The White Negro – Norman Mailer essay 1957
Mailer begins the essay by stating:
“Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.”[13]
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“It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed (343).”
In what seems to be a paradox Mailer explains that the hipster “is a psychopath, and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath (343).” He explains this understanding by pointing out that the hipster, the philosophical psychopath, is self-aware, a trait that the “unreasoning drive” of the psychopath does not possess. To Mailer “Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle”; the hipster’s “intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel (343).”
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Mailer’s reasoning for this prediction is that the psychopath “is better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us (345),” referencing one of his earlier observations that, in contemporary America, “sex is sin and yet sex is paradise (343).” This new personality is a reaction against psychoanalysis and conformity; one that is free from the inhibitions of the “inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past (345).” He explains that old “circuits” limit human potentials that “might be exciting for our individual growth.”
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Mailer explains that,
“Hip morality is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and – this is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins- to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need. Yet in widening the arena of the possible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man’s desire contains its antithesis of human co-operation (354).”
He goes on to state that “Hip ethic is immoderation, childlike in its adoration of the present,” and that it “proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed (354).”
Mailer then explains that the main woe of the mid-twentieth century is that “faith in man has been lost,” something that has allowed for the rise of authoritarian powers to “restrain us from ourselves.” Hip, which Mailer suggests “would return us to ourselves,” believes that “individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State (355).”
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He concludes by stating that “given such hatred, [society] must either vent itself nihilistically or become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state (357).
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Although the essay considers a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States. Probably the most prominent academic exponent of the New Left in the US was Herbert Marcuse