The Shaping of Popular Consent: A Comparative Study of the Sovie ...

Methodology and the Importance of the Visual Arts

To avoid confusion or ambiguity I turn now to explain the definitions of two key aspects of the terminology used in the book, and to comment on the approach towards the visual arts adopted here. Firstly, I make continual reference to the “establishments” of the United States and the Soviet Union. I use this term deliberately because it lends itself to the comparative analysis attempted here in a manner that terms such as “regime”, “government” and/or “State” would not. The “State” may incorporate the elite strata in the Soviet Union, but would fail to do so when applied to the United States because it does not encompass the elite strata in the private sector. Indeed, adopting such terminology would from the outset embed the same binary structure that the book is attempting to question. Power was not concentrated solely in the hands of legislators or public office holders. By the term establishment, I am referring to what Neil Renwick has called “a dominant political-legal-economic ‘power elite’”.⁴³ The establishment is thus the privileged stratum of society that makes the laws, divides the wealth and attempts to create the social norms and the social moral code.

Furthermore, I also make continuous reference to “cultural producers”. This term should be understood to refer to a privileged group of creative artists and entrepreneurs who occupied the “mainstream” space uniquely responsible for the creation, production and distribution of cultural (in our case visual) stimuli designed to influence, shape and re-shape popular opinion. There were two kinds of cultural producer, the kind that overtly and knowingly promoted values and virtues on behalf of the establishment (to which they, at varying levels, belonged)⁴⁴ and the kind that championed the same values and virtues believing that they came not from above (from the establishment) but, rather, were the natural/spontaneous/proper rights and wrongs, dos and don’ts, which they had a duty to help make clear and obvious to all.⁴⁵ That is not to say that this kind of cultural producer was not part of the establishment. Through the privileges of wealth and influence they most certainly were. In either case, it was the cultural producer’s primary function to give language, iconography and emotional resonance to the establishment’s myths, social norms and social moral code. The political and ideological savoir faire of cultural producers was much lauded within the establishment.