Why Theory

In this episode, Ryan and Todd return to their film genre series to discuss the musical through interlocked analyses of The Jazz Singer, Top Hat, The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain, and Carmen Jones. The hosts' theoretical intervention focuses on the musical as vehicle for technological innovation in Hollywood history, as well as how the genre operates as a site for excess becoming integrated into seeming normality.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd put the idea of common sense through the theoretical wringer. Working through examples both banal and world threateningly serious, the hosts present the argument that changes in what we often refer to as common sense fundamentally alter one's relationship to the everyday and that this is vital terrain for articulating a politics of liberation.

In this episode (recorded prior to such events as the Trump - Musk breakup and the National Guard being sent to L.A.), Ryan and Todd discuss Sigmund Freud's essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction." Freud's notion of narcissism clashes with the increasingly commonplace idea of narcissism that is largely informed by a pop-psychology importation of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Freud's notion of narcissism can appear, at times, to be a difficult to make relevant relic of an earlier age. Nonetheless, the hosts attempt to draw out the consequences of Freud's theorization in order to unlock a novel way of currently understanding the present day conversation on narcissism.Val Rohy's book mentioned in the episode.

On this episode, Ryan and Todd work through Sigmund Freud's under discussed Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The hosts first lay out how Freud establishes the group, rather than the individual, as the psyche's primary formation. They then devote time to teasing out the consequences of group dynamics as Freud writes about them in the figures of the Church and the Military, while spending much time talking about the "destructive" character of the couple. Finally, the pair discuss a matter of translation and where the drive (first theorized the year previous to Group Psychology's publication) appears in this short book.

In this episode, Ryan and Todd dedicate a full-length treatment to one of the podcast's most frequently referenced works: Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The hosts move from engaging the term racecraft itself (which, not for nothing, both gets a red squiggle when I write it and the computer keeps separating the two words from each other like it's an error after I insist that it's not) to discussing how and why the book has not had as much mainstream discursive success as others. The hosts tease out the uncomfortable and vital challenge the book puts to readers before finally highlighting the areas in which the Fields' project overlaps with psychoanalytic concepts. Note the below is referenced in the episode: Jacobin interview with Karen and Barbara Fields

In this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the effect artificial intelligence is having on higher education, primarily through commentary on ChatGPT. They first discuss how immediacy and the elimination of labor are key to ChatGPT's appeal before moving to discuss how it produces an idea of what Lacan would term the Big Other and how its ruling logic is one of emergent consensus. They end by arguing that ChatGPT inverts Rick Boothby's axiom that "the Big Other doesn't know" and how that introduces a damaging psychic dilemma.

Kicking off a new Overview sub series of podcasts, Ryan and Todd discuss the influential ideas of Hegelian-Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. After discussing Žižek's defining contribution in bringing the study of Hegel and the study of Lacan together, the two hosts move through three ideas apiece that each influenced their own work and their own thinking.

Ryan and Todd discuss the political implications of the societal tendency toward euphemism. They theorize euphemism ultimately as a tool of the reactionary forces and as a way of blunting the necessity of critique. Euphemisms make the people employing them feel better while furthering the very structure of oppression that the euphemism claims to ameliorate.

Ryan and Todd define and explore the key psychoanalytic concept of the symptom. They contrast the psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom with the therapeutic version and then think about how we must respond to the symptom, including what it means to enjoy one’s symptom. In the discussion of changing the relation to the symptom, they discuss the disaster film as a paradigmatic form of response.

In this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the erosion of the public under contemporary capitalism. Using Jurgen Habermas's influential writing on the public sphere as a jumping off point, the hosts move to discuss different challenges to imagining a vision of the public untethered to capitalism and self-defeating notions of inclusivity.