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09/13/2004 Archived Entry: "Laws of Cool"

Collin let me know that Alan Liu's book Laws of Cool is out. I'll have to read it. But I will begin with a bit of doubt based on the courses I've seen on his website and the listings he originally named Laws of Cool. In the ctheory piece I drew attention to some problems with how Liu views cool. The previous work he did was fairly negative, making cool out to have a hindering affect on information and the new media economy. The book's official blurb is here. This part troubles me:

The ultimate message of The Laws of Cool is that "cool" may be the most authentic response of contemporary culture to postindustrial knowledge work because it holds open a reserve of counter- or anti-knowledge (an "ethos of the unknown"), but nevertheless in its current form cool is often also know-nothing, narrow, shallow, self-centered, cruel, and coopted.

I'm troubled by both the "authentic" and the "narrow, shallow" remarks. Neither are in my manuscript. I see cool as a rhetoric, one which emerges out of a specific 1963 moment in technology, cultural studies, and writing. The question of authenticity seems irrelevant to me. And the issue of being narrow or shallow, I will guess for now, is going to be attributed to consumer culture. But consumer culture does have quite a bit to teach us, as I show, even if we have no intention of applying its methods in the same way (to sell goods and services). Advertising is one example. HP's Cooltown project is another. One of McLuhan's great lessons is to learn from consumerism how technology works...

Anyway. Off to make another book order I guess....