Showing papers by "Alan Liu published in 2005"

Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature

Abstract: Author(s): Liu, Alan; Durand, David; Montfort, Nick; Proffitt, Merrilee; Quin, Liam R. E.; Rety, Jean-Hugues; Wardrip-Fruin, Noah

Understanding Knowledge Work

Abstract: To a greater or lesser degree, Johanna Drucker's and N. Katherine Hayles's fair, principled reviews of my Laws of Cool articulate in their own right a broad vision of what is staked upon the humanities and arts in the information age. Drucker writes: "At stake is nothing less than the future of the humanities. To set a viable course for survival we have to unmask assumptions about what the humanities are." Hayles adds: "In my view, the humanities cannot afford to aban don its connection with history, or to construe this connection solely as the his tory of critical destruction. Such a narrowing of historical focus and thus of the meaning and importance of the humanities would be a grievous capitulation." If there is more momentousness behind such statements than might strictly seem merited by the topic—the academic humanities and arts—then this is because the question of humanities education overlaps with the question of "humanity" itself. What is humanity today, and what can humanities and arts education do for it, or to it, by comparison with other institutions and disciplines? The answer my book offers may be summarized as follows. The portion of humanity that higher education today trains is preshaped by general culture— specifically, "producer culture" in league with consumer culture—for knowl edge work. The present task of humanities and arts education, therefore, is to modulate the signal of that broader training so that it carries not just productive knowledge (matched to consumption) but also a more intelligent form of the counter-signal—ordinarily riding above or beneath the main carrier wave—that I call the "ethos of the unknown." Once we might have termed this ethos "iden tity," "culture," or even "soul" (Geist). But now a darker version of Bildung applies. The ethos of the unknown is not a surplus that emerges from neo Enlightenment knowledge, but instead a reserve held back precisely from such knowledge. In its everyday variant, it is what students and knowledge workers call "cool": a style, attitude, or object identification (constructed from elaborate