Who are the icons of the 21st century?

Will this century produce a Guevara?

A Malcolm X or Dr. King? A Garvey? A Stalin, Mao, Sankara or Fanon?

Or what about the less ‘revolutionary’ politicians? Can we imagine the blond boys of Durham University, class of 2050, worshipping David Cameron and Sajid Javid shrines in the way they adore the Iron Lady?

Mandela, Gandhi and Mother Theresa: they’re name-dropped by Western liberals the world over, who imagine them to represent some nebulous Cult of Niceness. Can we imagine any such heroes being canonised on this side of 2000? Will anyone be joining the pantheon of saints of popular imagination? Malala Yousafzai? Remember when she was in the news for a bit!?

Equally, when we want to call something evil, we currently liken it to ‘Hitler’. In 50 years time, are the ultimate insults going to be that someone is a Kim Jong-Un or an Osama Bin Laden? Of course not. And it’s not just because we disagree with the Pentagon’s view of who the baddies are. We also won’t be calling people Erdoganian, Trumpesque or Merkelian. It just wouldn’t have the weight.

Cecil Rhodes and Simon Bolivar have had countries named after them. Ho Chi Minh and Lenin had cities. Who on earth could you even name a cul-de-sac after now, without making everyone feel deeply sad?

In 2060, will Beyonce be as talked about as Michael Jackson is now? Who’s our Tupac and Biggie? If Bob Marley is forgotten, will we have anyone to make posters out of? Migos? Rhianna? The Biebs?

Even the idea of being an icon is a joke. We play the fun game of pretending Corbyn is an icon, like in this appalling photoshop, clearly done by toddler or dog

… or when DJ Khaled’s wants to say something’s good.

There are no icons in the 21st Century, only celebrities.

And what celebrities mean is entirely subjective. While we are forced to draw on elements of truth about their lives/opinions, we have licence to mould their meaning into what we want it to be. They consent to this because it builds their support. Like the Queen during the Mau-Mau Rebellion (or any atrocity), they keep tactically quiet, so they never alienate any potential customer.

This is what separates icons from celebrities. Headteachers who give emotional assemblies about Mandela might completely mangle and misrepresent what Madiba believed (and they rarely fail to do so) — but they at least have to accept that Mandela means something to do with antiacism, and they can’t untangle him from that.

Whereas Beyonce is there for the taking. She is ours. You could choose to deliver an assembly on how she’s either an ‘inspirational independent women’ or a ‘black icon’, or an ‘ingenious businesswoman’ or a ‘fun pop star’ and there’s nothing in her public image that prevents you from completely ignoring the other three perspectives. Walking into Beyonce and Jay-Z’s London gigs, I was surprised how many posh blonde families have come up from Surrey for the day out. Are they here for the black feminism, or the Fanonian insight? Nah, they’re here to see their Beyonce — some kind of fun, light entertainer, I imagine - like a sassy Graham Norton (I don’t know, I have done no research). Just as we know that Lady Gaga isn’t gay, and she means a lot to plenty of straight people, but we can decide that, to us, she is our gay icon.

Your uncle’s favourite pearl of wisdom — that “the world has shrunk” — is a statement about ideology as well as technology. There is now no space for outsider perspectives anywhere. This is probably because of 2 developments.

Firstly, many people in the 20th century, from Thatcher to Kenyatta, promised to lead the way to a better world. Their obvious failures created disillusion and a reluctance to follow subsequent pretenders, and led us to the postmodern condition of ‘skepticism towards any grand narratives’.

At the same time, capitalism continued to expand into every corner of life, swallowing up and subsuming everything it came across. Environmentalism’s been monetised, anti-consumerism’s been monetised, wokeness has been monetised. Dissent in general has been monetised, by huge media machines that make millions from indulging our dissatisfaction: making us click on the things they know we hate — whether its multiculturalism, corporations, capitalism or racism.

And Beyonce? Like a sub-editor at the Mail or the Guardian, she uses a bit of ‘politics’ here and there to keep us entertained. She know it excites us to hear arguments being made. Dissent is used by the entertainment matrix.

Neoliberalism was once acknowledged as one of several ideologies, with its own iconic defenders and advocates (Thatcher, Reagan). It’s now become the ubiquitous backdrop that is expected, and found, in every corner of life. It has outgrown all the dissenting ideologies.

Maybe is why there are no icons any more. Because there’s no space for an alternative system, an alternative answer.

This also means that, without an alternative, those who advocate for the status quo don’t have much to contrast themselves against. And therefore they would struggle to become truly totemic. What use is a Thatcher figure when there are no unions to fight against?

Of course Cameron seems wet compared to Thatcher, because who was he up against? No one. Everyone in his era agreed with him. It was just a question of exactly how racist to be to migrants or how quickly to starve the poor. He cannot be viewed, even by his ‘fans’, as a brave vanguard leader or crucial actor in geopolitics. He is a boring managerial clone which blends into the background.

How did we arrive at such homogeneity? Such a lack of alternatives, and therefore icons?

Well, if you excuse some massive generalisations:

Prior to postmodernity, people were often excluded/defined by of things they were born with — race, sex, class, sexuality, family profession. This created divisions between which there could be struggles — the emancipation of the working class, black people, or women, and the reactionary struggles to assert the supremacy of the state and capital (Thatcher, Reagan, etc.). Fertile ground for heroes and icons, right?

Under the postmodern mode of capitalism, this dividing people up by their god-given attributes wouldn’t work, because it requires us to consciously believe in essentialism, ordained hierarchies — basically, in the sort of grand narratives no one believes in anymore.

‘Being racist’ has not been rejected because it is wrong exactly; it’s just embarrassingly old-fashioned to believe in anything like that any more.

Instead of excluding bodies (Foucault), we now manage opinion (Chomsky, Fisher, Deleuze). Technology has developed to assist this. Everyone has the vote now, so they need to all be steered towards the same page, or chaos/change would ensue. Hard power to soft power. From excluding people to including them, provided they comply.

Look at who we consider outside the normal range of opinion. It’s embarrassing who we think of as ‘extremists’: mad Corbyn and the ‘loony left’; stupid Trump and his Deplorables. Le Pen, Orban, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez. These are on the very fringes of the politics which are discussed.

And, at the most extreme, all they want to do is slightly accentuate the world’s white-supremacist border policies or slightly increase the levels of welfarism (which buys neoliberalism’s consent). They are all mainstream career politicians from major parties.

It feels like dissent has stopped, change has stopped, history has stopped.

Under neoliberalism, the system promises us all so little, that our consent is unbearably fragile. One result of this, as Fisher/Badiou discuss, is consent is built on the fact we’re not as awful as ‘some other place’.

Another result is that we do not really enjoy entertaining the possibility of change. It is much more psychologically comforting to think that it just has to be this way: there is no alternative. Other avenues were tried (in the famously tumultuous 20th century). All ended in disaster.

This reluctance to believe things could be different means we don’t want a Garvey, a Guevara, a Sankara. Because there’s no hope of moving towards alternative worlds.