Vice President Harris has accepted her party's nomination to stand for election for the upcoming presidential elections. That is hardly news, the transition from President Biden's abandoned presidential campaign to the Vice President's endorsement by Party leaders thereafter has been well reported, and it would have been scandalous if the Vice President had not secured the nomination.
That brought the events of the Democratic Party convention to its high point--the speech of the Vice President formally accepting the nomination. The text of the speech follows (via the New York Times) and is well worth a read.
The speech is quite interesting as semiotics--that is a an expression of self creation for a community the embrace of the meaning of that self-creation carries with it important political consequences--at least for the community. In a sense, though, the Vice President was not so much engaging in an act of self-creation as a form of re-invention. That was clearly not the point--as much as her political opponents might be tempted to use the speech strategically in that sense. Instead, it might be more useful--from a semiotic perspective--to understand the speech in the usual sense of seeking to create an avatar. That is, a political candidate, running on the principle of democratic representation, must effectively undertake a process of reverse incarnation. That is the candidate must transform themselves from a carnate human being into a representative of something larger--of the polity that the candidate seeks to represent. The candidate, then, becomes not merely an avatar but also an icon. Where a divinity might take on human form--an incarnation from generalized representation to a specific human representation; the political candidate must seek to do this in reverse--to manifest themselves not as a single human but as a human whose humanity (or in the current parlance, whose "story") is representative of a larger, aggregated manifestation of the human condition, its aspirations, character and the like.
It is worth considering the difference in this context. An
avatar might be understood as the embodiment of the abstract, sometimes a divinity or divine essence (from the
Sanskrit avatarana), sometimes of the soul or manifestation resident elsewhere.
Since the 19th century in the West it has come to mean a ""concrete embodiment of something abstract." In one sense, and as a discursive trope now common in the United States, personal storytelling is a popular form of creating avatars. The avatar--the storyteller--incarnates the lessons and history that preceded them in time and place and space. They are the sum of that story and its manifestation in their acts and outlook. Every person, then, is the sum of their story; and their story is a manifestation of the aggregation of their history and their lessons that can be drawn from and through the conscious perceptions of rationalizing tastes of the community into which the story is projected. The avatar, then, is at once a personal incarnation, but also one that is given sense by its connection to the expectations and emphasis of the community into which the story is projected. It is not the story that is important--but rather its manifestation in its physical form.
An
icon, might be understood as a specific form of avatar. A closer consideration reveals its difference. Its etymology underscores both its richness as a concept as its difference from that of the avatar. The term
derives form Greek eikon "likeness, image, portrait; image in a mirror; a semblance, phantom image;" in philosophy, "an image in the mind." If the concept of the avatar focuses on the personification of the realities built into the story manifested in the concrete form of the person,
the concept of the icon focuses on the concepts behind the concrete image which represents it in material form. When one beholds an avatar one embraces the material as the embodiment of the immaterial; when one beholds the icon one embraces the immaterial through the concrete image which serves merely as a doorway to the immaterial. It is in those sense, in the 21st century that one can speak to avatars in the virtual realms of cyberspace and understand them as the manifestation of the person they now represent. In contrast, one understands the icon as the pictorial representation of the thing or action desired--
file, program, web page, or command. It is not the image that is important--but rather the abstraction it represents. An icon sometimes embeds history--like the floppy disk icon that represents the function of saving data on a medium largely no longer in use. In this sense, the icon can retain skeuomorphic elements that imitate (mimesis) connecting symbol to archetype.
All political figures are both avatar and icon, and the Vice President's speech serves as an excellent example of the semiotics of the avatar and the icon in the political field. The effort is not unique to the Vice President; indeed, its interest here is in the way it is invoked rather than that it has been invoked. The Vice President constructs her avatar as a composite of her upbringing and family life. These are semiotic objects (that she grew up as she did and within the overlapping identities which she invokes) that become signs--that is that signify both belonging and that serve to align her person (who she is as an individual) within the broad symbolism and significations of the context from out of which she emerges. These are not just personal stories but personifications of aggregated stories that are meant to be both defining and a manifestation of significance, of who and what is meant to be represented by and through the avatar. a Here the tropes are grounded in identity and class. Avatars, though, are also objects. And they must be activated or moved around the space into which they are projected in the way that simulated avatars engage within their virtual worlds. The icon represents the programing or coded instructions that are written into the avatar and that projects the avatar's character and sensibilities toward tasks. Here the Vice President identifies the icon and its objectives--to bring to further fulfillment the coded operational objectives already developed from the Clinton Administration and acquiring its current instructions and goals in the new era of the Obama Administration, a set of coding for which the Biden Administration served as a faithful caretaker (see eg here and here).
These are avatars and icons that draw their power from the fundamental nature of representative government--the candidate is both themselves and the incarnation of the represented. To mediate there must be both a "self" and an abstracted self that represents the electorate (or at least enough of them to get elected). Likewise, they must construct themselves as icons--in the cyber sense; as the image that one activates to rune a program and reach certain goals (that was in effect the construction that Mr. Obama produced for the Vice President in his speech; see American
Narrative Mimetics--"America’s ready for a better story": Former
President Obama's Remarks at the Democratic National Convention). The Vice President is both the incarnation of the story of the ideal current ideal of the aggregated polity (her story) and a command function which when activated will move the nation forward along the lines of the program described. The Vice President's self, then, is rationalized and projected through the perception of the self within its icon and avatar.
But every avatar must have its adversary. The adversary is the foundation of oppositions, the dialectics of which are the essence of the binary dialectics of good-bad; light-shadow etc. One recalls the etymological origins of the term from Latin oppositus "standing against, The adversary is itself the incarnation--the avatar--pf opposition, that representaiton of what stands in the way, what blocks the path. The Great Adversary (etymology from Greek Satanas, from Hebrew satan "adversary, one who plots against another," from satan "to show enmity to, oppose, plot against." Mr. Biden's remarks for example (Remarks by President Biden During Keynote Address at the Democratic National Committee Convention | Chicago, IL) illustrate the was that these fundamental rationalizations of collective perception are transposed into the performance of politics.
And perhaps it is in this sense of the semiotics of opposition that one might understand the profound effect of the fundamental essence of opposition which sharpens the dialectics of political discourse, that shapes the mutuality of oppositional storytelling and the constitution of avatar and icon. It is in the shadow of the adversary that the profundity of the avatar and the command of the icon can be more clearly exposed ("Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour" 1 Peter 5:8). The adversary is the inverted mimetic of the avatar and the inverse of the icon's pathway. AT the same time the Great Adversary is itself avatar and icon, a representation of a threatening other. The better defined the adversary, the clearer the adversary's narrative, the more precisely drawn the avatar and the ore clearly articulated the icon's representation. The greater the adversary the more profound the opposing avatar and its icon. The way forward, as the Vice President and Former President Obama noted, requires the overcoming of the adversary, removing the opposition that blocks the path. The process of overcoming opposition, semiotically, reproduces purification rituals that once, long again, relied on the tropes of burning away impurity ("Thou hast trodden down all them that err from thy statutes: for their deceit is falsehood. Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross: therefore I love thy testimonies." Psalms 119:118-119)
Mimesis, though, produces an echoing effect. The construction of the Great Adversary also requires its avatar and its icon. For the Vice President that incarnation of opposition--of standing in the way, is incarnated in the person of Former President Trump, to which a portion of the Vice President's remarks were directed. He is the avatar and a central element in the construction of a Great Adversary against which the greatness of the opposing avatar and icon can be sketched. This is not new to the Vice President--and carries over from the years long effort at constructing from out of the person of the Former President Trump both the avatar of negative-destructive opposition and the icon of the pathways to the dissolution of the Republic. And here the mimesis, Former President Trump applies the same measure to the Vice President with the polarities reversed. The discursive forms remain the same however, In this way collective discourse is possible around a shared set of meaning tropes. The contest is over the application of these fundamental tropes to the two candidates for office.
And always in the background is the Stan in Job--the oppositional force that accuses and opposes, that tests and doubts, against which all things are judged. An oppositional force the principal responsibility of which is indeed to test and oppose. The object is rectification, which serves as the essence of the Vice President's remarks, and the foundation of discursive elements of the campaign that is to follow, one that acquires its discursive power when read against the discursive elements of the opposing collective for which the Vice President is cast in the role of adversary.
