One Battle After Another
In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another. The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s…
JAWS at 50: Birth of the Neoliberal Blockbuster
In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg’s film by Scott Ferguson. Far from a simple celebration, the lecture critically situates JAWS as the first genuine New Hollywood blockbuster and the originator of a distinctly neoliberal aesthetic that would come to dominate Hollywood for the next five…
Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby (Part 2)
Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this…
Make America Laugh Again with Maggie Hennefeld
Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “Make America Laugh Again,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune. Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a…
Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby
Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results…
How can novels help us think about money … and maybe even save the planet? (Guest Lecture)
Can novels and, by extension, other works of art help us to think about money and trust in new ways? Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe? Rob Hawkes shares a new version of a talk previously presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of…
Modern Movie Theory: What We Do in the Shadows
Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Robyn Ollett (@robynollett) and Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) to discuss What We Do in the Shadows. Citing Robyn’s interpretations of vampirism in The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film, the cohosts situate What We Do in the Shadows within the vampire’s long history as a…
Power to the People w/ Sandeep Vaheesan
Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) joins Scott Ferguson on the Superstructure podcast to discuss the still-undecided political significance of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their conversation focuses on Vaheesan’s article, “The IRA is Still Being Formed: An Episode in America’s Past Contains Important Lessons for How We Move Forward in Greening the Economy,” published recently in Democracy:…
Adventures in Quantumland w/ Ruth E. Kastner
Scott Ferguson is joined on the Superstructure podcast by Ruth E. Kastner, philosopher of physics and research associate at the University of Maryland. In their conversation, Ferguson and Kastner explore metaphysical resonances between Modern Monetary Theory’s approach to money and Kastner’s “Transactional Interpretation” of quantum physics. Setting the stage for their dialog, Ferguson and Kastner…
Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 3)
In the third installment of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson wrap up their discussion of B.S. Johnson’s novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Rob and Scott tease out the text’s lingering potentials and blindspots in order to problematize…
Bank of the People: History for Money’s Future
By Dan Rohde Who would’ve guessed that the sudden failure of a state-chartered, regional bank would’ve inspired fundamental reckonings with the nature of money and banking? Yet, this is exactly what we see today. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”) and its $200 billion of mostly-uninsured deposits has spurred renewed debates about not only…
Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 2)
In Part 2 of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson explore B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Regarded as brokering a broader transition between modernism and postmodernism, Johnson paradoxically conceded that “to tell stories is to tell lies,”…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
About Superstructure
Superstructure is a left MMT podcast for critical theory, media culture & aesthetics that are committed to unconditional inclusion and intersectional politics.