The poetics of shameless self promotion

Have you ever felt embarrassed about pushing your own work? About discussing it in public or even posting a link to a publication on Facebook? British poet Tony Lopez has published a new essay entitled “Poetics and Institutional Embarrassment,” which explores the way the contemporary poetry scene, and in particular the academy, punishes what it sees as self-promotion. He writes:

When promoting your work for instance, you should not promote it directly or explicitly but do so obliquely, and pretend that you are doing something quite different. This feigning insouciance, this sprezzatura, is a social code and class marker with a cost: it blinkers insiders and makes them resist the power of direct expression.

Much of Lopez’s essay focuses on a paper Barrett Watten presented which was accused by another academic of being a blatant and vulgar attempt at self-promotion. Lopez counters this accusation with two points: 1.) that one of the specific traits of Language Writing is its attempt to historicize and theorize its own conditions of production, and so Watten’s presentation is a further instance of this, and 2.) conferences by nature are self-promotional activities, and we would be deluded to think otherwise. He writes:

An academic conference is a very particular kind of mixed social and business event, whatever the theme that draws people to the gathering. I don’t know how anyone could be involved without an element of self-promotion. The economy of such an enterprise is based on just that. Everyone giving a paper on whatever topic is also engaged in self-promotion. Many of the employed University speakers will have books for sale and courses to promote; they will be extending their range of contacts and, one way or another, building ‘evidence of esteem’. But the papers themselves in every case must promote the speakers. Postgraduate and research students will be showing their product to the community where they are seeking work. Employed relatively junior academics are moving on up; some people are getting laid for various reasons. All this should be completely obvious but apparently not; what else is a conference for?