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Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things
Dick Hebdige looks at the creation and consumption of objects and images as diverse as fashion and documentary photographs, 1950's streamlined cars, Italian motor scooters, 1980's 'style manuals', Biff cartoons, the Band Aid campaign, Pop Art and promotional music videos. He assesses their broad cultural significance and charts their impact on contemporary popular tastes.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
6 people are currently reading
176 people want to read
About the author
Dick Hebdige
26 books38 followersRichard 'Dick' Hebdige (born 1951) is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and subcultural resistance against the mainstream of society.
Hebdige received his M.A. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is best known for his influential book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, originally published in 1979. He has been teaching in art schools since the mid-1970s. He served as the Dean of Critical Studies and the Director of the experimental writing program at the California Institute of the Arts before going to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is currently a professor of film and media studies and art.
Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style builds on earlier work at Birmingham on youth subcultures. While much of this research was concerned with the relation between subcultures and social class in postwar Britain, Hebdige saw youth cultures in terms of a dialogue between Black and white youth. He argues that punk emerged as a mainly white style when Black youth became more separatist in the 1970s in response to discrimination in British society. Whereas previous research described a homology between the different aspects of a subcultural style (dress, hairstyle, music, drugs), Hebdige argues that punk in London in 1976-77 borrowed from all previous subcultures and its only homology was chaos. In making this argument he was drawing on the early work of Julia Kristeva who also found such subversion of meaning in French poets such as Mallarmé and Lautréamont.
Hebdidge also wrote Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987) on Caribbean music and identity, and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (1988) a book of essays that includes some further thoughts about punk.
In 2008 he contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
Hebdige received his M.A. from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is best known for his influential book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, originally published in 1979. He has been teaching in art schools since the mid-1970s. He served as the Dean of Critical Studies and the Director of the experimental writing program at the California Institute of the Arts before going to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is currently a professor of film and media studies and art.
Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style builds on earlier work at Birmingham on youth subcultures. While much of this research was concerned with the relation between subcultures and social class in postwar Britain, Hebdige saw youth cultures in terms of a dialogue between Black and white youth. He argues that punk emerged as a mainly white style when Black youth became more separatist in the 1970s in response to discrimination in British society. Whereas previous research described a homology between the different aspects of a subcultural style (dress, hairstyle, music, drugs), Hebdige argues that punk in London in 1976-77 borrowed from all previous subcultures and its only homology was chaos. In making this argument he was drawing on the early work of Julia Kristeva who also found such subversion of meaning in French poets such as Mallarmé and Lautréamont.
Hebdidge also wrote Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987) on Caribbean music and identity, and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (1988) a book of essays that includes some further thoughts about punk.
In 2008 he contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 22, 2014
M favorite academic essay of all time is in this fine collection: "Object as Image: the Italian Scooter Cycle."
September 29, 2020
The cultural studies of 1988 is now history. For some, it is prehistory. But if you are of a certain age, you will recognize here—hiding in the light--some of the ghosts of pop culture’s past, at least those from within the confines of England and the anglophone multiverse.
Let’s look at punks.
You can’t stop staring (with whatever emotion: horror, disgust, admiration, pity) at how someone thought it a good idea to defile and deform their body in the name of anarchy. But the aggressive visage is meant (live, not in a photograph) to deflect or repel one’s curious glance. This punk image is too violent to risk looking at directly, like you would be turned to stone if the punk looked back at you. So here is the intersection of exhibitionism and hiding, or of ‘hiding in the light’.
But here’s a question. By what right do cultural studies professors claim higher knowledge when critiquing aspects of culture which are open to the public and accessible by virtually everyone? Does it help to say that English departments faced the same critical question a century ago when they established novels and poetry as objects of study? After all, before TV, film and radio, most folks spent their time recreating or meditating with the written word, whether novels, poems, newspapers, magazines, and of course their scriptures of choice. Why should an English prof decide on the high canon of intellect and taste? Who gave him or her the right? But since most people recognize English as a subject of study, maybe the same pathway to legitimacy is open to cultural studies.
It might be true that pop will eventually replace primitive as the key object of study at the heart of anthropology. But I still get squeamish when I think of college freshman taking courses about television, reliving and interpreting their experiences…watching television. I don’t want to make a fetish of the printed word, but I do believe reading is a sure-fire way to overcome the new and improved opiate of the masses, television. This opiate is better loved than understood, but I sense cultural studies nevertheless will not gain legitimacy as the history of the present nor as the ethnography of the here and now, especially when tied to that primordial time-waster, the TV. It would appear Cultural Studies has not enough authority to be an authority, not enough discipline to be a discipline.
But Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light is a fun romp through pre-postmodern culture and society as lived and expressed through the designs and styles of modern (late-20th century) life. Some of these cultural references are opaque to me, but a lot of it makes sense. Hiding in the Light contains some interesting analyses of social groups and popular commodities. I found it interesting how the pre-Beatles youth in Britain looked beyond England to find their generation’s choices of self-expression. Whether a ‘rocker’, looking to America, Elvis, and the motorcycle for badges of identity, or else a ‘mod’, adopting the cleaner styles of Italy and the continent (including a preference for the motor-scooter), the young are perennially in search of themselves, out there somewhere. There was and has been much cross-pollination among cultures and across times, such that drawing a line around ‘national’ style or ‘modern’ design becomes increasingly difficult, and increasingly meaningless.
Unfortunately, this book has no key narrative, nor any developed theory that I could say taught me something about people and cultures in the current post-modern age. This is by design, but it seems to me the design is flawed. After reading roughly a hundred vignettes about the meaning of this and the significance of that, it does appear that Hebdige, like many of his peers in cultural studies, is winging it, making it all up as he goes along. Not quite a pop-pedant, the author drops a lot of names from the arenas of design and modern art, and the effect becomes tiresome. Same with his anti-totalization, anti-ideological, and anti-utopian stances, which seem to be paying lip service to the post-modern academic powers that be. Or that were.
In the end, I think you might need to be at least 50 to see these cultural criticisms as relevant and interesting today. They are interesting I feel only if you can peg an image (maybe from an advertisement or from a music video) to a living memory, enabling you the reader to answer to the text by comparing your insights to those of Hebdige. It’s not that the author lies. It is just that he has trouble at times telling the entire truth. But the wealth of often strange and surprising details about the late 20th century make this an entertaining enough read to try on for size.
And there are pictures. Lots of them.
Let’s look at punks.
You can’t stop staring (with whatever emotion: horror, disgust, admiration, pity) at how someone thought it a good idea to defile and deform their body in the name of anarchy. But the aggressive visage is meant (live, not in a photograph) to deflect or repel one’s curious glance. This punk image is too violent to risk looking at directly, like you would be turned to stone if the punk looked back at you. So here is the intersection of exhibitionism and hiding, or of ‘hiding in the light’.
But here’s a question. By what right do cultural studies professors claim higher knowledge when critiquing aspects of culture which are open to the public and accessible by virtually everyone? Does it help to say that English departments faced the same critical question a century ago when they established novels and poetry as objects of study? After all, before TV, film and radio, most folks spent their time recreating or meditating with the written word, whether novels, poems, newspapers, magazines, and of course their scriptures of choice. Why should an English prof decide on the high canon of intellect and taste? Who gave him or her the right? But since most people recognize English as a subject of study, maybe the same pathway to legitimacy is open to cultural studies.
It might be true that pop will eventually replace primitive as the key object of study at the heart of anthropology. But I still get squeamish when I think of college freshman taking courses about television, reliving and interpreting their experiences…watching television. I don’t want to make a fetish of the printed word, but I do believe reading is a sure-fire way to overcome the new and improved opiate of the masses, television. This opiate is better loved than understood, but I sense cultural studies nevertheless will not gain legitimacy as the history of the present nor as the ethnography of the here and now, especially when tied to that primordial time-waster, the TV. It would appear Cultural Studies has not enough authority to be an authority, not enough discipline to be a discipline.
But Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light is a fun romp through pre-postmodern culture and society as lived and expressed through the designs and styles of modern (late-20th century) life. Some of these cultural references are opaque to me, but a lot of it makes sense. Hiding in the Light contains some interesting analyses of social groups and popular commodities. I found it interesting how the pre-Beatles youth in Britain looked beyond England to find their generation’s choices of self-expression. Whether a ‘rocker’, looking to America, Elvis, and the motorcycle for badges of identity, or else a ‘mod’, adopting the cleaner styles of Italy and the continent (including a preference for the motor-scooter), the young are perennially in search of themselves, out there somewhere. There was and has been much cross-pollination among cultures and across times, such that drawing a line around ‘national’ style or ‘modern’ design becomes increasingly difficult, and increasingly meaningless.
Unfortunately, this book has no key narrative, nor any developed theory that I could say taught me something about people and cultures in the current post-modern age. This is by design, but it seems to me the design is flawed. After reading roughly a hundred vignettes about the meaning of this and the significance of that, it does appear that Hebdige, like many of his peers in cultural studies, is winging it, making it all up as he goes along. Not quite a pop-pedant, the author drops a lot of names from the arenas of design and modern art, and the effect becomes tiresome. Same with his anti-totalization, anti-ideological, and anti-utopian stances, which seem to be paying lip service to the post-modern academic powers that be. Or that were.
In the end, I think you might need to be at least 50 to see these cultural criticisms as relevant and interesting today. They are interesting I feel only if you can peg an image (maybe from an advertisement or from a music video) to a living memory, enabling you the reader to answer to the text by comparing your insights to those of Hebdige. It’s not that the author lies. It is just that he has trouble at times telling the entire truth. But the wealth of often strange and surprising details about the late 20th century make this an entertaining enough read to try on for size.
And there are pictures. Lots of them.
Currently reading
May 10, 2010haven't finished
August 7, 2007
This was assigned to me in a sociology class and it was one of my earliest experience with pop culture as something to be seriously studied and discussed. "Thank god," I thought "That there are people out there considering the greater implications of the shape of band aids. Thank god!"
September 26, 2009
cultural theory
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews