The Propaganda of "Bestsellers"

In his essay “On Bestsellers and their Audience,” the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer breaks down what the modern phenomenon of the “bestselling book” is all about. It’s basically the bourgeoisie’s last ditch, frantic effort to prop its own consciousness up, in a time when nobody any longer believes in their values or authority.

The bourgeois mind created this category known as a “bestselling book” that is supposed to give some legitimacy to their control over society. People are meant to look to the existence of bestsellers as evidence that there is some kind of meaningful cultural production happening and that there are some actual values left.

The weird thing about bestsellers is that they aren’t actually popular. The most popular books, the ones that people actually read, like mysteries, current events books, etc., are excluded from the “bestsellers” category. They lack a certain special seriousness that is needed to be a “bestseller” in the way that the bourgeoisie, in their last ditch effort to invent some kind of legitimacy for itself, requires.

There has to be some special type of cultural product that attests to the serious reality of the current status quo. The actual reality of the current situation, of course, is that it is totally empty and fraudulent, a void where real content should be.

That void, that total lack of belief where there should be some content, is very dangerous—it can’t become too obvious that bourgeois culture and society is totally dead. That would lead to social instability. So the bourgeoisie pump out books and calls them “bestsellers” to fill that cultural hole and make it seem like something is going on.

This is especially important in times of economic crisis—Kracauer was writing in Weimar Germany, which experienced severe inflation and widespread poverty. Sound familiar?

As he says “You can’t live on bread alone, particularly when you don’t even have any.” This is such a fucking good line. Ideas are always important, but when people are desperate, when the economy is in endless crisis, ideas are all that people have.

But this is a big problem, because our society is dominated by the bourgeois mind, and it has no ideas. And they know they have no ideas, so they frantically scramble to try to fill the void with anything. Hence the concept of “bestsellers.”

Bestsellers lists tell you what the bourgeoisie are capable of coming up with in the face of the cultural void they preside over. Check out this list.

Kracauer noticed a few things about the new bourgeois category of the bestselling book. We see all of his predictions on today’s list, with some new additions too.

They often reflected individualism, for obvious reasons—the bourgeois mind can’t think collectively, and so has to overinflate individualism.

Kracauer notes that “Wherever the individual appears, tragedy is inevitable. Such tragedy embeds bourgeois existence…” Bestsellers usually have a kind of air of tragedy to them—on this year’s bestseller list, there’s a memoir by a widow about her husband’s death from Alzheimer’s. There’s also a book about the death of George Floyd, and one about a guy who escaped from Auschwitz. Individualism and tragedy.

Feeling also plays a big role in bestselling books—as he says: “When people lack all else, feeling is everything.” This universal lack applies economically to the mass of people, who are being aggressively exploited by bourgeois domination of society. The lack also refers to the void at the center of bourgeois society. So feeling becomes a prevailing theme among all bestsellers.

An emphasis on nature is also common: “Nature is the great refuge for which the masses of readers yearn.” We see this today with the popular science books on the bestseller list. Like An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. This is a perfect example of bourgeois bestseller propaganda. Using nature as an escape, and suggesting that there is a big world “out there” in nature. The bourgeois mind loves to use nature itself—its vastness and complexity—as a stand-in for its own total lack of content or values. It’s very convenient. The best thing about nature is it is mute—you can use it as a source of meaning, without any language needed. What do the animals studied in that book actually have to say about the void at the center of bourgeois society? I would guess probably not much. As Kracauer says, the muteness of nature is an asset for bestsellers, because readers of bestsellers “desire nothing more fervently than to see embarrassing questions sink into the abyss of silence.” Nature—and today, popular science—is the perfect thing for bestseller propaganda to use, because it seems like this big open space that has lots of answers, but is actually just totally silent.

Sometimes nature, individualism, feeling and tragedy are mixed together in various ways. There’s a popular science bestseller called How Far the Light Reaches about weird deep sea creatures—there’s a chapter where the author relates “the morphing nature of cuttlefish with their own experiences navigating their gender identity.” Individualism and nature mixed together—the natural world becomes an extension of the self. It’s also a good example of how nature/science are used as a candle in the dark—a book about vibrant sea creatures in the darkest depths of the ocean. The idea is that like if there’s weird cool stuff way down in the dark ocean, then it can be anywhere or something. It’s all very stupid, and it tries to cover up the basic, obvious truth, that the ocean is dark and awful, and nature is quiet and has no answers.

In another bestseller, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, tragedy, nature, individualism, and feeling are all kind of mixed together. The author talks about her “medical journey” dating back to the 1990s, where she struggled for answers to her chronic illness. She moves between her own pain story, the history of illness in the U.S., and the ongoing “crisis” with “Long Covid.” It’s an exploration of medical science (nature) told through an individual narrative that is loaded with tragedy and feelings—that is the secret sauce right there. It’s a strange mix of memoir and research, which is also how another of last year’s bestsellers, South to America, is described. That’s a book about the history of racism in the American South, interwoven with the author’s own experience of racism. Those two are very similar—an analysis of a tragic problem that is filtered through an individual perspective.

Memoir and research—this is the perfect recipe for a bourgeois bestseller. Memoir is the exploration of the self, and research lends a kind of objective, scientific gloss to it. Merging the self with nature, that is the ultimate propaganda achievement of the bourgeois mind.