Alan Liu - From Critique to Ethical Hacking:

¶19 The stylistic repertory from which the future literary may emerge, therefore, is not new. What will be "new" among the artists, writers, programmers, designers, critics, scholars, and others who push workaday cool to an extreme will be the rejection of the aesthetic ideology of critical innovation ("make it new") in favor of an ideology of critical destruction. Such an ideology of art, I will argue, will be intended to reorganize the residual avant-garde, subcultural, and counter-cultural elements in cubicle culture (psychedelic screensavers, etc.) into a cool that reaches through style toward cool consciousness. Such consciousness will be an "ethos of the unknown" able, perhaps, to stand to one side of "knowledge" in the age of knowledge work with more than the normal (and normalizing) reflex of cool irony. Teaching the difference between such an ideology of critical destruction and terrorism—the subtle difference between dark historicism and even darker inversions of creative destruction—will be the special concern of humanities educators in the future.

¶20 But before we can glimpse the future literary, we need to make a serious attempt to grasp contemporary knowledge work and its information culture. What is knowledge work? How does information work sustain it? And how might the culture of such informationBself-named "cool"—challenge knowledge work to open a space, as yet culturally sterile (coopted, jejune, anarchistic, terroristic), for a more humane hack of contemporary knowledge?

¶21 In Parts I to III, I offer a historical sketch of knowledge work and a theoretical frame for investigating its culture of cool. And in my conclusion I follow up with the beginning of a meditation—a prolegomenaBon the future literary. There is much "more," of course, as the button at the bottom of any Internet search-engine page promises, and I will in my conclusion only be able to mark the path. That is the path along which literary knowledge might yet converge upon cool knowledge. For there is a ghost in the machine. It is called culture, and all the hope of the future literary is to be what Sidney called the companion of the camps of that culture—diviner, soldier, critic, and hacker all at once. [33]

[From] Chapter 3: The Idea of Knowledge Work

This chapter studies the discourse of business publications and the sociology of the professional-managerial-technical "New Class" to define the nature of contemporary "knowledge work." The following is an excerpt relevant to the question of historical knowledge.

¶22 . . . And herein lies what for us is the very crux of the issue. For to bring to a head our overall review of explanations of knowledge work, we can now ask: what is the ultimate point of the new corporatism? The point, which will strike humanists with force in the wake of subject and cultural-class critique, is of course precisely neither the subject nor class. It is the "dispersal," "weakness," or "contradiction" of both (as characterized by academic theoreticians) extrapolated to become the total negation of both that is the whole corporate entity. The new corporatism, in other words, is at once the logical extreme and annihilation of identity and New-Class critique. It is the subsumption of identity and class. Here we might turn to two of the diagrams that neo-corporatist literature so frequently uses to visualize its new world order: Don Tapscott's fivefold scheme of corporate identity (spanning from the "Effective Individual" up to the global "Internetworked Business") and Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps's similar scheme (spanning from the "Small Group" up to the "Economic Megagroup") (see figures).

From Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy

From Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, The Age of the Network

¶23 In this corporatist order, we recognize, the fundamental move is made when identity is from the first swallowed alive by the cult of the team (and thereafter, as Susan Albers Mohrman, et al., call it in their definitive work on the topic, the higher forms of the "team-based organization"). [34] What is a team? The positive answers offered by business are many and complex. In the terms I have developed here, the team is the unit of ephemeral identity that most flexibly fuses technologies and techniques into skill-sets (called "innovation," "creativity," "resourcefulness," etc.) adapted to the changefulness of the global economy. [35] But it is the negative answer that in our current context is most compelling: by definition a team is not an identity group, and it is assuredly not a class formation.

¶24 Or rather, we must rethink the notion of negation at this point if we are to avoid relapsing into once robust but now increasingly hapless modes of posing social "hegemony" and class "oppression"Bthe oppositional (or dialectical) poses, that is, of "them" versus "us" or big "company" versus little "worker." By contrast, what is distinctively new about contemporary corporate "identity management," as Thomas B. Lifson calls it ("Innovation and Institutions," p. 315), is that it does not so much master, marginalize, discriminate against, or exclude group and class identities as takes them over complete with their contestatory force (thus harnessing "diversity" to "competitiveness") through that most powerful manner of postindustrial negation: simulation. The team is designed from the ground up to "simulate away" identity groups and class by incorporating identity groups and class.

¶25 To understand how, we must now turn our gaze full upon the anti-historicism of business prophecy. As should be clear even from the brief views we have already had of it, this anti-historicism is so profound—yet often also so automatic and slick—that it might be likened to a shrink-wrapped, one-minute version of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave bundled together with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. On the menu bar of each of the business bestsellers, as it were, there is a big button marked "Delete History." Thus witness the precision model of historical obsolescence offered by Maynard and Mehrtens's Fourth Wave:

¶26 The First Wave of change, the agricultural revolution, has essentially ended and will not be of concern here. The Second Wave, coincidental with industrialization, has covered much of the Earth and continues to spread, while a new, postindustrial Third Wave is gathering force in the modern industrial nations. We see a Fourth Wave following close upon the Third. (pp. 5-6)

¶27 The possibility that the agricultural revolution may just now be reaching broad expanses of the globe in complex collaboration with the industrial revolution (tractors in Africa, for example) is moot: in this starkly unlayered view of history the world is a diskette that can be reformatted any number of times. Change, we heard in Chapter 2, means "starting over," "the systematic sloughing off of yesterday." Hammer and Champy add: it must be "fundamental," "radical," "dramatic" (pp. 32-33).

¶28 We might put the case in largest view as follows. Recall the succession of universalizing theories of civilization I earlier recited under the names of Reason, Repression, Instrumental Rationality, Knowledge/Power, and Knowledge Work. Contemporary management theory (descendant of the "managerial demiurge" C. Wright Mills identified in his classic study of the white-collar middle class) is the latest claimant in this Enlightenment genealogy. [36] As perhaps the most unmediated of anti-historicisms since the French Revolution (which presumed to throw out the relevant past to start over again in French Revolutionary Year One), management theory reveals with stark clarity that its universalism, progressivism, and rationalism resolve at base into a neo-Enlightenment theory of history. This theory (in a severe truncation of Fukuyama's thesis) holds that the only significant history is the end of history, or Reason. That end may be imagined at the teleological close to history, [37] but more ordinarily it is implanted as a sort of temporary telos in every point of significance in history. By this I mean that history in this view (and even in its counter-Enlightenment critique, as in Foucault) is finally all about "epochal," "revolutionary," or "epistemic" moments of change when history effectively starts anew—when it is historicity itself, in other words, that disappears from or, in the modern critique, becomes repressed in the "managed" apparatuses of Reason. Our greatest contemporary holdover from the Enlightenment, it might thus be said, is the belief that civilization is managed history. Whether one champions or critiques it, civilization simply is the faith that history can be rationally managed and that therefore, insofar as history from another point of view is precisely that which is unmanageable and irrational (Revolutionary mobs, the unconscious, Unreason, etc.), it must finally be managed through the overthrow/repression of history itself. ("Management is the organ of institutions," Drucker writes, "the organ that converts a mob into an organization, and human efforts into performance," Managing in Turbulent Times, p. 104. [38] ) The fact that much contemporary management theory in the Tom Peters mold appears to dance on the Bastille in its ludic celebration of "chaos" management and other forms of organizational irrationality is not an exception to the rule but instead the crowning instance of "the King is dead; long live the King!" (or its revolutionary variant, "the King is dead; long live the People!"). Irrationality in all its terrible energy is now to be harnessed within the organization as the very means of strong, rational management under the control of a charismatic leader (thus one of the outstanding contradictions of recent management theory: its simultaneous worship of decentralization and, often in a separate chapter, of executive "leadership"). [39] Postindustrial management is the ne plus ultra of the restructuring revolution initiated by the French Revolution with all its radical political, economic, geographical, calendrical, military, educational, and other reengineerings.

¶29 Now we can understand why those immediate predecessors to academic subject critique and cultural-class critique—so-called "essentialist" identity politics and traditional Marxism, respectively—now seem so distinctly unenlightened. These perspectives were predicated above all on remembering the historical struggles of peoples and classes—even to the point that the very process of "dispersing" identity (so phrased in subject- and New-Class critique) was experienced historically as the saga of diaspora. [40] And by extension, we also know what the postindustrial corporation must do to manage identity groups and classes so thoroughly (in a constructionism that is the extreme of subject and cultural-class critique) that it elides their last vestiges. It has to hide their history. Just as the French Revolution attempted to suppress the historical identity of estates and regions to ensure that everyone high and low, Parisian and provincial, would be fraternal, in other words, so now the new corporation does the same for subject-groups and classes.

¶30 But there is a difference. The French Revolution had substituted for historical identity a representation of national identity that was first of all what recent scholars of the period have called "theatrical" representation. The new representative politics of the nation-state, in other words, was theater before it was political reality, and one could only be fraternal if one "performed" the role, complete with improvised clothes and speech-forms, of citoyen. [41] But postindustrial corporations substitute for historical identity another style of unreal identity that makes even the post-historical or "eternally modern" nation-state obsolete (and implies instead the globalism that is now the necessary complement to any progressive nationalism). In the postindustrial version of the local/general problem, multinational corporations premise themselves solely on the local and global, or intra- and international, to the exclusion of the nation-concept in the middle, which now appears merely as a regulatory obstacle or trade barrier. [42] The result is that such corporations create a post-representational identity that is not so much theater as what postmodern theorists call simulation. [43] Simulation is representation backed up by no reality—or, what is the same, by "mass" realities too simultaneously local and global for representations of nation-state vintage to capture. On the side of consumption, for example, the pattern was early on set by cable TV channels that reached out from local markets (the city of Atlanta, for example) to blanket the world. And on the side of production, the cellular unit of such corporate simulated identity is the team. At once local and global, here at home and there in Japan, teams are a fraternity that by-passes both the essential nation and, arising to contest the melting-pot identity of such nation, essential group and class formations.

¶31 To say that the team simulates away identity, then, reduces to saying that it deletes the historical identity of the folk's habitus (or, as the Birmingham Cultural Studies group termed it, customary corporation) and then preempts the recapture of that identity by the great political, economic, media, and other institutions of the nation-state era that had arisen specifically to manage that recapture—i.e., to modernize and bureaucratize the folk. [44] Identity is recaptured instead for a new "flexible" bureaucracy—the team-corporation—designed to forge no recognizable national, group, or class identification at all (no "our country/group/class: love it or leave it") but instead simulated identification with the team, simulated identification with all the higher organizational forms of the team-corporation we saw in the figures above (enterprise, alliance, megagroup, etc.), perhaps even simulated identification with global competition itself ("global competition: love it or leave it").

¶32 Consider, therefore, the recent fate of identity groups and classes in the corporation. In regard to groups first, the most instructive instance is U.S. diversity management. Diversity-management theory arose in several works of 1991—most influentially, R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr.'s Beyond Race and Gender, David Jamieson and Julie O'Mara's Managing Workforce 2000, and Marilyn Loden and Judy B. Rosener's Workforce America!—and has since swollen into a whole movement of studies, guidebooks, video series, training programs, and corporate initiatives. [45] Prompted by the highly influential forecast of future demographic diversity contained in the 1987 Hudson Institute report on Workforce 2000, the movement explicitly discounts diversity efforts driven by statutes redressing past discrimination. Instead, it makes diversity all about present business self-interest. [46] To cite the subtitle of Gardenswartz and Rowe's Diverse Teams at Work, it is about "capitalizing on the power of diversity." Or as Roosevelt Thomas puts it: "Burning the increasingly diverse human resource fuel" and unleashing the "power that all the various groups in our national work force have to offer" is "an opportunity for competitive advantage" (pp. 9-10).

¶33 "Workforce 2000," in short, means that "Slavery Pre-1861," "Railroads Pre-1850," "Ellis Island 1892-1943," or "California 1990s" are not to the point—except (to put the pedal to Thomas's metaphor) insofar as their power may be drilled out of the historical ground, clarified of their dinosaur identities, and pumped into a corporate engine that had run on gas but now must guzzle any old diesel, methane, or perhaps even gasahol. Or rather, we cannot be content with mere bumper-sticker labels for history—part of the "Workforce 2000" mindset itself—if we are to be prepared to grasp the exact manner in which diversity management expends the past to compete in the present. What is the relevant history that is distilled out of the picture?

¶34 There is too much detail here, of course. But the broadly historical intent of the question will be served if we answer it this way: identity groups as we now know them originally arose on the industrial-age "line" or "shift" populated in different ways by emigrants from the Old World to the New, the South to the North, and the country to the city. [47] Previously, the identities of many of these migrants had been rooted in agrarian-age work formations on the order of the yeoman "household" (the extended family with or without live-in servants). [48] Together with its clan, village, parish, estate, and other envelopments, such household culture was saturated with the kind of blood, kin, religious, gender, language, paisan, and other solidarities that would later be called "race," "ethnicity," and so on. But crucially, such solidarities were not in themselves race, ethnic, gender, or other constructs in our sense. Constructs of this modern sort only became experientially real in dislocation from their original location—i.e., in the diaspora that transplanted the household onto the line/shift as a fragmented social system needing to be reconsolidated in a new set of cultural formations in competition with those of other diasporic groups. [49] "Experientially real" in my phrasing here means that while dislocation in fact derealized known cultural reality it was compensated for by an abiding sense of history—a sense that the very process of reality-turning-unreal (historical change) was a deeper reality cognate with identity. "Everything we once knew is gone and we are as strangers in this land," history says, "and therefore we are who we are."

¶35 The working subject, in other words, knew it was a subject only insofar as it was part of a "people" or "tribe" who, in a daily reenactment of their diaspora, all went on the line/shift together. This is why the Fordist-Taylorist line in its heyday was not just dehumanizing no matter how much it demanded that the lived reality of human technique mold itself to inhuman technology. The very fact of exile from one=s humanity simultaneously created the sense of a whole working-class neighborhood away from neighborhoodBa community so potentially solidaritous that it could have its own after-hours hangouts, charities, bowling leagues, youth subcultures, etc. (though cultural solidarity, we note, was effectively quarantined in "leisure"). [50]

¶36 We now know how diversity management must proceed. Increasingly, it concentrates on team-building or, in the now standard terminology, creating "diversity teams." [51] For the team concept, of course, is the perfect way to deinstall not so much the actual line/shift (U.S. auto makers, for instance, did not adopt the Swedish innovation of station-based assembly [52] ) as the relation between the worker and the line. Join the team; leave your identity group and history behind to enlist in a "small group culture" so semi-autonomous that it meets, talks, works, and plays together and even has the celebrated power to "stop the line." [53] And once team culture is in place, then all the rest of downsizing culture follows: smart work, flexible competence, flat management, and so on. The general principle, in other words, is to couple diversity to the total restructuring effort. Thus witness Thomas's restructuring of the "empowerment" concept in Beyond Race and Gender:

¶37 Another word for the process of tapping employees' full potential is "empowerment". . . . In fact, a managing diversity capability is implicit in several innovations already in process in progressive organizations. Some corporations, for example, are moving to "push decision making down." Others are implementing "total quality" initiatives. Still others have downsized their work forces in search of greater efficiency and productivity. All of these initiatives, however they differ, have one aspect in common: Their success depends on the ability to empower the total work force. (10)

¶38 So, too, Carnevale and Stone assert that diversity simply corresponds point by point with "total quality management," "reengineering," and other major restructuring imperatives (pp. 116-18). The real work of achieving diversity, it is now believed, lies in achieving a proper team and corporate culture in the first place. [54]

¶39 The real work, we may thus say, is capitalizing the very concept of culture so that the pure business culture that remains at the end of the process becomes definitive of all culture. . . .

[The rest of this chapter is not included here.]

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Notes

[Note 1] . "The Death of Literature" is the title of Alvin Kernan's book, The Death of Literature (1990). Harold Bloom's best-selling The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), begins with "An Elegy for the Canon" and ends with an "Elegiac Conclusion." John Beverley's Against Literature (1993) takes aim at the cultural distinction of "literature" in Latin America to offer one of the most original and strident of many recent arguments against the category or status of literature. Beverley's discussion of the testimonio as a challenge to traditional literary genres and their encoded social distinctions may be taken as an epitome of the current turn against literature of "distinction" in favor of general literature. See p. 84: "What happens, then, when something like testimonio becomes literature? Does this involve a neutralization of its peculiar aesthetic-ideological effect, which depends, as we have seen, on its status outside accepted literary genres and norms?"

[Note 2] . Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, pp. 84, 83.

[Note 3] . Ibid., p. 84; see also p. 32 on the foundational "turmoil" of capitalism.

[Note 4] . Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, p. 57; Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society,Vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, p. 199. (Subsequent references to Castells will be cited parenthetically). See also the Progress and Freedom Foundation's online manifesto titled "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" (discussed in Chap. 12). Thinking about business in the age of information, the "Magna Carta" takes it as a given that "dynamic competition—the essence of what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction"—creates winners and losers on a massive scale."

[Note 5] . The quotation here is from Guillory=s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, p. 166; subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically. For other comments in Guillory on the decline of the social status of literature, see for example pp. x, 81, 153. In his The Death of Literature, Kernan comments specifically about the decline of literature in the information age—e.g., "An informational model of social change would reveal . . . without concern for priority, that the photocopier, weak copyright, structuralist poetics, new-style democratic politics, and numerous other social energies are all 'saying' that texts are not so unique and particular as was once thought, or, more positively, that things of all kinds are much the same. In this new informational context, older views of copyright, originality, and artistic creativity would begin to lose plausibility and in time would simply disappear" (p. 127). Miller frames similar issues in the opening pages of his Black Holes, pp. 3-5: "Can literary study still be defended as a socially useful part of university research and teaching or is it just a vestigial remnant that will vanish as other media become more dominant in the new global society that is rapidly taking shape?" (Note: Miller's work is published on the recto pages of a volume whose verso pages contain Manuel Asensi's, J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading. Citations to Miller's work refer to the recto pages only.)

[Note 6] . In regard to Guillory=s concluding imagination in Cultural Capital of a universal afterlife of "aesthetics unbound," of aesthetics at the end of the class system, I invoke for comparison Milton's prophetic elegy, "Lycidas." "Lycidas," which mourns the death of Milton=s Cambridge friend, is in part also a work about the fate of intellectuals. It closes:

Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor. . . .

. . . . . . . .

Henceforth thou [Lycidas] art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.

It does not demean Guillory's book, I think, to say that it is ultimately a "Lycidas" or prophetic elegy, and that, as in the case of all such elegies (readers not familiar with this genre will also want to read at least Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais"), the mystery is how one gets from death to the moment of otherworldly release. Guillory, pp. 337-40, fills this rift between deadly, class-based aesthetics and the large recompense of "aestheticism unbound" with Marx and Bourdieu, whose ouevre he constructs as the very precedent for the rift. It is thus Bourdieu himself who utters "surprisingly 'utopian' statements" ( p. 339). But such a stopgap, perhaps, only defers the question, whose undergirding force is heard in Guillory's "surprise." What transitional aesthetics can bridge the rift between class-based and classless aesthetics? Or, in a less utopian voice, what aesthetics can represent itself to itself as transitional in this manner? The argument of my own ongoing research is that the answer inheres in the only avowed aesthetics of the techno-informatic New Class: "cool." Cool imagines itself to be what Guillory calls an aesthetics of "universal access" (p. 340), yet what such an aesthetics finally amounts to is the elitist imagination of a universal power to deny access (in the way that a truly cool, hip, slangy, or technically demanding Web page denies as much as it permits transparent access to information; see my argument about cool below). Cool is the missing transitional or paradoxical aesthetics in Guillory's scheme because it is a classless imagination of class or, put inversely, class-based imagination of classlessness.

[Note 7] . By focusing on producers of knowledge culture (researchers, teachers, professionals, managers, etc.) rather than their consumers (whether students in the academy or consumers in the mass market), I mean to give a view of the problem that complements the tradition of academic critiques of the "culture industry." Part of the argument my is that the most influential cultures in contemporary society are those of production rather than of consumption. I should also mention that in bifurcating knowledge work between, on the one hand, the academy and, on the other, the professional-managerial-technical stratum in the corporate, media, government, health, military, and other social sectors I do not mean on principle to elide the trade-press and journalistic workers (e.g., editors, publishers) who also play an important role in managing literature. In an era when major publishing and journalistic houses are increasingly subject to the management practices of their parent corporate aggregates, such literary managers occupy an uneasy hybrid zone between the academic and corporate realms that would be well worth a study in itself. (On the accelerating impact of postindustrial corporate philosophies on the book trade, including the imposition of "just-in-time" inventory management, see "Superstores, Megabooks—And Humongous Headaches," Business Week, April 14, 1997, pp. 92-94.)

[Note 8] . For my earlier reflections on cultural criticism, see especially: Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989); "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism" (1989); "Wordsworth and Subversion: Trying Cultural Criticism," (1989); and "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail (1990).

[Note 9] . Arif Dirlik, "The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture," in his The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, pp. 186-219. See also such essays in organization theory discussed by Dirlik as Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell, "Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction," Organization Studies 9/1(1988): 91-112; Kenneth J. Gergen, "Organization Theory in the Postmodern Era," in Michael Reed and Michael Hughes, ed., Rethinking Organization: New Directions in Organization Theory and Analysis (London: Sage, 1992): 207-226; and Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin,, "Organizations, Multiple Oppressions and Postmodernism," in John Hassard and Martin Parker, ed., Postmodernism and Organizations (London: Sage, 1993): 148-62. On a similar note, J. Hillis Miller comments, "Theory=s opponents lament the falsely supposed suspension of language=s referential function in 'deconstruction,' but that suspension actually characterizes the new global economy in all its features" (p. 47). (I am indebted to David Simpson for first steering me to Dirlik.)

[Note 10] . Cf., Douglas Kellner, "Intellectuals and New Technologies," p. 440: "In fact, the major research for two of my recent books was done from computer databases and I find that I am spending much more time in databases than in libraries for a variety of research projects. . . . Being an intellectual in the emerging high-tech societies thus requires new skills, the mastery of new technologies and intervention in new public spheres." On the cultural assumptions of operating systems, specifically Unix, see John Unsworth, "Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality" <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/Virtual.Community.html>, December 14, 1999. Unsworth's argument that "unlike transcendental fate, computer operating systems are historically and culturally determined" is conducted in the context of the Unix operating system.

[Note 11] . Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self‑Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 255-57.

[Note 12] . See my "The Power of Formalism" on the affiliation of the New Historicism with formalism. I use "formalism" here elastically to indicate the whole range of criticisms spanning from Russian Formalism and New Criticism through deconstruction that have had a lasting influence on how literary scholars "read closely." The relation between the various close-reading practices and the "technical" is clear even if antithetical. Thus, for example, John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism, p. 299, deploys a master diagram of the relation between poetic meaning and sound that is exaggeratedly scientistic despite its overt purpose of differentiating poetry from the determinate scientific meaning. The diagram combines the iconography of textbook physics with that of set theory (Venn diagrams) to make it seem that meaning and sound in poetry propagate outwards according to the inverse square law. On technicality and the New Criticism in general, see Miller, p. 65: "In place of that [the traditional idea that literary study transmits a single culture=s permanent values] the New Criticism put, more or less in spite of itself, technical training in the skills of 'close-reading.' Such skills were detached from any fixed cultural values. . . . The New Critics asserted certain universal cultural values while at the same time teaching an ahistorical technologized form of reading antipathetic to those values."
Similarly, the Russian Formalists approached literature as a matter of "devices" and "techniques." A well-known example is Victor Shklovsky's "Art as Technique." On Shklovsky's "obsession with machine analogy" and the overall mechanistic emphasis of Russian Formalism, see Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, pp. 44-67.
Finally, on the relation between deconstruction and the technical, see Guillory's discussion of the relation between "the avowed nonscience of rhetorical reading and its transmission in the 'technical' form of a science" (Cultural Capital, p. 201). "The refunctioning of rhetoric's techne as a kind of technology," he argues, "directly incorporated into the protocols of rhetorical reading a mimesis of the technobureaucratic itself" (ibid., p. 262; see also pp. 181, 257, 262).

[Note 13] . On the corporate "universities," see John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus, p. 57, and William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century, pp. 190-95.

[Note 14] . Davidow and Malone, p. 91. For my fuller discussion of contemporary corporate philosophy (including the "diversity management" movement), see "The Downsizing of Knowledge: Knowledge Work and Literary History," Doreen B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers, 15 (1998): 1-22. See also my Web site, Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation — Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured Age, created in 1998, <http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu>.

[Note 15] . This generalization, of course, does not apply to the same degree to all the humanities disciplines.

[Note 16] . In phrasing this problem in terms of past "metanarratives" of knowledge, I am influenced by Jean-François Lyotard=s, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, esp. pp. 31-37, and by Bill Readings, whom I cite below.

[Note 17] . Cf., Dirlik, Postmodern Aura, p. 3: "One of the fundamental contributions of postmodernism—indeed a defining feature of postmodernity—is the questioning of the teleology of the modern, and of other teleologies imbedded in economic, political and cultural narratives that have constituted the idea of the modern; so that it becomes possible once again to conceive the past not merely as a route to the present, but as a source of alternative historical trajectories that had to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility."

[Note 18] . On the lack of modern enforcement powers underlying the image of power in Elizabethan times, see Stephen Greenblatt on "Queen Elizabeth, a ruler without a standing army, without a highly developed bureaucracy, without an extensive police force, a ruler whose power is constituted in theatrical celebrations of royal glory and theatrical violence visited upon the enemies of that glory"; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, p. 64.

[Note 19] . Readers of Dirlik's The Postcolonial Aura will recognize that my views on the function of history in the age of postindustrial capitalism are broadly consonant with his—but with a difference related to my specific goal of grasping the role of aesthetics in such a context. One of Dirlik's main arguments is that postmodern, cultural-critical notions of multiculturalism should be replaced by a notion of "multi-historicalism" more aware of the relation between culture and the structural conditions of global capitalism. "In an ideological situation where the future has been all but totally colonized by the ideology of capital," Dirlik writes, "we can ill afford to overlook the critical perspectives afforded by past alternatives that have been suppressed by the history of capital. I take the recovery of these alternatives in memory to be not regressive, but rather as a means to keeping alive alternative visions of society that may yet open up the future in new ways" (pp. 2-3). My difference with Dirlik pertains to his consistent disqualification of postmodern cultural criticism (epitomized in "postcolonialism") as a caretaker of the rain forest of alternative histories—a disqualification that stems from its denial or ignorance of the structural conditions of capitalism in favor of matters of representation and subjectivity. Dirlik's understanding of postmodern cultural criticism does not accommodate the fact—as I have suggested at length in my Wordsworth: The Sense of History—that "denial" can itself be a powerful form of historical expression or engagement (the concept of "denial" is important both to Dirlik, e.g., p. 212, and to my "new historicist" book on Wordsworth). Whether manifested as an act of imagination, fantasy, the "bizarre" (Dirlik's most extreme denunciation of postmodern cultural criticism, p. 212), or simple ignorance (which is not necessarily an inert stance in the world of knowledge work), denial may—or may not be—the same as withdrawal or disinterestedness. It depends on the particular contest and context.
The motive for my difference from Dirlik—with whom I am otherwise in profound and multiple agreement—is to save a place at the table for art, which has for some centuries diverged from an exclusive reliance on the aesthetic ideology of mimesis (fidelity to natural or historical reality). Especially since the onset of industrialism, literature and art have been full of different kinds of denials of history. My question in this essay concerns how the tradition of aesthetic denial might be brought to bear on the condition of history in the postindustrial age. It is for this reason that I take the especially aggressive form of denial, imagination, fantasy, or bizarre behavior called hacking (see below) to be a thought experiment in the art of the future. The idea of the "other" fostered by cultural criticism in the academy, as I see it, might yet be of service in educating the artist of knowledge—whether avant-garde artist or humble Web-page designer in a cubicle—who actively denies the historical necessity of postindustrialism.

[Note 20] . See Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History, esp. pp. 3-28, for a plangent meditation on the topic of the obsolescence of the sense of history in contemporary times; see also Marcus's complaint against the "it's history" platitude, p. 22. (Cf., Louis Adrian Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," p. 11.) Evan Watkins Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education is an insightful commentary on the culture of innovation and its antithetical other: obsolescence.

[Note 21] . On the period circa 1900, see Clyde W. Barrow's assessment in his Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928, esp. pp. 31-94, that the assimilation of the U.S. university system to the corporate form began in the 1890s. On the period from 1900 to 1930, see Alvin Gouldner's view that there was in these decades a "take-off period" in the demographics of a "New Class" that included both college faculty and the technical-professional-managerial intelligentsia (The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, p. 15). Gouldner's discussion here is based on occupational statistics studied in Barbara and John Ehrenreich's "The Professional Managerial Class," p. 19. (However, a study like the present focused on the circa 2000 period must also distinguish between the industrial and postindustrial epochs in the rise of the professional-managerial-technical New Class. Fritz Machlup observes that while the total period from 1900 to 1959 saw a massive rise in the numbers of knowledge workers led by clerical workers, whose numbers increased 1,002 percent, it was in the years 1940-59 that professional-managerial-technical knowledge workers led the way [The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, pp. 387-88].) On the post World War II era, see for example Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition.

[Note 22] . Miller=s more recent Black Holes (1998), which is dedicated to the memory of Readings, extends the lineage of inquiry that runs through these two works.

[Note 23] . "To put this another way, the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all content. As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology=s self-reflection. All that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other than the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information" (University in Ruins, p. 39).

[Note 24] . Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1996).

[Note 25] . On the millenarism of recent times, see Castells, p. 4: "Bewildered by the scale and scope of historical change, culture and thinking in our time often embrace a new millenarism. Prophets of technology preach the new age, extrapolating to social trends and organization the barely understood logic of computers and DNA."

[Note 26] . Maintaining my academic Voice of the Shuttle web site <http://vos.ucsb.edu> since its origin in 1994, for example, has often meant justifying the protocols and vocabulary of academic knowledge to users from other occupational sectors who write to demand conceptual transparency or, more simply, just plain information. The scholarly or critical works indexed by VoS stand shoulder to shoulder with entertainment, commercial, corporate, journalistic, and other resources in an arena where all knowledge is viewed and judged within a single mental horizon called "browsing."

[Note 27] . My references here are to particular controversies. On the uproar over plans (since dropped) to partner with major technology companies in the California State University system, see the resources gathered on one of the "Featured Controversy" Web pages on my Palinurus Web site: "Featured Controversy: California State University System 'Technology Infrastructure Initiative': Partnering for Knowledge," Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation, 15 December 1999 <http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/CONTROVERSIES-2-calstate.html>.
         On the "Let=s pretend we=re a corporation" philosophy and restructuring plans of the President of the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1997, see "The New U.: A Tough Market is Reshaping Colleges," Business Week, Dec. 22, 1997: 96-102 ("English professors must demonstrate, in essence, that Chaucer pays the bills using funds as effectively as engineering or business classes").
         On the planned elimination of programs at George Mason University as the university restructures for a technological future, see Victoria Benning, "Liberal Arts at GMU Targeted by Degrees: Proposed Cuts Draw Immediate Protests," March 15, 1998: B03.
         On the controversy (with international ramifications) that followed upon the publication in September 1997 of the New Zealand government's Green Paper on "A Future Tertiary Education Policy for New Zealand," see my online article on "The New Zealand 'Green Paper on a Future Tertiary Education' and its Critics: A New Account of Knowledge," Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation, 15 December 1999 <http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/CONTROVERSIES-1-New-Zealand.html>.
         On the general issue of the relation between higher education, corporatization, and information technology, see my Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation Web site, esp. the set of bibliographies on "Academe and Business" and "Information Tech and the Academy" that are available through the "Suggested Readings" link in the left-hand navigation frame of the site.

[Note 28] . Readings, University in Ruins; Miller, Black Holes; Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts, esp. pp. 175‑97 on "Retrenchment—What the Managers are Doing"); Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education; Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life, pp. 168-218. For a more extensive bibliography of both scholarly and journalistic works dealing with the topic, see the "Academe and Business" section of the Suggested Readings bibliography on my Palinurus Web site.

[Note 29] . For essays from this point of view, see for example, Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: American Labor in Crisis; see also Workplace: The Journal for Academic Labor <http://www.workplace-gsc.com/>. For a more extensive bibliography on this topic, see the "Suggested Readings" on my Palinurus Web site, esp. the page on "The Economics of Education" under the "Idea of the University" category," <http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/BIBLIO-UNIVERSITY-cost.html>.

[Note 30] . William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 169: "You ever hear of slow virus before?" Dixie Flatline (McCoy Paulie), asks Gibson's protagonist, Case. "No." "I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that's what ol' Kuang's all about. This ain't bore and inject, it's more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn't feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles 'round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless."

[Note 31] . The term "hacker" is used antithetically in the literature on computer hacking. In its original sense, "hacker" celebrated the pioneering, ingenious, up-all-hours, no-holds-barred, beyond-geek culture of computer academics and hobbyists—those who explored or jury-rigged systems as part of the normal course of their work because there were as yet no legitimate ways to accomplish a task or because the security stakes were low in a trust community of peers using systems designed to share rather than secure information. The term is still often used in this way by those in the computing community. Tsutomu Shimomura, for example (who came to fame for tracking down the computer criminal Kevin Mitnick), assertively uses "hacker" in this sense to contrast his boon tribe of computer security experts and other "wizards" with the shady computer "underground". On the other hand, a passage like the following in Shimomura indicates how uncannily the maverick sensibility of legitimate hackers resembles the dark side of the force:

I've always found it a compelling intellectual challenge—finding the chinks in the armor of a computer or computer network that, unprotected, might enable a digital thief to loot a bank's electronic funds or permit foreign spies to slip into the Pentagon's computers. It's a world that you can't approach just on an academic or a theoretical level. You have to get your hands dirty. The only way you can know for sure the digital locks are strong enough is if you know how to take them apart and completely understand them. (ibid., p. 13; see also pp. 90, 97, 103)

The general truth, perhaps, is that it is the very mentality of analysis (as epitomized in contemporary programmers who "know how to take them apart and completely understand them") that verges antithetically into the zone of illegitimacy. This is the zone where "hacker" has become associated with stereotypically young, male, white, middle-class computer "gangs," braggadoccio hacker bulletin boards, and solo artistes with cipher-like online names (sometimes descended from the older subculture of telecom hacking or "phreaking"). For this use of the term, see for example Donn B. Parker's Fighting Computer Crime and Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown.
The term "ethical hacking" is a late variant that mediates between the two senses of "hacker" by envisioning an employable future for illegitimate (and sometimes convicted) members of the computer underground. A article by Sean Donahue in Business 2.0 titled "New Jobs for the New Economy" defines "Ethical Hacker" as follows:

It's the dream job for a generation of hackers: A company paying you to break into its network. By simulating attacks from the Net or from an internal source, ethical hackers locate weak spots in a company's network. Then they work with clients to prioritize which are the most serious threats, and suggest solutions. . . . Only the "ethical" part of the title is new. The best hackers . . . were illegally penetrating networks long before there was a market for that skill. . . . Salary: $60,000‑$140,000.

In a related vein, the hacker's Jargon File explains the "hacker ethic" antithetically as follows:

1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. 2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the belief that "ethical" cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as "benign" crackers (see also samurai). On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged—acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.

It is important to note that the possibility of generalizing the role of socially-constructive "ethical hacking" is still primarily a hypothesis. I am uncomfortable taking up the cause of hacking as a paradigm for a renewed creative arts and cultural criticism because there are few clear models of ethical hackers (in the literal sense defined above) and even fewer analogues in the artistic or cultural critical communities. Such movements as the Critical Art Ensemble and Electronic Disturbance Theater (whose ethos resembles that of the 80's-era, Bay Area Processed World collective) are candidates. But they are perhaps too closely associated with anarchist, Situationist, radical leftist, and/or high-theoretical paradigms (e.g., the "nomadism" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) to offer persuasive models for an art that might affect the knowledge worker in his or her ordinary cubicle. My hesitations aside, however, this is the direction that the logic of my argument takes me, and so there I go. I cannot with any honesty hold back from the conviction that hacking is the art of the new millennium. The aesthetic vocabulary in the portion of Sterling's Hacker Crackdown cited above is relevant: "Hacking can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can be found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect program can liberate the mind and spirit."
The real issue, to which I have adverted, is how to differentiate between hacking and terrorism.

[Note 32] . I discuss the Critical Art Ensemble and the Electronic Disturbance Theater in my concluding chapter.

[Note 33] .

[Note 34] . The book by Mohrman et al. may be called a "second-generation" work on teams that assumes that the case for team-working has aleady been made and that therefore the relevant problem is how to incorporate teams within the total structure of an enterprise. Cf., a work like Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler=s Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization (1991), which simply declares as a given, "The fundamental unit of work in the modern organization is the group, not the individual" (p. 25).

[Note 35] . On teams, see in particular _____.

[Note 36] . C. Wright Mills, White Collar, pp. 77-111.

[Note 37] . In a manner not unrelated to the apocalyptic historiography of the very religion that the Enlightenment rejected.

[Note 38] . Micklethwait and Wooldridge, p. 77, comment on Peter Drucker=s general influence on management theory: "Perhaps Drucker=s most insightful observation is that management plays a vital role in all spheres of life, not just in business. It is as important for universities, churches, hospitals, or charities as it is for the manufacturers of soap powder. . . . management is not only a business concern; it is >the defining organ of all modern institutions.="

[Note 39] . On "postmodern" organizational theory as a means of control, see Dirlik, Postmodern Aura, pp. 202-210 and Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin, "Organizations, Multiple Oppressions and Postmodernism." See my Chap. 7 below for discussion of the way centralized forces of control can co-opt decentralization in networked information environments.

[Note 40] . This is not to say, of course, that subject critique in the constructivist mode was not also historical or at least new-"historicist" in orientation—a fact that will come into substantive play later in my argument. But historicism in the advanced cultural-critical modes are discontinuous rather than continuous with regard to the premise of identity: the past is appreciated in the intensity of its strangeness. Another way to put this is to say that constructionist historicism is by definition as much a questioning as endorsement of the foundation of history.

[Note 41] . See Susan Maslan, "Resisting Representation: Theater and Democracy in Revolutionary France," pp. 27-51; and Marie‑Hélène Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793‑1797.

[Note 42] . Nicholas Negroponte is quite succinct on this topic in the section of his Being Digital titled, "The Nation as a Mothball": "Nations today are the wrong size. They are not small enough to be local and they are not large enough to be global" (p. 238).
A critique of the purely orthodox postindustrial thesis of globalization would begin with Castells= assertion of the unacknowledged importance of states in globalization: "the globalization thesis ignores the persistence of the nation state and the crucial role of government in influencing the structure and dynamics of the new economy" (Information Age, I: 97). If we add his urgent discrimination between "nation" and "nation-state" in the information age (Information Age, II: 27-52), with the former apparent in resurgent nationalisms, then it will appear that the notion of postindustrial global economy radically undervalues the persistence of both "national" and "nation-state" (or cultural and political) units of identity in its imagination of a direct link between the local and global. (With reference to the "imagined communities" thesis of nationhood, it might be said, the local/global nexus is the postindustrial "imagined non-community.") In Castells= overarching argument about the resurgence of comunitarian identities at the local level (fundamentalisms, nationalisms, etc.), the local is precisely not networked with the global, and it is the nation/state concept in the middle that is the place to look for the aporia between the two.

[Note 43] . Jean Baudrillard, Simulations.

[Note 44] . The line/shift was what the Birmingham School of cultural studies (referring to London working-class subcultures) calls customary "corporation": it had "its own corporate culture, its own forms of social relationship, its characteristic institutions, values, modes of life." John Clarke, et al., "Subcultures, Cultures and Class," p. 41. It is to be noted here that "customary" should not be broadened to the extent that it covers both industrial-age and agrarian-age folk cultures. The Birmingham School approach to subcultures (about which more in the next chapter) is all about specifically urban, industrial folk culture.

[Note 45] . Representative works: Lewis Brown Griggs and Lente-Louise Louw, ed., Valuing Diversity: New Tools for a New Reality; Katharine Esty, Richard Griffin, and Marcie Schorr Hirsch, Workplace Diversity; Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe, Managing Diversity: A Complete Desk Reference and Planning Guide and Diverse Teams at Work: Capitalizing on the Power of Diversity; Anthony Patrick Carnevale and Susan Carol Stone, The American Mosaic: An In-Depth Report on the Future of Diversity at Work; and the sections on multiculturalism in Philip R. Harris and Robert T. Moran's standard textbook on global diversity titled Managing Cultural Differences: Leadership Strategies for a New World of Business. Carnevale and Stone recount the early genesis of diversity management, pp. 91-93. Diversity management, of course, has been very U. S.-centric. Carnevale and Stone, for example, discuss multiculturalism in other countries but conclude that the U.S. has the clear lead not only in perceiving "diversity" but in seeing it as a management opportunity (pp. 493-500). However, their conclusion is tempered by a recognition that analogous traditions of management in other countries (e.g., European adeptness at managing cross-national workforces) may only need to be readjusted to make the U.S. advantage disappear. On the international dimensions of multiculturalism, see also the chapter on "Managing Diversity in the Global Work Culture" in Harris and Moran.

[Note 46] . William B. Johnston and Arnold H. Packer's Workplace 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century was prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1987. The findings of this report were later reinforced by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts. On the latter, see Howard N. Fullerton, Jr., "Labor Force Projections: The Baby Boom Moves On." See also Carnevale and Stone, pp. 40-44.

[Note 47] . This argument, of course, is necessarily a simplification based primarily on early-twentieth-century labor and immigration history. Fully to consider gender as well as later immigrant groups (e.g., sectors of the Latino work force), the notion of the "line" or "shift" would need to be broadened to give more emphasis to its inversion: the "home" separated from the line/shift. The domestic sphere (whether one's own or another's whose house or garden one tends) was also the locale where the experience of identity groups arose. But for convenience I will consider gender only as it was fashioned into an identity on the line/shift—in "women's" versus "men's" lines. (One of many vivid memories from my summers during college spent working on various factory lines and other menial jobs was the rigid distinction between women's assembly lines involving fleet finger-work and men's assembly lines involving mass-muscle work.)

[Note 48] .

[Note 49] . I am not assuming, of course, that populations in their original locale prior to migration were in steady-state, or that they did not often experience tensions resulting from long-standing histories of migrations and social collisions. For the purpose of my present argument, however, it is sufficient to simplify by taking the migration from pre-industrial to industrial society as our zero-point of origin.

[Note 50] . I am influenced in these thoughts by Dick Hebdige's Subculture, which sketches the intensely localized, working-class youth subcultures of London that emerged in a medium of leisure almost totally quarantined from the culture of work.

[Note 51] . See Carnevale and Stone, p. 117; Griggs and Louw, p. 114; Gardenswartz and Rowe, Diverse Teams at Work. See also Gardenswartz and Rowe's chapter on "Building Multicultural Work Teams" in their Managing Diversity.

[Note 52] . (Parker and Slaughter, p. 13).

[Note 53] . On "small group culture," see ___. On why the power to stop the line is infrequently used, see Parker and Slaugher, pp. __

[Note 54] . Dirlik observes, "What is of interest here is that transformations in management, required by changes in capitalism that were already under way, were blended with discussions of culture called forth by the need to manage a 'multicultural' work force, and reinforced the importance of culture in management" (Postmodern Aura, p. 194).

© Alan Liu, Dept. of English, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (ayliu@humanitas.ucsb.edu)
The material on this page consists of draft matreials from The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information (forthcoming, Stanford Univ. Press). Please do not reproduce without the author's permission. (Created online: 6/28/01)