Hebdige's Three Negations of Postmodernity

Dick Hebdige claims there are three negations which help define the issues within postmodernism, all of which oppose the Marxist totalitarian explanatory system.

1. Against Totalisation

· This is an abandonment of the universalist claims made by Hegelianism, Marxism and other forms of philosophical history, as well as tending towards the abandonment of all “sociological” concepts.

· From 1968 we can see a widespread belief amongst the educated in any kind of power structure which comes from a bureaucratically organised centre, as well as a suspicion of any kind of political programme formulated by an elite and progressed through a hierarchical chain of command.

· Feminism, micro-politics, the autonomy movements, the counterculture, the politics of sexuality and the politics of utterance grew out of the gaps in the old “radical” way of thinking.

· These all became responses to the “crisis of representation”, where the term representation – both political and ideological – is considered to be problematic. Political representation (as a guarantor of individual and collective freedom through the routines and institutions of democracy) in particular was rejected as a sham.

· What happened instead was that these two senses of the term “representation” were run together through the notions of discourse and language – which are ideas themselves which produce social relations and social and sexual inequalities, through identification, differentiation and subject positioning.

· The idea of a “subject” itself was also interrogated, leading to two new definitions of the term: subject as in rhetoric and grammar, and the “subjected subject” (as in a subject to the crown, or owned by some Higher Power.)

2. Against Teleology

· This is a scepticism regarding the idea of decidable origins and causes.

· It is first really noticed in the poststructuralist elevation of the signifier and the loss of the signified. This model goes on to generate the real-seeming, where the use value is disregarded and becomes the exchange value (sign-exchange), and where the old ideas are turned upside down so that value is now seen to be generated in the exchange of insubstantials – rather than from a “surplus value”.

· The rhetorical aspects which form teleology are parody, simulation, pastiche and allegory. All of these aspects deny the power of the author as a sole source of meaning and confine the artist instead to an endless reworking of previous and existing material.

· These aspects of parody, simulation, pastiche and allegory tend to celebrate the accumulation of texts and meanings, rather than the isolation and deconstruction of singular texts and utterance.

· None of these favoured aspects offer the artist the ability to be authentic in their work. Nor do they offer the critic a way of uncovering the “real” meaning buried in a text.

· This idea of depthlessness in postmodernism can be understood in this context as another step away from the old explanatory models and certainties.

· If the “depth model” disappears, then so too does the idea of the intellectual as a seer, as a person able to find the meaning within the texts. Once this idea is abolished, there would be no more hidden truths or reading between the lines of a text.

· Instead what is left is a fascination of mirrors, icons and surfaces.

· This whole model achieves the evacuation of the power of discourse, and end of ideology and the cutting off of Marxist critical practices.

3. Against Utopia

· This idea runs parallel to anti-teleology.

· It refers to scepticism of any collective destination or global framework of prediction about the world.

· It is directed against all the programmes and solutions which focus on social engineering and rely upon strict discipline to achieve this.

· These programmes and solutions are said to cause a barbaric excess in society, which would then suggest that all of our so called “utopias” come with severe problems.

· Theorist Lyotard examined the philosophical underpinning of this Enlightenment phase, which works towards universalisation and social engineering – both of which find support in progress, social planning and historical necessity.

· Much of Lyotards work focuses on a discussion by theorist Kant, between the two orders of aesthetic experience: the beautiful and the sublime.

· Kant’s idea of the beautiful consists of all those views, objects and sounds from which we derive aesthetic pleasure, and can be framed and contained. The sublime, however, consist of all those phenomena which exceed logical containment, and can create both pleasure and terror within the viewer (in the way that a natural disaster does).

· Lyotard argues that the various forms of modernist literature which attempt to “present the unpresentable” are only focused on the sublime and not the beautiful.

· These forms of utopian art take the viewer to a sublime point in which consciousness and being bang up against their own limitations, leaving the spectator’s subjectivities to be predicted for as long as it lasts in the unliveable tense (or the postmodern tense).

· For Lyotard, the notion of the sublime is a metaphor for the absolute nature of those limitations placed upon what can be said, seen, shown, presented or demonstrated – and implies that each encounter with the sublime in art provides us with an experience that complexity and difficulty are always just beyond our grasp.