Hack the World
Alan Liu's Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (2004), p.7-8:
Wherever the academy looks in the new millennium, 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 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 Enlightenmnent.
If cultural criticism is to be legitimate, I speculate, then together with the creative arts, it must metamorphose not so much into Kafka's insect as into a different kind of 'bug.' I have in mind the slow, sprawling, yet ever graceful "Kuang" computer virus at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which 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 creative arts is that they can in tandem become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work-- a problematic role in the information world but one whose general cultural paradigm needs to be explored. Many intellectuals and artists will become so like the icy "New Class" of knowledge workers that there will be no difference; they will be subsumed wholly within their New Economy roles as symbolic analysts, consultants, and designers. But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial, professional, and clerical mainstream 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 (and its sister arts) will be named-- that can serve as witness to the other sides of creative destruction: not the boundless "Creation" that has powered the market rallies of the New Economy, but the equally ceaseless destruction that produces historical difference. This is why it now makes sense to think of cultural criticism and the creative arts as having come into special conjunction. Where once the the job of literature and the arts was creativity, no, in an age of total innovation, I think it must be history.
Wherever the academy looks in the new millennium, 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 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 Enlightenmnent.
If cultural criticism is to be legitimate, I speculate, then together with the creative arts, it must metamorphose not so much into Kafka's insect as into a different kind of 'bug.' I have in mind the slow, sprawling, yet ever graceful "Kuang" computer virus at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which 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 creative arts is that they can in tandem become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work-- a problematic role in the information world but one whose general cultural paradigm needs to be explored. Many intellectuals and artists will become so like the icy "New Class" of knowledge workers that there will be no difference; they will be subsumed wholly within their New Economy roles as symbolic analysts, consultants, and designers. But some, in league with everyday hackers in the technical, managerial, professional, and clerical mainstream 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 (and its sister arts) will be named-- that can serve as witness to the other sides of creative destruction: not the boundless "Creation" that has powered the market rallies of the New Economy, but the equally ceaseless destruction that produces historical difference. This is why it now makes sense to think of cultural criticism and the creative arts as having come into special conjunction. Where once the the job of literature and the arts was creativity, no, in an age of total innovation, I think it must be history.