Dick Hebdige: Unplugged and Greased Back

On May 12, 2003, DICK HEBDIGE delivered a keynote address entitled: "Un-imagining Utopia: communication technologies after 9/11" at the University of Detroit Mercy. Professor Hebdige is a media and cultural critic who has published numerous articles on media and popular culture, art, design and critical theory as well as three books: "Subculture: The Meaning of Style", "Cut 'n' mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music" and "Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things." He is currently Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and a Professor in the departments of Studio Art and Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Here is a full interactive transcript of an interview conducted after the talk by Dr. Timothy Dugdale with Professor Hebdige.

Part I: The Man and his Machines

DUGDALE: The first time I caught your act was thirteen years ago at the Art Gallery of Windsor. You were
using VHS tapes and a slide projector. I must say the delivery is a bit more refined but you’re still using those technologies. Why?

HEBDIGE: I’m using some of the same slides, you notice that? [chuckles all around] Mickey Mouse and the globe? Very grubby, yes, but I just got addicted to that particular combination and learned to master it. The analogy we were making yesterday was to James Benning [American experimental documentarian] and 16mm film. Every time he does a screening is a disaster because none of these film studies places have the projectors any more. So immediately you have to do an audit of the whole institution’s capacity to handle these outmoded technologies. There are payoffs to that as well----

DUGDALE: The work certainly seems handcrafted.

HEBDIGE: Yeah, you place some pressure on the institution’s commitment to supporting the history of communication technology. The people behind instructional resources, their heads are so pitched into the future.

DUGDALE: Exactly. They had that state of the art podium in the auditorium and then behind it, a closet with your preferred gear.

HEBDIGE: There’s an insesance that you have to translate everything you do into the coming mode. I like wearing retro clothes, the car I drive, the way I choose to live, there’s a certain residual quality to it. I like the awkwardness. I use the word “shambolic” to describe my performances. They’re rickety.

DUGDALE: Between shambling and shamanistic?!

HEBDIGE: Shambling, always. Shamanistic, maybe. You’re trying to help people overcome their terror of things that are out their control. That are unanticipated. Their terror of the magician who drops the eggs or can’t keep the plates spinning. So there’s a comic, a ludic element to that brinkmanship of catastrophe. The technology dream is all about comfort like a kid tucked into bed. The digital world is going to help us process information so that we are comfortably in control. And I don’t think knowledge has anything to do those information processes. Knowledge comes from things breaking down. As Leonard Cohen said, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. To a certain extent, I’m trying to orchestrate little disasters. A bit of comedy, a bit of tension, you’re bringing in elements of theatre and of ritual. It’s definitely not the PowerPoint presentation.

DUGDALE: You’ve found me out! Marcel [O'Gorman, Director of Electronic Critique] and I were plotting to get your slides into a black box and put them into a neat-o PowerPoint nightmare. But watching your presentation, there is a certain ghoulishness to the process, what is this mad bastard up to? What if it doesn’t work?

HEBDIGE: It never works. There’s always some sort of breakdown. People are want to blame me but it’s not really my fault. They want something to happen without it happening.

DUGDALE: Very McLuhanesque! You’ve found the perfect equilibrium between the technology and your unique physiology.

HEBDIGE: PowerPoint is the ironing out of inconsistencies. It’s the amplification of clarity. And clarity isn’t really what I’m interested in. I want a bit of filth, a bit of opacity because I think knowledge is acquired at some cost. You have to lean forward to understand what’s going in the world. You have to make an effort. And if you’re continually being told what you’re going to hear and then you get a reprise on what you’ve just been told, this is a large part of the problem in a culture where everybody feels its their right to feel comfortable all the time. It’s not I want to make people feel uncomfortable, like in avant-garde theatre of the sixties, but I think a bit of friction and breakage helps you remember that you’re living in time. You have to co-operate with the person who’s up there at the podium.

DUGDALE: It’s part of the improvisation. I wish we had had a sampler on hand so that we could have played a loop of a dirty record playing in the background to add a bit more dirt.

HEBDIGE: I also like analog technology because some of those slides do look as if they constitute a health risk. [more chuckles] I don’t keep them very well so the filth does accumulate a lot like scratches on a record which you do grow to like. They use samples of scratches now to give music authenticity, don’t they? They manufacture the illusion of the analog because people want there to be a relationship between your discourse and your material reality. And digitalization, so much as it involves this detour through binary code and delivery back of this idealized, cleaned-up shadow reality, we don’t really know what the implications might be?

DUGDALE: You can have your CD player and turntable side by side with the same work by the same artist ready to go but it’s not the same music is it?

HEBDIGE: No. With digital, you get pure silence between the beats and the world isn’t silent. There’s always interference. The world is noisy place. You don’t even know if the signals and sounds that you think you shouldn’t be interested in are the ones that might be carrying the germ of the future. It’s always around the margins of the things you’re paying attention to that something is really happening. Wasn’t that the whole point of deep focus photography in cinema? Bazan’s point was that if you could capture the world in depth, then there are things that are being recorded that are beyond your willed attention.

DUGDALE: Orson Welles could play so beautifully with sound precisely because Gregg Toland's deep focus photography. The sound was the aperture.

HEBDIGE: I think if you can distinguish between mastery and control although I’m not pretending I’m a master… if you’re familiar with a particular medium and a particular mode of articulation and you’ve been doing it for twenty years as I have, you should have your shit together a little bit. I certainly know the groove that I want but I don’t try to control what people are thinking about it. You only gain mastery when you lose control. When you’re willing to lose control. The jazz of it is that the improvisation is within a larger structure. You have to allow accidents to happen and then turn into the skid.

DUGDALE: Something beautiful can come of that if you can do it.

HEBDIGE: That’s the difference between art and instruction. I don’t think of myself as a professor. I’m an intellectual. In this country, the intellectual is very hard to place. And very hard to find. [still more chuckles] Academia has become so professionalized and it’s merging with the corporation at every level to the extent that the PowerPoint presentation which was after all was a pitch mechanism for selling a product or idea in corporate culture, now we’re all in the mode where we supposed to be selling stuff. We’re supposed to summarize and not waste students’ time.

Since I started doing these mixed media things, people ask why I don’t just put the presentation on a CD? But then it’s captured. It’s nailed down. I saw Harry Smith’s opera, Mahagonny. There were four projections onto four pool tables that were mounted on the wall in some crazy Modrian-like pattern. Well, one of the spools broke and a fistfight started. Then the Getty Museum bought it, cleaned it up, and basically homologized it.

DUGDALE: It’s a twisted sort of taxidermy, no?

HEBDIGE: Now you can see it, perfectly. As it would have been if there had been a perfect screening. But it wasn’t intended as that. What Smith wanted has been perverted by this desire for something that’s transportable and portable and museum standard.

Much more to come. Stay tuned.