Hipster (a working definition):  One whose enjoyment is subservient to one’s perception of the acts essential to one’s self image.  

From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the hipster is one with a rigid, perhaps fundamentalist, investment in the fiction of his or her ego, placing the hipster at a radical remove from the truth of his or her subject.

The geek, however, experiences no limitation in his or her enjoyment of the experience; in fact the geek has the opposite problem in getting carried away with his or her enjoyment, in other words going too far in the sense of alienating others. The geek, whether engaged in civil war reenactment or on-line World of Warcraft gaming does not know how to limit his or her enjoyment, allowing his or her excessive enjoyment to interfere with basic social functioning. To use a (possibly hip) Lacanian term, the geek has an over abundance of jouissance. On a personal level, I am a closet geek about tennis equipment, but I have enough of the hipster in me to keep this geek enthusiasm largely concealed.

The hipster’s enjoyment is restricted by a rigid self image, and the hipster’s perception of his or her own sexual attractiveness is a key element in the hipster’s calculus of acceptable acts. The hipster is limited at all times by the idea of how he or she will be perceived by others, unlike the geek who could care less about the opinions of those not engaged in e.g. medieval warcraft and costume gatherings. The hipster is the far more tragic of the two conditions, as he or she is, ironically, as socially and sexualy limited as the geek; just as geeks only get laid by geeks, hipsters end up only having sex with other hipsters. But while the geek must struggle with an excess of jouissance, the hipster, bound by his or her rigid ego, exiled from the truth of his or her subject, can only nibble at the life-giving buffet table of jouissance, while everyone else helps themselves to Cheesecake Factory portions. And the geeks go home with doggy bags.

Finally, the phenomenon of “geek chic” in which the hipster attempts to coopt the yearned for jouissance of the geek but only ever manages to shackle the geek’s excess freedom, reveals the truth of the hipster’s subject as a narrative of the geek in flight from himself, i.e. the hipster is nothing other than the necessary ego fiction accompanying the truth of the repression of the geek into the always obscured subject.  

Witness the author’s circa 1995 immersion into thrift store clothing, wine-colored hair, local Perth indie rock bands, and a subsequent ill-fated long distance love affair with an Australian hipster sheela.  After further romantic catastrophes amidst a prolonged hipster phase, my care of the self has consisted largely of a modulation of my hipster terndencies in an effort to give the truth of my own subject room to breathe, e.g. allowing myself to devote untold hours to staring at tennis racquets on internet tennis gear websites and, ahem, posting thoughts on the pro’s and cons of various racquets on chat room message boards; perhaps if I can let myself chat up the occasional stranger in an elevator about the reason I am considering a switch from Head to Dunlop I will have truly relented my investment in a hip facade.  All that said, the most important step in the journey towards my subject was wooing and marrying a decidedly unhip, but manifestly cool (as in the true meaning of cool in the sense of the real meaning of Christmas) Jewish chick.  L’chaim!