The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (review)

Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool is a witty, persuasive, panoramic tour de forceof one of the most pervasive, yet elusive, concepts of contemporary society—what we mean when we use the word cool. That definition is framed by an exploration of other terms that have become part of the fabric of contemporary discourse such as knowledge work, postindustrial, automating, design, cyber-politics, and that equally ubiquitous yet elusive of contemporary usages, information. Put another way, The Laws of Cool is an examination of the World Wide Web as a case study for postindustrial cool.

Along the way, Liu poses several fundamental questions: What is the role of the arts in the information age? What is the relationship of the arts to information? What is the relationship between cool and technology? What are the visual metaphors our own age employs? What is the relationship between politics and information? These questions, and others, are teased out via a startling array of perspectives by examining political theory and contemporary business literature, cybercultural criticism and literary theory, anthropology and theory of design. His elegant, dense prose, indeed, his very methodology, present a microcosm of the topics he is exploring. As Liu, only somewhat with tongue in cheek, writes in his introduction: "It might be said, with Kafkaesque irony: I went to sleep one day a cultural critic and woke the next metamorphosed into a data processor." (p. 4)

Alan Liu, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is ideally suited to such an exploration. Not only is he is a traditional literary scholar, author of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, 1989), a cultural theorist, and one of the most widely-respected writers on information culture and new media, but he is also the founding editor of one of the earliest and most successful portals in the area of literary studies, Voice of the Shuttle, http://vos.ucsb.edu/, in addition to being the principal investigator of the recent NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project, Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information.

This background informs one of Liu's final chapters entitled "Historicizing Cool: Humanities in the Information Age," in which he ponders the role of education as a parallel anti-universe of cool. Liu argues that anti-learning, or learning that does not happen within the education system, is a turning away from "an education system it believes represents dominant knowledge culture toward a popular culture whose corporate and media conglomerates, ironically, are dominant knowledge culture." (p. 305) Although Liu writes that the cool themselves realize the irony of their own positions, he also demonstrates how humanities education has failed to demonstrate that cool itself is a historical condition and lacks understanding of how cool is of and not outside history. This recognition would go a long way in countering the routine charge by postindustrial business that humanities education is obsolete, inefficient, and irrelevant. Indeed, in reading, or more specifically, in re-reading, The Laws of Cool, one realizes that countering this charge is the central premise of the text.

The Laws of Cool, while clearly not written specifically for the library community, has far-reaching implications for the profession. It puts into a wider context the semantic and philosophic shifts in library schools from "schools of library and information studies" to "schools of information studies." This redefinition of the profession fits squarely into "New Enlightenment" (the title of Liu's first section) thinking, which represents one of the many ethos of cool explored in the book.

It has implications already evident in academic libraries, from the way students expect to interact with resources (another way of referring to information embodied in such old-fashioned formats as books and articles) to how students are taught to search, find, and evaluate those resources. It has relevance to the ways in which library Web portals, as well as the...