This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Dec 2008, by Olivier Le Deuff.
-
08 Nov 11
tk andersGood books do not just tell, they create history. In my case this happened to Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool, subtitled Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Ever since I found it in a New York bookstore, late 2004, I carried it with me on planes, trains, on the bike–and remained puzzled about its analytic density. The Law of Cool is a so-far unnoticed classic of new media theory that is not a hurry to show off its relevance. The Laws of Cool proved hard to finish, and even harder to put aside. I got the feeling that I might have had enough of it, yet the book wasn’t ready with me. What fascinates me is its unusually quiet, untimely style. The Laws of Cool is a thick and comprehensive University of Chicago Press humanities study by a Wordsworth scholar who digs deep into the contemporary conditions of knowledge production. As Liu writes, the Cool has always bordered to the Cold. The writer did not get carried away by the Latest or the Obvious. Liu, an Californian UC Santa Barbara professor and web editor of Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/), writes theory from a broad range of perspectives. The Law of Cool is hard to compare with the Deleuzian MIT Press titles and is light years away from the ordinary cyberculture readers. It studies business management bestsellers as serious literature, takes further elements of hypertext theory, explains the attraction to uselessness and the arbitrary, interpretes HLML language, analyses the cyberlitertarian ideology and maps the shift from ‘power to the people’ to ‘power to the individual’. Like it or not, cool is the antipolitics of information and ‘bad attitude’ is the constitutional gesture.
-
31 Dec 10
Katie Day"Interview with Alan Liu about his book, The laws of cool. <AL: “Hermeneutics of the digital everyday” is a nice phrase. My book is in part about the digital everyday. Every day we go into the cubicle (or office, or classroom, or Starbucks) and log in to work on our identity, which increasingly gets swallowed up in some institutional identity or “corporate culture.” The kind of hermeneutics or interpretation I bring to bear on that kind of everyday is historical. I try to bring meaning to the digital everyday by breaking down the hyper-compressed sense of “now” that is its prison (or cubicle) to compare it to past days. I make a narrative of the genealogy of “knowledge work” and, more specifically, of the information work that is a kind of carrier wave for knowledge work. And I use that narrative to make a historical critique.>"
-
The Law of Cool is hard to compare with the Deleuzian MIT Press titles and is light years away from the ordinary cyberculture readers. It studies business management bestsellers as serious literature, takes further elements of hypertext theory, explains the attraction to uselessness and the arbitrary, interpretes HLML language, analyses the cyberlitertarian ideology and maps the shift from ‘power to the people’ to ‘power to the individual’. Like it or not, cool is the antipolitics of information and ‘bad attitude’ is the constitutional gesture.
-
Cool starts to rise when unproductive elements come into play, ‘destructive creativity’ plays up and counter-systems of ‘style’ develop. “What is really cool, after all,” Liu asks. “At the moment of truth on the coolest Web sites—when such sites are most seriously, deeply cool—no information is forthcoming. Cool is the aporia of information. In whatever form and on whatever scale (excessive graphics, egregious animation, precious slang, surplus hypertext, and so on), cool is information designed to resist information, a paradoxical ‘gesture’ by which an ethos of the unknown struggles to arise in the midst of knowledge work.” Cool is an ethos of information. It is the moment of awareness of the information interface. It is the wellknown moment of revelation when you no longer look through a window and instead look at the window frame. Cool, so Liu, gives the knowledge worker the hope of ‘personality’.
-
“Hermeneutics of the digital everyday” is a nice phrase. My book is in part about the digital everyday.
-
The 1980s witnessed a generation change simultaneously in society, business culture, intellectual approaches, and information technology (from the epoch of mainframes to that of the personal computer and the network). So that becomes the pivot point in my historical critique of the digital everyday.
-
In general, I think that a serious literature department today should be able to offer a course titled “Contemporary Fiction” in which novels are read alongside selected works from business, economics, politics, city planning, and journalism (including medical, scientific, and technological journalism). In a sense, the search for the “great American novel” is over. The winner is business literature. I can’t easily think of another genre of blended realism and fantasy, gritty concreteness (case studies, character studies) and sweeping vision, objective description and moral designs upon our soul that has such wide cultural impact.
-
My short answer to your question is that students do”need to be told how to surf the Net.” Otherwise they will end up serving just the particular versions of the net that the great institutions and nations of our day have in mind. I don’t mean that students should be counter-indoctrinated in any left- or cultural-critical understanding of information technology, knowledge-work society, and the university’s role in all that (as if that would work!). I mean that training in critical and ethical action for networked society (what I theorized as the “best practices” management of destruction) can only be built on top of what students really need to learn: knowledge not just “of” the tools/skills needed to succeed in contemporary society but also “about” those tools/skills.
-
Today, universities should not only teach such recursive knowledge at a high, intellectual level (”no data without exposing the metadata” is my slogan) but also intervene at the level of the tools and source code that make knowledge possible.
-
ethically and pragmatically, the researcher-teachers of the university need to collaborate to create the tools that allow knowledge actually to work, which is to say, to be shared. (True knowledge work = knowledge sharing). I’ve been thinking about the issue of the university and society for a long time, and you pressed the hot button.
-
-
13 Dec 08
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.