My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

306 WAR N I N G - POE TRY ARE A
world of poetry and the small press as do group- and outsider-identified
cultural practices. For if commercial culture is increasingly dominated by
entertainment products that are developed, through the use of focus and
dial groups, to evoke maximum positive response at every unit of exposure;
then art that is not just figuratively but literally untested, art that
evokes contradictory and confused initial response, or simply appeals to
a statistical minority of targeted readers, will not be circulated through
commercial channels.
It should be no more a surprise to us in the USA, than it has been for
the past few years to citizens in the former USSR, that market forces create
different, but not necessarily desirable, cultural values compared to
those imposed top down by the old-guard of cultural arbiters or commissars.
In the post-Pantheon world of book publishing, the diversified companies
that own the major trade publishers are charged with publishing not simply
profitable books but the most profitable books. Works that appeal to
minor or micro publics, that is to say small constituencies, are excluded
from this system in favor of works that appeal to macro publics, which is
to say a substantial market share of the targeted audience. The circumstance
is somewhat analogous to a TV show with millions of enthusiastic
viewers being cancelled for its failure to garner an adequate public.
Yet unprofitable cultural product does continue to be manufactured in
the commercial sector and not simply as a result of the inevitable market
failures of the entertainment industry. The question is, why are some
works published despite their relatively poor profit potential in preference
to other works with a similar profit profile? It isn't just nonprofit arts organizations
that lose money supporting their particular cultural agendas.
Indeed, as far as losing money in an effort to construct a public, the independent
and alternative presses are no match for such mainstream magazines
as The New Yorker; which, despite a circulation that has recently surged
to 750,000, appears to be losing as much as $10 million a year (that's something
like $13 per subscriber )-an amount that could finance a good part
of the annual cost of the alternative poetry presses and readings and magazines.'
The New Yorker's parent company, S. I. Newhouse, is apparently less
concerned with profit than with cultural dominance-legitimating the
cultural product that forms the basis of its media empire; for this exercise
in hegemony, circulation, and publicity are more important than profit.
Of course, publishing statistics are notoriously unreliable, especially
1. Elizabeth Kolbert, "How Tina Brown Moves Magazines", The New York Times Magazine,
December 5,1993, p. 87.