PRIORISM

PRIORISM - a term that first appears in an essay called "A Portrait of the Hipster" (first published in Partisan Review, June 1948) by Anatole Broyard (American writer, critic and editor for The New York Times) which describes a claim to superior knowledge;

"One of the basic ingredients of jive language was a priorism. The a priori assumption was a short cut to somewhereness. It arose out of a desperate, unquenchable need to know the score; it was a great protection, a primary self-preserving postulate. It meant "it is given to us to understand." The indefinable authority it provided was like a powerful primordial or instinctual orientation in a threatening chaos of complex interrelations. The hipster's frequent use of metonymy and metonymous gestures (e.g., brushing palms for handshaking, extending an index finger, without raising an arm, as a form of greeting, etc.) also connoted prior understanding, there is no need to elaborate, I dig you, man, etc.

Carrying his language and his new philosophy like concealed weapons, the hipster set out to conquer the world. He took his stand on the corner and began to direct human traffic. His significance was unmistakable... "

Even though in his essay, Anataloe Broyard refers a hipster of the 1940s ("a character who likes hot jazz”), PRIORISM seems to characterize all the incarnations of the hipster;

"Referring to the work of Anatole Broyard, Grief considers the hipster as the black subcultural figure of the late 1940s. “Broyard insisted that black hipsterism was developed from a sense that black people in America were subject to decisions made about their lives by conspiracies of power which held a monopoly of information and knowledge that they could never possibly know,” Grief said. So, the “hip” reaction of the black community was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge one knew before anyone else, and knowledge independent of experience — a priori knowledge.
Later in the 1950s, the hipster was a white subcultural figure inspired by “the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate from whiteness,” and achieve the clichéd “cool” knowledge of the African-American community. Beginning in the 1980s, new subcultures such as the 1990’s “neo-bohemia” and “indie-rock” cultures, emerged as alternatives to the success of consumer capitalism. So contemporary hipsterism, which is defined by its rejection of the mainstream, emerges from a tradition of youth subcultures that tried to remain independent of consumer culture.

Yet contemporary hipsterism, according to Grief, is more complicated since it is defined as a subculture of people, but is currently quite dominant. Grief said, “The hipster is that person, overlapping with declassing or disaffiliating groupings — the starving artist, the starving graduate student, the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skate punk, the would-be blue-collar or post-racial individual — who in fact alights himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

"WRC joins discussions on modern hipster culture" by Dina Zingaro, The Phoenix, October 21, 2o1o