tola brennan

ARE mustaches cool? Uncool? Or so painfully uncool they are actually kind of hip? It’s possible they are all three at once, depending on who is wearing one and who is taking notice.

-Nick Burns, The New York Times

Along the windswept reverberating ocean of time sails a galley with a mast of science, sails of technology, a body of industry, a bowsprit of freedom, a rudder of optimism, and a silver haired entrepreneur at the helm. At a speedy clip, the future is pierced by the bow. But slowly, the dolphins disperse and the sun is obscured by mist. A tempest brews. Waves the height of skyscrapers bombard the galley till it fragments in confused resignation. The shards mingle with the storm. They land willy nilly and stick in between the toes of couples walking along the beach. But meanwhile, the storm has subsided into a ethereal fog. Cries of “whence?” and “wither?” pierce the air like lost dogs looking for shelter. This shifty vortex scurries to the bottom-most corners of the mind, and demands addressal. How do we, the inhabitants of the realm they call postmodern burn through the mist? We mostly close our eyes. But sometimes we wear skinny jeans and dance. This is about when we wear skinny jeans, and dance in the mist. And now, let our swimming commence.  Let us dive apart from the shallows. And now we shall inquire:

Postmodernism must semantically find its origins in modernism. The word modernism has a variety of applications, but in this context it is best understood as a cultural movement intimately tied to large-scale industrialization and post-Enlightenment European thought.  The Latin root of modern, modo, meaning “just now”, does much to exemplify the term. It is also useful to distinguish this facet of modernism from its earlier pejorative connotations, which denote something along the lines of simply following a fad of merely ephemeral importance, to its more recent positive implications which align the word more closely with modernization as “other and better than what had gone before” (Osborne 348). From this characterization, we can surmise that modernism is pragmatic, reforming, forward-looking and concerned above all with the future as opposed to the tradition-bound past.

However, for our purposes, it is most important to note that, “when viewed as a distinctive quality emanating out of ‘the West,’ or claimed as property of particular social groups, the modern becomes a standard against which other customs or ways of life are judged” (Morris, Sakai 219). Thus, by aiming to be inclusive and complete, much of modernism is paradoxically a purposeful exclusion of peripheral cultures and ideas which reveals it to be a fundamentally flawed and ironically transient framework.

By nature of its prefix, postmodernism is necessarily contingent upon the modern, and is very likely to be rebelling against it as well, which is an ironically modernist tactic. This arises from the first usage of the term postmodernism in 1870 by the English painter John Watkins Chapman (Storey 269) who used it to mean “more avant-garde than the avant-garde”. This particular meaning underscores an obsession with being continuously à la mode. Indeed, this quality can be extended so far as to include the maintaining of a facade of being perpetually in vogue, since it is, as we can surmise, exceedingly arduous in practice to be permanently avant-garde.

This preoccupation with constantly being contemporary, along with an advent of  technology which has allowed for mass production of both objects and media, eventually led to a rejection of the certainties on which modernist ideals depend, for example, the clear distinction between reality and illusion, original and duplicate, truth and simulation, and the notion that improvement is always a possibility, or even a necessity. In a cultural context, this development seems almost inevitable. When the idea of a superior present and future superseding an underdeveloped past metamorphoses into a lattice of constantly re-combining currents, it seems only natural that certitudes such as these must be eclipsed. For example, within the timeline of Eurological musical composition, we can see Schoenberg’s attempt at a unified and self-contained re-imagining of musical language become, through his student John Cage, a disparate realm of arbitrary experimentation which places chance at the center of the sonic maelstrom in his sonorously porous compositions Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), which is music for 12 channel drifting radios, or 4:33 (1952), which is simply a designated period of performed silence that directs attention to the surrounding incidental sounds, to name two of most notable.

Modernity, by aiming to progressively surpass its past on a mass scale, brought about its own demise partially due to a plethora of competing and mutually exclusive notions of the modern future. For example we can locate the friction of communism versus industrial-capitalism, acute nationalism versus internationalism, “high” culture versus popular culture as well as cubism versus surrealism. Thus, the often competing innovations in fields as disparate as industry, architecture, politics and the arts led to a diffusion and fragmentation of this modern endeavor. In other words, the sheer mass and arresting variety of cultural and industrial productions made it impossible to distinguish any single thread, much less determine a correct and right path. The ensuing post-modernity is therefore pluralist and inherently opposed to incontestable definition. Incommodingly, any discussion of postmodernism must be provisional,  provisional, provisional.

While modernity was busy destroying itself by overflowing its own boundaries and thus becoming post-modern, it was also being challenged by those who had traditionally been socially ostracized from its predominant meta-narratives. Women, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, Indigenous peoples, other non-Europeans, those with alternative sexualities, and almost anyone who had been generally excluded previously, refused to continue to be marginalized and began to succeed in gaining some measure of power and in having their voices heard. Furthermore, in many formerly colonialized countries this same process was also emerging. Of course, all these competing cultural narratives have worked to undermine the modernist hegemony.

While this was driven to some extent by mass immigration and weakening colonialism, this widespread evolution towards heterogeneity was almost entirely facilitated by the diffusion of new forms of media such as radio and television, as well as increasing accessibility to the newspaper and photograph. People, especially in the West, began to hear of and see, through technology, ways of being and thinking beyond the local truths they were accustomed to knowing as universal. Electronic media provided for a virtual cosmopolitanism which veritably precipitated all of the large-scale cultural movements of the last century. Iconic giants like Rock and Roll, the Hippies, Hip Hop, and most recently Hipsterism all owe their existence to the spontaneous combination of disparate cultures under the auspices of media transmission.

This disembodiment and duplicability of mechanical and electronic media also instituted a profound transformation on the workings of communication and artistic expression. Walter Benjamin famously:

described the result as a loss of ‘aura,’ the quality of singularity perceived as something numinous. Aura arises from the ‘unique existence [of an object of event] at the place where it happens to be’ (Benjamin 220), and persists in the quality of distance situated between the original object or event and its reproduction. Mechanical reproducibility collapses this distance and throws into question the very concept of an immediate, self-present origin. (Kramer 134)

This loss of aura, or escape from the authentic original, promulgated the circumstances which eventually allowed for an unprecedented commodification of art and of images in general. Beyond mere commodification, this estrangement of created from creator has extended so far as to potentiate simulacra, i.e. memes without a discoverable author. And most impactually, these new postmodern frameworks prime Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyper-reality, in which, the distinction between “real” and “imagined” is erased and the two polarities symbiotically generate a new mode of experience. With these successive leaps into the void of postmodernism, it is nearly a certainty that our identity as an individuals must be profoundly affected.

And at its core, identity is an image of the self as we perceive it, and simultaneously an image of the self as others perceive it. Modernist identity has traditionally been broken into these two categories of inner and outer.  This clear differentiation is rooted in, “the Christian idea of the soul, and in particular by Reformation Protestantism” (Hunter 318) and an ethical concern with the transcendental doer behind the deed. In this context, the inner identity is synonymous with the self.

During the Enlightenment, the self was seen as consistent, totally authentic and characterized as “the conception of the human person as a fully centered, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action… The essential center of the self was a person’s identity” (Hall 275). This “Enlightenment Subject” (Hall 275) endured fundamentally unchanged in the modernist conception of the self, “If there have been significant shifts in the criteria of individual distinction, however, the principles of autobiographical unity and coherence, and of consistency (even accumulation) through time, have remained central to the autobiographical project” (Robins 172). What these archaic notions have in common is that they all presuppose an a priori self which, instead of being shaped by culture, simply interfaces with it.

Unsurprisingly, according to this model, one’s internal identity remains consistent while the outer identity is a constantly shifting mask which adopts a myriad of different forms depending on circumstances. External personae may shift and combine to serve one’s interests and needs most successfully, but there is a constant awareness that one’s true self is being veiled in the process. This is a decidedly essentialist assumption. In many ways, however, the concept of a dualistic identity allows for an imagined internal sanctuary. The core self is a secure place of refuge within which individuality can be safely retained.

However, as postmodernism undeniably fragmented many of our cultural and artistic paradigms, it would seem that its reach would also extend to ourselves. When postmodernism destroyed the univocal Eurocentric meta-narrative, it would follow that this new pluralism would equally apply to our conceptions of self. When truth is no longer definite, our essential self is no longer paramount. We are forced to reconsider the position of our inner core and our outer facades. Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are among the many who have accepted this conundrum and treated the issue.

Jacques Lacan’s discourse about identity, unsurprisingly, begin with infancy. Between the age of six and twelve months:

Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this ‘jubilation’ as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. (Sharpe 2a)

Lacan, by following the implications of this mirror-stage, concludes that, “the genesis of individuals’ sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up” (Sharpe 2a). Lacan stresses that the self is, from its origins, an object.

Secondly, Lacan, throughout his career held that, “desire is the desire of the Other….human-beings need to learn how and what to desire” (Sharpe 2b). First, the infant emulates the mother by attempting both to desire what the mother desires and to become the perfect object of the mother’s desire. However, eventual estrangement forces the child’s object of desire to shift away from the mother, though the child:

can at least have a satisfying substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is that the individual’s imaginary identifications…have been supplemented by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an ‘ego ideal’. This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. (Sharpe 2d)

The ego ideal is organized by these cultural directives, which Lacan calls ‘master signifiers’:

These are those signifiers that the subject most deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the way s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan’s idea about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that they add to the subject’s field of symbolic sense. It is rather the efficacy they have in reorienting the subject vis-à-vis all of the other signifiers which structure his/her sense of herself and the world. It is precisely this primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master signifiers are actually ‘empty signifiers’ or ‘signifiers without a signified’. (Sharpe 4a)

Judith Butler both criticizes and builds upon this conception of identity as well as upon many of the ideas of Michel Foucault. While Lacan sees this estrangement from the mother, and subsequent dependence on master signifiers, as a necessary development, Foucault characterizes signification as a violent act in which the metaphorical “body is the inscribed surface of events”, dramatically referring to this as the “destruction of the body” (Foucault 148). The “body”, i.e. the self is constricted and mutated by cultural signification to such a point that the body itself becomes a signifier. The “body” becomes a purely social phenomenon.

Butler notes that, “this corporeal destruction is necessary to produce the speaking subject and its signification” (Butler 130). Thus, this violent act is crucial to ensure the intelligibility of the signification system, and for society to function. However, Foucault writes, “nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault 153). Foucault and Butler’s main complaint seems to be that this inscription imposes a “single drama” to the aggressive exclusion of all others. These master signifiers, the contents of the outer identity, are enclosing the body, or the contents of an ascribed inner identity. This parallels, in many ways, the imposition of the singular modernist meta-narrative on the actually rich and diverse cultural spectrum in which people create and live.

Butler goes on to challenge the polarity of modernist identity:

‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability…. Hence, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the ‘inner world’ no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self… becomes similarly suspect. (Butler 134)

She is, in effect, suggesting that “inner” and “outer”, themselves imaginary constructs,  are simply the premises on which to the build a binary identity resplendent with imaginary barriers. And as such, this binary identity is forcibly contrived by the terms of the symbol system. She vehemently describes this process as “domination” (Butler 144).

Continuing her critique of the impasse of essentialist identities, she reformulates identity as a performance of ritually repeated acts and gestures. If identity is imposed, “through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Butler 141). And hence she lauds parody, since “The loss of the sense of ‘normal’, however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when the ‘normal’, ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laugher emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler 138).

Following from these two notions, she concludes that if identity, “the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no pre-existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured” (Butler 141). Butler argues that the notion of a pre-formed intrinsic identity results from forced exclusion on the terms of a shared symbol system. However, this underscores that identity is “performed”, whether through compliant repetition or creative and subversive variation. Her conclusion: identity is an act, though not an act which obscures another layer of identity. Both components are synonymous.

Postmodern identity therefore sharply contrasts modern identity. Modern identity begins with a timeless and permanent notion of the self. However, with the diffusion of multi-culturalism, mass media and the reproducibility of creations, this purist perspective eventually fragmented into the much less definitive postmodern identities. Lacan approaches identity by attributing it to “master signifiers”. Foucault dramatizes this into a cultural ravage on the pristine and victimized metaphorical “body”. Butler adapts this to sunder the polarity of “inner” and “outer” identity and concludes that identity is, at its sheer nucleus, an act.

If these are the challenges of the postmodern identity, how do we consolidate these increasingly unavoidable complications? When there is no longer recourse to retreat into the sanctuary of the “inner” self, how do we formulate ourselves? When nothing within the self has certainty, or basis for certainty, how do we maintain individuality? And most prominently, how do we flourish as people amid so many contradictions?

One reaction to this incessant conundrum involves blatantly denying that any of these theoretical and cultural developments ever took place. A total retreat into an imagined, pre-Enlightenment conception of the self is Fundamentalism, which is best understood as adhering all the more vigorously to the Abrahamic religions in the face of the “ubiquity of the ‘outside world’ that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore because of the easy accessibility of information via twenty-first-century technologies of communication” (Schimmel 180). Though, “the power and attraction of religious convictions manifest themselves as well in their adaptability to apparent disconfirmation of beliefs by modifying the beliefs or generating new and novel ones that are incorporated into the belief system” (Schimmel 170). In short, fundamentalism is more of a social position than a firm religious belief system.

Furthermore, this process is no longer due to ignorance, it is a willful resistance to accepting pluralism. Its adherents are witnessing the effects of postmodernism while retreating into the singular confines and social exclusions of their religious certitudes. This fundamentalist attitude has always had foes, and the most successful in exposing what is faux about fundamentalism is the “hip”. Indeed, “mass hip is one of America’s protections against religious or political fundamentalism” (Leland 309).

So what is the “hip”? Here’s a good start: “A 1930 lexicon called American Tramp and Underworld Slang proposed, somewhat dubiously, that the vernacular use of hip came from ‘having one’s hip boots on—i.e., the way in which they protect the wearer from bad weather or dangerous currents is analogous to the way in which awareness or sophistication arms one against social perils.’ This is a suspect etymology, but a beautiful metaphor for the actions of hip, a stillness amid chaotic motion” (Leland 12). A more believable root is this: “Clarence Major, in his study Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, traces the origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi (“to see”) or hipi (“to open one’s eyes”), and dates its usage in America to the 1700s” (Leland 5).

The semantic origins by themselves are already fecund, but let’s move on. Hipness, while obviously being closely associated with the avant-garde, and being of course counter-cultural to some degree, is also “an undercurrent of enlightenment, organized around contradictions and and anxieties” (Leland 15). Being hip is not safe and secure. It is competitive and always in flux. And most importantly, “Hip is a social relation…. Even at its most subterranean, it exists in public view, its parameters defined by the people watching it…. Hip requires transaction, an acknowledgment” (Leland 8).

Hipness is by nature postmodern. It incorporates both irony and pastiche. On this stylistic level:

People who have never seen a Jim Jarmusch movie or an arty music video can recognize either as an articulation of hip. Specifically, what they recognize is this: the elevation of style and background as narrative and foreground. (Leland 10) In its essence, “hip is utterly mongrel. Which is to say, purism has no place in hip…. Born in the dance between black and white, hip thrives on juxtaposition and pastiche. It connects the disparate and contradictory” (Leland 11). In short, if something isn’t a little bit ironic or a little bit contradictory, it probably isn’t hip. In other words, if something isn’t a little bit ironic or a little bit contradictory, it probably isn’t postmodern.

Of course the hip has manifested with abundance throughout time, however, this argument focuses on twenty-first century hipsterism as the most zeitgeisty and most authentic embodiment of the postmodern strain of hipness. While hipster is far from a new word, or a new movement, certain elements of hipsterism have coalesced primarily in post-9/11 New York City, and particularly in the East Village, the Lower East Side and across the river in Williamsburg to form a somewhat contiguous subculture. However, hipsterism has not been restricted to New York. As it has become a catch-phrase in mass culture, Hipsterism has expanded to most major American and European cities, but can flourish anywhere with a passable nightlife, music-scene, clothing stores, and of course, a community of fellow hipsters.

The first thing to notice is that hipster is almost always used as a derogatory term. An integral part of being a hipster is a denial of hipsterism. Secondly, the people who most frequently use the word hipster are often accused of being hipsters themselves. Here is an elegant and graceful example:

In literal terms therefore, there are no hipsters. It’s a subculture with an apparently very low self-esteem. However, “after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of ‘counter-culture’ have merged together. Now, one mutating, Transatlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the ‘Hipster’ (Haddow 1). Unsurprisingly, few people who aim towards enacting the hip want to be associated with a word which generalizes so broadly. In short, once hipster became a universally known word denoting a particular aesthetic, it stopped being hip. Nonetheless, the word characterizes this still quite vigorous subculture most accurately.

Despite such endless and perennially changing motifs as thick-rimmed black glasses, skinny jeans, plaid shirts, dance parties, slang, fixed gear bikes and an obsession with coffee shops and record stores, being a hipster has a strong teleological component. All these often referenced external characteristics denote a fervent obsession with appearance and presentation, in short, the performative identity. Enacting a performative identity as a hipster requires the elevation of the aesthetic to such an extent that other considerations for the identity become secondary. Being a hipster entails performing a public aesthetic as the main fixture of the self. Of course, this aesthetic is none other than attempting to effortlessly and totally enact the hip,  that is to embody contradictions and dance between polarities. Thus, the hippest hipster is one who can put aside almost everything, including happiness, friendship, dreams, desires and all of the constants that we generally associate with the identity if need be, just for the sake of being hip.

To achieve this state of hipness involves transmuting the modernist identity into the performative identity in a specific way. This process involves authenticity, a quality which is applied to that which we hold to be the most tangibly meaningful and truthful. It generally has social implications and is used to the describe “the ability to be a reflective individual who discerns what is genuinely worth pursuing within the social context in which he or she is situated” (Guignon 155). Thus, authenticity requires a belief in discernible certitudes and commitments for to it to have value, and is, in this respect, quite emblematic of the modern. In conflict with authenticity is irony, which is always concerned with double meanings, and thus with facades. Quite simply, “irony consists of purporting a meaning of an utterance or a situation that is different, often opposite, to the literal one” (Williams 1). Indeed, layers are crucial to irony and complexity within the layers makes for more irony. Irony, by its polysemic, pluralist, humorous, and parody and pastiche-ridden nature is intimately tied to the postmodern circumstance. Postmodernism thusly enervates the value of authenticity and displaces it with irony.

This transition is quite problematic, and indeed quite terrifying. Recourse to a stable and consistent authenticity as a source of qualitative judgement is comforting and cements what is real and important. Irony instead provokes questions and leaves confusion in its wake. This is not to condemn irony, simply to note that it does not provide security. Naturally, by living in a postmodern world, and not a seemingly secure modern one, the gap filled by a belief in certitude is left empty. Though we, as a culture, acknowledge this lack of certitude and its impossibility, there remains a desperate need for something definite, at the least an appearance of substance. It is this need which hipsterism’s elevation of aesthetic appearance attempts to alleviate. It aims to make the hip so elusive yet so powerful that it can fulfill this need for a coherent, authentic niche to fall into.

So, we can associate the authentic in this sense with the inner self and the ironic with the projected outer self.  Though this ordering only describes someone who retains the image of a core identity while showing an array of whimsical facades. However, this still fails to assimilate the postmodern. In this paradigm, there is still a hierarchical ordering of the identity, which is precisely what Butler, for example, aims to refute. Truly enacting the hip demands that the inner authentic self and the outer ironic self be, not be erased as one might suppose, but instead fused so that there is no such practical distinction. In figurative terms, the barrier between the inner and outer identity is lifted so that the two polarities can intermingle. This results in the possibility of acting with authenticity and irony in equal portions. Any aesthetic decision is both ironic and authentic simultaneously, and cannot be perceived as either.  This restructuring resolves the conflict of inner and outer and results in a purely performative identity, one which is whole and without malaise.

In this state, the inner self is outwardly apparent, and effects upon the outer identity penetrate inwards. Thus, in literal terms, there is still, in some senses, an inner and outer identity,  this depiction no longer denotes anything other than the distinction between private thoughts and spoken words. This aesthetic state is extraordinarily freeing and allows for unprecedented extensions of creativity, especially as it applies to originating cultural memes. Of course, this aesthetic state in not infinite, just as being hip is never infinite. Yet it illustrates the ideal to which a hipster aspires. It means being really really cool.

And this is where hipsterism gains its merit. This aesthetic of authentic and ironic conjoined has immense staying power, and is responsible for the global explosion of hipsterism. The authentic aspect of the performed aesthetic fulfills a desire for purpose and substantial experience, one which is decidedly lacking in conventional mainstream culture. Secondly, the ironic aspect of the hipster postmodern aesthetic makes it enticing and approachable, since the hipster aesthetic demands no commitment, and a dated meme can always be cast aside if it ceases to to effect hipness. This allows hipsterism to create and refurbish culture without the same pressures which a defined social framework places on artistic expression.

Thus, there are hipsters who generate hipsterism by assimilating the postmodern identity and creating exciting, wonderful and alluring memes, and there are the multitudes who latch on to these memes, including corporate interests, yuppies, and and everyone in between who have made hipsterism as popular as it has become. These mimics are of course not actually enacting the hip, they are merely copying those who do. Doing so entails observing what to desire, and then acting accordingly. Of course, it becomes harder and harder to differentiate between the real hipster and the fake, since of course this is a framework that toys with authenticity from its very conception. Furthermore, a mimic may be momentary hip, and someone who enacts hip may stop developing. Despite the amount of crossover, mimics are distinguishable because they are not distinguished. Mimics show themselves because simply copying culture does not mean accepting and assimilating the postmodern, or uniting irony and authenticity. It simply means reaping the benefits, which manifest as appearing cool and avant-garde to those who are less cool and avant-garde, and aren’t aware that hip has already moved on.

And naturally, as hipsterism has expanded and the creative members turn elsewhere, the movement becomes more and more diluted till its current incarnation in which the majority of hipsterdom is the shell of a shell of a shell. But whatever the state of hipsterdom actually is, to mock it is to mock the hipster ideal and the anomaly ridden world of cultural innovation. And this hipster ideal has a very tangible significance. By elevating the hip and enacting it with this fusion of authenticity and irony, hipsterism allows us to find meaning in a postmodern world that is seemingly devoid of meaning. Indeed, by subverting these antinomic categories, hipster creates truth, however tangential and fluctuating it is.  And strangely enough, it creates truth in the modernist sense of the word. Hipsterism can alleviate our confused postmodern angst. And for that, we should be thankful.

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Works Cited:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) Illuminations. (ed.) Hannah  Arendt. Schocken: New York, 1969.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York, 1990

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Geneology, History”. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. (ed.) Donald Bouchard.  Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1977.

Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. Routledge, London 2004.

Douglas Haddow. “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”. Adbusters. Issue #79. 29 Jul. 2008. <http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html>

Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity”. Modernity and its Futures. (ed.) Tony McGrew, Stuart Hall and David Held.  Polity: Cambridge, 1992.

Hunter, Ian. “Self”. New Keywords, A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (ed.) Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meagan Morris. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005. 317 – 319.

Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2002

Leland, John. Hip: The History. Harper Collins: New York, 2004.

Morris, Meagan and Naoki Sakai. “Modern”. New Keywords, A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (ed.) Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meagan Morris. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005. 219 – 224.

Osborne, Peter. “Modernity”. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. (ed.) Michael Payne. Blackwell: Oxford, 1996

Robins, Kevin. “Identity”. New Keywords, A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (ed.) Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meagan Morris. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005. 172 -175.

Schimmel, Solomon. The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs, Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008.

Sharpe, Matthew. “Jacques Lacan”. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm>

Storey, John. “Postmodernism”. New Keywords, A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (ed.) Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meagan Morris. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005. 269 – 272.

Williams, Zoe. “The Final Irony”. The Guardian. 28 June, 2003. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/jun/28/weekend7.weekend2 >

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