Zizek om hipsters

"It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1‘s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth." 

It should by now be obvious that the utterance “hipster” finds its analogue in the sobbing flight of the debutante who arrives at the dance only to discover that another girl is wearing an identical dress. The debutante’s double calls into question her own sense of self. In order to avoid Girardian annihilation and rejoin her self she must flee from the sight of her double. But what would it mean if the debutante had planned the entire social disaster, including the existence of her own double and her ridiculous exit, in advance? The utterance “hipster” presents us with just such a scenario. 

The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body. 

- Slavoj Zizek - L’etat d’hipster (översatt) via Generation Bubble