Visual Culture: Living on the wake of the withering signified.

In this text, Hebdige sheds light on Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacrum, and ever-changing aspects between reality and what is signified. The text explores the theories of two viewpoints, pre-modern and post-modern. Hebdige scrutinizes the work of John Berger, a pre-modern critic that believes a photograph should “’tell’ it’s true story”, concluding that an image should hold an underlying meaning in order to help us understand them – to recover or retrieve truths within the image, allowing them to be signified. And without the story, the image would have no meaning, nor substance. Hebdige then introduces Post-modern theory, and the Second World critics, such as Jean Baudrillard, that oppose the theories of the Pre-modernists, and believe that an image does not need a meaning, and that meaning is in fact, subjective to the viewer. Baudrillard even goes to say that “reality is nothing more than the never knowable sum of all appearances”, that it ‘flickers’, and therefore can never be defined. The text investigates the development of truth and meaning in a modern world, and how a personal and subjective view has begun to distance the connection between image, signs and what is signified. It concludes this by showing how meaning is changing all the time and thus perceptions change, and meaning is lost. This in turn has an affect on what we perceive as reality, as they both change, the connection becomes construed, therefore causing the signified to wither.