For more than a year, this episode was hidden behind a What’s Left? paywall,1 but it’s one of my favorites and I wanted to share it with everybody.
But before you listen, check out my latest article on “The Work of Content Production” over at Russ Smith’s always-excellent Splice Today:
Although separated by enough world and time, Shandy, Suzuki, and I all found ourselves in the same business: creating “discourse drivers” that fuel the ravenous content machine. Whether it’s a sharp detail in a game or a fresh perspective on Oliver Anthony—whoever that is, aside from a carrot-topped country singer who shares my Christian name—we’re all just filling the void with more void. When something new emerges, I don’t care what it is. I’m not interested in the object—the “thing itself”—but rather the potential takes it can generate. Because that’s what it’s all about: keeping the gears of discourse grinding, even when there’s no grist for the mill, even when you’re reduced to baking that content bread with sawdust rather than flour.
The more I ponder the work of Yu Suzuki, the more I find our similarities to be a mocking testament to the absurdity of our crafts. We don’t indulge in what we produce because to do so would be an admission of defeat—a plunge into an abyss of meaningless content. We create because it’s what we do, even if what we’re assembling is a universe of carefully crafted distractions: “Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed,” as John Barth writes in “Lost in the Funhouse.”
Suzuki and I are both willing participants and helpless captives, circling around the world of content in an endless waltz that offers no promise of resolution, only fleeting moments of insight into our self-imposed exile from meaning. Over to Barth, then, to bring it all back home: “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not.” Perhaps R.P. Blackmur, that great unlettered critic, got it right when he said this of feckless Henry Adams’ world-beating meditations on failure and futility: “Thought asks too much and words tell too much; because to ask anything is to ask everything, and to say anything is to ask more.” Yes, yes—and so it goes, until it doesn’t.
In this 70-minute episode, I went deeper into my then-recent Compact and UnHerd essays on historical progress, regress,, and statis. The outro music is "End of History" by Bad Religion.2
Suggested Reading
Bateman, "History Doesn't Repeat Itself," https://compactmag.com/article/history-doesn-t-repeat-itself
Bateman, "It's not the end of the world," https://unherd.com/2021/12/who-cares-about-the-end-of-the-world/
C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Political Philosophy and History
Interview with Quentin Skinner
Michael Sugrue discusses Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life
Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question
Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft
E. H. Carr, What Is History?
Both there and here, the paywall is a necessary evil that drives paid subscriptions. The What’s Left? paywall worked so effectively — and people are so passive about cancelling these things — that the show still has 162 subscribers paying $700 a month in spite of the fact that WL ceased posting episodes a year ago (I no longer take a share from that projects, but it continues to amaze me as it carries on in true Schrodinger’s Podcast style: alive and dead, defunct and boasting an active subscription base). Imagine if Chapo, which pulls in $180k a month, ceased to produce new episodes. How many years would it take to run that “too big to fail” operation to failure? I’d hazard a guess that it would be earning $5k a month even if this went on for a half-decade, and I’d love to see it. Stay-in-bed work, getting to lay down while you’re earning some pay.
Also check out this piece on BR.
The Work of History and the Work of the Future