Norman Mailer
THE WHITE NEGRO
Superficial Reflections on the Hipster
Our search for the rebels of the generation led us to the hipster.
The hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character
with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformists by lying
low ... You can't interview a hipster because his main goal is to
keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to make everyone
over in its own image. He takes marijuana because it supplies him
with experiences that can't be shared with "squares." He may
affect a broad-brimmed hat or a zoot suit, but usually he prefers to
skulk unmarked. The hipster may be a jazz musician; he is rarely
an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty
criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a freelance moving man
in Greenwich Village, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge
in the upper income brackets as television comics or movie actors.
(The late James Dean, for one, was a hipster hero.) ... It is
tempting to describe the hipster in psychiatric terms as infantile,
but the style of his infantilism is a sign of the times. He does not
try to enforce his will on others, Napoleon-fashion, but contents
himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never
tested. . . . As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation,
he exercises a powerful if underground appeal for conformists,
through newspaper accounts of his delinquencies, his structureless
jazz, and his emotive grunt words.
- "Born 1930: The Unlost Generation "
by Caroline Bird
Harper's Bazaar, Feb. 1957
Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration
camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these
years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we
have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our
personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas
and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to
die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted,
and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and
unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to
serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deux ex machina in a gas chamber
or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization-that civilization founded upon
the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social
cause and effect-in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence
that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the
intolerable anxiety that death being causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and
effect had come to a stop.
The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded
anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out
of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always
insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter
how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was
nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the
past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of
questions about his own nature?
Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one's
own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an
elite by being a radical were forever gone. A man knew that when he dissented, he gave
a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then
that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come
out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The
only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated
courage of isolated people.
2.
It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American
existentialist-the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live
with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l'univers
concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and
rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and
the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of
twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence,
why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death
as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out
on that uncharted journey with the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether
the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to
explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness,
and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future,
memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he
must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and
unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to
swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brillance, quivers with the
knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one's power for new kinds of perception;
and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one's energy until
one is jailed in the prison air' of other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom,
quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the
alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel),
one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night
life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed
willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a
partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands, for the general anxiety is
greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often
takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro
for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two
centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of
American life is probably due to jazz, and its knifelike entrance into culture, its subtle
but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation-that postwar generation of
adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of
disillusionment and disgust of the twenties, the depression, and the war. Sharing a
collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too
many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of
the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual
antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H.
Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fit most
of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time
out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandize), in a bad world there is no
love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and this
indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more
precisely was Hemingway's categorical imperative that what made him feel good
became therefore The Good.
So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New
Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris
and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro
had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed-the
bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-toface with the Negro, and the hipster
was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the
language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could
share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was
the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro, who wishes to live must live with
danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can
saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.
The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family,
are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the
simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In
such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro has stayed alive
and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the
cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions
admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept
for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted
for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more
obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and
quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl,
cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of
orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the
communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost
killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential
states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art
because it said, "I feel this, and now you do too."
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at
night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had
absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be
considered a white Negro.
To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself-one must know one's
rages, one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration and know
what would satisfy it. The overcivilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and
deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the
contrary) one must be religious, one must have one's sense of the I 'purpose"-whatever
the purpose may be-but a life which is directed by one's faith in the necessity of action
is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end
meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one's emotions
provide their profound conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from
their unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all;
indeed only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then
proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the microscopically
senuous and all but ineffable frissons of mental becoming, in order finally to create the
theology of atheism and so submit that in a world of absurdities the existential absurdity
is most coherent.
In the dialogue between the atheist and the mystic, the atheist is on the side of life,
rational life, undialectical life-since he conceives of death as emptiness, he can, no
matter how weary or despairing, wish for nothing but more life; his pride is that he does
not transpose his weakness and spiritual fatigue into a romantic longing for death, for
such appreciation of death is then all too capable of being elaborated by his imagination
into a universe of meaningful structure and moral orchestration.
Yet this masculine argument can mean very little for the mystic. The mystic can
accept the atheist's description of his weakness, he can agree that his mysticism was a
response to despair. And yet ... and yet his argument is that he, the mystic, is the one
finally who has chosen to live with death, and so death is his experience and not the
atheist's, and the atheist by eschewing the limitless dimensions of profound despair has
rendered himself incapable to judge the experience. The real argument which the mystic
must always advance is the very intensity of his private vision-his argument depends
from the vision precisely because what was felt in the vision is so extraordinary that no
rational argument, no hypotheses of "oceanic feelings" and certainly no skeptical
reductions can explain away what has become for him the reality more real than the
reality of closely reasoned logic. His inner experience of the possibilities within death is
his logic. So, too, for the existentialist. And the psychopath. And the saint and the
bullfighter and the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning
consciousness of the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which the
possibilities within death has opened for them. There is a depth of desperation to the
condition which enables one to remain in life only by engaging death, but the reward is
their knowledge that what is happening at each instant of the electric present is good or
bad for them, good or bad for their cause, their love, their action, their need.
It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of
the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting,
disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life
and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire
to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic,
and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as
moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into
death.
3.
It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man
interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at
least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed. By this
premise the hipster is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the
psychopath, for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that
absorption in the recessive nuances of one's own motive which is so alien to the
unreasoning drive of the psychopath. In this country where new millions of psychopaths
are developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture
(where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as if there has been room already for the
development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition,
from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which
thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of
the more conventional psychopath. Having converted his unconscious experience into
much conscious knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from
immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of
civilized man. Yet with an irreducible difference. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise
primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man. If there are
ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure is most
modest), there are probably not more than one hundred thousand men and women who
consciously see themselves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite
with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can
understand instinctively, for the hipster's intense view of existence matches their
experience and their desire to rebel.
Before one can say more about the hipster, there is obviously much to be said
about the psychic state of the psychopath-or, clinically, the psychopathic personality.
Now, for reasons which may be more curious than the similarity of the words, even
many people with a psychoanalytical orientation often confuse the psychopath with the
psychotic. Yet the terms are polar. The psychotic is legally insane, the psychopath is
not; the psychotic is almost always incapable of discharging in physical acts the rage of
his frustration, while the psychopath at his extreme is virtually as incapable of
restraining his violence. The psychotic lives in so misty a world that what is happening
at each moment of his life is not very real to him whereas the psychopath seldom knows
any reality greater than the face, the voice, the being of the particular people among
whom he may find himself at any moment. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck describe him as
follows:
The psychopath ... can be distinguished from the person sliding into or
clambering out of a "true psychotic" state by the long tough persistence of his anti-social
attitude and behaviour and the absence of hallucinations, delusions, manic flight of
ideas, confusion, disorientation, and other dramatic signs of psychosis.
The late Robert Lindner, one of the few experts on the subject, in his book Rebel
Without a Cause-The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath presented part of his
definition in this way:
... the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a
revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve
goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All
his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to
satisfy his immediate wishes and desires.... The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay
the pleasures of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal
characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands
should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the
development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines
by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for
immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only
his behaviour but also the violent nature of his acts.
Yet even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most sympathetic of the
psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality was not ready to project
himself into the essential sympathy-which is that the psychopath may indeed be the
perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become
the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over. For the
psychopath is better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon
violence and love which civilization has exacted of us, and if it be remembered that not
every psychopath is an extreme case, and that the condition of psychopathy is present
in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper
columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, call-girls, promiscuous homosexuals and
half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising, it can be seen that there
are aspects of psychopathy which already exert considerable cultural influence. .
What characterizes almost every psychopath and part-psychopath is that they are
trying to create a new nervous system for themselves. Generally we are obliged to act
with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the
style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore,
we are obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with
reflexes and rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the "dead weight of the
institutions of the past" but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits
of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which
might be exciting for our individual growth.
Through most of modern history, "sublimation" was possible: at the expense of
expressing only a small portion of oneself, that small portion could be expressed
intensely. But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to history. If the collective
life of a generation has moved too quickly, the "past" by which particular men and
women of that generation may function is not, let us say, thirty years old, but relatively
a hundred or two hundred years old. And so the nervous system is overstressed beyond
the possibility of such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable
middleclass values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our
time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a crisis of
accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends to be replaced by
psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even ten years ago gave
promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because of its inbuilt and
characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex, more experienced, or more
adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice, psychoanalysis has by now become all
too often no more than a psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as
aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to
exhaust themselves against the analyst's nonresponsive reactions. The result for all too
many patients is a diminution, a "tranquilizing" of their most interesting qualities and
vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out-less bad, less good, less
bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus able to conform to that
contradictory and unbearable society which first created his neurosis. He can conform to
what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely.
The psychopath is notoriously difficult to analyze because the fundamental decision
of his nature is to try to live the infantile fantasy, and in this decision (given the dreary
alternative of psychoanalysis) there may be a certain instinctive wisdom. For there is a
dialectic to changing one's nature, the dialectic which underlies all psychoanalytic
method: it is the knowledge that if one is to change one's habits, one must go back to
the source of their creation, and so the psychopath exploring backward along the road
of the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer
seeks to find those violent parallels to the violent and often hopeless contradictions he
knew as an infant and as a child. For if he has the courage to meet the parallel situation
at the moment when he is ready, then he has a chance to act as he has never acted
before, and in satisfying the frustration-if he can succeed-he may then pass by symbolic
substitute through the locks of incest. In thus giving expression to the buried infant in
himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to
remake a bit of his nervous system. Like the neurotic he is looking for the opportunity to
grow up a second time, but the psychopath knows instinctively that to express a
forbidden impulse actively is far more beneficial to him than merely to confess the desire
in the safety of a doctor's room. The psychopath is ordinately ambitious, too ambitious
ever to trade his warped brilliant conception of his possible victories in life for the grim if
peaceful attrition of the analyst's couch. So his associational journey into the past is
lived out in the theatre of the present, and he exists for those charged situations where
his senses are so alive that he can be aware actively (as the analysand is aware
passively) of what his habits are, and how he can change them. The strength of the
psychopath is that he knows (where most of us can only guess) what is good for him
and what is bad for him at exactly those instants when an old crippling habit has
become so attacked by experience that the potentiality exists to change it, to replace a
negative and empty fear with an outward action, even if-and here I obey the logic of the
extreme psychopath-even if the fear is of himself, and the action is to murder. The
psychopath murders-if he has the courage-out of the necessity to purge his violence, for
if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love, his being is frozen with implacable
self-hatred for his cowardice. (It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage
for two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candystore
keeper, and indeed the act-even by the logic of the psychopath-is not likely to
prove very therapeutic, for the victim is not an immediate equal. Still, courage of a sort
is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as
well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and
introduces a dangerous element into one's life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the
unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.)
At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the
search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one
which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapyhe knows at the seed of his being that good
orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him. But in this search, the
psychopath becomes an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of the society which
formed his character, and the apocalyptic orgasm often remains as remote as the Holy
Grail, for there are clusters and nests and ambushes of violence in his own necessities
and in the imperatives and retaliations of the men and women among whom he lives his
life, so that even as-he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions of his
life create it anew in him until the drama of his movements bears a sardonic
resemblance to the frog who climbed a few feet in the well only to drop back again.
Yet there is this to be said for the search after the good orgasm: when one lives in
a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the cultural nectar of such a world because
the paradoxes on which civilization is built demand that there remain a cultureless and
alienated bottom of exploitable human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual
outlaw (if one's psychological roots are bedded in the bottom) is that one has at least a
running competitive chance to be physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is
therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. Hated from
outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring
all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as
delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt. (Actually the
terms have equal weight. Depending on the telescope of the cultural clique from which
the Square surveys the universe, "evil" or "immature" are equally strong terms of
condemnation.) But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the
heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other
direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion,
promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, whathave-you, the
Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation
between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as
opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute. Add to this,
the cunning of their language, the abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the
danger of their oppression they learned to speak ("Well, now, man, like I'm looking for a
cat to turn me on. .. "), add even more the profound sensitivity of the Negro jazzman
who was the cultural mentor of a people, and it is not too difficult to believe that the
language of Hip which evolved was an artful language, tested and shaped by an intense
experience and therefore different in kind from white slang, as different as the special
obscenity of the soldier, which in its emphasis upon "ass" as the soul and "shit" as
circumstance, was able to express the existential states of the enlisted man. What
makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught-if one shares none of the
experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems
merely arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictorial language, but pictorial like nonobjective
art, imbued with the dialectic of small but intense change, a language for the
microcosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate experiences of any passing man
and magnifies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is
seen more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized
field. (Which latter is the practical view of the snob.) For example, there is real difficulty
in trying to find a Hip substitute for "stubborn." The best possibility I can come up with
is: "That cat will never come off his groove, dad. " But groove implies movement,
narrow movement but motion nonetheless. There is really no way to describe someone
who does not move at all. Even a creep does move-if at a pace exasperatingly more
slow than the pace of the cool cats.
4.
Like children, hipsters are fighting for the sweet, and their language is a set of
subtle indications of their success or failure in the competition for pleasure. Unstated but
obvious is the social sense that there is not nearly enough sweet for everyone. And so
the sweet goes only to the victor, the best, the most, the man who knows the most
about how to find his energy and how not to lose it. The emphasis is on energy because
the psychopath and the hipster are nothing without it since they do not have the
protection of a position or a class to rely on when they have overextended themselves.
So the language of Hip is a language of energy, how it is found, how it is lost.
But let us see. I have jotted down perhaps a dozen words, the Hip perhaps most in
use and most likely to last with the minimum of variation. The words are man, go, put
down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square. They serve a
variety of purposes and the nuance of the voice uses the nuance of the situation to
convey the subtle contextual difference. If the hipster moves through his life on a
constant search with glimpses of Mecca in many a turn of his experience (Mecca being
the apocalyptic orgasm) and if everyone in the civilized world is at least in some small
degree a sexual cripple, the hipster lives with the knowledge of how he is sexually
crippled and where he is sexually alive, and the faces of experience which life presents
to him each day are engaged, dismissed or avoided as his need directs and his
lifemanship makes-possible. For life is a contest between people in which the victor
generally recuperates quickly and the loser takes long to mend, a perpetual competition
of colliding explorers in which one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same
(pay in sickness, or depression, or anguish for the lost opportunity), but pay or grow.
Therefore one finds words like go, and make it, and with it, and swing: "Go" with its
sense that after hours or days or months or years of monotony, boredom, and
depression one has finally had one's chance, one has amassed enough energy to meet
an exciting opportunity with all one's present talents for the flip (up or down) and so
one is ready to go, ready to gamble. Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In
motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the
crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he cam make it, he can win, he can release a
little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he can make a little
better nervous system, make it a little more possible to go again, to go faster next time
and so make more and thus find more people with whom he can swing. For to swing is
to communicate, is to convey the rhythms of one's own being to a lover, a friend, or an
audience, and-equally necessary-be able to feel the rhythms of their response. To swing
with the rhythms of another is to enrich oneself-the conception of the learning process
as dug by Hip is that one cannot really learn until one contains within oneself the implicit
rhythm of the subject or the person. As an example, I remember once hearing a Negro
friend have an intellectual discussion at a party for half an hour with a white girl who
was a few years out of college. The Negro literally could not read or write, but he had
an extraordinary ear and a fine sense of mimicry. So as the girl spoke, he would detect
the particular formal uncertainties in her argument, and in a pleasant (if slightly
Southern) English accent, he would respond to one or another facet of her doubts.
When she would finish what she felt was a particularly well-articulated idea, he would
smile privately and say, "Other-direction . . . do you really believe in that?"
"Well . . . No, " the girl would stammer, "now that you get down to it, there is
something disgusting about it to me, " and she would be off again for five more
minutes.
Of course the Negro was not learning anything about the merits and demerits of
the argument, but he was learning a great deal about a type of girl he had never met
before, and that was what he wanted. Being unable to read or write, he could hardly be
interested in ideas nearly as much as in lifemanship, and so he eschewed any attempt to
obey the precision or lack of precision in the girl's language, and instead sensed her
character (and the values of her social type) by swinging with the nuances of her voice.
So to swing is to be able to learn, and by learning take a step toward making it,
toward creating. What is to be created is not nearly so important as the hipster's belief
that when he really makes it, he will be able to turn his hand to anything, even to selfdiscipline.
What he must do before that is find his courage at the moment of violence, or
equally make it in the act of love, find a little more between his woman and himself, or
indeed between his mate and himself (since many hipsters are bisexual), but
paramount, imperative, is the necessity to make it because in making it, one is making
the new habit, unearthing the new talent which the old frustration denied.
Whereas if you goof (the ugliest word in Hip), if you lapse back into being a
frightened stupid child, or if you slip, if you lose your control, reveal the buried weaker
more feminine part of your nature, then it is more difficult to swing the next time, your
ear is less alive, your bad and energy-wasting habits are further confirmed, you are
farther away from being with it. But to be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the
secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for you
are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his
body, that trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is
energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga's prana, the Reichian's orgone, Lawrence's "blood,"
Hemingway's "good," the Shavian life-force; "It"; God; not the God of the churches but
the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and
perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.
To which a cool cat might reply, "Crazy, man!"
Because, after all, what I have offered above is an hypothesis, no more, and there
is not the hipster alive who is not absorbed in his own tumultuous hypotheses. Mine is
interesting, mine is way put (on the avenue of the mystery along the road to "It") but
still I am just one cat in a world of cool cats, and everything interesting is crazy, or at
least so the Squares who do not know how to swing would say.
(And yet crazy is also the self-protective irony of the hipster. Living with questions
and not with answers, he is so different in his isolation and in the far reach of his
imagination from almost everyone with whom he deals in the outer world of the Square,
and meets generally so much enmity, competition, and hatred in the world of Hip, that
his isolation is always in danger of turning upon itself, and leaving him indeed just that,
crazy.)
If, however, you agree with my hypothesis, if you as a cat are way out too, and we
are in the same groove (the universe now being glimpsed as a series of ever-extending
radii from the center), why then you say simply, "I dig," because neither knowledge nor
imagination comes easily, it is buried in the pain of one's forgotten experience, and so
one must work to find it, one must occasionally exhaust oneself by digging into the self
in order to perceive the outside. And indeed it is essential to dig the most, for if you do
not dig you lose your superiority over the Square, and so you are less likely to be cool
(to be in control of a situation because you have swung where the Square has not, or
because you have allowed to come to consciousness a pain, a guilt, a shame or a desire
which the other has not had the courage to face). To be cool is to be equipped, and if
you are equipped it is more difficult for the next cat who comes along to put you down.
And of course one can hardly afford to be put down too often, or one is beat, one has
lost one's confidence, one has. lost one's will, one is impotent in the world of action and
so closer to the demeaning flip of becoming a queer, or indeed closer to dying, and
therefore it is even more difficult to recover enough energy to try to make it again,
because once a cat is beat he has nothing to give, and no one is interested any longer in
making it with him. This is the terror of the hipster-to be beatbecause once the sweet of
sex has deserted him, he still cannot give up the search. It is not granted to the hipster
to grow old gracefully-he has been captured too early by the oldest dream of power, the
gold fountain of Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm.
To be beat is therefore a flip, it is a situation beyond one's experience, impossible
to anticipate-which indeed in the circular vocabulary of Hip is still another meaning for
flip, but then I have given just a few of the connotations of these words. Like most
primitive vocabularies each word is a prime symbol and serves a dozen or a hundred
functions of communication in the instinctive dialectic through which the hipster
perceives his experience, that dialectic of the instantaneous differentials of existence in
which one is forever moving forward into more or retreating into less.
5.
It is impossible to conceive a new philosophy until one creates a new language, but
a new popular language (while it must implicitly contain a new philosophy) does not
necessarily present its philosophy overtly. It can be asked then what really is unique in
the life-view of Hip which raises its argot above the passing verbal whimsies of the
bohemian or the lumpenproletariat.
The answer would be in the psychopathic element of Hip which has almost no
interest in viewing human nature, or better, in judging human nature, from a set of
standards conceived a priori to the experience, standards inherited from the past. Since
Hip sees every answer as posing immediately a new alternative, a new question, its
emphasis is on complexity rather than simplicity (such complexity that its language
without the illumination of the voice and the articulation of the face and body remains
hopelessly incommunicative). Given its emphasis on complexity, Hip abdicates from any
conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions
are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad, we cannot even know
(in the Joycean sense of the good and the bad) whether we have given energy to
another, and indeed if we could, there would still be no idea of what ultimately the other
would do with it.
Therefore, men are not seen as good or bad (that they are good-andbad is taken
for granted) but rather each man is glimpsed as a collection of possibilities, some more
possible than others (the view of character implicit in Hip) and some humans are
considered more capable than others of reaching more possibilities within themselves in
less time, provided, and this is the dynamic, provided the particular character can swing
at the right time. And here arises the sense of context which differentiates Hip from a
Square view of character. Hip sees the context as generally dominating the man,
dominating him because his character is less significant than the context in which he
must function. Since it is arbitrarily five times more demanding of one's energy to
accomplish even an inconsequential action in an unfavorable contest than a favorable
one, man is then not only his character but his context, since the success or failure of an
action in a given context reacts upon the character and therefore affects what the
character and context is the energy available at the moment of intense context.
Character being thus seen as perpetually ambivalent and dynamic enters then into
an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what
each observer feels at each instant of his existence. To take a perhaps unjustified
metaphysical extrapolation, it is as if the universe which has usually existed conceptually
as *a Fact (even if the Fact were Berkeley's God) but a Fact which it was the aim of all
science and philosophy to reveal, becomes instead a changing reality whose laws are
remade at each instant by everything living, but most particularly man, man raised to a
neo-medieval summit where the truth is not what one has felt yesterday or what one
expects to feel tomorrow but rather truth is no more nor less than what one feels at
each instant in the perpetual climax of the present.
What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his values, the liberation
of the self from the Super-Ego of society. The only Hip morality (but of course it is an
everpresent morality) is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, andthis
is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins-to be engaged in one primal
battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is
one's need. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for
others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man's desire contains its antithesis
of human co-operation.
If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically
different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience
of the past is that the Hip ethic is immoderation, childlike in its adoration of the present
(and indeed to respect the past means that one must also respect such ugly
consequences of the past as the collective murders of the State). It is this adoration of
the present which contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic surpasses
even the unforgettable solution of the Marquis de Sade to sex, private property, and the
family, that all men and women have absolute but temporary rights over the bodies of
all other men and women-the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every
social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is
that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not
destroy himself. Which is exactly what separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies
which now appeal to the conservative and liberal temper -what haunts the middle of the
twentieth century is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has
been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves,
at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian, for it
requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of
violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal
faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the
catharsis which prepares growth.
Whether the hipster's desire for absolute sexual freedom contains any genuinely
radical conception of a different world is of course another matter, and it is possible,
since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an elite of
storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass
murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions. But given the
desperation of his condition as a psychic outlaw, the hipster is equally a candidate for
the most reactionary and most radical of movements, and so it is just as possible that
many hipsters will come-if the crisis deepens-to a radical comprehension of the horror of
society, for even as the radical has had his incommunicable dissent confirmed in his
experience by precisely the frustration, the denied opportunities, and the bitter years
which his ideas have cost him, so the sexual adventurer deflected from his goal by the
implacable animosity of a society constructed to deny the sexual radical as well, may yet
come to an equally bitter comprehension of the slow relentless inhumanity of the
conservative power which controls him from without and from within. And in being so
controlled, denied, and starved into the attrition of conformity, indeed the hipster may
come to see that his condition is no more than an exaggeration of the human condition,
and if he would be free, then everyone must be free. Yes, this is possible too, for the
heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis, and it is pleasant to
think that courage contains within itself (as the explanation of its existence) some
glimpse of the necessity of life to become more than it has been.
It is obviously not very possible to speculate with sharp focus on the future of the
hipster. Certain possibilities must be evident, however, and the most central is that the
organic growth of Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in
American life. Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than
the white, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential
superiority, a superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground
drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of
unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro's equality would tear a profound shift into
the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every white alive.
With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may erupt as a psychically armed
rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the antisexual foundation of every
organized power in America, and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and
new conflicts of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no
longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely
to replace the time of conformity. At that time, if the liberal should prove realistic in his
belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life, then Hip would
end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry. But if this is not the reality,
and the economic, the social, the psychological, and finally the moral crises
accompanying the rise of the Negro should prove insupportable, then a time is coming
when every political guidepost will be gone, and millions of liberals will be faced with
political dilemmas they have so far succeeded in evading, and with a view of human
nature they do not wish to accept. To take the desegregation of the schools in the South
as an example, it is quite likely that the reactionary sees the reality more closely than
the liberal when he argues that the deeper issue is not desegregation but
miscegenation. (As a radical I am of course facing in the opposite direction from the
White Citizen's Councils-obviously I believe it is the absolute human right of the Negro
to mate with the white, and matings there will undoubtedly be, for there will be Negro
high school boys brave enough. to chance their lives.) But for the average liberal whose
mind has been dulled by the committee-ish cant of the professional liberal,
miscegenation is not an issue because he has been told that the Negro does not desire
it. So, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror, comparable perhaps to the
derangement of the American Communists when the icons to Stalin came tumbling
down. The average American Communist held to the myth of Stalin for reasons which
had little to do with the political evidence and everything to do with their psychic
necessities. In this sense it is equally a psychic necessity for the liberal to believe that
the Negro and even the reactionary Southern white are eventually and
fundamentally'people like himself, capable of becoming good liberals too if only they can
be reached by good liberal reason. What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred
beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in
the people is perhaps incapable of being contained, and therefore if one wants a better
world one does well to hold one's breath, for a worse world is bound to come first, and
the dilemma may well be this: given such hatred, it must either vent itself nihilistically or
become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.
6.
No matter what its horrors the twentieth century is a vastly exciting century for its
tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the
last war of them all will be between the black and the whites, or between the women
and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the
rebels and the regulators. Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point
where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of the
future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of
abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort,
and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about the meaning of life has come
so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense
conditions of exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded
as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive, then it is perhaps possible that the
Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if
this is so, the radical humanist could do worse than to brood upon the phenomenon. For
if a revolutionary time should come again, there would be a crucial difference if
someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending every
circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the communications of human
energy-a calculus capable of translating the economic relations of man into his
psychological relations and then back again, his productive relations thereby embracing
his sexual relation as well, until the crises of capitalism in the twentieth century would
yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic
imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost beyond
the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged,
and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its imprisonments, expressions, and
tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of
Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major
psychologies to approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say
that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and
procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)-where particularly the epic
grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more God-like view of human
justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those intimate and institutional
processes which lead to our creation and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our
rebellion.
1957