Dick Hebdige: Unplugged and Greased Back
May 13, 2003 | University of Detroit Mercy

Part II: 9/11, Security and Geography

DUGDALE: You seem to have a real bee in your bonnet about memory and communication technology, particularly post 9/11.

HEBDIGE: Everybody knows what 9/11 is, even to the point of “eating chicken after 9/11”. It’s a cliché to say it changed everything but it did if you look at 11/9/89 when the Berlin Wall came down. There was this triumphalist celebration of freedom, the end of history, this magical confluence of the spread of democracy and neo-liberal economics, freedom, liberty, the freedom of movement. Then the planes went into the buildings on 9/11 and suddenly it was the end of “the end of history”. Instead of liberty, we’re talking about security and all those freedoms that were celebrated are now under pressure in the name of security. What interests me is that these things don’t happen overnight. 9/11 was the opportunity to fully realize radical conservative authoritarian agendas.

DUGDALE: Ah, but the vibrations were already out there in the public. They were willing to give up liberty for security.

HEBDIGE: This is the historical debate about whether America is a republic or a democracy. Direct democracy is in trouble. People have been saying that for a long time, that it’s hollowed out, that no-one votes, opinion polls have vulgarized it. So I think it’s a crucial moment for understanding the drama of the American becoming.

DUGDALE: What is that “becoming”?

HEBDIGE: There’s a definite movement towards empire. This is a very militarized society, or para-militarized in some ways. Just look at the metaphors – war on drugs, war on crime etc. The war on terror is more metaphorical than Operation Iraqi Freedom because terror is very hard to actually define.

DUGDALE: You also need some form of amnesia don’t you? Didn’t Bush himself, after the bombing of Tora Bora, turn to his team and say “Well, what next?”

HEBDIGE: Like many people, I came to America because I was educated in American popular culture. Watching television as a kid, it was all American stuff. We listened to Elvis and watched Davy Crockett. America was a great escape fantasy for children. That’s why Disney get’em young. And America has also been projecting its id onto the world since the early 20th century. Economic refugees don’t just come here for the chance to earn minimum wage. It’s also about being close to the heart of this military-industrial entertainment machine. But when you’re in this machine, it looks very different. I think there have been many disturbing trends towards concentration of ownership of the media and the prohibition of certain viewpoints.

DUGDALE: Like banned playlists of songs during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I think it was Clear Channel. Certain songs couldn’t be played because of their unhappy connotations.

HEBDIGE: I drove across America in 1998. I remember my tape deck blew coming into Vegas and I knew I’d have to listen to the radio all the way. The only program that I could get without fail, including in a place called Emblem, Wyoming, was Rush Limbaugh. Loud and clear. The fruited plain wakes up every morning to Rush. [extended spate of chuckles] This sort of thing is now structurally hardwired into the culture. Local radio has been taken over by Clear Channel. Though I was educated in British cultural studies and learned to be very skeptical of conspiracy theories, there’s a degree of concentration and a felicitous complicity between the political economy and the FCC.

Then you get into these extraordinarily feudal kind of set-ups Colin Powell’s son sits on the FCC, George Bush’s cousin who worked at Fox announced his victory. And we have a president who’s the son of a president. So it looks very much like a Roman period where we’re moving from a democracy into a Caesarian operation.

DUGDALE: One of the most lovely bits of your talk yesterday was when you gave a “guided tour” of Valencia, California. You used to live not far from there in Piru. I remember there were beautiful orange groves, beautiful breezes.

HEBDIGE: Piru is a small rural community about twenty miles from Valencia. It’s like Shangra-La. The last wild river in Southern California goes through it. It has almost a self-conscious agragrian, pastoral connection to orange production; the attempt to create an Eden against modernity around the Spanish Mission mythology. It goes back to an earlier construction… I’m trying to resist the idea that is was total authentic because that too was part of the dream. You can see that dream being negotiated in “Chinatown”(1974). D.W. Griffith shot Mary Pickford there for the film, “Ramona” (1912) The town is populated primarily by Chicanos and people further south who come up to work in the fields. Avocados, flowers, oranges. The other source of income is renting out the whole place to film crews. They want a small town circa 1890-1950. It’s weird to sit and watch the films being made and recognize my town.
Valencia is much more the coming thing. It’s growing suburb which was one of the first planned communities by Victor Bruin who invented the first shopping mall. It’s very clean, very hygienic, very homogenous and growing at an extraordinary rate. And the town is really part of Northern LA. There’s nothing in between. Eventually they’ll build right through Piru and onward to the coast.

DUGDALE: You were showing us some slides of these statues that they have in Valencia. You mentioned that people are invited to take a vacation to see what their future will soon be, to witness this ideal.

HEBDIGE: Yeah, they’re these weirdly macabre bronze statues of ordinary people shopping so you get this kind of zombified representation of what you’re there to do. It’s almost as if your face is being rubbed into your addiction to consumerism. This is the literal reification of shopping. There’s no pretense that culture is anything but shopping. That’s what it’s become.

This is in a public space mind you but there’s about fifteen rules that have been written into a local ordinance including the prohibition of expressive, non-commercial conduct in front of retail outlets. Or bringing any animal, dead or alive, onto the property. Or loud music, or running or provocative clothing. It’s an extension of self-policing that goes on in the suburbs. If you live in Valencia, which I did for while, the Valencia Homeowner’s Association stipulates the color of the drapes you can use. You get a nasty letter if your mailbox isn’t painted properly.

DUGDALE: Perhaps the town fathers have been eavesdropping on the star chamber of lecherous octogenarians that run the Mormon Church. They have all kinds of crazy rules for the Tabernacle square.

HEBDIGE: [guffaw] In Valencia, though, it’s because of real estate values. People want predictability, they want homogeneity, they want to live with their own, and that logic of real estate development seems to run everything. So if you have a culture that insists upon screening out all surprises and all contact with otherness… you know the holy dirt of otherness… it’s part of a will to hygene. Which obviously has some pretty scary implications when you look at things like immigration.

DUGDALE: Or youth and its criminalization. Just look at the fallout from the shootings at Columbine.

HEBDIGE: I’m interested in three trends. One is the infantilization of adult culture. Last night I was watching “Day of the Locust” on television. I don’t think that film could be made now because it’s so adult, so skeptical, so cynical and critical. Now the prime target audience of film producers and screenwriters in Hollywood is a 13 year old boy from the San Fernando Valley. That’s what they’re giving to the world, material that they think is appropriate for someone with very little experience. That is literally dumbing down the whole culture. That’s why I’m interested in the Disney “effect”. In some ways, it’s charming, seductive, enjoyable and light. At another level, though, it’s so empowered now. It’s a massive media corporation. They get children very young and train them.

This is not unconnected to a re-thinking of what citizenship means, replacing the consumer with the citizen. The other side of that is the criminalization of youth. Youths are continually seen as being at risk. All kinds of legislative measures and law-enforcement norm are in place to prevent kids from doing what their baby boomer parents did. There are curfews in place that seem to violate the civil rights of young people. At the same time, young people are subject to enormous pressure to perform well at school, to become model workers when they’re young because it’s a competitive ratrace, nobody’s sure about the future. There’s all this anxiety about getting your children into the best schools. It’s lowering the ratrace to the elementary school level. You’ve got to come out fighting. [big guffaws all around]

DUGDALE: There’s no room to fuck-up.

HEBDIGE: Absolutely not. So there’s no art because art always requires the possibility of failure. It’s all very passive-aggressive because the kids are constantly being presented as if they’re potential Columbine killers or mack daddies and cartoon thugs. You can executed in 17 states at the age of 16. This is the only country in the world that has that on the books. At the same time, you’ve got look like you’re 35 years old before they’ll sell you a pack of cigarettes. The kids are putting into a terrible double bind.

The third thing is pathologization of childhood where if children are mischievous or boisterous, they’re diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and are slung on Ritalin until they snap out of it. Instead of the idea that human culture is a negotiated situation, an intersubjective negotiation of difference, it’s as if there’s some bureau dictating that this is the metabolism that the world must have. Everybody’s got to be happy so you get this dream about homogenizing the human race, to get rid of turbulent character traits and metabolisms which used to produce art and conflict and happiness.

DUGDALE: Now it’s just sloth and peevishness.

HEBDIGE: Right. We’re really living through a time when there’s some pretty vast engineering work going on in the psycho-social level.

DUGDALE: 200lb 13 years sitting on a sofa stuffing their faces in front of the X Box.

HEBDIGE: Or being sent off to boot camp in Arizona. Zero tolerance. When I first came to this country, zero tolerance struck me as a strange motto or mantra for a Christian country. Why it matters, because I still like being in this country, is that it’s not just America’s business anymore. America always felt protected by two oceans. We’re free. The nativist, isolationist, exceptionalist dream of America. I don’t think that’s viable anymore because America is now into some sort of imperial mode. It’s going into places and taking over. So the rest of the world is interested in what’s going on inside this country. Not just because they envy America or is curious. The world wants to know what’s coming next. Look at South Africa. The LA police are training their police force and the FBI comes in to organize wars on drugs and crimes in the townships. Financial and social aid are contingent on agreeing to this kind of regulation of civil society, you’re creating the conditions that America thinks are optimum for the development of capitalism.

That’s why I was so interested in the death penalty. The series we had at UCSB was about America and the Death Penalty. What does that say about this country? If America is going to be the policeman of theIf America is going to be the policeman of the world, then the American criminal justice system is going to start universalizing itself. The rest of the world is trying to work out the implications of this.