This project is to read The Bottom Line on Planet One, an essay written in 1985 by Dick Hebdidge, make notes and answer several questions that arise from the essay.
My usual policy is to make notes as read through an article, or to skim first to get the gist and then make more detailed notes. Within a few paragraphs, I sensed this was not appropriate for this article: it had to be read and understood more holisitically because, above all, it is an essay from the heart; the project invites us to analyze certain attributes and arguments and I shall come to that, but first and foremost one senses a degree of emotion in Hebdidge's thesis stemming from the contrast he perceives between Ten-8, a serious and penetrating journal on independent photography and The Face, a magazine originally founded by Nick Logan.
Logan earned his journalistic spurs on NME, one of the two pre eminent contemporary music papers of 70s; understandably therefore The Face was originally based on popular music but later widened its reach to include fashion and culture. Here are a couple of covers:
The magazine ceased production in 2004 but an internet search reveals many entries; copies of the magazine can be bought for around £5 on ebay. It has been added to the the permanent collection of the Design Museum (Wikipedia).
Ten-8 by contrast was a more highbrow publication. It has no Wiki page, an internet search for "ten-8" provides us with ten fire equipment, a family of convertor modules (whatever they are) and a software solutions company. Narrowing the field slightly gets us to a blog by Alicia Melanie (Melanie, 2013) who is enchanted to find some copies of the magazine in a library. The black and white layout and somewhat less than dynamic cover suggests it was not intended to be a widely circulated journal:
Melanie continues:
Perhaps the appeal derives from the fact that I’m quite an old soul or my attraction to photography, or maybe both.
No more needs to be said than that Ten-8 ceased production in 1992.
I spend some time introducing the journals as I believe it is critical to understanding Hebdidge's essay . He seems genuinely puzzled why in 1985 his students, when asked, said they preferred The Face to Ten-8. Hebdidge admits they are not alone: the then circulation of Ten-8 was 1,500-2,000, that of The Face 52,000 - 90,000 (p100). He asks why this is rhetorically, and concludes there is no simple answer:
"The chasm that divides them remains as absolute and inaccessible to concise description as the gulf that separates one element from another."
This is a curious metaphor as most elements are much more closely related to some elements within the periodic table than to others, but we get the gist. He turns the dialectic between the two literally into a War of the Worlds. In the First World, written and spoken language have precedence over the 'mere imagery' of the second in which the hierarchical ranking between the two has been abolished. Interpretation of an image by professionals is not required in the Second World, inhabited as it is by a 'motley gang' of bricoleurs et al. He continues the dialectic with zeal, referring also to a 'round' world and a 'flat one', synonymous with First World vs. Second World. Bizarrely the flat world inhabited by The Face and the like arises because the 'vertical axis has collapsed' so perhaps the metaphor might more accurately read one dimensional as opposed to two.
He launches into vitriol against The Face, concluding:
"To stare into flat Face is to look into a world where your actual presence is unnecessary, where nothing adds up to much anything any more (sic), where you live to be alive. Because flatness is the friend of death and death is the great leveller. That's the bottom line on Planet Two."
One is tempted to say that it is only a magazine....
Hebdidge continues by distinguishing between First World critics like John Berger and Second World ones, or the People of the Post (post structuralism, post modernism) as he calls them. The People of the Post (or simply Posts) seek to undermine any discussion of meaning or representation by pointing out the partiality and impermanence of any distinction made. Baudrillard, in particular, takes this to extreme, saying that reality is no more than sum of all apprearances, and is not therefore static or knowable. Hebdidge sets out a metaphor of life according to the Posts as being an anti system: one in which "our lives get played out for us, played out in us, but, never, ever by us". Hebdidge terms this scenario "Living in the wake of the withering signified".
Hebdidge parodies the Second World as vacuous, a world without distinction and hierarchy, where the consumer replaces the citizen; a world anathema to his Marxist leanings. He sees The Face as fitting within the Second World; scornfully he asks why should anyone think deeply when they are not paid to think deeply.
The essay continues with more analysis of The Face, including scornful critiques of Levi and Swatch advertisments. The Face, Hebdidge claims at one point is less of an 'organ of opinion' than a 'wardrobe full of clothes'. He evokes the image of the reader casually turning pages, taking in images, flitting over the words (earlier in the essay he claims that The Face is intended to be 'cruised' . He was prescient in this respect; within ten years we were 'surfing the net').
Hebdidge's essay is strongly worded and deeply personal, almost beyond academic discourse in places and ends with a powerful personal statement that he will go on believing that 'the earth is round not flat, that there will never be an end to judgment,.......' This, he believes, is the 'bottom line on Planet One', a gloomy conclusion. Indeed, the whole article accentuates the negative and eradicates the positive. Hebdidge writes many pages on the iniquitous The Face, yet Ten-8 is mentioned only as the positive comparator - the good guy in the argument - without explicitly setting out why.
The questions are as follows:
Does Hebdidge make a clear distinction between 'high' and 'popular' culture?
Hebdidge does not use this dialectic. His distinction between First World vs Second Worlds, and round vs flat is essentially between thinking; challenging; use of words as opposed to vacuous; accepting; scanning images, it is an academic dialectic. One associates the distinction between high and popular culture to be more akin to Bourdieu's distinction between the Sphere of Legitimacy (music, sculpture, theatre) and Sphere of the Legitimizable (cinema, jazz, photography). Perhaps Hebdidge even thinks of The Face as belonging in Bourdieu's Sphere of the Arbitrary along with cookery, clothes and decoration. And possibly his Marxist philosophy led him to avoid making the distinction between 'high' and 'popular' culture, realizing that unwittingly that would suggest he leans more towards Glyndebourne than to Duran Duran.
....what are his main arguments against the 'People of the Post?'
Hebdidge is scornful of the Posts because he believes they seek to divorce the viewer from the message. Their position is that any distinction between, say, good and bad, legitimate or illegitimate, is to be challenged because the distinguisher has his or her own prejudices. The aim of discourse is to identify and analyze the different articulations, the sociology of the sociologists in simple terms. Hebdidge evidently finds this frustrating because it effectively absolves anyone from making value judgments. He is particularly critical of Baudrillard who he views as at the extreme end of this school of thought. Hebdidge uses the metaphor of people as heads of a video recorder, merely passing and translating visual and audio signals but never owning, storing or 'seeing' the processed material. It is a view that conjures up Orwellian images of faceless people being done to but never being done by.
This is anathema to Hebdidge, because he is a thinker, an academic, a polemicist, one who wishes that the world would listen to the power of the pen.
Explain what you see as the difference between high and popular culture today.
I set out earlier the distinction between Bourdieu's Sphere of Legitimacy and Sphere of the Legitimizable, and this would be my difference; high culture is that which is inaccessible by the barriers put round it by those inside. The barriers may be economic (why bother to view paintings if you cannot afford to buy one for the living room?; do you really want to spend £80 per seat to watch someone belting out words you don't understand in a language you don't speak?) or academic (are you prepared to read, digest, and comment on 14 pages of turgid, unintelligible and pompous commentary to 'understand' this painting?). Either way, 'high' culture is intended for the elite, and you have to earn your passport to be included in that renowned club.
Popular culture, on the other hand, is accessible, both because people can afford it (as in Bourdieu's thesis on photography as Middlebrow culture) and can understand it readily. I have not (yet) come across Zipf's Principle of Least Effort in UVC but it is relevant here. The principle is simple - people will tend to take the path of least resistance- but applicable in many fields. Popular culture can be seen as exactly that: to paraphrase Hebdidge,why would anyone wish to indulge in high culture when popular culture will do.
In the light of developments in the media and other branches of the arts and culture, which is in ascendance today, The First World or the Second World? Is it flat or round?
Culture is cheaper and more accessible than it ever has been. Works of art can be viewed for nothing, and, perhaps as important, on demand. Music can be downloaded, You Tube videos can be watched, photographs can be post processed, all for nothing, instantaneously and in high quality with the fast broadband speeds most homes can now access. The computer and the internet have changed the way we view culture more in 20 years than in history. In doing so, they themselves have generated culture. Stanford University has just hosted a code poetry slam, for example. Space Invaders was the precursor of video gaming and is itself now a cultural masterpiece, the music alone defining the development of gaming music to the point where Nobuo Uematsu's music from the Final Fantasy series of video games was placed at no. 3 in the ClassicFM Hall of Fame 2013, while Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to The Elder Scrolls was 5th. To ClassicFM's credit, they did not seek to exclude the soundtracks from the voting as 'not proper classical music' despite some apparent disgruntlement from some listeners who have more traditional tastes. Smartphone and tablet games are an integral part of contemporary culture, even the Prime Minister being a fan of Angry Birds. (Daily Telegraph, 2010).
In Hebdidge's world, this is all signs of Second World dominance - if reading The Face is a flat earth activity what must he think of downloading media content for instant gratification or online gaming? The point is surely that we must embrace these technologies, these extensions to our culture, for they won't go away, they cannot be uninvented. Pining for the past or frustration that others do not see the cultural world as we do does little good - Zipf probably has it right. And one wonders further whether is actually matters. How much does analyzing whether playing Angry Birds or writing poetry in computer code are flat or round earth activities add to the sum of human knowledge and understanding of the world? One wonders in the end whether Hebdidge's essay is rather like Debord's spectacles, interesting as a view of cultural activity at a point in time but of marginal relevance today.
I have already provided examples of contemporary popular culture, high round cultural activities are much as they always were: classical music (notwithstanding the democratizing effect of ClassicFM and others); fine art, literature.
I am unconvinced that obsessively classifying types of culture is helpful. RE teacher Andrew Jones (2013) sets out an argument for how he integrates high and popular culture in his RE lessons, for example using Tom and Jerry alongside Dante's Divine Comedy to demonstrate the distinction between heaven and hell, and the game Supermarket Sweep to investigate altruism (Jones, 2013). He uses what works. The key factor to me goes back once again to Zipf and the path of least resistance. We should accept the inevitability that much culture may be viewed as low brow but we all need relaxation, some easy watching or listening or playing. I read Marx, Althusser and Debord for this course on a Friday and go to see Brighton v Wigan the next day (watching sport is not even on the cultural radar screen; it is not culturally dead, it has never been alive).
But we do need to cling on to the higher cultures in order to challenge ourselves and to respect the needs of future generations, for what is lost will not be recreated. Zipf rules for most of the people most of the time, but let's at least provide the opportunity to take a path of higher resistance.
References:
Wikipedia The Face Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_%28magazine%29. Accessed on 4 March 2014
Logan earned his journalistic spurs on NME, one of the two pre eminent contemporary music papers of 70s; understandably therefore The Face was originally based on popular music but later widened its reach to include fashion and culture. Here are a couple of covers:
The magazine ceased production in 2004 but an internet search reveals many entries; copies of the magazine can be bought for around £5 on ebay. It has been added to the the permanent collection of the Design Museum (Wikipedia).
Ten-8 by contrast was a more highbrow publication. It has no Wiki page, an internet search for "ten-8" provides us with ten fire equipment, a family of convertor modules (whatever they are) and a software solutions company. Narrowing the field slightly gets us to a blog by Alicia Melanie (Melanie, 2013) who is enchanted to find some copies of the magazine in a library. The black and white layout and somewhat less than dynamic cover suggests it was not intended to be a widely circulated journal:
Melanie continues:
Perhaps the appeal derives from the fact that I’m quite an old soul or my attraction to photography, or maybe both.
No more needs to be said than that Ten-8 ceased production in 1992.
I spend some time introducing the journals as I believe it is critical to understanding Hebdidge's essay . He seems genuinely puzzled why in 1985 his students, when asked, said they preferred The Face to Ten-8. Hebdidge admits they are not alone: the then circulation of Ten-8 was 1,500-2,000, that of The Face 52,000 - 90,000 (p100). He asks why this is rhetorically, and concludes there is no simple answer:
"The chasm that divides them remains as absolute and inaccessible to concise description as the gulf that separates one element from another."
This is a curious metaphor as most elements are much more closely related to some elements within the periodic table than to others, but we get the gist. He turns the dialectic between the two literally into a War of the Worlds. In the First World, written and spoken language have precedence over the 'mere imagery' of the second in which the hierarchical ranking between the two has been abolished. Interpretation of an image by professionals is not required in the Second World, inhabited as it is by a 'motley gang' of bricoleurs et al. He continues the dialectic with zeal, referring also to a 'round' world and a 'flat one', synonymous with First World vs. Second World. Bizarrely the flat world inhabited by The Face and the like arises because the 'vertical axis has collapsed' so perhaps the metaphor might more accurately read one dimensional as opposed to two.
He launches into vitriol against The Face, concluding:
"To stare into flat Face is to look into a world where your actual presence is unnecessary, where nothing adds up to much anything any more (sic), where you live to be alive. Because flatness is the friend of death and death is the great leveller. That's the bottom line on Planet Two."
One is tempted to say that it is only a magazine....
Hebdidge continues by distinguishing between First World critics like John Berger and Second World ones, or the People of the Post (post structuralism, post modernism) as he calls them. The People of the Post (or simply Posts) seek to undermine any discussion of meaning or representation by pointing out the partiality and impermanence of any distinction made. Baudrillard, in particular, takes this to extreme, saying that reality is no more than sum of all apprearances, and is not therefore static or knowable. Hebdidge sets out a metaphor of life according to the Posts as being an anti system: one in which "our lives get played out for us, played out in us, but, never, ever by us". Hebdidge terms this scenario "Living in the wake of the withering signified".
Hebdidge parodies the Second World as vacuous, a world without distinction and hierarchy, where the consumer replaces the citizen; a world anathema to his Marxist leanings. He sees The Face as fitting within the Second World; scornfully he asks why should anyone think deeply when they are not paid to think deeply.
The essay continues with more analysis of The Face, including scornful critiques of Levi and Swatch advertisments. The Face, Hebdidge claims at one point is less of an 'organ of opinion' than a 'wardrobe full of clothes'. He evokes the image of the reader casually turning pages, taking in images, flitting over the words (earlier in the essay he claims that The Face is intended to be 'cruised' . He was prescient in this respect; within ten years we were 'surfing the net').
Hebdidge's essay is strongly worded and deeply personal, almost beyond academic discourse in places and ends with a powerful personal statement that he will go on believing that 'the earth is round not flat, that there will never be an end to judgment,.......' This, he believes, is the 'bottom line on Planet One', a gloomy conclusion. Indeed, the whole article accentuates the negative and eradicates the positive. Hebdidge writes many pages on the iniquitous The Face, yet Ten-8 is mentioned only as the positive comparator - the good guy in the argument - without explicitly setting out why.
The questions are as follows:
Does Hebdidge make a clear distinction between 'high' and 'popular' culture?
Hebdidge does not use this dialectic. His distinction between First World vs Second Worlds, and round vs flat is essentially between thinking; challenging; use of words as opposed to vacuous; accepting; scanning images, it is an academic dialectic. One associates the distinction between high and popular culture to be more akin to Bourdieu's distinction between the Sphere of Legitimacy (music, sculpture, theatre) and Sphere of the Legitimizable (cinema, jazz, photography). Perhaps Hebdidge even thinks of The Face as belonging in Bourdieu's Sphere of the Arbitrary along with cookery, clothes and decoration. And possibly his Marxist philosophy led him to avoid making the distinction between 'high' and 'popular' culture, realizing that unwittingly that would suggest he leans more towards Glyndebourne than to Duran Duran.
....what are his main arguments against the 'People of the Post?'
Hebdidge is scornful of the Posts because he believes they seek to divorce the viewer from the message. Their position is that any distinction between, say, good and bad, legitimate or illegitimate, is to be challenged because the distinguisher has his or her own prejudices. The aim of discourse is to identify and analyze the different articulations, the sociology of the sociologists in simple terms. Hebdidge evidently finds this frustrating because it effectively absolves anyone from making value judgments. He is particularly critical of Baudrillard who he views as at the extreme end of this school of thought. Hebdidge uses the metaphor of people as heads of a video recorder, merely passing and translating visual and audio signals but never owning, storing or 'seeing' the processed material. It is a view that conjures up Orwellian images of faceless people being done to but never being done by.
This is anathema to Hebdidge, because he is a thinker, an academic, a polemicist, one who wishes that the world would listen to the power of the pen.
Explain what you see as the difference between high and popular culture today.
I set out earlier the distinction between Bourdieu's Sphere of Legitimacy and Sphere of the Legitimizable, and this would be my difference; high culture is that which is inaccessible by the barriers put round it by those inside. The barriers may be economic (why bother to view paintings if you cannot afford to buy one for the living room?; do you really want to spend £80 per seat to watch someone belting out words you don't understand in a language you don't speak?) or academic (are you prepared to read, digest, and comment on 14 pages of turgid, unintelligible and pompous commentary to 'understand' this painting?). Either way, 'high' culture is intended for the elite, and you have to earn your passport to be included in that renowned club.
Popular culture, on the other hand, is accessible, both because people can afford it (as in Bourdieu's thesis on photography as Middlebrow culture) and can understand it readily. I have not (yet) come across Zipf's Principle of Least Effort in UVC but it is relevant here. The principle is simple - people will tend to take the path of least resistance- but applicable in many fields. Popular culture can be seen as exactly that: to paraphrase Hebdidge,why would anyone wish to indulge in high culture when popular culture will do.
In the light of developments in the media and other branches of the arts and culture, which is in ascendance today, The First World or the Second World? Is it flat or round?
Culture is cheaper and more accessible than it ever has been. Works of art can be viewed for nothing, and, perhaps as important, on demand. Music can be downloaded, You Tube videos can be watched, photographs can be post processed, all for nothing, instantaneously and in high quality with the fast broadband speeds most homes can now access. The computer and the internet have changed the way we view culture more in 20 years than in history. In doing so, they themselves have generated culture. Stanford University has just hosted a code poetry slam, for example. Space Invaders was the precursor of video gaming and is itself now a cultural masterpiece, the music alone defining the development of gaming music to the point where Nobuo Uematsu's music from the Final Fantasy series of video games was placed at no. 3 in the ClassicFM Hall of Fame 2013, while Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to The Elder Scrolls was 5th. To ClassicFM's credit, they did not seek to exclude the soundtracks from the voting as 'not proper classical music' despite some apparent disgruntlement from some listeners who have more traditional tastes. Smartphone and tablet games are an integral part of contemporary culture, even the Prime Minister being a fan of Angry Birds. (Daily Telegraph, 2010).
In Hebdidge's world, this is all signs of Second World dominance - if reading The Face is a flat earth activity what must he think of downloading media content for instant gratification or online gaming? The point is surely that we must embrace these technologies, these extensions to our culture, for they won't go away, they cannot be uninvented. Pining for the past or frustration that others do not see the cultural world as we do does little good - Zipf probably has it right. And one wonders further whether is actually matters. How much does analyzing whether playing Angry Birds or writing poetry in computer code are flat or round earth activities add to the sum of human knowledge and understanding of the world? One wonders in the end whether Hebdidge's essay is rather like Debord's spectacles, interesting as a view of cultural activity at a point in time but of marginal relevance today.
Find four or five examples of contemporary popular culture, high round-world culture, and high referencing culture.
I have already provided examples of contemporary popular culture, high round cultural activities are much as they always were: classical music (notwithstanding the democratizing effect of ClassicFM and others); fine art, literature.
I am unconvinced that obsessively classifying types of culture is helpful. RE teacher Andrew Jones (2013) sets out an argument for how he integrates high and popular culture in his RE lessons, for example using Tom and Jerry alongside Dante's Divine Comedy to demonstrate the distinction between heaven and hell, and the game Supermarket Sweep to investigate altruism (Jones, 2013). He uses what works. The key factor to me goes back once again to Zipf and the path of least resistance. We should accept the inevitability that much culture may be viewed as low brow but we all need relaxation, some easy watching or listening or playing. I read Marx, Althusser and Debord for this course on a Friday and go to see Brighton v Wigan the next day (watching sport is not even on the cultural radar screen; it is not culturally dead, it has never been alive).
But we do need to cling on to the higher cultures in order to challenge ourselves and to respect the needs of future generations, for what is lost will not be recreated. Zipf rules for most of the people most of the time, but let's at least provide the opportunity to take a path of higher resistance.
References:
Daily Telegraph (2010) David Cameron is Angry Birds fan Available from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8075705/David-Cameron-is-Angry-Birds-fan.html. Accessed on 5 March 2014
Jones (2013) High culture versus pop culture: which is best for engaging students?
Available from http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/feb/20/pop-culture-teaching-learning-engaging-students Accessed on 5 March 2014
Available from http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/feb/20/pop-culture-teaching-learning-engaging-students Accessed on 5 March 2014
Melanie (2013) Attraction:Ten-8 Photographic Journal Available from http://thevisuallife.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/attractionten-8-photographic-journal/. Accessed 4 March 2014.
Wikipedia The Face Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Face_%28magazine%29. Accessed on 4 March 2014
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