Alan Liu The Laws of cool

Automating

Karl Marx    Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844      staging alienation as a struggle between, or within, identities.

a) estrangement from the "labor process" or "producing activity itself," (loss of self)

b) estrangement from the "species being"  (romantic terms of organic naturalism)

c) estrangement of "man from man" 

revisions or challenges to Marx's view

 Mills       White Collar

incompletely tragic class    "the hero as victim, the small creature who is acted upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed in somebody's office or store, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand... (he is ) the generalized Little Man."

Liu's critique

1) not from product       for white collar labor had no clear object-product     it produced "service:" the legion of organizing, communicating, publicizing, accounting, and other facilitating or mediating tasks

2) white-collars both supervised or coordinated labor and were debarred from actual ownership.   

it becomes necessary to speak of the professionalism of white-collars in a way that bypasses the notion of property.

Thus rose revisionist theories of alienation to account from the new middle class

p85 "The consist of the genealogy of Weberian sociologies, humanist and structural Marxisms, structural anthropologies, Foucaultian historicisms, media studies, and so on that arose to describe— in lieu of relations between persons— the nonrelation of persons to institutional structures, machinelike organization, and rationalized techniques..... It is all 'cultural criticism' and 'subject critique'—a mode of grasping alienation that refuses to dramatize it in terms of essential identity, and instead views it only in terms of constructed identity. Alienation becomes a structural function of 'modes of production,' 'bureaucracies,' 'institutions,' systems, apparatuses, technologies, media, discourse, and other such macro-agencies that construct identity but are fundamentally incommensurable with the identity concept."

capitalism is a drama not of workers versus capitalists but of bureaucracy systems of technology/technique            Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy

p92  systemic or technical friendship — the ideology that enforces the adjustment of technique to technology— has been the primary instrument of emotional labor management in the 20th century. 

Bruce Robbins   secular vocations: intellectuals, professionalism, culture

p100 the basic engine of cultural cool :  the consumption by middle-class workers of forms of entertainment, journalism, and dress influenced by that part of culture excluded by definition from normal work— subculture.
p103 thus did cool first come into its own as the ethos of modern alienation: a whole attitude or character of low affect that at once harmonized with the system of technological rationality and disengaged itself from that system by identifying just enough with outsiders to live a depersonalized fantasy of the Outside as pure style or decor.

informating

p107 (Shoshana) Zuboff coined the term (informating) to mean that computers generated an inescapably thick wrapping of second-order information (information acting on information) around the primary interface of information acting on matter where automation occurred— a wrapping so thick and interesting that it called into question the distinction between primary work and secondary mentality.

108   the tight coupling of the instrumental and the mental— the system and the sense of system—in computerization

How did computerization allow routine work to become "aware of" or "sense" the systematicity of work?  the key sense, it turns out, was "vision"

110 Such reflective distance was hard-wired or programmed into the system itself

computerization installed a whole culture of symbolic analysis and critical reflection in everyday work antithetical to earlier industrial culture of deskilling and routinization.

119   the parallel booms in information work and service work

        In an age when communications media increasingly supplanted physical transportation in carrying the bulk of exchanges between firms and their public, suppliers, contractors, and regulatory agencies, business necessarily had to be conducted in a compound idiom of information and service we might call   information service.

120 in this light, both information workers keying data and front-line workers dealing with the public must be seen to from a continuum of service through which information flowed

in other words,  front-line workers were the public inter-"face" of back-office computerization. They were living dumb terminals.

p127 Corporate culture in the mainframe age managed the unsupervised mentality or vision of information work ("fantasy") by making it part of a greater enterprise of service work that was now all the more productive because it appeared to be self-managed as part of a collective cultural fantasy.

Networking

By "networking" I mean the combination of new information architectures (personal computers, client/server networks, the Internet) and organizational structures that has created what Manuel Castells calls "network enterprise."

Information architectures       the networking paradigm arose through a twofold rhythm of convergence in underlying technologies and divergence in understanding what might be called the "philosophy" of those technologies. 

The technological convergence occurred when computing and communications fused together in three overlapping stages. 

1) the preliminary decade of the 1970s    such new devices as the microprocessor, digital telecom switch, and optical fiber

2) second stage from 1981 to 1991 when business adopted the personal computer as its own. The watershed year was 1981 when IBM brought to market its business-focused PC personal computer.

3) third stage  began in the early 1990s, when office computing fully merged with the new communication networking technologies.

divergence in the way the new networking was received, understood, and deployed

1) decentralization

2) distributed centralization