(((A whole lot of, uh, remarkable stuff here. Not for everybody.
It's sure for me, though. I've read this twice. I may
have to read it a couple more times. Pretty sure
I'll track down and read the book. May have to
read the book a couple of times, as well.)))
(((Best thing in nettime in ages. This is some
real, chewy, nettime-stylee cyberculturati-transgressive
intellectual fodder here, boyo.)))
From: [email protected]
Subject: 'I work here, but I am cool.' (Interview with Alan Liu)
Date: February 23, 2006 10:39:14 PM GMT+01:00
Reply-To: [email protected]
'I work here, but I am cool.'
Interview with Alan Liu
By Geert Lovink
Good books 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.
What makes Liu's study so unique is his redefinition of the contemporary time scale. Liu discusses 1920s typography, quotes from Processed World and the Hackers' Dictionary and writes about Jodi as if it is 1996. This study of the 'cultural life of information' focusses on life at the US campus. It investigates the corporatization and computerization of academia and its impact on the
humanities. Liu: 'It might be said, with Kafkaesque irony: I went to sleep one day a cultural critic and woke up the next metamorphosed into a data processor.' Liu calls for an update of Stephen Greenblatt's study on Renaissance self-fashioning,
and produces a number of useful elements for such undertaken. But, before web re-awake in a New Age, we have to reconcile with destruction in the name of innovation and creative arts. Are you ready to slough off yesterday?
Liu's motto is 'I work here, but I am cool.' In an Ascribe press release he explains the cool attitude like this: 'I am not so cool as to actively rebel or quit, but I am just cool enough to be slightly kinky in the web pages I browse at work, I'm not quite subversive, but my behavior asserts that I'm me and not just part of this corporation or that team.' Liu doesn't get excited about this or that
future scenario, nor is he interested in a deconstruction of the hype and spin that so characterizes the computer and Internet industry. Instead, he observes the behavioral patterns of 'head work' that perform a subtle play around the ethos of refusal and resistance. A glimpse at Slashdot will tell you what this often
misunderstood attitude is about. 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 well-known 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'.
GL: What makes your book so special is the somewhat different time frame that you use. The Laws of Cool is neither historical in it is approach, in the sense that it spans centuries, like media archeology does, nor does it stick to the ever-present now, as new media theory often does. These days we hardly find references to 1980s computer culture, but for you that seems like yesterday. How come? Do you practice a hermeneutics of the digital everyday?
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. In this critical narrative, the intermediate "time frame" of the 1980s you point to is pivotal. The "now" and the far past, I believe, are necessary to each other, but can only be brought into meaningful engagement if their encounter is staged in a transitional
zone of generational history–the history, that is, of the most recent change between generations that made us what we are today. Recently, after all, generational changes (between baby boomers, X's, and now Y's) have been the great scenes of critique, revision, and sometimes rapprochement. 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.
GL: You write: "Cultural criticism is fundamentally historical." At the same time History as we know is declared obsolescent. The history that unfolds is now partitioned in files and stored in a database. You call for cultural criticism to become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work.
AL: Your question is interesting to me partly because of the way it is asked. There is actually no question in your question. No insult intended, but it's as if you were yourself a database outputting information (a fragment from my book, sound bites from the culture of obsolescence, etc.). More frightening, you (and I, too!) are like many professionals today, whether they are information workers,
economists, journalists, bloggers, or professors: we're good at outputting data without any query (SQL or otherwise) actually having been made by anyone. We call that knowledge work, which produces a kind of "information overload" from which corporate culture harvests all its surplus value. (They don't even need to query;
we output!)
I play upon the database-like aspects of your question because it's a way of getting at what my book is about. A long time ago (and, of course, still in many parts of society today), people had another name for massive information dumps that occurred spontaneously without any query having been made. They called it God. It was God, or the gods, who spoke out of the burning bush to tell you
what you didn't even know you needed to ask. Before Oracle, Inc., in other words, there were oracles. But since the Enlightenment, secularization, and the many modern revolutions, that role of the oracle has been renamed History. We know we
are in the presence of history when it preemptively tells us, and enforces upon us, something we didn't even want to ask about. Gods and history: before we even know to query or pray, they have their root kit in place. So that accounts for the perhaps too romantic notion of the "ethical hacker" in my book.
It's now unfashionable to summon up prophets who can preempt even the preemptive force of the gods or history to query, in essence: what have we done that has called down upon us such a fatal information dump (the Biblical "handwriting on the wall")? What was the query that we have forgotten? So ethical hackers must
serve in the place of prophets. Ethical hackers are not just programmers or engineers, but also humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and occasionally economists, politicians, and media workers, too. Their calling is not just to query the database of cultural history, but to bring to view the conditions of critique, speculation, and downright curiosity that allow that database to speak unannounced, unbeknownst. The risk, of course, is that hackers of any sort–white or black hat–are just another priesthood, vanguard, or avant-garde. (So trust only hackers who–on principle, when needed for a greater good–are willing to turn off their own firewalls and open themselves to being hacked. Everyone else is just in the techno- or avant-garde priesthood.)
