While I’m on the subject of Slavoj Žižek, I thought it was worth recording how sections of his Pandemic! 2 reproduce his Hegel in a Wired Brain (oddly combining acknowledgments he is ‘drawing’ on that book while straight forwardly copying & pasting at least one paragraph). But most of the […]
I’m not searching for self-plagiarism but I increasingly spot it when reading. It’s a vague itch of “I’ve read this before” and the search facilities of digital books (Google Books, Kindle etc) makes it easier than ever to confirm. I noticed recently that a paragraph of Zizek’s recent Russia Today […]
This fragment from Xavier de la Porte’s The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland stuck with me because it dramatised an issue which I’ve often found myself reflecting on. How is financial, social and cultural capital transformed into the pleasures of intellectual production? This account of Bernard-Henri Lévy resonated because of how easily […]
I understand the allure which MOOCs can have for those inspired by the idea. Why relegate people to second tier tuition at regional universities when the best teachers in the world could teach everyone remotely at little cost? There are many problems with this vision but one that’s little remarked […]
This is an extract from Social Media for Academics 2. If you like it please consider buying the book! Social media hasn’t created the celebrity academic but it has made it a category to which a greater number and range of people might aspire. It can be a gateway to […]
Why the great disruptive project needs thought leaders, from Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas pg 94: The Hilary Cohens and Stacey Ashers and Justin Rosensteins and Greg Ferensteins and Emmett Carsons and Jane Leibrocks and Shervin Pishevars and Chris Saccas and Travis Kalanicks of the world needed thinkers to formulate […]
From Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas pg 88: Zolli was a kind of MarketWorld producer, standing at the profitable intersection of companies wanting to associate themselves with big ideas, networkers looking for their next conference, and writers and thinkers who wanted to reach a broader audience and perhaps court […]
This argument is made by Razmig Keucheyan in Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory at loc 6004-6028. It’s a thought provoking conclusion to an impressively broad text, even if it leaves me no more enthusiastic about critical social theory than I was at the outset. However, the globalization of critical thinking possesses the […]
This observation from loc 785 of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory by Razmig Keucheyan caught my eye. His concern is with the intellectual implications of a generation’s dominance within critical thought: The new critical theories have not been developed by ‘new’ theorists, if by that is meant biologically young intellectuals. […]
What is it like to be an celebrity intellectual? I thought this was an admirably honest answer by Yuval Noah Harari to the question of how fame has changed his life. It seems obvious he would be far from alone in this experience, suggesting we could reflect on it as symptomatic of […]
In Solar, by Ian McEwan, we encounter the weary figure of Michael Beard, the nobel laureate and serial womaniser who has long lived off his early contribution to theoretical physics. By the time he approaches his 60s, he is a chaotic and directionless man, nonetheless ubiquitously affirmed within the academy and […]
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he makes a number of observations about the importance of brand-name writers which could easily be applied to the growth of academic celebrities within scholarly publishing. From pg 212-214 Brand-name authors are important for two reasons: first, their sales are predictable, and second, they […]
I’m really pleased with this special feature I just finished for The Sociological Review’s website: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a SUPER PROFESSOR! Slavo Zizek: Between Public Intellectual and Academic Celebrity How To Shift Sociological Product: Lessons From the Career of Tony Giddens Academic Celebrity […]
From On Sociology by John Goldthorope, pg 7. This is a really nice description of the intellectual conditions necessary for someone like Žižek to come along and publish 55 books in 14 years: Such a response, it may be noted, is highly congenial to those theorists who would believe that […]
Taking the lead from Peter Walsh’s laudible work on academic celebrity, here’s some lessons from the career of Tony Giddens which I inferred from this excellent review article Peter pointed me towards, coupled with my own reading of Giddens, who was the major protagonist for my PhD: Choose your targets […]
