ACFM - ACFM Trip 43: Cool

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

What exactly is cool? Well, if it was that easy to describe, it obviously wouldn’t be cool. In this Trip, Keir, Jem and Nadia wonder if cool can ever be politically useful, and what happens when cool is used as a disciplining force. With ideas from Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Mailer and Paul Gilroy, and music […]

Hello, and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert, and I'm here as usual with my friend Nardia Idol. and Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we are going to be talking about a topic about which we all know a great deal, I think. And that is the subject of Cool. So, Keir, why do we want to talk about Cool?

I've wanted to do an episode on Cool for a while, partly because Cool as a sort of psychological disposition or an attitude, we're going to sort of talk about it rather than Cool as just a sitting in for good. but cool was quite an important component of how I put myself together as an adult or young adolescent person. It was important to me, particularly when I was young, it still affects the way I think about the world, I think. Part of what I'm really interested in is whether it still holds true, whether young people today also have a similar conception of cool to the to the one I have in my head and whether it's still an important attitude to them, whether it forms part of themselves, etc. Behind that is like a bigger question, which I'm always interested in, which is this basic question of, like, why do we do the things we do? Why do we

believe the things we believe, et cetera? An important question of historical materialism, I think, the idea that we need to understand that we're made up or we're influenced by, like, historical and social forces. And like, cool is an interesting one because it's not just about our ideas. It's also, it's like embodied, do you know what I mean? It's like it also influences the way perhaps we'd move ourselves, the way we'd walk down the street, the way the clothes we'd wear, the things we'd buy, but also the way that we look at the world. So one of the things I want to do today is to talk about there's a history of cool. Cool emerges from a series of histories, et cetera, and of course that's that Jameson thing, always historicize.

You know, when we understand that the things that we take as perhaps something essential to ourselves, that we understand that they have, in fact, historically formed, that's always a useful useful thing. And what about you, no idea? Yeah, so those are all really interesting things. I was really excited, actually, when Keir started explaining things around this topic, I thought, yeah, no, no, that's cool. I want to know all of that. So, yes, I'm interested in unpacking this maybe undescribable, indescribable mystique that holds so much cultural capital, this thing that is cool. I've seen it described in places as a merger of autonomy, authenticity and attitude. So it's interesting to like unpack that, yeah, and talk. about the history. But one thing that I'm particularly interested in when I was thinking about this topic is the pressure to appear to be cool in certain circumstances. So one thing I'd like to talk about later is perhaps when we might think it's a good idea to cultivate a certain coolness towards certain events and where are the circumstances for it's politically useful and for the self as well to cultivate or practice coolness and even if that's possible. So

something I would like to delve into. But I'm mostly interested in the opposite. So when cool is used as a disciplining force, not just in culture, but in relationship dynamics. So where in relationship dynamics, especially with women, unable to define and assert their own boundaries, and self-identifying into that category of cool to own their own oppression. So there is this thing called the Cool Girl phenomenon and I would like to explore that in depth later. What about you, Jeremy? I'm interested in all those aspects. Yeah, it's obviously really interesting and it's interesting the way in which in some of the literature on the concept of cool, sometimes we're talking about this very specific sort of disposition, this way of being

in the world, this attitude. And sometimes you're just talking about the idea that it's possible to require certain kinds of status through, you know, certain kinds of knowledge or certain kind of affectation, demonstrating that knowledge outside of, quote-unquote, mainstream culture, but nonetheless allowing one to accumulate certain kinds of, you know, certain kinds of markers of coolness as a kind of status category. So I think the relationship between all those things is interesting to think about. But before we do any more of that, I should, mention that you can get even weirder and even leftier if you like the show by subscribing to our newsletter which we now send out with every new episode every new

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that we're producing at the moment, then please do support our host, Navara Media, for as little as one pound a month. You can do that by going to navara.media slash support. Okay, I think we should play cool by Gwen Stefani. I'm a big fan of Gwen Stefani and no doubt in general and their female gaze lyric. It's a pop indie song that speaks to the space of relationship psychology, of being cool with your ex now being with someone else with the lyric after we've after all we've been through, I know we're cool, and it's about moving on from past pain. So let's get into the sort of meat of the topic then. What do we actually mean by this phrase cool?

Like when we hear the phrase cool, what do we mean? We're going to say at the start that we're not really going to talk about cool, just meaning a synonym for good, because that's definitely a way in which the term gets used. I use it all the time just to mean okay, basically, yeah, cool, we'll do that. and obviously that itself is an interesting phenomenon obviously a particular history of concepts of cool have produced a situation in which cool just means good but we're going to be talking about more specifically is concepts of cool have a bit more content than that so maybe we should start off by talking about this idea of cool as a as a psychological disposition the key do you want to get

Help us get into that? Yeah, I mean, one of the places I'd go to, for arguments around this, is this book that Dick Poutain and Dave Robbins wrote in 2000, it was published in 2000 called Cool Rules Anatomy of An Attitude. Dick Poutain is a sort of interesting character who's around the sort of situation, the UK situationists, or probably the English situationists, around the late 1960s, early 1970s. And it's released in 2000s.

just after this wave of Cool Britannia, which we'll talk about a bit later, perhaps. It's probably responding to that, this upsurge in the idea of cool, and in some ways it's sort of like colonisation by things we might want to look back to now with a little bit of a critical eye. But yeah, so the argument being put forward in that book is that cool is like a psychological disposition, basically,

or an attitude, maybe even a structure of feeling. I'm not quite sure about that. Yeah, I think it probably is, actually. it's like, you know, the way you might see the world, but that sort of affects the way you might hold yourself, the way you might hold your face, etc. You know, all of these sorts of things. And Putain and Robbins, they make this argument that Cool has three dominant characteristics they talk about as ironic detachment, narcissism and hedonism. We can get into them a little bit more, but perhaps when we think of Cool, we probably do think mostly of some sort of, yeah,

detachment as in the concealing of your true feelings, maintaining a cool face, concealing your true feelings sometimes by enacting the opposite. So basically, if you feel afraid, perhaps you will enact boredom and do an exaggerated yawn. If you're insulted, you might try to laugh it off. Do you know what I mean? So that's the opposite of what you're feeling. Or the other way in which you might respond to that is like by keeping a blank face, poker face. Then narcissism is the idea that you have an exaggerated regard for yourself, particularly around personal appearance, something like that. And then hedonism, we could think of as like sensation seeking or pleasure seeking, but detached from any meaning. So sensation for its own sake. These are the sort of three things

that they say, like these are the three characteristics of the posture of cool. just break that down a little bit. So is he saying he's not defining narcissism in general as that. He's saying this is an aspect of narcissism, which is attached to coolness, which is the personal appearance focus. Yes. Yeah. So not all narcissism is cool. Of course, we might think of Donald Trump as a prime, probably clinical narcissists, and of course he doesn't present a cool exterior at all. But this category or this psychological posture that they're proposing as cool contains these sort of three elements or these three elements feed into it. They probably take different mixtures of those three elements in different historical periods. I think they probably

make some argument like that. And are they saying that this is inside out? So as in in terms of like the ironic detachment and concealing your true feelings, as in this is something that, you know, when you talked about the structure of feeling, like it's being embodied from from within a person out rather than being attributed as an identity put on someone, right? Because there are two ways of looking at it. There's someone embodying cool, but then I think there's another set of judgments about whether a certain social grouping around that person, and that's perhaps important to their social status, would actually view that person as cool or not. Yeah, I think there's a link to aren't there. But yeah, so basically it's, like when we talk

about a psychological disposition. It's almost like, you know, once you've adopted this persona, once you've inhabited it for quite a long time or this disposition, you're not doing it consciously anymore. It becomes your attitude to the world. And so, yeah, so this is something that is, perhaps it's inside out. But like, one of the places that people point to us, has this been really useful, this posture of cool. There are some books who say, like, cool, as we understand it today, is like of most use to adolescence, you know, that point in time when like social embarrassment is really, really important or the avoidance of social embarrassment

seems to be one of the most important things in the whole world. And that becomes less as you get older, I think. And you become more sure of your place in the world. Yeah, so this disposition of cool, perhaps you could see that as a defensive posture. And in fact, you know, when you go back in the history of cool, often it is used as a sort of a defensive posture. It's sort of originally attached to sort of outsider groups

who may use it as a defensive. posture against the indignities of things such as class or even the indignities and dangers of things such as race. It's an interesting question of whether this is an inside or outside thing, no, dear. Yeah, no, I meant it more in the sense of like that there's two sets of judgment. It's like whether you are behaving in this way, and because I've not read the book, that's why I'm asking you, like whether it's those aspects that you describe seem that like there's some kind of embodiment, like it's in the body, it's in the posture, it's in the behavior, it's in what that person is doing,

which is quite different to there being a social construct. I mean, I'm not saying these things don't come together, but they're not the same thing to be like, oh, judging something as cool. So, you know, one thing that we're going to get onto, and I'll talk a little bit about later, is the concept of cool in, you know, late capitalist marketing.

That's something that is crafted for a very specific reason to be viewed as cool, but it might completely fall flat on its face, right? You can try and make something cool, but then people don't see it as cool. That's, I think, the differentiation that was trying to make. Yeah, it's interesting because you mentioned autonomy as well, which is another sort of route. People talk about perhaps like coolness is linked to some version of autonomy

in which you are separated from the norms or the goals of mainstream society. I'm doing my inverted commas fingers in that. I don't think it hauls up anymore. And so in a way, it would be sort of originally cool in the sort of like early 20, of century and then across particularly in the era of like mass consumption the post-war period etc then rock and roll is a really important path of its dispersion of this attitude cool is not an individual attitude i think you it's got to be recognized by your sort of by your peer group perhaps but if you are judged uncool by by a wider group it's perhaps not

that important too yeah that's very interesting yeah do we need to get into a bit more of the history of how some of these ideas have come about or some where some of these things come from because obviously in a way what we seem to be describing is an attitude which you can trace all the way back into ancient times the idea that you should be in control of your emotions or not that anybody read what they are unless you have a reason for wanting them to you know you can trace that back a really long way but cool seems to be something more specific than steroicism or whatever although it obviously has a relationship to it But then there's also this notion of hypnotus, which we've sort of been circling around.

It's really interesting the way those two notions are connected. Well, I will say, for example, if we forget about coolness in the kind of literal sense of keeping cool and that being a desirable thing, if we think about it just in terms of, as I said earlier, the idea of status markers, I mean, one way in which that gets conceptualized by sociologists is with reference to Pierre Boudier's idea of cultural capital. Pierre Boudier's a French sociologist, probably the most influential French sociologist of the past 50 years, at least in the English-speaking world, his most famous book is this book called Distinction, a sociology of the judgment of taste. And the basic thesis of the book is people's cultural tastes are almost entirely.

ways in which they signal to themselves and others what they perceive their place to be in the social world and how they differentiate themselves from other groups in the social world and the one they belong to. So he's really talking about France in the 60s and 70s. That's what the research is originally based on. So you're talking about a culture then in which there's a very, very clear status hierarchy within all kinds of spheres of culture. So if you think about something like music, it's really unproblematic to say, well, like the grand opera and the northern European classical tradition are the high-status music and everything else is sort of lower status. And within that context, it's possible for some individuals, especially in the situation of

the universities expanding in the post-war period, has happened in many countries. It's possible for some people to acquire quite a lot of status based on their cultural knowledge, even if they don't have a lot of money, this type of status and that you can sometimes transfer into other kinds of status or even into income, that you can acquire in that way

Bordeaux calls cultural capital. I'm sure that's a phrase people will have heard a lot, the idea of cultural capital. So you can get a lot of cultural capital if you are recognised as having a lot of this high status knowledge, even if you're not rich and influential and well connected in other ways.

Of course, it starts to become more complicated once you start to observe the fact that, well, different social groups might actually attribute different levels of status to certain kinds of cultural knowledge. And Bordi himself, even when he's writing that book, based on research in the 60s and 70s, he acknowledges that, you know, there are certain types of bohemian intellectual who might be really into comics, for example, and even though comics aren't traditionally seen as high status, you get a certain kind of status from that. And then the term's taken up in quite an interesting way by the American, actually I think she's Canadian sociologist Sarah Thornton in the 90s. She just wrote this book about British nightclub

culture in the early 90s. It was very negative actually. It's very pessimistic. She didn't, she was definitely wasn't going to the kind of places I was going. But she writes about this aspect of club culture. And from her point of view, really, the culture she's talking about, I mean, she doesn't see anything progressive in them at all to the point where I think, you know, their analysis is quite problematic. But she basically, she sees British club culture in the early 90s as a site at which all you've got really is groups of people, almost exclusively groups of white men, often already having a certain kind of class privilege a lot of the time, but not always, like accumulating status for themselves within this subculture and basically accumulating cool, you know, making, defining themselves as cooler than other people. people and especially cooler than girls who find it very difficult to climb to the top of this status hierarchy at the top of which are club promoters and DJs really and in that world having a kind of knowledge about obscure kinds of music for example like knowing where the clubs

are knowing where to get the best drugs all these are ways of acquiring cool but from that point of view cool is nothing but a sort of it's a sort of status currency basically and he's very negative about it in ways which I think are quite interesting. So that is one very sort of extreme example of a certain kind of sociological account, which would just say the concept of called is really just ways in which hierarchies are established within groups that are not necessarily at that moment, the dominant group in society. And if you really want to push hard with that line, you can even say, well, even if you're talking about contexts like the mid-20th century American cities where the concept of cool seems to emerge out of African-American

culture. Even in those contexts, it's the same logic that's going on that to some extent what's happening is people within marginal groups are nonetheless establishing hierarchies, you know, rather than practicing egalitarian or solidistic social relationships. And the way they're doing that is through establishing this idea of certain people. Being cool and being cool just means being hip, it means being knowledgeable, that means, you know, having access to knowledge other people don't have. And I think that's really interesting, and I always think a Bordeuian perspective on one's cultural attitude is a really useful corrective to any sort of arrogance on the part of anyone who thinks they're cool. I've always said to students, you know, if you think you're,

if you think you're really underground and really cool, you should read this because it will really shake up any complacency about that attitude. But of course, it's problematic, and this is a problem with the Bordeauxian perspective on culture, always, to be honest, is you sort of get to the point where from this perspective, you can't really say, well, actually, you know, there is something really cool about seeing John Coltrane in a club. You know, that was cool, that was really good. There was something good about that, as opposed to not ever, not being able to see John Coltrane in the club or something, because there was some actual aesthetic value to, you know, to. to the music and to the forms of innovation associated with it

and the experiments with modes of being in the world that are associated with it. So if you take that approach all the way where cool is just a sort of status category and it's sort of detachable from any notion that well actually some practices might be genuine innovations in ways of being in the world or might be genuinely significant aesthetically,

then you also lose some sort of critical capacity to really understand what's going on. I think. Yeah, so it's interesting that the Bajouian stuff, it sort of loses the psychological aspect of it, isn't it, basically? And so one of the ideas of like what hipness is and how hipness relates to cool is like so hip we can talk about as like access to insider knowledge or something like that.

You know, I'm hip because I have, I know what's cool or not, you know, I know about this band before you know about that band. And of course, one of the lifestyles perhaps even that derives from the concept of hip is the hipster, which perhaps we'll talk about a little bit later. there's some suggestions that like the word hip comes from hep cat or the West Africa wall off language word heppy cat

which means one who has their eyes open I don't know how reliable that that etymology is what I know is that the etymology of hip is something that people who study those things have really really struggled over because that's one theory there was also a theory at one stage that you were hip if you were such a junkie that the only veins left you had on your body you could inject heroin into were on your hips, which to me sounded completely implausible. I mean, the West African

etymology seems more plausible than that. I mean, isn't there another theory, which is that hip is because you're, in a literal sense, you're bent, rather than straight, as in you're holding yourself at an angle. You're bent at the hip. Yeah, bent at the hip. Yeah. Well, you want to have loose hips. Exactly. Or like, you know, you're hip because you're, you know, you're not stiff. It's the opposite of, you know, as in the way you carry yourself. That's what I understood it. Yes, yes. Calling back to the guts episode, like in yoga and Tai Chi and Qigong and things like this, it's thought to be really important to keep your hips loose. Yeah, definitely. Like it's like it's so important to have a healthy gut and to sort of know how to breathe into

your stomach. Exactly. It's really, it's really important to have loose hips. That's how you maintain your youthful energies. So, yeah, it could well be that. But it's interesting because basically nobody knows. Why did hip come to mean fashionable? Anyway, sorry, go back to the story. No, no, I mean, but the thing with hip is it's not just access to cultural insider knowledge. There's a hierarchy of obviously between the hip and the non-hip. And of course, like traditionally, the idea of hipness or coolness was in part, you know, a way to break the status hierarchy of society and erect another one, basically, the one that, you know, we're the ones who know what's cool or not, and you'll be listening to that music next year where we've moved on.

You'll be wearing those clothes next year, so we're the ones who are in control of the cultural future sort of idea, that old argument about styler's armour and all that sort of stuff. But there's another sort of aspect of that, which is that your hip, the link between hip and cool is that, like, you know, if you're hip to certain things, then you can be in control when other people can't be in control. It's more to do with, like, experience.

So there's this famous quote from Norman Mailer's essay, the white negro in which he says to be hip is to be cool, to be in control of the situation because you have swung where the square has not. And when people talk about this, they point this really famous picture of Robert Mitchum being sentenced to a couple of months in jail for marijuana possession. So this is, it derives from one of those set up busts by the Hollywood press who were working with the police and they would go in and take pictures of pop stars who were smoking pot, etc.

Mr. Mitchum, Robert Mitch has been to jail before, so he's not phase, and he's got a real classic face of whatever. Whereas there's another film star there, Lillian Gesh, who looks absolutely shocked, and the person next to them is their lawyer who is like, I've never been so outraged in my life. But Mitchum is cool. He's done that before. I understand with these things, which you don't understand. I've had this experience, therefore, you know, I am cool. You know what I mean? There's one link between hip and cool. We should play real cool time by the Stooges from their 1969 album

The Stooges. Partly because it is actually a really cool song, but it's also like the Stooges, they embody a certain form of cool, almost dissident cool to the sort of like countercultural cool of the time, you know, they're like, the Stooges appointed to as they're like the protopan,

from that era, etc. And it's a cool linked to sort of like a more nihilistic, we don't care sort of attitude, very much in the sort of like hedonistic meaning of cool but yeah portraying a type of cool which will be to some degree

out of favor when they release the album but will become the dominant form of cool perhaps when we have the punk rock revolution from 1976 onwards can I come over tonight can I come over tonight

Well, do you think I want to do that's right? Can I come over to tonight? All of these reference points, when we're talking about the origin of the idea of cool, they go to the mid-20th century. And as listeners to this and all various other podcasts, probably know by now, now my frame of reference from that stuff is always to think about it through this, to drive from Gramsci and the Regulation School. And so I'm thinking about this in terms, once again, of Fordism.

This is the high point of Fordism, the form of capitalism, which is predicated on the first era of mass consumption and really mass culture. And so on the one hand, it's really the one era when capitalism produces a highly conformist culture because of the specific technological affordances, which make it possible to give people lots and lots of relatively affordable consumer goods, as long as people are willing to have lots of relatively identical consumer goods, whether we're talking about clothes or cars or Hollywood movies.

And so under those circumstances, differentiating yourself from the squares, becomes a really big deal, partly because there has never been such a square time in history. There has never been such a time in history when so many people were incentivised, really, to participate in a relatively homogenous culture. So there's that.

But also, for disdialial. As we've talked about on the show quite recently, Fordism is also about producing this relatively affectless state of detachment in the worker. The ideal Fordist worker is on the assembly line, not emotionally invested in their work, just efficiently moving the cogs along the conveyor belt. And so in a sense, these things sort of converge to contribute to this idea of cool, I think, that the cool person is the person who has mastered the demanded art of effortless, affectlessness. and also but also is in is such a sort of skilled consumer that they are able to differentiate themselves from the mass culture which defines the moment so it is both a product of forwardism but also a mode of resistance to it a mode of opposition to it and it's kind of significant that what we what is thought of as called as being this relatively marginal disposition in the for this period is we're going to become almost hegemonic as a kind of cultural ideal within the for this period.

Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis' 1957 album, widely regarded as inaugurating a whole new phase in the history of jazz. Cool jazz becomes a recognized style after this, has these particular characteristics, including this quite a laid-back beat, compared to the more frenetic style of bebop

out of which it emerged. So, led us here, Jeru from 97's Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis. It might be time actually to do a little bit more of the history of cool. I mean, the other way we could take it is to talk about related concepts such as like camp or even like geekdom, et cetera, or even hipsterism. All of these are ways in which people are trying to have some sort of individual relationship to mass culture,

rather than just a mass relationship to culture. Yeah, and I think that's like a. really important framing is like what are the points in history or like what are the social conditions that create the situation where a group of people want to differentiate themselves into some kind of subculture based on these kind of notions of being cool or being hip or being you know a geek like so many people today in in the UK want to call themselves a geek like I find that interesting like that's a phenomenon in itself which is a reaction to I think certain social conditions. So I think that's interesting. I think if we're going to start

the history of cool, I'd like us to go back to this notion that Jeremy mentioned earlier, which is this idea that there's this notion that goes back into history, that it's a positive thing for one to remain cool, as in terms of how it's linked to stoicism and to not show your emotions. And I think it'd be interesting, I don't know if you guys have the knowledge around this, is to problematize that a little bit and say, like, well, Well, why? So I could understand in battle. And for all of this conversation, what I'm seeing the imagery that's coming up for me is very much the imagery of, you know, it's very male. I'm seeing men in this situation. So I'm wondering, like, why would it be taken as read, like, that it's important

other than in battle, whether or not it was called cool, but to like not show one's emotions. Like, where is the value in that? Well, I mean, one way into that is to do a historical thing and then try to work out why that is valued. Like, where does that valuation come from? You know, why is it valued and whether it still holds up today? And it's like a whole series of possible routes or examples of like very similar attitudes to the one that Dick Poutain would pose as a contemporary cool posture. One of those is like the English aristocratic reserve, you know, the whole keep a stiff upper lip,

I don't show your emotions. You know, that's a well-known, a cliche about the English. although I think it's much more of an aristocratic thing than an English thing. It depends you're comparing to, you know, yeah. No, no, no. I think in general, like from an English perspective, of course you're able to make that discrimination between that kind of stiff upper lip posture. But to the majority of the world, everyone in England looks a bit stiff. People think I'm aggressive all of the time just because I talk with my eyes and my mouth and my

hands and I gesticulate and I'm gesticulating now and my shoulders are going up and down. as I'm talking, because I'm brought up in the Mediterranean, you know, and there are obviously other cultures that are also quite stiff. It's not just the, you know, English at all, but I think that is, it's several things together. I think coolness could possibly relate to that, but it's also, I think it's much stronger about the reserve. I think the stronger effect there, which definitely several eastern cultures have, but also England and definitely the south of England, is that idea of, like, reserve, which is related, but it's not exactly the same thing, I think.

Mm, yeah. I mean, there's also, like, this long centuries-old tradition of aristocratic cool, like a more European aristocratic cool, called spresutora. Perhaps it's spelled that, said that way. Presatura. Spresatura. Spresatura. Spresatura.

Very good, Kea. Thanks. Yeah, I'm getting my pronunciations. My pronunciations. Getting your Italian down, go on. So one aspect of cool that we might relate from that is like not just that we want to look detached and disdainfully at the world, but like we want to make that appear effortless. You know, that's the whole cool thing is that, you know, even though it probably takes a lot of work to hold yourself in a particular position or to, you know, maintain a particular psychological predisposition, you want to present it as though it's effortless in some sort of way. I think that's a key point, actually. Thank you for bringing that up. That effortlessness

that cool requires, in a sense. I think that's really interesting. And also, what's important there in the example of the European aristocratic cool or the English aristocratic cool is that I think intrinsic to it is a value class judgment that, you know, we want to be like this. And it's because, you know, the poorer classes are not like this, you know. So we want to to differentiate ourselves from people who are, quote, unquote, over-emotional or not cool by holding ourselves in this posture. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting as well about whether the value of being an emotional person or a non-emotional person and how that sits within social hierarchies.

That has changed over the years, basically. But yeah, aristocratic coup, this idea that, like, you know, the aristocrats can maintain their composure while the hoi-poly will be slaves to their emotions, etc. It's certainly linked to this idea of trying to distinguish the rulers from the ruled in some sort of way. One of the other ways in which places that people go to is this concept or this disposition of Itutu is part of a sort of religious sort of attitude from West Africa amongst Yoruba and Igobo civilizations in West Africa's dates back to like the 15th century, which really values composure in all situations.

over other attitudes. So the ability to maintain your composure is the most valued aspect of life, basically. You could probably distinguish it from contemporary conceptions of cool because it's not just in times of stress that you're supposed to maintain this posture of composure. It's also something you should maintain during moments of pleasure and stuff like that. And presumably during sex, I've not read anything particularly on that. But, you know, so basically it would be maintaining a cool posture during dancing and these sorts of things and performance would be the most valued thing.

And one of the reasons people find that really interesting, people try to make a link between this sort of like West African attitude of a tutu and closer related sort of like West African warrior mask cultures in which people or warriors would wear of wooden masks or perhaps cloth masks into battle that you can sort of see at this. there's a link to coolness in like the wearing of a mask into battle, which will allow you not to portray feelings of fear, etc., in this stressful situation because you've got a mask over. And people talk about cool as a mask, you know, you wear coolness as a mask. You can see that it's sort of linked to basically security guards and police officers wear peaked caps because your forehead is the most expressive part of your face, etc.

And so that's another way in which you can try to mask your emotions in a stressful situation and try to show composure and all that sort. of stuff. The reason people find that really interesting is because the dominant root of perhaps the most dominant conception of Kool traces back to African American culture of the early 20th century and into the mid-20th century. The really important role that African-American culture has played in what is now like global popular culture. There are arguments made that perhaps in fact the experience of slavery is the mediated institution in which some sort of inheritance from that sorts of West African cultures get transmitted into black African-American

culture. So the argument would be something like this in situations in which there are really severe social hierarchies and particularly in situations such as slavery in which, you know, if you portray your actual feelings, that could get you reprimanded or killed, basically. You could see why you would continue to value the ability to maintain a cool face. I mean, one of the other attitudes that people talk about in terms of how you might behave in a sort of situation like slavery is that shuck and jive sort of thing, you know, overly performing the stereotype the white master might have of you. You know, one way would make sense that you would maintain a sort of cool posture

and that would be valued. From there, you would trace some sort of route through from, you know, what we actually know for sure is that like our conceptions of cool and hip carry strong inheritances from the blues and jazz music and jazz musicians. And that sort of feeds into, you know, rock and roll and popular music, etc. In that sort of like early to mid-20th century, you know, I think Jeremy mentioned hip as in you couldn't find a vein to inject your smack your heroin into, so you've injected into your hip. You know, you'd have to say something like, yes, heroin is the cool drug. I'm not advocating that you take heroin. I'm advocating you don't take heroin. But like the

affect of that is to make you cool. As in you'd like, you know, basically you don't care about anything anymore. That's what people find attractive about it. So you can see that sort of experience feeding into conception of cool. And perhaps it too too in West African cultures, this valuing of composure was linked in fact to social hierarchies in that sort of way. But then it gets reversed. And in fact, it's those who are inferior in the social situation who adopt cool as a sort of form of resistance, then in the late 20th century, perhaps you see that become reversed again, in fact, and then cool being linked to your ability to consume and buy the right things, etc., which can allow that reversal of the role of cool in a hierarchy

again. And I wonder to what extent there is a kind of bleed where a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if on one hand, you know, you are portraying cool or you are wearing the mask of concealing your emotions because it fulfills a certain function, either in really serious historical moments of, you know, stress or danger, or because you're trying to distinguish yourself from another social grouping, to give yourself social capital, whether that actually becomes a situation where you start to be cool, as in you start to deaden your emotions, in the extreme situation that you brought up here, where, you know, you are mimicking the effect of heroin or other

opiates where you just don't care. Because I think there is some kind of sliding scale, having listened to, you know, everything that we're saying here, where there's a point at which it could dip into aloofness or detachment. And I kind of wonder what the social function of those things are, because at what point does it become apathy? And I think we're going to talk about this in its relationship to politics, you know. And I don't think it's unrelated. I haven't quite got to the point of being able to see exactly how we get there. But I do think there's a relationship. Yeah, I mean, it can be dangerous wearing the mask, because you can become The Mask. Yeah, exactly. Certainly, that was it. That was what I was told by Jim Carrey's

1990s film The Mask. We should play Take Off Your Cool by Outcast from 2003. Outcast are two people, André 3,000 and Big Boy. So they did a double album in 2003 in which one side was all songs by Big Boy, and the other side was all songs by Andre 3000. And Take Off Your Cool is on the Andre

3,000 side. The vocals by Nora Jones, the lyrics and the song title, indeed, just convey that idea that, like, cool is a mask that people wear, and wouldn't it be nice if you could take that mask off sometimes, so the lyrics go, baby, take off your cool. I want to see you, I want to see you.

Take off your coup. I want to get to know you. Yeah, I think it's worth noting that there are other contributors possibly to this notion of a cool becoming so important in the 20th century. So you can trace this idea of emotional control and coolness being good or being ideals. I mean, as we're always saying, actually, you can trace that in the Western tradition, at least back to the Stoics, but also in the Buddhist tradition. I mean, Nirvana literally means like the flame being put out. some interesting the scholarship on early Buddhism that thinks the whole agenda of early Buddhism is to reverse an emphasis in pre-Buddhist, kind of conservative practice and Buddhist practice

on kind of cultivating and intensifying your sort of internal energy. And instead to put this emphasis on cooling it down and being calm. So this idea of coolness in an almost literal sense being associated with a desirable state of equanimity and kind of affective control has a really long history. And then if we're talking about that 20th century urban experience, George Zimmel's famous essay on the metropolis and mental life is how it's usually translated. That's quite an old translation now, I guess.

Zimmel's like a late 19th century, I think into early 20th century, German sociologist. And Zimmel's essay on The Metropolis and Mental Life puts forth this idea that in the modern city, one develops a certain kind of disposition, which includes being at least outwardly, relatively affectless, being quite ironic, being reflexive, being tolerant, like sort of being able to get on with anyone, but not forming too many close attachments to anyone. and it really seems to anticipate a lot of what we're talking about with reference to Kool. I mean, he's talking about Berlin, basically, in the late 19th century. He's not talking about people who've got any experience of slavery or anything like that. So I think it's important to know that there are reasons why the experience of urban modernity might produce all those effects, like whether or not it has got this African genealogy.

And I think when we're thinking about that role of African-American culture in promoting influential ideas like cool, I think it's always important to emphasise that, you know, as people like Paul Gilroy have always pointed out, one of the key features of black American and, as Gilroy calls it, Black Atlantic culture, the culture shared by people of the African diaspora in Britain, in the Caribbean and America. One of the features of that culture in the 20th century is that a lot of the time the people in that culture are experiencing the absolute cutting edge of capitalist urban modernity. One reason they're developing these ways of living in the world which end up becoming influential on other groups of people is it's not because just or it's not just because they're carrying some cultural traces from their African ancestry. It's also just because they are having to deal with the more difficult. got aspects of modernity before anyone else is and more intensely than anyone else is.

So I think it's important to stress that because it's always important to stress the modernity of especially African-American urban experience, like not to try and always refer it back to some origin in African culture, which is always tendentious because cultural historians and anthropologists tell us that there are any claims that get made for the direct survival of African-culture in African-American culture are really difficult to actually prove. just because the culture of people on plantations really wasn't documented for a couple of generations. So we don't know, we can speculate, but we don't always know what survived and what was completely reinvented in the new context of the cities from the early 20th centuries onwards.

That's sort of interesting, yeah, there's a sort of interesting connection. If you think about the experience of that slavery in the middle passage and all that sort of stuff, it is people from like a whole range of cultures and I'm speaking a whole range of languages is mixed up and put together, you know, not being able to speak to each other. I mean, that's part of the whole thing is that you have to invent a new culture. You have to invent this sort of like culture out of what's there, basically, because, you know, it's not a homogenous group who are being enslaved and brought across to the West Indies or the Americas.

You know, it's a huge hodgepodge of people. And of course, yeah, it's not recorded. And so we don't know what's going on. But in a way, that sort of the experience of the plantations is an accelerated version of the experience of urbanisation, a lot of people coming together from different places and having to recreate a sort of an urban culture

distinct from, although probably influenced by the rural cultures from people in the cities were coming from. But yeah, you can totally see how useful that conception of a certain form of coolness can be in an urban situation in which you're meeting far more people than anybody had ever met before.

Relationships are much more fleeting, etc., And so the ability not to lose your temporary, etc., when you're just meeting somebody, and bump into somebody on the street, it's going to be highly praised. But it also sort of leads us to, later on, when we're sort of talking about

whether cool survives anymore, could see that, like, one of the experiences of contemporary youth is like an increased mobility, not just in terms of geography, but also in terms of jobs, except, having to move from one job to another. And you can see a certain form of coolness

being a useful attitude to adopt there, be able to slotting to one thing and then slot out and slot out and slot into another thing without forming, you know, two strong attachments without, you know, showing too much enthusiasm about one thing over another when you don't know the beliefs or enthusiasms of the person you're interacting with. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And we're raising an interesting question as to how much of this survives. I think we should talk a little bit about what happens to that idea of cool in a bit more detail from the kind of

second half of the 20th century onwards. So, I mean, the cultural group are really, really crucial in some ways to popularising a certain ideal of call of the Beetniks. Beenix is also one of these cultural objects which sometimes seems to disappear if you look at it under a microscope. So in theory, there was this collection of writers, novelist poets in the States, you know, Kerouac, Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, and they were into this interesting combination of like jazz

culture, a kind of very aggressive pursuit of a bohemian, autistic life outside the world of the 9 to 5 work-day job, Zen Buddhism, etc. But they were quite apolitical in that moment of the 50s.

And then supposedly there were kind of there were young people out there in the world who were heavily influenced by them who were also into jazz and maybe if they were if they were very well connected they were into smoking weed and they were into poetry big thing for the big thing was poetry but it's one of those formations where we we don't really it's very hard to pin down like well where there loads and loads of people in cities like living like this or was it really just something that people who have very ordinary lives and ordinary jobs sort of found attractive and appealing

and you know maybe they put on a beret occasionally to advertise that fact but but But that sort of beat-knit culture was obviously crucial for sort of consolidating a number of strands, this white bohemian veneration of black American culture, an interesting drug culture as potentially something culturally interesting and not just decadent, a kind of attachment to a certain ideal of the autistic life, the bohemian life, which you can trace right back to the romantics in the late 18th, 30 19th century. and this idea of cool and coolness, which they partly get from black culture and they partly get from Zen Buddhism. So all those things kind of come together.

But then what you really see happening from sometime in the 60s onwards as these ideas become more and more diffused and as the Beatingitnic culture partially mutates into hippie culture is you start to get a situation in which well on the one hand, I mean some strands of Beatenit culture

go into the counterculture from the new left. And people like Ginzburg, Alan Ginsberg, like by the end of the 60s, whatever it is he's into, it's not cool. He's into this very passionate kind of politics of free love, free drugs and revolution. There's nothing to really to do with being cool in that 50 sense. You might want it to be fashionable. It's kind of revolutionary, its aspirations. But then there's also this idea that things which might seem to be associated with a certain sort of niche culture or might be outside the cultural mainstream might have a kind of commercial value to them really starts to get picked up on by the cutting edge of consumer capitalism and

the retailer marketing industries. Thinking about the past 20 years, famously the very last scene of madmen is Don Draper at a hippie retreat coming up with the idea for what would become the most iconic TV ad for years and years and years, which is the Coca-Cola, I'd like to buy the World of Coke campaign. And it's making this point that, well, what actually what the counterculture and mind expansion actually meant to a lot of people by the end of the 60s was new ways to sell things like Coke to people. This is a narrative we're very familiar with on the show. I mean, we started off the entire run of ACFM with a discussion of the history of counterculture, or at least it was one of our first episodes. I mean, in fact, this is a story which has had become so well

known by the late 20th, 30, 21st century that when we started the ACFM or even, it seemed necessary to push back against it and say, well, actually, you know, the counterculture wasn't just about finding ways of selling specialist products or like paisley shirts and fringed, suede waistcoats to people. It was actually also a genuine attempt to try to rethink the way people might live in a post-capitalist context. But partly what we were pushing back against there was, I think, what we were trying to correct for was a kind of what had become, I think, an over-emphasis on those aspects in the analysis, but it is important to acknowledge the validity of all that analysis. I mean, Pantam talks about this in his book, although obviously he isn't,

he doesn't say that's the whole story, but for example, a really influential book for people like me, I've mentioned it here loads of times before, I'm sure, is Luke Bultanski and Eve Chiappetto's book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, which comes out in France, sometime in the 90s, but which, amongst other things, it tells

the story of how the leading edge of management theory in the capitalist world over the course of the 70s and 80s, learns to adopt all this language and ideas from the kind of the hip world, the cool world. It tries to make

capitalism cool, not just in the way that it sells products to people actually by telling them that if they buy this product, they can be hip and cool, but also in the way that just even corporations organise themselves by seeming to put a far higher emphasis on values like creativity and entrepreneurship and like, you know, cutting edge, bohemian living, you know, rather than the very kind of staid values of the post-war corporation. Their argument is that capitalism sort of has to reinvent itself in that way. partly because the influence of kind of bohemian and sort of beatnikish ideas on a whole generation of young graduates in the 60s is so strong that they're just not going to go along with capitalism as it was then constituted. I think Boltecans-Kinchepello are often misread, especially by people on the left, and they're often read as just dismissing any idea that the counterculture was ever radical, and that's a complete misreading.

That's not the story they tell. the story they tell is that actually the lack of interest, I should say, amongst the new generations of graduates coming out of universities towards the end of the 60s in participating in the management of Fordist capitalism was so intense that basically capitalism had to reinvent itself, partly just to persuade these new generations of graduates to participate in it rather than in pursuing the revolutionary objectives of that 1968 or what have you. But in the context of that story that development of capitalism, you have this situation where by the late 1990s, the idea of cool has just become absolutely central to the marketing industry, the retail industry.

In Britain, it culminates in this idea of Cool Britannia, this idea that somehow, you know, everyone in Britain should be really happy and excited because of Tony Blair, Tony Blair and Oasis. Tony O'Brien. Tony O'Brien. Tony Blair and Oasis had made Britain cool again, partly with a very explicit callback to 1966 and swinging London, which is widely seen as the last time Britain had been cool in the eyes of the world.

I don't know, we should all talk about that. Everybody knows my views about Britpopping cool Britannia. Yeah, the issue here is also like, I think we've talked about this several times. It's like if you have lived through the minor strike and you have memory of the minor strike, is quite different to if you are 10 years younger and you came up into your teenage years in the 1990s in the UK, in which it was very cool. I have very fond memories of the 90s and it is till now my favourite decade. So, you know, it did feel like it was Cool Britannia and I love the whole 60s revival thing. Like I was completely dressed like it was 1966. It was great.

Can we just go back to the 60s though, which was the message of the Cool Britannia era, But not the real 60s, of course, only with an ironic twist. No, no, I just want to just think a little bit more about, like, the relationship between hippiedom and cool, because if you think about hippodem, you'd probably think about a link more towards, like, the warmer emotions, such as love, and these sorts of things. And I think in that period, Cool picks up probably already is there. But something that gets exaggerated or emphasized in cool is like a link towards authenticity, towards living authentically. Like, that's something that feeds into, like, the hipster, the figure of the hipster when we get a little bit. You know, you're trying to have some sort of authentic life, but within mass cultures.

But, like, hippie-dom is a really important part of, like, this movement from African-American culture through, like, jazz, the blues, etc. I mean, part of that is just done through more general pop culture and rock culture, etc. But from the beatniks into hippie-dom, it's like the classic story that's told. But, like, it's much more of a warm emotion sort of. thing. It's just something that's sort of interesting. The other thing to talk about is that period towards the end of the 90s in which capitalism tries to become cool, basically, I try to portray itself as cool. So I think part of what you were talking about, James, like dressed down Fridays and these sorts of things, you know what I mean? Perhaps a ping pong

table in the workplace and all these sorts of stuff is sort of interesting, because that's the moment at which like the precarity of middle class jobs, then into the professions as well starts to accelerate, basically. The actual managerial trends in capitalism are in fact to promote internal markets and all of these things that promote anxiety and precarity and these sorts of things. But there was this moment where you had a sort of compensatory tendency towards things such as cool capitalism and, you know, the ability not to have to wear a suit on a Friday or perhaps even spend 20 minutes playing ping pong ball or table football or something like that. And that sort of leads me into wondering whether that has completely broken down.

Oh, it's time from my monthly call to Mr. Stats, actually. I put my call in. Let's see if he's around. No, but so basically, millennials' attitudes towards work or finding meaning in work has absolutely dropped off a cliff. So it's something like even a decade ago, 40% of millennials said that they found meaning in work, and now it's down to 14, 1-4. Basically, disenchantment with work because what the work is is associated now with precarity and not the place in which you can pursue and find yourself, which I think does relate back to this very strange moment at the end of the 90s. And of course, like Cool Britannia fits into that. To some degree, you know, it was the time when people thought that neoliberalism was going to solve the world's

problems, not cause them. Not everybody thought that, of course. But like that Cool Britannia coolness was very highly linked to consumption. etc but it was also linked to basically fed into a level of crulness and basically not caring so one of the like chief magazine of cool britannia is that magazine loaded and that you know the tagline of loaded was for lads who should know better do you know what i mean men you should know better yeah men who should know better you know that that thing and then like the late 90s nearly 2000s comedians all about punching down etc you have this cool britannia but it has a nasty edge it has a nasty edge hidden by irony

which then basically gets fully embraced as you move into the 2000. Well, I think if a 21st century style of music has sort of embodied a certain deliberately cool aesthetic, then it would have to be a German, so-called minimal techno. I, like many other people, I'm still reeling from the recent decision by UNESCO, to declare Berlin techno to be a piece of world cultural heritage.

And to not mention in any of the accompanying statements, the fact that the home of Techno is not Berlin, but the black suburbs of Detroit. Nonetheless, this is Ricardo Villalobos, the key architect of Berlin's minimal techno. And Villalobos is a guy whose parents came from Chile in 1973, escaping Pinochet's approach. but has grown up in Berlin and it's a very distinctively a Berlin style of music which is this incredibly smooth kind of techno which is very controlled doesn't have any of the embarrassing crescendos or climaxes of house and disco-derived dance musics and doesn't even have the sort of sinewy sensuousness of Detroit techno or the kind of intensity of yeah the kind of techno produced by people like underground resistance. I'm not, I don't know whether I love, I mean, at its best, it's really

kind of admirable. I really sort of like it. I think ideologically, I'm basically sort of opposed to it. I've danced to it at Bergen in Berlin, didn't really enjoy it that much. And I always remember somebody coming up to me when I was DJing years ago, somebody coming up to me and saying, are you going to play any minimal tonight? And I said, no, it's all going to be maximal. And that, but it doesn't you know it absolutely embodies a certain a certain kind of cool aesthetic and that Berlin I mean that Berlin dance scene which is really exemplified but Baguain is an interesting example of the kind of cool aesthetic as at

Bergen when I went anyway I mean it was really interesting to go there and I'm really grateful to the person who took me meaning I didn't have to queue up because I wouldn't have done and it was very interesting and instructive experience but the experience for me was well it was being in a room full of people who were all standing about you know two feet away from each other and not making eye contact for the entire night. It's a sort of constituting a sort of example of a serial group in the Sartrean sense rather than a

collective, a joyful collectivity in any sense that I could really recognise. But I understand that for those people, that wasn't their experience of it, that it was an experience of a certain kind of intensity and a certain kind of joy in collectivity for them. But there is certainly a kind of coolness to that in that Zimmerlian sense of everybody keeping their distance from each other so they don't get in each other's face so they don't intimidate each other or they don't harass each other and there's no eroticism and in that context the removal of eroticism is seen as like a good thing and I can understand that so yeah and this is a really good example of Villa Lobos's work anyway this is Heraclon from 2004

So it seems we've got this situation by the book we've already talked about comes out. Thomas Frank publishes book The Conquest of Cool, where I would say post-Fordist capitalism has produced this situation where the idea of Cool as a kind of niche cultural currencies become so central, partly because post-Fordism is all about getting people to buy into the idea, that they express themselves and define themselves through highly specialised forms of consumption. So that idea becomes so ubiquitous that it just seems to be sort of hegemonic. And

it feels like that. I remember it felt to me at that time like, well, the most conformist thing you could do, the most capitalist thing you could do is to try to be cool in some sense. And this is a proposition that was actually explored really brilliantly by the great cultural study scholar Jim McGuigan in his 2009 book Cool Capitalism, which I can really recommend as the best study really of the way in which capitalism in the late 20th or 13th to 21st century tried to become cool. A lot of the themes we're talking about to day were summed up in that book. But that book comes out just after the financial crisis and I guess was written mostly before it. But then the question is, well, what happens

to it now? What happens, according to theorists like me, we're sort of 20 years out from the end of post-forwardism really now. We're almost 15 or plus years into the era of platform capitalism, the era of social media, the era of the fully digitised culture. And so what do we think has happened to cool in that context? Is it even, is it still a thing? Does it still make any sense? My sense really is that people in their teens still get quite hung up on the idea that they've got to be, they've got to conform with what's trending on TikTok or whatever in a vet, but it's very, some of these really rapid cycles, like to the point where it's almost kind of comedic. And then I get the impression that that is a sort of teenage phase people grow out of

by the time they're in their 20s. And like, no one really cares now. What does it mean to be hit when everything is just to click away? Like every record, you know, even drugs, the Dartweb and what have you, everything is just to click away now. So what does it even mean to be hip? So I think that notion of hipness, it seems to me, I don't really think it's there anymore.

But I might be wrong. I'm sure there are groups of people to whom they think it's really important. But I say even to people who think they or members of their peer groups, of whom they might be critical, are really hung up on an idea of hipness. I would contend it's quite different to what it was 30 years ago. But then that's interesting because what you've just said, Jeremy, it insinuates that there is something there related to access. So if everything is just a click away and everyone has access to everything, then it makes it more difficult to have a kind of hip personality or cool, is my understanding of what you're saying, because everyone has

access to that stuff. So there isn't that one cool kid who can, you know, who get those records or be part of the underground, etc. But you are still able to perform cool through some kind of embodiment of the self in real life, right? I mean, I don't know how this would

be mediated in digital spaces. I don't feel like I've got an analytical position on like cool on TikTok, for example, or like, you know, whatever. I think that's a whole like different realm. Well, I think in that, so media realm, that classic 20th century idea of cool has this disposition of effortless,

affectlessness. It just doesn't translate because you don't get clicks without emoting, basically. You only get clicks from emoting, whether it's kind of confessional, whether it's wide-eyed enthusiasm for some new kind of moisturiser, whether it's anger and rage, that's what gets the clicks. And it's something to do, maybe it is something to do with the fact that everything is coming through a stream, coming through a screen, it already reduces the affective charge compared to being in people's physical presence to such an extent that, like if you try to be cool on a screen, then you just look like a robot. So everybody has to kind of overperform a certain kind of emotionality just for the sake of there being any kind of affective charge to the

relationships at all. It's a really good point that like what travels on social media is emotion, primarily anger. We should come back to this actually, but like if you want to think about the dominant political affect of the current moment, it's anger, isn't it? Is it anger or is it anxiety? I'm not sure. I spend a lot of time thinking about what younger people are doing because I teach people in their 20s and my kids are in their teens and my sense is that performing anxiety and also, but also to some extent pathologising it actually. My sense at the moment is a like youth culture for the whole culture of people aged like 15 to 25 would collapse. if people just said, well, you know what, everyone, everyone just feels sort of anxious quite a lot,

that's just being human. That's like a normal thing, as you would realize, if you read a novel written at any time in the past 300 years, like the entire culture is to some extent about, on the one hand, talking about being anxious, but talking about being anxious as if your anxieties are clearly worthy of discussion because they are in some sense, you know, they're both exceptional and non-exceptional in a completely paradoxical way. Yeah, no, I think you're right, But I think the difference is that if you think you can get clicks, I mean, I don't necessarily mean in a cynical way, I mean, but if you think that you can get attention and agency and resources by overperforming, you know, an aspect of normal human life, especially under the

conditions of late capitalism, then that is what you're going to do because there is such a lack of agency in people's lives in other spheres in terms of work, in terms of money, in terms of where you live and how you can live. So I think that becomes the sphere for which you're trying to overperform. Anxiety is an expression of lack of agency more than anything, isn't it? Part of that is like let's not fall into that error of mistaken what we see on social media as the totality of life. Certain things travel on social media. It influences the way people see the world, but it's not the totality sort of thing.

But I want to just go back a little bit moment to the argument you made earlier, Jem, about, there's a couple of arguments been made. The first one was the conception of Coolas Hip has disres. disappeared because everybody can get access to the whole of the archive, basically. It's all there. And so, you know, being able to access that special record, there's no longer holds. But like that period also coincides with the period of the hipster, although the hip is probably like 20 years old, isn't it actually?

Which is that hip taken to an extreme. And I think what the difference between contemporary hipterism and the classic conception of the hip is that there's some attempt to detach from mass culture. So, like, what is, you know, there's that search for authenticity that we talked about earlier. How do you get that? Well, it's like artisanal cheese or craft beers, et cetera. That moved towards the artisional to the small niche manufacturing. To live an authentic life, you have to go and brew your own beer somewhere.

And that's sort of like the ambition for a real authentic life as opposed to the life that we're forcing to. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I would say there's a complete revalorization, redefinition of what that term hipster refers to between. around 2003 and like 2013 because when people are first using that term hipster in its relatively contemporary and often pejorative sense

the people they're talking about are the people who in London vernacular were known as shoreditch twats they're talking about the people who were satirized on that TV show Nathan Barley and I would say that is like very late post-forwardist subjectivity like hyper-consumerist

hyper self-differentiating and then what happened And it's just a sort of accident of history in a way that it's not an accident. It's because it's talking about basically the same demographic. But the term hipster continues to be applied to people who have a completely different set of values, which are the ones you've just described, which the only similar. The similarity is the ideal type of this figure is still an urban middle class man in his 20s, who's white, and who is very focused on forms of consumption as a mode of self-expression.

But between like 2003 and 2013, the ideal type that that term hipster refers to, it goes from being Nathan Barley to indeed, as you say, a guy who runs a little coffee shop or something. And those aren't they, and I think you've just said it, you've summed up, what is the difference? It's a big difference to going from wanting to be like a self-facilitating media node and not thinking that's a horrible thing to be, which is Nathan Barley, to being a guy who just wants to make nice coffee for people. That is a very different set of things to want to be, and it bespeaks a very different orientation. I mean, I always think it does bespeak a different orientation towards capitalism, because what's implicit in a lot of that craft beer, hipster culture, is a desire for modes of commerce, which are not really capitalists.

Like, your little brewery is never supposed to actually get to the point of engaging in full-scale capital accumulation. And when it does, when it becomes like broodog, like everybody starts to hate it for that reason, like it's supposed to be something that will enable you to have the freedom of the classical entrepreneur, but not actually something that's going to turn you into like a tech CEO. Rznake and Barley wants to become Steve Jobs. I mean, there's no, unashamed and unembarrassed. And I think that is all to do with the financial crisis, really, that before 2008, it seems like a plausible objective to want to become Steve Jobs. Like after 2008, that is never happening.

So you want to have a decent life. You might as well get a little coffee shop and hope it makes enough money to pay the rent. The other way to think about, like, there's a conception of cool hold now. Perhaps it's sort of been remixed away. If we go back to Dick Putain's sort of tripartite characterization of the cool posture,

which was narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism. The last one, hedonism is certainly under threat at the moment, isn't it? I mean, part of the training that is instilled by life under late-near-liberalism or life under platform capitalism really, really does accelerate narcissism. It's this idea that you have to tell your own story all the time, you're curating your story, putting yourself on display, obviously, that is what you were trained to do by the algorithms of platform capitalism.

Everyone can talk to the whole world, but the only thing they can talk about is themselves. Apart from us, of course, you can expand their length about cultures going back thousands of years. Well, it's true, yes. But the heading isn't part of it. One of the phenomenons is that young people are, by all surveys, Mr. Stats tells me, having less sex and taking less drugs and drinking less.

And that's at a time when, you know, you have the dating apps, etc., which in theory should make having more sex possible. Yet there seems to have been a response to that. One of the reasons for that probably can be related back to the subjective training of platform capitalism, which is an acceleration of the subjective training of neoliberalism, which is that your whole life must be productive. Do you know what I mean? You go to the gym, you can't waste a moment, taking acid and staring at a ceiling for 12 hours and all that sort of stuff.

I think it's good you brought up the taking acid, because I think there's two things going on with the examples that you just gave here, which are also there, which is that it's like the stakes, basically you've got to lose a lot more if you take those kind of risks in, you know, 2024 than you would previously. Because if you lost your job on whatever, the production line or, you know, at a time of full employment or in the late 60s or whatever, you'll get another job. It doesn't matter. Or like if you're a relationship that ends badly, it's not necessarily going to be all over social media.

Like if you have sex with someone and take a risk, like the chances that like they're going to post some like deep fake porn of you is like, you know, that that's all new stuff that people are having to contend with. That's one thing which is like the stakes of like what's the possibility of like putting yourself out there and making yourself vulnerable and you know what you have to lose. And then the other one is gamification. Like you mentioned like the dating apps and like the way that they create a fatigue where you know you might be in the middle of a conversation with. someone that actually the app causes this kind of apathy within you because you're just exhausted from like being on this platform which is very different to if you would be interacting in real life so like both of those things make it difficult to you know to have a freer kind of relationship to other people and to one's self yeah there's also there's a neuroendocrinal determinist version of this or analysis of this which would just say yeah a lot of points for Like a scrabble. Yeah.

Everything we're talking about is just ways of getting a dopamine hit, whether it's sex or alcohol or scrolling on social media. And people are so addicted to social media and their phones as ways of getting a dopamine hit. They're not out looking for other ways of doing it. I think there's probably something to you. Well, actually, that's not at all. Having that analysis doesn't contradict anything else we've said.

I think that's part of it. These are all part of the same things. And, you know, there's an argument that the fact that, you know, our generation, like, here, like, the only way anybody could get a dopamine hit, which was shagging and getting pissed, like, always seemed a bit, you know, I remember thinking even when I was a teenager, they seemed, there was something wrong with that as well, seemed like there should be other things to life. And there was acids, which of course, none of us have ever taken. I mean, it's interesting when we think about

this category of hedonism, I think that your description of hedonism as like doing things for pleasure, but without any meaning being attached is really sort of interesting. That's vacuous hedonism, right? Yeah. Because it doesn't have to be vacuous. I mean, the term hedonism, I think, is really useful. And I've often used it when just describing the world of late 20th century consumer culture. I say, look, casual hedonism becoming a central element of people's everyday lives is a big, big cultural shift that takes place in the late 20th century. And that casual hedon, it can just mean going to McDonald's.

I mean, it just means, like, you're not living like previous generations where you're thinking about your relationships in the material world is all about harvesting. your resources to make sure you don't starve and your family don't starve like the following winter. It all becomes about seeking out little kinds of pleasure. And for most people, that just means eating chocolate and like hamburgers and stuff. That's all what it means. But it's still, that's still a hedonit relationship, a hedonistic relationship to the world, the one which is really central to people's whole lived experience of capitalism. And from that point of view, it is interesting to think about whether that's changed or whether indeed people are just getting such an addictive dopamine hit from playing computer games and scrolling on

their phones, that in fact it's got even more like that. It's just that people who have found a new way of getting a sort of addictive hit. I don't really know, I feel like I don't really know the answer there. I feel like both things are sort of true. Like there is really something sad about people having less sex than they're used to. But there's also the dimension of the scenario in which we have to say, you know, one of the, one of the great questions facing humanity from the late 70s onwards was if you could create the conditions which would make it possible, would everybody want to live like a gay man in 1978? And it turned out that the answer was no.

If everybody could just have loads of casual sex with people they barely know, you could facilitate that. Would that make everyone happy? And it's turned out, no, it doesn't. And now we're at a stage, now we don't really know what to do, because that's what we figured out how to do. We haven't figured out how to facilitate people actually having meaningful relationships. then that's a whole bigger question. We should do a whole show about it one day. We haven't

already because it's fascinating to me and it's, I sort of think on some level, we still haven't really worked out like what replaces arranged marriage as a form of people finding people to have sustainable intimate relationships with that lasts like for more than a couple of generations. Because basically since the end of most marriages being effectively arranged for lots of people, I don't think any form of like romance and intimacy has survived like more than two. or three generations. Let's do romance. I have a whole analytical position on it. It's a really great topic, actually, isn't it? Let's do, let's do, let's do that as another episode. Another song called Cool, which I also think we should play by Dior Lipa from 2020.

I'm always one happy to drag this podcast in the 21st century. Also, from this point of view of the female experience related lyric implying the expectation, the need and the desire to be cool, declaring its loss because I'm burning up on you. That's cool by Dear Leaper. I guess we're ready for this long. The conception of cool has been really masculine. Of course, there's been like cool women, people like Nico, etc. She was on smack, wouldn't she? No, I think it's a really important point.

Like, what did it mean to be a cool girl or a cool woman from the moment when Cool starts to emerge to this hegemonic term? It meant to be sexually available and probably, on smack. And that was one of the things that, you know, women's liberation had nothing to do with cool. Women's liberation was about being angry or about being in love or about being passionate. And that was one of the things that people didn't like about it, found scary about it. Well, women's emotions have always troubled, you know, patriarchy, especially collectively. Well, of course, and this is one of the issues, isn't it, that that whole history going all the way

back, indeed, even to early Buddhism, of people saying, well, it's good to be in control of yourself. I would say very, very many times that sentence has been finished because otherwise you're just a girl. Otherwise, you're like a woman. I will never tire of pointing out that Plato thought that instrumental music should be banished from the ideal republic because music got people too worked up and emotional and it made them like women. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, so I think definitely what's implicit, you know, even if it wasn't made explicit in a lot of this contemporary and older conceptions of being cool is this idea that you want to be cool because like you just said, Jeremy, you don't want to be like women. So what's implicit is that women are

the body of like warm emotions and overreaction and like hysteria. But if we pull this back forward to what we were talking, just talking about the cool Britannia and the late 90s and then the early noughties, I think Angela McCroby, who's like British cultural theorist and feminist, she wrote a paper in the early 2000s, which I think was really kind of on point at the time, which is making this argument that for women to even be able

to reach up into this quite male domain of cool involves both the endorsing of and in a way like an ironic normalization of this kind of hyper-consumerous pornography culture that we're talking about seen in the lads magazines. And then that's what you get with the kind of Lodette culture, right? And it's kind of like her post-feminist analysis of the time where this, like I said, this sexually commercialized content is then regurgitated by women as kind of cool. And if I extrapolate from that paper, and I know might be wrong here,

but my reading of that is basically a way of saying, saying, well, women have to allow their boundaries to be violated to reach up into that category of cool, okay? So this brings me on to another gender topic that I'd like to spend some time talking about, which is this conception of a cool girl. Okay? So the cool girl in between inverted commas is this kind of pervading paradigm under patriarchy, which is very, very contemporary, it very much exists in alternative relationship scenes and in mainstream relationships scenes in the West, in definitely English-speaking cultures. I don't know whether it exists or what the term is in other languages. But where women kind of posit themselves

or they seek to appear to have few needs or no needs or desires and take pride, and this also carries on from kind of the Ledeck culture, in calling themselves like low maintenance. right and easygoing and and they work hard not to react to their boundaries being violated which happens all the time and this is self-identified like women are self-identifying into this category of the cool girl right so this is of course not a new phenomenon like this is as I was just saying you know when we're talking about and Jeremy mentioned like this is very old the idea of women feeling the need to suppress their emotions or else they will be talked down to as behaving in that hysterical feminine way. But what's interesting here is there is this newish

iteration of cool in this concept of a cool girl that we find in the 21st century. So let's break down like what this is. So effectively what this is in relationship studies, which is an area which I find really interesting, right, is the reality that under patriarchy, growing up, many girls and young women are not really taught to advocate for themselves and their needs, right? And they're told through this concept of the needing to be cool and needing to be masculine implicitly or explicitly that their emotions can be seen as annoying, irritating, out of place. And we see this, you know, whether it's in families or in the workplace, etc. So setting yourself up as a cool girl basically saying, don't worry about me.

I don't have those needs. I don't have those boundaries, which have course, creates a situation which is attractive to narcissists and players. So what's interesting about this is relating back to what we were talking about masks, is that this is a space where young women wear this mask and identity. In the consciousness-raising sessions that, you know, we run, we talk about using style as a weapon, we've spoken about cool as a mask here, but there's also this like cool as a veneer to avoid any kind of confrontation, not just in our relationship with others, but also in like a deep psychological level, I guess in relationship with ourselves. And so many of us who have been in abusive relationships, and whether that's

with caregivers or with parents, with intimate partners, and even in friendships, letting go of that fixation of the appearance of being cool and the importance of being cool around your peers and around, you know, the person who is subjecting you to abuse, et cetera. And letting go of these optics of being cool is an absolutely essential part of one's healing and a journey of personal growth and ultimately a growth of self-esteem. So I think actually the conception of cool here, and there's a lot written about this, this is intensely googlable if you look for like cool girl as a phenomenon in relationship studies. It's a really, really interesting space in which the concept of Kool has developed in the 21st century.

How are you going to link New Order Blue Monday to Kool? Well, Blue Monday is a kind of electronic dance music, but it's very controlled, like it never really reaches a climax. It's very influenced by Kravdek. and it has this historical status as the record that basically is sold the idea of dance music to a certain rock-focused white middle-class audience of listeners in Britain and to some extent in the States. But my story about Ballyamanda is, I grew up completely as part of this cohort of British music fans

who were constantly told a certain story of mainly British music and music culture by the music press really in the 80s and 90s and by kind of music journalists on television and such. And according to that story, Blue Monday almost invented dance music. Of course, it didn't at all. It really just created a form of dance music which was acceptable to a sort of post-punk white rock audience.

And so when I was researching out my first book, the book I wrote with Ewan Pearson, Discographies, in the late 90s, one thing I ended up doing as part of my archive research was I ended up looking at the reviews of Blue Monday when it first came out. And in sounds, music paper was like the third biggest music paper at the time in the 80s. In sounds that week, the week it was released, they had a guest reviewer. And the guest reviewer was Mark Almond of Soft Cell. And Soft Cell are a band who in Britain really were one of the pioneers of this electronic dance music sound in their first single memorabilia it's clearly a direct influence on

on later records like blue monday but they really helped popularize it and they came out of that gay club scene and they had spent a lot of time around both european and american like club scenes and mark armand hates the record he says this is awful that we've heard all this before for years now we've heard all this electronic this electro disco i don't know if he i don't think he uses the word cool i can't remember he says make the disco wilder And he wanted some more passionate, some intense kind of dance music, in a way, which really anticipate actually what's going to come out, kind of garage and deep house coming out of New York over the next 10, 20 years. So it's really interesting that to him, like, the coolness of it

was a kind of pose, which was already tedious and kind of boring by the time this record was released in 1983. And to me, that is really interesting. That is an interesting. example of how this very kind of controlled aesthetic with which a certain strand of electronic dance music, which runs through Kraftwerk, through New Order and people like that, through to Villa Lobos and people like that in the 2000s, it can really come across as alienating to people who want their dance music to be, to be passionate. And that does revolve to some extent around a certain contestation of the

meaning of cool and coolness but you know when can you you can also make a defence of it and say that you know it's partly has to do with a certain deliberate deeroticisation which is necessary at times for people to be able to experience this stuff as it may answer pacing but that's a whole other story

famously this the story that goes along with Blue Mondays it was released as a 12 inch at the time when 12 inches didn't really sell at many cock and Peter Saville, a designer, did an incredibly elaborate sleeve for the record, which looked like a floppy disk and now redundant media form. And it basically costs so much to do the sleeve that the cost of producing a record were five pence more expensive than the cost at which it was sold.

Of course, I didn't think that was going to be a problem because 12 inches don't sell any copies. And then Blue Monday went on to become the biggest selling 12 inch of all time. So thousands and thousands of records, and they lost. a lot of money. We've talked about cool in quite negative way towards the second half of this recording, linking it to like consumption, etc. And then to this image of the cool girl who is supposed to not make a fest, etc. And that sort of idea that linking it to the patriarchy and that sort of thing,

which does lead us to this question of like, well, what should we do with this category of cool? You know, is there any political utility in it? If the dominant political emotions are a mixture of like anger and anxiety, then it seems like cool could be useful in that sort of way, you know. but we'd need a different conception of cool in order for it to be useful. One experience we haven't talked about and one place we could go back to

is like the history of black radicalism in the late 1960s, 1970s. So in some ways, that's, you know, that's one of the paths out of the African-American experience and how that feeds into popular culture, et cetera. And in particular, like the Black Panther Party, the late 1960s into the 70s, You know, they had this very cool image, basically, a very conception of cooler.

We're seen as like the cool party. There's this book by Jean-Gene, who's a French writer. The book's called Prisoner of Love, and he's visiting the Black Panther Party, and then he goes and visits Palestinian camps in Jordan as well. It's like a very impressionistic sort of book. He writes like really remarkable passages about, like, the coolness of the Black Panther Party. And it's a Black Panther Party, you know, it's a coolness that comes from, particular place, I think. Do you know what I mean? And I think the argument is something like

this. If we think about that line of coolness, which is like you have swung where the square has not, right? It's that like, you know, you've gone through certain experience. Is that an individual thing? Or can you have like a collective cool? And the way you could have a collective cool is to have that link between, you know, we understand what's going on. You know, you may not understand what's going on. We understand what's going on. We know, you know, we know what we want to do, etc. is a conception of hipness or coolness, which is linked not necessarily to, not necessary to lived experience,

but like to reflection, to collective self-reflection. We understand the world. Do you know what I mean? We understand the world. Therefore, like, you know, we're the ones who are set in our own goals, which are broken from the goals provided to us

by capitalist society, that sort of idea, you know what I mean? Which is super interesting, because it's almost like what we're saying, is that the formula is revolutionary plus historical analysis equal coolness, which obviously the three of us have a lot of, right? So, you know, maybe individually we're not that cool,

but when we get together as a collectivity, we are really fucking cool. Well, I have individually cool as well. But the point stand, yeah, no, but the point that is, it's like collective cool. Yeah, revolutionary does not seem to be cool, but the Black Panthers, undeniably are cool. So how do we square that circle, right?

But it's also, if it can be, if like coolness can be linked, to, you know, that we have knowledge that you do not, but that knowledge comes out of a process of collective self-reflection and collective analysis of the world. That's a democratic cool. Do you know what I mean? All of a sudden, it's not a cool that's in hierarchy,

or perhaps the hierarchy is those who are for the revolution and those who aren't, or whatever. Perhaps it's just, we should just put it this way. Can you have a democratic cool? Is it inherently linked, as Bourgeois would argue, or the rendering that Gem gave at the beginning, that it's linked to, you know, position yourself in a hierarchy, or can you have a democratic conception of Cool, which comes about because, you know,

we know what's going on and you don't because we're involved in this project to understand the world and change it? It's a really interesting question, actually, yeah. I think you can say that Cool as a personal disposition can have a powerful political utility in that classic sense of, as I keep saying, effortless, affectlessness. Because I think that this is consistent with something I've said on the show later times. It's really important. in political struggle and political work to be reflexive and careful about where you put your emotional attachments. So I think everybody's probably got the message by now. I think one of the great weaknesses of the Corby movement was that people became emotionally invested in and

attached to an idea of Corbyn as a person or the Labour Party above all, which as I've said many times is just not a thing about which you should have any feelings like negative or positive. You have to be ruthlessly unsentimental about it if you're going to engage with it from the inside or the outside. And that's not to say you shouldn't be angry about, for example, the Labour Leadership endorsing carnage in Gaza, but I think you have to learn to experience that anger at those individuals without then developing some kind of emotional feelings

about an overall institution, which it doesn't serve you well politically to have those feelings about. That is an example, that's just one example of how a certain kind of reflexivity, a certain kind of emotional control, a certain kind of self-conscious capacity to decide on some level where you're going to put your emotions and your affect and your attachments. I think that is really, really useful and it does precisely come out of. As you said, Nadia, it comes out of having a really well-developed sense of one's place in history as much as anything else, like a historical consciousness. Oh,