A Collection of Thoughts, Fragments, and Questions
Enjoying on “Strange Attractor Roundtable Ep 3: The Philosophy of Cool — with Bard, Ebert, Hamelryck, and Sweeny”
Given Alex Ebert’s recent work with Cadell, Tim, and me in “The Philosophy of Lack,” I found this relevant talk deeply enjoyable. Also, Ebert’s talk on “Dead Cool” is worth every second.
For those interested, I jotted down some thoughts to share (though they won’t make any sense if you don’t watch the video above…)
1. Can we be “cool” if we’re too much a loner? If I’m utterly off the grind and nobody knows about me, am I cool? Or do I have to be a loner who the group sees? “A visible loner” can be cool, but perhaps not an “invisible one?” But the moment a loner is visible, that means they’re not really a loner anymore, so perhaps that starts a clocking ticking where now their “coolness” has an expiration date? Perhaps this suggests why coolness is dialectical, but once the previous “visible loner” becomes uncool, then a previously “invisible loner” may then become “visible” and fill the void, restarting the cycle. This could easily occur relative to a cycle of “what’s lame becoming cool / what’s cool becoming lame,” just as Ebert describes.
2. At the end of Revelation, the Bible claims each person has a “unique name” on the bottom of a white rock that only that person and God knows. Is this “ultimate coolness?” Or is it to have an “ultimate aura” (in a Walter Benjamin sense)? Since God is a Trinity in Christianity, God is a community, so in receiving this unique name, do we “stand outside the club” as a loner (in never being God), or do we “enter the community” as a member (and thus become “one” with God somehow)? Perhaps there is a dialectic tension here where it is both, meaning we are “always” in a “sweet spot” between “in” and “out,” making some kind of perpetual “coolness” possible (or, perhaps a better term, “holiness”). Hard to say.
3. Walker Percy’s tremendous essay on the Grand Canyon before the invention of the camera came to mind (as discussed in On Beauty, Representing Beauty, and causally in How Do We Escape?). Basically, Percy argues that it’s hard to really experience the Grand Canyon because we’ve now more than likely seen pictures of it before the actual experience. This means we have a “preset complex” with which we compare the Grand Canyon, and that “complex” makes it hard for “the real experience” to reach us. Perhaps “coolness” does something similar? Perhaps we’re trained to encounter people with “preset ideas” in mind of what it means to be “cool,” and as a result, it’s hard for us to experience “truly cool people” (like legitimate artists, saints, or that elder who sits in the diner every Monday morning doing a crossword puzzle). We must fight against these “preset complexes,” but that requires endless diligence.
4. Are there differences between saints, heroes, moralists, “cool people,” people with “auras”…? What makes them different? It’s almost like we “know” the difference between Bonhoeffer and James Dean when we encounter such people, but the moment we think about the difference, the “knowledge” slips away. Perhaps this is due to the problem of acknowledgment (mentioned in point 1)? The moment we acknowledge a person who doesn’t need acknowledgment, we’ve created a paradoxical tension that might put an expiration date on how long they can be “cool” (to us)? Perhaps the person and subject of our gaze genuinely never cares what other people think, but relative to us, it’s “practically as if” the person does care, for we are acknowledging them, and it’s hard for us to hold a tension in our heads where someone can be acknowledged and genuinely not care to be acknowledged. This reminds me of David Foster’s Wallace’s essay “Up, Simba” and the incredible last paragraph:
“But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone’s nonprofessional, have come to a point on the Trail where you’ve started fearing your own cynicism every bit as much as you fear your credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you’re apt to find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of reprieve and a certain Young Voter named McCain’s refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs’ cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines “the real John McCain” still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain “real” is: impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. That’s why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, be apprised that a “profile” of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there’s way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox — the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles’ spinning cubes and squares and boxes that layer McCain — is that whether he’s “for real” depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.”
Wallace could prove useful for the discussion on “coolness”: reading him inspired a piece on what I call “metamentality,” which might also prove relevant.
5. I loved everything on Girard in the talk, and the point stood out that just because we created scapegoating doesn’t mean we can escape it.
6. I’m curious if the deflationary impacts of AI will are great enough to stop inflation from manifesting out of current MMT-like policies of Central Banks around the world. I’m wondering if we’ve greatly underestimated how deflationary technology really is, but that’s a paper for which I only have scattered notes at this point…
7. I liked the point that coolness has replaced strength, that there has been a movement from Achilles to psychological selves, which reminds me of the movement from Homer to the Torah described by Auerbach. I also like Ebert’s point that the muses sang of Achilles, but now we’re all our own muse, and also how social media is kind of inherently “uncool” because you can’t really be a loner if you join Facebook…
8. Bard seems to be suggesting that because Capitalism has practically consumed the world and attempted to put everything in monetary values, this very “quintessential moment” is also precisely the moment when it is unveiled that not everything can be valued monetarily. In this way, the victory of Capitalism is precisely the moment that unveils its ultimate incompleteness (not just theoretically, but practically).
9. “Even if we learn how desire works, we’re still a slave to it” — an excellent point.
10. We can’t ultimately be free of “status anxiety” (once and for all), only ever-vigilant (and perhaps dialectical) to fight it through deconstruction, self-examination, awareness…This reminds me of Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont, where he argues that we naturally develop systems of order that tend toward hierarchy. If it’s true we naturally create hierarchy, then we naturally create status, and that feeds right into Girardian scapegoating. Perhaps we can never “escape cool” (or hierarchy), only manage it. Perhaps not all problems are solvable, but that doesn’t mean the unsolvable problems must be fatal. We can at least go down fighting…
12. Maybe the answer to the problem of coolness is to just get tired of thinking about it?
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