Review: Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine. London: The Indigo Press https://www.theindigopress.com/the-twittering-machine

By Sean Phelan

In his most explicitly philosophical book Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) clarified what he meant by the notion of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence signifies more than simply forms of discursive power that mediate social relationships without the imposition of physical force. Rather, it signifies a form of violence that the target of the violence is themselves complicit in. “Symbolic power is exerted only with the collaboration of those who undergo it because they help to construct it as such” (p. 171).

Bourdieu suggests “nothing would be more dangerous” than interpreting this complicity as a “conscious, deliberate act” of “voluntary servitude”, as if individuals willingly submit to their own self-domination (p. 171). Instead, symbolic violence names a form of structured domination that accretes over time into a habitual mode of social being. “It is itself the effect of a power, which is durably inscribed in the bodies of the dominated, in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions (to respect, admire, love, etc.)” (p. 171). It is not an “act of consciousness…but a tacit and practical belief made possible by the habituation which arises from the training of the body” (p. 172).

I was immediately struck by the resonances with the notion of symbolic violence when I started reading Richard Seymour’s brilliant book The Twittering Machine. Each of the chapter titles captures our own entanglement in the dystopian aspects of today’s internet culture: “we are all connected”, “we are all addicts”, “we are all celebrities”, “we are all trolls”, “we are all liars”, “we are all dying”, “we are all scripturient”. Bourdieu’s trained bodily habitus is reimagined as the forces that motivate us to continuously reach for our smartphones or laptops, lest we lose contact with the mediated social universe that allows us to publicize our adoration or contempt for the latest thing happening online. As a Marxist intellectual, Seymour does not need to be told about the different political, economic and technological factors that structure the organization of our digital lives; his book is a far remove from a moralizing style of commentary that frames the problem of the online “mob” as simply a problem of the psychological deficiency of particular groups or individuals. Yet, even when dissecting the corrosive impact of different structural forces (platform capitalism, surveillance culture, big data, algorithmic power), Seymour keeps returning to the theme of complicity. “The Twittering Machine may be a horror story, but it is one that involves all of us as users” (p. 212). “If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite of or because of its frequent nastiness, as I have, then there is something in us that is waiting to be addicted” (p. 15).

In a prefatory author’s note, Seymour suggests he wants the book “to be read as an essay, rather than as a polemic or an academic work” (p. 13). He does not hold back from castigating different targets when he needs to. And, as anyone familiar with Seymour’s other books and writing will know, his work is nothing if not political. The argumentative and imaginative force of The Twittering Machine lies in the lucid questions it poses, not in blunt answers or glib policy panaceas to the problems it identifies. The political questions at the heart of the book are existential: about the collective consequences of living in a capitalist media universe where we spend so much of our time performing, curating, and, crucially, writing ourselves on platforms where we are the primary form of extractive value. As Seymour puts it at the end of the foreword, “it is a story that asks the minimal utopian question: what else could we be doing with writing, if not this”? (p. 17)

The title suggests a specific focus on Twitter, but Seymour’s argument constructs a wider target. The title is taken directly from a 1922 painting by Paul Klee, which is reprinted at the start of the book. The painting features an image of mechanically powered stick-figure birds hovering over a pit, functioning as bait to lure victims to their downfall. Seymour reads the painting as a metaphor for how the attractive aspects of internet culture are also forms of entrapment. We are drawn to our own version of the “holy music of birdsong” (p.21) whilst exposing ourselves to risks and dangers that we do not clearly see or willfully ignore. Our desires become inseparable from the machine, though “no one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addicts” (p. 200). We submit to a regime of structured domination while also affirming our individual autonomy. “The ideological power of our interactions with the machine derives from the way that the conditioned choice, be it the compulsive selfie or the angry 3 a.m. thread argument, is experienced as freely and pleasurably chosen” (81).

Seymour may not have set out to write an academic monograph, but he brings a theoretical sensibility and intelligence to everything he writes. The open-ended essay style enables a form of conjunctural analysis that is sharper and more suggestive than a lot of academic work. He makes thoughtful reference to a range of academic sources to support different lines of argument. And he presents vivid journalistic-style accounts of different empirical events and online “shitstorms” that illustrate the machine’s punitive tendencies.

The dominant theoretical idiom of the book is psychoanalytical; Seymour weaves in theoretical insights with a literary flair that recalls the most illuminating kind of psychoanalytical writing. He wants to understand the combination of conscious and unconscious desires that compel us to give so much of our time and attention to “the social industry”, his preferred term for what is usually described more flatteringly as “social media” (p. 23). He is especially interested in grasping the relationship between desire and writing in a context where writing has been industrialized; acculturated to an experience of literacy where we read quickly and impatiently so that we can scavenge more material to write and comment about. The Twittering Machine is “a story about desire and violence, as well as writing”; a story about a media ecology where “we are, abruptly, scripturient – processed by a violent desire to write” (p. 16).

Unlike most academic and popular commentary about digital media, the technology that interests Seymour most is writing itself. Chapter one begins with a brief history of writing, and he returns to the theme in the final chapter. He emphasizes the materiality of writing: “To begin with knots is just to stress that writing is matter, and that the way the texture of our writing materials shapes and contours what can be written makes all the difference in the world” (p. 22). One of the most attractive qualities of the book is Seymour’s alertness to the dialectical character of technological developments. He avoids the obvious technological determinist trap of making “social media” sound like the source of all our contemporary ills. Yet, he also avoids the inverse trap identified by John Durham Peters (2017), where the determining power of technology is downplayed because of the critic’s wish to show how their own analysis is impeccably free of technological determinist “fallacies”.

Seymour emphasizes the amplifying power of the machine. If it “confronts us with a string of calamites – addiction, depression, ‘fake news’, trolls, online mobs, alt-right sub-cultures – it is only by exploiting and magnifying problems that are already socially pervasive” (p. 15). The “economy of surveillance” underpinning the business models of social media corporations had its antecedents in a tabloid media culture that converts “private experience into profitable information” (p. 87). Islamic State’s savvy use of Twitter as a promotional device “did not create the sumps of misery from which recruits could be found in small Welsh towns, among Swedish teenagers or from put-upon Muslim minorities in the suburbs of the Île-de-France” (p. 187). The phenomenon of online bullying and whispering campaigns accentuates tendencies that have long been part of the culture of office and professional gossip.

Seymour argues that the Twittering Machine has “collectivized” existing social problems “in a new way” (p. 34). The “digitization of capitalism” is disrupting traditional hierarchies where people were punished or socially ostracized for breaching the codes of “an authoritative, venerable text” sanctified by a centralized power structure (p. 37). “Spectacles of witch-hunting and moral panic, and the rituals of punishment are being devolved and decentralized” (p. 37)”. Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle is being reconfigured in a form that is no longer organized around the top-down messaging of “large, centralized bureaucracies” (p. 37). It is re-centered instead around the images we write and disseminate for the social industry. Our collective experience of the social is increasingly encased within the logic of the machine. We script our public identities in a way that anticipates its reward mechanisms and preferred writing idioms. We become abstract data points in big tech’s commodification of our participatory labour. But we also seek to boost our cultural capital in an online “stock market of status” (p. 172) with its own complex hierarchies. Our addiction to the machine becomes “not so much a scourge”, but a “mode of production” in today’s attention economy (p. 54). We all internalize the pedagogy of the entrepreneurial self, even when we use the industry’s platforms to denounce the imperatives of neoliberal selfhood.

The aspect of the machine that most concerns Seymour is its fascist potential. “We should begin to take seriously the possibility that something about the social industry is either incipiently fascistic, or particularly conducive to incipient fascism” (p. 171). He makes the point as part of a discussion of how the far right have successfully used YouTube to create what Rebecca Lewis (2018) calls an “alternative influence network” that blurs the difference between more extremist and more mainstream forms of political identification. The gamification of YouTube algorithms explains something about the rise of the online far right. But if we stop at a one-dimensional technological determinist explanation, Seymour suggests “we miss the real story. The obvious question is, why should neo-Nazi material, or conspiracist infotainment, be so riveting?” (p. 170).

The question again brings into view the place of human desire in shaping our investment in the machine. The online far right exemplifies “an emerging form of techno-political regime” (p. 174) where loosely formed, but potent ideological alliances are brought into being through the shared enjoyment that different groups and individuals get from mocking a gallery of common enemies (“social justice warriors”, “radical feminists”, “cultural Marxists”, “postmodernists”, “social constructionists”). Social life is staged as a horizon of interminable antagonisms. “Trumping the enemy” (p. 171) becomes part of the pleasure of being on the machine. We normalize a mode of social interaction that “magnifies our mobbishness, our demand for conformity, our sadism, our crankish preoccupation with being right on all subjects” (p. 175).

As elsewhere in the book, Seymour’s argument about the machine’s fascist resonances unfolds in a way that lets none of us off the hook. “The mistake would be to see this as someone else’s problem, a problem only affecting obvious villains like trolls, hackers and alt-right bullies” (p. 175). He illustrates the point by citing an online genre familiar to any Twitter user: the “critique-by-quote tweet”, where we publicize the insufferable idiocy or cluelessness of a tweet sent by someone else (and, in doing so, bring attention our own rightness). Seymour is struck by the profound lack of generosity that can animate this very banal form of online interaction. It can transmute into a sadistic form of anti-politics. “Inviting others to join in, we treat disagreement, not as constitutive of society, but as malevolence, idiocy, or the cry of the loser” (p. 175).

Seymour’s discussion of how the affective grip of the machine can inhibit a political ethos of what William Connolly (2005) calls “agonistic respect” is particularly suggestive, because it describes a phenomenon that is also clearly observable in the factionalist tendencies of the online left. It is a topic that is only suggested tangentially in the book. However, as someone whose wider body of work is concerned with questions of left strategy, it’s easy to see how Seymour could have written a different kind of book that dramatized the point in a more polemical way. A similar line of argument is suggested more obliquely in a section that discusses identity politics. Seymour plays with the category in a manner that constructs a much more interesting target than the one usually constructed by reactionary critiques of identity politics on the right and left. It is a vision of identity politics that implicates all users of the machine: “the internal politics of the medium is itself a politics of identity, because it compels us to dedicate more and more time to performing an identity” (p. 100). The argument points to the repressive tendencies of much online politics. We are steered toward a repetitive performance of identity/difference relations that is inseparable from the programmatic logic of the machine, and “the toxic pulsions of identification and dis-identification [that] generate passionate solidarities and sudden explosions of hostility” (p. 99) in online communities. Seymour wonders if we may need, as an antidote, a “form of ‘anti-identity’ politics” that encourages us to “forget ourselves from time to time” (p. 101). The argument recalls a strand of critical political theory that is wary of the concept of identity, articulated in the work of authors like Jacques Ranciere (2009) and the aforementioned Connolly. It perhaps also voices an implicit warning about how the conflicts amplified by the machine, which can often be strategically valuable to the left, might also inhibit the construction of politically effective alliances between different left identities and constituencies.

The Twittering Machine is not a book that sets out to tabulate the pros and cons of digital culture. It is, as its author suggests, written as a horror story, and like the scariest kind of horror story it is set in a world that is very familiar to many of us. And, yet, perhaps some kind of political hope can be taken from its piercing insights into our own complicity with the destructive aspects of life online. There is a humanistic impulse in Seymour’s essay, which asks us to think about our agented role in the birth of a “new nation” (p. 44) that, in its current form, has no need for a demos. The question of what else could we be doing with our time certainly assumes a new political valence after reading this powerful book.

References

Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity.

Connolly, W. E. (2005). Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lewis, R. (2018) “Alternative influence: Broadcasting the reactionary right on YouTube,” Data & Society Research Institute. Available at  https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf (accessed 22 April 2020).

Peters, J. D. (2017). “‘You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong’: On Technological Determinism.” Representations vol. 140, Fall, pp. 10–26.

Ranciere, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.

Sean Phelan is an Associate Professor at Massey University, and currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp.