Why Theory

On this episode, Ryan and Todd cover the topic of structural violence in both U.S. and global contexts. Beginning with an implicit debt to Slavoj Žižek's influential book Violence, the hosts move to clarify the idea as how unwritten dictates of oppression sustain themselves through their being unwritten Where it is easier to see the violence of a thrown punch, for example, structural violence is the invisibility structuring why the punch was thrown. Visible violence often hides its less visible structuring force. For this reason, the hosts discuss the difficulty of depicting structural violence in popular film before moving through examples of structural violences both contemporary and historical.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the recently concluded first season of Apple's Pluribus. Taking on the ideas of duration, repetition, alienation, and isolation presented by the show, the hosts analyze how Pluribus delivers a fascinating treatment of life under contemporary capitalism. The hosts foreground how Pluribus dramatizes the tension between the group and the individual, a deftly staged dynamic that recalls a fundamental psychical torsion that psychoanalysis has long concerned itself with.

On this year’s exploration of the Christmas film genre, Ryan and Todd look to three films from the early-2000s: The Family Stone, Love Actually, and The Family Man (but not Elf, to one host’s disappointment). The hosts theorize two core concepts across these films and, by extension, the Christmas films they have covered in general: deepening the cut in the family dynamic to integrate an antagonism and a Christmas articulation of Shakespeare’s Green World (a concept famously developed by Northrop Frye). The hosts layer these new ideas atop prior Christmas film genre concepts such as the necessity of the castration of the father, the misfit, the rejection of cynicism, and seeing a flawed person as though they are an unwrapped present.
On a personal note (this is Ryan speaking), I just want to take a second to thank everyone for the support over the years. As I mention early in the episode, I recently made it through the tenure process successfully, which is a pretty big career milestone for me. It took an awful lot of work to get tenure, and I couldn’t have found as much depth and meaning in that work without this audience. Thank you, everyone.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the episode--a fading television art. Beginning with a brief history of what early American Broadcasting aestheticized about television as form (e.g., its liveness), the hosts theorize the unique cut of the television episode, an analysis typically reserved for film media. The cut has been aesthetically mobilized by television (as seen in the banal yet artistically fruitful breaks for commercials), though it is precisely this cut dimension of television that is currently being lost in favor of cliffhanger heavy models of recent streaming television series.

In this episode, Ryan and Todd continue their commentaries on Jacques Lacan's seminars by turning their attention to Seminar XIX: ...or Worse. Lacan deepens his consideration of the non-relation in this seminar, further breaking from the signifying chain that had defined much of his earlier and middle work. Lacan also turns more toward mathematics and set theory to ground his discursive inquiry, which requires him to articulate a seemingly new notion of the real. Ultimately, the hosts try to draw out the consequences and coordinates of these dynamic moves in Lacan's late work.

Relevant Announcement! Ryan's book Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life is available for preorder on a number of different websites. Here is the link to the publisher's page:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/seriality-9798216197782/

August 6th is the worldwide release date. GET EXCITED.