allowing the critic to carve out a skeptical distance from the mainstream.”14 Lerner’s variety of hipster inherits all of these tendencies: he is urbane, hypercritical, and acutely aware of both his membership in the dominant class and his lack of power within it. The lurch from semiparodic aestheticist delectation to Marxist-analytic dissection of the “aura” of the commodity performs (or exposes) the formation that links the intellectual to the aestheticist connoisseur in a way that Patrick Bateman never could. We might even say that Bateman, in his hyperbolic revoltingness and his finance-class affiliations, represents something like an attempted disavowal on the part of the intellectuals of styles of connoisseurship and consumption with which intellectualism itself is intimately connected.
10:04 aims to expose this mystification by frankly avowing an aestheticism of intense momentary experience drawn from Pater but politicized and desolipsized, made a feature of communal experience. One must, as the narrator puts it in lyrical jargon, embrace “the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and co-construct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.”15 Lerner’s narrator offers a dandiacal-utopian vision in which intense experience is decoupled from the prerogatives of capitalism.
Is this a parody of the overheated jargon perpetrated by some left academics? Or is Lerner sincere? I am genuinely unsure, and one of the things that can make Lerner’s work seem irritatingly self-regarding is that even its parodies of critical affectation seem to flatter their objects. This is potentially a feature of all parody, but it is particularly salient in the history of dandyism, in which the parody and the “real thing” exist in a kind of symbiosis, with the parodic imitation often giving cues to the original: like Oscar Wilde and his images in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, original and parody together “co-construct a world,” as Lerner’s narrator might put it.
Hurricane Irma and Occupy Wall Street offer two instances of apocalypse and utopia respectively in 10:04, a novel whose imagination of aftermath—to recur to Vincent Sherry’s useful label—is characteristically decadent. Lerner’s narrator’s most important meditation on such aftermath occurs in a consideration of the potential for the work of art to be released from its bondage to the “monetizable signature” and its status as a “commodity”: “[I]t was incredibly rare—I remembered the jar of instant coffee the night of the storm—to encounter an object liberated from that logic. What was the word for that liberation? Apocalypse? Utopia?”16 The intellectualized hipster’s quest for this transcendent aesthetic encounter is a descendant, refined and delibidinized, of the midcentury hipster’s for “kicks.” In both cases—remember that Mailer opens “The White Negro” with an evocation of the atom bomb—apocalypse is the backdrop and even the condition for the quest for high experience.
10:04’s narrator does not, as it happens, realize the utopian “transpersonal revolutionary subject”; nor does the hurricane inaugurate an apocalypse in which he is caught and destroyed, or raptured. Instead, he decides to procreate. The last movement of the novel offers an ambivalent response to Edelman’s polemic in No Future (a text which the theory-savvy Lerner, who has published essays in academic journals like boundary2, is much more likely than most novelists to be familiar with). The narrator agrees to impregnate his friend Alex; tentatively and without the usual commitments or ceremonies, they are planning to constitute a heterosexual family unit. Pronatalist sentiment will replace the utopian “transpersonal subjectivity” earlier gestured to as a redemptive mode: “Neither Alex nor I speak, have any questions for the doctor, or take each other’s hand, but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.”17 Reproduction gives rise to the same emotional ties normally generated (when it is generated at all) in the narrator’s life by experiences of works of art. Walking with Alex in the area of an Occupy Wall Street protest toward the very end of the novel, the narrator has a vision of fertility that is also a vision of Hades:
A steady current of people attired in the usual costumes was entering the walkway onto the bridge and there was a strange energy crackling among us; part parade, part flight, part protest. Each woman I imagined as pregnant; then I imagined all of us were dead, flowing over London Bridge. What I mean is that our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. I’m quoting now, like John Gillespie Magee.18
As in the concluding paragraph of Burroughs’s The Western Lands, Lerner’s narrator synthesizes moments of the most intense experience via a tissue of literary quotations. Unlike in The Western Lands, he is not an old man but a young one; the quotational strategy, by which life is converted to literature, serves not so much to evoke the pathos of aging and memory as to buffer experience itself by literary allusiveness, or to suggest that, in a novel at least, experience itself is nothing other than belletristic allusion. Louis Menand has written of T. S. Eliot that “the literary quotation marks of imitation and allusion” allow for the “neutralizing” of the poet’s own suspicions about his emotional authenticity.19 Lerner inherits an amplified version of this dilemma, an extreme self-doubt and anxiety about affectation that is characteristic of the intellectualized hipster. This self-doubt extends to the sentimentalized pronatalism offered in 10:04’s lyrical final passages, in which “Alex is pregnant and the seas are poisoned and the superstorm has shut down all the ports.”20 While the apocalyptic scenarios of A Clockwork Orange are overcome, however parodically or unsatisfactorily, by Alex’s sudden, sentimental commitment to fatherhood, in 10:04 parenthood involves a melancholy rapprochement with the climate apocalypse that is already upon us. This is one possible response to a millennial attitude recently described by Gabriel Winant in n+1, in which “nobody . . . wants to have kids because of climate change.” Lerner’s narrator’s answer: have kids anyway, but work them into an elegiac, fragmentary prose-poem drawn from The Waste Land and leavened with Whitman. The hipster’s preoccupations—aestheticized culinary consumption, the construction of aesthetic “moments” drawn from Pater, the ambling flâneurie of the privileged urban male—are here sublimated or transcended in favor of a sort of love-among-the-ruins rumination, a resigned spawning in the decadent aftermath of the apocalypse. But that very response comes swaddled in quotation, its sincerity and authenticity buffered, held in suspension.
Self-doubt is not a dandiacal quality. The intellectualized hipster’s tentativeness involves a stark discontinuity between the hipster and the dandy—a discontinuity that, in terms of the history of archetypes I have been tracing, is most strongly to be noted between the midcentury hipster and the twenty-first-century hipster. As Greif asks, “Why would ‘hipster,’ this archaic term of the ’50s, be on everyone’s lips at the turn of the 21st century?”21 Greif offers three connective planks. First, both hipsters are primordially white—the earlier dialectically constituted by his fascination with a fantasized black other, the later by a nostalgic preoccupation with the white suburbia of the 1970s.22 Second, just as the twenty-first-century hipster negotiates “the very old dyad of knowingness and naïveté, adulthood and a child-centered world,”23 the ’50s hipster is constituted above all by his “claim to knowledge.”24 Third, and perhaps most important, the hipster in both historical periods knows how to consume: “The hipster is the cultural figure of the person, very possibly, who now understands consumer purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption . . . like the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right foods for that matter—to be a form of art.”25
This generalized lifestyle aestheticism connects the semicriminal hipster of, for instance, The Wild One to the intellectualized hipster of 10:04. But while the ’50s hipster is all blustery self-assertion, a self-assertion whose extreme is actually psychopathic, the intellectualized hipster is hampered by layers of self-reflexivity and doubt, a doubt that extends to his aestheticism itself. Is it really possible for Lerner’s narrator to “work [his] way from irony to sincerity,” as he announces he intends? Such a path is a signal instance of what Lee Konstantinou calls “post-irony,” an ethos captured by writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace.26 Lerner represents a further stage in this post-ironic trajectory. One can imagine some version of post-irony that would permit a full-throated return to a confident aestheticism, an unabashed neo art for art’s sake. Although there is a sense in which the dandy has always been linked to criticality, the peculiar species of self-doubt suffered by the intellectualized hipster blunts his critical arsenal, a dilemma having everything to do with that originary “supermaleness” shared by the hipster and the dandy. As Schwenger puts it, “the masculine mode” is marked by a “despair that shadows the reflexive life.” For the hipster, as Schwenger says of the practitioner of the masculine mode more generally, “Self-consciousness is a crack in the wholeness of his nature.”27 Such despairing self-consciousness is, arguably, Lerner’s major novelistic theme.
The aestheticist dandy is an ironist, sure, and all irony is marked by reflexivity, but he is not ironical about the importance of art. Such a path does not seem possible for Lerner’s hero, though, who instead embraces—though in quotation marks, as it were—that least dandiacal of options, fatherhood. On the terms established by 10:04, fatherhood is a solution to the failure of the aesthetic object to transcend its context or to redeem its world. (To be sure, this, too, is ironized: but post-irony is not non-irony.) By reproducing, the intellectualized hipster will attempt to corner the apocalypse into a draw, not art for art’s sake but art for the sake of the child. Earlier I called Lerner “precious.” I didn’t mean it pejoratively. “Preciousness,” in this context, is what happens to the aesthete who has become unsure about aestheticism. I am tempted to suggest that this uncertainty is the dandy’s terminus. I am not sure, though, that a comeback is not somewhere in the offing.