The Tribe of Cool
The Tribe of Cool
In his 1974 book Society against the State, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres argues that there are societies without politics. Most Indian tribes of the Americas, Clastres says, “are headed by leaders and chiefs,” but “none of these caciques possesses any power.” The tribe of the cubicle, like the tribe of the forest, inhabits a sociality of mandatory disempowerment. The laws of this sociality—the post-industrial sociality of “neocorporatism” and informationalism—can be summarized as follows: the law of “nature,” the law of mobility, the law of modularity, the law of random access, the law of exchange, and the law of cool. These, or something very like these, are the laws of cool. These are the laws of knowledge work that now make it mandatory to be cool or at least—trained by cool consumer cultures that are really a lifelong, parallel education system teaching us how to live under the dominion of producer culture (the “corporate culture” of the new workplace)—to aspire to be cool.
Keywords: Society against the State, Pierre Clastres, societies, politics, Indian tribes, cool, sociality, knowledge work, laws, producer culture
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
