[lbo-talk] Re: The Black Commentator on Cosby

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Mon Jul 5 15:03:00 PDT 2004


Since role model culture and structural analysis do not peacefully coexist (indeed, you might say role model culture pushes the analytical tendency into the shadows) I wonder how much of its dominance can be attributed to propaganda? .d.

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All of it? The dominance of character over structure is the basis of propaganda.

Propaganda can't exist as propaganda without its literary form where character and moral conflict dominate the emotive registers. And it is the psyche, the mythological identification via the parallelism between audience moral conflict and the character's moral conflicts that is manipulated by propaganda as well as drama. The character embodies the conflicts and struggles with the world as performance. From Cosby to the latest Rap stars, but in virtually all players, audiences, and media. The only structural components are those within the dramatic conflicts of life or death, win or lose, good or evil, men or women, black or white, Democrat v Repugnant, Kerry v Bush, Capitalism v Nothingness, America v the World... Even the one-two time signature and its direct sums in rap... The whole of mass culture and mass media are composed of these primordial binaries, where visual effects add the missing interest figuration. But even these visual effects are reduced to their primary structural form, a patch work collage in apparent random sequences that mark one two, one to one time.

Structural analysis in literary form is seen by most audiences as abstraction (read boring) and often begins by questioning the nature of drama, character, plot, conflict, narrative, and manipulates these as provisional interrogations on dramatic form itself. Such questions are then turned into metaphors and critiques on society's structural armatures.

CG



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