Planet One

Analogy: ten*8 is a separate world, the “first world”
-written and spoken language are valued over images.
-a priestly caste of scribes oversees language, meaning
-images are used to illustrate, verify, or supplement text,
-this is a historical world,
“Each moment is watched, argued, recorded by the scribes, --it is a point on a line that links a past which is either known or potentially knowable to a future which is eternally uncertain. Each moment is like a word in a sentence and this sentence is called history.” (104,105)
-religion, politics represent the higher good, beyond the now, present, and individual
Relation to photography and writing
-John Berger…narratives about photos to “authenticate its substance” that which it depicts, make the image tell its true story.
-seen as “bourgeois obligation to ‘speak for’ truth and liberty or to ‘represent’ the oppressed…109 Possibly more reflective of an
Industrial society, material goods produced by a proletariat that sells its labour powerFeels contradiction points to “insanity” of culture (Berger) and must be resolved. 113
-sincerity
-permanence
-feeling

Planet Two

The Face is the second “world”
-word and image are not hierarchical
-truth if it exists is shown in pictures
-there is no “higher good” a -- “renewal of the now” survival
-Now becomes new
-eternal present of the image,
i.e. non historical
-106 the political, ideological and aesthetic roots of the Face lie as much in the 1960’s, in Mod, Pop Art, the myth of the metropolis and Situationism as in Mrs Thatcher’s 1980’s.
-aims to “flatten the world” blur the line between politics and parody and pastiche; the street, the stage, the screen, between purity and danger; the mainstream and the ‘margins’
-a designed environment
-distracted gaze
-everything a commodity 108Disciples of post modern, post structuralism
-do not seek to recover truth captured in image but to “liberate the signifier from the constraints imposed upon it by the rationalist theology of ‘representation’. 108
-simulacra, nothing “behind” image
-cohesion is imaginary and “guaranteed” by oppressive “Word/the Enlightenment Project/European Rationalism/the Party/the Law of the Father..etc”
I is an illusion--death of the subject
Jean Baudrillard, we playback, no human “agency”
-mindless journey of the signifier, the “withering signified”
-post industrial or media or consumer society
intensified “hypercapitalism” abstracted production, automation
-embraces cultural political contradictions (picture of starving children beside bathsalts ad in magazine)
-irony and ambiguity
-obsolescence “every photograph and epitaph, every article and obituary.” 115
-reserved, cool, non emotional, or emotionally committed
-picturing the popular

To end Hebdige reaffirms the “depth” values, triggered by a “Pretenders” song…:

”And worlds like ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and ‘faith’…depth words drawn up like ghosts from a different dimension will always come back…to haunt…it is quite simply, in the very nature of the human project…found…even in…the flattest of environments…something else will still be there…there will never be an end to judgment, the hosts will go on gathering at the bitter line which separates truth from lies, justice from injustice, Chile, Biafra and all the other avoidable disasters from all of us, whose order is built upon their chaos.