The Artist’s Self-Interest: On Capitalist Fiction
Dan Sinykin | Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature | Columbia University Press | October 2023 | 328 Pages
Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction feels like a major contribution: to our understanding of contemporary literature and literary publishing as an industry, definitely; to literary criticism as a whole, probably; and maybe to our conception of how culture, in general, is made. It is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and clear-sighted cultural materialist analysis of the sort that feels almost verboten within the formal and professional fields of artistic production.¹ To suggest that something so crass as conglomerate logic—i.e., the whims of twelve perverts in a room looking to round out their defense contracting corporation with synergistic asterisks like Random House²—could predetermine the majority of all literature the reading public receives, feels impolitic; it offends our sensibilities about the indomitability of genius, the unbounded potential of imagination, or your friend whose book just came out. Tricky waters indeed.
But this should offend our collective spirit, and we should endeavor to understand that offense as closely, and cleanly, as possible. Because of course when I mention the twelve perverts I am speaking less of any specific individuals than the underlying material forces they follow and embody, and which Sinykin expertly demonstrates to have a massive effect on what gets published and what we (“we”) are invited to read in the US.
Consider the mass-market paperback and its effects on popular reading using Sinykin’s materialist lens. Post-WWII, returning soldiers took advantage of the GI Bill and flooded universities, and universities, in turn, expanded to accomodate those enrollments, in the process extending more Americans access to a post-secondary education. This surge of new readers coincided not only with historic post-war economic growth, but also the beginning of historically low economic inequality. The readers were ready, the market was ready, and the classics were in the public domain. These historical confluences contributed to a new way of reading, in a form that would subsequently have a massive effect on who read and what literature was available: small, pocket-sized, cheaply printed paperbacks.
These impulses were economic, but also artistic, also democratic. One of Sinykin’s somewhat startling revelations is how difficult it actually was in this period to get books if you didn’t live on the East Coast, bookstores being far apart and fairly rare in the first place. But the mass-market paperback altered The Book’s status from specialty item to ubiquitous product. It put Faulkner in a racy cover, right next to crime-pulp popstars like Mickey Spillane, and put them together, spread them everywhere: “newsstands and in drugstores, variety stores, tobacconists, railroad stations, and other locations visited by thousands of people who might never have entered a bookstore.” [Beth Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” The History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2009), 43; citation Sinykin’s.]
Perhaps most instructively, Sinykin shows in Big Fiction that these conditions of aesthetic experience—laureates and cashgrabs sharing shelves pleasantly all across the nation—lasted exactly as long as the material conditions necessary to support them:
In the 1970s the boom [economy] bled into a downturn, and the book business slowed. Wages stagnated and inflation grew, hollowing out the middle class. Conglomeration intervened, creating a class of mega-bestsellers…By 1980, market segmentation and sales prioritization had become the norm, bestseller lists populated by a small group of brand-name authors.
Hearing this, you might ask yourself, “why should I care about The Bestseller List, and why should I assume that The List has anything to do with literature, or, indeed, me; every time I look at The List I experience a vertigo, a sense of total disassociation from the great mass of culture that I guess I also swim in and find my spirit finely coated in its residue of despair.” But consider that even the US’ staunchest artistic hermits have long been forced to dance—perhaps gracefully, perhaps not—to the tune set by the publishing industry and the market. Here I am speaking of my late father, Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy happens to be one of Sinykin’s case studies, and mine. If you ask me, his body of work can be delineated into two sections: one half easily in contention for the greatest (whatever, “greatest”) American literature, and the other a bunch of hack shit. Sinykin calls these periods pre- and post-conglomerate, but come on, All the Pretty Horses is dogshit. You know it. The Crossing is pretty good, a partial return, and then Cities of the Plain is so embarassing it made me reconsider my literary polestar. And even though that last part isn’t true, it would be justified when also considering The Road (plot-throttled), the two new ones (SFI fanfic), and the fact that I still can’t bring myself to read No Country.
McCarthy’s aesthetic change took place precisely on the spine broken by conglomeration. His longtime editor and champion, Albert Erskine—who had kept him published despite never selling more than 2500 copies of a book, who had secured him nearly every big grant available—retired. Five years later, McCarthy turned in All the Pretty Horses, presumably aided by his lifetime lack of recognition and all the money running out from his grants. As Sinykin informs us:
Between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy moved imprints, gained a new editor, and hired a formidable agent. Random House fired a president who defended boutique novelists and hired one who demanded each book support itself. And McCarthy’s style changed. He adopted genre techniques that would persist in his work until the present... Conglomeration made McCarthy middlebrow.
Fucking kill me.
No, OK, excuse my excess. But no matter how you feel about the heartbreaking reduction of one of our (sure, “our”) greatest artists into sap and blandness and “real page-turner”-dom, Sinykin’s point stands tall: material realities eventually affect all the literary substances we typically consider to be solely artistic: language, style, tone, mimesis and its foci, mythos or narrative and their animating ideologies… the whole dang shebang. And our era’s predominant mode of organizing these material forces has been conglomeration.
It follows that with sustained influence, conglomeration’s ordering forces would come to develop their own aesthetic, and indeed this is the principal argument of Big Fiction:
Like an ant farm or a beehive or consciousness itself—or a Hollywood film—conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism. This book charts the emergent properties of conglomerate era fiction.
Sinykin’s argument is that the conglomerate literary aesthetic is essentially the average of the desires of each actor involved in the sale of a book:
The published [conglomerate] author also channels the norms of a cultural system, its sense of literary value. She forges a commodity that will appear attractive to scouts, agents, editors, marketers, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, critics, and readers.
I am sympathetic to this argument, and I read it not as a suggestion that art is or must be inherently subordinated to financial concerns, but that it is only allowed its individuality within the ever-tighter confines of marketability. This subordination to market by necessity implies a reliance on established narratives, established techniques, established modes of expression. When every editorial choice doubles as a business decision, these decisions are made according to what will sell, and what can be proven to sell is only what has sold before.
Thus the vague critical consensus on aesthetic homogeneity, from many different, often contradictory, ideological currents. On the American Vandal podcast, Sheri-Marie Harrison (Assosciate Professor at the University of Missourri, focused on African Diaspora literatures, Modern and Contemporary literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies in English) described her project of consistently reading literary prize lists: “there’s some sameness that is happening, especially inside of contemporary books written by authors of color in response to the political moment, in response to needing content to show that you have diverse publishing lists.” Elsewhere, the leftish substack writer John Ganz provides his own analysis, as well as a round-up of various pieces (NYT, Christian Lorentzen, more) all trying to needle the same feeling that culture is “boring,” “stagnant,” “repetitive,” etc. There are, of course, criticisms from the right as well, from the protofascists’ “cathedral”—a theory in which Curtis Yarvin fumbles the notion of a superstructure to explain élites’ aesthetic flaccidity—and the more congressional concept of “cultural marxism,” which seems to be some form of trans-panic combined with a laughable overestimation of humanities professors’ power. All of these analyses are insufficiently material, which is precisely why Big Fiction is so valuable.
The idea that this cultural moment is specific to an era of progressivism, neoliberalism, or late capitalism (a term which always feels a little baselessly optimistic), does not seem accurate. Regular capitalism describes the moment pretty well, if you assume that publishing, as a culturally insulated and comparatively low-income industry, was just a slow adopter of capitalism’s gold-standard form of organization: the monopoly.
Vlad Lenin seemed to clock the phenomenon pretty clearly in 1916: “The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism.” That’s his first sentence.³
He goes on to posit that any unconcentrated enterprise attempting to keep pace with the vastly larger ones would then, by necessity, produce so many surplus goods that they could only stay alive by somehow massively increasing demand. With the surplus goods, but without the increase in demand, all the enterprises would go down together. This pairs well with Sinykin’s history of the seventies, when the beginnings of conglomeration coincided with an economic slowdown, a massive increase in book sales between 1960-73, stagnation until ’79, and the beginnings of decline in 1980. In response, the publishers “implemented new management techniques… seen as key to generating new revenue and enhancing the bottom line.”
Read “generating new revenue” as purposefully expanding demand, and consider that this took place during the same period that centralized book distributors developed, which in turn allowed for the development of chain bookstores, and by that point the trade publishers were almost entirely owned by conglomerates demanding growth no matter the economic conditions. This is when publishers realized “they could reach much larger audiences… focusing on a small number of titles distributed widely for strong returns on investment” and that “the New York Times bestseller list was [itself] great marketing.” Something to consider the next time you see The List and all that’s not on it and feel that residue of familiar despair.
If we take Lenin’s assessment to be accurate, the scale of enterprise achieved through conglomeration necessitates demand to be fully slammed at all times. There is no room for low-demand commodities, a particularly troubling arrangement for, say, literature, or any art that aspires to be more than ornament or addictive entertainment. Lenin describes the coalescence of competition into monopoly and the resultant socialization of production (a “dispersed authorship” of goods, if you like). You’ll have to read it a little metaphorically because books and iron ore are actually not that similar, except as commodities, but:
This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market. Concentration has reached the point at which it is possible to make an approximate estimate of all sources of raw materials (for example, the iron ore deposits) of a country… Not only are such estimates made, but… an approximate estimate of the capacity of markets is also made… skilled labour is monopolised, the best engineers are engaged… [it] leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production.
My point in citing Lenin is not to convince you (or myself (I think)) into bolshevik party politics, but rather to suggest that conglomerate fiction is not a new phenomenon or accidental outcome; it is a historically well-observed development into capitalist maturity, now taken place within the publishing industry. Lenin greets this socialized production with a positive tone—in part because he, too, was confident that it was a sign of decrepit capitalism, but also—because rationalizing the process of iron production so as to exactly replicate products as quickly, efficiently, and therefore identically as possible, is pretty good. But I have to say that rationalizing art to create it as quickly, efficiently, and identically as possible is actually pretty bad.
Maybe this aesthetic category doesn’t really need to be named “conglomerate fiction” at all; maybe we can just call it capitalist fiction. The “best engineers” or, in Sinykin’s words, the “privileged vessels for conglomerate authorship,” have internalized agents’, editors’, and marketers’ notions of what the market demands, and deliver up literary efforts that match these expectations. Then, those secondary actors select what will create, satisfy, and not exceed demand: one eminent Black writer at a time, or, per Big Fiction, literary-genre hybrids, like Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One. Or, of course All the Pretty Horses, “containing at once the popular genre of the Western and McCarthy’s Faulknerian style, however lightened.”
These conditions will necessarily seek to satisfy—and in so doing, partially reproduce—the most normative values of readers. If you could create the Most Normal Novel—a novel so normal it was weird, how normal it was, but not in an interesting way—you would have the ideal asset. I do think there are some incredibly successful recent novels that feel like this. I also think that I will avoid naming them. And I also promise to end my marxist harping after one final characterization, which is that all capital longs to replicate capital’s most perfect assets: the fundamentally unproductive ones, the ones that produce nothing but the grand landlords’ thumbsitting fortunes or the frictionless financial instruments so divorced from any real commodity, all unsexily laden as those commodities are with labor that must be paid, infused with time that must be spent, made from real resources like, in the case of art, all the complexities of being that refuse the forced contortions of social pseudoscientists and the bright blinking duplo-block thoughts of the marketing campaign. Difference is an unnecessary risk.⁴
Sinykin shows this most convincingly through the logic of comps—comparative titles—which have become a necessary component for agents and editors in the process of acquiring and selling books: each novel must be triangulated between three (or more) existing novels that have already sold well. The dampening effect on originality is predictable.
Thus far, the primary—or rather, largest, by print volume and market visibility—attempts to resist these effects have been nonprofit publishers, small presses that have professionalized into formal nonprofit structures. Sinykin’s overview of these publishers begins with Scott Walker, a somewhat maniacal semi-hero, who “publish[ed]… from a letterpress in a shed in his backyard under the colophon of Graywolf Press.” This section of Big Fiction is replete with people whose dedication to books and literature have set the stage for the saving graces of the small, independent, or otherwise nonconglomerate publishers that we have. Many of which fall (or adapt) to snares familiar to utopian projects of all kinds: professionalization, and eventual institutionalization, in response to market pressure.
Sinykin describes this inevitable—if only partial—co-optation of the presses by their sources of funding, primarily through the rise of multicultural literature initiatives:
The timing was such that literary nonprofits without explicit commitments to ethnic literature, such as Coffee House and Graywolf, found themselves expanding their fiction lists because ethnic literature was becoming increasingly marketable as well as increasingly desirable for government bureacracies and the donor class to support. At a long-range planning meeting in 1991, Graywolf staff observed that fiction sales were down in general, but up for ethnic literature. One of the “goals and priorities” that year was to “aggressively broaden the range of potential funders to Graywolf, by making special efforts on behalf of books that treat social and educational issues.”
For what it’s worth, these presses only found themselves in a position to capitalize on a cultural trend because of their pre-existing commitments to exemplary literature. They—or specifically Coffee House Press—found and recognized underpublished talent like Karen Tei Yamashita and Frank Chin. But most of their authors were, and had been, white. “This was how an accident became a mission,” Sinykin writes: not as a bold and overdue ideological intiative, but as a fiscal practicality.
That strategy came with strings attached: a very specific brand of multiculturalism that partially explains a career arc like Yamashita’s. Her “first two novels, Arc and Brazil-Maru, are set in Brazil with Japanese protagonists.” Sinykin cites Kandice Chuh’s essay “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres”: “The centrality of Brazil to Yamashita’s creative work immediately marks its eccentricity to the usual regimes of US American literature.” But as Coffee House sought increased funding, the press “wrote to one of its funders, ‘we have been encouraging Ms. Yamashita to take up the subject of Asian/Black relations in Los Angeles.’” Yamashita delivered Tropic of Orange, a satire of liberal multiculturalism, where the main character notes that she is “so distant from the Asian female stereotype—it was questionable if she even had an identity.” As Sinykin has it, the novel “deflates triumphalism about the political good of cultural protest,” and “indicts Coffee House's embrace of liberal multiculturalism at the same time that [it] knowingly acknowledges [it] will advance that cause.”
In this nonprofit arrangment, writers of color are often expected to perform narratives and analyses of race, but only certain versions of them. This is because nonprofits operate at the behest of those individuals and their philanthropic extensions who not only have enough capital to significantly donate, but who also have an interest in patronizing culture. I’m sure there are many passionate and well-intentioned individual donors, but the most powerful private donors come from a very small subsection of the American upper classes, with political compasses that predictably flow from their stations. On top of matching, to some degree, the patron’s predilections, the art must also consistently justify itself as socially useful, especially during periods of widening inequality, and especially when the same donation might go towards someone’s name on a hospital wing.
Sinykin also mentions an essay—written by Ralph Ellison and published by Graywolf—praising the National Endowment for the Arts, which in 1985 became Graywolf’s primary source of support. Sinykin says the essay “argues that art does the crucial work of lubricating the otherwise dangerous friction generated by the differences internal to American society.” In Ellison’s words: “By projecting free-wheeling definitions of the diversity and complexity of American experience it allows for a more or less peaceful adjustment between the claims of “inferiors” or “superiors”—a function of inestimable value to a society based, as is ours, upon the abstract ideal of social equality.” As Sinykin diplomatically frames it, Ellison is “celebrat[ing] art for its ability to resolve real inequality with symbolic projections.” I will be more blunt: Ellison’s argument is a direct bid for literature to serve as a vehicle for appeasing mystifications, so that those with the greatest disadvantages feel like their plight is being addressed and cease to feel the need for concrete struggle. It is craven. It does not simply accept but brazenly and revoltingly courts culture’s superstructural function and I feel shame simply reading it when I think of how much I valued the complexity of Invisible Man, of how unqualifiedly I, as a younger person, admired the nonprofit alternatives.⁵
•
The central arguments of Big Fiction are not only accurate, but the forces that drive them are intensifying. This is sure to continue, perhaps until a period of economic collapse and a subsequent social democratic reset, where the slow cycle of capital in crisis will play out again. In the meantime, small presses will continue to chart alternatives to capitalist fiction because the only goal of the small press is to make literature, period. That is the whole fucking point. I actually do not know why anyone would bother with any of this shit without the linguistic heat and madness of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat Books, 1992) or the color tones of Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2010) or the weirdness—the reality—leaking in from Jackie Ess’ Darryl (Clash Books, 2021), and the countless other small press novels from the “conglomerate era” for which there is no economic explanation, no logic of utility, no justification at all in the so-called rationality of capital, and so only appeared thanks to their publishers, each of which must relentlessly insist on art’s value just to ensure that some of humanity’s most redemptive elements continue to exist.
I want to fucking scream. I feel like I have shaken baby syndrome.
Moving on.
Even while I acknowledge the importance of small presses, I feel that any hope for these efforts of insistence and resistance to turn the greater tide of the culture or the market also feels misguided. If we believe that capitalist literature poses problems, we need to also recognize that these problems are material, and thus require material solutions.
Sinykin argues that “decline is its own fiction, a useful one for literature. Perpetual crisis props up nonprofit publishers… Tales of a lost golden age are seductive—and dangerous.” These points are well-taken, but their reasoning feels incomplete. Sinykin’s hesitation is understandable. He has no desire to create nostalgia for the Harvard boys’ club publishing models that excluded so many for so long, and rightly champions the extension of access—to women, and, much more modestly, to anyone nonwhite—that developed in the wake of its destruction. But it seems simple to approach this issue dialectically, to want that access radically extended and deepened, while also recognizing that the material conditions that were the soil for certain works no longer seem to exist.
I am thinking again of Blood Meridian. I have no pretensions of objectivity here; it is the most important novel to me, for many reasons, many of which are personal. Nothing else has ever adequately reflected the intensity of the world to me, as a reader. At one point Sinykin describes McCarthy’s “aimless plots,” which makes sense as a phrase only if you consider plot to be a specific set of narrative conceits that create reader-pleasing experiences—suspense the most notable—regardless of whether these effects contribute to or detract from the work’s meaning. Actions and their sequences in Blood Meridian are anything but aimless; they are the most singular expression of the animating evil at the heart of the logic of expansionism, and that logic’s highest expression, America. The novel’s characters and their acts, read properly at the metaphorical level that is the richest domain of literature, delivered the full intensity of this expression directly into the heart of the American twentieth century, and will remain a record of what this place has meant for as long as people can read, and neither philosophy, nor the sciences, nor plain language of any kind will ever be able to express the same except in the barest fractions.
McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian across ten years, during which time everyone involved likely knew it would never sell more than 2500 copies. And it didn’t. McCarthy was not supported by book sales or universities; he had a massive grant with no strings attached that he was incredibly lucky to get, and which allowed him to live modestly while working on it. This is not an argument for intentional poverty or greater grants or independent wealth, but for broader societal conditions that these grants currently simulate for the chosen: time, energy, security.
Yet McCarthy wouldn’t be a blip on the current MacArthur radar because a conglomerate would never have published The Orchard Keeper,⁶ a dense, confusing, destructively beautiful novel that began his career. So I can argue decline, at least subjectively, because the preconditions necessary to create Blood Meridian are no longer here. This is the type of unquantifiable loss that conglomeration relishes, and the kind we often pretend is not real.
Those preconditions barely existed in the first place, and intensifying inequality not only puts greater pressures on writers, their time, and their capacity; readers, too, who will find the difficulties of such works increasingly incommensurate with their harried lives. And with that shrinking market, so too goes those works’ shrinking marketability. What fills the space is increased pressure to reproduce what is already expected: like, to use one of Sinykin’s examples, “books by black authors that already read as black.”
It is against the artist’s self-interest to tolerate this. It is against readers’ self-interest to tolerate this. I’m on the edge of making grandiose claims about humanity’s self-interest in dismantling capitalist fiction and the necessity to combat it materially, though I know it’s unclear exactly what an artist or reader or human should do in that case. They should, undoubtedly, support a vast redistribution of wealth, and thus a vast restructuring—i.e. reduction, for most of us—of the time spent creating economic surplus, and they should support these conditions for everyone. They should submit to small presses and buy books from small presses and independent booksellers too, as these remain the sites of realest value for artist and reader alike. But to do something that’s large-scale corrective, or redirective, in any way beyond “support,” beyond the lending of attention to initiatives? It doesn’t feel like there’s much. Go to labor school; join the sharper edge of a union. There’s little else to pull on. At least not in the role of artist, reader, individual. Sure, opt not to shop the Amazon deal, but even that won’t stop the basic function of capital, which is and always has been the creation of greater capital.
Big Fiction ends with Sinykin’s conception of “privileged vessels for conglomerate authorship,” i.e., the most successful conglomerate authors. In his words, “these authors… are… industrial writers, whether their sector of that industry is defined by or against conglomeration… Until we recognize that, we have misread six decades or more of US fiction.” I would extend this assertion, to say that until we—by which I mean our culture at large, its memory, its intention, its concept of reality—recognize that, we have simply not read, not integrated, six decades or more of anything narratively, culturally, stylistically, formally, politically, et ceterally “unprivileged” by conglomeration.
This offends my spirit. Dramatically. I’m a dramatic man. But I also truly do not know a better method of creating human meaning than making art, and the arrogation of that act, its forced subordination to criteria that are essentially irrelevant to it, tempts me to despair. The other side of despair’s coin is pointless action, but I can’t keep getting arrested and pretending it adds up. So what to do—what to do—when I consider the creation and experience of art so important, and feel it increasingly devalued, and feel that as a writer (and a very small-time one at that) I have so little ability to affect it?
•
Cultural power is sway, influence over the few choices we have among those that are predetermined by any place and moment’s material reality. It is obviously not separate from art, but it is distinct from it, and instrumentalizing art in its service often engenders bogusness. But it can be used.
One way we should use it is to make it incredibly embarrassing not to be an open socialist. Some people will say this is already the case, which is stupid. I mean there should be an easily spoken consensus among any thinking person, as naturally enacted as all the other scripts we follow; I mean that not to be some version of a socialist should feel equivalent to being a feet guy.
All art is a subjective organization of reality into meaning. This organization occurs within any individual work’s frame and, in proportion to the breadth and depth of its acceptance, outside of its frame. Even when artists attempt to avoid prescribing meaning—Warholic slickness or ironic distance or anything anywhere else—they assert their own vision of reality, replete with its values, disdains, and conceptions of joy and misery et cetera. The idea that you could somehow separate a work of art from “politics”—a society’s internal power dynamics expressing their definitions of what reality is and should be—betrays a discouragingly simplistic understanding of both.
And any artist interested in the preservation of their art, or social change of any sort, should consciously organize reality around socialism. They should draw a milewide circle around that big vague word and focus all of their work, their reading, their criticism, their thought, on that circle. It should include the co-optation of any or all existing artistic modes and the conscious development of new aesthetics within it. Its possible content far exceeds the scope of an already long essay and a single person, but I’m convinced it doesn’t require a hardline position on the sino-soviet split, or to make work that explicitly mentions it, or that it must—must—depict the urban proletariat in a gritty but ultimately redemptive realism. Its artistic value must be primary, which is not just “okay,” but convenient, because its social value will not be in the valorization of any specific position or policy, it will be in working towards the creation of a new consensus, one that provides context and cover for the sharpest material struggles. It’s an energized miasma for life to leap out of, not a straitjacket in service of singular intent.
I keep thinking of Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He was a socialist, a journalist, a literary critic, greatly moved by the revolutions of 1848, and eventually founded an anarchist tendency that planned and executed decades of misadventure which never achieved their goals. One of these anarchists was Alexander Ulyanov, who was hanged for a plot to kill the tsar. This pushed Ulyanov’s brother, later known as Lenin, further into his radicalization, which led to his first arrest, and subsequently to a lot of reading time, during which he happened to find a novel, one called What is To Be Done, written by the same Chernyshevsky, in prison, twenty years earlier. It provided Lenin with a model of a dedicated revolutionary, and partially explains why he had so much piss in his blood for the rest of his life.
struggle → culture → struggle → culture → struggle
Just a thought.
And I have one other thought, contained in a syllogism that I know is a little unfair, but that I maintain is essentially correct anyway:
Art is the best language humanity has for understanding where, and what, humanity is. That is why art is beautiful to us—it creates and affirms the many meanings we have for ourselves. Capital, as a societally organizing force, does not have a way to value this function, because the value exists outside of utility. Because capital cannot assign a value, it treats this function as irrelevant, thereby rendering it irrelevant. In this case, no one could claim to love art and simultaneously tolerate the dominance of capital, as they inherently contradict each other. And if you don’t love art, how could I be particularly interested in yours?
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¹ One notable, recent-ish exception (or confirmation) is Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois’ Telegram, that, while admittedly written with a more strictly academic tone and focus, still received mere ounces of the recognition it deserved, given the scale of its revelations about direct state intervention in American, and global, culture.
² “Random House ‘barely constituted a speck on RCA’s organizational chart.’ [Random House President] Bernstein reported to the same vice president as did the heads of RCA Records and the Global Communications division, each of which contributed small change next to RCA’s serious preoccupations: defense contracting and television.” (Sinykin, p. 78)
³ marxists.org edition of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
⁴ Or not exactly, I guess. Difference must exist just enough to allow the redelivery of pre-existing feelings. It’s the core of how genre works and, as has been well explored (including by Sinykin), literary fiction acts pretty similarly to any other genre, at least at the level of marketing. And unfortunately I’m too young to be dismissed as a crank about this. You could maybe call me bitter but not really because I’m so effervescent in social situations.
⁵ See Spahr’s Telegram.
⁶ Sinykin argues as much in a recent essay.