Detachment isn’t a lack of affect: it is an affect; and it requires a certain repertoire of performances and knowledges. Hipster irony generates a variety of affective registers including the pleasure of feeling ‘cool’, the humiliation of exclusion and the outrage of moral violation.
[…]
Or rather, hipsterism has only a base, brain-stem politics: it delights in the event, in the idea of togetherness, even if that togetherness serves only hedonistic purposes.
I really don’t know what hipsterism is, perhaps this demonstrates my intellectual and class-based nerdist exclusion from hipsterism, or maybe I am so hip that I have sublimated it all… but I doubt it! Anyway, Mel has an excellent post with a totally excellent multi-level title “Free your signifier and the rest will follow”.
One thing on the above, the second quoted para: Is it an ‘idea of togetherness’ or a feeling? That is, the ‘hedonism’ or other complex feelings derived from the affective territorialising effect of the ‘free signifiers’ alluded to in Mel’s title that effectuates the togetherness — so the sign or sign-complex are material points or series around which collective subjectivities self-catalyze.