TODESTRIEB, n. This is a German word and I don’t speak German, let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. Freud originated this word, which means “death drive,” pretty much literally. “Tod” is death and “trieb” is drive, urge, impulse, desire. (Plus, Wiktionary tells me, “sprout.”) Sometimes people translate “Todestrieb” into English as “death instinct,” and I am not getting into the difference between “drive” and “instinct” because I don’t speak Freud, either.
SIDE NOTE 1. How did I manage to get through 8 years of literature grad school without learning anything about Freud? Very carefully.
SIDE NOTE 2. English speakers joke about long German words like they’re so foreign to us, even though English fucking loves compound nouns. Written style in English tends toward spaces or hyphens in things like “veteran employee discount card” or “individual health insurance mandate penalty” and German deletes the spaces, that’s all. Perform some eye-plank removal on yourselves before you try to initiate a dust-mote removal process on your German-speaking neighbors. If you live in a Germanic-language stacked-noun glass house, don’t throw stones.
Anyway, my layperson’s understanding of the death drive is that Freud initially attributed basically everything weird and hinky in human behavior to sex stuff. Or maybe he attributed everything, full stop. All dreams are sublimated sexual desires, blah blah. And then a whole bunch of young men came back from World War I and they couldn’t stop having what we now call post-traumatic-stress nightmares every night, and Freud was like “okay, those are not sex dreams.”
I’m being glib, but revising your previous theories in light of new evidence is good shit. We should all be so willing to admit we were wrong!
So Freud came up with the idea of a death drive to explain our self-destructive urges, our aggression, and our compulsion to relive humiliating, painful, or otherwise traumatic moments. He also sometimes refers to the death drive as “Thanatos,” the Greek God of death, in contrast to “Eros,” the Greek God of love. Freud uses “Eros” as another word for our life drive, the unconscious urge toward life, self-preservation, and of course the (sexual) pleasure that he once thought motivated all our bizarreries.
Is any of this shit even real? Probably not. I mean, it’s useful to know if you’re really into theory, I guess (what’s that like), since a lot of later theorists are responding to or refuting Freud. But the death drive isn’t likely to come up in regular life—except this week, for me, it did! That’s why I had to look up Todestrieb and write this newsletter.
I read this book review by Max Read, discussing Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine and the book’s psychoanalytic view of why we use social media. I haven’t read the book, but the article summarizes three major viewpoints on why we can’t stop posting and scrolling. The first two are as follows:
Liberal and left-wing tech critics like to suggest that we post, even against our own self-interest, thanks to nefarious software design that has been built in service of a multibillion-dollar advertising industry. The right wing has a tendency to blame the incentives encouraged by a hardwired social hierarchy, in which “blue checks” “virtue-signal” to improve their standing within social platforms, even to the point of self-sabotage.
The third is what Richard Seymour proposes: that “the horror must partly lie in the user.” There’s a lot of psychoanalytic terminology in the article, but the gist is that we use social media because it makes us feel bad. So the book explores our self-destructive appetite.
lolllll
We don’t gotta tie ourselves in knots talking about Freud or Lacan to explain why I go on twitter, or why anyone else does, but I wouldn’t expect a book review that begins “I quit twitter” to grasp it. You weren’t having a good time there. Okay, fine. Both the book and its review seem to entirely pass by the idea that, actually, social media is fun sometimes. I go to twitter to see what my friends and favorite authors are up to. I go to twitter to laugh at memes. I go to twitter to share something silly or exciting or just-barely-interesting thing that happened to me, because even before the pandemic I worked from home and sometimes I want to talk to another person. Cat pictures and minor updates from someone’s day aren’t worthless, “stupid and bland.” Those are the stuff of human connection, on or off twitter. Not every water-cooler conversation is scintillating, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes we just wanna know if our coworkers are having a good day.
When I check twitter, I am always hoping for fun, for connection, for creativity. The reason twitter feels bad is because I don’t always find those things. Very often I find news about the climate crisis and the United States becoming a fascist regime. Twitter is, unfortunately, entangled with that second problem—as is every other social network. Also, you know what my maternal grandfather, who died before twitter mattered, spent his last decades on Earth doing? Forwarding me conservative chain email garbage. (Compound noun alert.) The political problem is much, much bigger than which mode of communication we’re using. Not every bad thing on twitter is solely twitter’s fault.
There are times when twitter’s mode of communication does aggravate a problem, such as when my little niche of book twitter, Romancelandia, tries to hash out complex issues in brief tweets. Romancelandia happenings often require their own Wiki with citations and timelines. But you know what? Those arguments also happen on forums and blogs (and at in-person convention panels, back when those existed). Such discussions also usually necessary, because they’re about how people in publishing are wielding their power. Twitter isn’t an ideal medium for conveying nuance, but it seems to me that messiness is just part of public discussion. Yes, you will need to read the original post and several of the response threads in order to know what’s going on. That’s why people are still reading Freud; Lacan and Žižek quote-retweeted him.
And, of course, sometimes twitter brings bad news on a more individual scale, as people report their own misfortunes. That doesn’t make me feel good, either, but I want to know if my friends are suffering, because I’m not a total fucking asshole.
So, does social media make me feel bad? Yes. But it also makes me feel good. You know, just like talking to people. Sometimes people are boring or sad or infuriating, online and off. You don’t know what you’re gonna get until you talk to them. That’s why I keep checking twitter.
And just like with talking to people, you can make choices. You can curate. You don’t have to engage with someone ranting in the grocery store parking lot.* You can just put your groceries in the trunk and move on. You can turn off retweets and make lists of close friends and block the President of the United States.
And yes, there’s a conversation to be had about habit formation and app design and moderation, but I don’t think any useful version of that conversation starts with the assumption that social media usage is universally rooted in self-destructive urges. Sure, sometimes I am scrolling twitter because I don’t want to grade an essay or figure out what to write next, so Max Read’s points about killing time aren’t completely off the mark. But when I worked in a building with other people in it, I used to get stuck in the middle of a task and go make myself an espresso in the department office and chat with whoever I found in the hallway. Was my espresso part of the Freudian death drive, too?
Lastly, even with some curation, sometimes it will still feel bad to be on twitter, because sometimes it feels bad to be alive. But I’m still doing that, and I won’t be deleting my account any time soon.
Credit where credit is due, though, I did get a genuine lol from the line “What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?” in the review. I’d retweet the shit outta that.
*I credit this very useful grocery store parking lot analogy to my friend Ethan.
Good things that were on twitter this week:
I asked people what they call their pets’ usual poses and got the best answers:
“Circle” or “donut” showed up a lot for both cats and dogs. Another common name for a particular cat pose was “trap belly” or “cute trap.” There are many more names in the replies, which I highly recommend perusing.
Nicole Cliffe hosted an incredible conversation about family behavior:
Irulan, Princess Royal, Bene Gesserit-trained @Nicole_Cliffe
If you normalized something (non-awful) because your family did it and then realized it was not, in fact, normal or remotely common, I would love to hear about it.
September 7th 2020 1,179 Retweets 18,162 Likes
Also:
The word 'calque' is a loanword, while 'loanword' is a calque.
September 9th 2020 266 Retweets 1,188 Likes
and
Whoever named frogs got it 100% right. Those things are frogs
September 12th 2020 101,127 Retweets 788,065 Likes
Elsewhere on the internet, some things worth reading:
Jesmyn Ward writing a beautiful, heartbreaking essay about losing her husband, the pandemic, and Black Lives Matter
Carole V. Bell on fat representation and fat acceptance in romance (with recommendations!)
And this week in small-r romance, I read:
Nine of Swords, Reversed (nb/nb, fantasy, novelette) by Xan West. Xan West passed away recently, and it’s bittersweet to read their work after the fact, but I’m glad to be able to. This is quiet and cozy and it’s about two genderfluid mages working through a difficult moment in their relationship. Content warnings: abuse (in the past, some relating to gender identity), non-sexual D/s kink.
No Two Ways (bi f/lesbian f, both cis, contemporary) by Chi Yu Rodriguez. This is a cute, trope-y romance that also deals with biphobia in the queer community. If that’s not a dealbreaker for you, this is set in Manila, which is very cool, and it has one main character getting nominated for a makeover show, only to find that her makeup artist is the girl she just walked away from, so it’s a good setup. Content warnings: a significant amount of biphobia, some transphobia, sex.
Shards of Hope (m/f, both cis and het, sci-fi) by Nalini Singh. I learned a few weeks ago that Nalini Singh is what’s referred to in the writing community as a “pantser,” meaning she does not outline her books/series in advance, and it blew my mind. This action-packed book is the fourteenth in a series and there are, by this point, twenty-eight current or former main characters to deal with, plus all the supporting characters. That it all comes together is a testament to her skill. Plus, in this book it’s the woman character who is ferociously angry, and I love to see that. I also love to see two very traumatized people learning how to feel their feelings while escaping a secret prison and surviving in the wilderness together, so this was a standout in the series for me. Content warnings: emotional and physical abuse, torture, murder, threat of rape, violence, some gore, sex.
I probably read something in Capital-R Romance this week, or several somethings, other than the introductory French textbooks I read every week, and also the million “how to log your seven-your-old into Zoom” remote-schooling emails I am supposed to translate from English to French, but who can remember a whole week these days.
It’s Sunday evening and I haven’t planned tomorrow’s classes, so I gotta go do that. Is that death drive or life drive, do you think?
