Record of a Failed Academic, Pt. 1: The Epideictic Rhetoric of Celebrity

these will be of interest to very few of you so please feel free not to read

An ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy. - Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

One of the recurring questions of our current cultural moment is the future of community and shared values in an era of fractured and fracturing attention. Political commentators and media critics have suggested tha…