The Double Matrix of Popular Culture

The book project that I am working on now examines the relationship between popular culture and social inequality. When I think about social inequality, I think in terms laid out by Patricia Hill Collins, whose book Black Feminist Thought emphasizes the intersections between race, class and gender, as well as many other dimensions of identity. She calls this the 'matrix of domination and oppression' and in my work the key variables are race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability.

When I think about popular culture, it seems the key sociological issue right now is the enormous amount of popular culture that we have (so many movies, books, CDs, websites, magazines, TV networks and shows), all produced by a tiny handful of massive corporations. We tend to assume that these corporations are competing, but a close analysis shows that they have far too many contractual relationships to truly be invested in competition (for instance, network studios frequently sell their shows out to other networks, which is how Scrubs ended up first on NBC, even though it was always produced by ABC studios, and how it eventually was reclaimed by ABC). I call this the matrix of cultural production.

I am interested in the connections between these two matrices: the matrix of domination and the matrix of cultural production. I call this the double matrix of popular culture.

We address social inequality in many ways--through educational reforms, legal changes, economic policies and political movements. I argue that we need to also address social inequality by bringing some attention to our popular culture. The first issue is representation, because popular culture in its ubiquity is often our primary source of information about these issues and about various identity groups. Our beliefs about other people are formed through thousands of tiny interactions and in many cases these interactions happen virtually through the consumption of popular culture. If we're trying to change the kinds of representations that we see in popular culture--fewer stereotypes, more robust ideas about sexuality, less insulting representations of class identity, richer portrayals of the lives of the disabaled--we have to think about organization of the cultural industries. The same old companies are not going to hasten to produce new cultural representations. That doesn't mean they won't do it all; indeed, they already have. But they have actually lagged behind reforms in other areas.

How do we address the problems created by cultural oligopoly? Through our cultural policies. We have important political policies that shape the character, size and content of the cultural industries. The most important of these policies right now lay with the Federal Communications Commission. My Monday posts are going to try to explore these issues in greater depth over the next year or so.

Suggested Reading:

Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry"
Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent
McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Watch this documentary online! Douglas Rushkof's Merchants of Cool (Frontline Special)