Self-consciousness

As I was making up some notes for the book Teenage by Jon Savage I came across this idea: “The Bright Young People's style was a fusion of modernity and Oedipal obnoxiousness organized around what looked like meaningless pleasure” (246). “The problem with outrage, however, is that it always needs to be trumped. The Bright Young People began to hit the law of diminishing returns. What had begun spontaneously became self-conscious rather than joyous.”

Now the Bright Young People were a group of partiers primarily in the 1920s it, but they made a lasting impact. There were hedons with a purpose. They saw enjoying life and all it had as a way of not only bucking authority, but also as a way of expressing their own youth. One of their best creations in this area was the themed party. From Russian parties to murder parties they came up with wild ideas to give each night's merriment a certain twist.

The above quote describes what happen as the BYP began to have too many parties with too many in attendance. Fun was once the only goal of a party, but when trying to top the last party is the goal it stops being fun. There is actually a point at which massive drunken orgies are just not fun. I know! Shocking!

Does this over saturation happen to all social movements though? Indie-Rock Pete would probably say that it does before you have even heard about the movement, but we all know that we can't find the lower limit of quality because it doesn't exist according to the Theory of Hipster Relativity. This means that there should be a range of popularity at which something is cool. My first reaction is to see cool as looking something like this (sorry for the poor quality chart, also note that a high quality graph would not have the movement at 0 on the x-axis):



This is clearly what happen to the BYP. They were a small group of cool seekers who found something that was not only rebellious it was also something that was fun (a necessary combination for something cool as I will explain in another post).

I wonder though a few things. What are the parts of popularity that make something cease being cool? The number of people willing to participate seems important. Whether or not something is still rebellious or not does not seem to matter. What matters is that there is a mass of people that want to be part of something. The kind of people matter too. Here I mean the specific clique of people and if more other cliques connect to cool movement. The graphical representation of this would be something like a single circle being the clique that contained the cool movement to begin with, but as time goes on the image begins to look more and more like an impossibly complex vin diagram. As this happens the movement is less cool.

However, the movement can become cool again I think. The first is not a true cool. It is around the point at which the movement becomes as uncool as possible. When this happens the cool kids can now enjoy the thing with the irony that makes modern popular cool run.



There is a genuine cool out there. This cool is something appreciated by many but the movement is now not appreciated for its novelty so much as its technique. Here it is no longer good to simply do something, one must do it with a flare that makes the moment seem almost artful.

For an example of this cool cycle let's assume that picnicing is a cool activity. People will go picnicing and with each visit to the park they will begin to gain attention. At the same time the things they did at the last picnic will seem less exciting because they will have done them already. This will force more extreme picnicing (maybe people will start cooking and eating turkey instead of enjoying a cold chicken leg from the night before). As this happens the people within the movement will become tired from the need to constantly improve because of the expectations of others. Soon there will be so many in the park picnicing that people will begin deciding that the activity is square. Before long the only people really picnicing are those who do it because no one does it. The might even use sporks and eat KFC, but only because irony dictates that it is cool to mock-picnic. Eventually, the idea of picnicing will become cool again but will be practiced by a smaller set of people who will set out to elevate it to an art. Sporks might be kept, but now metal sporks are seen and the food is prepared beforehand specially for the picnic. So we get a chart that looks like this when it comes to the actual practice of cool movements:



This is the cool cycle as I see it right now. I am sure that last graph needs a bit of work, but it is close for the time being. The biggest question is not about the theory then but about operationalizing these variables. Any suggestions?