ENG 495E

11/20/01

As Alan Liu defines "cool", it is a non-political protest in society, "a gesture of ambivalent oppositionality." In Liu's terms, "cool" is a cultural component of the information age, and can only exist and have meaning within the environment it protests. This essay seeks to explore the relationship image culture, marketing, and Alan Liu's concept of "cool."

In a recent presentation he gave at New York University, Liu previewed his forthcoming book The Laws of Cool : The Cultural Life of Information, which describes the importance of "cool" in the information age. To assist his explanation, he compares corporate culture to the Guayaki tribe of South America. Liu says that in both cultures there is a central problem, an unreasonable demand placed on some people that must be dealt with. As he opens his presentation, Liu makes an important point: being a part of a community is both empowering and stifling.

The demand placed upon the information age worker is to retain productivity and remain valuable in the traditional sense, while in the postmodern sense being flexible and decentralized. Workers must keep order in their jobs to be productive, but also be able to excel at a wide variety of tasks that often require a breakdown and restructuring of corporate structures, departments, teams, and tasks.

For the Guayaki, the job of hunting parallels the demand of flexibility required of Liu's information worker. Hunters are charged with the task of feeding their tribe, and sharing their wives, since Guayaki men outnumber women two to one. (I mention the latter condition because Liu made a point of it; whether or not this aspect of Guayaki life represents normality or hardship was not addressed in Liu's presentation.) Hunting in the forest with a bow and arrow requires a huge amount of skill, with dire consequences if unsuccessful, for the tribe will then not eat. In both "primitive" and technologically advanced cultures, there exists what Liu terms mandatory and individual disempowerment. Both hunters and information workers must defer to the will of their tribe.

In response to stifling, both the tribesman and the information worker develop "cool." "The desire for flexibility and decentralization opens the gap between a culture and its people," says Liu. "Cool" is a technique for expressing that gap between a society and it's people. In the case of the Guayaki, this technique involves singing a highly personalized warrior song at nightfall, which essentially serves to fuel ego and one's sense of individuality. The song celebrates the hunter who sings it, declaring to himself what a great hunter he is. In parallel, the information worker's version of "cool" is to use his job skills to construct, for instance, a highly complex Web page.

In both cases, "cool" is expressed by the same means that caused its production. The hunter does not sing, "I hate hunting, it's a drag sometimes," he sings "I am a great hunter." Likewise, the information worker makes his work style "cool" by using those things that suppress him as an outlet for skill and artistry. As Liu suggests, the information worker says, "Look at my web page. I work here, but I am cool." Both the song and the Web page serve as personal affirmations of ability.

During the coffee break, or around the hunters' fire, "cool" rushes in to what Liu calls "the slack time," the gap between being an individual and being part of the progressive, productive group. It is precisely "the cool" that image-culture pulls from the gaps and slack when searching for the Next Big Thing. By presenting the "cool" as an image, marketing attempts to commodify the hunter's song and the worker's style and attitude and then market them to the crowd.

When thinking of image culture, its most obvious outlet is the television, a passively viewed landscape that, as David Foster Wallace writes, " purveys and enables dreams" (39). While this much may be evident, implicit is TV's "whisper," which murmurs that our "best and only access to this (dream) world is TV" (39). The TV tells us that a wide world exists (presumably where people don't watch TV) but that we have to watch TV to get there. For Wallace, this paradox certainly explains why the average American watches six hours of television a day. As images gain more weight that what they actually represent, whether those images are of a bar of soap, a shoe, or a hairstyle, it is the medium that gains power. What is represented by the image will be consumed in an attempt to partake in the image itself. Examples that come to mind are advertisements for domestic beer in the 1980s. What those ads promised to the viewer was a good time, replete with sports and women, assuming a certain brand of beer was purchased. The images sold the beer itself indirectly, but sold themselves (the beer's intangible peripherals: parties, attractive women, etc.) directly. The images and attitudes of the "good time" took on value of their own.

To provide an example of how Liu's concept of "cool" might be marketed, I'm going to borrow some of David Foster Wallace's ideas on television's use of irony as well as an example from "The Merchants of Cool." Sprite's ad campaign, mentioned in that film, is a good example of the commodification of "cool". A few years ago, an ad explicitly stated that "Image is Nothing." The response to the ad was encouraging, as Sprite sales went up. As D.F. Wallace comments on a similarly ironic, but earlier Pepsi soft-drink ad, "The commercial invites a complicity between its own witty irony and veteran viewer…It congratulates on transcending the very crowd that defines him" (Wallace, 60-61). This is comparable the song of the Guayaki hunter Whom Liu believes "transgresses the social climate of the tribe." The advertisement's irony became "cool". "How ironically chic," think the viewers; "I get it," think others. Consumers were by that time familiar with the traditional ways products had been sold but irony on the part of the advertiser was a new one. Because it is aimed at a group, the Sprite ad doesn't really transgress the laws defining "normal" in that group the way the hunter's song does. Whereas the Guayaki hunter sings to himself, the Sprite ad sings to all who see it. In terms of advertisements, when an image is presented to a group, it ceases to be cool because the image's presentation seeks group/societal adoption, and thereby negating the desire to affirm individuality, the desire responsible for "cool" behavior. To present an image of "cool" is to add the idea of group to it, and in effect, to close the gap where "cool" exists and squeeze it into the shared social climate, where it quickly withers.

A spike of popularity followed the Sprite ads, but their target market of teenagers eventually came to see that the irony of Sprite's ad campaign was a ruse, an image itself. This was because implicit in the advertisement is the message that image really is everything. The ad whispers, "If you're "cool" enough to think that image is nothing, you'll show it by purchasing Sprite." Or to paraphrase the teens interviewed in The Merchants of Cool, if image really is nothing, then why would Sprite spend so much money to tell us so? When the teens knew that all of the other kids understood the irony as well, the ad wasn't "cool." There was no oppositionality in everyone drinking Sprite.

All of this may seem obvious when television ads, a medium made for quick reaction and not for serious thought are subjected to scrutiny. The relationship of Liu's "cool" to image culture may be, as The Merchants of Cool understands it, a cyclical one between trend, marketing, and then eventual mass popularity. "Cool" creates itself from and inside a society, is then discovered and is turned into a commodity, before being repackaged and presented to a large audience. The gap closes for a short time, but reasserts itself as a necessary way for an individual to deal with social pressure, and the next trend is then soon to be born. However, we must keep in mind that it is not unlikely that marketing can invent a "ghost-gap" and market the images of a "cool" that never was.

References

Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A Supposedly

            Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1997.