BOTTOM LINE DREAMS AND THE END OF CULTURE
Engelhardt, Tom
Bottom Line Dreams AND THE END OF CULTURE BY TOM ENGELHARDT Naming and dreaming. The most adventurous dreams, the most innovative names. In eighties America, these could be found not in journals...
...Culturally, with that fat goes "redundancy" and "luxuries": the "small" movie, say, or the book published "only" for "prestige...
...After the Last Emperor George Orwell's 1984 is history partly because no Big Brother has found a way into the human mind, nor has any power yet been able to flatten language into the reversible two-dimensional creation Orwell envisioned (War is Peace, etc...
...The spread of the chain bookstore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with its nationwide emphasis on—and ability to push—discounted bestsellers past the million-copy sales mark, changed all that...
...And what that end to history seemed to mean was a world without stories, without the disastrous dreamers and visionaries of the last two centuries—a world in which every movement would henceforth be to the rational, global pulse of the Market...
...Dollars in hand were the full definition of sense...
...Yet something else happened in the cor-porately dreamy 1980s...
...Its creation involved design elements and technological innovations from one set of countries, parts produced in others, assemblage in still others, the whole process held together by computer, fax, and satellite...
...What even the biggest bestsellers made was peanuts compared to the financial fallout from a single hit sitcom or movie...
...This translated into growing frustration (revulsion might not be too strong a word) at what Random House Chairman Alberto Vitale calls "one-of-a-kind books" (once, of course, the definition of a book...
...Surgery was required—a process that culminated in the forced "resignation" of Andre Schif-frin, Pantheon's managing director of twenty-eight years, and the resignation in protest of most of his staff (myself included...
...The West German Bertelsmann communications conglomerate, for example, now housed Doubleday-Bantam (each formerly independent), the trade paperback house Anchor, and the mass paperback publisher Dell, as well as the Dou-bleday bookstores and eight American book clubs, including the Literary Guild, one of the two biggest in the United States...
...Of course, globalization had its limits, not the least of which was that no one truly meant global...
...All that remained was for the obvious economies of scale to kick into operation, with each "profit-center" (read: former independent publishing house) pulling its own weight...
...Knowledge was retrospective and regularly proved wrong by next season's books...
...and "the Real World," into which Pantheon's staff was constantly invited, the only world around...
...That loss, a starvation-amidst-glut phenomenon so typical of the Reagan-Bush era, allowed corporate culture to capture the terms of reality for itself...
...The Maxwell organization owned Macmillan (including the formerly independent Scribner's, Atheneum, and the Free Press...
...To whom might such units be divested...
...In academia, postmodernism turned criticism into an intellectual mall experience...
...In 1980, the RCA "family" (as it liked to call itself in its in-house publications), disappointed by the meagerness of publishing profits, gave up on its fantasies of book-computer synergy...
...and, before such globalizing dreams begin to fail on their own terms, they will have changed the institutional structure of human life...
...When the bottom line was drawn under the potential demographic purchasing units of the movement, whole realms of nonpurchasers ceased to exist on a national level, whole geographic areas were erased internationally...
...Bottom line...
...Elsewhere, whole peoples attempted to regain control over their societies...
...It has used its ceremonial abilities to turn its dreams into our realities...
...Even silence turns out to be an Infiniti ad...
...Liberalism gracelessly disintegrated as the decade began, even its truths eliciting channel-flipping from many, and yawns from those others who slumped to the polls...
...or that for a time glas-nost advertising in the form of Gorbachev's manichean baldpate should have become a staple of our world...
...In place of challenging thought was the opinion poll, whose results proved to us that our opinions were far less interesting than our purchases...
...At present, no oppositional response to the penetration of the ad exists except inattention—and that simply fuels the process, driving ad-makers to new heights of creativity (ads in classrooms, ads in toilet stalls, ads on personal computers, on videos in malls, in pinball machines), so that their message can rise above the "clutter...
...bigness [is] a great force for good...
...In this sense, the more of them there are, the more they represent a language of starvation, for each of the dreams they offer us is invariably followed by an implied ™, meant to confirm the corporate ownership and production of consciousness...
...an owner's "right" to do anything with his company, the only right conceivable...
...that Milton Bradley, a major toy company, should be releasing the game Gorbachev ("Find the most Western-style luxury items...
...A Future History of Publishing Today's cutter of fat and creator of international efficiencies may be tomorrow's fool, for who knows what fissures may someday open to swallow up our last globalizing emperors...
...A Hungarian dancing to the beat of U-2 could not do the same to Robert Ludlum's new novel...
...In the nether regions, the crumbling inner city dropped away like a mini-Third-World...
...nonstop shows across a smorgasbord of TV channels...
...which includes the Economist, the Financial Times, and Viking Penguin books...
...He wrote about it ("Pantheon Purge") in the May issue...
...Whether individual dreamers or not, they have been swept up in a collective corporate reverie that has gained a particular omi-nousness, because for years it has so successfully passed itself off as reality...
...Though bookstore sales (and book prices) continued to rise throughout the 1980s, a recent report in American Demographics magazine indicates that weekly reading time fell about a third between 1965 and 1985...
...The actor, the writer, the film-maker, the adman, the musician, and the cartoon character were brought under one roof to create the book/film/TV show/ theme-park ride/journalistic puff-piece/ videotape/T-shirt...
...Into these black holes of expanding media capital were sucked previously disparate categories of culture—high and low, mainstream and avant-garde...
...Will we in this decade be better able to recognize, question, describe, and defend our realities, so that the triaging of humanity and the planet itself will not go unopposed here in the heartland of the most powerful dream-makers ever to have thrown existence into question...
...Talking about placing a call to the Iranian pres-ident, President Bush recently commented: "I think the bottom line is you have to say: Would you do it again based on the information you had...
...has to do with reality...
...Marketeers found themselves dreaming not so much of a world freed of national boundaries as of a Baltic Market, an Estonian Free State, a Prague Duty-free Trade Zone, and so on...
...Whether or not the 1990s might have been "our" decade we never found out, for global manager and new Random House chairman Alberto Vitale declared Pantheon a financial hemorrhage, the sort of cultural luxury no globalizing entity could afford...
...Long after the press, music, television, and Hollywood began merging and globalizing, publishing retained something of the mom-and-pop-shop feel of an earlier era...
...Our post-Post-War imperial economic order has developed a distinctly modern twist to this formula...
...Possibly, some would go to the next set of corporate dreamers: global ad agencies convinced that a stable of "wordsmiths" would offer a synergistic edge to their clientele, or large food companies looking for upscale linkages to writers for God knows what reason...
...His papers now extended from Australia and Hong Kong to Hungary, England, and the United States...
...All "fat" has been surgically removed from this dream of a single transglobal market, an all-encompassing hypermall in which One Brand/One Film/One Song/One Product Line/One Video/One Promo is brought directly to the feeding grounds of the One Global Consumer...
...Unlike leftist ones with their perfected human beings in perfected social organizations, these have been cleansed of people...
...There, all complex dangers, all international diversity, dissolve into the exotic, primitive native, the roller coaster ride through a landscape of movie heroes and villains, and the Mexican/Chinese/Italian fast-food outlet...
...Ever-larger publishing entities found themselves bidding wildly for a small number of "sure" books, so multimillion-dollar advances went out for future products that, even when they sold, didn't always justify the sums invested...
...Among his publishing enterprises were Harper & Row, the textbook house Scott Foresman, and the religious publisher Zondervan in the United States, and Collins in Britain (now collectively known as HarperCollins Publishers...
...In fact, the 1980s were an unkind decade for critical thought and language of any sort...
...for their fate is likely to be settled early enough in this decade to illuminate aspects of the global enterprise that the globalizers might prefer to ignore, including the ways in which the failure of their dreams will change our lives...
...Fiscal responsibility" was the only imaginable responsibility...
...The danger is that these dreamers have granted themselves the right to fail on the grandest scale...
...fiscal rules," the rules of the only game in town...
...To say that this monopolization of cultural production and distribution has gained a cachet of inexorability would be an understatement...
...Already, "hard-nosed" global managers are slashing and burning the "fat" (read: people) out of these global entities as they continue to construct themselves...
...and the stridency of their anti-nationalism ("I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society...
...As long as the value of publishing houses continues to appreciate, global dreams will ride high, spawning fewer, ever-larger publishing entities (in fewer, ever-larger media empires), whose hyphenated names will remind us of the destruction such dreaming involves...
...But when the bubble bursts, it will be clear, as it already is to many inside publishing, that the Book itself cannot support the Dream...
...and end up as the toast of the Kremlin...
...Outside—well, outside is nowhere...
...Will there be, in publishing and elsewhere, more people beyond the boundary that hand draws, more hands reaching in to efface, deface, erase that line, to draw other kinds of lines...
...This rise in value masked two linked problems which made publishing's entry into the global sweepstakes a weak one and its exit likely to come swiftly...
...Here, one catches the uncertain bravado of men beginning to articulate a vision, a language in which to recast the world...
...Each book, however streamlined, still had to undergo the painstaking, time-consuming, and problematic process of translation before even facing the larger issue of whether it would match the quirky and unpredictable tastes of another nation's readers...
...Whatever the sphere, The Product was now promoted as a Global Concept, and a new-style media conglomerate was there to do the promoting...
...One might say, though, that in the 1980s, Latin American "magical realism" returned to our world as "magical capitalism," and that its magic lay partly in its ability to convince us that there was no language other than the one it was developing to describe itself...
...In 1961, in an era when book dreams only occasionally coincided with dreams of profits, it was bought by Bennett Cerf s Random House...
...The fact that the independent bookstore and reader refused to die...
...He also owned percentages of the news service Reuters and Pearson Pic...
...Other dreamers followed, unfazed by such small-scale failures...
...End of dream...
...On the other hand, the reorganization of the world in accordance with capitalist dreams is taking place on a scale beyond the human, and in a blast of white noise that threatens to wash away all small but crucial distinctions between human acts...
...In America, we watched on TV as those crowds clambered onto walls, as brave union organizers stared down power...
...After initial fluster and hesitation, most of our storytellers hailed its collapse not just as our triumph, but as the triumph of Reality itself—even as an "end to history...
...Among his many magazines were Seventeen, New York, Soap Opera Digest, and TV Guide, whose parent company Triangle Publications he had purchased for $3 billion...
...For at least a decade, in publishing as elsewhere, the unidentified hand drawing the bottom line has been drawing a boundary...
...Individual eccentricities, habits and resistances, local tastes and oddball desires, as well as ecocatastrophe (unless translated into biodegradable product), poverty, and Third World debt are banished...
...Our media dream-makers suddenly found themselves oppositionless in a world in which the rational pulse of reality had an increasingly alluring beat to it...
...and the only public left—the buying one—bought the prerogatives of ownership they were peddling in a way seldom before seen...
...Worse yet, the books so produced were financially insubstantial products on which to support the overheads of increasingly top-heavy and bureaucratized enterprises, no less the global dreams they engendered...
...The particular danger of utopian capitalist dreaming is not that the dreams will come to synergistic fruition, though obviously world brands, movies, ads, and books will continue to come into being...
...The Collapse of the Story In our world, the Greatest Story Ever Told proved to be a cautionary tale that played successfully to audiences for more than seventy years...
...Halfway around the world, the assorted bureaucrats who called themselves Communists droned on in a language long ago stripped of its truths...
...In eighties America, these could be found not in journals of dissent, or in the works of an avant-garde of artists and intellectuals, but on the business pages of the daily paper...
...For the first time, this makes the mission of the ad—to colonize every imaginable space in our lives—seem achievable...
...This weakness of books as product, however, gives them a special interest...
...The Pearson organization owned Penguin USA (including the previously independent Viking, Dut-ton, and New American Library, which, in turn, included the paperback houses Plume, Meridian, Mentor, and Signet Classics), and so on...
...The more "you" dream, the more there turns out to be...
...Globally, the situation for The Book was hardly more promising...
...MCA owned the Putnam-Berkeley Group...
...After all, a great triumph was being celebrated, and it was neither the End of the Cold War (in Adland, a Drixoral cold medication tagline: "May the only cold war in the world be the one being fought by us"), nor VR Day for America, but the triumph of a new corporatist globalism over the global pretenses of either former superpower...
...According to one demographics research firm, Americans, on average, spend less that $50 a year for their newspapers, magazines, and books...
...Few phrases have spread farther in our time...
...The tiny group of men who "ran" these suprahuman organizations came to assume that they owned the means of describing the world (as they increasingly did...
...Results were disappointing...
...One Newspaper/One World...
...In "middle" America, all that seemed to remain was the demographic niche and the zip-code-organized consumer...
...The "American" automobile, to take but one example, had become an international amalgam...
...It may not then take long for media conglomerates, saddled with debt, to begin to divest themselves of their publishing units, those fat-free, still unprofitable shells of once substantial houses reduced to bottom-line proportions...
...in consumption and marketing, in technological innovation, and in the language of corporate wheeling and megadealing...
...Or we read about them in newspapers and magazines, which also showed us an America emptied of much that was familiar, including politics and unions...
...the "bottom line," the only line anyone could draw...
...No one who matters, anyway...
...Monochromatic Dreams Reality, as offered up by the global triageur, takes the form of the ad, whose language is that of exclusion, reduction, and control...
...By the end of the 1980s, the bottom line as the ultimate in realism was so embedded in the language that its mention acted totemi-cally to cut off further discussion...
...Lodged in this vast corporate enterprise, Pantheon outlasted the hostile 1980s (if only by days) while regularly nurturing books with a critical spirit...
...Worse yet, by the end of the 1980s, the rising price for a new novel on Vietnam had passed the descending cost of putting the video of Platoon in your home "library...
...Gulf + Western held Simon & Schuster (Touchstone, Fireside, Summit, Poseidon, Prentice-Hall, and Pocket Books, which in turn included Washington Square Press...
...Will the 1990s be a new decade more than chronologically...
...It goes: One Brand/ One World...
...Within that boundary is the quantifiable, which means the permissible, the discussable, the possible—in short, the real...
...Their language was language...
...Will a new language be possible after these last emperors...
...The Newhouse family owned Random House...
...The assumptions of these men became the operative ones...
...Often called "gentlemanly," it was easily sentimentalized...
...When naming is lost to us, it's hard to see its loss, and when dreaming is not ours, no one can tell what dreams we might have had...
...End of conversation...
...It went something like this: Once upon a time, men with romantic names like Fourier and Saint-Simon dreamed Utopian dreams— Utopia being a no-place in which humans might explore possibilities for social well-being not previously experienced on this Earth...
...Do words need a certain human scale to close ceremonially the gap between names and reality...
...How much more convincing this performance is now that ad and product can cycle through a multiplicity of "real" forms linked by ownership: film, cassette, book, theme park, television, video, and on and on...
...Publishing companies, like baseball teams (though without the lucrative television contracts), appreciated in value—sometimes with little regard to what anyone did to them...
...Hence, publishing problem two: In a developing consumer package that included CD players, VCRs, Walkmans, camcorders, Nintendo, and the microwave oven, there was only limited space for a product that was not just labor-intensive to produce but to consume...
...that McGlasnostland should be the site of a McDonald's ad (and Moscow the site of its latest Hamburga-torium...
...Where a few buildings and a little land had previously sufficed for disaster, these far more fanatical believers in the possibility of a communal paradise on Earth seized whole impoverished nations, subjecting millions of people to the experience of an underfinanced, overpoliced heaven-on-Earth...
...Though it had gained a timeless ring, it performed a time-bound service...
...Take media baron Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which had begun with a single inherited Australian newspaper...
...In their utopia one finds a specific form of triumphant earthbound paradise, limited to The Product and most easily expressed by the slogan...
...A relatively small number of ever-better-selling bestsellers slipped into consumers' lives, but even this "success" was not untroubled...
...Capitalism...
...All such experiments ended ignomi-niously in nightmares of factionalism and economic ruin when faced with the intractability of human nature and the limits of reality...
...Experiments were made in cloning one category bestseller from the next in pathetic homage to the spin-off TV series and the film sequel...
...Utopian Capitalist Dreaming Rather than being the proprietors of reality, today's global capitalists are our greatest inventors of fiction, and we live amidst the most extravagant of their utopian dreams...
...No one...
...that significant global economies of scale cannot be wrested from this "one-of-a-kind" occupation...
...The Bottom Line Though capitalism has always been to some degree synonymous with the transnational, the globalizing capitalism of our time is remarkable for the size of its "integrated" transnational structures, for the command-and-control technologies that go with them, and for its grasp over our reality, which is remarkably recent...
...In Disneyworld, whether in Paris, Tokyo, or Orlando, in Universal Studios, whether the Florida or Hollywood versions, we do, in fact, become the One [infantilized] Consumer in a world where One Taste is All...
...Value that couldn't be expressed on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet simply was not to be entertained...
...alizing, employing inconceivable sums of money and making unimaginable use of science and technology, they created entities of unparalleled size, glued together in grotesquely original ways...
...thousands of ads in every shape and form...
...in which they control movie production companies and movie theaters, theme parks and the cartoon characters that populate them...
...It was commonly said that a low-interest bank account would offer better returns than the hard-cover book trade...
...One Channel/One World...
...One Book/One World...
...From jacket design to subject matter, the 1980s saw desperate efforts to genrefy books, making them more amenable to mass appeal, mass prediction, and massive repeatability...
...while nationalism, that bugaboo of the corporate internationalists, had miraculously transformed itself into a global marketing tool, breaking large, previously hostile units into smaller, more penetrable market niches...
...Naming, it seemed, was increasingly a capitalist activity, one that was filling all available space...
...All different, yet remarkably similar...
...In three closely linked areas, however, naming, that most basic of human activities, broke into new territory...
...Recently, Peruvian novelist and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa stated that "unlike socialism, capitalism has never generated a mystique...
...magazines ranging from The New Yorker, Details, and Vogue to Parade and Bride's, and forty-one foreign magazines...
...In such a bottom-line world there could be no talk of "trickle-down economics," "working-class politics," or Third World "takeoff...
...Most of these had publishing groups in England, and some elsewhere...
...Whether or not the 1970s was the Me Decade, the 1980s was certainly the Them Decade—and They enjoyed it to abandon...
...The North American novel wasn't so much dead as in a terminal state of boredom...
...A world armed to the teeth, embracing Iran-Iraq-style wars, a level of maldistribution of wealth unparalleled in history, and future Chernobyls (chemical as well as nuclear) will not, in any lifetime we can look forward to, become One Market, a vast boutiqueland for a barely distinguishable mass of consumers...
...Like the bottom line, the ad limits reality to its own specifications, and then expends its efforts convincing us that it, like the product it enhances, is the Real Thing...
...That line was a boundary...
...Despite international auctions of potential Global Books which reached fabulous sums, national boundaries proved resistant to imagined book synergies...
...By decade's end, almost all publishing was lodged in larger imperial edifices...
...The next emperor, to secure the "mandate of heaven" for a new and righteous dynastic order, was then obliged to "rectify the names" by conducting ceremonies that would bring words back into alignment with the realities they were meant to describe...
...Only in the next decade does "bottom line," that paradigmatic phrase of our period, appear in those pages ("the final figure, showing profit or loss, in a financial statement, the ultimate result or consideration")—and it takes even longer for it to become a verbal litmus test for the "pragmatic," the "realistic...
...Rectifying the Names In traditional China, it was believed that dynasties fell, in part, because of a disastrous disparity between names and the things named...
...His TV/film interests included the 20th Century-Fox Corporation, Metromedia television stations, Fox Broadcasting (the new fourth network), and the Sky Television network in Europe...
...Their utopian dreams are of a historically unique variety...
...A barrage of the already named...
...They must always be of things-things that can be bought tomorrow (lest we "wake up" the day after in horror...
...But the dreams themselves operate under severe constraints...
...Publishing, Past and Present Publishing has been a curious backwater from which to watch the rational pulse of history race...
...For what were the alternatives in a world in which the other "bloc" had collapsed into a heap of impoverished states, desperately wishing only that one, two, many Murdochs would bail them out...
...In 1967, Random House was acquired by the transnational giant RCA...
...This never-ending story ended unpredictably late last year...
...These capitalist dreamers have their hands on enough "reality" in the form of organization and capital, and face a landscape emptied enough of opposition, to act as if the world were no more than a potential theme park for capitalism...
...In the tiny arena of global publishing, however, certain lines of development can, perhaps, already be seen, and a preliminary outline for its future history suggested...
...After all, you still had to read the things...
...Though Stephen King might follow Stephen King and Michener, Michener to the heights of bestseller lists, armies of financial analysts and business school MBAs proved minimally useful in predicting or, for that matter, creating the next printed object of mass desire...
...capitalism was never preceded by a Utopian vision...
...If one returns to Global Reach, Richard Barnet's and Ronald Muller's now-classic 1974 account, what is striking is the crusading tone of the globalizers (the world corporation represents "a transcendental unity...
...In the Third World (which all but disappeared from our consciousness), obstreperous voices like those in Nicaragua were pounded into the dismissible language of the barracks by dollars and rent-a-guns...
...In the new media empire, energy flowed into the creation of the craze which both was the product and could promote The Product, whosever product, anywhere on Earth...
...Neglect by zip code, triage by consumption...
...Naming There was a time at the height of the "boom" in Latin American fiction when it was commonly said that Latin American writers had a great advantage over ours: they were "naming" their world for the first time...
...Nothing more emphasizes this than the often unsuccessful attempts of publishers in recent years to expand into anything but books— audio-cassette tapes, videos, diet cards, computer software, games and puzzles, to name only a few such products...
...Nothing...
...Ads are the dream language of overproduction...
...And the only people to stand in your way were others of your own pragmatic kind, reaching into their respective pockets to do the same...
...It had a tiny corporate history of its own...
...And his is by no means the most impressive of these empires—not when a Time-Warner ("The world is our audience") is considered...
...The first was that writing books and, from the publisher's point of view, finding, editing, and producing them (even when done minimally and sloppily) remained a painfully singular and labor-intensive activity...
...that bookstores selling challenging novels and nonfiction— some of it from the increasingly lively world of the small press—flourished against all prediction, offered a certain hope for the future of books, but not for The Book...
...One Movie/One World...
...And I'd say, Yes, I probably would...
...Alternately, those units might follow an impulse already evident in the business and attempt to eliminate their central product—the book...
...The uproar that followed was of interest partly because it displayed a decade's worth of code words, phrases proven to reduce all issues to the narrowest conception of what might be profitable, what might be valuable...
...The concept of Lite Reading did not sit comfortably next to Lite Drinking, Lite Eating, Lite Listening, and Lite Viewing...
...A monolithic enemy was being rapidly reconceived as a set of demographics—the global equivalent of the "narrowcasting" process already occurring in the heartland markets of the United States and Western Europe, where national "audiences" were being broken down into narrowly profiled sets of buying traits...
...So despite a decade of ever fiercer cries that publishing should at last be put on a business basis, a decade in which smaller houses with questionable profit-and-loss records were almost automatically folded up or into larger entities, books continued to fail the test of globalizing dreams...
...These imperial structures were awesome...
...If, however, you open a dictionary from the 1960s, between "bottomless" ("lacking a bottom, immeasurably deep, unfathomable, mysterious") and "bottommost" ("farthest down, lowest") there is nothing...
...Because there was so little reason to be in the business beyond, perhaps, a pleasure in or curiosity for books themselves, it long remained a relatively small-scale (and underpaid) profession for writers and editors alike...
...During those years, I worked as an editor at Pantheon Books, a small publishing house founded in 1942 by European exiles in flight from Hitler...
...Instruction by computer was obviously education's future, and something, after all, had to go in those teaching machines...
...There is now a bottom line for everything, including Presidential speech...
...Even if they are unattended to—as most ads seem to be—they aggressively occupy space that might otherwise be available for our dreams, dreams we hardly know we miss...
...The allure of such a language is incontestable...
...nor could a Russian sampling a McBurger take a bite out of Bright Lights, Big City...
...These gulag-lands, these evil empires threatened our world with a similar fate, were we ever to drop the eternal vigilance recommended by our storytellers...
...Within that boundary are the numbers that provide such rich dream material for our globalizers...
...In fact, the explosive growth of theme park and mall in the last decade reflects this larger desire to meld selling and entertaining into a single controlled environment from which all unsightly reality has been erased...
...There was no longer even a half-convincing language of hope available to those unable to purchase that Pepsi in Madonna's hand, and the video of her songs, and the clothes she wore, and...
...These dreamers of the Left, passionately believing their visions could be realized in the world, established farms, or communities, or small industrial enterprises based on their new principles of communalism...
...The efficiencies of a global marketplace seemed at hand...
...And the only trick was to scope out the reading desires of the consumer so that you could cut down on titles and radically increase sales per title throughout, at least, the English-speaking world...
...Sooner or later, the abyss between the named and the real simply swallowed him up...
...Gorbachev's Pate It is no happenstance that the reach-out-and-touch-that-concrete crowd celebrating atop the Berlin Wall became an instant AT&T ad...
...hundreds of new magazines each season...
...It de-acquisitioned Random House into the arms of the Newhouse family media empire, a $10-billion-plus entity which now also includes cable television systems, scores of newspapers, twenty U.S...
...All that was left to do, it seemed, was reach into one's corporate pocket and, like media barons Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, begin buying percentages of ownership in the Eastern European Party press (giving "partying" a new name), or of major movie companies in the United States, or of book publishers in England, or of Australian ad agencies, or of sky channels over the continent, or, or, or...
...Can words take the measure of such events...
...As an image of capitalist normalcy, it reduced the godlike "invisible hand" of Adam Smith's free market to that of an unnamed accountant drawing a line under the figures at the end of each day, month, year...
...The last dynastic ruler, mistaking the reassuring descriptions his courtiers offered him for the actual state of affairs in the imperial domains, found himself, in effect, blinded by names...
...And often enough, as with James Clavell's Whirlwind, for which William Morrow & Company paid $5 million, they didn't sell at the levels desired, which meant, since bookstores take books on consignment, that hundreds of thousands came back...
...In the mass media, the sequel prevailed wherever the hit reigned supreme...
...Within that constricted world, we, the ones who can buy their products, are supposed to reside...
...It underlined the rules of the game, which were short-term and quantifiable...
...Despite the growth of a bestseller mentality in a decade in which business methods proliferated and the "books" increasingly meant what accountants worked on, it remains so...
...The Murdoch organization owned Harper & Row...
...in which they commandeer global ad agencies and publicity firms—that is, all forms of language production including the dictionaries in which words are housed—naming and dreaming cannot be separated from a consideration of the phenomenon of globalization...
...Leveraged, megamerged, globTom Engelhardt was one of the senior editors who resigned from Pantheon Books earlier this year...
...A few of them might even fall into the hands of people with a curiosity for actual books, ones that reflect (and reflect on) the human experience, including our most recent globalizing era...
...For business purposes, the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the equator...
...It can unravel whole societies...
...If you couldn't pull your weight in purchases, you had no place in reality...
...What ads mask in their speed and sprightliness, their bright colors, knowing winks and upbeat endings, is not just their monochromatic nature, but the ways in which their specific brand of dreaming squeezes out all others...
...Their success in the decade and a half to follow made the globalizing mentality so dominant that its language now seems to have been with us forever...
...Time-Warner owned the other, the Book-of-the-Month Club, as well as Little Brown, Warner, and Time-Life Books...
...Hardly noticeable then was the impoverishment our language suffered, the loss of any convincing set of names that would allow us to tell the story of what they were doing...
...Another reason was that books obdurately remained objects sold seasonally, whose successes in the marketplace were painfully unpredictable and generally unrepeatable...
...In such a world in which a few corporate entities have bought up almost all major book companies, magazines and newspapers, TV stations, cable networks, satellite systems, record companies, computer software firms, and home-video distribution chains...
...Loss, masquerading as triumphant nostalgia, was the media mood, and everyone seemed to be heading back to the future...
...Adult trade publishing, nonetheless, remained something of a subsidized profession—by textbook divisions, by a personal fortune in the case of one independent house, and, in the case of Random House, in part by a highly profitable children's-book division...
...In the 1980s, an era that glorified repetition, in which culture became an endlessly re-runnable series of predigested bits, word glut was the order of the day: 40,000-plus books published every year...
...or even the RCAs of the future (undoubtedly, Japanese) once again dreaming that electronic software married to publishing texts will mean untold selling possibilities in a machine-driven marketplace of education...
...Like a handful of other electronics firms, RCA was then dreaming of textbooks as the missing link between its electronics business and the classroom...
...One reason was that profit margins, where they existed, were woefully thin...
...Only up There, in a sort of capitalist heaven, was there dynamism, challenge, heroism, and glory, for There was the abode of gigantic corporations which drove everything, including language, before them...
Vol. 54 • October 1990 • No. 10
