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09/30/2004 Archived Entry: "More Liu critique"

More Liu Critique
Upfront apologies for too much Liu critique these days (no apologies to Liu, of course, but to those bored by such commentary). Reading his new book causes, for expected reasons, all kinds of reactions, but many reactions related to recent posts as well.
Liu writes: "In the relevant future, I believe, education will increasingly need to teach that cool is a historical condition. . .A first step would be to follow the lead of those cultural critics who have investigated the history of media, advertising, entertainment, fashion, and other forms of consumer culture" (306).
What’s wrong with that? As Jameson has written, "always historicize." The main problem with the statement is that the historicizing is meant to undermine the item being investigated. Those cultural histories Liu draws attention to (media, advertising) are most often positioned as moments of understanding in which we come to realize how bad these items truly are. Ah ha. Now I know how advertising dupes me.
This is one of the major faults of contemporary education: seeing popular culture as "outside" of or antithetical to the Humanities. Liu mostly does this in his very random, often digressing, at times schizophrenic, discussion of cool and technology. Cool is in opposition to the Humanities, Liu pleads.
In 1960, Walter Ong notes:
“Teachers and students of language and literature must cultivate sensitivity to the more profound significance of the media of popular culture.” Point well taken. But not in work like Liu's. In fact, I wonder why this interest in cool, anyway? To offer critique? Ok. Fair enough. But the critique really isn't about cool, is it? It's focused more on how technology and the information economy diverts us away from the "real" work of the Humanities. What, I would ask, does this book learn from cool’s various meanings and manifestations spread out across a spectrum of knowledge bases? Very little, it seems. No matter how much he deeps into the texts written about cool or into technology, Liu always comes back with a zinger about “being cool.”
It is one thing to offer up critiques of popular culture (the cultural studies approach mostly) and another to learn from popular culture. Of course, we already have learned from popular culture; the novel is the result of that experience. But the novel is too absorbed into higher education today to keep that fact full frontal (ha ha). Liu’s argument seems more situated in a resuscitation of an almost dead university culture; its demise blamed on popular culture. What, however, would it look like to base the university or Humanities on popular culture (as Graff almost suggests in his last book). Not to teach popular culture (like the Open University of the 1970s), but to base its logic on popular culture? To ask that question is to break the bond of Humanistic learning (ordered learning, rational thought, literary explication) Liu seeks to revitalize or save. It is to completely reimagine education. This book ain’t doing that. Pity. Liu’s usage of cool more closely resembles the overall move by higher education to integrate technology with all kinds of big time expressions (“lifelong learning” “connectivity”) but little actualization of technology in its structure or logic. He’s got some of the lingo and cultural allusions down, but none of the real meaning.