Why Theory

On this episode, Ryan and Todd return to the topic of the superego to discuss--for the first time at length--the enjoyment particular to it. Superegoic enjoyment is an idea that first appears in Freud though it is not fully developed as a concept until Lacan (briefly) and Žižek (massively). For Žižek, transgression of the written law enables the group identification with a suspension of the law. This is crucial to the superegoic enjoyment we see in, for example, the banality of breaking the speed limit and the horror of militarized police brutally suppressing a protest movement under special orders. Ryan and Todd depart from Žižek's influential and important articulation of superegoic enjoyment by offering that it is not the obscene underside of the law but rather an internalization of the Big Other's demand that is the essential characteristic of the superego's injunction to enjoy.

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.