Delicious, But Not Enough
Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine
Indigo Press, 226pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781999683382
reviewed by Dominic Fox
Richard Seymour's much-anticipated book about social media takes its title from Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a surrealist painting which expresses a kind of horror of automation, of birdsong driven by crankshaft. Although it delivers a solid analysis of the driving mechanisms of social media and the commercial imperatives that have shaped them, the insistent focus of Seymour's critique is on the eagerness with which users of these technologies have allowed ourselves to be cast as automata, embedded into the apparatus. The book is substantially a treatise on addiction, on the quandaries of displaced agency, from a psychoanalytically informed perspective.
One of the things that social media offers its devotees is the opportunity to experience themselves as subject to a compulsion: to write, to react, to have and deliver one’s ‘take’ on an ever-evolving situation. Another is the experience of being an object of impersonal fascination, a puppet-self co-constituted through the amusement, envy, rage, or even kindness of strangers. We cannot see ourselves as others see us, but we can see an alienated part of ourselves as others see it. By shaping this alienated part in response to the feedback represented by user engagement metrics — likes and retweets — we can exercise a new kind of social agency. Do those who are adept at such fetishcraft — the fabled ‘influencers’, virtuosi of self-promotion — feel that they are serenely in command of their own destiny? Those of us whose stars have not risen so egregiously will often have had opportunity to take satisfaction in seeing such pneumatic self-confidence abruptly deflated. And the enjoyment of such comeuppances is another of the things that the platform is very transparently for. An appetite for others' humiliation is brought uncomfortably to the surface in such debacles: as Seymour notes in an arresting aside about the public tearfulness of one notable target, ‘hurt feelings are delicious, but not enough’.
The Twittering Machine is structured as a series of short multi-paragraph reflections, organised into chapters by topic: addiction, celebrity, trolling, ‘post-truth’ and political upheaval. Each salvo is freighted with research-nuggets, eye-catching statistics, tales of the internet, which cumulatively run together into a babbling information stream. This may seem like a disobliging way of saying that the book is well-researched and evidenced, which it is. But more than that, I think it is quite self-conscious about the kind of attention economy it is participating in. Rather than trying to build a single argument over many pages, it makes multiple short passes over its terrain. This in turn communicates something about the unboundaried and fragmentary nature of the object under consideration, which is implied to be such that a single, synoptic, god’s-eye perspective will not serve.
This approach makes for a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, with much in the way of incidental insight and sharp commentary delivered in passing: there are plenty of quotable lines. However, Seymour sometimes forfeits the opportunity to drive some of his points more firmly home. The claim, for example, that social media has made its users ‘scripturient’, seized by a compulsion to produce text, feels like it ought to lead somewhere definite rather than diffuse into a cloud of suggestiveness. Perhaps the nearest neighbour in modern English usage is ‘prurient’: scratching at an itch of sexual curiosity. Seymour cites the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as an instance of someone driven by frustrated desire to compulsive writing, as ‘both her symptom and her only hope of a cure’: an almost physical emanation, like ectoplasm. He gives a supporting quotation from Lacan: ‘The subject cries out from every pore of his being what he cannot talk about’. Well, and what might that be? A text which dallies with psychoanalysis as Seymour’s does might have dug a little more into the dirt here: since the impulses we are gratifying through our social media use are clearly highly potent, it is probable that they have some connection to the beast in the nursery, as Adam Phillips named the appetites of infancy. For a book which confronts, among other topics, the joys of online trolling, sadism, spite and reckless disindividuation, The Twittering Machine is strangely salubrious.
It is also characterised by what I think of as a distinctly Phillipsian (or Darian Leader-ish) ‘we’, the ‘we’ of mild psychoanalytic exhortation. ‘We’ entertain certain notions about ourselves, which are found to be contradictory; ‘we’ engage in behaviours which feed our appetites, but may not bring us what we really want (or may get in the way of our discovering that there are other things we could want than the things we think we want). ‘We’ could become more interestingly dissatisfied and empathetically capacious versions of ourselves if we were less committed to the self-stereotypes which straitjacket our enjoyments by committing us to predictable compensations. In Seymour’s account, social media is ultimately another means by which we convert infantile curiosity, aggression and concupiscence into dependable rewards. If we disconnected ourselves from the horrible machine, recovered our capacity for creative boredom, we might find other things to do with the urgent, unsettled, appetitive part of ourselves that social media taps into and extracts the juices from. Hence the book’s conclusion that we should seek to ‘escape - from the hot flows of information, the flux, the bombardment of impressions, of exposure to messages, more now than ever before, a data apocalypse, from which nothing intelligible can ultimately be wrested — to a fixed point of unknowing’, a vacant space which we can begin to populate once more with the real content of our desire.
This is all wise and sound, as far as it goes, but runs the risk of falling into a type of argument that Seymour himself would instantly recognise as individualistic and moralising in any other context: mindfulness as cure-all. Can the answer to the enormous social transformations wrought be social media really be to stroll in the park ‘with nothing but a notebook and a nice pen’, or sit ’in a church’ (a church, Lenin?) with our eyes closed? “We” continue, obstinately, not to do what writing in this genre attempts to goad or seduce us into doing. (This review, I confess, would have been written much sooner if I had spent more time on the train reading Seymour’s book, and less time on Twitter). Is this obstinacy a moral failure of the individual, or the failure of the book to dislodge it a pedagogical one? On the one hand, Seymour argues that our attachment to social media has the character of an addiction, induced and maintained by a constant supply of seductive stimulants; on the other, he suggests that our addictions are themselves strategic attempts to reduce an unbearable part of ourselves to quiescence. An addiction is a crisis of outsourced agency: we find something to take responsibility away from us, and will do almost anything to forestall its return. The Twittering Machine offers a cool diagnosis of this condition, but stronger medicine is needed if we are to overcome it.
One of the things that social media offers its devotees is the opportunity to experience themselves as subject to a compulsion: to write, to react, to have and deliver one’s ‘take’ on an ever-evolving situation. Another is the experience of being an object of impersonal fascination, a puppet-self co-constituted through the amusement, envy, rage, or even kindness of strangers. We cannot see ourselves as others see us, but we can see an alienated part of ourselves as others see it. By shaping this alienated part in response to the feedback represented by user engagement metrics — likes and retweets — we can exercise a new kind of social agency. Do those who are adept at such fetishcraft — the fabled ‘influencers’, virtuosi of self-promotion — feel that they are serenely in command of their own destiny? Those of us whose stars have not risen so egregiously will often have had opportunity to take satisfaction in seeing such pneumatic self-confidence abruptly deflated. And the enjoyment of such comeuppances is another of the things that the platform is very transparently for. An appetite for others' humiliation is brought uncomfortably to the surface in such debacles: as Seymour notes in an arresting aside about the public tearfulness of one notable target, ‘hurt feelings are delicious, but not enough’.
The Twittering Machine is structured as a series of short multi-paragraph reflections, organised into chapters by topic: addiction, celebrity, trolling, ‘post-truth’ and political upheaval. Each salvo is freighted with research-nuggets, eye-catching statistics, tales of the internet, which cumulatively run together into a babbling information stream. This may seem like a disobliging way of saying that the book is well-researched and evidenced, which it is. But more than that, I think it is quite self-conscious about the kind of attention economy it is participating in. Rather than trying to build a single argument over many pages, it makes multiple short passes over its terrain. This in turn communicates something about the unboundaried and fragmentary nature of the object under consideration, which is implied to be such that a single, synoptic, god’s-eye perspective will not serve.
This approach makes for a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, with much in the way of incidental insight and sharp commentary delivered in passing: there are plenty of quotable lines. However, Seymour sometimes forfeits the opportunity to drive some of his points more firmly home. The claim, for example, that social media has made its users ‘scripturient’, seized by a compulsion to produce text, feels like it ought to lead somewhere definite rather than diffuse into a cloud of suggestiveness. Perhaps the nearest neighbour in modern English usage is ‘prurient’: scratching at an itch of sexual curiosity. Seymour cites the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as an instance of someone driven by frustrated desire to compulsive writing, as ‘both her symptom and her only hope of a cure’: an almost physical emanation, like ectoplasm. He gives a supporting quotation from Lacan: ‘The subject cries out from every pore of his being what he cannot talk about’. Well, and what might that be? A text which dallies with psychoanalysis as Seymour’s does might have dug a little more into the dirt here: since the impulses we are gratifying through our social media use are clearly highly potent, it is probable that they have some connection to the beast in the nursery, as Adam Phillips named the appetites of infancy. For a book which confronts, among other topics, the joys of online trolling, sadism, spite and reckless disindividuation, The Twittering Machine is strangely salubrious.
It is also characterised by what I think of as a distinctly Phillipsian (or Darian Leader-ish) ‘we’, the ‘we’ of mild psychoanalytic exhortation. ‘We’ entertain certain notions about ourselves, which are found to be contradictory; ‘we’ engage in behaviours which feed our appetites, but may not bring us what we really want (or may get in the way of our discovering that there are other things we could want than the things we think we want). ‘We’ could become more interestingly dissatisfied and empathetically capacious versions of ourselves if we were less committed to the self-stereotypes which straitjacket our enjoyments by committing us to predictable compensations. In Seymour’s account, social media is ultimately another means by which we convert infantile curiosity, aggression and concupiscence into dependable rewards. If we disconnected ourselves from the horrible machine, recovered our capacity for creative boredom, we might find other things to do with the urgent, unsettled, appetitive part of ourselves that social media taps into and extracts the juices from. Hence the book’s conclusion that we should seek to ‘escape - from the hot flows of information, the flux, the bombardment of impressions, of exposure to messages, more now than ever before, a data apocalypse, from which nothing intelligible can ultimately be wrested — to a fixed point of unknowing’, a vacant space which we can begin to populate once more with the real content of our desire.
This is all wise and sound, as far as it goes, but runs the risk of falling into a type of argument that Seymour himself would instantly recognise as individualistic and moralising in any other context: mindfulness as cure-all. Can the answer to the enormous social transformations wrought be social media really be to stroll in the park ‘with nothing but a notebook and a nice pen’, or sit ’in a church’ (a church, Lenin?) with our eyes closed? “We” continue, obstinately, not to do what writing in this genre attempts to goad or seduce us into doing. (This review, I confess, would have been written much sooner if I had spent more time on the train reading Seymour’s book, and less time on Twitter). Is this obstinacy a moral failure of the individual, or the failure of the book to dislodge it a pedagogical one? On the one hand, Seymour argues that our attachment to social media has the character of an addiction, induced and maintained by a constant supply of seductive stimulants; on the other, he suggests that our addictions are themselves strategic attempts to reduce an unbearable part of ourselves to quiescence. An addiction is a crisis of outsourced agency: we find something to take responsibility away from us, and will do almost anything to forestall its return. The Twittering Machine offers a cool diagnosis of this condition, but stronger medicine is needed if we are to overcome it.