The political-economy of hipsterdom

The venerable Monthly Review must have been doing some market research on its target audience (i.e. uh... us), because they published this gem of a review of Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City. When I was in love with sociology, when I thought I was reading really earth-shattering work, it was when I was delving into the workplace ethnography. Starting with Braverman, with lots of Burawoy, and following the labor process literature as it recognized the shear breadth of experiences that constitute "the workplace." It's fucking fascinating stuff. And it looks like this book follows nicely in that tradition.

A few choice quotes from the review by Forrest Perry - which is in and of itself worth the read:

The understanding Lloyd’s interviewees have of themselves in the world of work is not without its blind spots and tensions, however. Many of the people Lloyd interviews fail to see that the life of risk and instability they take themselves to have freely chosen is a life they (and most Americans) are more or less forced to choose. As Lloyd explains, with several decades of deindustrialization and the decline of Fordism has come the dominance of a new, “flexible” mode of capitalist accumulation, which generates insecure jobs in the very sectors Wicker Park’s artist types find employment. The artists in Wicker Park are like their bohemian predecessors in “insist[ing] upon their opposition to an imagined mainstream,” but they rely on an “imago of the mainstream [that] is anachronistic, as the old promises of career and social security under the terms of the Fordist corporation and the welfare state have increasingly evaporated.”

>snip<

Far from mounting resistance to capitalism in its neoliberal incarnation, Wicker Park’s neo-bohemians, precisely because they are bohemian, contribute to its reproduction. What counts as the artist lifestyle nowadays, Lloyd argues, has been deeply influenced by the legacy of bohemia, and bohemia has always been associated with urban spaces. With most artists being bohemian and all bohemians living in densely populated urban areas, spaces like Wicker Park become home to a reserve army of labor that the service and design industries benefit from having flexible access to. However, Chicago’s neo-bohemia does more than just concentrate an ample source of so-called creative labor in one area. As Lloyd points out time and again, it also fosters dispositions and attitudes particularly useful to capitalist accumulation in its post-Fordist form. For example, like bohemians in the past, Wicker Park’s artists take pride in tolerating material scarcity, thus constituting a pool of labor particularly well adapted to the needs of the neighborhood’s design firms, whose hiring (and firing) fluctuates in accordance with the volume of piece work they happen to have contracted out to them by corporate clients.

The book is now on my "when-I-have-disposable-income" wish list. A point of [cultural] production analysis of hipsterdom? That's the sort of shit that would've kept me in academia!