Episode Transcript
Episode 40.1: Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. My name is Matthew Remski. This is Antifascist Dad Podcast and this is episode 40.1: Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling. Very grateful for your support. I hope this project is bringing some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. You can find me, as always, on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. If you're listening to this bonus episode on Patreon on the day that it dropped, or a little bit afterwards, you know that the Patreon is antifascistdadpodcast. You know that supporters get early access to these part-two episodes, these codas, these continuations of interviews — whatever it happens to be. In this one, I'm going to be picking up a thread left dangling for me after my conversation with Nora Loreto, so you'll probably want to listen to that episode first if you haven't.
So the part of that conversation that stuck with me most — and maybe this is because it's lighter than talking about the content of her reporting — was about how she had to zoom out for her book project and then zoom in for beat reporting, and how one function of that is that it pushes back against the typical fragmentation of liberal capitalist media, which lurches from crisis to crisis in this breathless cycle of disconnected issues.
So the book becomes the anchor of having a coherent analytical framework. And to me this has become as important as remembering I have a body and a family and a home that are larger than my brain and its brain-in-a-jar feelings. And I do hope that, although my model for this little meditation will be the nerdy world of media and content, this examination of two modes of life will be resonant for folks doing many kinds of work or thinking or care.
So I've written a lot of books, and I've resonated with Nora's experience of bouncing between the episodic nature of the news cycle and the longer and slower process of bookmaking.
But I also resonated with that other second world that inspires and provokes the zoom-out book-mind — a world apart from posts and news stubs and memes and scrolling and the various fragments of polycrisis. And that's the world of Marxist interpretation, where there are no disconnected crises.
Now this world, which Nora and I share, isn't finished. It's not empirically correct or complete. It's not a panacea, and it's never clear how its promises will bind together us who are refugees of fragmentation. But it is a world apart. It's inspired by a kind of prophecy. And then it's been built and nurtured for over a century by a global faithful, and it floats like an ark on the flood of capitalist anarchy.
And maybe you'll notice that I'm sounding a little bit religious, and you're right.
I have a reliance on hearing a new world breathing, as Arundhati Roy says, or on the idea that we're in a time of monsters as a new world struggles to be born, as Gramsci wrote as he shivered in a fascist prison cell.
And this same feeling was carved into my mind growing up Catholic, when I felt something uncanny whenever I crossed over the threshold between the world and the church.
Now, of course, there were a lot of problems with going to Catholic school as a kid. There was the distance between the love and justice and peace that Jesus was said to offer and what the school itself could provide. That was obvious. It was a repressed time, a homophobic time, an ableist time, a time before autism awareness, a time before anyone paid attention to secure attachment in parenting or teaching. And the curriculum was equal parts doctrinaire and suppressive in what it encouraged — or discouraged — you from learning.
But there were cracks in that wall, and they came from two types of figures: our librarian, Gary Fitzgibbon, and our choir conductor, Father Armstrong. And I think about them still, forty years on, because they each stood as doorways out of Catholic hypocrisy and claustrophobia.
Father Armstrong lived for music and would conduct us in throes of ecstasy that could flip into rage as mistunings or missed entries built up, but then just as easily flip back into a kind of raw joy.
By contrast, Gary was even-keeled and had this serious serenity. He was always there to quietly point you to a book you'd never thought could exist, a book that could take you out of your perspective into an unknown view of things — that could take you out of the episodes of your life and into a fuller story. I think he wanted us to know that the world of knowledge carried with it great themes, but also great responsibilities. And he was also a little skeptical that we could enter it in good faith. Later I found out that he sat on the board of the Centre for Inquiry of Canada, which is a think tank for skeptics. So that's fitting.
Now, that world I lived in was split between school subjects and church rituals. And there are many aspects to this split, but the one I want to concentrate on is the one that came up in my conversation with Nora, where she's describing playing the organ for four masses on Sunday and between each discussing the news and politics with a pastor in the parish kitchen. I felt something similar every day, because I was going back and forth between the math and science and geography worlds and then hours in the cathedral with ancient texts and songs. English class was somewhat of a bridge between the two. But the general split was between a disconnected granularity and a vast wholeness. That sliver of me that is atheist chalks this up to the difference between reality and fantasy. But I think there's something more than that, and it's something I try to keep alive.
Here's where I feel it in my own unconscious instincts. After a day in the content mines — reading, analyzing, learning, writing, checking, editing, scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling for bits of usable data — I transition to partial-work mode while doing some childcare hours. Meaning I can do paperwork while supervising some things while also engaging with the social feeds. Of course, that all depends on what the kid needs and wants, so it's uncertain how that pans out. But the day continues in its fragmented way until I head out for an hour at the pool.
And when I step out of the house and meet the hour that I'm free, I can sometimes touch grass, as they say. The world is enough to turn my brain off. But sometimes this doesn't work, and the trees themselves seem to vibrate with the sputtering news, and music doesn't seem to help. So on many evenings, when it feels like I need a downer drug after the upper, I kind of replicate this thing that I did in school — going from this busy, detailed work on things that seemed unconnected, and then the stuff that was happening in the church, the larger themes, the larger stories. And so I set my podcast player to play the daily mass recorded at St. Francis of Assisi in Des Moines, Iowa.
It's simple and sober. There's only one priest in the rotation whose voice I can't stand — he's really self-absorbed, performative, he drones on and on — and so I have to make do with the trees and the wind on those days.
Now, I don't even know how I found this channel. There are dozens of daily masses on the feed, and I don't even know if I like this one the best. But what I do know is that it stops the fragmentary scrolling feeling with something nearly the opposite: a coherent vision of history. It doesn't even matter that I don't like many aspects of that vision, or that I don't understand it, or that I'm constantly pushing away at the politics I hear at the edges of it, or that I have to apply the coherence myself when the gears grind between Old and New Testament readings and whatever the deeply confused St. Paul has to say. I am nourished by something about its scale and continuity.
And I think that these qualities, baked into my brain at an early age, have given me ballast. If I am a religious person, it's not out of belief, but out of the need to enter another world not characterized by fragmentation and disconnected crisis — a world with a central story to which everything clings, finding its own chapter.
So here's a funny story about how the vernacular of social media, I think, is aware of this double world, the need for a double world. And it expresses it through the term "deep dive," which is meant to convey that someone has gone farther than the surface details to find something hidden and complicated and also often nefarious. Now the problem of the phrase getting captured by a fragmenting medium is that the proposition becomes its own kind of brand.
Recently I did a series of commentaries on Instagram about these Catholic Dominican nuns in Ann Arbor who have become virally popular through clips from their very wholesome-seeming podcast, which is called Open Mic — Dominican Sisters Open Mic. And I didn't find anything special by doing the bare minimum of reviewing their actual long-form content that the clips are pointing to. These are clips about the jolliness of convent life — playing ultimate Frisbee and board games — but they were concealing their dogmatic bigotry against trans people and their outdated fascination with anti-communism. Nonetheless, tons of commenters on Instagram thanked me for the deep dive. But this was only nine minutes of programming in total, about 1,500 words. So the public notion of that zoomed-out perspective is not exactly rising to the level of the book.
Now, in digging around for who has looked into this micro-macro tension — what it implies in media and what it does politically — a number of pathways led me back to a 1991 book called Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. It's by Shanto Iyengar, who is a Stanford University political scientist and media researcher. And in this book — not through tweets or reels — he establishes a distinction between what he calls episodic and thematic framing, to demonstrate how television news shapes public attributions of responsibility for social problems.
So here's a key paragraph from the opening that contextualizes the political impacts of episodic versus thematic framing.
"This book is about the way in which television news framing of political issues influences the public's assignment of responsibility for those issues. Responsibility is a central concept in American political culture. We believe that individuals are responsible for their own actions and that they should be held accountable for the consequences of those actions. But at the same time, we believe that the government is responsible for the general welfare and that it should be held accountable for the state of the nation. The evidence presented in this book demonstrates that the manner in which television news frames political issues has a significant effect on the public's attribution of responsibility."
Okay, there's a lot going on there, but there are two things I want to pick out before going on to the main event of the episodic versus the thematic.
First of all, why does Iyengar concentrate on television? And is this relevant today? I think it is, because the question tracks back to the basic observation of Marshall McLuhan. Like McLuhan, Iyengar emphasizes that television news has an overwhelming dependence on pictures of individuals that illustrate headline stories. And because images of specific people are more visually compelling than abstract data or policy discussions, the medium naturally gravitates toward the episodic mode.
For Marshall McLuhan, television was what he called a cool medium, requiring high audience participation to complete the visual narrative. This is unlike hot media — print or radio — which delivers dense, linear information demanding passive reception. Television pulls the viewer into a state of involvement through its incompleteness. The medium doesn't tell you what to think; it draws you in emotionally and sensorially. And for it to focus on the individual face is personally compelling — a virtual magnet for psychological projection.
And this is where Shanto Iyengar's foregrounding of the personal, especially in relation to personal responsibility, shines through. Because his line is: we believe that individuals are responsible for their own actions and that they should be held accountable for the consequences of those actions. That's his summation of the American point of view on accountability.
Now, there's a sociological term for this concentration: responsibilism. It describes the project of relocating responsibility for social problems from collective structures to individual actors, especially under neoliberalism. And it's a pervasive reasoning we see in many different places. Poverty becomes a failure of personal initiative. Poor health becomes a failure of lifestyle choices. Precarious employment becomes a failure of skill development. And so this corporatized state — which is just ubiquitous across the Global North — erodes social supports while simultaneously intensifying moral pressure on individuals to manage what are structurally produced conditions. And it's a noxious lie that, in my opinion, over time becomes a form of mass psychological abuse.
I'm sure that you, dear listener, have been asked for decades to be vigilant about your electricity consumption. Turn off the lights, replace older appliances with energy-efficient ones, replace incandescent bulbs with LEDs. And then a data centre moves into your neighbourhood and instantly guzzles more power than the entire city uses — to perform work that nobody asked for and that threatens their employment — and gets away with it without doing the bare minimum it takes to acquire permits or local approval. Nothing.
UC Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown says that neoliberalism carries responsibility for the self to new heights, producing a subject who accepts responsibility for the consequences of choices amid a range of options — but regardless of whether those options were ever genuinely available. And so this launders structural injustice as personal failure.
So back to Shanto Iyengar. First, he defines these two streams of media approach, which really name the dynamic that Nora and I were discussing.
Episodic framing takes the form of a case study or event-oriented report and depicts public issues in terms of concrete instances — for example, the plight of a particular homeless person or a specific terrorist act.
And I think those examples are great, especially now, in their diversity of scope. The unhoused person is routinely individualized in news and police action. And then through the concept of the episode of terrorism, something like the Hamas attack on October 7 is said to be one moment of psychotic violence emerging out of nowhere.
Thematic framing, by contrast, places public issues in some more general or abstract context and takes the form of a takeout or backgrounder report directed at general outcomes or conditions.
So Iyengar ran experiments to explore how television news framing influences political consciousness. Subjects were randomly assigned to view reports utilizing either episodic or thematic frames, and researchers then measured their attribution of responsibility for various social issues, categorizing responses into individual or systemic factors.
Here are some summary quotes from the findings. The overwhelming dependence of television news on pictures of individuals to illustrate headline stories deflects those who watch it from demanding governmental accountability and action. And this contributes to the trivialization of public discourse and the erosion of democratic accountability.
And then, by contrast: thematic framing leads viewers to attribute responsibility for national issues to the government and to public policy. This moves the viewer from an individual-centred view to understanding issues as collective or systemic outcomes.
So I do episodes for this podcast, but I try to connect them to a larger theme. I'm using the Instagram reel format as a boot-camp training ground for ideas I'll be stringing together into essay form and then book form.
And I feel the two modes in parenting. The ten-year-old is currently fascinated with medieval culture and warfare, and so he tracks the details of the cassocks and weapons and helms and gauntlets. And then he asks me for the broader theme of what the Hospitallers did, what they fought for, how they understood their place in the vast and broken Christian firmament. And then we can talk about West Asia, which of course leads to discussions of what's happening today.
Away from the world of words altogether, I also feel the small, automatic, nearly unconscious acts of love and care that my partner and I show each other, and the kids and the pets and the garden, and how they build up the larger story of a life together.
And I feel my Catholic ancestors and my Marxist mentors pointing at both modes of production — you created love, you created labour — and together they show me that these build something whole that no one should be allowed to chop up and sell off for parts.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
