The Bestseller, or the Cultural Logic of Postsocialism

Abstract

When the word bestseller entered post-Soviet Russia, it was invested with transformational power to remake postsocialist culture according to capitalist models of exchange. From its appearance in the early 1990s to its apotheosis as the name of a new literary prize in 2001, the bestseller demonstrated the active power of cultural categories. It built a data-gathering apparatus around itself, shifted the ways that authors, publishers, and audiences interacted with each other, and even generated new modes of collective creativity specific to capitalist markets for culture. Applying insights from actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, this article focuses on the bestseller, decentering authors and other human agents. The bestseller is shown to be more than a mediator between market forces and other literary actors; it is an active force (a real object, in the terms of object-oriented ontology) that plays a central role in the postsocialist formation of cultural capitalism, or the system of cultural production and consumption based on market value, fungibility, and exchange.