Some thoughts on hipsterism, and constructive vs deconstructive forces; or the queer art of reconstruction

I just finished David Foster Wallace's excellent essay 'E Unibus Pluram', a meditation on entertainment (well, TV), culture and literature.  I don't really want to write tonight about TV or literature, per se, but I do have some thing to say about irony, hipsterism and queerness.  Hopefully you'll understand what I mean by the end of this post.

Wallace basically claims that TV has appropriated post-modern aesthetics in order to sell shit.  Specifically, TV has become almost fully ironic, allowing the watcher to feel in on the joke, and therefore special.  This has all sorts of ramifications, but I want to focus on Wallace's feelings on irony.  This essay is, essentially, a take down of hipsterism written in 1993, before our current hipsters had stopped wetting their beds.  Wallace writes:

'Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their own cage.' This is because irony, as entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow... oppressed.

That is, irony is a deconstructive force.  Irony allows us to take things apart, to question paradigms.  It allows us to ridicule.  As Wallace claims, it exposes hypocrisy.  Irony, therefore, can be an incredibly potent tool when it comes to exposing terrible things we often live with without thinking too hard about it.  Irony does not, as Wallace points out, necessarily provide alternative modes of living.  

This is my problem with 'hipsterism': hipsters are too cool for school in an exclusive and terrible way.  They deconstruct everything they see.  They live, as others have pointed out, an extended adolescence, balking at the idea of a wife/husband/kids/white-picket-fence/suburban life.  I fuck with hipsters on this last point.  I think the nuclear family and the societal norms saying that everyone should be in a monogamous relationship and on the path to home ownership are entirely janked.   What hipsterism doesn't offer is an alternative, unless you consider listening to loud music that no one has ever heard of and drinking terrible beer ad infinitum a viable life-style.

I have been going on some first dates lately (yes).  Inevitably, on first dates, the conversation about expectations and long-term future potential comes up.  The reason I have been going on first dates (don't ask) also started me thinking about constructive versus deconstructive forces.  See, for all my queer theory bullshit, turns out a lot of what I want in life is fairly traditional.  I might or might not require/want a monogamous relationship, but I definitely want a partner, and I want to live with this person and think about having kids some time in a near-ish future.  And although I want to live in the same building as all my best friends so my future child can have about 6 co-parents (I believe these used to be called things like Aunties and Uncles), the things I DO want might look a lot like some fun-house mirror version of what most people I went to high school with want.  

And this is the thing.  Queerness isn't just a deconstructive force.  As post-modernists (?), queer folks have been spectacular at pointing out all the flaws in the system.  We can pick heteronormativity apart like hyenas feasting on a fresh kill.  Given our relationship to (and oppression by) heternormative forces, this is in our blood.  But the thing about actually BEING queer as opposed to being a queer THEORIST is that we have to live within the confines of the world we make for ourselves.  

That is, queerness is also a constructive force.  Tearing down walls of bullshit heteronormitivity isn't enough.  We have to construct a queer house in which to live.  We have to try as hard as we can to understand all the forces that socialized us into believing relationships have to look a certain way, and decide how we want our relationships to ACTUALLY look.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them towards lives that might look normative, from the outside.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them to have several partners, or none.  But all of these decisions, because they are intentional and thoughtful and queer, are constructive.  We are providing an alternative, if only for ourselves.  As weary and cynical as we might be (and as I certainly am at this present moment), we do believe in brighter, better alternatives, and I, for one, am willing to risk my future on the fact that I can build a queer alternative within whose walls I, personally, can live.