I've just read a fascinating article in New York Magazine titled, What Was the Hipster? Here are some interesting points.
There was an aestheticization of the mode of pastiche, as a characteristic mode of postmodern narrative.
Here, “blank parody” gave way to a reconstruction of past techniques more perfect than the originals, in an irony without sarcasm, bitterness, or critique. Reflexivity was used as a means to get back to sentimental emotion.
After 9/11 the wifebeater-wearer’s machismo no longer felt subversive, the artistic concern with innocence turned from human absolution to the fragile world where life transpired in some more loving, spacious, and manageable future.
In culture, the Hipster Primitive moment recovered the sound and symbols of pastoral innocence with irony.
The contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption. However the game of knowing-in-advance can be played with maximum refinement.
Within the Hipster Primitive there emerged a glimmer of an idea of refusal.
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