Reflections on Hipterism -An Exchange of Views

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...In the Western sexual literature with which I am familiar, classical, technical, and pornographic, I can remember—with the harsh radical exception of Wilhelm Reich—almost no incisive discussion of male orgasm...

...Their own literary productions are few, and what there are of them— with the exception of some poems by Robert Duncan and parts of his unpublished play, Faust Foutu—have almost no literary merit whatever...

...Man is a flux of possibilities and energies long before and perhaps long after he is a manipulator of land, properties, and productions...

...There is more real solidarity (class solidarity) between white and Negro "law abiding citizens" than between people of "Caucasian" or "African" complexion...

...Thus the American hipsters' writings cannot begin to compare with the work of the arch-hipsters of modern European literature, Celine and Genet, to say nothing of any number of non-hipsters...

...The British Teddy, the Russian besprizornye, the Polish hooligans, the French pseudo-existentialist fauna, don't behave differently toward life than the hipster...

...He may be correct in stating that Hip and psychopathology follow two parallel paths, but he has still to persuade this reader that the American Negro bohemian and his white imitator embody a special brand of the human species...

...On the other hand, the rebel who outgrew the romantic stage of his rebellion, who knows himself to be a grown up rebel—which is quite different from being a "radical," for after all a McCarthy too was a "radical"—knows also that he conforms, that he moves within the bonds of social and cultural institutions whose weight he cannot shake off in his private way, but who keeps within his conformity a lucid mind and a clear heart as to what conforming and what rebellion mean in terms not of his subjective immediate I, but in terms of man as such, of man as a social creature...

...Of course one could walk through a mile of analysand-type persons to find one who really believed that his orgasm had been sexually improved...

...What one may fumble toward is a dialectic which can bridge the material and the ideal—which can infuse material notions of energy into that philosophical country of the ideal (read: the individual unconscious) which psychoanalysis now occupies with a middle-class mechanistic weltanschauung...

...Though obviously a male, the myth was believed to be pregnant with child— a well conformed socialistic baby true to the Scriptures...

...It is yet to be established that sexual life can be promiscuously altered without affecting the psychic real es tate of capitalism...

...they don't even know—worse, don't want to know—that the things they praise were achieved by art-music composers years ago...

...If the terms are death, and if he accepts the terms—nay, if he so to speak naturalizes the terms generally prevailing for his private use, why he conforms nice and clean, he is at the avant-garde of conformity...

...Prompted by their thirst for eternal values, many made dangerous inroads into heretofore uncharted lands...

...Most hipsters scarcely read at all, not because they can't (nearly all of them have finished high school, and a surprising number of the whites have attended our better universities) but because they won't...

...says Hip to society...

...81...

...No amount of plain or fancy screwing is going to change this...

...Norman Mailer replies: As a cool critical view of the affectations, vanities, and hypocrisies of the hipster, I have little quarrel with Ned Polsky's remarks...

...Or is it not finally a matter of courage, courage not necessarily nor uniquely before violence, but courage to accept telling blows to the ego...

...The contemporary contradictions from which America has been suffering (given the virtually self-regulating economic valves of war finance) have been almost insupportable psychological contradictions, virtually perfect Orwellian ambivalences— (War is Peace, Love is Hate, Ignorance is Knowledge...

...As for the few who can be said to read with any regularity: they turn their backs not only on the horrors but the grandeurs of the past, restrict their horizon to contemporary literature, and from this area select what is in large part tripe—a compound of Rexroth and Rimbaud, Henry Miller and Mad Comics, Sartre and science fiction, jazz magazines and jerkoff magazines...

...The difference is that the conformist hardly ever becomes a lumpen, that the lumpen almost always becomes a conformist (all exceptions granted...

...The adjusted social person knows better than to worry about his orgasm...

...If Marx did not find it necessary to take them seriously, how dare we...

...They create what to sociologists is a contradiction in terms: a subculture of marginal men.* • A good index of the subculture's strength is provided by that most pervasive ofhipster activities, marijuana-smoking and its attendant exploration of exotic statesof consciousness, for the reactions of one under the influence of marijuana aredetermined not nearly so much by his individual psychology or physiology as bysubcultural norms...

...On this matter as on others, Mailer confuses the life of action with the life of acting out...

...They don't really dig us as people...

...When Mailer says of the hipster that he has "converted his unconscious experience into much conscious knowledge," he may speak of the hipster's 73 knowledge in a very narrow practical way, as for instance knowledge on how to survive momentarily in a back alley...

...for the lumpen to become a conformist means to acquire property, which he always wills by free choice —however strong his overt denial...

...The reason is not far to seek: even if we grant Mailer's dubious claim that the American existentialists feel their existentialism more than the French do, it is still true that for art something more is required than the raw recital of raw emotion...

...Two examples: many male hipsters (if I am to believe the testimony of several hip men and women) are extremely sadistic in their sexual relationships, and many others are so narcissistic that inevitably their orgasms are premature and puny...

...I am sure that the average psychoanalyst would now say, "The fact that the advocate of this thesis wants more of orgasm, is an indication of dissatisfaction with his narcissistic involvements...

...The growth of human consciousness in this century demanded—for its expanding vitality—that a revolution be made, that a mankind be liberated, and since the attempt failed in its frontal revolutionary attack, failed precisely 75 to change the exploitative character of our productive relations, it may well be that the rise of the hipster represents the first wind of a second revolution in this century, moving not forward toward action and more rational equitable distribution, but backward toward being and the secrets of human energy, not forward to the collectivity which was totalitarian in the proof but backward to the nihilism of creative adverturers, a revolution admittedly impossible to conceive even in its outlines, for unlike that first revolution which was conscious, Faustian, and vain, enacted in the name of the proletariat but more likely an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited from the nineteenth century, a revolution motivated by the rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct and marshall it into productive formations, the second revolution, if it is to come, would come indeed as antithesis to the "Great Experiment":—its desire would be to turn materialism on its head, have consciousness subjugated to instinct...

...There may even be ineradicable conflicts of interest between the superstructure and the base of productive relations...

...But not significant in any of these groups, Mailer to the contrary, is a sexual revolution...

...MoiEovER, there is hardly a hipster alive who doesn't long to conform (like his extreme representative, the psycopath, he is always a case of a frustrated conformist), and there is hardly a conformist alive, white or Negro, who doesn't long to rape and murder (like his extreme representative, the pulpit moralist, he is always a case of a frustrated rebel...

...At the least, is it not reasonable to assume that society has reached a point of such complexity, such "organismishness" that it is capable of adapting itself to avoid economic crisis by unwillingly (owing to the contradictions of mass manipulation) communicating mass psychological crises via the mass communications...

...The white Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality, but as the bringer of a highly specified and restricted "cultural dowry," to use Mailer's phrase...

...The hipster, rebel cell in our social body, lives out, acts out, follows the close call of his instinct as far as he dares, and so points to possibilities and consequences in what have hitherto been chartless jungles of moral nihilism...

...It has been improved by psychoanalytical therapy...

...For all its probings of hipster pathology, Mailer's rhetoric covers up the fact that hipsters are not only more "psychologically" crippled than most people but sexually likewise—that they are not sexually free and have no chance to become so, and that this means they are not actual or potential sexual revolutionaries in the profound sense that Mailer is talking about...

...All are the product of an identical social phenomenon prevailing in highly industrialized and more or less paternalistically ruled countries: extreme inner insecurity dipped in a State-sponsored "welfare" at the price of a terrific loss to the individual's self...

...Immediately, the charge by Malaquais is that the hipster is our old black sheep, our discontented nephew of the proletariat, the impotent lumpen no more than a thousand dollars away from kissing the penny-calloused hands of the petit-bourgeoisie...

...MALAQUAis SAYS the hipster has his opposite number in the British Teddy, the besprizornye (still untamed?—how unlumpen...

...Some hipster groups, for example, have everything to do with motorcycles, whereas others have nothing to do with them...

...But no...

...The essence of his expression, his faith if you will, is that the real desire to make a better world exists at the heart of our instinct, (that instinctual vision of a human epic which gave birth to consciousness itself) that man is therefore roughly more good than evil, that beneath his violence there is finally love and the nuances of justice, and that the removal therefore of all social restraints while it would open us to an era of incomparable individual violence would still spare us the collective violence of rational totalitarian liquidations (which we must accept was grossly a psychic index of the buried, voiceless, and ineradicable violences of whole nations of people), and would—and here is the difference—by expending the violence directly open the possibility of working with that human creativity which is violence's opposite...

...I) Jean Malaquais Once upon a time there was a myth named le proletariat...

...Negro shopkeepers and white shopkeepers, should their shops be endangered, would dismiss all color lines and slaughter hand in hand Negro and white lumpen...

...They come together and create a little world of their own which elaborates its own worldview, code of behavior, institutions, argot, and so on...

...to in some part of himself: that an unjust society wreaks cruel if subtle imprisonments and destructions of personal energy, wreaks them not only upon an individual class or race, but upon the being of each of us...

...Death you want...

...A civilization from now, the vast chapter of Western expansion which was built on property and such inhuman abstractions of human energy as money, credit, and surplus value, may be seen as an ice-age of cruel and brutally slow liberations of produc tive, purposive, creative and sexual energies which the contradictions of in equity and exploitation congealed not only into the working habits of men, elaborated not only into the institutional hypocrisies of society, but indeed drove as cancerous ambivalences and frustrations into the texture of being itself...

...I The new Bohemia's inferiority shows up clearly in its lack of intellectual content...

...Quite the contrary...

...If," says Hip in Mailer's words, "if the fate of 20th century man is to live with death...

...To make an image: the lumpen yells sh to the cop on the street-corner and 'feels purged...

...And he can never fully make it in, or be accepted by, the Negro world...

...But of course this may be no more than the sword dance of my "romantic idealism...

...But the Hip argument, if one is to dredge it forth, would claim that even in an orgasm which is the most there is always the vision of an outer wider wilder orgasm which is even more with it...

...Hip is but another name for lumpen, and lumpen make excellent conformists and the best of potential hangmen for "order's" sake...

...Even in the world of the hipster the Negro remains essentially what Ralph Ellison called him—an invisible man...

...Howard S. Becker, "On Becoming a Marihuana Smoker," American Journal of Sociology, LIX (November 195S), pp, 235-242...

...The amusing thing is that one can read into Mailer's essay precisely the proposition that the hipster is nothing but a conformist in reverse...

...Since he can hardly have had the requisite personal experience—"Uncle," said a bisexual Negro to me once, "I couldn't have more charge for that chick if I'd gone down on a platoon of Marines,"—I wonder if Polsky isn't really just passing on a tyrannical assumption which is one of the cement blocks of the Square throne of n—choanalysis...

...sociological theory is too gross at this point because it neglects the fact that "face to face" occasionally means, among other things, "looking in opposite directions...

...The white Negro, as Mailer aptly calls him, is of course a marginal man...

...all he's interested in is laying white chicks...

...But it is equally undeni able that psychoanalysis—whatever the brand—still provides greater sexual ben efits than does the dreary alternative that Mailer glorifies...

...so with rare exceptions (notably Mezz Mezzrow) he doesn't even try to live within the Negro community, and if he does he is put down by Negroes a lot...

...The Negro's experience appears to be the most universal communication of the West, and the authority of their tortured senses may indeed be passing by the musical states of their artistic expression, 76 without language, without conscious communication, into the no doubt equally tortured senses of the wild sensitive spawn of two vast wars...

...Good, death there'll be...

...Since Malaquais seems to be indirectly arguing the affir mative, I would suggest that there are obstructions to his proof which the poetic excellences of his style cannot storm by metaphor...

...Is it so very lumpen to be able to influence American culture...

...79 Now, the inner tragedy of the hipster subculture is this: the white member is attracted to the Negro member because of the latter's Negro-ness, whereas the Negro—and this Mailer ignores—is attracted to the white precisely because of his whiteness...

...II Hipster hedonism takes many forms...

...But it is equally legitimate and desirable to recognize that there are qualitative differences among Bohemias and that the current Bohemia is greatly inferior to its predecessors of at least the past four decades...

...Indeed, he is right...

...Of course now that psychoanalysis has become a respectable part of psychiatry and the old-style European analysists, who were mostly rebels by definition, are being rapidly replaced by bourgeois young American M.D.'s, it is undeni able that the patient runs a much greater risk of encountering the analyst for whom "cure" necessarily includes "adjustment" to the present social struc ture...

...But to argue this way is to stalk one's opponent about a circle, each a safe diameter apart...

...The social necessities of their work...

...The first thing to notice about these marginal men—white or black—is that they are not the utterly isolated, atomized individuals whom sociologists assume all marginal men to be...

...He seems to forget that the American hipster has his counterparts and equivalents in countries with no Negro population: Sweden, England, Russia, Poland, France, to name only a few places...

...In so doing he creates an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place...

...But the analyst, this middleclass and usually pampered son, is he the one to make the imaginative journey into the tortured marijuanaracked mind and genitalia of a hipster daring to live on the edge of the most dangerous of the Negro worlds...

...Many a time I have heard white hipsters, when no Negro members were present, put down one of the absent Negroes with "The trouble with X is that he's too fay-oriented," or "Y is a drag...

...he bestows upon him a Messianic mission...

...The nature of orgasm is a spectrum, perhaps an infinite spectrum, perhaps intimately dialectical: in the worst of orgasm there are nips of pleasure, in the best of orgasms some .mannered containments denying pleas 80 ure beyond high pleasure, restraining the rarer liberations of energy for the next day...

...That's one reason why, as a rule, they react on the level of a purely personal idea of "recovery"—but from what and toward what none of them really knows...

...But to Malaquais the lumpen is the lumpen...

...And I'd bet my bottom dollar that Negro hipsters, among themselves, often put down the whites with something like "Man, those fay cats are pretty cool and don't want us to be Uncle Toms, but they still want us to be spooks...

...Now if man's fate is to live with death, how does the hipster manage to divorce himself from society since he does accept "the terms of death...

...Yet if a handful among the tens of thousands, as Mailer numbers them, do go through rape and murder, it is mostly by accident, by a tragic mistake, almost never by deliberate clear choice, and then only once, for they are ambushed as soon as they have zipped up their pants...

...the Polish hooligans, the French existentialists, all Hip, and not a drop of Negro blood in a thousand of their black masses...

...Psychoanalysis has been domesticated but not castrated...

...tary, middleclass, in fief to fifteen years of training, Iiving among the absurd magpie scrutinies of wife, children, colleagues, patients, and hostile strangers, most analysts are obliged to be more proper than proper, and their characters, impulses and value judgments become shaped to satisfy the social necessities of their work...

...Mailer is right in seeing the hipsters as the only significant new group of rebels in America...

...One other reason why lumpen of all kind are but a myth in terms of social action, except possibly a small home-made pogrom with the implicit or explicit blessing of State and municipality, is that they do not form any coherent social body...

...if these psychic contradictions should eventually introduce an apathy sufficient to turn our country back into economic contradictions and economic depression, which is indeed far from impossible, it will not mean that the process was a simple dialectic whose breath moved only through the circuits of productive relations...

...As a matter of fact, lumpen is a way of making a living...

...2 and back issues of Origin and see for yourself...

...That Hip found in Norman Mailer its most outstanding and original theologist (I don't say apologist), seems quite clear in the light of his essay [DISSENT, Summer 19571...

...There, as in a secret Eden happily rediscovered, amazingly new and refreshing reasons to live awaited the bold myth hunter: Liberalism, Democracy, Free World, Peace, Stop-the-AH-Experiments, etc., and —honor to whom honor is due—the long neglected bastard-brother of le proletariat: marijuana soaked Hip...

...Verdoux once made a superb parody of our death-bent hipster...

...For what would the analyst do, and what would become of his tidy, narrow, other-directed little world if he were to discover, and may God help him, that the hipster way out by the lip of danger, may conceivably know more of the savor and swing in the damn dialectic of the orgasm than he, the doctor, the educated ball-shrinker who diagnoses all joys not his own as too puny...

...I imagine that Mailer really knows all this but that he cannot state it baldly because it would then be obvious that "bad orgasm" is one habit the hipster will never kick without the "dreary alternative" of psychoanalysis...

...Hip, says Mailer truly, Hip wants love, wants peace in a nice kitchenette with a white apron around his girl's waist...

...Great schisms followed, yet few of the flock turned cynical...

...For a related point of view, and much concrete evidence, cf...

...He is also right to recognize the new 77 Bohemia, extend it his "essential sympathy," and where he cannot find much of merit, perhaps yet encourage it by praising with faint damns...

...Paris September 4, 1957 Norman Mailer replies: In his search for a sexual life which will suit his orgiastic needs, the hipster wiIly-nilly attacks conventional sexual morality, and to some degree succeeds in disturbing the balance...

...Still the impolite question remains to be asked: does the direct experience of the analyst's own life prepare him to judge the inner states of Hip...

...they just dig us for our music and our pot...

...And there he goes, the small entrepreneur in death competing with industrial death...

...He exists, then, between the two worlds, where he meets his obverse: the Negro hipster, who puts down the Negro community at large (one reason, though not the main one, being that most Negroes are also squares, Mailer's stereotype of the Negro notwithstanding) and can never fully make it in the white world...

...For the conformist to become a lumpen means to give up his actual or virtual property, which he cannot do by free choice...

...The analyst is Gibraltar in a pathless middle-class sea, his guiding torch is lit by money, his triumphs are invariably with plain and miserable patients, squashed too early by life, ruined permanently for pleasure, and so burgeoning under the stern authority and human comfort that an expensive person listens to them for two and a half hours a week...

...The remarkable thing about hipsters of all kinds and variety (and they vary indeed in many aspects) is that, except for a case or two in a generation, as a body they are sooner or later swallowed up by the most conforming routine ever...

...but he is mistaken if he takes it for more than it is: an instinctive and empirical know-how...

...They were written with a keen eye...

...Finally, one cannot enter another being's orgasm and measure its scope, (especially since many people's frustrated theatrical talents are brought resolutely to bed), one can only guess from the spectrum of one's own what the possibilities may be for others...

...But almost everyone is sick sexually in more or less degree, and so the indictment by the psychoanalyst should come forth no more maternally than to claim: better you should be sick as a Square than sick as a Hip...

...Although the inter-racial groups which constitute the hipster subculture are "primary" groups in sociological terms, since in them whites and Negroes meet in "intimate, face-to-face relationships," this does not automatically imply the deepest kind of social bond...

...All the "mysticism," all the "dialectical conception of existence" Mailer so generously bestows upon Hip is, as far as I am concerned, a gorgeous flower of Mailer's romantic idealism...

...2) Ned Polsky Although Norman Mailer, in "The White Negro," shows ample awareness of some drawbacks of hipster life, others he romanticizes away or ignores...

...Of course hipsters are willing to try a variety of partners and positions, have no objection to inter-racial intercourse, etc.— but this is merely to say that they are "liberated" in the superficial ways that many "liberals" are...

...Starting with the fact that the Negro's status within the American community is a marginal one, Mailer is not content to allow him his particular or characteristic psychological bent...

...And the line I would prefer to engage is to call into account the psychoanalyst's self-interest in believing that almost all sexual rebels are sick sexually...

...I wonder, however, if it would not be more "Marxist" to recognize that the superstructure of society has attained vast autonomies outside productive relations, psychological undercurrents which often clash with material economic realities—as, for example, the swoop of the stockmarket in response to the Sputnik...

...Which is true...

...The mass audience may turn in for the night to the chest-out, stomach-in, pinch-buttocks of the Star Spangled Banner, with perhaps a five minute sermonette to speed them to churchly sleep, but their waking hours were vibrated by that now déclassé (so fast does it change) Holy Shaker, that ex-apostle of small-town Southern orgasm, Elvis Presley...

...In turn, the difference is due to the only real relationship in modern society: property relationship...

...One Mr...

...The closest thing to an intellectual discussion is their chatter about the pseudoprofundities of contemporary jazz...

...they dream of rape and murder in idiotic cliches, vicariously, with a hand from the tabloids and other such literature...

...I wonder...

...If we socialists, radicals, anarchists, rebels, nihilists, and dissenters are to become more than the dried twigs of an old family tree, the shabby genteel clerks who end the line of a warrior family, it can at least be recognized that until the radical bridge from Marx to Freud is built, and our view of man embraces more facts, contradictions, and illuminations than any conservative view, and stares into such terrifying alternatives as totalitarianism or barbarism, we are doing no more than scolding ourselves, and ignoring that revolutionary indictment which every human alive can respond...

...If we accept the usual ultimate test (and Mailer's) —whether whites and Negroes sleep together—hipsters undoubtedly meet it much more often than squares do...

...For, ultimately, unjust societies must, out of the nature of their contradictions, stifle the best part of each creativity, and so starve into neglect and atrophy that future we hear raging to be born...

...He puts down the white world from which he came...

...But I believe he overrides a most complex question when he declares that many male hipsters have orgasms premature and puny...

...If capitalist society is grounded upon property relations, these relations are wed to monogamy, family, and the sexual strictures which maintain them...

...74 the conformist lifts his cap to the same cop and feels reassured in his pants, the grown up rebel ignores the cop (though he may summon his help in an emergency) and applies his energy to fell the tree that breeds cops, conformists and lumpen...

...Baby being long overdue, the congregation of the faithful first became skeptical, then frankly disgusted...

...Seden...

...When Mailer glamorizes the hipsters' "search after the good orgasm" he is 78 simply accepting at face value their rationalization for what is in truth a pathetic, driven sex life in which the same failures are repeated again and again...

...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," etc...

...But Malaquais would be hard-put to find the taint of Hip without the blood of jazz...

...III The world of the hipster is commonly held to break down racial barriers, and indeed it does...

...Nevertheless there is a built-in barrier to full acceptance of black hipsters by white ones (and to a lesser extent vice versa), which stems from the fact that hipsters are marginal in a very special way...

...And not a, few pioneer analysts now devote all their energies to making rich men's children content with their lot in life...

...Feeling cheated, never allowing that they may have misread the Book, they repudiated le proletariat, sued for divorce, and being an idealistically inclined flock, started to shop around for a better, less sterile myth...

...Even before they fall into rank and file, rather than raping and murdering they blabber of rape and murder...

...The Swedish youth runs properly amok...

...The very notion of "good orgasm" (which indeed I used superficially in The White Negro, DISSENT, Summer '57) betrays the lack of examination we bring to it, for it assumes there are two domains, good orgasm and bad, each clearly set apart by a defense line of psychic dragon teeth...