Dick Hebdige "OBJECT AS IMAGE: the ITALIAN SCOOTER CYCLE" (19 88 )

8 pi Dick Hebdige "OBJECT AS IMAGE: THE ITALIAN SCOOTER CYCLE" (19 88 ) One of the difficulties of sociological discourse lies in the fact that like all discourse, it unfolds in strictly linear fashion whereas, to escape over-simplification and one-sidedness one needs to be able to recall at every point the whole network of relationships found there. -PIERRE BOURDIEU, LA DISTINCTION, I979 owhere do we encounter "networks of relationships" more famil Niar and "material" yet more elusive and contradictory than those in which material objects themselves are placed and have meaning(s). If linearity is an effect of all discourse then the world of things seems especially resistant to coherent exegesis. And one of the central para doxes facing those who write about product design must be that the more "material" the object-the more finite its historical and visual appearance-the more prodigious the things that can be said about it, the more varied the analyzes, descriptions and histories that can be brought to bear upon it. In a sense, each essay in Roland Barthes' Mythologies is an equation which depends for its impact on the initial recognition of this perverse formula and Barthes handles the paradox with a relish which alternates between the comic and the macabre ("What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the con dition of truth"'). In "The New Citroen," Barthes describes how the "tangible" is made to intersect with the "ethereal," the "material" with the "spiritual" through the convention of the annual motor show where the industry's new product is miraculously "unveiled" before the public. Be refers to the mystique of the object: the dual mystery of its appear ance-its magical lines, its "classical" body and the unanswerable riddle (unanswerable at least for Barthes, the aesthete) of how it came to be Illade in the first place-to religious myths and archetypes. Here a set of Contemporary wonders-the transubstantiation of labor power into thinp-" thp r1nmp'Otir-;Jtinn nf thf' "mirClrlr" in lISI':-is intimated by 118 THE CONSUMER SOCIETY READER T OBJECT AS IMAGE: THE IT ALlAN SCOOTER CYCLE 119 Barthes through the manipulation of a single pun: the Citroen DS J 9 been dubbed the "realist fallacy") is certainly avoided. But the "new" (short for "diffusion Special") is pronounced "Deesee" (Goddess) in position has its own attendant fantasies: when language becomes a mir French. ror for the narcissist, other illusions are, of course, possible. We could The essay is, then, a kind of trial by catachresis. It might be argued say that what is "misrecognised" in (this kind of) language is the depth that that is precisely Barthes' "method"; that Barthes would have been of perception (the depth of the reflection). To put it another way, what the first to insist on the validity of constructing an analysis on the is "misrecognised" is the illusory "materiality" of language itself. strength of a single word-on what it evokes and makes possible for For Barthes, the real can only be inserted into language as a "si the mythologist. Indeed, for Barthes it is only through"displacements" lence"-"a silence which belongs to fairy tales." But instead of the "si of this kind that writing is exalted into Literature: lence" of the object, we might like to stress its solidity, its materiality, ... for the text is the very outcropping of speech, and it is within speech the simple fact of its "being there." And it might be more accurate to that speech must be fought, led astray-not by the message of which it is say that the problem of representing the material world remains para the instrument, but by the play of words of which it is the theater ... The mount in Barthes and is depicted in that form-i.e., as the relationship forces of freedom which are in literature depend not on the writer's civil of speech to silence-because that problem is itself material: Barthes person, nor on his political commitment ... nor do they even depend on was, after all, a litterateur. Had he been an engineer or a traveling sales the doctrinal content of his work, but rather on the labor of displacement rep. who yearned to own a car capable of impressing potential clients he brings to bear upon the language ... 2 ("actualising (perhaps) ... the very essence of petit-bourgeois advance To be Barthesian, writing is the only practice in which the writer has a ment"6), then the "problem" would have been differently conceived and "presence" in which, about which he or she is qualified to speak: differently presented. And if he had shared the interest in mechanics and "progress" (mechanics as a metaphor for progress) which no doubt in The paradox is that the raw material, having become in some ways its formed the ecstatic response of many of the supplicants who filed past own end, literature is basically a tautological activity ... the ecrivain is the Citroen stand in 1955 and wanted, themselves, to possess the God one who absorbs the why of the world radically into a how to write ... ' dess, then, no doubt, we too would have been confronted with a dif And for Barthes, that writing which would claim to deal with represen ferent object, a different alienation. For, far from being silent, the tation, with myth and the "doxa" must satisfy certain conditions. It must number of voices which speak through and for "dumb things" are le be self-returning and sensitive to the plurality of verbal signs. It must he gion. The enigma of the object resides for us less in its "silence," its capable of "sarcasm." A pun is therefore valued insofar as it opens up imagined essence than in the babble which proliferates around it. and undermines the strictures of a "natural" (i.e., "bourgeois") speech. So Barthes renders the Citroen back into its "real" premythical compo nents. He recreates it using purely linguistic materials. Barthes' "New THREE" MOMENTS" Citroen" is powered on a figure of speech. Nonetheless the subversive The variability of significance rather than the persistence of qualities rationale of this replacement is not necessarily visible to everyone who should be at the forefront of analysis ... picks up a copy of Mythologies. Like the DS revolving slowly on its dais, - FRAN HANNAH AND TIM PUTNAM, the argument is simply "exhibited," turned by a mechanism which re TAKING STOCK IN DESIGN HISTORY, BLOCK 3 mains hidden from the wondering eyes of the reader (even, in all likeli hood, from the eyes of the reader who appreciates the pun): How then can we hope to provide a comprehensive and unified account of all the multiple values and meanings which accumulate around a It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it single object over time, the different symbolic and instrumental func appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an tions it can serve for different groups of users separated by geographical, object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a temporal and cultural location? The problem Bourdieu outlines and brilliance-a transformation of life into matter ... and in a word a silence Barthes embodies in Mythologies has already been acknowledged: there which belongs to fairy tales. 4 is a tendency amongst those who aspire toward a "materialist" concep tion of design to question the adequacy of the object as the basic unit If writing is regarded as a "narcissistic activity'" as Barthes would have of analysis and to substitute instead design practice as a more satisfac it, then the gross illusion that language is transparent (what has recently tory point of entry. But this shift in emphasis and the quest for episte OBJECT AS IMAGE: THE ITALIAN SCOOTER CYCLE 121 120 THE CONSUMER SOCIETY READER 1F mological rigour which motivates it carries its own price. For in the case into account the kinds of significance generated as the object passes of design history, there can be no subject without objects. All design through a maze of independent but interlocking frames-drawing back practice has as its ultimate ideal and actual destination a tangible result, at every point to consider the structures in which each individual frame a real set of objects. Indeed, in design the thing itself is the ideal. is housed. How then is it possible to talk simultaneously about objects and the We could trace the passage of the Citroen, then, from its inception/ practices which shape them, determine or delimit their uses, their mean conception through the various preparatory stages: market research, ings and their values without losing sight of the larger networks of re motivational research, design-engineering, styling (division of labor lationships into which those objects and practices are inserted? The task within the design team; relationship of team to management infrastruc becomes still more daunting if we acknowledge first that there can be ture), modifications in conception at design stages, constraints of avail no absolute symmetry between the "moments" of design/production and able technological resources on DS design, adaptation of existing consumption/use and, further, that advertising stands between these two Citroen plant to accommodate the new product, production of proto instances-a separate moment of mediation: marketing, promotion, the types and models; production (labor relations, labor processes), exhi construction of images and markets, the conditioning of public response. bitions and launch of new product, press conferences, press releases and It is tempting when writing about design either to run these three mo handouts, reviews in trade press, advertising campaign (target group), ments together or to give undue prominence to one of them so that distribution of finished product: retail arrangements, distribution of for production, mediation or consumption becomes the "determining in eign licences, provision of servicing facilities, price, sales figures (con stance" which dictates the meaning of the object in every other context.

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