When approaching the idea of cool's rhetorical function and its latest incarnations in the digital/information age, there have been at least two excellent sources to cover this ground—Jeff Rice's (2007) The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media and Alan Liu's (2004) The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. My own argument will be located within a tension between the two works, but both have a wealth of insights about cool since the age of computers and networks.

Rice's (2007) work is instrumental in taking cool away from the realm of an attitude, an ideology, or a sensibility, as he firmly declares cool to be rhetorical action. Like Dick Pountain and David Robins (2000), Rice acknowledges that the term is incredibly difficult to pin down and thusly uses that malleability to produce his own definition of what cool writing (or cool school) might be. Rice stated, "I am interested in how cool functions as a rhetorical act . . . how cool shapes an emerging technological apparatus we are living, working, studying, and teaching in" (p. 2). More specifically, "I am writing against the status quo [a cool move of Rice's own writing] by arguing the cool writer as not cool for her identity . . . but rather how she is cool for the way she uses specific rhetorical practices to make meaning in electronic environments" (p. 6). Rice's own rhetorical move is to return to Aristotle's topoi which establish common meanings, ideas, and assumptions that allow a rhetor to structure his or her argument in familiar (and therefore assessable) ways. Rice works from Gregory Ulmer's critique of the topoi as serving print culture's need for expectation and fixed–places of argument (paragraphs, tables, footnotes, etc.). He adopts chora (originally from Plato) to update the topoi for a digital age where "choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer's specific position in the time and space of culture" (Ulmer, 1994, p. 33).

Out of this return to choral writing, Rice (2007) proceeded to outline cool strategies such as appropriation, juxtaposition, and nonlinearity. All of them, he suggested, "challenge and disrupt print–oriented conventions and structural logic" (p. 21). Rice readily admitted that his definitions of cool are appropriations themselves; therefore, the narcissism and hedonism focused on by Pountain and Robbins (2000) didn't necessarily have a place in Rice's exploration of the concept (though the rebellion aspect certainly remains in his sustained assault on the conventions of print culture). Rice ultimately saw cool as a rhetorical stance that an author can adopt for positive purposes. His focus on the productive aspects of cool in digital environments brings his argument into confrontation with the other work I'm considering, Alan Liu's (2004) Laws of Cool.

Rice's Coolest Practices

Liu's (2004) book was quite a different beast from Rice's (2007). Liu was primarily concerned with the status of "knowledge work" in a society now focused on the production and transfer of information. Liu was also on a quest—to save the future of the Humanities when that area's focus of interest and study (art, literature, aesthetics) seemingly have nothing to offer the profit motivated, homogenous output of knowledge work in a world of hyper-capitalism. Liu's motivating questions include: "What is knowledge work? How does information sustain it? And how might the culture of such information—self-named 'cool'—challenge knowledge work to open a space, as yet culturally sterile . . . for a more humane hack of contemporary knowledge?" (p. 9). As Rice pointed out, "Cool, in this definition, is something to be avoided for how it hinders the production of information" (p. 5). Rice believed Liu's tome was not about "Laws of Cool" so much as how to resist cool in order to overcome its cold, passive, and sterile co-opting of our knowledge systems. In Rice's perhaps most crushing critique, "Cool, as Liu understands it, has nothing constructive to do with rhetoric or with writing . . . if you engage with cool, this argument follows, then you engage with the superficial" (p. 5).

Liu (2004) never mentioned Pountain and Robins's (2000) cool touchstones of narcissism, irony, and hedonism by name, but they are heavily implied in Liu's definition of cool with other words like "remoteness," "distantiation," and "impersonality." It is not my intention to imply that Rice (2007) was reading Liu incorrectly. The Laws of Cool does operate, on some level, as a warning about the powerful seduction of cool to make knowledge insignificant and trivial. However, Liu's dissection of cool was much more complex than Rice gave him credit for. Specifically, Rice, in his careful explication of "cool," was not as careful to pause and explore the complexities of "information." Further, Liu's ideas about the often paradoxical nature of cool ethos, in my reading, cannot be so easily cast off as simply productive or destructive. Finally, whether we like it or not (and I suspect Rice would not, hence the omission), Liu's notions of cool's possibilities for persuasion are prevalent in culture's current digital texts; therefore, his ideas deserve a closer examination.