The thing is, I wonder whether propaganda creates this frame or merely exploits a deeply embedded aspect of human thought. .d.
--------------
I think it's both. I have a theory about all this, but it's long winded (mostly anthro and phil). Part of the theory looks at propaganda, advertizing and mass media in general as art forms---making no asethetic distinction between good, bad, and ugly, commerical or non-commerical. However, there are structural categories that match the socio-economic, socio-cultural gestalt of the intended audiences, and equally bare the same stamp from the producers---that is reflect the social relationship between audience and production. So one way to look at the question is to consider the relationship between art and psyche in society. I like psyche better than thought because it is a quasi-mythological term and can embrace any experience.
Modern propaganda is little more than a specialized and technological refinement, amplified many times in impact and sophistication. It has a long history reaching back to at least ancient Egypt when the primary art forms were almost all productions of the state, and celebrated the state social order in cosmological terms. This views makes the cartouche of the pharoah some thing like a `brand' or `logo' for god and social order. So art/propaganda is made and put to use to serve, authenticate, and ennoble the prevailing social strata, relations, and power systems, just as it has served a similar social purpose in most societies.
In this view then arts/propaganda are part of the totality of the cultural system that obviously includes language, images, media, and their modes of production and the social relations that attach to all of these. This provides a `material' level of analysis that escapes the less concretely understood modes of `thought' or `mind'. It has to be understood of course that thought (or psyche) and its productions in the world of symbolic forms are obviously not identical---but the latter forms are all we have direct access to. We can not know each other's thoughts, except through symbolic media---and this fact alone puts the arts as symbolic form at the center of the social process. This view and its critiques also has the advantage of escaping `individuals' as such so that we can then focus on socially constructed systems and concepts.
In this mode of critique then the idea of narcissism and role models is perfectly valid as an acculturation process. It is part of how people form themselves as `self', constitute their psyche through socialization and the arts. This is one of the uses of art. The propagandistic role of the arts in socialization then appears as authentication and certification of psyche as belonging to particular strata, giving to it a `place' in the social order.
This socialization and acculturation process is certainly not restricted to the petite bourgeoisie or any other class. However the content, the emotive registers and their figurations, their `style' or composition so to speak is class identified and determined as attaching to particular tiers in the social hierarchy. It is part of how we become a member of a `class'---in addition to the material determinants of family and social environment. People escape their material conditions and some of its concrete determinants through their aesthetic experiences and relations with different media---and by making art or media for themselves. For example white teenage can `become' `black' through arts, just as `black' teenagers can `become' `white middle class' through different arts. If you watch enough Leave It to Beaver, pretty soon your mother starts to look like June what's her name, or you start comparing her to said icon. On the other hand if you start listening to blues you start wondering if your mother or father has a drinking problem. This was perhaps (didn't read it) part of Cosby's rant.
So I don't really want to deny cultural propaganda or the arts their due in society and social development. I would never have gotten into higher education without art. On the other hand, styling myself as a member of the well educated elite doesn't make it so. I can suck up all the brie, chardonnay, and Italian renaissance art I want and still be stuck fixing wheelchairs for a living. It is very likely that this disjunction between education, sensibility and personal material conditions is what brought me into a critique of the system. How can you do most things right, begin in the middle class, and still end up at the bottom? Well, bad attitude was definitely part of it---but not the whole of it.
So, in some sense Cosby might be right if you consider my case as an example of what happens when you have a bad attitude. However, the difference is that I didn't pay with my life, just my pocket book---thanks to the inital privilege of being middle class, educated, and white.
Nevertheless, a structural view, yeilds a completely different picture. The particulars of the visual arts that I liked and did reasonably well, were an obsolete handcraft technology long before I started out. The traditional visual arts were made even more so through the development of a whole series of visual media technologies, most of which I had no interest in learning.
For example the Capitalist endgame for the particular sort of geometric abstraction I did, was of all things, the logo, branding identification and related symbols of power all historically related to signs, signatures, stamps, seals, emblems, going back to the Pharaohic cartouche. In other words visual propaganda---the accoutrements of power.
These sorts of abstract design details and decor (visual propaganda) dotted about create that high tech look and feel in all sorts of things from architecture to product design and help sustain the belief that Capital is up to something new, much more fancy and impressive than just the same old sleazy swindling crap it always was.
For instance, the Enron tilted `E' in front of their Houston HQ is a design that borrows heavily from the geometric scupltural abstractions of the 50-60s, the icongraphy of `modernity' and symbolic of `advanced' post-industrial capital, new world order, etc. The visual critique would be to corrode, etch, and destory sections of its high polished bronze surface with a combination of acids and cutting torches. To complete the image, then fill in the resulting cavities and hollows with industrial junk and heavy asphaltum that dribbles down the sides. The defaced logo of Energy dredged up from the bottom of some toxic waste disposal pond---tech noire from the terminal future.
But, for all its faults bad attitude does have some giant advantages. It links up with a long tradition of the anti-bourgeois critique, a the privilage space of the avant guard (again art as propaganda, as critique). For example, almost all my roles models were from jazz and art so there were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Theolonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Franz Klein, de Kooning, Stella, Serra... Among the Europeans, well Caravaggio was just about as bad as they get. But then there is the Reign of Terror and David, Goya and the Spanish revolt, and then there was Dostoyvesky, Nietzsche, Marx, Flaubert and Zola---Gide, Mann, Camus, Sartre, and Genet, All of them created profound critiques of the bourgeois order and the ruling elite.
Many or most of them, however enjoyed some privilage---and almost all of them have been subsumed, co-opted into a vast cultural support system for the current privailing order. They have become the `elite establishment' so to speak. What can I say. They were bad in their day...
CG