I just found out that Benjamin Studebaker was the co-founder of What's Left podcast (and now we're starting our own called "Why Left?")
Reflecting On The Origin of Theory Underground and Its Serendipitous Relation to Benjamin Studebaker
That's right,
was co-host and founder of What's Left? podcast with Aimee Terese.If you are like me, then you don’t have time to be bothered with who is who in the world of podcasts. For me there are only a few podcasts that exist, and I have barely any knowledge of what actually goes on “there.” I prefer books, and only track down podcast appearances when I want to hear an interview with a specific author.
I’m not trying to disparage podcasts at all though. In fact, I think almost every friend group should have a podcaster in their midst. Podcasts are the synthesis of phone calls and radio — they’re awesome.
Some people feel like the proliferation of podcasts are a curse adding to the constant sense of FOMO and TMI. Those people had better just get over it because FOMO and TMI are mainly due to a failure to develop basic media literacy and basic value prioritization. But that’s another topic.
What I want to focus on right now is this news about the early days of What’s Left?. And I want to do so for people who are, like me, out of the loop.
Some of you don't know about What's Left?. I'm curious to know if anyone from my network actually does know about it. I've said before that we have a lot of Why Theory? fans but not a lot of people who used to listen to What's Left?… but for anyone who was listening to both 5 years ago, TU will make a LOT more sense.
What was What’s Left?
Unlike Why Theory? with Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley, What’s Left?’s focus was a scathing materialist critique of the political scene and of, especially, what calls itself “left” in the United States. Aimee Terese was the memester “outsider” from Australia with charisma and a delightful death drive hellbound on exposing the hypocrisies of those Democratic candidates and pundits who were working to undermine the Bernie campaign. Benjamin Studebaker’s role on the podcast was the voice of reason and theory. He would talk her back to Earth, or roll out a history lesson to help contextualize things.
To hear what their dynamic was like from before they started What’s Left? you can listen to this ancient episode of Dead Pundits Society when Aimee and Adam (the co-hosts) had Benjamin on. There’s a killer bit in this episode about materialist vs idealist theories of racism.
Eventually Benjamin and Aimee parted ways with seemingly no hard feelings. They simply had changed in ways too substantial after Super Tuesday in 2020. If not for Benjamin leaving when he did, I would have discovered him shortly thereafter, which would have changed everything. So I guess I’m grateful everything worked out the way it did.
How did What’s Left? become relevant to me?
When I had given up on politics and activism in 2020, I checked out "post left" content and felt like it was lacking. I went to it ready to learn, expecting that it would be a quality alternative or antidote to the problems I had experienced trying to organize a working class movement for the left.
It was disappointing. Both the What's Left? and Red Scare podcasts having monopolized the term “post left” was enough for me to avoid that label. Not because I lack a feeling of kinship with others who have been through similar things, and not because I think talking to people who are excluded from left-only discourses is unimportant. No, the issue was the lack of rigor concerning fundamental problems, questions, and concepts. Those podcasts are/were, ultimately, political entertainment.
What I saw were people becoming captured by their audiences. I saw people that were made slaves to the duopolistic media machine (“so it's not the left? Then it must be the right! We must become anti-left!”). I saw that the implicit theory of social change Aimee was operating under was still the old model of smug influencers who make examples of others by shaming and ridiculing.
Now, some of that might be necessary. I admit to a great deal of jouissance seeing Aimee trigger or dunk on the leftoids. If you don’t find these kinds of tweets “fun” you simply didn’t spend enough time doing politics before you burnt out (or you never burnt out… which I would argue means you never tried to do politics)
But can we resist the worst tendencies of the attention economy? Are there ways to counter those tendencies while still harnessing other aspects of the medium?
These questions grew out of me because I had already felt myself becoming overly-influenced by my relatively small audience at Theory Pleeb.
Those tendencies were something I felt long before I had the theory to conceptualize them. What tendencies, you ask? Perhaps there is no better summary of the issue at stake than Studebaker’s callout of Vaush over the weekend at TUCON:
“Vaush, whose real name is Ian Kachinsky, operates an enormously popular YouTube channel that thrives on controversy and agonism. Vaush continuously polices the discourse for his customers, telling them what's cool and what's not cool, who is okay and who is not. What he really sells is smugness and contempt. The further he goes with this routine the more he is utterly dominated by it. He has completely lost the ability to think for himself. He is constantly seeking to have the right line on every bit of political and cultural minutia the algorithm commands him to discuss. He cannot choose his own topics or even take his own positions on the topics he discusses. He is a slave of the market, of the audience, of the algorithm.”
This is why, especially between 2018 and 2019, I felt a war occurring between my desire to contribute positively to (the simulacrum of) a movement and my intellectual/moral integrity. This had less to do with the fact that the “movement” wasn’t going anywhere and more to do with me becoming rewired by the medium.
How perfect that Studebaker used Vaush as his example, considering the fact that I was there at the dawn of Vaush’s channel. I was watching Vaush before he had 20k subscribers (he now has 483k). I could see the trajectory Vaush and I were on. I knew what I would have to do to be more successful in that scene.
I pray endless thank yous to a non-existent God for saving me from the algorithmic capture of the dead left (with all due respect to both!).
Origins of Theory Underground
As early as 2019 I was realizing my own implicit theory of social change was a product of the cultural duopoly combined with residue of assumptions belonging to the old media model (Overton window, influencership, consensus, etc).
I was a breadtuber, i.e. making left content during the Bernie era. Influencership is a natural way of playing a non-passive (Baudrillard would say “pseudo-active”) role in the medium. But such pseudo-activity destroys the conditions of genuine thinking – which is why Benjamin Studebaker went on to say, “There is perhaps no one today who is less free. Even wage laborers in desperately poorer circumstances have more freedom to think for themselves than Vaush does.”
That is exactly why I chose a slow-growth approach to my project, choosing to work at Amazon rather than depend on a Patreon.
In those early days after closing down the Theory Pleeb Patreon, I wished that there was a place where I could go to meet others who were not simply interested in seeing one of the "two sides" dunk on the other. A place where people were committed to tackling fundamental problems, questions, and concepts in an attempt to understand the situation.
I wanted something like a post-left university to emerge from the underground. Like Platypus Affiliated Society, but not just from the standpoint of the old left trying to sublate every left tendency. This is absolutely essential work that must be done, but dialectics does not only apply within Marxism-socialism-anarchism-social democracy-communism… dialectics would also work through thinkers who never shared any of the assumptions or goals of those movements.
I wanted a place where all that gets included alongside Heidegger, Lacan, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Levinas, Burnham, Ehrenreich, Arendt, THE ANCIENTS, and so many more heavyweights who absolutely must be worked through in order to come to an updated understanding of our situation.
To that end, and in the interest of a secure founding, the first course at Theory Underground was one guaranteed to not attract many people at all. We deliberately chose an obscure author, not good for SEO at all, the topic for which was equally alien to the current scene. As interested as people are to talk about the corruption of the university system, there is little interest in fleshing out Ideals against which to measure actually existing institutions. That’s why we chose The Idea of the University by Karl Jaspers.
The Idea is, in short, a community of truth seekers trying to approximate universal truth across their differences in field-specific and experiential/existential standpoints and backgrounds.
Karl Jaspers is keen on the fact that both politics and business work against the Idea of the University—often from opposed sides. A professor or admin might be well aware of the ways that politics foil the genuine striving for truth, while never being critical of the coercive influence of business.
More often though it is assumed that truth is generally left, i.e. liberal, progressive, or socialist, and that the only real issue is business “neoliberalizing” the institution.
Platypus Affiliated Society inspired me a great deal, though as Cutrone pointed out in one of his first interviews with me at TU, they don't tend to focus on the French side of theory. He framed it as though TU is the French theory side whereas Platypus is the German theory side. I think this is a natural conclusion from a quick look at our early catalog, if not paying attention to the important role of Jaspers, Burnham, and Ehrenreich, who are German or American. But yes, with that said, TU is where you go for some Lacan, Levinas, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Baudrillard.
From my standpoint though the goal of TU has always been a non-dogmatic and non-sectarian approach to understanding the situation, one that would not steer clear of a thinker because they are considered problematic or “not left.” As anyone who took the course I taught on Being and Time will be able to tell you, I think Heidegger bracketing out or deconstructing most of the operating assumptions of both liberalism and socialism while trying to reconceptualize the human situation is an essential aspect of what makes his work valuable to us still to this day.
Though Platypus, with its slogan “the Left is dead, long live the Left!” drew me in, and I took a ton of inspiration from the organizational feat it has become, my main concern was that it was not dialectical enough. Contradictions do not just exist within the Left!
If the Left is dead, then the contradictions that must be worked through in order to understand our moment would not only be “within the Left.”
was someone I was paying attention to at that time. He argued that to be like Marx today meant being anti-left. Chris Cutrone at The Platypus Affiliated Society came close to agreeing, though he will say that Marxism is a critique of socialism from the left.Cryptofash, before becoming the author of the Antileftist Marx Substack, had first been a reply guy in the What's Left? community. I wanted to see Cutrone and Cryptofash talk through their different perspectives on Marx and the Left.
I wasn't able to make it happen, because Cryptofash wanted to maintain anonymity. So I brought Cutrone on for a contradiction conversation, wherein I tried to represent what I took to be the Cryptofash position.
This was the beginning of what became an epic series of conversations with Chris Cutrone (culminating in the course he is currently teaching at TU called Introduction to Marxism). Thinking through the contradiction between Cryptofash/What’s Left? and Platypus helped me figure out what it was I was seeking: An institution for working class intellectuals who are more interested in understanding the contradictions that constitute our reality than simply the correct definition and history of the term “left” or trying to understand only the contradictions that happened “within it.”
As I said in my critique of Cryptofash (and by extension What's Left?) Marx did not only rail against the left as the nice face of capitalism. The real task Marx set himself to was a ruthless critique of everything in existence, done from the shoulders of giants in the French, British, and German philosophical traditions.
This thinking-inside-out (immanent critique) of all the most current, formative, or fertile theories, if done today, would look very different from Marx's time. Marx, if born today, would not just read what is on the Platypus syllabuses—he would also read Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard… et al., and run the contemporary debates and assessments of the situation through the nexus created between those powerhouses being put in dialogue w
Too many Marxists want to act like that stuff is all just idealist clap trap. They haven't set themselves to the task of tarrying with the failures of the Left—many of the most crucial being based in representation and its complications given the new media environment that forever changed the coordinates of social change.
In the same way that Platypus only looks “within” “the Left,” Aimee Terese, after severing ties with Benjamin Studebaker, was only focused on positions and relationships happening outside of the Left. In both cases though “Left” still functions as the master signifier, the thing that orients and quilts the entire constellation of their thinking, discourses, and options.
The genuinely critical thing would be to suspend the signifier “Left” while deconstructing its signified, which is itself only intelligible in relation to others—i.e. “Left” necessarily bases itself in opposition to a scapegoated Right, or otherwise takes up a resolute stance in one or more of the following mutually exclusive binary terms: past vs. future, hierarchy vs. equality, order vs. chaos, liberty vs. subjugation, democracy vs. authority, et al.
An entire presuppositional framework from the early days of capitalism must be deconstructed (as Cryptofash started to do in the early days of his Substack), while at the same time the “cultural” left/right framework of the late 20th century also needs a serious deconstruction. That’s something I’ve been working at since 2020. It’s something TU was founded to do. It’s why my first book had “critical media theory and culture war” in the subtitle, along with the term “timenergy” which is what, ultimately, gets us to the stakes of the current situation.
The current situation is that of the PCFM: Post Class Fractured Mass. Something that cannot be understood or organized without serious time spent doing the work we have been engaged with at TU for the last year and a half of critical media theory, professional managerial critique, and timenergy theory.
In summary, Theory Underground comes out of a response to something that was seen as lacking in the underground theory scene, because at the time that I needed a place to go for the kind of research referenced above, I had nowhere to go. What’s Left and Platypus were the closest things I could find besides entities I had already tried out such as The New Centre, or supposedly new ideologies that diagnose our situation such as Alexander Dugin or Metamodernism. But for some reason Platypus and What’s Left? had a bigger impact on me during the initial stage of my burnout.
This is why it’s crazy to discover that Studebaker was the co-founder of What’s Left? podcast. Over the last year of getting to know him I have always come away impressed. Now that everyone got to hear his keynote at TUCON on day 3, I think everyone feels that way.
As my wife Ann said to me a couple of days after TUCON, “I already knew Benjamin was a thoughtful, rigorous, and charismatic guy… but I had no idea his politics are as close to our own.”
“Close” is an important word here. Benjamin and I have at least one essential contradiction between our perspectives so far, and it is ultimately the one he would have had to work through with Aimee if they could have worked through their contradictions on What’s Left? at the time that she was becoming anti-left.
There is almost nothing more offensive to say to a leftist than “Democrats ARE the Left, and all your disavowal does is provide their antifa shock troops with some kind of fantasy that they are something other than puppets for the actually existing American left.” That is basically the position that Aimee and Cryptofash had taken by the time I was checking out their stuff. And that is very close to the position I have held since that time, though for different reasons.
In close, Theory Underground exists as a response to a demand created by a lack of something I was looking for when I was first drawn to Platypus and What’s Left?. If Benjamin Studebaker had still been on What’s Left? when I checked it out, chances are there would be no Theory Underground today, and I would have instead become a deeply invested listener, hanging on to their every word as they worked through that contradiction.
Instead, I’ve spent the last four years base-building the foundation for something that will hopefully allow that contradiction to work itself out, not just between Benjamin and I, but within and between all of us.
You can check out Benjamin and I talking about this today on a livestream that will launch our new podcast called Why Left? linked below.
Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
fuck yeah dude.