The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour review – escape from dystopia
Twitter, texts, email … the psychological needs driving today’s vast and risky digital ‘writing experiment’
The notoriety of “postmodernism” has waxed and waned over the past 40 years. While a frequent reference point in the cultural criticism of the 1990s, the term was falling out of use during the first decade of the 21st century. Today, however, in the context of Brexit, Donald Trump, re-energised identity politics and the chaos of social media, it has reappeared as a diagnostic category for rationalists seeking to understand what ails the west.
For intellectuals such as Steven Pinker and a cluster of neoconservatives associated with the online magazine Quillette, the “postmodern left” has injected relativism and self-pity into liberal democracies, with all of the results we see around us today. Few appear to have any clue what postmodernism ever referred to, nor any desire to find out. As Richard Seymour writes in one typically excoriating aside, “their ‘postmodernism’ is a straw figure, the bogey-scapegoat of anglophone centrists losing an argument”.