1. Excerpt from Alan Liu's English Institute talk, Oct. 2, 1999, "The Laws of Cool (Information Should Not Mean But Be)"

[The talk was adapted from material in Liu's in-progress The Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life of Information. (Notes not included)]

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. It is not just that cultural context and information have come to approximate each other in their gross anatomy (each requiring the same kind of gathering, collating, and filtering work); it is that now even the fine structure seems to mate. In a convergence so massive as to be all but indiscernible in normal academic practice, advanced academic literary theory has since the 1970s evolved from structuralism through deconstruction to cultural/multicultural criticism so as to swing into conjunction with an information society that meanwhile evolved in parallel from logocentric corporations and broadcast empires to the techno-informatic equivalents of cultural diversity: flexible-team corporations and distributed information networks. To put it rudely: perhaps the academic controversies of the past two decades were not really about supplanting the author or canon with the deconstructive intertext or cultural context. Perhaps such controversies were really about recruiting professional interpreters for an impending mental merger with the software-telecom-cable-Hollywood conglomerates now promising that ultimate intertext or context: high-bandwidth information.

After all, any cultural critic who today uses a personal computer to write "files" about literature is from the first incorporated within an information culture closest to hand in the very operating system. As it were: the well-known epilogue to Stephen Greenblatt's paradigm of New Historicist criticism, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, needs to be updated. To reshoot for the 1990s the scene in which Greenblatt reads Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures while sitting on a plane with a man whose son is dying would require that our camera pull back to reveal the device that all the corporate intelligentsia up and down the aisle have open instead of a book: a laptop computer. Greenblatt romancing Geertz (and, it must be said, myself romancing Wordsworth's "sense of history" in the 1980s) is as expert at opening archives of cultural memory as the managerial/ professional/ technical intelligentsia are at neuromancing databases and spreadsheets. Cultural-critical experts, in other words, read in a manner originally schooled by the technical rigor of formalism; while corporate intelligentsia process with an equal technical ritual schooled in the burgeoning corporate learning-industry–Dana U., Disney U., Motorola U., Solectron U., BMW Study City, and so on. Even the technical jargon seems congruent. Such "politically correct" academic anti-foundationalisms as "différance" and "difference" are matched by the mytho-Japanese anti-foundationalisms of the new corporate correctness: "continuous improvement (kaizen), just-in-time delivery, total quality, statistical process control, and 'design for' manufacture and assembly".

The one consistent difference is that cultural criticism is fundamentally historical. I mean by this more than the obvious fact that most humanities fields are now ipso facto historical (in the non-controversial sense that "literature department" is synonymous with "literary history department"). I mean also that even as cultural criticism has rejected older modes of literary or intellectual history it has not repudiated the necessity of historical consciousness so much as proposed rude ways to examine the seeming obviousness of this necessity. Cultural criticism wants to know why historical consciousness became the core of humanities education from the Enlightenment on. What was such consciousness for, and who did it serve?

Put in the past tense, such questions concern what Jean-François Lyotard has called the "metanarratives" of progressive Reason and Culture that academic historicism once sustained but that now–from the viewpoint of cultural critics–seem just so many empty postures. But it is the present tense of these questions–the sense that they bear on a gigantic "now" inclusive of the Enlightenment and nineteenth and twentieth centuries together–that cultural criticism has found most compelling. That now is modernity. In the broadest sense, the underlying historical concern of cultural criticism has been modernization, the centuries-long "progress" of rationalization, routinization, institutionalization, and organization- and empire-building (with their attendant political, market, and media effects) engineered by post-Enlightenment industrial societies. Cultural criticism is the critique by disjunction of such progress. Its characteristic practice has been to bring pressure to bear on the apparently seamless necessity of modernization by foregrounding the otherness of Early Modern, subcultural, multicultural, postmodern, and other alternative historical paradigms. Queen Elizabeth I's unchanging portrait-face and Madonna's ever-changing face (the Early Modern and postmodern, respectively) thus come to look alike in such criticism because both hold up a mirror of historical difference to modern understandings of the relation between cultural display and institutionalized power (the Queen's face constituting a power of display unconfirmed by modern police or military apparatuses; Madonna presiding over a "society of spectacle" also empty of rational reality). In this vision, history is not dead to modernity; it is other to modernity.

By contrast, the world of "just-in-time" knowledge work–of astonishingly rapid yet finely calibrated turnovers in supplies, inventory, documents, mission statements, and finally people–waits upon the death, or layoff, of no one, certainly not of the son of the man in the plane. As they say: he's history. History–including the history of modernization itself (now identified with smokestack industries and ossified organizations)–is obsolescence.

Of course, the convergence between academic humanities research (the very term is symptomatic) and corporate, government, media, medical, and military knowledge work has developed over time–whether we date such convergence from the period circa 1900 when U.S. universities first modernized under the influence of corporate capitalism, from 1900-1930 when academic and white-collar sectors grew in tandem, or from the boom after World War II when it was the relation between the academic sciences and the military-industrial-government complex that claimed attention. But it is only with the new millennium that the conditions are in place for humanists to grasp the full implications of such convergence upon "excellent" knowledge work (as Bill Readings ironically called it)–above all, to recognize that the defining issue for a field like literary studies really is its position vis-à-vis information and, borne on the carrier wave of information, the juggernaut of postindustrial knowledge work. This is because the combined ideological and material build-up to the year 2000–to its installation in social consciousness as an "event"–has focused the problem with sudden clarity. Ideologically, "2000" has unlocked an end-of-history enthusiasm that theorizes knowledge work as millennial knowledge–i.e., as knowledge that is anti-historical (anti-obsolescent) on principle. The centrality of the challenge to academic knowledge thus stands starkly revealed: knowledge work is not just indifferent to humanistic knowledge; it is opposed to it on principle. The material instantiations of "2000" have been just as bracing. Among all the technological, political, and economic infrastructures put in place to install the new world order and new economy, just one may be mentioned as epitomizing the whole: networked information technology. Networked IT crossed a threshold of scale in the mid 90s beyond which–as evidenced most spectacularly by the World Wide Web–competing models of knowledge work once rooted semi-autonomously in academic, business, media, health-industry, government, and other sectors suddenly seemed to fuse into a single, parsimonious continuum–so-called "world wide"–able to afford just one global understanding of understanding. . . .

Wherever the academy looks in the new millennium, in short, it sees the prospect of a world given over to one knowledge–a single, dominant mode of knowledge associated with the information economy and apparently destined to make all other knowledges, especially all historical knowledges, obsolete. Knowledge work harnessed to information technology will now be the sum of all worthwhile knowledge–except, of course, for the knowledge of all the alternative historical modes of knowledge that undergird, overlap with, or–like a shadow world, a shadow web–challenge the conditions of possibility of the millennial new Enlightenment.

If cultural criticism and the kind of academic humanities it represents is to be legitimate, it must metamorphose not so much into Kafka's insect but a different kind of "bug." I have in mind the slow, sprawling, yet ever so graceful "Kuang" computer virus at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer that can break the densest ICE (intrusion countermeasures electronics) of corporate databases because it transforms its own substance into that of the database, draws nearer and nearer until there seems to be no difference, and then at last injects the one powerful difference it has treasured at its core. My highest ambition for cultural criticism and the academic humanities, in short, is that they can become ethical hackers of knowledge work. Many intellectuals will become so like the icy, cool "New Class" of knowledge workers that there will be no difference. But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial, professional, and clerical core of knowledge work itself, may break through the ice to help launch the future literary. For it is the future literary–or whatever the peculiarly edgy blend of aesthetics and critique once known as the literary will be named–that serves as witness to the other side of creative destruction: historical difference. Where once the job of literature was creativity, now in an age of total innovation it must be history.

The two logics of remediation have a long history,for their interplay defines a genealogy that dates back at least to the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective. We do not claim that immediacy,hypermediacy,and remediation are universal aesthetic truths; rather, we regard them as practices of specific groups in specific times.[note] Although the logic of immediacy has manifested itself from the Renaissance to the present day, each manifestation in each age may be significantly different, and immediacy may mean one thing to theorists, another to practicing artists or designers, and a third to viewers. The diversity is even greater for hypermediacy, which seems always to offer a number of different reactions to the contemporary logic of immediacy. Remediation always operates under the current cultural assumptions about immediacy and hypermediacy.

We cannot hope to explore the genealogy of remediation in detail. What concerns us is remediation in our current media in North American, and here we can analyze specific images, texts, and uses. The historical resonances (to Renaissance painting, nineteenth-century photography, twentieth-century film, and so on) will be offered to help explain the contemporary situation. At the same time, the practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we can view the history of remediation. What we wish to highlight from the past is what resonates with the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves.

Note: Our notion of genealogy is indebted to Foucault's, for we too are looking for historical affiliations or resonances and not for origins. Foucault characterized genealogy as "an examination of descent," which "permits the discovery, under the unique aspects of a trait or a concept, of the myriad events through which -- thanks to which, against which -- they were formed." Our genealogical traits will be immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation; however where Foucault was concerned with relations of power, our proposed genealogy is defined by the formal relations within and among media as well as by relations of cultural power and prestige." [Reference is to Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 146)]

Fernand Braudel, from The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), pp. 20, 42:

The first part [of this book] is devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles. I could not neglect this almost timeless history, the story of man's contact with the inanimate. . . .

The further south one goes, the higher is the upper limit for the cultivation of crops and usable trees. In the northern Appenines today, chestnut trees grow as far up as 900 metres; at Aquila, wheat and barley are found up to 1680 metres; at Cozenza, maize, a new arrival in the sixteenth century, grows at 1400 metres, and oats at 1500 metres; on the slopes of Mount Etna, vines are grown up to a level of 1100 metres and chestnut trees at 1500 metres. In Greece wheat is grown up to a level of 1500 metres and vines up to 1250 metres. In North Africa the limits are even higher.

(from U.S. Geological Survey page on GIS):

Two types of data were combined in a GIS to produce a perspective view or a portion of San Mateo County, California. The digital elevation model, consisting of surface elevations recorded on a 30-meter horizontal grid, shows high elevations as white and low elevation as black. . . . The accompanying Landsat Thematic Mapper image shows a false-color infrared image of the same area in 30-meter pixels, or picture elements. . . . [Image] Perspective View of San Mateo County, CA

Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 140, 142, 146, 148:

Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its "cyclopean monuments" are constructed from "discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method" . . . .[note]

However, if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different" behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.

Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations -- or conversely, the complete reversals -- the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.

Victoria Vesna, Bodies, Inc.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 228-29:

At his point it seems unfortunate that with the limited means at the disposal of French anthropological research no further advance can be made. . . . as soon as the frame of reference becomes multi-dimensional (which occurs at an early stage, as has been shown above) the board system has to be replaced by perforated cards, which in turn require IBM equipment, etc.

Clifford Geertz, from "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 428, n. 15:

The precise dynamics of the movement of the betting is one of the most intriguing, most complicated, and, given the hectic conditions under which it occurs, most difficult to study, aspects of the fight. Motion picture recording plus multiple observers would probably be necessary to deal with it effectively. . . . But a detailed understanding of the whole process awaits what, alas, it is not every likely ever to get: a decision theorist armed with precise observations of individual behavior.

Images Produced Using IBM's Data Explorer of the Rabbit Hills Oil Field in Montana

Visualization of 3D MRI Human Head Data

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Love, Death and Money in Pays d'Oc, trans. Alan Sheridan (Penguin, 1984), p. 35 (opening of Chap. 1):

The Languedocian novel Jean-l'ont-pris is the principal work of the abbé Jean-Baptiste Castor Fabre (1727-43); this author, though little known to the pure French-speaking public, is one of the greatest writers of Occitan literature. I shall try to relate his novel, or rather his novella, to the Occitan stereotypes of marriage to be found in the regional literature and in the customs of the Midi; I shall also try to relate it to folk tradition. From this point of view, Jean-l'ont-pris is for me, at least to begin with, no more than a rather arbitrary starting point from which I shall set out in search of a particular culture, part Occitan, part folk-tale/fairy-tale. In either case, the elements of this culture are to be found consistently, but not exclusively, among the ordinary people, below the level of the official culture of the educated élite. They occupy, as it were, the ground floor of the written language.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Penguin, 1982), p. 1 (opening of Chap. 1), p. xx (from "Preface to the Italian Edition"):

His name was Domenico Scandella, but he was called Menocchio. He was born in 1532 (at his first trial he claimed he was fifty-two years old) in Montereale, a small hill town of the Friuli twenty-five kilometers north of Pordenone at the foot of the mountains. . . .

Before examining the degree to which Menocchio's confessions assist us in understanding this problem, it is only proper to ask what relevance the ideas and beliefs of a single individual of his social level can have. At a time when virtual teams of scholars have embarked on vast projects in the quantitative history of ideas or serialized religious history, to undertake a narrow investigation on a solitary miller may seem paradoxical or absurd, practically a return to handweaving in an age of power looms. It is significant that the very possibility of research of this kind has been ruled out a priori by those who, like François Furet, have maintained that the reintegration of the subordinate classes into general history can only be accomplished through "number and anonymity," by means of demography and sociology, "the quantitative study of past societies." Although the lower classes are no longer ignored by historians, they seem condemned, nevertheless, to remain "silent."

But if the sources offer us the possibility of reconstructing not only indistinct masses but also individual personalities, it would be absurd to ignore it. To extend the historic concept of "individual" in the direction of the lower classes is a worthwhile objective. Certainly, there is the risk of succumbing to the anecdote, to the notorious Histoire événementielle. . . .

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge., Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 6 (opening of Chap. 1):

In 1527 the peasant Sanxi Daguerre, his wife, his young son Martin, and his brother Pierre left the family property in the French Basque country and moved to a village in the county of Foix, a three-week walk away.

Robert Darnton, "Worker's Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 75 (opening of essay):

The funniest thing that ever happened in the printing shop of Jacques Vincent, according to a worker who witnessed it, was a riotous massacre of cats.

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 11 (opening of Chap. 1):

A dinner party at Cardinal Wolsey's. Years later, in the Tower, More recalled the occasion and refashioned it in A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation as a "merry tale," one of those sly jokes that interlace his most serious work.

A New History of French Literature, gen. ed., Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp.xix-xx (from "Introduction"):

Insofar as the essays that follow are each introduced by a date and are arranged in chronological order, they observe the general presentation of a history of literature. But both individually and cumulatively they question our conventional perception of the historical continuum. Each date is followed by a "headline," evoking an event, which specifies not so much the essay's content as its chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary. . . . But some of these events are literary only in terms of their repercussions, and some of those repercussions are far removed from their origins in time or place. The juxtaposition of these events is designed to produce an effect of heterogeneity and to disrupt the traditional orderliness of most histories of literature. . . . Rather than following the usual periodization schemes by centuries, as often as possible we have favored much briefer time spans and focused on nodal points, coincidences, returns, resurgences.

A New History of French Literature, p. 223 (opening of Stephen Greenblatt's article titled "1563, 18 August - Montaigne Witnesses the Death of his Friend Etienne de La Boétie: Anti-Dictator"):

In August 1563 Montaigne's friend Etienne de La Boétie lay dying. . . .

Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen G. Mandell, Poetry: Reading > Reacting > Writing (Fort Worth, Tex: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994) (front cover):

Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano, American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991) (front cover):

Disk Fragmentation on Drive C: (image produced by Norton Utilities):

The Information Supercollider (Random URL Generator)