More notes on cool

Posted on | September 13, 2006 | 2 Comments

It’s taken me a long time to get my notes together from Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool, but I want to share some of them here given how much use I’ve made of them in the conference papers and grant applications currently occupying my time. I didn’t realise how fitting Geert’s description was going to be of my own experience of reading the book – i.e. what a bitch it is to read when you’re on a bus & carting it around in a backpack for months on end. Its sheer mass makes you want to be done with it as soon as possible. Yet this has a poignancy, as if the density of the ideas it tries to convey is physically as much as mentally challenging. It speaks too of Liu’s interest in the possibilities for humanities education in a culture enamoured with competing types of superficial reading practices:

“The tendency of text-centred scholars to dismiss new media and browsing as merely facile practices of knowledge is itself facile without serious consideration of the unique kinds of thought—and also anti-thought—native to the delightful new media. The issue is not surface versus depth, in other words, but surface versus surface. Which surface or interface should the humanities adopt to teach and delight most effectively?” (p. 320)

That said, the second Amazon review also matches my reading of the book: to say that it could have done with an edit is an understatement. But this also made me think that it was almost a perfect rendition of the position Liu sought to posit. As Geert says, the book refuses the packaging and the hype of so much new media commentary, and instead becomes a fitting reflection of internet research, indeed the research process itself. Through so much unstructured, unremarkable and almost pointless speculations, one stumbles upon a complete gem of an idea to make it all worthwhile. Here are some examples.

“If the network is our contemporary intuition of infinity, then its boundlessness is matched by an equally infinite, equally unreal hunger for security—indeed, for what amounts to a metaphysics of security (paradoxically secure yet connected) compensating symbolically for all the other vulnerabilities of life in the post-cold War era of global connections: immune systems, national borders, jobs, and so on. This is the fundamental meaning of the password that is the first information demanded of a user when logging onto a system… the sign of the metaphysics of security.” (p. 42)

This is a point my New Media students keep returning to in class. How do we understand the way that online communication makes us simultaneously secure (we can Google that potential love interest) and exposed (they can Google us)? In what sense is the blurred distinction betwen public and private life online changing our very understanding of self-presentation, friendship, intimacy and trust? How can we support downloading free content, and demand access to any information we desire at our earliest convenience, yet resile from the intrusion of surveillance by any interests bigger than the individual, like government or big business?

Meanwhile, in the world of work, which is Liu’s greatest concern, this paragraph could have been written about the micropolitics currently unfolding in the endless course review meetings I’m involved in, especially as the imminent Research Quality Framework begins to impact on academics’ careers:

“As spelled out by the refrain in the business books, ’some’ will not adapt: that is, not all workers will be willing or able to commit to lifelong learning, ever quicker just-in-time production, riskier evaluation and pay schemes pegged to team- and company-wide performance, and, in general, what has been called management by stress. In middle management, similarly, increased spans of control and flexibility are accompanied by the classic symptoms of corporate demassing: multi-tasked overwork, anxiety over non-traditional management roles (what exactly is a facilitator?), worry about late career retraining, broken faith in the firm, and so on.” (p. 46)

Liu describes how contemporary workplace culture encourages empathy with management in spite of hierarchy, such as when the Professor and Head of School takes you out for coffee to celebrate your first book and spends the time explaining how unenviable his job is: “the New Class, in its internal confusion of manager and labourer identities, is itself out of joint with traditional class logic, in the end it is how blue-collars and white-collars alike are assimilated to the class of those who have no class.” (p. 63)

How does my generation cope with this shift in labour ideology? Not by resistance or belief in an alternative lifestyle (as the Boomers apparently did in the 60s, or so the story goes) but by adopting a cool workstyle: “…cool is the shadow ethos of knowledge work. It is the ‘unknowing,’ or unproductive knowledge, within knowledge work by which those in the pipeline from the academy to the corporation ‘gesture’ toward an identity recompensing them for work in the age of identity management.” (p. 78)

Apart from this description, which culminates in the idea of petty kink I’ve mentioned before, Liu seeks to understand the stakes at risk in cool’s ‘bad attitude’, its anti- or nonpolitics. Put one way: “Cyberlibertarianism is in-your-face individualism, except when it would rather lose itself in the anonymous mass.” (p. 261) Put another:

“…its politics swing upon the frictionless pivot-point of an immaculate ‘individual’ attached by no more than a single wire to such community paradigms with entrenched political histories as the left’s ‘inner-city neighbourhood’ or the right’s ‘family values.’ It is hard to fix the state of liberty idealized by cyberlibertarianism when the political battle lines are displaced into a virtual state where the relation between the individual and the collective can be terminated at the press of a key.” (p. 262)

Reading this sheds light on my scepticism towards the MySpace Valentines Day card sender from earlier.

“…at the moment of cool, knowledge workers (not to mention students training for knowledge work) regress to ‘adolescence,’ which is less a dismissive epithet than a structural description of individual as opposed to social archaism. Even when knowledge workers have graduated and gone to work, ‘cool’ is how they instantly retreat to their mental ‘room’ instead of joining the broader, public history of peoples resistant to rationalization.” (p. 305)

These are just some of the pages of quotes I’ve noted, and I’ll return with more when I come to write the CSAA paper. Liu’s book is immensely important for thinking about the big shifts taking place in labour politics from the unique perspective of the humanities. If we live in a society “where the sun—which is to say, the computer screen—never sets on the empire of work from time zone to time zone (or, within personal life, workday to worknight)” (p. 262) we need more voices that can clearly articulate new media’s far from innocent role in our own enslavement. As Liu puts it:

“In the era of the Whole Earth Corporation, ‘information wants to be free’ is ultimately how we are no longer allowed to say ‘we’ want to be free.” (p. 69) And yet “knowledge workers in cubicles know in their bones, especially their carpal bones, that information technology does not grant “unlimited power and disembodied immortality.” (p. 472)

The amount of time we go on believing the fantasy is up to us.

Category: Reading, Research, Work

Comments

2 Responses to “More notes on cool”

  1. Adam Gall
    September 13th, 2006 @ 9:49 pm

    Thank you for this post. I was not familiar with this book before reading about it here, but what you’ve sketched in a really concise way is a set of reasons for reading it, even given my very different research interests (Australian studies, to put it in a disciplinary frame). Or, perhaps I should be reading the work that you’re going to be producing over the next several years instead, since you seem to have taken it on in such a thorough fashion? At any rate, genuine thanks are in order for your post.

  2. melgregg
    September 15th, 2006 @ 2:10 pm

    Hi Adam,
    No worries! Glad you found it useful.

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