Abstract
This article introduces the concept of dialectic icons: public figures who feature in contentious and polarising political discourse. The inflammatory quality of dialectic icons and their role as highly mediated symbols of conflict creates long-lasting emotional energy among audiences, who cluster in ideological camps as a response. However, these audiences can also actively and directly engage in and shape these discourses, particularly through social media. Examples of the public discourse about quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests illustrate how the controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility of dialectic icons ultimately contribute to social polarisation. By focusing on dialectic icons as proxy battlegrounds for public audiences, this article establishes a useful concept for gaining fresh insights into collective meaning- and truth-making processes.
Introduction
In 2017, The New York Times wrote about quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick that ‘[o]utside of politics, there may be nobody in popular culture at this complex moment so divisive and so galvanizing, so scorned and so appreciated’ (Branch, 2017). When Kaepernick decided to repeatedly kneel during the national anthem in the 2016 football season, audience reactions were markedly polarised. Kaepernick explained his silent protest by stating he was ‘not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color’ and emphasised that to him ‘this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on [his] part to look the other way’ (Wyche, 2016). The athlete’s open criticism of systemic racism and police brutality, as well as his support for the Black Lives Matter movement, fuelled national debate in the US and earned both widespread appraisal and resentment from the public. While some audiences applauded his outspokenness and bravery, others denounced Kaepernick as ungrateful and disrespectful towards veterans. Football fan or not, US Americans started voicing strong opinions on the athlete and demonstrated where they stood on the issue: as some people uploaded videos of themselves furiously burning his jersey (Boren, 2016), others emulated his gesture of ‘taking a knee’ thousands of times across the globe (Garber, 2017). After the end of the season, his professional athletic career came to a halt and he remains unsigned.
But Kaepernick is far from being the only person of recent years who has inspired intense public debate about societal issues larger than themselves. TIME magazine declared teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg ‘Person of the Year’, while opponents called her a ‘mentally ill Swedish child’ (Voytko, 2019) on global television. Former-US-actress-turned-UK-duchess Meghan Markle faced accusations of ‘tearing apart the royal family’ (Spargo, 2020), but also received praise for uncovering ‘outdated practices and attitudes’ (Scobie, 2021) within the monarchy and British society at large. Their image has become iconic by being associated with societal divides over contentious topics such as racism, climate change and inequality. But how is it that individuals become the emotionally charged focus of deliberation in a civil society, especially when the common-sense functioning of that society does not depend on these individuals per se? Why are public figures such as Kaepernick, Thunberg or Markle channelled in contentious political discourse, rather than the impersonal institutions, structures and abstract values that are so often pointed to as being essential for democracy? And what do these emotional attachments teach us about how audiences with opposing opinions engage with each other?
Scholars have primarily paid attention to the performative power of political leaders, (Mast, 2012; Alexander and Jaworsky, 2014; Villegas, 2020) and considered icons as unifying forces (Ghosh, 2011; Olesen, 2015; Prestholdt, 2019). This article, however, introduces the concept of ‘dialectic icons’ to emphasise their divisive potential and how they can catalyse ephemeral collective emotions into feelings of in-group solidarity and out-group hostility (Collins, 2004; Bar-Tal et al, 2007). It starts by outlining theoretical affinities between cultural sociology and the sociology of emotions, and discusses the neglected double-sidedness of iconicity. It continues by centring four elements of dialectic icons – controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility – and illustrates them by using examples of the discourse about Colin Kaepernick. Finally, the article concludes with remarks about the role of dialectic icons in political discourse and suggestions for future research.
Contention over the meanings of icons sheds new light on old issues explored by conflict theorists but this article argues that another direction is possible. Studying dialectic icons and their audiences elucidates the strong emotional pull they exercise and how audiences clash over their diverging interpretations. By emphasising the importance of symbolic identification and iconic consciousness in contentious political discourse, dialectic icons can benefit sociologists of emotions because they provide powerful emotional signals that help audiences negotiate a shared societal ‘truth’.
Emotions and culture
The rising emotional intensity of polarisation, as well as populist sentiments paired with political resignation (Flinders, 2020), has revealed that we need to develop a better understanding of how controversial public figures impact societal conflict by amplifying audiences’ emotional responses. Utilising lessons from both Cultural Sociology and the Sociology of Emotions, the framework of dialectic icons offers a new analytic dimension that includes supporter-antagonist relationships and shows that feelings of anger and admiration are targeted at icons as symbolic representatives of partisan divides.
Sociologists who accentuated the importance of feelings for social life drove the emotional turn that started to take hold in the 1980s (Hochschild, 1979; Kemper, 1987; Scheff, 1990; Denzin, 2017). Instead of reducing emotions to physical urges, sensations, physiological processes or individual dispositions, sociologists identified emotions as expressions of culture, which inform ‘emotional climates’ (De Rivera, 1992) or ‘regimes’ (Reddy, 2001): repertoires of appropriate emotions and rules of feeling that guide social interaction (Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1988), identity formations (Stryker, 2004), group consciousness (Collins, 2004) and moral responses (Stets et al, 2008), as well as conversations about power relations (Kemper, 2006) and social change (Jasper, 2011). Ergo, emotions are a crucial aspect of social life, structuring what we pay attention to, whom we perceive as threats and how we make sense of our positions in society.
Approaching these questions from a different perspective, the early 2000s gave rise to ‘cultural pragmatics’ (Alexander, 2004): Inspired by performance studies, it became concerned with the ability of public figures to create morally compelling and emotionally engaging ‘social dramas’ (Turner, 1974), in which actors (politicians, activists, celebrities and so on) try to portray themselves as authentic, virtuous heroes in contrast to villainous oppositions. Consequently, cultural pragmatics became particularly attentive to people who manage to sway society, such as government officials (Mast, 2012; Alexander and Jaworsky, 2014; Villegas, 2020), movement activists (Olesen, 2015; Jijon, 2018) or pop culture icons (Fine, 2001; Lofton, 2011; Prestholdt, 2019). Audiences know to project feelings of love towards heroes and hate towards villains, drawing from cultural and emotional repertoires, thereby fitting them into clear-cut narratives of good versus evil (Alexander, 2017; Jasper et al, 2020). A shift happened: away from structuralist approaches that identify economic conditions and class relations as the key explanations for social phenomena (Bourdieu, 2010), towards hermeneutic and semiotic analysis of meaning-making (Geertz, 1973; Barthes, 2013).
In many ways, theories of culture and emotions developed parallel to each other: Against the idea of modernity being characterised by disenchantment and increased rationality (Weber, 2013), ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ were instead acknowledged as working in tandem (Bericat, 2016). Drawing on Durkheim’s legacy (2008), scholars researched how feelings are appealed to, social change is narrated, a collective identity is formed, and how rhetoric, symbols and ritual performances are utilised (Jasper, 1997; Goodwin et al, 2001; Collins, 2004; Alexander, 2006; Polletta, 2009; Sonnevend, 2016). The political backlash of the Trump phenomenon in 2016 clarified that emotions are crucial to any cultural analysis trying to understand how someone like Donald Trump could succeed despite a lack of political experience and a multitude of high-profile scandals (Jenkins, 2018; Hochschild, 2016; Mast and Alexander, 2018). Rather than focusing only on ‘leader-love’, anger and resentment were identified as potent emotions within populism (Joosse and Zelinsky, 2022). Ultimately, both fields are concerned with the cultural imprint on emotional patterns and how they affect public discourse. Dialectic icons showcase how these two sub-fields can draw from each other.
Dialectic icons
This article specifically discusses people-as-icons, as opposed to objects-as-icons (for example, the US flag or Coca-Cola bottles) or events-as-icons1 (for example, the Selma to Montgomery marches or the 9/11 attacks). Icons provide an easily recognisable and reproducible canvas: they condense complex social and historical processes, leaving behind a simplified, and often mythologised, version of events and people who were central to them (Bartmanski, 2012; Sonnevend, 2016). Icons are a type of symbol2 that combines a material surface (such as bodies, faces, voices, dress) with a meaningful discursive depth (moral associations and ascribed meanings) (Alexander et al, 2012). More concretely, icons are a kind of highly mediated totem in the Durkheimian (2008) sense: they become the material expression of group consciousness and collective identity and are loaded with intense emotions (Ghosh, 2011). Durkheim’s theory of totemism can gain new relevance in mass-mediated, socially fragmented and large-scale societies, where symbolic representation and communication fill the gap of decreasing face-to-face interaction. Therefore, we need to study how feelings of collective effervescence and solidarity are evoked in people that may never be spatially adjacent in interaction rituals (Collins, 2004), but instead rely on technologically mediated communication.
To name an established example, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was not just a charismatic leader with a talent for rhetoric. Instead, it has become impossible to think of the 1960s and the whole civil rights movement3 without thinking of the face and booming voice of ‘MLK’ (Hoffman, 2000). However, we tend to think of these icons positively, as they become institutionally commemorated (Jijon, 2018), obscuring that they did not consistently hold the same meaning for all audiences and were often sources of intense controversy. As time passes, contention erodes in the collective memory as icons become culturally and historically ingrained. Time functions as a sandblaster, evening out any kind of irregularities, leaving only a smooth memory of an inspiring image signifying a different era (Hartmann, 2003). New icons are made credible and culturally legible through comparison with historically established ones that are part of a society’s narratives and myths by activating established emotional patterns and guiding audience reactions. Journalists and audiences drew parallels between Colin Kaepernick and the controversial acts of 1968 Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos (Longman, 2018) or boxing legend Muhammad Ali (GQ, 2017), narrating his protest as yet another chapter in a long tradition of Black athlete activism. Kaepernick is iconic because he condensed a complex message (here: a critique of racism and police violence) into a recognisable visual scene (here: kneeling during the anthem) and has since become a symbol of resistance and social justice for a whole protest movement.
Throughout the article, the qualifier ‘dialectic’ is used to describe a particular kind of icon that arises through the interaction of opposing forces who wish to establish a ‘truth’ about the iconic object. Four characteristics of dialectic icons and their sustained emotional leverage are outlined: controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility. While they are presented as analytically distinct and discussed sequentially, they are empirically overlapping and mutually reinforcing. Elements of Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests and the responses to them serve to illustrate the four characteristics and their interplay: the diverging interpretations (controversiality) of Kaepernick protesting on the football field prompted media reports on his unconventional act (newsworthiness), which was openly debated by the news media, as well as by audiences disagreeing with each other on social media (interactivity), fuelling divides over issues like racism, patriotism and police violence that was reinforced by people sharing their opinions online (visibility). The more Kaepernick dominated the news, the more recognisable and controversial he became, solidifying him as a dialectic icon that contributed to audiences clustering in response.
The framework introduced here is based on five years (2016–21) of broadly sampling media about Kaepernick on a multitude of news outlets across the political spectrum (from the New York Times to The Hill and Fox News. Though social media is highlighted as a platform for audience interaction throughout the article, this qualitative study bases its sampling on news sources’ interpretations of social media to demonstrate saturated examples of discussion on Kaepernick rather than selectively sampling individual social media posts. Hence, this article uses the Kaepernick case as an exemplary illustration of how dialectic icons contribute to contentious political discourse and does not provide an in-depth empirical analysis. By spotlighting a case within the US civil sphere and focusing on reports by its media this article is limited by its singular context. Other national contexts with lower levels of partisan division or less (social) media saturation might display different communication mechanisms for contentious political engagement. However, as the internet and its effects are spreading rapidly across the globe, similar processes might be observed outside the US.
Controversiality: icons invite multiple meanings
The common sense in cultural sociology has been that iconic individuals are threatened or even diminished in their status when they are publicly challenged (Alexander, 2010; Olesen, 2015; Sonnevend, 2016), their charisma wanes and their performances ‘fail’ when an audience does not ‘fuse’ with the image they are presented with. However, we have paid much less attention to those individuals who are propelled to visibility through the interplay of positive and negative perceptions and who become totems of both group cohesion and conflict. Even those scholars who have explicitly considered scandal (Adut, 2008), difficult reputations (Fine, 2001) and dissent (Prestholdt, 2019) miss key factors: their case studies focus on historically established examples, which emphasise agents and institutions with particular interests and neglect interactions between audiences with different opinions.
One explanation for this might be that cultural sociologists have largely relied on ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ as mutually exclusive binary opposites instead of acknowledging the sacred itself as two-fold: the sacred-good and the sacred-evil – or ‘impure sacred’ (Kurakin, 2015). Recognising the ‘ambiguity of the sacred’, Durkheim states that ‘the pure and the impure are not two separate genera but two varieties of the same genus that includes all sacred things’ (2008: 306), which equally contribute to the moral order of society. Sacred things can become profane and vice versa, but dialectic icons can be pure and impure, coexisting among different audiences. They arouse both positive and negative emotions, fusing the ‘good’ with the ‘evil’ binary (Smith, 2000). They inhibit the space in-between interpretations (Figure 1), leading to tension between the audiences that ascribe opposing meanings.
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: Dialectic icons in between sacred good and sacred evil
Citation: Emotions and Society 5, 3; 10.1332/263169021X16824558710337
Instead of being harmful, contestation can be a force that explicitly contributes to iconic power by emotionally engaging audiences who charge the icon with conflicting meanings. Dialectic icons can hold several different interpretations at the same time without being threatened by their status as an icon. Supportive audiences are crucial for iconisation, but the righteous anger of detractors helps iconise the individual even in their own camp, with collective anger as a powerful emotional response indicating a perceived threat to a group’s identity or social standing that demands attention (Bar‐Tal et al, 2007). In a tweet reaching over 117,000 likes and 48,000 replies, then-president Trump called to boycott the National Football League (NFL) if players continued to kneel (Trump, 2017)4 and critical audiences renounced fashion-giant Nike (Fortin and Haag, 2018) and even Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (Schwartz, 2020) for aligning themselves with Kaepernick. An icon that evokes strong negative emotions and continuous resistance is therefore not just a nuisance but a ‘sacred evil’ that stands outside the mere mundane. Hence, audiences being confronted with opposing interpretations fight not just over the ‘correct’ view of the icon, but for their version of social order and, ultimately, reality.
Instead of being ‘deflated’ by criticism that punctures the icon’s halo of sacrality, attacks are seen as a validation that the iconic individual is hitting a nerve. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ qualities are not just limited to the icon itself; they spill over to audiences and purify or pollute them as well. If an icon is considered evil by one side, so is the audience that supports it. People do not just ‘love to hate’ a dialectic icon. They despise its admirers just as much and the icon itself more fiercely because it has managed to rally people in its support. Controversy can generate a spiral of iconic empowerment, pitting audiences against each other and inciting more long-lasting emotional responses, as they argue over an icon’s true meaning. This ‘true meaning’, however, is not inherent to the icon but ascribed by society and continuously negotiated until audiences settle on an interpretation that is widely accepted – a process that can take years or even decades and is sometimes reversed.5 Dialectic icons are dually powerful: they don’t just cause mixed feelings in audiences but ‘belong simultaneously to […] two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction – and consequently, [have] two contradictory meanings’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 305).6
While some journalists hailed Kaepernick for bravely using his public platform to speak out against systemic racism (Maxouris and Ahmed, 2018) and stepping into the footsteps of civil rights leaders (Ballesteros, 2017), others construed his protest as disrespectful towards veterans (Fox News, 2017) and perceived him as hypocritical, ungrateful and arrogant (Shapiro, 2018). Yet, antagonistic audiences did not simply dismiss him as inconsequential, but actively distinguished themselves against Kaepernick, feeling united in their resistance. For years, right-wing audiences have bonded over Kaepernick’s ‘collective desecration’ (Duvall, 2020), while the liberal discourse about racial discrimination has referenced him positively. Iconic individuals can become sources of controversy, precisely because they stir emotional responses in audiences. This, of course, is not an entirely new phenomenon. What has changed today is the wide access to the internet and the participatory nature introduced by social media, which not only enables audience members to distribute their opinions but also rewards those who post hostile content with higher rates of engagement (de León and Trilling, 2021).
Newsworthiness: icons are magnets of attention
Dialectic icons attract widespread attention and generate newsworthiness through their controversiality, and are circulated by both traditional news and social media. Our understanding of reality and the construction and dissemination of opinions is a fundamental aspect of how the social world is negotiated under the veil of ‘transparent’ and ‘impartial’ news reports. Journalists act as cultural intermediaries who interpret and contextualise events ‘as plot elements in a story’ (Jacobs, 2000), shaping people’s perception of what should be considered important. ‘Newsworthiness’, therefore, is not an inherent quality but generated through the ascription of significance that turns an occurrence into an event worth attracting society’s attention. Deviant or transgressive behaviour that threatens to violate cultural norms or a society’s status quo (Shoemaker et al, 1991; Adut, 2008) is particularly attractive to news media and can fuel ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 2011), which exacerbate strained social relationships between groups.
Colin Kaepernick criticising police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling during the anthem presented a symbolic breach of a nationally cherished ritual (Turner, 1974; Marvin and Ingle, 1999). Through challenging narratives of US American exceptionalism, and sport as a colour-blind ‘social equalizer’ (Smith, 2014), he switched roles from ‘professional athlete’ to ‘social activist’ and transformed the football stadium into a political arena. While one media narrative identified Kaepernick as an inspirational civil rights activist who integrated politics into the realm of sport at great personal cost (Branch, 2017), the other interpreted him as disrespectful, hypocritical and anti-patriotic for appropriating the football field for a questionable political agenda (Lehman, 2016). News articles like these contributed to the iconisation of Kaepernick using symbolic and emotional language, as well as dramatic visuals, condensing him into a heroic or villainous character.
Even though traditional news media are still crucial for setting a public agenda, social media offer a platform for discourse without the conventional intermediary of established news organisations. US Americans increasingly use at least one kind of social media (Pew Research Center, 2021), which are outpacing print newspapers as sources of news among US audiences of different ages (Shearer, 2021). Further, online discourse itself is increasingly creating newsworthy stories. Journalists use social media platforms as information sources (McGregor and Molyneux, 2020; Heim, 2021), report on online phenomena such as trending hashtags (Brantner et al, 2020) and produce content of their own on apps like TikTok (Vázquez-Herrero et al, 2020). Instead of rendering traditional news media obsolete, they help circulate conflicting opinions and make people aware of opposing interpretations outside their networks. Hence, news and social media work in tandem and are crucial building blocks for emerging icons: plot elements are discussed and reenacted, and icons are solidified by institutional agents and lay audiences alike. News outlets like CNN and The Hill reported on hashtags such as #TakeTheKnee (Stracqualursi, 2017) and #ImWithKap (Wise, 2019) trending on Twitter, The Washington Post and Fox News published articles about upset NFL fans burning their Kaepernick jerseys (Boren, 2016) or Nike apparel (Gaydos, 2018a) on YouTube, and Breitbart broadcasted audience memes poking fun at Kaepernick’s Nike ad (Nash, 2018).
The new dynamic introduced by social media has also made it easier for audiences to express moral outrage, ‘by magnifying its [emotional] triggers, reducing its personal costs and amplifying its personal benefits’ (Crockett, 2017). People who regularly engage in angry exchanges on Twitter, Reddit and others tend to be reinforced in this habit because of the virality of online behaviours (through comments, likes and shares), emotional detachment from conflict, perceived anonymity and the ease with which they can signal their moral superiority over others (Yoo et al, 2018). With even more people emulating, praising and condemning Kaepernick, the controversy kept flaring up and stayed newsworthy even years after the initial protest (Boykoff and Carrington, 2019). Interactivity: icons offer proxy battlegrounds for opposing audiences As our world becomes more pluralised, digitalised and globalised, we face old questions about identity formation, group solidarity and social change – but in new circumstances. While conventional mass media outlets like newspapers and TV still shape who we think about and what we think about them, social media like Twitter and Instagram have enabled more direct interaction between public figures and their audiences. These new communication channels have also given audiences unmatched opportunities to engage with each other and show us that they are ‘connected in ways that mean the reaction of one audience will influence that of the other’ (Malacarne, 2021).
Often reduced to a mere reactive function in studies of actors and performances, audiences have been granted little agency.7 But rather than simply accepting or rejecting a performance, they actively shape public discourse – an oversight that has been increasingly recognised (Braunstein, 2015; McCormick, 2015; Taylor, 2021). Icons are not the sole performers we should be paying attention to, and while audiences have always performed themselves,8 the internet as an easily accessible virtual space is changing how audiences make and convey meaning. They have become ‘co-performers’ (Olesen, 2020) who take a central part in the iconisation process, rendering the classic icon-as-performer and audience-as-receiver models outdated. Rather than conceptualising performance as a dyadic actor(A)-audience(a) relationship (Figure 2), an actor(A)-audience(a1)-audience(a2) triad9 (Figure 3) allows for a theory that centres sustained, reciprocal communication between audiences and actors instead of limiting research to distinct performances.
Actor-audience-audience triad
Citation: Emotions and Society 5, 3; 10.1332/263169021X16824558710337
While Kaepernick-as-an-actor had clear motivations for how he chose to stage his protest,10 audiences do not have to accept or even consider these intentions but can come up with their own interpretations and circulate them. Posting, sharing, liking and commenting on social media are performative political acts by both producers and consumers. Instead of simply ‘calling into the ether’, people who post on social media assume an attentive audience they feel connected to (Van Zoonen et al, 2010; Shifman, 2014). The ‘dialogicality and temporality of [social media] create a unique feeling of direct participation’ for its users, since ‘it offers an experience of ‘real time’ engagement, community, and even collective effervescence’ (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).
Moreover, this shared attention to space and reciprocal awareness enables not just ‘neutral’ observation of the opposition, but the emotional reaction of one audience potentially fortifies another’s resistance: Conservative anger over Colin Kaepernick seemed to confirm their bigotry to liberal audiences, and ultimately substantiated the necessity to ‘force the country away from denialism and toward progress’ (Newkirk, 2017). In turn, antagonistic audiences were resentful about how Kaepernick and his supporters supposedly ‘ruined’ the joy of watching football for them, by ‘threatening to erode the unifying power of [the] game’ (Gaydos, 2018b). Each group reacted to the other’s anger by condemning their interpretations as misguided, which strengthened both sides’ ‘sense of in-group solidarity and personal superiority’ (Malacarne, 2021). Kaepernick became the living representation of ‘the hated opposition’ (Berry, 2013) and ultimately an anchor of the imagined community (Anderson, 2016).
Hence, audiences and their interpretations should not be viewed as isolated entities, but as linked and mutually influenced through moral outrage performed on social media, where people engage in ‘genre wars’ in which ‘parties try to impose their version of reality’ (Smith, 2005: 28). By giving audiences a concrete issue to debate (for example, anthem protests), dialectic icons serve as symbolic proxy battlegrounds in which audiences reinforce boundaries between in- and out-groups. Instead of audiences clashing directly, icons provide an outlet for political and social frustrations. But contrary to conflict theory, they are not simply ‘safety-valve institutions which serve to divert hostility onto substitute objects or which function as channels for cathartic release’ (Coser, 1964: 41) or ‘scapegoats’ (Girard, 1989). Icons simultaneously concentrate and amplify conflict instead of diffusing it. However, they stabilise interaction by becoming the starting point for a shared conversation between antagonistic audiences and prevent hostility from being unpatterned. Hence, dialectic icons create a level of intersubjectivity through visible disagreement, as they provide audiences with information about the social world.
Visibility: icons make conflict tangible as material signifiers
Controversies that are broadcast through traditional news and audiences interacting with each other on social media lead to greater visibility of icons, who ultimately come to signify societal conflict. Dialectic icons become powerful symbols, graspable embodiments of both ‘us’ and ‘them’, and help define the boundaries in between. But instead of creating this rivalry, icons are a symptom of already existing, underlying ideological differences and social tensions. Kaepernick by no means started the conversation about police violence in the US but instead managed to move the existing discourse on racism into the extensively nationalist realm of football11 and forced millions of viewers to confront accusations against their country being built on institutionalised oppression, instead of freedom and equality. Hence, if we assume that an icon creates an ideological clash, this falsely presents as a linear process with a clear starting and endpoint (Figure 4).
Icon leading to ideological clashes and polarisation as a linear process
Citation: Emotions and Society 5, 3; 10.1332/263169021X16824558710337
However, this process is better thought of as circular. First, dispersed audiences intermingle (t1), though the individual members have diverse worldviews (Figure 5). Their diverging interpretations about what is happening result in controversy over the icon’s supposed ‘true’ meaning.
: Dispersed audiences (t1)
Citation: Emotions and Society 5, 3; 10.1332/263169021X16824558710337
Later, this controversy mobilises audiences to split (t2), with the icon as their central symbolic referent (Figure 6). The icon then becomes the visible manifestation of an underlying ideological conflict between audiences. Even though there is a concrete starting point for the controversy itself (here: the kneeling), controversy and iconicity become mutually reinforcing: by feeding back into the audiences’ conflicting interpretations, controversy strengthens the icon’s emotional leverage, while the condensed symbolism of the icon keeps the controversy potent for longer.
: Mobilised audiences (t2)
Citation: Emotions and Society 5, 3; 10.1332/263169021X16824558710337
Both audiences interact with the icon in multiple ways, solidifying it as a meaningful symbol of either good or evil and using it to signify their group membership. Generating heated public debates, controversies push people to take sides and declare their allegiance, thus reinforcing in- and out-group boundaries. One might argue that there are always those who do not care or do not have an opinion. But dialectic icons are persuasive enough that audiences will feel that the ‘absence of opinion is, in fact, an expression of a political position’ (Papacharissi, 2021: 28). They are not just protagonists of social dramas, but make societal fragmentation tangible, giving people a concrete time and space to engage with an otherwise abstract ‘Other’.
Therefore, icons are like tribal totems (Durkheim, 2008): they are the material crystallisation of group consciousness, creating cohesion among its members. However, instead of only being sacred to the in-group, an icon is just as much totemic for members of the out-group, as they define themselves against its ‘evil’. This is where the communicative function of icons becomes apparent: the interpretation of a dialectic icon always also expresses belonging to a specific ideological camp. The icon’s material surface signifies their conflict with each other. These surfaces often become a source of judgement, especially when the iconic person is considered a member of historically oppressed communities and challenges ‘respectability politics’ (Higginbotham, 1993) through their Otherness. Kaepernick’s open defiance against the myth of colour blindness in US sport and beyond has been met with outrage and hostility, targeting his racial identity and personal character (Schmidt et al, 2018).
Audiences solidify icons in their materiality by engaging in a multitude of memetic acts (Olesen, 2017): by adopting and replicating hashtags (posting memes online) that have become symbolic extensions of the icon itself; by creating artwork portraying the icon; by emulating or mocking their style; and by consuming or destroying objects (for example, merchandise) that are associated with them (Dickerson and Hodler, 2020; Eschmann et al, 2021). All these different actions are integral parts of audiences signalling their group membership and awareness of each other outwards, creating a sense of collective solidarity inwards and using ‘the mimetic potentialities of the [icon] as a means of extending the community’ (Gaines, 1999: 96).
To align oneself with Kaepernick by tweeting #ImwithKap means supporting the anthem protests at large, while critiques of the athlete go hand in hand with the rejection of the protest. To wear his jersey becomes a political statement against police violence and racism. To burn it means distancing oneself from both the player and the mindset that the US is built on fundamental social and racial injustice. His protest gesture has seen revivals after the murder of George Floyd by police in the early summer of 2020, with Black Lives Matter protesters fusing kneeling with the iconic Black Power salute of the 1968 Olympics (Hartmann, 2019). Symbolic extensions of Kaepernick are clear and visible signifiers of in- and out-group membership. By flaunting or destroying them, individuals confront opposing views and communicate allegiance to one side or the other.
Conclusion
This article introduced the concept of ‘dialectic icons’, using athlete-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick as an empirical illustration of how public figures can take on crucial roles in exacerbating emotions in contentious political discourse. Four characteristics of dialectic icons were outlined: controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility. These emphasised that dialectic icons are powerful because they are triggers for shared discourse and present audiences with realities that are different from their own. As proxy battlegrounds, dialectic icons give audiences a site through which they can see, touch, feel and engage with politics and each other.
In theorising dialectic icons, I demonstrate the value of cultural sociological analysis for the sociology of emotions and vice-versa: Kaepernick’s controversiality can only be understood by considering both the intense feelings he elicits in audiences and the varied symbolic meanings attached to him. Pairing the inflammatory quality of dialectic icons with the participatory dynamic of social media generates persistent emotional energy among audiences. Dialectic icons present an important, yet sometimes unpredictable, resource for political institutions and social change movements, as they can ignite collective effervescence and feelings of belonging.
Through their contentiousness, dialectic icons can create more widespread awareness of societal issues. However, icons necessarily condense complex information and create symbolic shortcuts that audiences, politicians and even brands can take up to position themselves ideologically. In this simplification lies both the democratic potential and the danger of dialectic icons: by reducing complexity, they might make difficult conversations more accessible for audiences who would not have participated otherwise, but they also run the risk of shifting the focus away from systemic injustices and towards the icon’s character: while Kaepernick drew attention to police violence in the US, some audiences dismissed him as attention-seeking and hypocritical. The double-sided nature of dialectic icons is also suggested by Greta Thunberg, who has both consolidated the youth climate movement and intensified resistance to it, or Meghan Markle, who inspired new discourse about racism in the English civil sphere which has frequently been overshadowed by personal attacks from the British media.
Further research might apply or adapt the concept of dialectic icons to other national contexts, shedding light on how conflict finds symbolic expression outside the US. Zooming in specifically on the perspectives of antagonistic audiences and negative icons would elaborate on the less-studied side of iconicity. Additionally, future projects should explore the role marginalised identities play in the formation of icons, and how characteristics such as race, gender, age or disability make public figures more prone to becoming dialectic icons.
Shifting away from historically established and universally beloved icons, this article has shown that icons are often controversial and deeply divisive. Still, dialectic icons do not stay contentious forever. While iconic figures of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King or athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are celebrated and acclaimed today, they were once at the centre of nationwide, and even global, disputes. Loving or hating Kaepernick has become an indicator of deeply rooted cultural conflicts but it remains to be decided how he and his anthem protest will stand the test of time: possibly, memories of critiques and outright hatred will erode and instead make way for a homogeneous vision of him as a heroic activist who demonstrated what it means to ‘believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything’ (Rovell, 2018).
Notes
Though this distinction is only neat on the theoretical level since iconic people are often embedded in and fortified by events that become iconic themselves, like Martin Luther King’s participation in the Selma to Montgomery march.
Both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement of the 1960s had several such ‘larger-than-life characters’ (Alexander, 2017): Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and so on. These figures have not just entered collective memory and history books through their activism and intellectual work, but have become iconised and are part of the 21st century’s popular culture, with feature movies, documentaries, biographical accounts, new editions of written works, artwork, Halloween costumes and endless kinds of consumable merchandise (finger puppets, fridge magnets, printed shirts and so on).
Even more prominently, pro-Kaepernick audiences decided to boycott the NFL for as long as Kaepernick was being ousted by teams (Gregory, 2017).
Even historically established icons are not immune to newly arising controversies: changing moral orders and social values or recently discovered personal shortcomings may reopen negotiations over their status.
Bakhtin is talking about the meanings of the same word in different languages, but his analysis of hybridity also fits this concept of dialectic icons, as they are used as tools of communication.
This might be due to case selections being biased towards historical examples that rely on archival data.
Through attending demonstrations, creating artwork or in their private lives.
Similarly, this model could be extended by including multiple actors, as these tend to interact with each other as well: just think about how Trump’s comments about Kaepernick fuelled audience sentiments in 2017.
Like kneeling as an explicit sign of humility and respect for veterans: ‘Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, you know, to show respect’ (Brinson, 2016).
Sport in general is associated with meritocratic ideals and football in particular draws heavily from military symbolism (Trujillo, 1995).
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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