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Book Review: The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the

Culture of Information

Article  in  New Media & Society · December 2005

DOI: 10.1177/146144480500700609

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New Media & Society 7(6)

production than the utilization of ICTs, leaving far better areas to contrast with
the Finnish case.
This is a strong collection that would supplement any graduate course on the
information age. It presents Castells’ theoretical conceptions in a concise way,
and juxtaposes them with many complementary and competing perspectives
that should stimulate students and scholars alike to think critically about the
societal implications of ICTs and the concept of a network society.

Reference
Bell, D. (1974) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.
London: Heinemann.

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work

and the Culture of Information. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press. 2004. xi+573pp.
ISBN 0–226–48699–0, $22.50 (pbk)
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Reviewed by JEREMY HUNSINGER

Virginia Tech
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

In the Age of Enlightenment, a new middle class arose which had the
intellectual capacities to manage the growing populations of workers, the
growing production of labour and the growing need to control and systematize
knowledge. This new middle class had profound effects on the social, economic
and political systems in which they arose. It transformed the ways that people
came to understand, manage and care for themselves and their places in society.
In The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu presents us with the new middle class, one that
has moved into the position of the old middle class as brokers and managers of
knowledge, one that has learned to play with and control information, and thus
one that is the primary participant in the culture of information. Much as the
Enlightenment sacrificed some discourse and concepts, while favouring and
consolidating others in order to generate the modern world, Liu is concerned
that this new class is sacrificing aspects of literary culture in favour of an
informational culture, collapsing the boundaries between the two and thus losing
aspects of the literary that are worth preserving. To that end, he provides The
Laws of Cool as a critical analysis and intervention into the current construction
of the literary within informational culture, as an impoverished and uniform
informational construct that is governed increasingly by the laws of cool.
To understand how the culture of information and the notion of cool has
become a dominating discursive construct in everyday literature, Liu turns to
the mode of work in which the new middle class performs – knowledge work.
Working primarily as a cultural critic from a humanities background, Liu
presents us with several conceptions of knowledge work. His conceptual

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 Book reviews

investigation maps a territory including professional perspectives, business

perspectives, humanities perspectives and other fields.
Beyond introducing and expanding the analysis of knowledge work and the
culture of information, The Laws of Cool also provides several excellent examples
of the cultural analysis of information in a variety of contexts. Prior to that, Liu
contextualizes the cultural history of the development of knowledge work as a
field of labour. This section, entitled ‘Ice Ages’, affords us with the generative
relations between the rise of information and its relationship to production in
the history of knowledge work. Through this history, we are shown that
knowledge work arises out of the alienation of a particular form of labour and a
particular way of knowing. As the practices that unified the knowledge with
labour first were automated through machinic means, then abstracted to
informational representations, forming a culture of information, the work
surrounding these representations became knowledge work. Knowledge work
alienates knowledge, making it an object of labour, to be manipulated with
informational tools and contrived into new bits of knowledge. Liu highlights
the complex interplay of discursive fields surrounding this knowledge work,
such as the countercultural utopias of cyber-communalism or cyber-
libertarianism and also includes those discourses of the management professions.
The importation of utopian discourse into informational culture is what opened
up the concept of cool for co-optation. Once the concept was introduced, it
became a basis for transvaluation within the culture. This coolness became the
basis for what Liu terms the intraculture of knowledge work, where the
landscapes of knowledge becomes flattened, uniform and centred on cool.
The continual negotiation and reconstruction of cool within the culture of
information parallels the changing technological landscapes of information
technology. From standards development to technological implementation,
knowing what is cool becomes a way of knowing what work needs to be done,
or what work one wants to do. Liu locates the concept of cool as an
undefinable quality through a deferral to the archived revenents of informational
cool – the ellipsis on the Project Cool and the ellipsis on Netscape What’s
Cool’s webpages sets of definitions. This missing definition indicates that cool is
not what we define, but what we judge.
Liu gives us an idea of where he is probing for this conceptualization of cool
within knowledge work:
Just four themes of cool in the information age – each phrased as assertion
about the life of information, followed paradoxically by its contradiction – will
provide an adequate dossier. Cool is and is not, an ethos, style, feeling and
politics of information. (p. 179)
From these four themes, we can find an idea of the territory that coolness
occupies within informational culture. When investigating the ethos of cool
using data from 1998, Liu attempts to ‘discern the central quality concealed in
such a quantity’ (p. 181). He identifies a profligate use of the word ‘cool’

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 New Media & Society 7(6)

through out the web. But then he argues that cool is not in this case just a
claim of identity in these millions of examples, but is qualitatively a ‘way of
looking’ at the content and design of webpages. For Liu, cool is not an identity
but a processual way of knowing about something informational. It is part of
the context of the informational object, not part of its essence. If something
tries to be cool, it is inherently not cool, but if it exceeds the expectations of
its coolnesss or uncoolness, it becomes cool. It is the dialectical opposition of
for and against within the ethos of cool that constructs essential coolness as an
impossible goal, the cool is not ‘in’ the object or ‘of ’ the object, but is ‘around’
the object, like an aura.
Similarly, Liu’s analysis of the semiology of webpages in his section on style as
cool brings this idea of the context of coolness as ‘deco-technology’ (p. 195).
Information is the style and style is the message, but so is the lack of style and the
lack of design – all of which constructs ways of seeing the coolness of
information. However, here Liu alludes nostalgically to the great masters of
modern as a way of understanding where style and information conjoin and
become uniformly cool or uncool. I think he should be wary of this strategy
because of the embeddedness of those ‘masters’ in one form of an informational
culture. Following his parallel analysis of the feeling of information, he provides a
conceptually rich analysis of the politics of information confronting the
relationship between freedom and information, the non-politics of attitude and
its relationship between labour. With these four themes in hand, we can begin to
come back to the function of cool in relation to the literary in the culture of
information.
In his concluding section, ‘Humanities and the Arts in the Age of Knowledge
Work’, Liu begins to resolve the problems of the future for literary studies by
introducing the possibility of a new alliance between the arts and humanities to
establish the possibility for a new, informational literary field. The possibility is
based in the legitimating interaction between the arts and humanities within the
culture of information, where the laws of cool could provide a basis for
understanding of informational projects.
Liu’s The Laws of Cool may be seen by some as yet one more salvo in the
culture wars, trying to establish a legitimate territory for the arts and humanities
in the information age. However, this book can be seen also as an intervention
into the culture of information and an explanation of how ‘cool’ operates in
our society, and to that end this book is excellent. His innovative cultural
analysis and criticism of knowledge work in the culture of information is a solid
foundation for future research in a myriad of informational fields. However, the
book is burdened with an excess of information and context for Liu’s position,
which can deter or confuse readers seeking a more concise theoretically focused
work on any one of his topics. Given the surfeit of information, it is difficult to
recommend this book for anyone but an advanced reader who is interested in
understanding Liu’s unique perspective on the culture of information, the laws
of cool and their applications to knowledge work in the information age.

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