- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literature and Creative Destruction
-
PART I The New Enlightenment - Preface “Unnice Work” Knowledge Work and the Academy
-
Chapter 1 The Idea of Knowledge Work -
Part II Ice Ages - Preface “We Work Here, but We're Cool”
-
Chapter 2 Automating -
Chapter 3 Informating -
Chapter 4 Networking -
PART III The Laws of Cool - Preface “What's Cool?”
-
Chapter 5 The Ethos of Information -
Chapter 6 Information Is Style -
Chapter 7 The Feeling of Information -
Chapter 8 Cyber-Politics and Bad Attitude -
Part IV Humanities and Arts in the Age of Knowledge Work - Preface “More”
-
Chapter 9 The Tribe of Cool -
Chapter 10 Historicizing Cool -
Chapter 11 Destructive Creativity -
Chapter 12 Speaking of History - Epilogue
-
Appendix A Taxonomy of Knowledge Work -
Appendix B Chronology of Downsizing (Throught the 1990s) -
Appendix C “Ethical Hacking” and Art - Works Cited
- Index
Epilogue
Epilogue
- Chapter:
- (p.385) Epilogue
- Source:
- The Laws of Cool
- Author(s):
Alan Liu
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
This Epilogue reflects on how the author of this book found a strange yet utterly familiar thing that he came to call the “ethos of the unknown” from which this book grew. The author wanted to believe that an individual could match the world of corporate knowledge work—at least enough to criticize it. The Epilogue criticizes post-industrialism from inside because—here and now, in this place and time—there is no transcendental outside. One must think a little like a corporation to engage with post-industrialism. The Epilogue also addresses the question of whether critique from inside the corporate knowledge structure is just another kind of cool irony, but no more than that. Finally, it states that literature will have a place in a new-media world otherwise dominated by the design, visual, and musical arts. But we do not yet know how to theorize what the eventual nature and position of that literature will be among the convergent data streams of the future.
Keywords: ethos of the unknown, knowledge work, post-industrialism, cool, literature, arts
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literature and Creative Destruction
-
PART I The New Enlightenment - Preface “Unnice Work” Knowledge Work and the Academy
-
Chapter 1 The Idea of Knowledge Work -
Part II Ice Ages - Preface “We Work Here, but We're Cool”
-
Chapter 2 Automating -
Chapter 3 Informating -
Chapter 4 Networking -
PART III The Laws of Cool - Preface “What's Cool?”
-
Chapter 5 The Ethos of Information -
Chapter 6 Information Is Style -
Chapter 7 The Feeling of Information -
Chapter 8 Cyber-Politics and Bad Attitude -
Part IV Humanities and Arts in the Age of Knowledge Work - Preface “More”
-
Chapter 9 The Tribe of Cool -
Chapter 10 Historicizing Cool -
Chapter 11 Destructive Creativity -
Chapter 12 Speaking of History - Epilogue
-
Appendix A Taxonomy of Knowledge Work -
Appendix B Chronology of Downsizing (Throught the 1990s) -
Appendix C “Ethical Hacking” and Art - Works Cited
- Index