Journal of Visual Culture
http://vcu.sagepub.com/
Obama as Icon
W.J.T. Mitchell
Journal of Visual Culture 2009 8: 125
DOI: 10.1177/14704129090080020201
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Questionnaire on Barack Obama 125
Obama as Icon
What does it mean to be  visible , and how could we quantify it? Is it merely
a question of how many pictures of something there are in the world? Or is
it a question of historical, that is to say social, cultural and political impact, a
certain quality of reception that includes the ability of an image to  have legs ,
to spawn copies and mutations, and to circulate across numerous
geographical and media borderlines where it installs itself in human memory
and imagination? And should we take  visibility literally or figuratively? Is it
not the case that the emergence of Barack Hussein Obama as a highly visible
 cultural icon is not merely a phenomenon of visual culture, but of auditory,
aural culture as well. This is not merely a question of the masterful oratorical
style that made his first impression on popular awareness. As Obama himself
noted early on in his campaign, he is a  skinny Black guy with big ears as well
as a  funny name . If we do as Theodore Adorno recommended, and  think
with our ears , it is impossible to ignore the fact that the auditory image of
 Barack Hussein Obama is a kind of composite sound-image, combining
echoes of the arch-enemies of the United States during the period preceding
his election to the presidency  Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. If
human history is heard as well as seen, an audio-visual record of events and
processes, then Obama s election is, at this level, a revolutionary event, not
merely in the quantity but the quality of what we can call his  visibility . It is
certainly a less than revolutionary event at the level of actual policies, and
one of the central issues with Obama s presidency will be measuring the
distance between his audio-visual image  what he says and stages  and what
he is able to do.
Obama is unquestionably the most visible US president to date, and this is
partly an effect of his striking identity as an icon of racial difference, and
partly the personal beauty of himself and his family, his sculpted facial
features, his body image especially in motions that reveal his athleticism. His
hyper-visibility is also a result of his unprecedented mastery of new media.
Obama is not just the first Black president; he is the first wired president.
And he is wired, not only into the internet, but also into what might be
thought of as its exact opposite, namely the face to face encounter. Facebook,
YouTube and his Blackberry, along with an amazing variety of online fund-
raising organizations famously contributed an enormous grass-roots financial
basis for his campaign that overwhelmed the Clinton base of fat-cat donors.
But that was only half the story. The other half is signaled by the first, crucial
turning point of the campaign, namely the Iowa caucuses. Obama swept
every caucus state in the primaries because they are the last bastion of direct,
town-hall democracy in which communities manifest themselves in real time
and real places to engage in actual embodied political conversations. And
then of course there is the  third thing , the zone in between the mediated
time-spaces of the internet and the immediate sites of direct democracy,
namely the spectacular gatherings of masses of people. The mass rallies
Obama gathered, from Berlin to Denver to Chicago to inauguration day in
Washington DC, are the synthetic convergence of his mediated and
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126 journal of visual culture 8(2)
immediate appeal. Millions of people endured considerable inconvenience
and discomfort for the sake of  being there at these occasions. And even
more millions watched the spectacle of mass gathering on television, as
much to see the tremendous popular gathering as to see Obama himself.
This sense of both actual and virtual gathering is what gave Obama s
campaign the aura of a social movement being born. In my lifetime, only Jack
Kennedy, who briefly mobilized the generational activism of the 60s and
Ronald Reagan, who energized the long-festering neoconservative reaction
against the 60s, have had this feeling of leading an emergent social
movement. Bill Clinton had a bit of this aura as the  Baby Boomer avatar, but
quickly squandered it in policy triangulations and compromises. Obama
came in to office on the crest of a wave of popular feeling that he helped to
create, but that largely pre-dated his candidacy. It is crucial that we not forget
how improbable Obama s election was. No one predicted his amazing
victory, including most of the people who finally came around to supporting
him. He was not the first choice of left liberals who tended to favor John
Edwards or (further left) Dennis Kucinich. The Black community tended to
support Hillary Clinton and, one year before his election, he was widely
regarded as the least likely of the candidates in the upper tier to survive the
primary season; the smart money was all on Clinton. What we had not
counted on was the emergence of the Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan of
politics, a figure of such superior talent, discipline and vision who could
meld the diverse movements of anti-war and environmental interests,
economic and social justice, and participatory democracy into a unified
movement.
And we also must not forget that even with all this going for him, Obama had
the most spectacular run of good luck that has ever blessed a candidate for
the presidency. He was lucky to run against an elderly curmudgeon who was
unpopular with the base of his own party (who would evidently have
preferred someone like Sarah Palin) and  defined by Obama as  McBush 
was identified with the most unpopular president since Herbert Hoover.
Obama s good luck began, in fact, to take on overtones of the uncanny when
he managed to provide perfect weather for the most visible mass gatherings
of his campaign, the 70,000 who gathered in Denver, and the 200,000 on a
balmy November night in Chicago. And the final, and perhaps most necessary
stroke of good luck: if the crash of the American economy in October of 2008
had taken place two months later, the election very possibly could have gone
the other way.
When we analyze the effect of Obama as a  cultural icon , then, enumerating
the innumerable commodifications of his image, it is important to recognize
the extent to which his image is, before any positive content of, say, visible
racial marking, a highly ambiguous blank slate on which popular fantasy
could be projected. Obama noted this himself in numerous speeches, calling
himself a receptacle for the projection of hope and insisting that his meteoric
rise was  not about me, but about you . He made himself a mirror for an
international community of frustrated desire for peace, hope and change.
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Questionnaire on Barack Obama 127
So the key to Obama s iconicity resides not in determinacy but ambiguity, not
in identity but differential hybridity. From the outset, he was dismissed as  too
black to be supported by whites, and  not black enough to be supported by
blacks. And in fact he emphasized, not just his fusion of binary contradictions,
but his multiple, plural determinations: African, American, Hawaiian,
Indonesian, Christian, Muslim and (like every other American politician) Irish
on St Patrick s Day. He could have been called an incarnation of Jesse
Jackson s  Rainbow Coalition , except that his contrast to the Reverend
Jackson in oratorical style was so dramatic. Obama had mastered the soaring,
sublime oratory of the Black pulpit, but he modulated it carefully with the
cool, reasoned professorial tones of a historian. In a speech in Milwaukee, he
told the story of a young woman who whispered to him a confession that,
although she was a Republican, she was going to vote for him and join the
ranks of the  Obamicans , a reversal of the flow associated with the  Reagan
Democrats in the 1980s. Obama delivered this story in a hushed tone in front
of a mass gathering of thousands of people, concluding it by saying that he
just had one question for the Republican woman:  Why are we whispering?
It is this fusion of opposites, of sublime eloquence and quiet, thoughtful
questioning, that makes Obama such a compelling figure. At the level of the
visual image, in addition to his bi-racial identity, he is a figure of both
intimacy and monumentality, accessibility and reserve, enormous energy and
casual relaxation. I have had the good fortune to meet him in person (he lives
two blocks from me in Hyde Park), and in fact my earliest recollection of
meeting him is at the home of my next-door neighbor and dear friend,
William Ayers, who hosted a neighborhood party that helped to launch
Obama s political career. (Yes, this is the same Ayers vilified as a  terrorist by
the media throughout the campaign.) Up close and personal, Obama strikes
me as the same person one encounters at the level of media and public
spectacle: thoughtful, eloquent, and given to listening carefully before he
opens his mouth. For me, the enduring icon of his election will not be any
of the famous moments, but an image snatched from the BBC World Service
on the morning of 4 November 2008, when my wife and I had the good luck
to be at the polls in the tiny elementary school across the street from our
house at the same time that the Obamas came to vote. There he is, about to
give my wife a hug and kiss, and me a handshake (Figures 1 and 2).
Marshall McLuhan would have been hard-pressed to say whether Obama is a
hot or cool medium for the expression of political feeling since he is so
clearly capable of modulating his temperature to fit the moment. But his
dominant mode is clearly on the side of cool, especially in the sense that
 coolness involves maximum involvement on the side of the audience. This
is nowhere more clearly manifested than in the image that has emerged as his
most visible icon, the Shepard Fairey  HOPE poster. Aside from the obvious
overtones of Soviet Constructivist posters, most notably Lenin, the most
important thing about this image is that it was not produced by the Obama
campaign. Like the  Yes We Can and  Obama Girl videos on YouTube, the
most notable, memorable images of Obama were produced by members of
the movement he catalyzed, not by his professional image-makers.
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128 journal of visual culture 8(2)
Figure 1 Voting, Chicago, 4th November 2008.
So Obama is what Walter Benjamin would have called the  dialectical image
of our time, only that he does not capture (as Benjamin put it)  history at a
standstill , but in its actual motion towards an open, indeterminate and
ambiguous future. The image-event of the campaign that most clearly
illustrates this point is the famous New Yorker cover of July 2008, which
portrayed Obama in Muslim drag and Michelle as an Angela Davis-type
revolutionary, burning the American flag in their fire-place, and giving each
other a  terrorist fist-pump . At the time, this cover was severely criticized by
my friends on the left for its reinforcement of right-wing propaganda images
that were trying to caricature Obama as a secret Muslim. The fist-pump (seen
every day as a sign of athletic solidarity in American basketball) was
interpreted as a terrorist sign, of course, by Fox News. My own reaction was
to defend the cover on the grounds that it exposed to view in a manifestly
ridiculous tableau the insidious whispering campaign that was being waged
in the right-wing media. As Blake would have said, it  gave Error a form so
that it could be cast out . The response of my leftist colleagues was that  the
American people will not understand the subtlety of the satire, and will take
this literally, as a revelation of the Obama s secret subversiveness. To me, the
joke was on people stupid enough to take the image literally, and on those
leftists who outsmart themselves by underestimating the intelligence of
everyone west of the Hudson River.
We have providence or uncanny good luck to thank that my reading turned
out to be correct. We also have to thank George W. Bush, who in every
conceivable way set the conditions for Obama s emergence as his opposite
number  Obama as the icon of anti-or non-Bushiness. Just to tabulate the
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Questionnaire on Barack Obama 129
Figure 2 Voting, Chicago, 4th November 2008.
obvious contrasts between Obama and Bush: smart versus stupid, eloquent
versus inarticulate, flexible versus rigid, modest versus arrogant, a mulatto
cosmopolitan versus a white Texas cowboy, subtle and complex versus
simplistic and reductive; confident in reason and science versus a faith-based
science and foreign policy based on  gut feelings . The United States suffered
a historic plague of bad luck in having George W. Bush as President at the
moment of 9/11. Now we must hope that, in the midst of the deep calamity
of global recession brought on by conservative economic policies, Obama s
luck will hold. For the moment, he is the icon, the talisman as it were, of that
possibility.
W.J.T. Mitchell
University of Chicago, USA
[email: [e-mail]]
Obama s Whiteness
Barack Obama is not only the first black American President; just as notably,
he is the first biracial American President. Almost unique among public
figures of mixed racial ancestry in the history of the United States, Obama has
maintained his  white half in the media framing of his person and life. I
would like to examine Obama s racialization, and specifically the racialization
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