So as not to overburden today's earlier post, I momentarily tabled the relationship between the concept of "cool" or "hip" that is related both in historical time and in concept to Riesman's discussion of anomie and autonomy.
Cultural historians often reference Normal Mailer's essay "The White Negro", published in the fall of 1957, as a landmark, connecting the outsider stance of the beatnik and the Negro as the only way to live with authenticity in the face of the existential horrors of the nuclear age. Although Mailer makes no reference to pop culture, this connection of the young white rebel with a "Negro" hip was also present in jazz, teen movies, and early rock 'n' roll. The early Elvis Presley, the white boy Sam Phillips had been looking for who could "sing like a black boy", modeled his look on James Dean and Marlon Brando, combining a disdain for adult, parental authority with an outsider music (David Halberstam, The Fifties, 457). Although Elvis, and rock 'n' roll softened in the late '50s and early '60s (to be revived later post-British Invasion and Bob Dylan), a cultural connection of youth, rebellion, and "cool" was established in popular culture at the same time that Mailer's essay made its arguments to a more highbrow audience (see Glenn Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America). And the youth rebellion element of hipness, which Mailer does not address directly, may be the most important element as the notion of hip spread from American sub-cultures to mainstream popular culture.
If, as Thomas Frank argues in The Conquest of Cool, Mailer's essay posited hipness as "an actual solution" to the crisis of conformity, a "blueprint for the cultural eruption by which the civilization of conformity would be overturned" (12), it was one which straddled the distance between Riesman's categories of anomie and autonomy. Both types are non-conformist, but only Riesman's autonomous character has the choice, the opportunity, of conforming. Inhabiting Mailer's worldview, or that of Presley posing as Brando or Dean, the question of "why conform?" seems a reasonable one. Yet here we get into the slippery territory of who rejected who first. The affluent middle class suburban conformity of the '50s wasn't much of option for the "white trash" Presleys of Tupelo, Mississippi or Mailer's Negroes. Conformity was been a mindset, but it also had boundaries of class, region and race.
As culture changed throughout the 1960's we see the parallel processes of entry to middle-class life opening up for groups of Americans who had previously been excluded (more opportunity to conform) and a growing acceptance of individual difference within middle and upper class life (more opportunity to publicly express an individualized self (that is perhaps authentic) without as much risk of social rejection). The conquest of cool in advertising, and the wide reach of popular mass media, was influential in both processes. Youth, associated with things that were new and hip, became not just a natural and growing demographic group, but a "consuming position to which all could aspire" (25). New styles of advertising downplayed old value systems. As Frank explains, "The old values of caution, deference, and hierarchy drowned creativity...and enervated not only the human spirit but the consuming spirit and entrepreneurial spirit as well" (28). Consuming became redefined as both inclusion into the mainstream and rebellion against and older, stodgier, less profligate ways of conformity (31).
Perhaps this is part of what Paul Kinsey had in mind in the brief scene in season two where he is riding the bus to civil rights protests in Mississippi and stating that advertising can be part of the solution, because advertising sees no color, and sees everyone as a consumer. Yet, at the same time, corporate advertising is inherently conformist. This contradiction is apparent in Paul's character. Paul is mocked by Joan in earlier episode following his party in South Orange, and presumably mocked, at least questioned, by the audience watching the bus scene, as someone only posing as hip through his beard, artistic aspirations, and less than fervent commitment to civil rights. The complexity of character in this case allows the audience to examine these questions of cool / conformity / and authenticity from multiple angles. Kurt, the European, Dylan-listening, out-homosexual, is presumably authentic in his cultural choices -- he doesn't seem to care what his co-workers think. Paul Kinsey embodies contradictions.
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