Avoiding Hipster Localism

Following Chris’ very kind comment on Friday, I thought I would resume my digging into what my sputtering about glocalism and glocalization really means. It’s all fine and well to talk about “globalizing the local” (Chris’ summary) and maintaining global networks and interconnectivity that avoids visiting a corresponding violence upon local cultures and communities, but what is necessary for this idea to spark a real discussion is something approaching a coherent outline or structure. I’m getting there in bits and pieces, slowly but surely; however, the challenge here is that in some senses I’m still building the boat as I set sail. So I imagine that the whole project comes off a touch disjointed and schismatic.

I think Chris’ framing the discussion in terms of trying to introduce some verticality into Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude is helpful and it is true that I have actually drawn some vague and abstract inspiration from Hardt and Negri’s vision. Truth be told, though, I have started and stopped Multitude three times now, never really getting into the meat of it. Most of my understanding of what Hardt Negri outline there within comes from conversations with a good friend who speaks both highly and critically of the work and a handful of videos on YouTube that I’ve watched primarily featuring Michael Hardt.

However, Multitude is back on deck in terms of my reading schedule and the last time I had started I was actually quite into it — coincidentally, I suspended that reading to take on Barnett’s Great Powers. I intend to make a sizable dent in the book over the course of this weekend and am hopeful that doing so will flesh out some ideas in some interesting ways.

But in terms of why glocalism’s bee is stuck in my blogging bonnet, I tend to take as much inspiration from my interactions with a variety of localists around the blogosphere and their articulation of an ideal, or at least more sustainable, enjoyable, and manageable world.

Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Nathan Origer, Russell Arben Fox (hell, basically everyone at Front Porch Republic), and here at the League our own E.D. Kain present what I consider to be a powerful and compelling analysis of our modern lives and the ways in which we might choose to alter those lives towards a better end. I lock horns with these characters as much as I do precisely because I am so impressed with the vision they present, which is a vision that underwrites a great many of the ways I live my life and the values that inform my life.

Ultimately; however, I am unwilling to set up stakes with them entirely (a fact that is distinct, but probably not entirely separate from my same predilection around ideological and partisan camps) because there is something in their vision that requires… massaging. When I was thinking about my own articulations around glocalism, it occurred to me that apart from this value for the local that is present and an aversion to overt centralization in favour of a more organic, if not messy and uncertain, symbiotic decentralized crucible, an element of my articulation stems directly from that subtle discomfort I have with strict localist interpretations.

The verticality that Chris identifies has as much to do with addressing that discomfort as it does with transfiguring Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude.

There seems to be an almost ever present discussion and debate about the role that hipsters play in our contemporary culture. This elusive yet ubiquitous cultural icon seems as difficult to slay as a Lernaean Hydra — each time you expose one of a hipster’s pernicious shortcomings to the light of day, an even more aberrant iteration appears in its place. Almost universally despised, hipster culture seems ever able to exert a distinct yet vaporous influence on our collective identity through some sort of  subconscious cultural autopoiesis.

At core; however, I think that hipsterism is less about jagged edge fashion sensibilities, musical over-refinement, and proximal value diffusion, than it is about a state of mind — an attitude or disposition. So-called hipsters are universally despised precisely because they are perceived as the ultimate in-group, the hyper-elite counter culture to which you will never really belong nor understand.

It is this same frame of mind that my ruminations around glocalism are designed to avoid. The last thing we need is the rise of a hipster localism.

Which is not to say that I think everyone I mentioned above and any and all localists out there are hipster localists or that localism’s logical conclusion lies within some hipster variant. Rather, my purpose here is to suggest that we stand a much better chance of avoiding that forsaken domain if we alter our trajectory slightly and assume a glocalist posture. Neither am I suggesting that the whole reason d’etre of glocalism is to avoid this potential cul-de-sac, but I think there are significant ramifications to doing so that make glocalism a preferable framework.

In a skype/podcast conversation between myself, Freddie, and John Schwenkler that, for unfortunate technical reasons, will never see the light of day, Freddie commented that it is unfair to judge the ideas and values expressed by localists based on the fact that they tend to arise amongst those who occupy a relatively comfortable to distinctly wealthy socio-economic space. Freddie’s point in making that comment was to say that the ideas themselves possess a certain merrit that ought not to be dismissed based on the individuals presenting them — i.e. we ought not to judge the merits of localism on an ad hominem basis.

I acknowledge that I have as much as inferred just such a criticism to localist critiques, though generally I have made the point less about specific individuals and their relative circumstances and more pointed out that it seems a bit convenient for those of us in a relatively wealthy portion of the world to decided to pull up stakes and not desire to engage the rest of the world upon whose backs we have arguably cultivated our own wealth and relative comfort.

That argument still contains a degree of salience for me, but I take Freddie’s point generally and recognize how my own argument fundamentally fails to grapple with the core subject matter in question. In that regard, it is worth pointing that I take the underlying vision and values espoused by localists to be among the most intellectually and ethically satisfying of those available.

But I think there is some fundamental damage inflicted upon that vision if the practical end point is even a moderate exclusivist culture of hipster localism. Being as that I hold the values and ideas of the localist paradigm in such high regard, it only makes sense that one of my primary goals is to go about exploring how it might be that those values and ideas might best be shared around and implemented as far and wide as possible. A failure to take up that kind of attitude, which I should note is not so much an attitude of paternalistic meddling as much as it is one of fraternal solidarity — just the type of community spirit that localists prize regionally, extended in such a way as to create linkages between different regions without giving in to the trappings of mono-culturizing (call this inter-subjective community building?) — is I think far too open to the kind of in-grouping phenomenon that provides the source for so much hipster derision.

Hence the coining of hipster localism.

But it isn’t just that in-grouping is a phenomenon to which most human beings have a negative reaction, which is to say that my concern isn’t just emotive in nature, but rather that there are structural challenges that such in-grouping or hipster localism tends to cultivate, which, over time, will undermine its ultimate goal of a better quality of life. How valuable might we consider a conceptual schema designed to improve quality of life, but only the quality of life for a relatively small sliver of the possible lives to be improved. Wouldn’t we consider this less of a “movement” and more of a “cult”?

Now, undoubtedly cult is too strong a word for what we’re talking about here, but the slippery slope that I’m looking to avoid here is the always tempting stagnation of “I’ve-got-mine-ism” that acts as perhaps the ultimate nemesis of community. Part of what I take to be a major focus of localists is to address the kind of pervasive bowling alone that has overcome our modern lives and rendered notions of community as quaint throwbacks to more sentimental times.

The overt focus on the individual to the exclusion of the broader context in which that individual lives, breathes, exists, is perhaps the most disturbing component of hyper-modern living and results in any number of different manifestations of fraying around our social edges.  Such an effort is, at least in my estimation, an attempt to reconcile and find balance within the autonomy of the individual and the reality of the collective in such a way that the benefits of communal living upon which we depend as social creatures are not allowed to overshadow the importance of  living one’s life in as free a manner as possible.

My goal in articulating a slight inflection of this effort, is to extend the context one step further. If localists have found what seems like a winning formulation of placing the individual within a specific place and time without eradicating said individual, does it not stand to reason that we could perhaps do the same for the individual communities that speckle our map? And I worry that an unwillingness to explore this possibility will ultimately lead to a tainting of the very community spirit we have, in many regards, set out to cultivate and protect so fiercely.

Our verticality, as Chris put it, is not only a helpful and innovative iteration, but perhaps also a necessary move for intellectual survival. My intuition is that part of that process necessarily involves a reorientation to our notions about how globalization works and what the structures involved in said globalization stand to accomplish. And in this regard I consider a glocalist posture to be as co-optive towards globalization as any localist or neo-marxist articulation, if not more so given its willingness to hide in plain sight.

At the end of the day, my continuing belief is that only directional potion is forward and that the question facing us is not whether we choose to move forward, but how we choose to make that move. A striking revisioning of the way we understand both ourselves and our place in the world is always available, but has to be capable of grappling with the predominant dynamics and contexts at play if it is to assume the lasting relevance of more than just a passing fad. As is true in most other circumstances, no localist should want to be accurately labeled a hipster and, indeed, I doubt very much that those with whom I have had the privilege to engage are likely to voluntarily affect such a pose.

It is in this regard, I suspect, that most localists are closeted glocalists, they just don’t know it yet.

Tagged as: Community, freedom, globalization, glocalism, hipsters, localism