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Art: Chomsky protege sees contradiction between Celebrity Worship and Reality TV

Jason Weinberger, long-time Noam Chomsky protege and all-around social critic, has identified a fundamental problem with Amercan culture, which he calls the “celebrity-reality split.” “A culture with both reality TV and celebrity worship is fundamentally unstable,” says Weinberger, “the two simply cannot continue to co-exist. I am looking for an implosion every time I turn on the TV. ” Either we give up George Cloony or or ourselves” says Weinberger. Though working on a book which will elaborate the social mechanism of this contradiction, Weinberger says that this is not enough. He is looking for other ways to capitalize on his awareness such as perhaps a “futures market where you can sell short reality TV shows and buy celebrity figures (or vice versa). “Just because Im a Marxist doesnt mean I want to live in poverty,” he says. Weinberger considers himself to be one of an increasingly disappearing group of holdouts in cultural studies not engaged in the discovery of new methods for aggregating the repressed sexual neuroses of the masses of peoples and cultures world-wide. Weinberger denies that this pursuit is born of his personal frustration stemmig from an inability to locate himself within some of the cultural aggregators such as myspace, or friendster.