MetaPost: Writing about Writing about Obama and Semiotics

Taking a step back from reading representations of Barack Obama in popular culture in order to read the process and politics of such a project reveals a great deal about how we already see our culture.

Marshall McLuhan argued in the 70s that we live surrounded by media; that we are always already inside its grasp and its gaze. It stands to reason, then, that our readings of media and media culture probably also fall within the parameters that we and the media have mutually established. To step outside those boundariess, though, to read icons, media, and public discourse on our own terms is more complicated and can be seen as elite or overly abstract.

In the case of Barack Obama, though, it's just fun. How often do we see a person and that person's politics infiltrate so many aspects of popular culture? Without question, Obama has literally altered the semiotic topography of America and American culture beyond what some have called "the Obama effect."

So prevalent is his image and so utterly altered is the political and social terrain post-Obama, we can now, officially, talk about what we at SemiObama call an "Obamized" landscape and the "Obamazation" of popular culture.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault describes revolutionary action as confronting "the relationships of power through the notions and institutions that function as their instruments, armature, and armor.” As our culture has migrated so thoroughly to the realm of the visual, the politics of semiotics have become more and more important. Obamizing shoes, t-shirts, billboards, pins, posters, YouTube, web pages (perhaps even this blog) can be seen as a kind of semiotic revolution--an alteration of the signs, symbols, and images we tend to associate with authority, power, and dominance.

The Splash Page

A few weeks ago, when I went to Barack Obama’s home page, I was greeted with a sepia-toned photograph of the senator, his wife, and two daughters (now it’s a photograph of Obama and John Edwards, who recently endorsed him). In the photograph, the family are smiling. They are dressed semi-formally, with the senator wearing a white shirt and trousers, and his wife wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a print skirt. Both children are draped over the senator.

It’s pretty clear why Obama’s campaign has you enter the site this way. It’s an appeal to emotions, positive ones, a reminder that Obama is first of all a family man. Practically, this is important—all presidents of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been married. As a potential voter, perhaps you have children, or perhaps you want children. Even if you don’t, as a Democrat you probably won’t begrudge Obama including his family, and if you are an independent or Republican, you probably won’t either.

While an unmarried person could be president, the selection of married people as candidates and presidents suggests a certain conservativeness in the general populace, one that Obama is undoubtedly trying to tie into.

But this is as much about class as it is about family. The photograph also displays a stereotypical version of the middle class, with two parents together with two children. It does not look that different from an advertisement for home décor—it’s a comfortable looking ad. It’s clear this is the American Dream looking out at us.

Welcome to SemiObama

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.

--Umberto Eco

One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary American culture is the ascendancy of Barack Obama as a symbol. He stands for so much for so many people--hope, possibility, racial equality, vision, youth, energy, and change. In fact, he is, in many regards, no longer just a person; he is an icon. For a great number of people, especially young people, he stands for America's most positive values, while to some, he embodies America's most unattractive fears and anxieties. Regardless of how one feels about Mr. Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic candidate for president of the United States, one cannot ignore his ubiquity. He is everywhere: on t-shirts, on YouTube, across magazine covers, on television, and in nearly every meaningful publication around the world. So saturated is our media with images of Obama, it is now, officially, approaching the level of high camp.

SemiObama is here to do something about that.

With a sense of humor and a sense of history, SemiObama seeks to
offer insightful, innovative, and informative readings of representations of Barack Obama in popular and visual culture. This publication is not concerned with parsing Mr. Obama's politics. Rather, we are interested in unpacking and decoding the visual texts of and about Obama. In other words, SemiObama is dedicated to offering semiotic readings of various Obamian texts as they make thier way into our culture and come to signify ideas, values, and beliefs beyond the candidate himself.

In addition to his observations about semiotics and signs, Umberto Eco also suggests that semiotics is the "discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie," so we will also look closely at visual Obama texts that are used, both by the idealistic and the idiotic, to mislead.

We hope you have as much fun reading SemiObama as we will have have reading (and writing about) the semiotics of Obama.

We can be reached at semiobama@gmail.com. Feel free to contact us with ideas, suggestions, and criticisms.