the Madame Psychosis show (pp. 188–189)

The Academy's founder built spectation into its curriculum, and the phrasing is the tell. Incandenza insisted, over Avril's and Schtitt's objections, on a six-term Entertainment Requirement, on the theory that athletes are "by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort." It's a quietly devastating admission from the man who made the Entertainment: that the tennis he's raising these children to play is, at bottom, a thing to be watched, that the performing body is always also content, and that the border between the athlete and the spectacle he becomes is one his own school has stopped pretending exists. The "deep and special sort" of entertainer is the hedge JOI needs to make the requirement bearable — but the requirement itself concedes that even here, in the temple of doing, they are being trained to be looked at.