On Cool

Cool is the protest of our contemporary "society without politics". It is the gesture that has no voice of its own and can only protest equivocally within the very voice of the new rationalisation....

I work here but I'm cool....

"cool" exclaimed about any new toy, dress, high-tech gadget or Web page always hovers ambiguously between the subjective and objective (I'm cool/it's cool). Cool is the song of a subject robbed of any voice except that of the technological object.


Cool is an ethos that starts as early as daycare and primary school (to judge from raising my own child), matures in high school, and becomes adept in college (as instanced by the paradigmatic student we all know at the back of the lecture hall: slouched in his or he chair, dressed in a tee-shirt advertising an alternative or heavy metal band, headphones on, looking up at the ceiling or down at the ground. Cool is nothing if not closely bound to the schooling system. Yet cool is anything but identified with the schooling system as such. Rather, it is a parallel system of learning - or just as accurately, antilearning - that turns away from the educational system it believes represents dominant knowledge culture, toward a popular culture whose corporate and media conglomerates, ironically, are dominant knowledge culture. As I put it earlier, the cool seek an ethos of the unknown...making them ever more vulnerable to the conglomerates that truly prey on the unknowing....

the cool today take their Walkmans, MP3 players, and handheld and laptop computers with them when they go 'walkabout'. They relinquish nothing offered by the technologies and media of consumer culture because their instinct is that such culture - full of sensation rather than knowledge - is the only regressive, hence apparently archaic, zone left in a world given over to knowledge work and its proxy, school....

cool is almost unbelievably narrow in tone, incapable of modulation, cruel without compensating pathos, indiscriminate and above all self-centred or private... Even when knowledge workers have graduated and gone to work, "cool" is how they instantly retreat to their mental "room" instead of graduating to broader public history of peoples resistant to rationalisation.

Alan Liu, The laws of cool, 2005