Welcome to the first post on Icon Index Symbol, where we'll be attempting to see whether a graduate student really can make an academic career implode by mixing glib dismissal of powerful thinkers, snark about colleagues, and Google. Anything after that little experiment - from organizing our thoughts to getting feedback from as-yet-unoffended readers - will be an unanticipated but very welcome bonus.

We're gearing up for quals in the next couple of weeks, so we're going to use this space as a place to work out some ideas and trajectories. Plus: blogging what we've read is as close to instant gratification as academia gets - which is, as the psychiatrists say, "helpful" to us. We've got some Nietzsche, some Habermas, some Lacan, some Aristotle, some rhetorical criticism, and a little bit of new media technologies. So we figure we'll get to like two of those and then - mid-route to blogging - go check out what's happening over at The Superficial (the metaphor alone blows us away).

The rest of the posts will be of a form similar to: "no seriously, everyone on CRTNET is dying to hear about the rally you've organized for this year's NCA... because marching through freezing Chicago streets is right above going to the bar with old friends". So you can already tell there's no way this is going to go poorly.

References:
* The Superficial