Ain't it Cool?

[Dave Monroe]

The Village Voice
Education Supplement: Fall 2004
by Benjamin Strong
Ain't It Cool?
August 3rd, 2004 1:20 PM

The National Endowment for the Arts released a survey
in July based on 2002 Census Bureau data that
indicates just 56.6 percent of Americans had read a
single book of any kind in the year prior. Yet,
against a worldwide web of evidence to the contrary,
many bookworms refuse to concede the diminished role
of literature in a high-tech society. Alan Liu, a
professor of English literature at UC-Santa Barbara,
is not one of them. In his new book, The Laws of Cool:
Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
(Chicago), Liu writes that "whether we should elegize
or celebrate 'the death of literature' . . . is now
beside the point." 

Literature in the last two decades has become a school
subject unbound. The critical theory and identity
politics that emerged in a more diverse American
academy in the 1970s deconstructed the patriarchal
fiction of a white-members-only canon, opening
literary study to more than sweetly musty books.
University English departments now play de facto host
to a broader discipline of Cultural Studies, in which
any object—a fanzine, a Volvo, a Balinese cockfight—is
a set of signs that can be read and interpreted as a
text. 

But when literature no longer possesses greater
inherent value than any other text you can download
from the Internet, then literature has become mere
information. Liu writes in The Laws of Cool, "I went
to sleep one day a cultural critic and woke the next
metamorphosed into a data processor." 

The immigrant son of an engineer, and no Luddite
reactionary, Liu doesn't want to regress the study of
literature to its 1950s incarnation as a gentleman's
sport. Although he's an expert in English
Romanticism—his first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of
History (1989), remains a must-read in that field—Liu
was an early adopter of computers. "I bought an IBM
PC, one of the first models they made, in 1982 dollars
of $5,500 or something like that. And I was only
making something like $11,000 that year," Liu tells
the Voice. 

While continuing to guide confused undergraduates
through the metaphysical walkabouts of The Prelude,
Liu in 1994 designed Voice of the Shuttle
(vos.ucsb.edu), an ambitious online humanities
resource. He also began work on a book, about the
relationship of information culture to literature,
that would occupy him for a decade. "The more I wrote,
however, the more I kept being blocked by the problem
of—as I conceive of it now—a popular aesthetic, which
is dominant and much more important than a literary
aesthetic. I call it 'cool.' " 

When we talk about culture, we talk about whether or
not something sucks. "No more beauty, sublimity,
tragedy, grace, or evil: only cool or not cool," Liu
writes. To reach disaffected students then, teachers
have got to make literature cool. But that's no easy
task. Children pick up what's cool and what isn't on
the playground, but not inside a classroom. 

More than just a pose, cool, Liu writes, is a
"parallel system of learning—or just as accurately,
antilearning—that turns away from an educational
system it believes represents dominant knowledge
culture, toward a popular culture whose corporate and
media conglomerates, ironically are dominant knowledge
culture." In other words, universities used to be our
primary interpreters of culture, and just when
knowledge itself has become a valued commodity and the
humanities ought to enjoy a golden age of relevance,
the networked office has already purchased the
monopoly on information and its brave new philosophy. 

One nation under an MBA president, "who prides himself
on being incurious," Liu points out, our culture teems
with the facile paradigms and dehumanizing rhetoric of
downsizing. College administrators now insist as much
as HMO executives on efficiency, even as they slash
budgets, outsourcing labor to the higher-education
version of the permanent temp, non-tenured faculty. 

For the rapidly growing blue-collar class of office
drones, cool lurks as a "shadow ethos," rebelling in
stolen moments of on-the-job Web surfing. What other
choice does a worker have whose literal and
metaphorical vision have been confined to a computer
screen? "Contemporary slack . . . has nowhere to go to
be itself. Its only recourse is to disguise itself
within the processes, procedures, and techniques of
information technology." 

Slack has its limits, and Liu thinks "it's time for
the academy to have its say on the corporation and
technology." In an information culture, the analytical
skills developed by learning to read a book carefully
are eye-openingly subversive. The Laws of Cool
investigates contemporary management texts and reports
that popular business theory unanimously emphasizes
thinking outside the historical box. With innovation
as its highest value, corporate culture advocates a
quick march toward an ever progressive future. What
the humanities offer in opposition, Liu argues, is the
more nuanced, less optimistic perspective of
history—"not of things created—the great, auratic
artifacts treasured by a conservative or curatorial
history—but of things destroyed in the name of
creation." 

Liu's book offers thoughtful suggestions about how the
humanities can reclaim their cultural authority. But
foremost, he challenges his university colleagues to
join writers and artists in an effort to ethically
hack corporate technology. In the future, nothing will
be more cool, he believes, than destroying
information. If Liu's idea sounds suspiciously
cyberpunk, it is. The science fiction writer William
Gibson is more influential than Marx on Liu's radical
manifesto. Literature is dead, but it's the specter
haunting information. 

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0431/strong.php

Liu, Alan.  Wordsworth: The Sense of History.
   Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989.

http://www.sup.org/cgi-bin/search/book_desc.cgi?book_id=1373%201893

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work
   and the Culture of Information.  Chicago:
   U of Chicago P, 2004.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16122.ctl

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