A Romp in the Bookish Dark of Technocracy
“The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry” (Anthem Press, 2021) is a treatise by JT Welsch, poet and lecturer on poetry and creative industries at York University.
This book sets out to deliver new, radical insights for contemporary literary criticism. Welsch’s scrutiny of the poetry world stands indebted to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu–who, after reading a poem-letter received from Godard, smiled confessing into the camera of a French documentarian “I do not understand such things.”
Welsch takes no stance supportive of any notion of aesthetics or of poetics. In Bourdieu’s system for understanding the symbols of social class, these amount largely to trivial game-playing and illusionism, which the reinventor of sociology called “ludus” and “lusio” (related to illusion) in themselves, accidentally poetic concepts.
“The Selling and Self-Regulation” focuses instead on failing PR marketing stratagems undertaken by mid-sized and larger publishing firms, in their attempts to make poetry relevant to distracted 21st century audiences.
Deploying Bourdieu’s “martial art of sociology” towards demystifying the rites and fantasies of literary people and dusty aesthetes, perhaps requires a disbelief in poetry itself–but such disbelief could also mean inability to write or defend it.
Aesthetic notions and artistic ideologies are here dismissed as amounting to little more than irrationalism, snobbery, and nostalgia driven by market consumption and the white male gen-x and boomer establishment– such as when the author attacks a New Yorker critic who laments the “crowd pleasing twitter poetry” of millennial superstar Patricia Lockwood. Welsch makes a point of distancing himself from controversial academic conceptualist poets Vanessa Place (who performatively tweeted the entirety of “Gone with the Wind” the novel) and Kenneth Goldsmith, because of allegations of racism, calling them fitting precursors of the Trump era. Unfortunately avoided are any as-scathing analyses of the aesthetic claims made by these writers, such as their movement’s proclamation that nothing new of value can be written in the 21st century, beyond recycled pastiches of previous artworks. For critic Frederick Jameson, “pastiche” represents the defining aesthetic of late capitalism. Welsch, however, seems aligned with the camp that remains hostile to Jameson. The playful conceptualist assumption, that reading is passé and impossible to rescue, goes unchallenged despite its belying the kind of upper-class biases which disciples of Bourdieu should dismantle.
Welsch does well to expose the “creative industries” as a Trojan horse rolled into the citadels of the arts, attacking the idea of the writer as internet era "content provider", a concept rightly identified as hostile to poetry. At the advent of the digital age, only a handful of dissidents questioned the euphoria about an imminent future in which writers would become unpaid "content providers" supplementing the growth of the web.
Strange, for a book mentioning the selling of poetry in its title, to leave unexplored the “free economy” in which unpaid work became the new normal for writers and artists. Equally untouched is the poetry community’s growing acceptance of practices once associated with vanity presses, alongside expensive contest entry-fees, and reading-fees charged by mid-sized publishers. Such omissions seem inadequate considering the title, or the fact that minor competitions held by indie publishers and established poetry magazines, whilst charging considerable reading tariffs and awarding modest cash “grand prizes”, have become a prevailing business model for burgeoning small presses.
This book instead aims at larger players. A journey into the politics infusing major British literary awards such as the TS Eliot Prize, reveals entertainingly petty squabbles between jurors accused of workshop nepotism, before sympathetically chronicling the travails of artist-activists who announce their last-minute withdrawal from prestigious prizes when rumours surface about “dark money” (cash from hedge funds, arms dealers, & co.) having compromised the erstwhile purity of the prizemoney. Here and elsewhere, Welsch’s activist scholarship seems devoid of Marxist critique regarding the real nature of capital: no Marxist would seriously entertain the illusion that any large sum of the money we accept in order to survive under the current system, can somehow be redeemed of its complicity with everyday exploitation. Believing in such a force as “dark money” implies the existence of redemptive “sunny money” under capitalism– these synthetic and naïve distinctions, popular in art schools and inherently capitalist, once again go unchallenged by academic left critics.
“Booklust vs. Ebooklust”
The chapter "Poetic Devices" leverages Walter Benjamin's famous theory of "the aura" in defence of the eBook and Print-on-Demand publishing technology, while mocking the hesitancy expressed by traditional publishers towards these devices.
Welsch accuses stodgy editors of a primal “booklust”, or fetishism for antiquated print– which, according to the “Benjaminite” theory, derives its prestige from the ceremonies of handicrafts and authenticity, imbued with superstitious awe for handmade items, over those forged by mechanical production. Benjamin championed the liberating and democratising potential of the mechanical reproduction of art– especially cinema– while celebrating the “destruction of the aura”–the end of the undemocratic idea that an art-object loses its inherent magical power, if subject to mass-dissemination.
But couldn’t one argue that a similar fetishism motivates enthusiasm for Print-on-Demand? After all, the new concept has not yet proven effective in promoting previously unknown writers.
Welsch also does not consider whether eBooks, requiring expensive consoles like Kindle, would backfire in any campaign to encourage workers (who may lack tech-literacy) and their children to read poetry. The very term "Print on Demand" implies that literature somehow obeys markets’ titanium laws of supply and demand. But art has almost never been made successfully according to predictable mass market demand: most speculations about the need for art, seem vain compared to forecasts about demand for bananas, shampoos or screwdrivers. As no “demand” exists for previously unknown poets, these remain unlikely to escape obscurity, symbolically “published” even as they remain absent from physical bookshelves where potential readers meander. Meanwhile, cognitive scientists continue to debate whether digital reading impairs comprehension or mental processes with its stimuli. All this reveals the author’s dogmatic application of Benjamin: Welsch, who seems to have read less Marx than Benjamin had read, foregoes the material socio-economic analysis more flippantly.
Despite missing the mark here, it remains sensible to apply Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” when contemplating how contemporary publishers acquire new writers.
Welsch makes welcome dissections attacking various forces proven to be external and inimical to the processes of writing and reading poetry. Foremost among these, he targets the “clickbait economy”– the business around highly polemical online discussions which generate frenzy leading to “hits” “views” and other internet-equivalents of TV ratings which are later monetised. This book seems largely to base its inquiry upon the noble concern that such a tabloid “clickbait” economy has taken poetry hostage, while impinging upon readers’ capacities of reflexion. We examine how celebrity poets like Patricia Lockwood (who attained breakthrough success with her 2013 poem “Rape Joke”) or Danez Smith (equally successful with his “Dear White America”) happen to have produced poems that "go viral".
Such viralisation of poems on liberal news outlets typically detonates in light of media coverage days after a calamity involving sexual, racialist or homophobic violence–such as the horror of the 2016 Orlando shooting in the Pulse nightclub, or the assassination of British MP Jo Cox that year: immediately, the online commentariat sought to involve the oracular relevance of poetry, highlighting specific poems (such as Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”) which might not have been originally conceived for that purpose.
Poetry has a natural, ancient affinity for confronting national traumas with dignity (certainly the case for modern poets from Latin America, the Middle East). Rightly, the poet-scholar questions whether corporate social media have misunderstood poetry’s role for purposes other than factual reportage or punditry. Welsch acknowledges that Lockwood’s poems seem tailor-formatted to fit mobile phonescreens. But before following that train of thought to its conclusion, the critic leaps to Lockwood’s defence, insisting this marketing-angle reveals no conscious meticulous consideration by the poet– rather, this supposedly proves how industry machinations took advantage of her. Thusly Welsch’s critique pulls punches throughout, whenever the risk of causing upset to the lit community seems likely. We must assume that the poetry-reading circuits’ high-grossing stars are never deliberately playing to the gallery, but are merely “alienated labour” exploited by the biz.
To illumine the function of algorithms in regulating contemporary poetry, the author delves into the topic of “game theory”.[1] Welsch rightly mentions how this influential pseudoscience plays guides clickbait’s algorithm-crafters, and today’s market ideologues who speak of “innovation” and “creative industries”. But nowhere does the critic go so far as to locate how all this neoliberal ideology has guided actual aesthetics, informing our generation’s prose, poetry and values. Have poets not internalised and promoted a governing ideology in contemporary literature and MFA Programs?
At its best, this tract antagonises those who ply poetry towards making it serve the agendas of commercial news outlets. Yet it does not delve into the aesthetics of neoliberalism. Many social scientists, and few poets and poems under discussion are cited.
Not until the 9th chapter, “All Our Exploring” does Welsch begin to take on the academy– mostly, a critique of the ceremonial bureaucracy surrounding national surveys for efficiency that faculties sheepishly submit to. Seeming comfortable with the dominion academics exert over all forms of contemporary poetry and its publication, Welsch laments how the ivory tower has become excessively, irrationally bureaucratic– such as the British national campaigns testing teachers’ outputs (the “Research Excellence Framework” surveys) following Blairite dictums about the so-called “knowledge economy.”
Bourdieu had called academics the most oppressed echelon of the oppressing class. Today they dominate creative writing. Rather than kick against this monopoly on writing, Welsch’s inquiry of activist scholarship carefully limits its critical scope to objecting when hyper-administration wastes academics’ time excessively.
Welsch draws parallels between artists who participate in “cultural appropriation” and those who advocate for the free market (neoliberals). This resonates with the author’s slightly cynical comparison of Shelley’s and Goethe’s calls for universalism, to later advocates of the “global village” interlinked by communications tech firms. Artistic universalism, according to this framing, prophesied the financial and tech globalisation which, in the words of scholars quoted in the book, now go about “killing location, putting the world in our pockets”[2] leaving our surroundings “disembodied of their cultural, historical and geographical meaning”[3]. One could as easily argue that the obsession with regulating “cultural appropriation” itself results from the divisiveness and despair after the 2008 economic crash, and the angst of middle-class intellectuals who, contemplating diminished prospects and social mobility, decisively seize upon symbols pertaining to their group identities, privatising these as last bastions of their otherwise damaged social capital.
Welsch avoids more jarring theses that might generate friction with his academic environs and the poetry community– thereby proving self-regulation a hard thing to avoid.
[1] Originally conceived by mostly German-born scholars during the 1940s, the mathematical PR pseudoscience of “game theory” has, in the 21st century, become somehow central to free market ideology, especially when it comes to the claims of “rational choice theory”, a theory that makes the strange assumption– perhaps eerily tempting for its German-born progenitors in the 1940s–that humans are rational, self-interested actors.
[2] Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance : How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, 1997, quoted in Welsch, JT “The Selling and Self Regulation of Contemporary Poetry”
[3] Manuel Castels, The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, idem