The Rhetoric of Cool: Computers, Cultural Studies, and Composition
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THE RHETORIC OF COOL: COMPUTERS, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND COMPOSITION By JEFFREY RICE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS Eage ABSTRACT iv 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1963 12 Baudrillard 19 Cultural Studies 33 Technology 44 McLuhan’s Cool Media as Computer Text 50 Cyberculture 53 Writing 57 2 LITERATURE 61 Birmingham and Baraka 67 The Role of Literature 69 The Beats 71 Burroughs 80 Practicing a Burroughs Cultural Jamming 91 Eating Texts 96 Kerouac and Nostalgia 100 History VS Nostalgia 104 Noir 109 Noir Means Black 115 The Signifyin(g) Detective 124 3 FILM AND MUSIC 129 The Apparatus 135 The Absence of Narrative 139 Hollywood VS The Underground 143 Flaming Creatures 147 The Deviant Grammar 151 Hollywood VS The Underground 143 Scorpio Rising 154 Music: Blue Note Records 163 Hip Hop - Samplin’ and Skratchin’ 170 The Breaks 174 ii 1 Be the Machine 178 Musical Production 181 The Return of Nostalgia 187 4 COMPOSITION 195 Composition Studies 200 Creating a Composition Theory 208 Research 217 Writing With(out) a Purpose 221 The Intellectual Institution 229 Challenging the Institution 233 Technology and the Institution 238 Cool: Computing as Writing 243 Cool Syntax 248 The Writer as Hypertext 25 Conclusion: Living in Cooltown 255 5 REFERENCES 258 6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...280 iii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE RHETORIC OF COOL: COMPUTERS, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND COMPOSITION By Jeffrey Rice December 2002 Chairman: Gregory Ulmer Major Department: English This dissertation addresses English studies’ concerns regarding the integration of technology into the teaching of writing. Working from the general conception of cool as well as three distinct 1963 definitions of the term from the areas of technology, cultural studies, and composition, the dissertation uses cool as the basis for an electronic writing practice. Because the overlap of definitions occurs in 1963, the dissertation uses this date as a focal point for further exploration. By studying the rhetorical construction of 1963 texts from literature, film, music, and technology, the dissertation constructs a rhetoric of cool. In turn, the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication’s call for a modem rhetoric is finally met. A rhetoric of cool creates a method for students writing electronically by teaching them how to construct meaning and produce knowledge in digital environments. IV CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Rhetoric: The use of words by agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents 1 Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise. - Kenneth Burke “It’s cool, Sister Heavenly,” he said in the voice of a convert giving a testimonial. “I got the real cool faith” - Chester Himes The Heat ’s On Cool is not a new concept to either popular or academic discourse. Contemporary understandings of cool as a technological phenomenon surface on the World Wide Web in the guise of “cool sites,” “cool tips,” and “cool gadgets” or in e-mail bulletins such as the popular “Cool Site of the Day Newsletter.” Such concentration tends to be on worthwhile places to visit on the Web. Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle web portal, for instance, presents a “Laws of Cool” listing of sites that he feels combine literature and information into an aesthetic category he defines as “cool.” Liu foregrounds the purpose of his project in an introductory paragraph on the site questioning the role of cool in cultural and electronic discourse: Through such improvised categorizations as “techno-cool,” “anti-verbal cool,” and “ordinary cool” (e.g., pages recording someone's grocery list or daily journal), I hope to gain some initial purchase on the deeper issues. My goal is to make it possible eventually for critical consciousness to be brought to bear upon what otherwise seems one of the most single-minded and totalitarian aesthetics ever created. Why are there “cool sites of the day” but no beautiful, sublime, or tragic sites? Why is it that “cool,” which came out of the border worlds of the jazz clubs in the ‘20s and ‘30s and the 1 offered by http://www.thecoolsiteoftheday.com 2 http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/cool.html 1 2 Beats in the ‘50s is now so mainstream-hip that even the major corporations want "cool" home pages? Who does cool serve? (Liu) Liu’s project is pedagogical; its purpose to teach the meaning of cool as related to the 3 information economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. CoOL, “Resources for Conservation Professionals,” also marks a place where pedagogy and cool intersect. CoOL, a “full text library of conservation information,” utilizes the popular term to name its warehousing of documentation (text and audio) regarding conservation, to imply that ecologiscal attention can be cool; i.e., worthwhile, yet fashionable at the same time. 4 Coolclass.com, on the other hand, employs cool to keep educators updated on current classroom trends by listing a variety of online educational sources. The site’s Coolclass Chronicle newsletter acts as an online clipping service, providing snippets of educational news for educators. Coolclass’ choice of name also suggests that teaching and learning can be trendy, hip, and stylish. Other web portals like Netscape and Yahoo hide their promotional activities under the title of “cool sites.” Netscape, in particular, asks its readers “How Cool Are 5 You.” The answer arrives via a link to Cnet.com’s top ten “technojunkie” must haves. For these sites, to be cool means buying electronic gadgets, products sold under advertising packages set up with the site hosting the original link. Other sites, like The 6 7 8 Cool Zones, Project Cool, and Yahoo Cool Links, propose cool as long listings of out 3 http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/ 4 http://www.coolclass.com 5 http://home.netscape.com/netcenter/cool.html 6 http://cool.infi.net/zones.html 7 http.y/www.projectcool.com/ 1 3 of the ordinary web sites because of either design or content. Usually, the more bizarre or eclectic, the cooler the site. Netscape used to clarify its criteria for coolness by stating: Someday we’ll all agree on what’s cool on the Net. In the meantime, the Netscape cool team will continue to bring you a list of select sites that catch . our eyes, make us laugh, help us work, quench our thirst . you get the idea. (Netscape) Recently, the portal’s policy has changed to the more direct statement: What Makes Us the Arbiters of Cool? It takes a willingness on our part to apply well-honed skills of judgment, together with a certain savoir faire. Of course, no one can claim to be the definitive source of cool even though we're trying. Meanwhile, we refuse 9 to hoard cool URLs solely for our own enjoyment. (Netscape) 10 The web site Everything2.com, on the other hand, resists the listing trend and instead offers its Page of Cool and Cream of the Cool where registered users express in hypertext (or as the site describes it, “cools”) opinions on contemporary cultural topics like “The Slow death of the Japanese meal,” “Rules for tripping on hallucinogenic drugs,” and 11 “Everything as a literary composition.” The entries use a system of nodes to link with other entries creating a broad hypertextual site where politics, popular culture, and writing merge. Noders (users) of Everything represent the new media writers: self- described cool composers of radical, alternative ways of thinking. Portals like Netscape’s or Liu’s present cool as a combination of technological savvy and underground sentiment. They propose that to be cool in the twenty-first century, one must be connected to electronic culture. Like Cool.com, “a docking station 8 http://dir.yahoo.com/entertainment/cool links/index.html 9 http://home.netscape.com/netcenter/cool/editorial.html 10 http://everything2.com/ 1 these topics were listed on the Page of Cool on December 29, 2000 at: http://everyth ing2.com/index. pl?node=Page%20of%20Cool 4 for teens,” cool has become the Web’s direct connection to youth culture. Cool.com declares, “You know what’s cool. We’ll show you what’s hot,” and does so through its Cool WishBox section, Cooltoons comics, and free e-mail that allows registered users to become [email protected]. These sites fall into the trap the editors of Suck.com satirize as a growing obsession with being hip and trendy. Suck.com’s editors see the over-indulgent web site listings as pretentious and false entryways into youth culture. Site listings point to the Web as a new media tool only capable of supporting the latest trends in fashion or style. “Analysis and commentary are decidedly extraneous, ‘Old Media’ impediments, which only serve to obscure the fundamental catechism: ‘Is it cool? Does it rule?”’ (Suck) Overall, the belief that cool combines technology with rebellion is brought to the classroom by students raised in a media culture that teaches cool as meaning “good,” “popular,” “in,” or “a form of approval” (Brathwaite 13), all within the context of teenage angst and electronic know how. In the university, students see cool as a feeling, an emotional state held over from counter culture attitudes developed in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which for that time period offered distance and dissatisfaction with the status quo as life strategies. This version of cool resembles Michael Jarrett’s definition of the term in Soundtracks-, cool can be divided into prophetic cool- characterized by barely harnessed rage”—and philosophical cool—“the existential void lurking behind a persona” (Jarrett 19).