They're Not There Just to "Represent" You Anymore: Welcome to the Age of Iconic Politics

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They’re Not There Just to “Represent” You Anymore: Welcome to the Age of Iconic Politics.

By Don Curren

 

That representative democracy is under assault in many ways and in many places is clear and indisputable.

Why that is the case, and what to do about it, is much less clear.

Examples are legion: the outright assault on democratic norms and procedures in the US, the slide into “illiberal democracy” in parts of Europe, and the continuing suppression of democratic tendencies in established autocracies like China and Russia.

Here at home in Ontario, a government supported by roughly 17% of the electorate attempted to shut down the collective bargaining process in a labor dispute with educational workers in recent weeks through invoking the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ self-suspending “Notwithstanding Clause” and depriving the workers of the right to strike

As disturbing as these developments are individually, they are just surface symptoms of a deeper malaise, a profound weakening on the entire process of representative democracy

The problem was summarized in a recent piece by Stephen McBride, a professor of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in this way: “All this points to a lack of representation and accountability, as well as the need for radical changes to our institutions and politics.

“Avoiding catastrophe must involve devising new institutional structures that can achieve the goals of representation and accountability in new and effective ways based on the roles people play in society — whether they’re workers, farmers, business owners or caregivers, for example — and on their lived experiences,” McBride wrote.

Devising those new institutional structures will be a challenge. Because, as I see it, the problem doesn’t originate solely in our democratic institutions themselves.

In large part, they reflect some fundamental shifts in the way our culture operates, shifts that were partially captured the activist and cultural critic Guy Debord in his seminal 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.

Debord argues that the Spectacle, broadly equivalent to the world of “entertainment” in all its forms, has in essence taken over the “real world.”

“(The spectacle) is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration,” Guy Debord writes. “It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.”

As I explored in an earlier blog piece, Debord believes the Spectacle does not consist just of the media that envelop us and the messages they deliver. It is also a way of framing the world, a filter that recasts all of reality in the light of entertainment, amusement, and appearance.

“Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation … of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance,” Debord writes.

In the Society of the Spectacle, politicians operate differently; they “represent” us in a very different sense.

They retain their legislative role of representing our perspectives and interests in their deliberative bodies – although often in a haphazard, hypocritical, and intermittent way.

But they “represent” us in another, more important way, a way that is captured in another sense of the word “representation” – they depict or embody the values and beliefs that we identify with.

What I’m trying to get at was captured very effectively in a recent piece on JSTOR Daily entitled Do You Trust Your Democratic Representative by Geoffrey Baym, Professor of Media Studies in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Baym writes about the political theorist Michael Saward, who argues that there has been “a significant shift in the primary political sense of representation as a practice and concept.”

“The very act of representation, he contends, has become less about what a representative does—the arguments they endorse and the decisions they make—and more about what, or who, they stand for,” he writes.

“Representatives often function less as agents working on behalf of a constituency, and more as performers, deploying aesthetic symbols and cultural gestures to construct what Saward calls their ‘representative claims’,” Baym writes.

To use a word that’s become all-pervasive in our Spectacle-dominated world, our politicians have acquired a new role as “icons.”

“Icon” is a word and a phenomenon that can tell us a lot about how politics and politicians function in the Society of the Spectacle.

It’s a word we hear constantly; how many times in the course of a typical day are you told that someone or something is “iconic”?

Its rapid re-emergence and incessant use in the last few decades reflect some significant changes in the underpinnings of our culture, and, therefore, our politics.

I’ll explore history and significance of icons in greater future blog posts, but for the moment, I’ll briefly explore what it means in the specific context of politics.

It seems like a nebulous word, one that’s constantly tossed off in ad copy and broadcast journalism and other ephemeral forms of discourse.

Although – or perhaps because - it’s used by everyone, all the time, its meaning seems elusive. That’s true of a lot of words, of course, but it’s particularly, and tellingly, true for “icon” and its derivatives.

For our purposes here, we’ll look to the two primary definitions provided by the Merriam Webster dictionary for our basic orientation.

Its first two key definitions of “icon,” following by a few examples, are:

 1 a person or thing widely admired especially for having great influence or significance in a particular sphere

a civil rights icon

an actor and fashion icon

… Purple Rain, the flick that established Prince as a pop icon and cineaste. Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell

That cultural icon, the Nintendo Game Boy, was released in 1989 … Eleanor Flegg

 

2 EMBLEM, SYMBOL

Rosie the Riveter, a WWII [World War II] cultural icon with her blue jumpsuit and red bandana, represented the women who went to work at manufacturing hubs across the nation …

 

A single photograph, the photograph of Earth taken from space by William Anders, on Apollo 8, in 1968, served as an icon for the entire environmental movement. Jill Lepore

 

The nation's first President was transformed into an icon, a national symbol whose somewhat forbidding portrait would adorn the dollar bill. John J. O'Connor

 

Although they’re related, it’s the second sense I’m going to focus on here.

Historically, the word icon has been associated primarily with the religious images produced in such proliferation in the countries dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

One of the interesting things about them is that they provided concrete, visual images of beings that were said to exist in an invisible, spiritual realm, such as Jesus Christ, the other members of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and, in the example below, the Archangel Michael.

                                 

 

While Jesus did exist historically, the icons depicted him in his spiritual, “heavenly” aspect as a being to worship and emulate.

They provided a graphic illustration of the values and emotions that their objects were supposed to embody.

Often, when people use “icon” in the contemporary world, they are using it in a surprisingly similar way; they are pointing to a person, a product, a building, an image that embodies a belief system and/or a set of values and priorities.

In a very real, sense, Donald Trump is a living, breathing icon. He represents a particular worldview, a set of values, in much the same way that the fictitious Rosie the Riveter did in WW II.

But it’s a very different set of values and beliefs. It’s not the collective, “can-do” determination that embraced any task needed to help defeat fascism exemplified by Rosie.

It’s a “populism” that implicitly pits a select tribe of “real Americans” against those seeking to disenfranchise them, the globalists, Democrats, Cultural Marxists, etc.

The people who vote for Trump are signaling that they embrace this world view and the values it prescribes.

They aren’t, in their own minds, primarily voting for a well-defined set of policies or even a coherent political ideology. They are signaling they accept Trump as their icon, and they embrace the values and ideas he represents.

That helps explains why people so often vote for leaders who then embrace policies and pass legislation that directly contradict their supporters’ own interests.

They are voting for a politician in much the same way they decide to watch movie or TV show featuring one of their favorite “iconic” performers. As an affirmation of who they are. Or perhaps, more accurately, who they would like to be.

As long as those voters feel those politicians successfully “iconize” their belief systems, they will usually overlook other details about those same politicians, who claim to be the champion of the “little guy,” embrace measures like tax cuts to the wealthy that can directly contradict the material interests of the voters who support them.

The iconic aspect of a figure like Trump was explored recently in an essay by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in the New York Times. While her terminology is different – she describes Trump as a “fetish” rather than an icon – her perspective is similar to mine.

“He is a fetish object. If possessed of any form of brilliance, he is a brilliant synthesizer of low American moments; his presence replays the racial suspiciousness of the 1980s and of “Birth of a Nation” all at once,” she wrote.

“He is a brilliant manifestation of what a poor, angry man hopes a rich, angry man will be like; he brilliantly demonstrates what an embittered loser hopes winning will feel like — vengeful and delicious,” she writes. “A fetish figure is illogical to those on the outside, but it makes perfect sense to those who venerate it.”

It's not a coincidence Trump and many other contemporary politicians either come directly from the world of entertainment, or the world of the Spectacle, or embrace its arsenal of tactics and techniques.

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, did not originate in entertainment, but he is also a political icon; the political sensibility he incarnates is “for the people,” populist, like Trump’s. Not as belligerent as perhaps, but also predicated on being for the “ordinary people” and against the “elites.”

And like Trump, Ford’s actual policies, such as his recent effort to squelch the collective bargaining process, directly contradict the interests of the hard-working, “ordinary” people he allegedly represents.

The rise of the iconic politics is deeply intertwined with the rising dominance of the phenomenon that Guy Debord diagnosed as the Society of the Spectacle – and with the rise of the communications media that enabled and accelerated it.

The relationship between the re-emergence of icons as a significant cultural and political force and the spread of mass media was noted by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his co-author Bruce R. Powers in their book “The Global Village:

Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21^st Century.” It was published in 1989 but based on their work together prior to McLuhan’s death in 1980.

Here's a relevant passage:

A person appearing on national or regional TV is automatically disconnected from his friends, his neighborhood and the very lifestyle that is his peculiar hallmark. Contrary to his own perceptions, he becomes larger than life and alienated from himself. The same affect occurs with politicians and entertainment personalities, only it is amplified millions of times through repetition. Their personal image becomes frozen into iconic shape.

McLuhan and his co-author Powers very perceptively hit upon the way politicians and other public figures were becoming icons in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a trend that has only intensified since then as electronic mass media became more pervasive, more diverse, and more powerful.

McLuhan and Powers explicitly noted the threat to representative government posed by the emergence of electronic media and their tendency to transform politicians from representatives into icons.

“Governments need to know that electronic services, especially television, eliminate or dissolve representative government. TV ends representation at a distance and involves one in the immediate confrontation of an image,” they wrote.

They also perceptively identify Ronald Reagan as on the vanguard of image-driven, or iconic, politics. “For the new popular image, of which Reagan is an example, there can be no relevance in parties and policies, but only a war of icons and images,” McLuhan and Powers wrote.

 In McLuhan’s better known 1966 text Understanding Media, he declares at one point that “The iconic age is upon us,” decades before the world had made its startling reappearance in popular discourse.

While McLuhan anticipated the new iconic age, it is also perhaps not surprising that his ruminations about it were sometimes opaque and need to be subjected to further examination if their relevance and usefulness is to become clear.

But McLuhan’s probes function in a way like the flares sent up to illuminate enemy positions in WW I, to borrow a metaphor used by economist and complexity theorist W. Brian Arthur in his book The Nature of Technology.

Arthur likens the work of great economic theorists such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo or Karl Marx to the flares in WW I; although the economy is constantly being transformed by technological change in a way analogous to the constant change on a battlefield, the flares “light for a time, but the rumblings and redeployments continue in the dark,” Arthur writes.

The flares sent up by McLuhan and Debord helped illuminate the changes that preceded and shaped our current social, cultural, and political situation, but they don’t provide a definitive, comprehensive overview of the Society of the Spectacle and the icons that populate it.

In fact, both McLuhan and Debord fell prey to the tendency to see things in terms of absolutes that often dogs visionary thinkers.

 McLuhan famously insisted “the media is the message,” and scorned any notion that the content delivered by the media itself might be significant - that, in fact, the message was the message, along with the media.

And Debord believed the rule of the Spectacle over society was absolute, not partial and challenged by other pressures and tendencies, as it is in reality.

Sometimes the realities of economics and other existentially urgent issues like abortion rights can supersede the spell cast by the iconic aspects of politicians.

We had some interesting real-world illustrations of that recently, both in the US and here in Ontario.

In the US, the “red wave” of Republican electoral victory expected by some pundits in the mid-term elections on November 8 failed to materialize, with several Trump-associated candidates – including the TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz – losing their races.

Without getting into the particulars of why Trump’s acolytes failed to make the expected gains, it’s possible that deep-seated opposition to Republican policies on abortion and gun rights proved a more potent force for mobilizing voters than the iconic allure of Trump.

In Ontario, Ford’s “For the People” rhetoric and posturing seems to have collided with a solid wall of opposition based on people’s understanding of the need for collective bargaining rights and the need to protect them.

After widespread protests – and polling that revealed how deeply unpopular the move was - the Ontario government struck down the legislation which would have deprived education workers of their collective-bargaining rights shortly after passing it, and a tentative deal with the union was reached.

The power of “iconicity,’ in short, is a powerful force, but it’s not the only force at play.

By using the work of Guy Debord and Marshall McLuhan, along with other thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Theodor Adorno, Daniel Boorstin, Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce, as well as examining the use – and misuse – of the word “icon” itself in popular discourse and in history – it’s possible to gain a deeper understanding of how icons once again became a powerful social and cultural force.

That’s something I plan to continue doing in the coming months here at Curren(t) Thinking, and perhaps in other formats and contexts, as well - and I hope you’ll join me.